But I could find out a secret in the king’s
daughter’s bedroom that triggered my hope to reach out to the reason behind it.
Haven’t I told you that the king’s daughter kept forgetting her dreams once she
got up from the bed with shock? I didn’t need much time to make her sleep
again. She slept calmly after a brief conversation with me. As her words didn’t
carry any signs of dreams, I didn’t ask anything about them. Only after the
night wind entered the room carrying the scent of neem after she slept did I
see the window of the room kept open. I came to know about it later from my
disciple. I had an intuition that the god was trying to tell me something
furtively with that open window. I had told I could spend the whole night
sleeping on one of the long beds laid in the king’s daughter’s bedroom. There
was still a long time for the night to go. I got up and went near to the
window. The top branch of the tall neem tree from the palace garden was
standing near the bedroom, branching out into the window. In that area—which
had a lesser number of security guards due to the faith reposed on the
twelve-foot-high wall with spears fixed on its top—I saw two pug marks trailing
from the grass bed in the garden, climbing on the tree, and jumping into the
bedroom. Then, it slinked along the wall, went past the stuff stacked up in the
room with an ease as if they didn’t exist, and entered the adjacent room where
the maid was sleeping. I thus began to have a hope to find out the reason why
the dream-lover of the king’s daughter spat on her face.
***
With this, my great-grandfather’s story of the first night (the
story of inhalation) came to an end. The people and the members of the royal
family who were listening to his story dispersed, unwilling though. Those who
were permitted to stay back were just whiling away their time, chattering.
Their conversations were centred on the dreams of the princess and the
enigmatic pug marks that jumped into the palace bedroom through the neem tree.
All of them tended to believe that the servant maid, who was supposed to guard
the sleeping princess by being awake, was the one who had willingly allowed the
person to whom the pug marks belonged, and began hating her. They announced
aloud that her crime of stabbing in the back was unpardonable and made her
misconduct reach far away through the seasonal winds that passed through the
capital. The people living in faraway places also began loathing the maid of
the king’s daughter. Their guesses, which put the number of stars into shame,
were predicting the possible punishment the king would give after completion of
the story the next night. The maid’s house, located somewhere in a small
village away from the capital, was set ablaze that night. Her old parents
living in that house readily accepted being burnt up alive in fire for giving
birth to such a wicked woman. This news reached the palace only nineteen days
later after the incident happened. The entire capital mourned for that incident
only after nineteen days. All the people, who hated her to the extent of
killing her when the story was narrated the previous night, now realised their
mistakes during the narration of the story next night. With their implicit
seeking of her pardon, they comforted themselves that they could absolve
themselves of their sins. But when that innocent servant maid, to her utter
shock, came to know about the injustice meted out to her after nineteen days,
she cursed my great-grandfather wholeheartedly for leaving the story at an
inappropriate juncture the previous night that had rendered her forsaken. She
then jumped out of the window through which the tiger went out from the king’s
daughter’s bedroom and killed herself by jumping onto the spiked
fence of the garden.. On the other hand, the king’s wife, who
returned to the palace after the story was narrated in the previous
night, was also cursing my great-grandfather mouthful
for disclosing the amatory dreams of her
daughter in front of the big crowd, that too, in the presence of her parents.
She remained sleepless that night, troubled by a commonly accepted thought that
a woman’s mind is created in her father’s imagination, whereas her body is
created in the fantasy of all men. She was terrified to see in her imagination
the erotic dreams of her daughter spilling out of her closed eyes were
reflected as flowers on her nostrils, a smile on the corner of her lips, the
red hue on her cheeks, and the taut pearls on her nipples. She was unable to
imagine that twenty-two men were watching those changes on her body that could
enamour anyone. She kept her husband away from hatred, as he was the father of
her daughter. Other than the king and my great-grandfather, she couldn’t find any
plausible reason to forgive those twenty hunters. She then ordered her guards
secretly, without the knowledge of the king, to behead all those twenty men who
played the collection of songs called “The Coition of Star Dwellers.” Those
hunters were brought to a place of execution without the knowledge of anyone,
and summarily slaughtered. The eyes and tongues of their family members were
shut under the huge compensation they received and the burden of their
allegiance towards royal family. It was said that the sequence of many
auspicious events, including the marriage of the king’s daughter and the fame
of my great-grandfather, shot up at great speed to the peak only after these
murders. The king came to know after many days about the murder of an
untarnished girl and the twenty hunters who played the music to soothe his
senses. He then took responsibility for all those unfortunate events that
occurred under the shadow of his bright reign, fell irreversibly sick, and
became bedridden. One of the stories says that my great-grandfather came to
know, from the hysteric laughter and yells of the queen at him when he was
expelled from the palace years later, that she did want to get my
great-grandfather killed along with those twenty hunters. But she kept her plan
of killing him aside due to her sense of gratitude that had overwhelmed her
seeing his personality, wisdom, and illustriousness on the day she left after
listening to the story. She remembered the old proverb and comforted herself
