‘My father once boiled a man,’ Magha told me, the next time I saw him. He was surrounded by soldiers, lying on a feather mattress as he said it, pale and with a cruel thinness to his voice. ‘Boiled him like a rabbit, just for plotting against him. Sneaking about. My father – now there was a man who knew how to deal with traitors. Tell me, Asanka, tell me why I shouldn’t do the same to your queen.’
Those hissed words sounded over and over in my head as I walked to the dungeons deep below the guards’ barracks abutting the citadel wall. Three soldiers came with me, dragging their feet and kicking up dust as they did. I felt a desperate, bottomless emptiness, once again bent low under the weight of news I had no wish to deliver. The guards led me down the row of dark cells and stopped at one door with a small barred slot at head height. They opened it, and let me go in alone.
Queen Dayani sat slumped in the centre of the cell, still wearing the torn sari of her wedding day. Her hair was dirty and unoiled, and a purple bruise flowered across one cheek. The cell was exceptionally narrow, and floored with sand that sloped up the walls.
‘Asanka,’ she whispered as I entered, although the clank of the door closing drowned this out, and I recognised my name only by the shape of her lips.
‘My lady,’ I said, bowing as though I were entering the throne room. In that instant I knew why King Parakrama had taken only a single wife. This Queen, this young Sinhala girl from Rohana, was so much braver than I was. She was braver than anyone I had ever met. They had given her only the water she could suck from a doused rag, and her lips were white and cracked.
‘Did Magha send you?’ she asked, but there was no accusation in her voice.
‘Yes,’ I said, feeling hot tears in my eyes. ‘He has set a date. He has ordered you to be executed on the full moon before the New Year.’ She didn’t react. ‘It . . . will be a quick death, Your Majesty. Everyone at court has been ordered to attend.’
She breathed out then, in what might have been a sigh of despair or relief. She was shaking a little, but held one arm in the other to hide it. You would weep to see it.
‘I wish I’d killed him, Asanka,’ she said, and her voice was as cool and sharp as a copper blade. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing. That’s the worst part – that’s what I regret. I hid the knife in the lining of my clothes before he summoned me, but I wasn’t going to actually do it. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I felt it there as he spoke to me, as he slid across the bed towards me and called me his wife, his tender lotus flower. When I refused to lie with him, he became angry.’
Her hand moved to touch the bruise on her cheek, but she didn’t look away, refused to apologise with her eyes.
‘I knew if I struggled, he’d find the knife there, and he’d kill me. So I didn’t struggle. When he’d finished, he slept, and I crept from the bed to find my little dagger in the folds of my clothes. I sat beside him in the dark, watching him. He breathes like a snake when he sleeps. All nostrils. His lip twitches, sometimes he murmurs in Kalinga. Sometimes he laughs. Sometimes his face falls and he looks afraid. He looks monstrous when he sleeps, but I couldn’t kill him. Even after what happened to my husband. Even though I’ve heard everything he’s done, what he did to the noblewomen – my friends, their children. I’m not Rama, Asanka.’ A whimper escaped her throat as she said this. ‘I’m not a hero.’
It was a long time before her eyes left the floor and she continued.
‘He woke up slowly, frowned in his sleep, the way dogs do – he frowned as though a mosquito had bitten him, and opened his eyes – like this. At first, he thought I’d returned to make love to him, but the dagger must have caught the light. When he saw it, he leapt at me. I stabbed him in the side when he grabbed me. I stabbed him in the side, but he was too strong and pinned me against the bed. His blood made my hands slip. If I could have done it, Asanka, if I sank the blade into his heart or slit his throat while he slept, I could have avenged my husband. I could have saved so many others.’
Her story over, she visibly sagged.
‘The King would be proud of you,’ I told her, but she was crying now.
‘Write me a poem,’ she said.
‘A poem?’ I was taken aback. ‘What kind of poem?’
‘Something beautiful. Something I can take with me to my death. Short enough to memorise, so that I can repeat it to myself as the sword falls. Write me a love poem.’
