31

Saahas drew a breath but before he could close his eyes, the multi-coloured branches pushed out and around him, enclosing him swiftly in a circular prison.

‘What is this?’ he jumped to his feet, panicking.

‘Sire,’ he heard Bhuma scream and his hand reached down to his side for the khanda but it wasn’t there.

‘Let me out,’ he pummelled the coloured walls. ‘Do you hear me? Get me out of here.’

‘Stay calm, Saahas,’ Tathakim’s rich voice tolled like a temple bell, ‘or else the trees will not offer you that which you seek.’

Stumbling back to the seat, he squeezed his eyes shut and drew slow, deep breaths, the scent of mint and lemons suffusing his senses. The rainbow trees flickered under his closed lids, their colours shifting and moving like the shoals of fish he had seen at the bottom of the river. Then, all of a sudden, the colours vanished, leaching out of the bark, leaving only a white blankness. Saahas opened his eyes.

The circular wall around him was crammed with books. ‘A library,’ he exclaimed, jumping up from his seat and examining the shelves closely. One shelf caught his attention. It held only three books, the one covered in bark to the right, another in pure gold to the left and a book as white as the purest pearl in the centre. The white one attracted him the most and as he continued to look at it, a deep desire welled up in him to riffle through its pages. Yet, he hesitated, his hand hovering over it. All of a sudden, he changed his mind, and picked the book covered in bark instead. When he flipped it open, he found a single palm-leaf page, with one sentence inscribed on it— ‘Failure is just a word.’

Saahas pulled out the gold book next. It too contained a single page, a gold leaf with one sentence— ‘Truth at any cost.’ Gasping, he hastily returned the book to the shelf as if it frightened him and moved to the white one. His hand remained poised over it for what seemed an eternity, until he finally grasped it. As he opened it, a white papyrus slipped out of it, drifting upwards on an invisible current, the one word inscribed on it shining bright. Aum.

Tears fell rapidly, soaking his chest. ‘I will not fail you again,’ he wept, ‘I promise you.’ The encircling walls moved away, the colourful branches meeting once again over his head. Tathakim shook him gently. ‘You had a vision.’

‘Vision?’

‘Yes. You were screaming for help.’

Saahas grasped Tathakim’s hand. ‘I don’t know anything about visions. All I know is that I must return soon and save Aum. Please, I beg you, give me the special weapons. I cannot fail Aum again, I must not.’

‘Failure is just a word,’ Tathakim said, a gentle smile lighting his face. ‘It is the experience that binds us, making us suffer, and then we call that failure. But when we use experience to free ourselves, we become victorious. And what was the other sentence?’

‘Truth at any cost,’ Saahas answered in a choked whisper.

‘Truth,’ Tathakim shot a piercing glance at the distraught face, ‘do you want it?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Your vision, it is telling you to seek the truth about Aum. But for that, you must be willing to renounce revenge.’

‘No,’ he shook his head vehemently. ‘I cannot give it up. I must have my revenge.’

‘Then sit down once again and ask the trees for it. They will give you all that you need to destroy your enemies.’

Hot winds scorched a landscape so barren and grey that it appeared to be a desert. ‘Give me the weapons you promised,’ Saahas yelled at the bleak sky. It split open with a mighty rumble, the weapons falling out of it, racing towards him at great speed. A thunderbolt crackling blue fire, a crossbow spitting arrows in an arc and a flying sickle that could slice off a hundred heads in one stroke. He caught them deftly, a rush of energy pumping through him, a one-man army ready to take on the forces of Aham.

‘Yes, I will have my revenge,’ he snarled, and lowering his head, charged, his feet barely touching the earth. Dark shapes flew at him, like gigantic bats, screeching with hideous laughter. He leapt at them, his weapons attacking all at once, burning, hacking and slicing, splattering him with sickening sweet blood. At last, they lay dead at his feet, Manmaani and her sons.

He stood over their bodies, laughing loudly but his laughter had a hollow ring. Everywhere he looked, he saw a wasteland, the people, his people, like the living dead.

‘Look, it is I, your Saahas,’ he cried out to them. ‘I have set you free. You are free of Aham. Everything will go back to the way it was before.’ But they shrank from him, blanching in terror.

‘You said you would save Aum.’ He whipped around at the sound of the voice. It was his replica, another Saahas, hollow-eyed with anguish, staring back accusingly. ‘Aum is dead,’ it cried, ‘and you couldn’t save it. You failed, yet again.’