that the one who saw the dreams of a young girl without any qualms and
disclosed them without any scruples would die of the thoughts of those very
dreams. Unfortunately, that old proverb proved to be true. Destiny was bringing
him the image of the king’s daughter sleeping with her curvaceous waist and
flaccid breasts again and again and was troubling him for days. He was longing
for his early death in those days after the third usage of his craft, trying to
absolve him of the sins of his mind defiled with the impure erotic thoughts,
which was otherwise abstemious. But the poisonous seeds sown by the king’s
daughter’s dreams, to which he stood as witness, and her sleep kept growing
fast as per the wishes of the king’s wife and against his wishes. Even long
after the king’s daughter was married to a handsome and healthy prince after
her complete recovery from the disease, and the people almost forgot her, my
great-grandfather was still roaming with the undying passion due to the effect
of seeing her dreams (which he understood only after the third usage). While he
forgot the last part of the treatise on dreams that stipulated that the dreams
of women shouldn’t be seen by men, he remembered the part that explained the
dreams that attained eternal beauty without ageing as they were not
contaminated by seeing them, and then drawn into a pathetic state of mind to
penetrate the youthful dreams of his own wife, who was widely respected across
the old city, without her knowledge. Destiny blocked his wisdom in such a way
that he remembered neither the tenets of the scriptures nor the promises he
gave his master in this regard. In the dreams of that middle-aged lady, his
wife, he visualised her as a young woman in her youthful days before marriage
when she was his master’s daughter brimming with stiff assets and scents, and
he let himself have the sense of erotic pleasure that the men of wisdom usually
despised. At that moment, the anger of the scriptures he had antogonised and
the curse of his master he betrayed brought in front of his eyes two
apparitions. My great-grandfather was shocked to see himself in one of them in
which he, who hadn’t yet crossed his middle age, was standing as a complete old
man with grey hairs being brushed aside as a subject not worthy of serious
consideration by his own youthful wife. In the scene that was both the second
apparition and bloodcurdling, he saw his childhood friend, who was believed to
have disappeared from the eyes of this world after being devastated due to the
ill effects of the patient’s bad dreams years ago, coming out of his hideout
and appearing in front of the master’s daughter with his strong body that
hadn’t lost its vitality. While he was climbing on the taunting steps of death,
with his eyes opened forcibly by the curse, he saw both of them fully nude,
playing the game of seduction on the very steps made as their bed, and had all
the craft he learnt all through his life completely slip out of his mind that
very moment. After that, he never
attempted to find it out anywhere. His face turned like a burnt firewood,
withered, as the lustre of his craft that was shining had been put out.
He then stopped shaving himself and allowed the terrible knots called ‘Adai’ to grow copiously in the hairs that had grown very haphazardly on his face and chin. His enemies, who were waiting for such a fall of his, declared that he indulged in bestiality, was the enemy of scriptures, was responsible for the death of twenty innocent men, was the one who drove out his own wife to her parent’s home, and had been affected by the disease of profligacy. They charged him with the irreplaceable reprehension, expelled him from the palace, and banished him into the jungle. They rendered his two male children orphaned and drove them out along with him. Unable to pass his craft to his children, my great-grandfather left them ignorant. The priests traced out the entire palm-leaf manuscripts that contained all his preaching, which served as the holy scripture to women, and destroyed them completely without leaving any traces. They enslaved the women, brought them under their control by way of obligating them not to shave off the thick hairs grown in their armpits and vulva, and thus made them suffer from the guilt of bearing bad odour. They gouged out mercilessly the eyes of those who were suffering from bad dreams and killed them. They announced the barbers were low-born, ousted them from the centre of the city, and got them settled near the cremation grounds so that they would live their remaining days by inhaling the stench of burning corpses. The king, who assumed the responsibility for the sake of his daughter and fell sick irreversibly bearing the sins of his wife, who had killed those twenty innocent hunters, was still ruling his country efficiently with the help of his daughter without losing his faith. He heard about my great-grandfather’s actions and their effects, felt helpless about how to stop the unwanted things from happening, and then started counting his final days by keeping his body ready to embrace death. He stopped the administrative engine of the country. The king’s son-in-law, who was declared as the royal heir after his marriage with the princess, expressed dismay that it was rather very difficult to bring good sense into the heads of intelligent men who went astray than to bring the boorish men who were causing poverty back to the track, and slowly gave up his responsibility towards the old city despite the repeated appeals from his wife, the king’s daughter. As the years rolled on, the trees and animals that had been hiding behind the walls of the old city, built on the destruction of forests, came out of their hideouts and began hunting the humans. Very soon, according to the rules of the universe, the walls began hiding into the trees, and the dense forest, which was once destroyed by the new city, had now re-established itself there. My grandfathers, who had been roaming in the cremation grounds after becoming demented and impecunious, could somehow save their lives from death by becoming hunters and getting along with the animals. They brought up their children like the way animals do as well, in the forests.