I took a moment’s thought. If she had asked me this a month before, I would have begun composing like a spider spins its web. Now, I felt unable to write even the first line of a verse that wasn’t the Vadha. I felt in the folds of my cloth, and found a small piece of wrapped charcoal that I kept there to thicken ink. I began to write in Tamil on the stucco wall:
O man of hill country, where in winter
it rains heavily with sweet thunders –
all living beings sleep at midnight.
The fathers of hill-dwelling maidens,
with pretty jewels and fragrant hair,
have searched for a resting place during the chase,
but returned home to sleep on a bed of tiger hide.
When we are separated,
I suffer whenever I think of you.
When I wait long for you outside,
during the night, while all are asleep,
facing the cold and unfriendly north wind
in our garden, and stand embracing a tree
and pondering over your return—
such standing and waiting is sweeter than
embracing your body so as to press
my well-shaped and heaving breasts
and to surround you with my bangled arms.
It took some time before I had copied out the entire poem, and the Queen watched silently as I did it. It was an excerpt from one of my favourite Tamil collections, Akananuru. I chose these lines because I knew the Queen wouldn’t have heard them, and would believe that I’d composed them all for her. She may have heard Sinhala folk rhymes as a child, but on the throne neither Queen Dayani nor King Parakrama had ever concerned themselves with the poetry of the common languages, poems written in the voices of the common people. Like most people in Lanka, when the King and Queen weren’t reading the scriptures of the Buddha, they looked across the sea to the epic poems of the north: to the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, to the love poetry and drama of Bharavi and Kalidasa. I knew this Tamil poem would seem utterly new to her, with its mysterious shades, its aroma of wood and water.
The poem’s rasa is also the grey juice of sorrow. The lover is waiting for her beloved to return through the dry and dangerous wasteland; the Queen was waiting to join her husband in the beyond. The poet, whoever he may have been, articulates perfectly how I imagine the Queen must have felt in that cell: that as miserable as it is to cross the wasteland, it’s worse to be left behind alone.
When I finished writing, I turned and bowed. I saw that the Queen was reading the poem with glistening eyes.
‘“It rains heavily with sweet thunders”,’ she murmured, and I felt my heart glow as she recognised my favourite line. ‘That’s beautiful, Asanka.’
I nodded, squirming inside.
‘Thank you, my lady. I hope it’s what you desire.’
Before she could answer, there was a banging on the door. My time was up.
‘I have to go, my lady. I’ll visit you again as soon as I get permission,’ I said, though I think we both knew that no such permission would be granted.
‘My Queen,’ I said, feeling my heartbeat in my head, feeling my mouth dry. ‘Why did you choose me? Out of all the others?’
She looked up, as though surprised by the question, and took a moment to answer. When she did, it was as though saying the most obvious thing.
‘Because you loved poetry,’ she said. ‘That’s the way it seemed to me at the time. That you loved it more than anything else in the world.’
I felt a great weakness spreading through my arms and legs.
‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’
I bowed once more, and left. The bearded guard outside leant in to draw the door closed, and I heard the Queen reading the poem back to herself: ‘“All living beings sleep at midnight”,’ I heard her murmur, and then the door slammed shut behind me.
When I look back on those days, it’s not that I don’t remember them, but rather that I find it hard to separate one from another. They were all hot and without rain and spent in torment. The image of the Queen, alone and parched in her dungeon, sat in my head like a warm stone, and still you wouldn’t speak to me. Even if I went to see you in the evenings, to apologise or explain, I found that you had disappeared into the forest, leaving your room empty. My wife knew what was happening, I think, and was enjoying my ill temper. I could see in her face that she thought this a fitting punishment for the months I had abandoned her, left her alone with the servants in an empty villa in a city she didn’t know. I began to find pieces of charcoal in my morning curry, and grit in my rice.
