The King’s Daughter (ராஜன் மகள்) by Ba. Venkatesan (Part -1)

This is an English translation of “Rajan Magal” a short novel written by Ba. Venkatesan. Translated into English by Saravanan Karmegam.

***

This new city, which is celebrating its birth anniversary today as a grand festival, truly has two faces—one, its history, and the other, its story. The history of this new city dates back to the time during the reign of the Nayakkar king, who built a huge lake as expansive as a sea, beautiful verdant gardens, fort complex, and fortifications on its banks for his people to live there. Its story had already been chased out of the city along with its animals and gigantic trees, which once thrived at the places where palaces and gardens were standing tall majestically now. The one who wrote its history wouldn’t know that the forest that thrived there before the history of that city did, in fact, exist on the walls and corpses of a self-serving kingdom it had swallowed up.

The immortal storytellers who were living as remnants of the old city with their melancholic thoughts knew about it. Even that old city swallowed up by the trees was built after destroying the forest that was once lush and verdant there. 

Time has never been interested in moving the universe along a straight path. It lets the events spin around and just watches them—turning what is below to above and what is above to below, layering the new upon what emerged before, and obscuring what has vanished.

The tussle between nature and man would never end in the world of stories. Putting it in other words, this very interminable conflict is actually the stories. When one defeats another and the ignominy of the defeated is written as history, the remnants of the defeated hide under the history and thus escape the possibility of being fully decimated. It is this battle between the histories and stories that keeps the days and seasons in perpetual spin. The story in the history becomes a history, and the history in the story becomes a story, and thus they lose their indispensability in their perpetual spin. The stories of the destroyed old city swallowed up by the luxuriant forest that once stood there were still alive among the indigenous people who were living aloof in the woods that were waiting in silence far away from the city.

One of the stories had its version that the roots of that big forest that swallowed up the city were nothing but the curse of a palace servant maid who had been orphaned on false charges. 

One story told that the branches of the forest were the foolishness of the king, who was longing for a male child despite having a female baby, which conferred him prosperity in abundance.

Another story narrated that the aerial roots of the forest were the hapless death cries of twenty hunters who happened to see the king’s daughter sleep with her clothes lying loose.

Another story inclined to say that my great-grandfather, who was belittled at the later stage of his life for having brought bad luck into the kingdom, was the breath and darkness of that deep and vast forest. Those indigenous people collect these scattered narratives, string them together, and have the ruined old city tied to their memory again.

The old city was governed by the twenty-three generations of the royal family. The kingdom was under the reign of the twenty-third generation during the time of my great-grandfather. This generation was gifted with a peculiar aspect that other generations couldn't boast of. Even the royal astrologers in the palace, in the later part of the generation, could never come to a conclusion whether it was stroke of luck or a bad omen. 

That capital had been ruled by the male heirs of the kingdom before the present generation my great-grandfather lived in. All these male heirs did contribute their parts and kept their generations flourishing with the innate skills and talents they were gifted with. It was rare to find the specific characteristics of one generation in other generations. But each generation was gifted with some specific individuality, which might be due to the blessings of the god, so as to compensate for it. For example, the wild animals in the twelfth generation of the royal family never intimidated the humans, and the humans never posed a threat to them, and the animals enjoyed freedom to roam around the city. 

It was said that the time was so favourable that the men and cattle from the kingdom would go into the forests any time without fear.

It was an adage that did its rounds in the kingdom that the tiger and hare would drink water in the same pond, standing close to each other. There were a lot of anecdotes in the royal lineages that the untrained, ferocious wild animals would form a formidable frontal barrier during the battles, stand by the soldiers as their protective cover, fight the enemies before them, and get mowed down by their swords. (Tigers had a special place in these narratives). On the contrary, during the reign of the next generation—the thirteenth generation—it was said that the movement of the wild animals was greatly curtailed on the street and rendered it almost impossible. The battlefields of the thirteenth generation were normally filled with the army of men who were as wild and ferocious as animals. The hunting of wild animals became a much sought, famed sport during the reign of the thirteenth generation. My grandfather would say that he had heard from his forefathers that it was during the rule of the thirteenth generation that the golden tigers, which enjoyed the honour of having a place in the flags of the old kingdom, sporting their skin without black stripes, had started becoming extinct. It was also said that the palace standing in the centre of the city in which the royal family had been living for ages was built by the king of the thirteenth generation after razing an old Kadamba tree that stood so majestically there and banishing the tiger out of its dwelling, which had been living at the topmost branch since its birth. It was the time of wise men who were known for their skills of winning in war and hunting of animals by devising war plans in the hunt and applying the tricks of hunting in the battles. It was generally believed that the weather that prevailed in the rule of one generation couldn’t be found in another. (But the old tiger, which had been living in the perfectly protected bedroom lying on the third floor of the three-story palace, with its full consciousness for several generations, shook the foundations of this belief.  

