The Queen's Play (6 page)

Wind, which high up was rapidly making and dissolving clouds, had dropped entirely near the ground, and an unexpected chill prevailed in the air, inspiring the kind of sadness which assails you on certain afternoons as the year is drawing to a close, and the light turns crimson and the trees grow still and the tweeting of birds in the branches can be heard more clearly, and just for a few moments, but this you remember only later, you seem to mourn something you have lost, without knowing what it is.

DA, DA, DA, is what the thunder said.
Damyata, Datta
,
Dayadhwam
, is what the Father meant by those resounding, recurring syllables. Thus also was he understood by his triad of descendants, gods, men, and demons, sitting by his feet on their last night of tutelage. Be self-controlled, said Prajāpati to the first, for the gods possessed enormous powers. Be giving, said he to the second, whom he knew could easily grow covetous. Be merciful, echoed the thunderclap one final time in the thickening night, for the dark ones were susceptible, on the flimsiest of grounds, to the most unusual bouts of passion or fury, something they might later have had cause to regret, for remorse is the other face, the dark back, of thoughtless action.

The lesson was over. The children were delighted. Bliss filled them, drowned their senses. Overjoyed, they looked at earth with longing, the first to teach discipline, the second to ennoble with charity, the third to grant mercy. In order to please the Father and do his bidding, they turned away from him. Nobody noticed that the Father was gone. As if he had never been, Prajāpati had dissolved into that which is neither space, nor time, nor matter. Undifferentiated, indistinct, eternal, he ruled without ruling. In front and behind him, within and without him, the firmament glowed with incalculable points of gold. Seven of these made up the shape of a plough or a dipper, the very symbols of fertility and nourishment, the Bear as some would later say, the never blinking, forever- watchful eyes of the great seers. They who came before the
children. They who were born of the Father's mind. They, the Father's mind.

But like the teacher, the teaching was forgotten. It was bound to be. The world is like that. It enchants. Hardly there, beings succumb to its spell, drenched from top to bottom in the spray of phenomena. It is the goal, this spell, the mind at once engenders and strives for. The obstacle it wishes to overcome even as it forms it. The mirror it needs to know itself. This world cast in impressions of a dizzying variety, like an elusive antelope always a step ahead of the hunter's grasp, and separating them, surrounding them, this scent of the hunt, nothing but the hunt, until perhaps at long last the hunter pounces on the hunted and rolls over the edge with it into the one true, formless totality.

But how rarely does this happen, leaving the mystery of the world intact, fully cloaked in its manifestations. Only the hunt continues. Forever and ever. Its path rising from the earth into the dark vault of the sky, cutting through the stars, scattering along the way, for this is inevitable, countless bones and bodies.

Yes, blood, bones, bodies. This is what the wisdom of the thunderbolt had warned against, and this is what the listeners so easily forgot. As soon as they alighted upon the world, the children quarrelled. Coveting what did not belong to them, exercising neither restraint nor mercy, each cleverly selected a foe weaker than himself to pour out his fury upon in full. They tricked one another, they schemed and fought unendingly to no end, unless that end was simply to put on show and sustain the spectacle of life. At any given point in time one or more such battles raged in one or another of the worlds. Covered in soot and blood and abrasions, the children in due course came to resemble each other, as if the lines of distinction had ever been sharply drawn. Gods incarnating as men, men rising far beyond gods, who, if not men, were the great seers?, gods who were also demons, demons who were remarkably close to men, these happenings were not out of the ordinary. Yet not all was war. Incredible though it looked, peace still lay in the midst of wrath and
death.

Men, who now placated the gods and now parleyed with the demons, had an ambivalent position. They held the mean between the two opposites, and so also held their peace the more easily, but if incited they could be a resilient group. Their allegiance swayed from one to another every once in a while. For although they believed gods to be the more powerful if not always the more even- handed, they felt a strange if somewhat tenuous camaraderie with the demons who being their neighbours on earth held with them several interests in common. And what was man and what demon, in the final analysis, was merely a manner of speaking. The other, the unknowable, the dark one, the demon. That was the simple chain of inference. For not all who were described thus were giants or inhuman monsters, not all were scoundrels or bullies. Nor were they bloodthirsty savages or cannibals.