My nights were a frenzy of candlelit writing as I tried to make progress with the first three parvas of the Vadha before the first full moon. I walked through the city and already the koha’s two-tone warble could be heard from the acacia groves, and the scarlet, trumpet-shaped flower of the erabadu tree was blooming. It was the season of the New Year. The moon was only days from fullness, and soon Magha would read what I had written so far, and Queen Dayani would die.
I knew that my life, too, was in question. I knew that there were other poets – and Hindu poets at that – who would love to see the Kalinga’s patience with me run dry, his protection expire. Poets who would clamour all around court for the commission. The Kalinga must continue to find me useful, I thought over and over as I knelt in the temple on idle days, as I bathed in the lake, as I sat and flaked away at the paper with my stylus, cursing under my breath. My three anxieties, about you, the Queen and the poem, felt like a trio of elephants chained to my arms and legs, each about to be seared by a white hot iron.
Every night, I tried to imagine what Magha wanted my translation to be. The lamps gave me kathakali dancers for shadows, the temple garden across the road always aflame with the sound of cicadas and frogs. I wrote my translation with an urgency I hardly ever felt for anything; I brought the terrible King Shishupal to life with similes that hit their targets like darts. I sifted the Sanskrit the way commoners in Ratnapura pan the rivers for precious dusts. I paced the room incessantly.
If only you would talk to me, I thought, then I could ask you every time I grasped and fumbled for one of these words – the certain slant of light that falls through waterfall mist, for instance, or one of the eighteen different ways of describing the smell of a durian. You could help me knot together the suffixes that are the threads of your tongue, and weave into each verb the amount, the mood, the tense, the voice of what I was trying to convey. But thanks to Magha, I had lost you for ever.
I wrote magnificent work. I wrote work that Magha would applaud, but with each simile I unpicked and restitched into Tamil, my Shishupal became an ever more detailed tapestry of my King.
In the second parva, when Krishna’s elder brother Balarama is encouraging him to march to war, I even gave these words to the famous mace-carrier: ‘Shishupal has conquered a kingdom and enslaved its people, bought its lords with his foreign gold, flogged its children in the streets.’
The Vadha, you see, is structured like a palm tree – it’s large and asymmetrical, with many fronds, filled with divergences and tangents of a hundred different kinds. I was confident that the Kalinga wouldn’t notice my small changes, and I was careful: for every change I made, I balanced it with twenty or so verses of immaculately rendered work.
Still, my hand shook whenever my restlessness and anger found this release. I knew the look that would cross Magha’s face if he ever saw through it. The hours he would spend planning my death. How much he would make it hurt. I couldn’t stop myself – that’s all that matters. When I became too afraid to continue, I would step out on to my balcony and let the night air cool me, let the soft sounds of the city draw me back to earth.
The day of the full moon, the day of the execution, was oppressively hot and unusually cloying. It was a good day for brick-makers, I imagine, a good day for pig-herders and pepper-farmers, palm-tappers and potters, but in all other respects, it was a day of sorrow.
I found a spot on that gravelly rise up against the western tank wall, between the servant quarter and the Sal Bazaar, and watched them build the platform. It seemed hours that the lashing of beams and split planks clattered around the square, and the soldiers’ backs steamed in the heat. Unable to watch, I looked down at the dust and loam beneath my feet, at a single stamped okra finger and a pink rambutan skin, a blood-splatter of spat betel juice. There are such enormous termites in Polonnaruwa, so large you can see the dust on their backs. I remember following their lines to where the mounds rose between the buildings, homes for cobras, monuments to their own futility.
The market was filling. Lords were arriving in litters, with their entourage; robed courtiers with peacock feathers in their turbans; palace servants and artisans; copiers and philosophers squinting in the bright sun; priests and clothiers, all in silence and pale as unpounded dough. No one spoke as the storekeepers threw mats over their wares. It was like some sorrowful festival: a lightless Deepavali, or a colourless Holi, like a Vesak without drums. An ascetic tottered through the crowd, avoiding the shade of the bo tree and wailing. His eyes were bloodshot with bhang. Then things started to happen.