The traditional occupation of my great-grandfather, who lived during the rule of the third-generation king, was barbering. He was responsible for the wealth and fame that barbers were enjoying in the old city. At the same time, he was equally responsible for why barbering was treated as a third-rate profession after his time. Till the end of the twenty-third generation in the old city, people believed that barbering was just a menial task that required no specific set of skills other than steady hands that carefully shave off the hair without cutting into the flesh. Barbering was not treated as a menial job in the old city. Yet, there were no suitable places available in the kingdom for the barbers who were just depending on this profession to make their living, just like any other profession. 

Only after my great-grandfather, who had that city as his native place, went out of the city before his adolescence set in to roam in the Malayala land- lying beyond the hills in the western side, well known for the practice of black magic- in order to learn the art of entering other people’s sleep and witnessing their dreams returned to his native in his youth and proclaimed standing boldly in the junction of the four corners of the city,  thus attracting the attention of people and exclusive consideration of the king towards barbering that  it was not just a profession to shave off one’s head, then the world began to understand a truth behind barbering that it was something that shared an unbreakable affinity with other extraordinary disciplines such as medicine, magic, varmam, and sexual pleasure. My great-grandfather proclaimed that a skilled barber would be able to achieve remarkable changes in the moods and activities of individuals by way of controlling the secretion of sweat through opening the sweat pores, exposing them by shaving off the required amount of hair—keeping less or more—according to the structure of one’s body. A barber had an innate understanding of physiology and body temperature. He further said that a barber’s hands that shave would only know the hair as a nerve running outside the body before one’s brain could understand it, and the efforts of a barber to distinguish the beneficial hair strands that must grow along one’s skin from the poisonous hairs that one should avoid while shaving were in no way inferior to the quest of a learned man who tries to find out the worldly truth from the pages of the Upanishads. From that day, my great-grandfather made the people aware of the importance of barbering; getting their hair shaved off and waiting in queues for it became one of the important matters that everyone wanted to share with others proudly. 

Those who suffered from a high temperature made a bun out of their hair above and walked, exposing their neck and back to the wind direction. Those who were shivering due to a cold fever let loose their hair to flow down to cover their bodies. 

The erudite, who wanted to evade the attention of ‘evening demons’ known for luring them away from their wisdom, would plead with barbers to tie up all the nerves on their heads at the back with the help of hair strands and make sixteen tiny tufts at the tip. The men who had the agony of not being able to enjoy sexual pleasure let their hair remain as a wet plait and returned home content. In contrast to this, for those who wished to remain ascetic despite being in a family, the barbers made a special plait covering the tip with silk cloth. Even the ascetics who went into the forests, forsaking their mundane lives, did accept the eighth part of the rules of facial beautification by way of allowing their hair to grow thick and unfettered on their face, without getting it shaved off. The “Suyamwaras” (bridal selections) ended up in great confusion, as the neatly attempted barbering on the hairs in the cheeks and upper lips had made all the men of the old city handsome and healthy. Our genealogical anecdotes say that the men from other countries would never be able to meet any man with an odorous mouth and booger-running nose or hear male voices that threw the abusive words at others. Not only that, but in that old city where women wouldn’t seek the services of barbers nor did women themselves work as barbers, the women also had tender hair under their arms and on their vaginas—in accordance with the Samudrika traits, which mentioned that the exquisiteness of men is visible in the exposed body parts while the beauty of women is seen in the hidden parts—that was said to have the energy, beauty, and curative powers that matched the spiked hair growing on men’s faces. The preachings of my great-grandfather that these hairs shouldn’t be ignored were still living afresh in the memory of the women of the twenty-third generation living in the capital. When my great-grandfather announced that the responsibility of grooming, adorning, and caring  of the sacred private parts of women’s bodies that could be seen only by their husbands and fantasized about by other men was not only lying with women but also with men, it attracted a huge uproar from menfolk, and at the same time, it could garner a surreptitious admiration from womenfolk. Upon being compelled by the royal court to stop such slander campaigns, my great-grandfather dropped another truth in public courageously that the preachers and priests used to undertake the task of barbers to attend to their spouses’ needs secretively and thus earned the wrath of educational institutions and temples. (Later, it was the owners of these institutions who poured ghee into the cruel fire of slur that engulfed my great-grandfather to prevent the fire from going out and help him burn completely). Seeing my great-grandfather unstoppable in his campaigns on the secrets of hair decking that reached the Paraiyar women in the lower strata, the women in the upper strata began worrying about their husbands' probable wavering of mind. My great-grandfather suggested that those women could trim their thick pubic hair from the navel to the vulva as thin as black eyeliner and thus gave them back the peace of mind they had lost. The women who were married to a man who she didn’t like could trim their pubic hair like curly wood chips falling off while chiselling. The women who wanted to get the men they loved could draw the upper cleavage of their clitoris in the form of a fish. The women who hadn’t yet given birth to babies could trim the hairs in their underarms and between their thighs to the minimum and keep them wet like the new tender grass bed found after rain. The women who sought liaison with men could shave their entire body below the neck to keep it as silky as pebbles and spotlessly clean. Let the mothers, who knew about the barbers who could predict the time of girls attaining their age by a mere touch to distinguish the nature of hair that changes from its sand-like roughness to the strong silver wire-like stiffness, prevent their daughters from facing disgrace while menstruating in an undesirable situation. 