***
The story narrated on the second day: (Or the story of exhalation) My great-grandfather says:
If the royal family hadn’t destroyed the dreams of an animal generations ago, perhaps I wouldn’t have got this opportunity to tell this story. It was reasoned that the bedroom of the king’s daughter had been existing in the dreams of the old tiger as its birth place for ten generations. Not only the bedroom of the king’s daughter, but you must understand that this city, my telling of this story, and you listening to it—all are happening in the dreams of the animals. My days of learning in the hermitage had taught me the entire certainty of this universe was nothing but the dreams of animals. Putting it in other words, it is the essence of the craft I have learnt. Further, it also remains the essence of the secret of this universe the humans are searching for. The animals see this universe as their birthplace in their dreams. No sooner had they come out of the womb than the entire universe became a womb and engulfed them. It then becomes their permanent home. On this earth where the birds and termites want to build their own homes like humans, only the animals wouldn’t like to build homes for themselves. What one eats, what is eaten, what one drinks, what is drunk, inhalation, exhalation, the nostrils that breathe, the temperature falling upon the things, the things that allow the temperature to fall upon them, the one that sinks, the one that appears, and the fewer moments between sinking and appearance—all these are their dwellings in their dreams. The food into which the animal dips its face becomes its dwelling that accommodates the animal with love. The wind accommodates them in its vastness. The animal enters the visual space and dwells there. During sexual intercourse, the male animal treats its sexual organ as its ‘self’ and the female sexual organ as its dwelling and thus gets settled by entering it. At the same time, the female tucks its body between the male’s legs and submits itself. Other than the possibilities of entering, coming out, appearing, and disappearing, any movements of this world that decide the gradings of upper or lower or equivalent or lateral movements will never occur in the dreams of animals. An animal that binds this universe with its memory before its birth will never forget the place it first fell onto with the lymphatic residue and scent even after its death. It is this world of dreams of animals are often described as the world of gods in the holy scriptures. Why don’t the gods pat their eyelids there? Why don’t they feel hunger and thirst? Why don’t the dead souls sleep there? When the gods left the worldly reality that clearly attests to their physical existence for the world, which had no fixed structure, God Almighty created the world of gods, which in itself serves their food, water, sleep, sight, time, and breath, apparently to prevent those gods from developing a suspicion about their physical existence. All my attempts, with my real-life experiences, to learn that secret, which still remained the essence of any craft being leant anywhere in the world, were full of pains and miracles. Only those who had understood the rules of this universe would believe that the melancholy of the old tiger, which stayed in the king’s daughter’s bedroom for ten generations, was neither a wonder nor a mystery but about reality. So, it is necessary that I have to tell you about the dreams of animals before I resume narrating the story of the dreams of the king’s daughter. Let me use this opportunity to tell you the most challenging part of the story during my days in the hermitage. This story is about me, blessed by my master for having mastered the art of penetrating into others’ sleep to see their dreams. This story is about the woman—who is listening to the story along with you—whom I married as a gift of my victory. This is the story that describes the glory of my master, who trained me to be an erudite man.
Listen to me. The general rule is, the things that we are not aware of, are being seen in the dreams. The mortals don’t like to see the universe but like to know about it. Knowing something ends up bringing in the reality. Man created language by streamlining the elements of sounds in order to know the things. The animals do not know language. So, they never try to understand the universe around them. The place where no efforts are made will have the perfect vision. The animals never distinguish this world the way humans do—with the binaries of vision and awareness to distinguish it into dreams and real worlds. Since seeing is the character of dreams, the reality the humans ever tried to understand remains the dream of animals. It was why the treatises of dreams had insisted that those who wanted to test their limitations in the art of penetrating others’ dreams must first penetrate the dreams of animals to realise the reality of this universe through the eyes of animals. This test would be rather very difficult. The one who wished to enter this test would have to pass through it in three stages. In the first stage, he had to know what the animals see in their dreams. In the second stage, he would assess the nature of movements in the scenes occurring in the dreams. In the third stage, the last and extremely difficult one, we ought to know how the animals perceive this universe in their dreams. When I entered the dreams of a cow once, given to me for this experiment as ordered by my master, it took me one hundred and eighty days to get over with the first stage of knowing how the cow converted the reality based on language into a ‘languageless’ pure entity before perceiving it in its dreams. You can understand how difficult it is! When the words ascribed to the things are separated from them, the light and the scent that were earlier separated from them and converted into memories will all come back to them. After an arduous journey during the winter through the dreams of the cow, keeping myself alive from the possible asphyxiation amid the swirls and density of its dreams, I told my master that those dreams were a mixture of complex colours that enabled one to realise the purity. My master said that I had passed the first stage of the test successfully and hugged me as his eyes welled up with the tears of grief, mourning the death of his first disciple, who jumped from the fourth storey of the building and killed himself. He then turned to his daughter and ordered that she should cover her breasts with clothe when she appears in front of me. When I completed the first stage of the final test, seven days were remaining for the full moon day to bloom in its fullness in the east. I was given two days of rest. I started my fasting for the next five days as directed by my master. After that, on the full moon day, I entered the cow’s dreams once again in order to pass the second stage of the test.
The world was created in the beginning by the God almighty as a wordless, magnificent, unending dream. The man could reach this god’s world of dreams that has been hidden under the real world only after his death. But the animals, the blessed ones, though having inferior intellect than men, are able to perceive the world of God while being alive without having to stoop with the burden of the enormity of knowledge. That world has different amazing shades. The time and place in the world of dreams are different from the time and place of the real world, as the things there won’t move the way they do in the real world. In the real world, man creates meaning with words. The meanings create reasons. The reason creates physically visible things. The things cause the effects. The effects give birth to words that create reasons and meanings. Since the things are associated with other things, both horizontally and vertically bound by reasons and effects, like a chain, the scenes are visible to human eyes as horizontal and vertical movements. But in the view of animals, which just see this universe as dreams, the world neither moves right to left nor left to right nor top to bottom nor bottom to top. When I narrate all these, my eyes grow teary as I am reminded of God’s compassion and sagacity in making the animals’ faces cone-shaped, looking downwards, unlike the flat faces of humans. The humans who have flat faces to see the things with both eyes simultaneously won’t have the problem of seeing two different things simultaneously that are potentially confusing to one’s understanding. One vision—one understanding—is the basis of knowledge. But the animals with their eyes on both sides of their faces, seeing two different views at the same time, wouldn’t be able to correlate them to understand it, and hence they are unable to produce a language. Viewing many things at the same time does remain the basis of sight without words. During the second stage of the test, I saw the view that appeared on the right moving to the left of the cow given to me for the experiment and the appearance of a new view on the right to fill the space left vacant, and the view that disappeared on the right was now sitting on the left view, which the cow was already seeing. After understanding that the dreams in animals produced in complex colours and scents, unlike in the real world, are moving from inside and appear outside and then disappear inside again, I reached my master’s hermitage after a gruelling effort of sixty days to come out of the cow’s dreams, went to him,, and told him that I had understood its causes the way I could explain it to you. He then told me that I had passed the second stage of the test successfully as tears fell down from his eyes, thinking about his second disciple who found succour in the thick jungles of Kashi. Also, he kindly instructed his daughter to come infront of me only after covering her body parts with jewels that were not covered with clothes.