A dignitary stepped up on to the platform, and began to read from a long piece of leaf. You know the kind of man: a long, full-bottomed robe, wearing his side-whiskers braided on his cheeks, and his cap pulled over his forehead.
‘These are the crimes and the sentences of the traitor-queen Dayani,’ he read. ‘An attempt on the life of the King. Death. Acting against the peace of the land. Death. Being a whore in the first degree.’
And so on, in his reedy voice: death, death, death, and before long that wailing ascetic took up the chorus at the back of the crowd.
‘Death!’ he started shouting, and cackling as he shouted it, and I watched the mist of the word settle over the crowd, over the caved-in rooftops of the old buildings, the clusters of ruined temples, the disused devales and ancient dry bathhouses that had filled that district of the city for a hundred years.
By the time the platform was complete, the square was stifling and crowded. The loose ends of turbans snatched at the breeze, and I was glad of my raised position beneath the wall, where the breeze could wash over me. There was the pounding of staves on drums, and then the low mourning of a conch ran a thread through the air.
‘Clear a path for the traitor-queen!’ cried a Keralan soldier in Tamil and then Sinhala. The crowd parted, and a horse cart made its way through the people. The Queen was slumped on top, finally stripped of her sari and wrapped in sackcloth. I couldn’t see her face. On the platform that waited up ahead, a bearded man leant on a curved bar of sunlight.
I’ll not dwell on the events of the execution. I’m not one of the bloodthirsty idlers who loiter at crossroad gallows, nor one of the men of science who are hoisted up to the prisoners gurgling on the stakes to ask them: what colour are the flowers of heaven, have they yet been shown their past lives? By that time I was already worn thin with the weeks I had spent immersed in the Vadha. The resurrected demon, the war for dominion over the world, the battles in which hundreds of thousands died, Krishna’s army marching through the glorious countryside to war, and always the spectre of that final, terrible beheading. That Sri Magha’s descriptions are those of a man who wrote from imagination, that he probably never saw with his own eyes the likes of such bloodletting – on that day only this redeemed him in my eyes.
It will do to say that there was no daring rescue, nor cunning deception to save the Queen, as there might be in a poem. Still, I expected the beheading itself to be different. I imagined the scimitar rising slowly into the air, catching the light at the apex of its arc and then falling as though through water into the nape of her neck. I expected to catch a glimpse of her sorrowful gaze just before the blow fell, a gasp from the crowd as the last breath escaped her throat. The tolling of a faraway brass bell. This, at least, is how I would write a poem of the scene.
None of this happened. I was a long way from the front of the crowd, and although I was glad to be spared the sight, I felt that of all the people there, I should have been close to the Queen when she died. The swing of the sword was so quick that I didn’t see its journey, and her hair hung down over her face so that I could almost pretend that she was some other woman. The executioner had to strike twice through the substance of her neck, and her head hit the wood three times before coming to rest. The whole thing was as unspectacular as the breaking of a jar. The crowd was silent throughout, but when the Queen’s head rolled to a stop and the streams of blood gushed, flowed and then trickled, the silence intensified until the marketplace was like a wasteland devoid of even the smallest signs of life.
Outside the city, the funeral pyre burnt for hours. I stood there, beside the road, and watched the black outline of the Queen’s body swimming in the flames. I watched until her charred remains were indistinguishable from those of the camphor and reeds that burnt beneath her, the pile of mangoes and cassia flowers that had been laid on her body. Hundreds stood along the highway, watching with bowed heads. Some chanted prayers, some murmured darkly among themselves.
Even the servants were allowed from the kitchens to mourn. The girls of the palace, who had loved the Queen, threw garlands into the fire. Their hair, their saris were whipped about their bodies by the hot whirlwind that lifted spirals of dust into the air, which made a mirage of the countryside behind and set the leaves nodding. I saw you among the crowd, weeping, but couldn’t bring myself to try to talk to you again. I lifted my eyes to where the steep lines of Gangadoni Hill crested the horizon across the river, its twin granite peaks like a cup to hold the sun. To my left, a Sinhala chieftain with a glittering sash muttered to his friend through chewing: ‘What hope do we have now? The rebel lords are fleeing south. Now Magha has garrisons at Kottiyar, Anuradhapura, Padaviya, Valikagama, Pulaccheri . . .’