During that time when my great-grandfather was advocating that there was no gender distinction between nature and its tricks, the women across the old city had made their spouses and lovers their private barbers and made them spread all over the country. Certain ancient scriptures were summarily proscribed by the twenty-third generation soon after my great-grandfather declared that the old scriptures, which praised one’s inner beauty while denigrating the practice of shaving and growing hair, were in fact all against the barbers. Some say that palm-leaf manuscripts were even burned by women who used the flames to heat water for cooking.  

The barbers were enjoying new concessions, fame, and importance with the arrival of my great-grandfather, while he was seriously involved in endless research to study the possibility of controlling the sweat secreted through the pores and thus changing the course of dreams caused by the odour of sweat. People used to say that he had spent all his youth just to study the art of penetrating one’s sleep. He had been the most trustworthy disciple of a Kerala Namboothiri during that time. My great-grandfather—a barber by birth—was in search of a tutor who was beyond petty caste considerations to learn the holy scriptures that were denied to his caste, ever since the time his voice got broken, amidst some years of insults, mistakes, and fears. At last, he could find a Namboothiri ascetic who went out of his city, living a life incognito in the woods after being branded as mad by the mortal human beings who didn’t have the acumen to understand his distinct wisdom. My great-grandfather joined as his third disciple along with his other two Brahmin disciples. The first of the two had the power to assess the mass and weight of things with the help of their light and scent. The second one had the skill to assess what an object was in its past and what it would be in the future on the basis of its speed and direction.

My great- grandfather was overwhelmed with sorrow about the tragedy of the art of seeing other people’s dreams being destined to languish in the forest as a secret known only to four persons who were aware of its hidden marvels. When the Namboothiri, often praised as a saint, wanted to get his upper-caste-born daughter married to my great-grandfather—a low-born barber—before burying himself alive in the mud of misery, the only soul left behind that knew the art of seeing others’ dreams in the entire world was none other than my great-grandfather. He then thoroughly learned the art of Varmam and the Sanskrit language that were said to have been closely associated with dreams. One of the disciples, wanting to test the art he had learnt along with his two other friends before learning it fully, escaped the forest, went to the city, and tried perkily to enter the dreams of a patient. He was caught in the foul odour of bad dreams and whirls of negativity that caused the disease and became mentally deranged as he couldn’t bear its severity. He ran out of the room, jumped out from the fourth floor of the four-storey building, and killed himself. Another disciple with the same immature and weak mental state faced a similar fate, lost his mental balance, became demented, and found succour in the holy land, Kashi. Some unfounded news was floating around that he had confined himself, obviously never to come out, in the thick forests of Kashi that were inaccessible to dreams. But as bad luck would have it, my great-grandfather met his friend after some years at a doomed place, might be due to his poor wit, and thus invited a steep decline of fortunes in his life.

In spite of all these, the world knew about him as the only learned man who had mastered the art of getting into people’s sleep to see their dreams. When he returned to the old city in the middle of his youth along with his wife, the people  were already aware of his  fame like a   hidden lamp being understood by its inherent brightness. Although half of the city was speaking about him indirectly, saying that he was also mad like his teacher, and the king—being the head of the twenty-third generation—was also embarrassed at the candid campaigns and actions of my great-grandfather, the aura of the latter obligated the king to place my great-grandfather, who had transcended the distinctions made in the name of gender, society, wealth, caste, and knowledge, equally among other erudite courtiers and honour him. Apart from this, a separate quarter was allotted to my great-grandfather on the palace campus itself. The king didn’t allow him to do barbering for his sustenance. He was living happily in that small palace-like house along with his Malayali wife and the children he got from her till the day he was expelled from that house due to his master’s curse. He came out of his room only to attend to the barbering needs of the royal family and spent his remaining hours in the house on rereading the treatises he had already learnt, practising them, and researching new ways to understand them. People would say that the seat allotted to him in the court was always lying vacant without his presence. It is very common to see such eccentric men confine themselves in a solitary room. Isn’t it? They never show themselves and their erudition for a public display and make them look silly. Though my great-grandfather had a formidable reputation for having mastered rare skills like them, he never attempted to show off his skills in inappropriate circumstances to gain fame. The ever-shining flame of his skills that was burning in him, and its lustre reflected on his face, were just enough to bring him the reputation he would have ever wanted. When the learned men in the court asked the king how a barber who was just confining himself in a room, unable to prove any of the skills with tangible demonstration, could enjoy such a reputation in the court, the king told them, “The time of peace can never be the time of bitterness for any talented swordsman. The healthy people can never be the enemies of a good doctor. An erudite man will always want that no one should fall into such a miserable condition, which might require the skills of the erudite man to help the latter to come out of his misery. But at the same time, a scholarly man will always keep his skills sharpened, expecting the worst of such situations. It isn’t my intention to keep Appaiah (my great-grandfather’s name) in my palace permanently. Instead he, as a rare gem, not easily accessible to all of us, shouldn’t remain absent from this palace when we need him the most. I would like to remind you all that it is not he but we who should be proud of having him in the court. I am also proud of the fact that I am able to run a healthy administration of this country, which doesn’t force him to evoke his skills.”