Simple as this seemed, it was not simple enough for those upon whom fell the vicissitudes of living. For if there was a thing life fortified day in day out, as much in the small as in the big, it was prejudice. To live was to be prejudiced. Prejudice was the very marrow of our mental makeup. Dissociation was the technique with which we worked things out. Counting relied on this, words, too. So did every system and category of thought. Unless the eye separated, it saw nothing. And yet how awfully little it saw, and even what it saw it dissected, while life rushed unseen like a raging torrent behind the observer's back. Prejudice, fear, and the wish to dominate and annihilate the face of the other. The chase of the antelope. The hunt.

But never before had the children clashed like they did on the island far out in the sea, as if kicked out from the mainland, the island where the dark ones had built their alluring refuge surrounded by great tropical rain forests, the sparkling capital city, the seat of the demon king's vast empire. For eighty-four days, the terrible war continued on its accursed shore. Out there, as the sun slowly arced in the sky, dust flowed into sweat and sweat into blood,
hands hurriedly grabbed the entrails let loose by the spear and tore them off in disgust to finish the task quickly before moving to the next adversary. Bones crackled like dry twigs going up in flame and men kept falling, sinking everywhere amidst a cesspool of bleeding flesh, piss, and vomit, whereas those still standing and moving were pale as ghosts, swathed in dust, shaking and eluding, with each turn of their bodies, Death which was wheeling in the oppressive air, entering willy-nilly the jaws of the wounded that clenched only too late and were already slackening and drooling as she made off with their life. Not once during this unremitting carnage did the thunder roll DA, DA, DA, DA, DA. Not one among them recalled the benign, sacred words of the scriptures,
Damyata, Datta
,
Dayadhwam
. Not one voice begged for mercy, not one hand trembled in horror at its own doing. Even the heavens remained clear, distant, glittering with stars, heavens that had clouded and flared and pealed so often in the past. Only the eyes of the great seers watched, stupefied. Night upon night, the Bear hung from the sky like a question mark over the abyss, as if the seers were asking in horror, Why? What for?

For honour. For avenging your honour. The demon king had contrived and abducted the exiled prince's wife, who had been ever since held captive in his palace, and whom the wicked king refused to release with due honour, even after entreaties and warnings to this end. The word again, honour. A man's dignity, a warrior's code of honour, had been ridiculed. What was there to be done? Lust and vanity had clouded the king's head, we said. The vile man must be taught a lesson, we declaimed. Too much evil only brings ruin, to war!, to war!, we cried in rage.

That for the sake of this very honour many ignoble deeds were also committed, nobody saw or thought it fit to recount. We didn't ask whether it formed a part of the warrior's code to inflict injury on a woman, unarmed and blindly enamoured of the prince? We didn't stop to think whether it was befitting a man, the second prince of an illustrious dynasty, to simply slice off the nose of this woman, the
demon king's half-sister, likewise exiled and wandering in the forest, for merely rubbing her breasts against the younger prince's forearm? Of course, she had incited the brothers, first lecherously and when that didn't work by provoking their ire in trying to attack the docile wife of the elder prince, an attack more childish and futile than dangerous, doomed to failure by the very fact that she was alone, impoverished and empty-handed, without even a stick to arm her against the two ablest archers in the whole realm. But then too her anger had been aroused by their own doing, they played and led her on awhile, as she ran from one to the other, taking her chances with each and making a fool of herself. Indeed she may have had other evil motives in putting on show this pathetic act concocted in equal measures of desire and villainy, motives that had their begin- nings in those obscure iron-blue depths of the heart that nobody has ever traversed to the end, motives that like silken threads tangled and untangled, until the whole sorry tapestry was lost in the gathering darkness of the deepest past. Or perhaps she was destiny herself come to meet the demon king from an earlier life, incite him to such base, no, for someone of his powers and intelligence, simply befuddling action so that he should pay for the wrongs done then or make good some ancient unremembered pledge. Honour, however, hardly could be the name of what erupted from the many non- rational springs of action and feeling of all those involved, a number so vast and indefinite none could have predicted it. Honour was not in being truculent and a little too free with your hands, not in the matter of that hanging nose dripping a steady flow of blood into the victim's convulsing bosom.