‘I knew some of the chiefs they sent into slavery,’ murmured another, and he stared into the fire as though it were a far-off hill. ‘They were good men. But only the fool struggles against the stronger. Isn’t that how the saying goes?’
The first spat his betel into the red earth. ‘Aiyo,’ he sighed. ‘Even the bravest man doesn’t go down the path where a devil lives.’
People left the pyre, one by one, bowing their respects, but I stayed. I stayed until my hair was thick with soot, until my eyes welcomed the cool insides of my eyelids with every blink. I thought of the stories of the Jataka. I remembered how the Buddha-to-be had once lived as a cobra, how he bore the torments of a brutal snake charmer, danced for the crowds and endured.
I will not say that the rains fell for the last time on that day, that drought descended immediately and completely, as some have said. That seems too neat, too like a poem or a story. But it was close enough. Even when everyone began blaming the Tamils and the Muslims, they still said that it was the Queen’s death that stopped the rains, and they would go on saying it for a long time.
Later that evening, I carved the final mark of the Vadha’s third parva. I took my time dabbing ink across the cuts, and watched each word drink in the black one by one. For the first month, my torment was done. I bound the pages and readied to take them to the palace, murmuring a chant under my breath.
I took my route through the gardens, and the canopy of Nandana was thick with cheeping parakeets that night. When I arrived I found that Magha was away. I left the book with the captain of his bodyguard, and walked home infused with a glow of hope. Perhaps the King’s wound had turned bad, I thought. Perhaps he was already sweating the last of his life into a mattress. I even spoke fondly to my wife when she encountered me at the door, though she met this with no little disdain. I returned to my bedroom feeling happy, feeling drained, but already the next parva was unfurling in my mind – an army on the march to destroy evil, passing through the land’s beauty. The bare, mist-wreathed pinnacle of Mount Raivataka in the distance.
When Magha returned from his absence – not riding, but carried in a litter – and all my hopes for his death evaporated, it took him several days to read what I had written. It was evening when he summoned me, perhaps a week after the Queen’s death, and the day’s heat still rose from the stone.
I presented myself at the royal quarter and found him pacing the throne room in distressing good health, but with a definite limp distending his stride. He was speaking rapidly in his own language to two of his generals, but broke off what he was saying as I entered. There was a powerful aroma of medicine in the room: ginseng and wine, tar and burnt skin. He stopped his pacing and turned to me.
‘Do they teach you the word “dharma” here?’ he asked, and I could hear his voice hardened by an edge of pain, still thin and reedy. I murmured a yes. ‘It means duty,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘That’s how my father would explain it. It means a man’s duty, his destiny, obeying his fate – it’s difficult to explain in your language.’
‘I think I understand, Maharaja.’
‘Do you?’ he said, and went over to his desk. He stooped with a small grunt, and picked up the solid gold inkwell with the shell pattern that had belonged to King Parakrama. Then he walked towards me.
‘Do you know what this is?’ he said.
‘An inkwell, my lord.’
‘Let’s say for a moment that this is your dharma,’ he said, and his eyes were fixed on me. When he was less than an arm’s reach from me, he suddenly lifted it above his head in both hands. I flinched, but he did not strike me. He only placed the inkwell on the top of my head, and I felt the cold metal pressing down on my skull. It was heavy. He slowly took his hands away, and I felt the amused eyes of the generals watching me.
‘Don’t let it fall,’ he said.
‘My lord?’
‘Don’t let it fall.’
He sidled back to the desk, where I saw the pages of my first instalment of the Vadha were lying fanned open. I felt the inkwell wobble on my head, and my breathing began to come in little gasps. I looked at the generals, but they were only watching and smirking.