My great-grandfather used his rare skill of getting into the dreams of others while sleeping only four times in his entire life. Our hereditary narratives indicate that all those four circumstances of its usage actually proved to be the turning points in the life of my great-grandfather. The first instance was that unfortunate incident in which he tried his hands, obviously before gaining adequate mastery in that, in testing that skill with a patient along with his two friends who were also learning it along with him. It was his good luck that when he initiated his skill on the patient, it was already past midnight, and thus the patient’s dreams were found void of vigour and couldn’t be differentiated from his actual sleep. With the god’s blessing, my great-grandfather escaped the biggest danger that awaited him, ostensibly caused by his temerity of being a youth and the pride of education he boasted, like his other two friends. These developments, when brought to his master’s attention, caused a profound despair in him for his other students while making him feel immensely happy for my great-grandfather’s escape, apparently due to his special love for him. He warned my great-grandfather that any such daring attempt to get into someone’s dreams was as felonious as making a hole in the wall of someone’s house with the intention of stealing. It was said that the master forgave my great-grandfather that time and allowed him to continue as his disciple due to his immense love for him. But after many years, when he entered his middle age, which is often touted to be the garden of intelligence after the hasty spiral of his youth was over, he  was again prompted by a desire that had spoiled his senses to test his skills, totally against the dictum of his master, on our great-grandmother—the master’s daughter cum his wife—when she was sleeping. This audacity resulted in the master’s warning turning into a curse, which snatched his rare skill away from him and rendered him forgetful of it completely. The fourth usage of it had been destined to be the last usage of that rarest of the rare crafts, which he had learnt arduously all through his youth. Being fully aware that the design of his destiny would force him to use his craft a fourth time, which, by all means, would bring him a perpetual disgrace and disrepute, my great-grandfather had no qualms about making this revelation public, giving the least attention to his private predispositions. Interestingly, the unfortunate third usage of the craft, which sowed the seeds of his destruction many years ago, had, in fact, made him enormously famous not only in his place but also overseas without even hinting at a sign of destruction at the time of its usage. It was because his intelligence and intuitive skills were shining along with the clout of his craft at that time. That incident paved the way for thousands of students from abroad lining up to become his disciples. But my great-grandfather didn’t accept any of them as his disciples because he thought he hadn’t yet attained the complete knowledge in his craft. He remained discontented with the limitations of his craft that had allowed him only to be a spectator of the dreams by watching them from outside. He aspired to see his progress in his craft, which would enable him to penetrate not only sleep but also dreams so as to control the wonders of this world as per his wishes. Even his master, Kerala Namboothiri, hadn’t reached that stage. Only after he could conquer such skill in his craft would he become eligible to become a tutor to others, he thought. That was why, other than the time he spent barbering the king and important people, he just confined himself in the room during the remaining hours and seriously pursued his research on the subject, leaving his children under his wife’s custody with all the amenities arranged outside his room. Other than some visible changes in his outer appearance after the third usage, the wealth and fame he earned were still unable to diminish or change the insatiable thirst he had for his craft. The intriguing disease of the king’s daughter did thus have the privilege of making the ‘world famous’ third usage of the craft possible. But the genesis of that disease had its origin in the poignant grief of the king of the twenty-third generation.

