68

Kalidasa paced up and down the courtyard of his mansion in Ujjaini, steeped in thought. This was all he had done since he came back from his meeting with Bharatendu. He would walk on the balcony for a while. Then he would descend and pace up and down the courtyard. Once more up to the balcony, then down to the courtyard again. Two days and two nights had gone by in this way.

It was nearly time for the sun to rise. Having risen twice, the sun was preparing to rise once more. The poet saw the flowers in the garden open out one by one. He shuddered every time one of them broke open, as if each had made a thundering sound as it blossomed. And now, birds were making real sounds, followed by the ringing of bells from the temples and the recitation of stanzas from the Vedas. The world was reverberating with sound and growing radiant with light.

The king must have been annoyed at not seeing the poet at the evening assemblies. The dancing girls must have wept until their eyes hurt. He would have to answer all of them. But meanwhile, he was distressed, wondering how he would answer himself.

The poet’s heart was full of the verse Amir had quoted to him. All the scholars without exception had praised him for it. Amir too had praised him and then suddenly fallen silent.

Sa nirvasya yatha kama…

The poet recited the lines to himself again. At the time when he had written them, there had been a full day’s discussion over the words ‘vikramam’ and ‘langhanam’ that he had used. It had been pointed out that the words implied the physical pressure a man applies in order to rouse a woman’s passion and that no one with an awareness for art would fail to be delighted by their dhvani, the meaning they implied.

The question the dramatist had asked—whether a writer should not feel happy if his characters walked out of his pen and became dignified people—pierced him like an arrow. In the verse, it was the act of a king attacking and subjugating a territory that he had compared to an act of copulation with its connotations of lust and passion. Why had a poet of his stature not thought about the dignity of the people who had been attacked and subjugated?

The face of the king who had been enraptured by the verse and the image of the courtiers who had nodded their heads in time to the rhythm of the words came to his mind. It was clear that all of them had perceived the cruel act as one of love. He could, if he chose, argue that his poem was true to that extent. But he had not chosen that imagery to expose the vulgarity of their minds. He had wanted to delight, to titillate them. Therefore, he had really been on the side of those who looked at an act of cruelty as an act of lovemaking and delighted in it; he had not been on the side of those who had suffered it in agony. As a poet, had they not been characters he had created?

The poet ran into the house like one possessed. He came out again holding in his trembling hands his most acclaimed poetic work. His heart thudded like a drum. He was afraid to open the book. How many ghosts like this he might find in it! But he could not help opening it. He stood there helpless, drenched in perspiration. His shawl slipped from his shoulder.

Sadayam bubhuje mahabhuja
Sahasodwegamiyam vraje diti
Achiropanatam sa medinim
Nava panigrahanam vadhumiva⁸

These were the words that his eyes fell on when he opened the book. Once again, the courtiers’ heads nodded before him, keeping time with the rhythm of the words. It was not because he was not strong enough but because he feared that the virgin he had just married would grow frigid if he used force that the king was gentle with her: wasn’t it to imply that you used the word ‘mahabhuja’ to describe the king, asked Emperor Vikramaditya. King of kings, can I call you weak? said Kalidasa without thinking, forgetting that the lines were attributed to Aja, the son of Raghu. The emperor roared with laughter—not as Vikramaditya, but as a character the poet had created…The poet’s hands crushed the page.

‘Be gentle, did you say? Be gentle and kind?’

The poet shuddered when he heard the voice. A group of men with long hair and beards parted the bushes and came towards him. One of them came right up to him, snatched the book from the poet’s hands, placed his finger on a page and ordered him to read: ‘Read! What the king who was a mahabhuja did after he had disrobed the virgin’s body with gentleness and satisfied his lust—read, what did he clothe her with? Read it out loudly!’

The poet read the lines he had written, obediently:

Bhallapavarjitaistesham
Sirobhi smashrulairmahim
Tastara sarghavyaptai
’sa kshoudra patalairiva⁹

The moment he finished reading, Huna women whose faces were red from weeping for their dead husbands came and stood on his left.

‘Look, poet,’ they cried, turning their reddened cheeks to him, ‘forget our sorrow and pain. Think of a verse to describe the beauty of the exciting redness of our cheeks!’¹⁰

Another woman came up quickly and stood on his right. Pulling off her clothes, she showed him her naked breasts.

‘Not there, poet, look here!’ She turned his face towards her. ‘I have taken off my necklace because I lost my husband. Instead, to provoke your imaginative faculties, I have put on my sumptuous breasts an unthreaded necklace made with the pearls of my tears.’¹¹

All the bushes suddenly disappeared from the garden. The crumbling walls on the roadside collapsed one by one. Cattle-dust settled over the earth with magical rapidity. The strange characters who had been lurking around and behind him for days came and surrounded him without any hesitation. He recognized every one of them without exception.

‘Get out, get out of here!’ he shouted in a moment of madness.

They did not go away. He had known they would not. He had wished secretly that they would not go. After all, they were his characters. His own creations, his own children. They had come before him after such a long time! People whom he had written out, treated like material for enjoyment. Who had lain flat, waiting to be raped. The patterns of cloth used to cover violated bodies. Red cheeks, full breasts…The objects that had provoked delighted laughter at the court of the king had come back now to stand before him as dignified people with bold voices. Shedding his fears and doubts, he stood in front of them humbly, his head bowed.

And then suddenly, another group of visitors arrived—a number of severed heads suspended in the sky by their hair behind the men and women lined up before him. Their eyes bulged, their mouths were wide open. Blood dripped from their necks. And yet, this terrible sight did not frighten the poet. For they too were familiar to him, they were objects he had used with glee to embellish his poems.

Hanging in the sky, each of the wide-open mouths began to laugh. The sound of their mirth took shape as a verse in his mind:

Adhorananam gajasannipate
Siramsi chakrairnisitai kshuragrai
Hritanyapi shyenanakhagrakoti-
Vyasaktakesani chirena petu¹²

The heads began to talk: ‘Great poet, you have raised your eyes now not to look at us, but at the high points of your imaginative faculty and poetic excellence. But do you really see the vultures your imagination has summoned? The vultures who picked us up from the battlefield and now suspend us by our hair from their beaks? No, all you see is us. The vultures are elsewhere.’

‘My children, my beloved children,’ the poet pleaded with the men and women surrounding him and with the heads that hung in the sky. ‘The day that Bharatendu spoke of has arrived for me as well. I free all of you. Be liberated! Journey wherever you like! It does not matter whether your freedom is my ruin or my tragedy in the eyes of the world. My poetry finishes here. It is time for you to take over.’

The heads interrupted him. ‘No, Mahakavi, our journey will not give you freedom. The vultures you are searching for, that tore us apart, are within yourself. Even if you give us freedom, we cannot give it to you. Because we are actually suspended on your nails. We are neither lustful kings embracing virgins nor are we soldiers who draw our swords in order to kill innocent people at the bidding of kings. We are not even the elephants who carry soldiers. We are just mahouts who stand at the farthest end of the long line of rape and plunder. And yet your cruel quill used our terrible destiny for your pleasure. Hanging us from the vulture-claws of your pen, you won praises and gifts from kings. No, we do not have the power to leave you. Will you be able to throw away your quill? We can go away only if that pen is with us…’