‘When I ordered you to translate this poem for me, Master Asanka, do you remember what I asked of you? The dharma I gave you?’
He gave that same pained grunt as he bent down for the pages of my translation, and his eyes moved like a saw blade as he skimmed back through the verses. I willed myself not to tremble, not to let the inkwell fall.
‘You told me to translate as truly as possible,’ I replied, trying my hardest to keep my head still, and taking short breaths when I could. ‘To make it both Tamil and Sanskrit. Both popular and beautiful. Both glorious and sacred. To make it – balanced.’
‘Balanced,’ he repeated, and looked up at me. The inkwell wobbled. ‘And? How do you think you compare?’ he asked, dropping the cover of the book with a snap.
I didn’t understand why I was being punished. Then, with a rush of needles, I realised. It was my idiot joke. I had given my King Shishupal Magha’s eyebrows, like a child’s chalk drawing of a schoolmaster on the wall. He noticed, I thought, and those words sounded again and again in my head. He’s too clever not to have noticed. All I could think of in that moment was: Help me, Buddha, what a foolish way to die. Where were the guards? Was the royal torturer waiting behind one of the tapestries or curtains, toying with his knives? I began to quake, and the inkwell teetered dangerously forward on my head. I felt a little whine in my throat as I struggled to balance it.
‘Well?’
I felt my voice shaking. ‘Please my lord, a poet – a poet can never translate in isolation. I have to – the words of the two languages are very different. There are compromises to make – everywhere compromises – and yes, my lord, some of these may be tinted by my own – by our own—’
I felt my life drain away like milky rice water, and closed my eyes, felt the cold weight press down on my scalp.
‘I can only – only try to keep Sri Magha’s spirit alive in my translation,’ I pleaded. ‘I wanted to mock what he would find absurd – to hate what he would find hateful.’
‘Hrm . . .’ the Kalinga grunted, eyeing me. ‘And you have done magnificently!’
I opened my eyes, a shudder passed up through my body, and the inkwell fell forwards. I caught it in my hands.
‘Ha! Not a man with natural balance, I see!’ he laughed, and his generals laughed too, both at once. ‘But your translation has pleased me. I was unconvinced that a Lankan poet would have the sophistication to translate such a great work of Sanskrit poetry. I thought you might not be worthy of this dharma.’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘His Majesty – my lord – liked it?’
I came close to tears. Like the Ganga bursting its dam of arrows, relief flooded into me. It stunned me with the recklessness of what I had done, laid open to me the miracle that my changes hadn’t been caught. I swayed a little, but remained upright.
‘Your mastery of Magha’s similes is impressive,’ he told me, and he sounded very far away. ‘Here, where he describes the glow of Krishna’s teeth shining on the sage’s white skin as the light of the moon falling on the walls of a whitewashed palace.’ He sighed, shaking his head in admiration. ‘And here! Where Balarama displays his fury towards the heretic Shishupal, the beads of perspiration on his body are like stars in the reddish evening sky – magnificent!’
I nodded, feeling the cool heft of the inkwell in my hands, the pain still fresh on my crown.
‘He was a truly accomplished poet,’ I replied. ‘It has been an honour.’
He ignored me.
‘Surely now you see why I’ve brought this epic to your shores,’ Magha said to me. ‘Why I chose it as the fine example that the people of Lanka need to be set.’
He brushed his hands as though they were covered in dust.
‘Yes, Maharaja. I am sure they will follow it,’ I said, and a servant hurried from behind me to take the inkwell and put it back down on the desk.
‘With the will of Ganesh,’ he murmured, ‘all obstacles are removed. That’s all, Master Asanka. Leave us.’
I stared at him. He wasn’t mad – I saw the intelligence in his eyes and knew that for certain. I bowed to leave, and when I stepped out on to the terrace, with the sun setting like heated bronze in the lake, everything seemed sharpened and more brightly coloured. A new world. Then Magha’s voice sounded again from inside, unnaturally high.