Later, my master gave me ten days of rest to prepare myself for the third level of the test, the last and extremely difficult one. In that period, I relished different types of foodstuff that I had never tasted during my days in the hermitage. My master had ensured that drinks made of different aromatic herbs were given to me continually during that period. They kept my body cool and awfully tired, requiring sleep of many days, and numb like wood so that the body wouldn’t roll out on sand while sleeping, thus leaving the clothes sloppy and lying haphazardly. When I received all these from the hands of my master’s daughter—here sitting beside me as my wife—they had kept me in a long, deeply resting sleep as the titillating dreams kept coming out of me. I was disdainfully proud of those treatments given to me for passing the second stage of the test without any adverse remarks. Only a little later could I understand that those compliments were hiding in them the scent of treachery, like the way the sacrificial goat is offered with the new clothes, perfumes, and garlands. To corroborate this, my blood became almost frozen when I heard my master’s advice and directives for the test on the day I was getting ready to face the third stage of the test. I was terribly stunned at what he had said. My master told me, unlike the first two stages, that the craft wouldn’t be used on the animal that was subjected to the third stage during its dull moments when the food was getting digested in its stomach. Further, he said, “My dear student, you have already learnt thoroughly what the animals see in their dreams and how those dreams are born and disappear in it. Now, you are going to know the meaning of those dreams in human language. You must understand that you have now been assigned the tremendous task of passing this to the future generations the way our ancestors - who had converted the dreams of animals into words and given them to us in the form of scriptures - did. The animals don’t create their dreams only in sleep like the humans do. They undertake tiny, temporary sleeps in every specific moment of their life and then perceive the worlds of those moments as their dreams and have the power to enjoy them. So, at times, you will also lose your sixth sense while attempting to read the dreams of an animal with five senses. Let you be mingled with all the places it moves, all the scenes it sees, all the places it visits, the food it eats, and all the moments it indulges in sex. Only at that time will you understand how this universe is perceived in the eyes of animals, which create dreams every moment and leave them in the form of this universe. The day when you are satisfied that you have converted the colours and scents you saw in the first stage of the test into words and chants, you would come to meet me again.”
My master, then, bought the same cow that he had subjected to experiment during the first two stages of the test from its owner after paying him an amount, removed its nose-rope, ferrules in the horn, drape on its face, and the cloth from its body, and wiped off the vermillion from its forehead and the decorative colourful patterns drawn on its body, rendered it totally naked and set it walk ahead of me. Terribly shocked at his order to take off all my clothes and start, I earnestly pleaded him to allow me to wear at least a loincloth. That seer (ok) who knew all three dimensions of the universe, first vehemently denied my request but later allowed only a small loincloth, mumbling some words out of his discomfort with it. From that day, I was wandering behind the cow like its shadow. O courtiers! It was not a day, not a season; it was two complete cycles of summer the cow made roam behind it - through the jungles, urban areas, depths of water bodies, ridges, fields, and shrewdness of people who allowed it to enter their houses and accumulated their fortunes by giving it jaggery, rice, and coconut stalks during special occasions - as an ascetic having no bond other than the cow. When it was chewing its food, I saved myself from the severity of cold sparkles generated during the clash of seasonal cycles inside its dreams. Neither did I eat nor sleep during that entire period. I came to know that, before this experiment, the sleep and hunger induced by the aromatic drinks prepared by my master’s daughter—my present wife—during the time I thought was most enjoyable in my life were actually fed to me as medicines to take a toll on my eyelids and stomach at the time of the experiment. The cow I was following remained completely indifferent, as if it wasn’t aware of someone following it, and lay and rolled out wherever it wanted. It slept with its eyes open. It was gleeful in completely drowning its pure nudity in the water bodies, covering its body with the sand and then shedding the dried sand. During winter, it used the exhalation on its body to keep its interiors warm. During summer, it licked its snout where the inhalation takes place, thus making the air cool before making it enter its body, and ejected out the excess heat by twitching its skin. As these actions of the cow, which were otherwise impossible tasks for a human being kept teasing my intellect and insulting me incessantly, the urge to complete the experiments as soon as possible and go back to my place began badgering me. (Only after my marriage did I understand that my urge to go back home had in fact been burning like fire due to the thought about my master’s daughter). Hence, this forced me to resort to a foolish act of deliberately bringing the experiment to an abrupt end by way of hastily converting the cow’s actions into words. I tended to believe that apart from those jaggery, rice, coconut, grass, and hay that appeared as dreams in front of the cow roaming nude, even the air, temperature, and other sundry scenes were also looking like its food. It first appeared to me in the first autumn during the period of experiment that the cow identified anything that came in front of it by sniffing and licking. I caught the cow, which was walking in front of me, reined it with the rope inserted through its nostrils, and walked on haughtily holding the rope’s knots and reached my master. My age blocked my vision from realising the biggest mistake I was making. I announced before him, proudly, that the animals perceived this world as their food and their dreams brought taste to anything they saw. Only when I saw my master falling unconscious on the patterns drawn on the floor in the front yard with his eyes blocked, losing his balance at the very moment of my boastful declaration, did I understand my mistake. The moment I came to know that my failure was so poisonous that it could bring death to my master, I began to hate myself. Before this woman—my master’s daughter who later became my wife—came to the front yard searching for her father, I tossed the nose-rope and my loincloth onto the ground as a telltale sign of my presence there and left that place immediately with a pledge that I would return as a victor before my master could regain his consciousness.