I was there, quietly passing my time in the forest, waiting for events to catch up with me, recalled the child in the old cedar. In the forests at the foot of the
Nilgiri
, the blue mountains that made up the western edge of the southern provinces, not much farther from the hill where I was born. Wind-born they told me, for a kite had flown away with a pinch of the divine pudding in its beak that fell straight into my mother's hands, and which she promptly transferred to her
mouth taking it to be a blessing from heaven, a pudding that I later learnt was meant for the womb that would give birth to the exiled prince. God-incarnate, he was called. And so I became one of them, the gods. Life's affinities, you could say. Elective affinities. So it was I felt a spontaneous sympathy for the elder prince the moment I laid eyes on him, and so was I ready to do his bidding from the start, whatever it be, without doubt or indecision, although I wasn't then aware of the special connection that bound us together. The pudding, the kite, the breeze.

At the time I was living with the tribe that took the monkey as its totem. Its members went about wearing a crude image of the primate round their necks, and the tribe's triangular flags, too, were painted with something resembling it. The men were swift climbers of trees and could camouflage themselves on the spur of the moment. More than a few among them had developed this into an art form and were seen as sublime shapeshifters.

I had come to the tribe upon completing my instruction in the
Vedas
and certain esoteric practices that granted one the power to change form and move with ease over wind or water, this supreme knowledge transmitted then as now orally from teacher to disciple, one to one in strict confidence, whereupon my teacher asked me to join and aid the brother of the tribe's ruler who had also been his student in old days and had recently fallen on hard times, banished by the elder one, the ruler, for what he saw on the former's part to be an unpardonable act of betrayal and cowardice.

Another affinity, another exile. Exiled in your own home, a wilderness where others came from far away to serve their respective exiles. It seemed like the season of exiles.

When I met him he was living in hiding with a band of his followers in a cluster of rock caves with a system of underground streams. It was not the ideal place to live, for the rocks constantly dripped water the colour of rust, and it was wet and cold on most evenings. But the place offered protection in that it lay concealed in the darker part of a ridge with clear views of the forest in three direc-
tions and there was no lack of food or firewood. He was dejected and in utter despair, left with next to no self-esteem, for the elder brother had gone ahead and taken this man's wife as his own queen, following the tribe's custom. In there, accompanied by the sound of dripping water and the hiss of the flames sawing the darkness, I listened to the exile's tale of ruin and woe.

For some time an ogress had been carrying away women and children to her remote grotto. People came crying for help to the ruler who at once made off to beat the life out of her. The younger one offered to go with him. Near the mouth of the grotto, the ruler instructed his brother to watch and wait for him at the spot, and rushed into the darkness. He waited a long time and when waiting some more there was still no sign of the other, he sadly surmised that great evil had befallen his brother. Not a sound could be heard, not a howl, not a footfall. Dark thoughts gripped him and he felt heavier in his body and his shadow stretched long and trembling from his feet. Just as he was thinking what best to do, his sight fell on the ground where the mud had turned to a thick red gruel, fed by fresh drops of blood that were even then trickling out from the mouth of the cave. Dreading that his brother had perished, slipping and swaying half from fear, half from sorrow, he used all his strength to push a heavy boulder across the mouth of the grotto, buckling more than once under its weight, and returned to tell others the sad news. The very next morning he was proclaimed head of the tribe by consensus, and the same evening the elder one returned seething and quivering in rage with bloodshot eyes to find the deserter on his own throne, and assumed the worst.