‘Master Asanka!’ he called. ‘Step back inside for a moment.’
I shuddered, the fear crashing back down on me. I turned and re-entered the throne room. The generals hadn’t moved, but now Magha was sitting on his cushion, pulling out his maps.
‘Asanka, I have to mention it before I forget. I know you were close to Queen Dayani. And you were, after all, the man who told me that she would be happily remarried. Let me ask you – could a woman working alone plan and carry out a deliberate attempt on the life of a king?’
He let this question linger as he smoothed out his maps and the papery sound of his hands on their surface filled the air. He let it turn to accusation in the heat. Suddenly there was the smouldering look of a beaten child on his face.
‘“All living beings sleep at midnight”,’ he mused without emotion, and I felt the blood rush to my face. When he spoke next, it was in the tone he also used to suggest new levies on chena cutting, or a new system of weights and measures in the marketplace.
‘If your translation were not so much to my satisfaction,’ he said, ‘I assure you that my torturers would already have you in their hands. I advise you to give me no more reason to suspect you in the future.’
‘I understand, Maharaja,’ I replied, and I was ashamed to hear my voice jump a note higher in mid-sentence.
I left the throne room, and the breeze funnelling through the palace corridors kissed the hollows on my neck and face where sweat had gathered. The sun was almost completely set, and darkness crept into the halls. I walked down into the shadows of Nandana to cool myself among the shifting leaves, then along the canal to my villa, where my wife was already asleep in her empty room.
Inside my chamber, I balled my fists and pressed them into my eyes. A powerful shaking passed over me, and I moaned. I lit the lamps, making many attempts to bring flame to the tinder, and took the Kuruntokai collection from my shelf. My breath was still heaving. Without stepping away from the bookshelf, I read through the verses of Neytal, the seashore section, and then moved on to my favourite, the mountain section. I imagined watching the mountainsides of the mainland as the rains washed them and the sun turned them gold, waiting twelve years for the kurinji flower to bloom and turn the whole world blue. I read until my breathing softened into tiny gasps. I let the Tamil voices settle into my chest like blossom.
Once the shaking had subsided, I felt my exhaustion and prepared to sleep. I stepped out of my clothes and kicked off my grass sandals, but as I watched them skim across the floor to the bed, I saw it. I felt the same sudden start as when one expects an extra step in a dark flight of stairs and finds only flat ground to meet one’s foot: pressing a soft indent into the straw mattress, a thin bundle of bound pages sat on my bed. I hadn’t left them there. I knew I wouldn’t have left poetry in any proximity to where I sleep, for the tale of Shishupal and Krishna was already seeping into my dreams. No, someone had been inside my room.
I crept towards the book as though it were an injured grey monkey, as though it might leap at me with claws and teeth at any moment. My name was written on the cover in Tamil. I picked it up, felt its weight, explored the paper with my fingertips, tested the give of the sinew binding. The paper was familiar, perhaps even of quite inferior quality – the binding in the fashion of these new workshops that are popping up everywhere – but the ink was very fine, and smelt of faraway places, of strange earth. It wasn’t the simple charcoal and oil I black my own writing with. I took another breath, and thought that the strange ink smelt like rain, falling for the first time on dusty stone.
I read this manuscript dozens of times over the coming months, and I caressed it like this each time, as though its secrets could be coaxed out with gentleness. The book was made up of three sections tied together with cord. That night, I let the tied leaves unravel, and saw a single line of Tamil script at the top of each section. As I read the titles, I felt my stomach boiling, frothing like a pot of rice forgotten and left to sputter on the flames. They said:
‘I am Shishupal’
‘I am Rukmi’
‘I am Ilvala’
No, do not step back; I will not hurt you. I have been asked to tell my part of the story. I am the rakshasa inside Prince Rukmi. The spirit, the demon – whatever the commoners are calling it today. I was listening when he told you about me (I am always listening), but in truth, he’s lucky I don’t take his body all the time. It’s such a strain to inhabit a man from morning to dusk: all the sinews and muscles always moving, the glands that make me hiss with disgust – how does a sweaty halfwit like Rukmi even manage to keep it all going, keep it all secreting, even for the eye blink that is a human life?
