The Monkey Grammarian (17 page)

a rose and green, yellow and purple undulation, human tides, whitecaps of light on skin and hair, the inexhaustible flow of the human current that little by little, in less than an hour, inundated the entire courtyard. Leaning on the balustrade, we saw the pulse of the multitude throbbing, heard its swelling surge. A coming and going, a calm agitation that propagated itself and spread in eccentric waves, slowly filled the empty spaces, and as though it were an overflowing stream, mounted, patiently and persistently, step by step, the great stairway of the cubical building, partially in ruins, situated at the north corner of the parallelogram.

On the third and uppermost story of that massive structure, at the top of the stairway and below one of the arches crowning the building, the altar of Hanum
n had been erected. The Great Monkey was represented by a relief carved in a block of black stone more than three feet high, approximately thirty inches wide, and half an inch thick, placed on, or rather, set into a platform of modest dimensions covered with a red and yellow cloth. The stone stood beneath a wooden canopy shaped like a fluted conch shell, painted gold. From the conch there hung a length of violet silk with fringes, also gilded, at the bottom. Two poles, mindful of wooden masts, stood on either side of the canopy, both of them painted blue and each of them bearing a triangular paper banner, one of them a green one and the other a white one. Scattered about on the bright red and yellow cloth covering the table of the altar were little piles of ashes from incense burned in honor of the image, and many petals, still fresh and moist, the remains of the floral offerings of the faithful. The stone was smeared with a brilliant red paste. Bathed in the lustral water, the nectar of the flowers and the melted butter of the oblations, the relief of Hanum
n gleamed like the body of an athlete anointed with oil. Despite the thick red pigment, one could more or less make out the figure of the Simian, taking that extraordinary leap that brought him from the Nilgiri Mountains to the garden of the palace of R
vana in Lanka; his left leg bent, his knee like a prow cleaving the waves, behind him his left leg extended like a wing, or rather, like an oar (his leap calls to mind flying, which in turn calls to mind swimming) and his long tail tracing a spiral: a line/a liana/the Milky Way, his one arm upraised, encircled by heavy bracelets, and the huge hand clutching a warclub, his other arm thrust forward, with the fingers of the hand spread apart like a fan or the leaf of a royal palm or like the fin of a fish or the crest of a bird (again: swimming and flying), his skull enclosed in a helmet—a fiery red meteor hurtling through space.

Like his father Vayu, the Great Monkey “traces signs of fire in the sky if he flies; if he falls, he leaves a tail of sounds on the earth: we hear his roar but do not see his form.” Hanum
n, like his father, is wind, and that is why his leaps are like the flight of birds; and while he is air, he is also sound with meaning: an emitter of words, a poet. Son of the wind, poet and grammarian, Hanum
n is the divine messenger, the Holy Spirit of India. He is a monkey that is a bird that is a vital and spiritual breath. Though he is chaste, his body is an inexhaustible fountain of sperm, and a single drop of sweat from his skin suffices to make the stone womb of a desert fecund. Hanum
n is the friend, the counselor, and the inspirer of the poet V
lmlki. Since legend has it that the author of the
Ramayana
was a pariah suffering from leprosy, the pariahs of Galta, who particularly venerate Hanum
n, have taken the name of the poet for their own and hence are called Balmiks. But on that altar, a black stone daubed with thick red pigment, bathed in the liquid butter of the oblations, Hanum
n was above all the Fire of the sacrifice. A priest had lighted a little brazier that one of his acolytes had brought to him. Although naked from the waist up, he was not a Brahman and was not wearing the ritual cord around his neck; like the other officiants and like the majority of those present, he was a pariah. Turning his back to the worshipers who had crowded into the little sanctuary, he raised the brazier to the level of his eyes, and swinging it slowly up and down and in the direction of the eight points of the compass, he traced luminous circles and spirals in the air. The coals sizzled and smoked, the priest chanted the prayers in a whining nasal voice, and the other officiants, in accordance with the prescribed ritual, one by one cast spoonsful of melted butter into the fire:
The streams of butter gush forth (the golden rod in the center), they flow like rivers, they separate and flee like gazelles before the hunter, they leap about like women going to a love-tryst, the spoonsful of butter caress the burned wood, and the Fire accepts them with pleasure
.