My education, which should have been completed within one cycle of the season, got into another cycle due to my foolishness and arrogance, which thus invited unwanted troubles. Since I gave up the piece of cloth that was used to cover my genital from dangling along my thighs, I had lost the least number of words to share with others, which the confidence of having that cloth offered me. Along with the animal that led me, I also completely entered the world of no words and distinctions. But at the same time, I had to remain with the consciousness of a human in order to create the words I came across by being away from that world. My total nudity taught me that the real test had just begun. Now, I could clearly hear the words my master mumbled when I refused to take off my loincloth. Haven’t I told you that I had understood in the first test that the universe appearing in the dreams of the animals was full of complex colours and scents? Now I could see them assuming particular colours and scents at specific moments. I could progress faster in a very short time to become an animal that enabled me to see the dreams of a cow turning red and dark when it chewed its food. In the eyes of the cow, this world appeared red and dark when it drank water by dropping its cone-shaped face into the water till its eyes were drowned, cleaned its breath by lifting its face against the wind, wallowed in mud full of putrid stuff due to rain and small insects, and gave its body to some small birds to pick the ticks. Along with it, as my surprise shot up, I could enjoy a comforting, warm temperature coming out of those dreams. That temperature was ringing into my ears a heavy serenity not heard in any corner of the world. It troubled me as if it was very familiar to me and something that had disappeared from my memory due to some curse. I could understand that, being an animal among the animals; though I was unable to decode how they perceived this universe in their dreams into words, I was still able to see them as scenes in my view. I was hopeful that I would be able to discover a device that could capture the dreams into a language. Very soon I got that opportunity. But what actually happened was that it was the device that found me on its way as its tool. The device that had found me was a dark bull whose eyes looked like that of a chaste woman. When I and the cow were on our usual journey through a region that couldn’t be termed either a village or a town, suddenly in between us there appeared a well-grown bull—with toned, rounded twin humps, sharp horns looking upward as if tearing off the sky, broad thighs, reddened eyes, and a massively drooling mouth. Before I could regain my senses from the shock, that mammoth male animal that stood hiding the cow from my view touched me with its erect pizzle, licked me, and pushed me aside. Then it mounted on the cow with its front legs up and pulled the cow to its side like a thunderbolt falling upon a tree. All these things happened within a fraction of second. Lying onto the ground, I saw the cow’s body, in reflex, was shrinking small in size and finding its place between the bull’s legs, and its dreams turning reddish dark hastily. In the eyes of the bull that still remained mounted on the cow from the rear, were reflected the same reddish dark dreams spilling out everywhere. That time too, the temperature I was familiar with and later forgot came out of that dream and fell on me. Conquering my arrogance of my age that made my master fall unconscious, I was watching just like a spectator all these events patiently lying on the ground. Very shortly I realised with tears that the bull which abruptly came in between to separate the cow from me, earning my momentary wrath, was actually sent by the God as a connecting agent to unite me with victory. Losing no synchronicity, as if declaring that the universe was nothing but the world of animals’ dreams, which was not about getting closer after parting but about dipping and ascending, the bull was performing its vertical moves of that world on the cow’s rear. After a long time, the bull brought its heavy frame to the ground that shook with its weight and turned its eyes—that had turned normal, losing its reddish darkness—toward me and glanced at me lovingly. The white cow that had never even turned a glance at me all throughout the journey, for the first time, turned its eyes welling up with the tears of love towards me. As the cow was standing at its place, the bull came near me as I lay down, threw its warm breath onto my body, licked it with its tongue curling all over, and spoke to me in an elegant language of the nature that belonged to the ‘wordless’ world. Soon it shrank and disappeared in the wind the way it had appeared. Before my mind could understand its language, my phallus grew erect and extended towards the cow without my initiative, as though my body had understood that language. Immensely happy, I got up, cried, and pounced on the cow, which was awaiting me with its open vulva lips. Placing my palms firmly on its back, I lifted my body and inserted my penis into its vulva, from which the sperm of the bull was still dripping. With the reflex of having been released from my body, my penis, more elongated than my height, entered the cow’s body, skidded through its flesh, tissues, layer of fat, blood, and the tender nerves in its interior and grew. At last, with the eyes of my phallus, I saw the real appearance of the universe, which the animals perceive every time with the help of each sweat pore on their bodies.
Amid that unbearable ecstasy, I was struck with a sudden realization that the dark red hues and the temperature that had become dreams themselves by occupying the animals’ dreams, the intoxicating scents, and the deep silence as if drowned in water were all, in fact, the womb of a female animal. It was revealed in the space of my realization that what I had occasionally perceived as the universe through my journeys along with the cow was nothing but the place of my birth, the womb. I perceived through my eyes of wisdom pulsating restively inside the cow’s stomach that the animals were seeing the entire universe as their birthplace, while the man—in the world he had created for himself by isolating the words from them—were just building metal palaces, huts made of leaves, houses made of tiles, and shelters made of hide, thus making replicas of their birthplaces they lost out of their memories to find solace for themselves. Prompted by this simultaneous state of bliss from the revelation and the unbearable state of agony about the foolishness of people, I remained in the womb of that female animal in the form of my phallus for a long time, ostensibly reluctant to detach myself from it. The time for us to complete our journey and to return by the same route we came by had then arrived. This time, the cow refrained from showing its resplendence, followed me as a meek animal licking me lovingly, and made me feel proud of myself.