Day to day, I let the Prince have control of his body, of those various secretions and oily oozings. I let him sit through conversations with Brahmins longer and duller than a front-to-back reading of the Mahabharata, I sit through all the quarrels with his disobedient sister, and I do nothing. But sometimes history calls, or at least some tremendous fun. The little boy beside the river – that’s exactly the kind of thing I mean. This – look at this – these bodies of muscle and skin and jelly disgust me so much, it is liberating to tear them apart like canvas sheeting.
I was furious to find myself trapped in the oozing body of a Prince. Under the constant gaze of his father (with his strangely instinctive sense of good) and sister (her disobedience and clever eyes) and all the servants and soldiers and priests and Brahmins and scholars, I could never sate myself. There were many times that Rukmi does not remember. Some pigeons and rats that I pulled apart with his fingers, for instance. You see, I must keep myself amused, like any prisoner. I leave him clues: he awakes some mornings with feathers in his hair or blood on his bed sheets, and the fear that clings to his sweaty forehead is like sugar to me. That day beside the Wainganga, I painted myself with blood and howled.
Sometimes I consider taking control of the Prince and jumping him off the palace’s highest tower. I imagine plummeting him through the air, the incandescent moment of weightlessness, then his bones snapped like sticks against the rocks. Fun, perhaps, but I might be reborn into someone worse – a cripple or an untouchable or an orphaned brothel girl. After all, at least a Prince has cushions to sit on and does no work, but still, I was so bored. This was until the business with Rukmini, Shishupal and Krishna.
My brother Vatapi would be proud. I remember his favourite sport when we were young was to murder Brahmins. He would transform himself into a goat – listen to this, it gets better – he would transform into a goat, and I would slit his throat, slice him up and roast him into the finest dish you have ever tasted, dripping juices soaked to cochineal by turmeric, cumin and a thumb of ginger, garnished with tears of coriander.
We would invite the Brahmins to eat with us, fat, obnoxious ones – the kind we knew would walk past a starving orphan girl in the street and pretend to be blind, the kind who say to the people ‘read our stories, forget your language and your festivals, serve us, worship us and pay us levies!’ The kind who burn down villages, and then write great poems about how they defeated armies of demons.
Corpulent, sweating, they would eat until they had finished every scrap of my brother, licking their lips at his tender parts, gnawing at his gristle. The mess they made was disgusting – the slime and spit, the slobbering mouths that split their jowly faces. I would sit and watch the shadows of the plantain palms shifting across their skin, trying to ignore the mortal bodily functions that they did not seem to know they were performing.
Once they had finished, I would ask ‘Sri Brahmin, oh wise one, have you enjoyed your meal?’
As they sat back and began to blather their praise, massaging their swollen bellies and dabbing their mouths on their dhoti, I would call to my brother deep within them. I would call to him and utter the Sanjivani mantra, the mantra used to make the broken whole. Vatapi, that little trickster, would hear the mantra, and would rend his way back to life through the lining of their stomachs, would burst out into the room in a fountain of blood and bile. Oh, how we laughed!
Afterwards, once we had both bathed in the river, Vatapi and I would watch the fireflies circle the areca palms, and he would tell me stories. I loved Vatapi’s stories. Stories are like words: they change what they mean every time someone tells them, but they belong to no one. In the end, that’s the only reason I tried to force Rukmini into a marriage she did not want, why I brought Krishna and Shishupal into such spectacular conflict. For the story. Have you ever trapped two beetles in a box, just to see which one would kill the other?
Now it would be a good idea for you to step back, for I feel the old mischief boiling in my blood. It would be wise to run, even. Get away from here as fast as you can!
Unless, of course, you are hungry?