I told that all the generations of the royal lineage in the old city were, till then, thriving with the male heirs. Didn’t I? The twenty-third generation, which gave my great-grandfather shelter in its palace, had its first-ever female heir to rule over its kingdom. It wasn’t an overstatement to say that that female heir enjoyed a formidable reputation for ruling the kingdom in the later years better than the male heirs born to date, with efficiency and compassion. But the king was deeply worried in the beginning that the “Godhra” chain of his royal lineage would be broken with the entry of the female heir. You can assume that his fear had come true. Later, there were some astrological extrapolations that the skirmishes, bad omens, famine, and ill effects of the Kaliyug that occurred in their respective realms in the capital city were all due to inadequate rectification of the Godhra that was defiled with the birth of a female heir. They are in no way related to our story and hence do not require our attention. The king, because of this fear, was performing ‘yagnas’ in demand of a male child till he got tired of listening to the complaints about the decreasing virility of his youth. His grief slowly tiptoed from his bedroom, went past the corridors of the palace, went down the steps, and spread across the country, making everyone suffocate with it. As the people started performing ‘yagnas’ individually, maybe out of love for their king, seeking a male child for him, we were informed by our grandfather that the old city in which our great-grandfather once lived was then filled with male children born out of the blessings from ‘yagnas’ conducted all over the city. Since the kingdom of the twenty-third generation was destined by the god to have only a female child, the royal family didn’t receive any benefit from yagnas conducted by the king and his people. Perhaps due to this unavoidable certainty, while spending his time and other resources on yagnas and charity, the king carefully made the arrangements to nurture his daughter to possess the power, character, and education equivalent to that of twenty-two men. There were people who complained that the king’s lack of faith was one of the reasons why the yagnas had been ineffective. But the king’s daughter’s successful acquisition of all the skills she was taught made her critics happily regret their impudent, foolish remarks, and, in a way, it did compensate for the grief of the king as well. People used to say there was no human being who ever lived who had mastered the administrative skills and war tactics that could rival hers. It was so arranged that the girl would learn the art of ‘Varmam’ from my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather refused to impart to her the training on ‘Varmam,’ recusing that it wasn’t meant for women known for their lumpy, firm breasts and flat private parts. Unlike other war tactics, its finer aspects had been designed for a male body known for its flat chest and dangling private parts and its delicate movements as against the women’s body, he argued. The persistent requests of the king and the girl’s undying interest in learning the art rubbed his conscience that he shouldn’t demean their requests anymore. 

There were anecdotes that pointed at other reasons behind it. When the king’s daughter, after she had attained puberty, went to him with her undying desire to become his disciple for the first time, my great-grandfather, an extremely talented barber, told her on first sight that the tender hair grown in her vulva had become white and she would face problems one day due to bad dreams later in her life. Having already been briefed clearly about his temperament, the girl became paranoid with the thoughts about bad dreams. She requested my great-grandfather to inform her when her pubic hair would turn to its normal appearance. My great-grandfather assuaged her worries that her pubic hair, which had gotten the white layer of senescence, would turn to its original black when she got rid of her bad dreams. Unable to decode this whirl-like reply, the king’s daughter was scared to ask him the explanation of it and spent many sleepless nights after that with the hope of understanding his words. Only in the later stage of her life did she understand with experience the hypnotic hands of the youth that exposed the very reason for her sickness as its antidote. People would say that the sense of pity my great-grandfather had for the king’s daughter, as he knew about the eccentric sickness waiting to affect her, had engulfed him so that he couldn’t reject her as his disciple. He accepted, half-heartedly, to teach her the art of Varmam. But within days, he understood what he had thought about her was completely wrong. I have heard many stories that speak about the brilliant days the king’s daughter spent with my great-grandfather to learn lessons. They were also equally eccentric, like the dreams we see. My great-grandfather used to reportedly say that he had learnt some mudras he had not yet learnt in Varmam from that girl. He used to tell his heirs during his routine laments in Sanskrit that it was the thoughts pertaining to the period of him being the master to the king’s daughter that had actually kept him alive a little more at the time when he was under severe mental stress caused by the curse-induced forgetfulness, the life without any disciples, and loneliness without a spouse. My great-grandfather told me way before she came to him to learn Varmam, she had already possessed endless wisdom in the art of Varmam, and he had seen the very spirit of the art had gone deeply into her, becoming inseparable from her wherever she went to learn that. Feigning her learning in front of me for my satisfaction, as if she were serious about the very basics of varmam that involved touching the body parts with other body parts, stopping their movement, or bringing them under our control, she then made me understand that there existed a stunning skill with which one could stop some parts of the body, and if wanted, even the heart with the mere look and sounds from the mouth. During my attempts to learn that spectacular skill, I came to know that only females had been blessed by the god to master that skill. Despite my enormous amount of training, my dry, masculine eyes couldn’t capture the art that came out of her green eyes that matched the lustre of water drops shining under the sunlight. It seemed that my curses in those days on God for not blessing me to take birth as a female had sown the seeds of my destruction in me. How could I have denied the fact of her eyes hiding in them a splendour that could match the supreme feat of conquering dreams, usually perceived to be the ultimate stage of penetrating one’s dreams? Aren’t the artistes’ unfortunate souls who die after being pulled by beauty despite knowing well that beauty kills? With the help of her feminine clairvoyance, she had been aware of the impending steep decline of my clan and the dark future of the royal family; that probably explained well why such a talented woman came to me to learn lessons. It was because of her goodwill that I shouldn’t be mowed down by the unbearable grandiosity of the sacred scriptures I had been learning while being tormented by my forgetfulness and loneliness; she faked herself as my disciple in order to teach me about the humdrum of my art. Truly speaking, she possessed the physical power and sharp intellect that could match that of twenty-two men and the kindness that they lacked. Later, by falling into a disease that no one could diagnose, she paid her tribute to her teacher in the form of offering me an exemplary opportunity to treat her and thus earning me an inconceivable distinction in life. 