***
The moment I stepped into the hermitage, my master, after his recovery from the long oblivion, came running to the front yard and greeted me. At once he saw the mud smeared on my body, the scent of fat that was radiating in all directions, my penis that hadn’t yet lost its erection, and the cow standing behind me. He—the saint—declared aloud that I had passed the test successfully and hugged me tightly with his body. He asked me to come in. When I stood hesitantly seeing my nudity and his daughter, the girl who would become my wife in a short while, my master reminded me of the stricture of the scriptures that offering anyone other than the beggars the holy cloth at the doorway would amount to a sin that could take him to hell. Further, he said, “Other than a grown-up man, nudity of any living being will not make a woman feel shy. Till you get back your clothes that you had abdicated, you can never be considered as a man.” Encouraged by my master’s words, I entered the hermitage, received the clothes from the woman without any misgivings, and took a bath. After freshening up, when I was about to sit on the seat set below that of my master’s, he stopped me, made me sit on the seat equally placed as his, thrust in my hands a set of Thamboolam and coconut, poured some water on it, and then announced that he was going to get his daughter married to me as a reward for my victory. He then asked me to narrate my experience on the journey to please his ears. At the moment he announced me as his son-in-law, this woman—with her face reddened with shyness—avoided showing up in front of me and was also listening to my experiences of the journey. From the day I set out on my journey following the cow to the last day I returned with the cow following me, I narrated every bit of my bizarre experiences in detail so as to please my master’s ears.
My great-grandfather, who reminisced about his childhood days and achievements through his story in this manner, resumes his narration further: While I could understand that among the animals, blessed with the ability to enter the wonderful world called dreams without hassles, it is the animals, not the man, that consider this universe as their dwellings (or their birthplaces), sometimes it didn’t occur to me that I should know what would follow after those animals are banished from their dwellings by the selfish and arrogant species, the humans. My stay in the hermitage was over by then, and I left for this city along with my wife. These incomplete questions that betray our attention are generally the reasons why learning is left flawed. This story I am telling now carries the answers for the question I have never asked myself and how I got it from the bedroom of the king’s daughter that made me literally die with shame for being indifferent towards it these many days. This story constitutes, that way, the continuation of my quest still being protracted without my knowledge, though, due to my second usage of the craft on dreams. It just means that there is one more stage I need to pass in this test. Doesn’t it mean that I need to overlook the presence of my master too? It is only time that brings us the lessons we have missed learning due to our carelessness and the tests we have missed writing, through unexpected men at unexpected places. Isn’t it?
***
Our king has been spending his entire life in yagnas and charitable works for a male heir. Let God bless him to get what he wanted. At the same time, he has been nurturing his daughter with the willpower and physical power matching that of twenty-two men. Not disheartening his faith in her, his daughter has mastered all the arts spectacularly. I am really proud of having her as my student. She was the one who made me know about a wonderful craft that neutralises the enemy with a mere stare without touching. I have no qualms about telling this. Her gaze had the power of extraordinary beauty and radiance that arrests not only the body parts of humans but also the crudeness of incipient animals, the movement of insects, and even the breath of plants. The craft of arresting the movement of inanimate, lifeless things was yet another wonder born along with her. One day, when she was learning Varmam from me, she stopped the movement of the flow of sand in the sandclock with the power of her gaze. All my daily routines, the time of food, the number of texts I needed to read, and the amount of sleep were turned upside down. With certainty I can say that there is no man living around, either in this city or any other country, who can match her radiance. In spite of being enormously gifted with these talents and praised by everyone as one having no match, she was deeply troubled, agonised even without her knowledge, at her father’s continuous attempts towards getting a male child through yagnas, obviously due to his conviction that she was still not equal to yet another drop of his sperm. Yet, she—who had mastered the learning of twenty-two princes before her youth—was still unable to decode the agony that had been tormenting her. She was completely haunted by an illusion that there must be something found in abundance in men which women would never be able to achieve. This illusion turned into sleeplessness in sleep during nights and stupor in her skills during the day. Around this time, the youth of the king’s daughter brought forth an incident that truly threw her virgin feelings into despair and made them panic. Nothing to get surprised at. The erotic treatise says that no one would be able to tell when, where, by whom, and by what the feelings of a young girl who is in search of her pair would be aroused. Anything as small as the blossom of a flower, or the stroke of a breeze, or the loneliness of the night, or the music from the harp, or a mere touch of a woman, and other than these, even the death of a small bird, or the body withered in diseases, or the eyes welling up with tears would be enough to be a reason for the arousal of the pair-seeking desire in a woman. In those days, her youth was not only a stage in her life but also her vision. It just transforms whatever touches her into masculine appeal and keeps her happy. Further, it infuses the peculiarities, which are in no way inferior to that of dreams, and mysteries into the reality and keep playing its games. This leaves the young girls perplexed, as they sometimes treat the truth happening in front of their eyes as the residue of dreams and most of the time, oddities of dreams as truth that happened in front of their eyes. Even in the case of the king’s daughter, an unbelievable truth assumed a smoky proportion of dreams and left her perplexed. This type of truth could occur only once in one lakh probabilities, that too in one woman in one lakh. Hence, the disquiet caused by the yagnas the king conducted and her pair-seeking desire due to the effect of a spectacle she witnessed on one night some months ago, gotten intermixed and thus became the very bizarre disease that had afflicted the king’s daughter. She witnessed that view only one night when she was neither sleeping nor awake. But it had