‘Shut up,’ he screamed. ‘I am the king of this realm. Now that I have vanquished my enemies, I shall bring Aum back.’

‘Bring Aum back,’ the replica laughed scornfully, holding up a mirror. ‘You need to take a good look at yourself.’

‘No,’ he shouted, recoiling as if bitten by a scorpion, eyes wide with horror, ‘that is not me! Not me.’

‘Wake up!’ The sharp command jerked him into awareness. Tathakim floated towards him, as if treading air, ‘You have been weeping silent tears for over a week. What did you see, Saahas?’

‘My face in a mirror,’ he whispered, touching his cheek, feeling the rough bristle. ‘My eyes smeared with pure evil. I had become like my enemies.’

Tathakim held him by the shoulders, his gaze compassionate. ‘The weapons can make you invincible but only against mortal enemies. Your mind is your real enemy, Saahas, coloured as it is with hatred. With such a mind, any victory will taste like ashes.’ His gaze suddenly became penetrating, ‘Tell me, what it is that you really seek?’

‘Freedom, master.’ The spontaneous admission surprised Saahas and it was a moment before he spoke again, controlling the quiver in his voice. ‘Yes, that is what I want. I seek to be free of this mind. It won’t let me be. Help me, help me, please.’

‘Are you willing then to drop all your identities—Saahas the avenger, Saahas the brave general, Saahas the failure and Saahas the king?’

‘But,’ he looked perplexed, ‘without my identity, what am I?’

‘The identities are your unreal Aham, the false I, the cause of all your sufferings. When you remove the false, the reflection, what do you get?’

‘The real, the truth,’ he answered softly.

Tathakim smiled. ‘Truth at any cost. Pay the full price and Truth will take you from the limited to the limitless, making you the master of Destiny. It is the celestial weapon for which Dyaut sent you to me.’ Placing a gentle hand on Saahas’s brow, he said sweetly, ‘Recognize your thoughts as waves that come and go. Still them and the real you will shine through. Chant I Am.’

Saahas inhaled a deep, steadying breath. ‘I . . . am,’ he intoned, closing his eyes and was gripped immediately by well-worn emotions. Ecstasies and terrors, thwarted desires and ambitions, he scurried from one to the other at breakneck speed. ‘They will kill me,’ he pleaded, clutching his head, trembling uncontrollably, ‘I can’t do it, master.’

‘Stay with the I, Saahas,’ Tathakim instructed, breaking off a twig from a rainbow tree and muttering over it until it began to smoulder. Drawing out a multi-coloured spark from the wood, he touched it to Saahas’s head. ‘Keep good watch,’ he told it. ‘Help him focus on the I, the I that is constant from birth to death, the I that is the most beloved to each one of us, the I that is muddied with inconstant thoughts and feelings. Help him separate it from these, peeling off layer after layer.’

‘Rrum,’ the rainbow flame assented loudly and formed a smokeless ring, a cold band tightening around Saahas’s forehead. He cried out, feeling icy fingers burn into his skin, the flame seeping into his brain. And for all too brief a moment he glimpsed Tathakim, painted in the spectrum of colours, before his eyelids dropped. Instantly he panicked, past events and imagined futures warring to take control of him again. Rrum flared up, feeding on them eagerly, turning them into feathery snowflakes, blanketing his mind in silence.

It was a solitude of many shades. Of the infinite blue ocean cradling a solitary boat, of the vast rose-pink sky sheltering a lone bird, of the white summit bearing a man, of the last grey breath exhaled into death. Tension eased out of Saahas, bones and sinews relaxing, his breathing calm and regular. And then it came, the first faint echo of ‘Aa’ rising up from the bottomless well of silence. Slowly, it grew louder, the ‘Aa’ followed by a soft ‘ham’.

‘Aa-ham, Aham,’ resounded in his being, energetic and emphatic. ‘I Am,’ it sang, vibrating to its music. ‘I Am,’ it intoned, revelling in itself.

Saahas became inert, as if turned to stone, his breathing so shallow it couldn’t have stirred a feather. Days melted into nights and nights faded into days, the earth continuing to turn, the sun rising and setting as it was wont to do in an endless loop of seasons. Yet, time had come to a standstill as, neither waking nor sleeping, Saahas had set off on another journey.