The disease my great-grandfather usually referred to did come out in the form of an eccentric desire from the king’s daughter when she reached her marriageable age. The king, who had already been pestered with the pain of not getting a male child, shivered like a snake under thunder at hearing it. It was at that time his body started growing fragile with sickness. During those times his wife, the queen, was somehow managing the administrative affairs and family issues with remarkable courage and sensibility. It was the queen who first initiated the talk about their daughter’s marriage. When the girl was fourteen, her mother wanted her daughter to be married, as she felt there was nothing left in the lessons of administration, war tactics, and world affairs that her daughter might still want to learn. Even the king was not very interested in the beginning in taking a resolute decision about his daughter’s marriage. Even the girl, who was equal to twenty-two men as far as courage and intelligence were concerned, didn’t show any visible interest in her marriage. The king’s wife had a discreet discussion with these two and managed to convince them to accept on the ground that a girl not getting married even after her fifteenth year of age would bring ruin to the royal family. The king, who was already troubled with the astrological findings that his royal Godhra line would be broken by his daughter’s husband, readily accepted this marriage proposal, as he was aware that preventing a girl’s sexual consummation—which was akin to her entering heaven—would be a greater sin than anything else. The king’s daughter didn’t oppose any of the arrangements made for her marriage. She had only one condition: her would-be husband must be an ugly man and stricken with illness. No one could understand why a girl, who could match twenty-two men in intelligence and willpower, spoke such words. It was the eccentric disease that had afflicted the king’s daughter. She was a very beautiful girl. My great-grandfather praised that the lustre of her green light-emitting eyes had shaken the foundation of the art of Varmam. She used to travel along with her father to various places in the kingdom to get trained in person in administration. It was said that the parts of the country that received the scent and freshness of her body, which had merged with the wind during such expeditions, would develop a distinctive power to withstand three harvests in a year for three consecutive years without rain. Her portrait was not available in the palace because even the greatest painting virtuoso in the world, who once visited the palace, expressed his helplessness in bringing her frame into a picture. It was said that, in the later part of her life when everything had turned normal, the messengers who ventured into different kingdoms in search of suitable suitors for her were, in fact, carrying the light of her eyes and voice in small vials. Any words spoken in praise of her beauty would never be an exaggeration. The messengers sent in sixteen directions to find the suitors for the girl were first sent to the best poets and tutors in the palace to get trained to express her beauty eloquently. Her beauty kept growing brighter, penetrating the time, and mixing up with the imaginary narratives and sensual descriptions. The king’s wife discussed this with all learned men to find out why her daughter, with such an enviable beauty, wanted to have an ugly and diseased man as her husband. The king, on the other hand, stricken with sickness, was whining all the time on the bed that the administration of the old city, which had some possibility of flourishing even at the cost of the broken Godhra chain of royal lineage, was now facing the probability of getting broken without any heir to name. Initially the king’s wife paid the least attention to the meaningless rants of her daughter and brushed them aside as a blunt attempt of young girls with the fresh blood flowing in their youth to create a strong impression on others and attract their attention. When she met with the same stiff stipulations from her daughter while initiating the talk of marriage for the fourth time, she appointed some men to keep a watch on her daughter’s activities. The king’s daughter was closely watched till she retired to her bed at the top of the palace to sleep. The close confidante of the king’s daughter, who would sleep in the adjacent room, pledged her heart that she hadn’t seen any unknown man at any time of the midnight. The king’s wife comforted herself that the dangerous part of her daughter’s youth was not affected by any secret that could possibly be the cause of postponing the marriage. But when she grew confident about it, she was afraid that the sickness that had affected her husband would affect her as well. When they talked about the marriage the eleventh time, our damsel again placed her stipulations without any qualms that forced the king, whining on the bed, to get up, run out, put his hands around her neck, and strangle it to kill her. The girl helplessly cried that she was innocent and ready to accept anyone ugly and disease-stricken, picked by her parents, as her husband. She said that she felt a bizarre puke coming out of her abdomen uncontrollably at once when she happened to see handsome men, and she didn’t know why it happened. She shed tears as she had been left completely forsaken. There hadn’t been anyone in the whole twenty-three generations who could have cried like that. Before this matter reached my great-grandfather, her most affectionate male, the king’s wife had exhausted trying all her tricks on her daughter. The stars at the time of her birth and the stars at the time she had attained puberty were referred and deeply scrutinised once again. A passing word of a passer-by that the splendid horoscope of the king’s daughter had some ‘dosha’ in it did actually ignite the fire of yagna towards absolving the dosha and kept its flame alive along with the fire of yagnas that were burning perpetually in demand for a male child. When everyone turned to my great-grandfather at last, seeking his help to solve this issue—after all the physicians brought from various countries who had no intuitive skills to find out the reason that was actually lying frozen in white amidst the thick, curly pubic hairs of her clitoris, coupled with their inability to see any visible sign of disease on her body—the king’s daughter had already completed her fifteenth year as the king’s wife feared.