been happening for generations in the royal family. It had thus become a negligible occurrence during the rule of the twelfth generation. It then became a rare occurrence at the beginning of the thirteenth generation and disappeared, not to be seen anywhere before the end of the thirteenth generation. It then became an archaic anecdote wiped out from the memory of this city. But its scent has been navigating through the generations. This scent was passed over through each period, secretly, like the chain of regal Gothra and bloodlines. In all the streets of the capital, this invisible, smoky form of the story—the archaic story of a tiger and hare drinking together in the same pond, standing near, living amiably with the people—was mixed up with the dust of the city, visible all over its walls, and still stood relevant today. The truth was, it wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. It was the secret—a splendid vision of the previous generations that had been famous before the thirteenth generation—that the king’s daughter had seen on that night many months ago when she was half-sleepy. Yes! What she saw was the soul of a wild animal—which was living happily with its mysterious form at the top branch of the Kadamba tree that had been converted into a bedroom during the thirteenth generation—jumping into the bedroom daily through the window kept open, in search of warmth to the skin of its memory that had turned numb in the freezing winter of the jungle. It was an old striped tiger that thrived on consuming the memories of its jungle life. That anecdotal tiger, with the memory of its past, was spending its nights sleeping under the cot in the adjacent room for nearly ten generations without catching anyone’s eyes and without being a reason for anyone’s dreams. It was the king’s daughter who saw it first in the form of a pleasing breeze. The arrival of the right time of its salvation and the keen eyes of the princess, which wouldn’t allow anything to escape, were the reasons behind it. She was a wonderful girl who could mesmerise even inanimate things with her single stare. There was no wonder why the smoky form of the anecdotal tiger—which lived as shadows during the nights and dust during days—roamed the streets as the relics of the memories of the thirteenth generation fell into the eyes of the king’s daughter and thus lost its enigmatic presence. That tiger would never visit the bedroom again. Its life wandering without peace had gotten frozen at the sight of the king’s daughter and thus ended forthwith. It could have gotten its salvation it was longing for generations by now. On the third day it was chased out of the palace bedroom; the veins of the old anecdotal tiger that weren’t accustomed to the freezing cold of the midnight must have gotten shrunk and tautened, jamming the pulse of its memory by rendering it inactive and stopping it. But dear courtiers! It was not a single old tiger. There are still thousands of wild animals wandering all over this kingdom with their smoky forms and pleasing hearts as sweet as jagggery being unable to get away from the scent of the golden days in which they had remained as tales in the breath of ordinary men and enjoyed their lives on equal footing with the people. They are creating this city in their dreams and making it spin around. Hiding behind the walls of the bedrooms, with their marble-like eyes, they are still watching those who are listening to this story, their ancestors and their progeny, with awe, with love, and with longing. I pray to God, in front of this king, to bestow this kingdom with the female children gifted with the luminous eyes to see those animals in mortal forms and give them salvation.
The phantom of the old tiger that jumped in from the window like a breeze had bloomed the king’s daughter's pair-seeking desire that remained a bud till now. She was accustomed to a belief, without her knowledge, that men would have an exclusive trait for themselves, and she now began thinking that she had found what it was. Her mind grew restless in a mixed delusion of being awake and asleep, thinking that only the men, not the women, had the deftness and courage for theft in love. The part of the lesson that examined the roots of dreams taught me that the visual of the old tiger—jumping in through the window along with its moon-like dim light, scent of breeze, weightlessness of feathers, and smoky form—had, in fact, pierced through her heart like a lance of masculinity. It was at that moment that the eyes of her youth opened, and at that level, the dreamlike qualities of the visuals and the mortal moments of dreams began to play with her. She closed her eyes and delved into the bizarre world of dreams with her eyes closed as if being aroused by the masculinity she had fantasised about. She wished whole heartedly for the success of the yagnas her father had been conducting in demand of a male child. Being uncertain whether she was awake or sleeping, the king’s daughter was waiting with the bloom of her femininity for the heft of masculinity to fall upon her to satiate it. But dear courtiers! The old tiger that entered, went straight to the adjacent room, parting the curtain, and disappeared instead of going towards the bed of the king’s daughter. That magical tiger had the habit of curling its body under the servant maid’s cot while sleeping in the adjacent room, as it was smaller than the bedroom, cramped, windowless, and warmer than the bedroom. It happened that day too. The king’s daughter, waiting for her wooer and snoozing with her eyes closed, fell asleep in that tranquillity. The scene that she witnessed in her semi-sleep state slipped out of her brain’s memory spot and fell into the dreams with the dull appeal of a drawing room. At the same time, an unquenching carnal desire was awakened. If she had seen the tiger’s soul wandering without peace when she was fully awake, she would have opened her eyes again to look for it. Or she could have understood while being fully awake that it was not of humans. Even that tiger, which had lived for many generations without falling into the eyes of a fully awakened human being, could have confirmed its existence only in the stories and continued its state of being as a melancholic soul in the room without anyone’s attention. The event—the reason behind the bizarre dreams of the king’s daughter—would have gotten cracked up at the very top layer of her consciousness. There wouldn’t be any chance of fame or popularity to both this story and my fame today. If she hadn’t at least seen the two pug marks crawling on the floor the next morning, her dreams would also have been ended just like that of any other young girl lustfully waiting for her wooing male partner. But, since she had been ordained by destiny to appease the soul of a wild animal wandering for generations, seeking salvation, the king’s daughter saw a pair of pugmarks that belonged to the tiger, which began regaining its mortal weight and form from the very moment it was exposed to human sight the next morning on the floor below the window inside the bedroom.
