This essay attends to the flesh of Thomas Stephens, also known as Tomás Estêvão, also known as Pâtri Guru. Stephens, a dissident Catholic, fled his native England in 1575 and eventually joined the Jesuit mission in Portuguese Goa in India, where he spent the rest of his life. He became a student of Indian languages and wrote an epic 11,000-stanza poem, the Kristapurana, in Marathi. The poem is a story of transformed flesh – not just the flesh of the Jesus commemorated in his poem but also Stephens’ own, altered by his exposure to new cultures and a radically new climate. It is, additionally, a story of the transformative power of non-human flesh: the flesh of the coconut.