Considering the possibility that my great-grandfather might take it as an affront if the chief minister was sent to him to discuss the issue of the king’s daughter, the king’s wife went herself that day to my great-grandfather’s residence. That day when his personal room door was knocked on and he was called out did actually coincide with the king’s daughter’s sixteenth birthday and thus kicked off the first day of his impending ruin, as many who had wished to write this anecdote years later predicted it. Though the prediction of that day did take different directions due to many reasons, it was true that it still remained an irrefutable reason behind the unquestionable fame that my great-grandfather enjoyed beyond the seas. My great-grandfather, happy at her visit, acknowledged before her that the personal visit of the king’s wife at his place, who had never shown up her face anywhere in her life under any circumstances other than the corridors of the palace, was the biggest honour the royal family had accorded to him and his family. He happily accepted her plea not because it was the order from the king, nor because of the servitude of the king’s wife, nor because of the likely fame he would enjoy soon, but because of the king’s wife’s endearing words that the king’s daughter would remain his only most affectionate disciple ever. It was said that he treated the king’s daughter for sixty-eight days, which included the last day when he could chase away the tiger that was responsible for the dark dreams of the king’s daughter from her bedroom. Though my great-grandfather could identify the disease that was waiting to trouble her at the very moment she was introduced to him some years ago, he started his treatment from the beginning strictly according to the medical treatises, which prescribed that even if the disease was extremely strong, it still wouldn’t deserve to be fed with ‘amirtham.’ With his hands, everyone believed that it was sufficient to cure her disease. ‘Beginning’ meant a medical approach to the first category, usually a normal one, among the three variants of foul odour that stays up and nurtures germs in the body. It was called a pure medical usage. In this first category, the tongue is controlled by the bad odour that occupies the interiors by penetrating the parts of the body. The people who get sick with cold fever and jabber subsequently due to drenching in rain will fall in this category. It is just an average example. Even in this category, there were thousands of magics caused by the germs in the patient’s voice. The usage of rare herbs and sometimes the patient inhaling the breath of the physicians who chewed those herbs instead of the patient played important roles in this medication. The king’s daughter was initially administered this treatment. My great-grandfather tried it, as he suspected that the soft nerves of the female body might have gotten misaligned with the moves of Varmam due to the forceful learning of it, which was essentially designed for males and caused the spurt of words just opposite to what she had thought. This type of treatment went on for thirty-three days continuously. After he concluded that the bizarre utterances of the girl were not due to the effect of the first category of bad odour, he assumed she must have been affected by the germs that used to attack the voice from one’s memory and began administering the medication to address it after a gap of three days.

The fact that the unfortunate death of ancestors who were blood-related would have a specific odour did constitute the foundation of scriptures on magic. It was said that the smell of incomplete death would wait for some generations and rest in peace only when it was sniffed by someone in their progeny perfect in beauty and intelligence. A king who was born ugly and disease-stricken lived for thirteen years in the third generation before he died. The second type of medication was tested on her with the suspicion that the smell of this king could have penetrated the memory of our damsel.