***
The black magic says that, among all animals, only the tiger has the eligibility to enter and enjoy the dreams of a woman by taking any form. Other animals would prove themselves as not human with a mere movement of their breath. The tiger is not like that. It is as majestic as humans. It possesses resolute moves, noble ideas, belligerence, and a feminine heart to enjoy music like humans. Tiger remains the aspiration of soldiers on the battlefield and the dreams of beautiful women in the bedroom. It never allows its front paws to leave their footprints on the ground. Though it was created as a four-legged animal due to its destiny, it has a strong desire to show its front legs to others as its weapons. Ordinary hunters and common people wouldn’t know about it. The one who mastered the treatises on the body parts of animals would know the very characteristic traits of a tiger. The tiger would erase the imprints of its front paws on the ground with the help of its shadow that crawls upon it. The two pugmarks of its rear paws not covered by its shadow would only be visible to others. The king’s daughter was powerfully attracted towards one such pair of pugmarks. Yes, she was attracted anyway. She wasn’t confused at seeing them, nor shocked. Those pugmarks didn’t bring back to her the visuals that slipped away and fell into the dreams of the previous night. She had been aware of the fact that they were not human footprints. As she hadn’t seen any wild animals before, she couldn’t figure out what those circle-shaped footprints were. The manner in which those pugmarks moved along the edges of the wall was just enough to make her astounded by arresting her attention. The very nature of the pugmarks without straying from the proximity of walls for any obvious reasons was the main reason for her astonishment. The interior bottom of the man-sized ornamental flowerpot that stood on its way along the wall had those pugmarks imprinted in it. The moist phantom of the breath was seen misted up in the centre on both sides of the circular surface of the marble mirror, which the king’s daughter used to deck herself up daily. The tip of the night lamp’s wick, lit in two big caskets, was found twisted sharply towards the direction of the adjacent room. Who else could have been the owner of the feet that had left their marvellous imprints on the objects they penetrated without considering them worthy of their obstacles? Other than air and light, who else would have the courage and elegance to move around in my room like this? The king’s daughter thought that it was either the breeze or the moon that had walked that night in her room. Her youth allowed her to draw an extremely handsome man by mixing the features of the body according to the footprints she had seen tangibly and letting it wander in her dreams. Her subconscious mind was even ascertained of itself with a reason why he left her without copulating with her. She had composed some verses that brimmed with the heaviness of misery and the heat of coital longing. Those lines must have emerged in her heart immediately after she saw those footprints. While her composure, without making others panic after she was shocked at seeing those bizarre footprints, showed the greatness of her acumen by birth, the verses she composed after being enticed by those footprints showed her mastery in the craft. Later, she always kept mumbling those lines herself, as she seemed attracted towards rhythmic beats and the imaginative opulence of those lines she composed. How did I come to know about it? I had seen those lines spilling out of her mouth, effortlessly and pompously, during the days she was with me to learn the craft. But I wasn’t aware of the fact that it was a manifestation of the eccentric disease that affected her. Singing those verses in her own voice, listening to them with her own ears, being forced into an illusion that they were all true, and eventually letting them rot in her dreams were all the results that couldn’t be conditioned by the weakness of her adolescence with theoretical knowledge but by the experience. On the first night, I heard those lines rising up from her navel, being played as background during the time she was enjoying, playing with her friend in the world of dreams she had built herself. The woman playing in the dream listened to those lines that the king’s daughter mumbled while asleep. It was these lines, sung again and again, that had slowly changed the usual yearning of a female into an eccentric disease.
In a long dream of breeze
A tiny move of my face.
In the enduring life of the moon
My femininity remained a single sigh.
Why am I not the slumber of air?
Why am I not the breath of light?
That is why
This night pesters me enormously.
My confidant adorning himself with ambivalence
Drifts away from me
Like a merciless relative
who leaves the sickly with disease
along with flowers.
Whenever that dream girl closes her eyes, leaning on the real girl in the state of sleep, to allow her friend onto the bed at the peak of playing, I am again seeing the sleeping girl in front of my eyes chaotically begin gibbering through fear, repeatedly, with the severity of fever that she was not sick. The fear—that her extremely handsome friend, who had the lightness and scent of air and glow of moonlight, was going to leave her, as he wasn’t interested in having sex with her—tears her face off and leaves it unsightly. Now I am seeing again that the last lines of the verse are squirting out of the sleeping girl’s mouth with the foul odour and colour of waste. Even I couldn’t bear that disgusting scene. But the dream girl, apparently not aware of the real girl’s agony and the horridness of the verse’s lines that flowed copiously down on her body, was still waiting with her impeccable face, lounging, for him to copulate with her. Such a pitiable and horrible scene it was. It was a wonderful scene as well. Narrating the agony that small girl underwent while having tangible footprints as finite forms penetrating her dreams and hurting her body that lay outside the dreams, thinking about her dream friend, my tongue aches and stutters. It is true that even I couldn’t bear the very sight of the horrendous form she got. If so, how could that handsome man with a soft heart and smoky form bear it? Unable to bear the foul odour of her song, he spat on her face, leaving her to wake up with shock, and disappeared immediately. Not one day or two days; it had been happening for months. Since she lost her friend due to the fear of losing him and was thus affected by a severe fright as she had kept on losing him, the king’s daughter submitted herself to an eccentric ailment without even her knowledge. Due to this effect of the dream, her mind started believing that she had no longer been fit to mate a handsome man in the real world. Till we brought the animal hiding in the bushes of memories for generations into its physical form and showed it as a real tiger to her eyes by playing ‘the coition of star dwellers’ on the third night, the dreams kept reminding her, without her consent, that her face had become so despicable due to diseases that any handsome man would spit on it. The story says that even the last man at the end of the sea of people that had spread over many miles could hear the grief-stricken words of my great-grandfather, who completed narrating his story with the note that the images of handsome men reminded her of the spittle flowing down on the face, thus causing a repulsion that rose up from the stomach and kept her under perpetual fright.
Other than this city whose streets had the restless spirits of animals—which perceive the universe as a womb in their dreams and want to keep themselves safely in it—roaming the streets carrying the dead winds of the chopped trees, who else could have created the despair of a young girl—who could match the power, beauty, courage, and erudition of twenty-two men—being affected by a bizarre disease that made her believe that she was only fit to unite either with an ugly or a sick man?
***Ended***