The germs causing such diseases were known as the germs of memory. They would cover the consciousness of the patient with the thick ring of water. They achieved their old solid forms first through the immediate interaction with the voice of patients that was caught in the ring of memory and then stabilized their solid forms through slow interaction with the outer appearances of the patient. In other words, the germs entering as the memory would then start enacting the patient’s past right in front of his eyes and thus hide the present from vision. Being a highly skilled barber, my great-grandfather, who was aware of the ways through which the germs would enter, their behaviour and their association with the sweat pores, had readily trimmed the tip of the princess’ lock of hair, the curly hairs grown behind her earlobes, and the tender hair strands found on the upper part of her left elbow. The ring of memory encircling the patient’s consciousness needed to be weakened with the help of some rigorously chanted secret mantras and the stench from burning the rare varieties of herbal plants. Sometimes the usage of extreme medications might be needed. Since my great-grandfather was very certain in the beginning that the king’s daughter’s disease was not that severe, he didn’t attempt using harsh measures. After employing some experimental medications, he came to understand that there were no traces of germs of memory, which forced him to conclude that he didn’t have any means other than getting into her dreams. Twenty-two days had already passed in the second type of treatment. My great-grandfather said that it would take a week for the girl to recuperate from the tiredness of the first two types of treatments to see her normal dreams and added that he needed that one week to get himself prepared and returned to his private room after fifty-eight days. During that one week, he behaved like a lunatic. After he entered his private room straight from the palace, he never attempted to come out of the room till the eighth day, the day he went back to the palace. He didn’t even try to complete his meals and other essential duties. He didn’t stop me from entering his private room. During that one week, he never asked me any questions other than only one. He began to read the books he had already learnt from the beginning again. Those old books were sprinkling on him from the loft. He was just shivering amidst those books as if he were perpetually drenched in rain and snow. He was repeatedly flipping over the specific pages of those books that dealt with the strictures on whose dreams shouldn’t be seen by whom under any pressing circumstances. His activities reminded me of both the jester and the chief priest of the palace. He must have walked at least three thousand ‘yojanas’ with his restless steps across his private room and read that particular part of the book seven thousand times. He was still indecisive, unable to come to an acceptable conclusion as to whether it was right to get into a young girl’s dreams or not. So pitiable a soul he became that he had been forced to ask that question to me, an illiterate, after growing enormously hopeless about his enviable erudition, his scholarship, and the depth of knowledge. He was profoundly afraid that the purity of his scholarship would be defiled with it. When he wept in front of me like a child, asking whether it was right under the strictures of holy texts to see the dreams of a young girl, which in fact carried the level of secrecy, energy, and scent of sexual coition despite it being done with the approval of the girl concerned and purely for the sake of medical understanding, I saw his robust, well-built frame had gotten dwarfed to two feet in height as if being forced to stand nude in front of ten young girls. I was also unable to answer that question. He left for the palace, visibly perplexed at his indecisiveness. For the first time, I heard him cursing himself for having made the mistake of learning that craft. We were left with no choice other than comforting ourselves by praying to the god.

However, everything went on well with the will of God. The story ended with a note that my great-grandfather returned to his private room after three days with the fame that made him famous overseas and, above all, with the peace of mind that the purity of his scholarship had not been spoiled. When my great-grandfather—who went inside the king’s daughter’s bedroom the previous night, which hadn’t ever witnessed the presence of men in its existence, carrying an unfathomable, mounting burden in his heart to see through her dreams—opened the door the next day, the people around him were astonished to see the clarity, serenity, and resolute look that were found settled on his face. On the second night, my great-grandfather said that he wanted to sleep in the adjacent room attached to the king’s daughter’s bedroom, usually allotted to her servant maid. It was reported that many in the royal family grew suspicious and made them feel insulted by it. But the king’s wife, who knew about my great-grandfather and his eccentric ways of doing things and wisdom and mental maturity very well, gave her consent immediately. The next night was spent with the king’s daughter sleeping in her chamber while my great-grandfather slept in the adjacent room, which had no doors but was separated by a thin curtain. The next day, my great-grandfather, who got up from his bed before the king’s daughter woke up, announced that the treatment was over. The enthusiasts who had come there from abroad to witness his marvel lost their eyes with the lightning of his laughter that erupted out of immense happiness and got them blinded with it, as they were not accustomed to watching his face earlier, and returned to their countries. Thus, on the third morning, my great-grandfather came out of the room and told the king’s wife that if some twenty hunters were permitted to stay in the king’s daughter’s bedroom on the third night with half the preparations meant for the tiger hunt, the medicine would be ready. The king grew terribly uncomfortable with the idea of permitting unknown men into the bedroom of his daughter, which he considered a bigger sin than the Godhra line of royals getting defiled. The king’s wife, who was set to hate my great-grandfather years later, was now ready to do anything to cure her daughter’s disease. It was decided that the girl’s father would also be permitted to stay in her bedroom that night, apparently to convince him that it was a part of remitting that so-called sin. The traditional folktales used to mention about the king’s daughter jokingly that even the disease that affected her had the power of twenty-two men. When my great-grandfather approached the king seeking his permission to leave for his residence after the treatment was over, the king’s wife requested my great-grandfather to narrate what had happened inside the room during those two days for the sake of everyone to know about it. Acceding to the request that it was his duty, he requested her to wait for a few more days, as it was against the ethics of the craft to describe its details before ascertaining the complete benefits of the treatment, and returned back to his dwelling. 

From the words the king’s wife spoke for the nineteenth time on the seventy-second day about her daughter’s marriage—that her daughter, who fell unconscious after yelling “Is that you?” at a tiger that she saw jumping out of her bedroom, had now been released from the shock and dreams and finally regained her old charm—my great-grandfather was satisfied that his craft and guesswork had proved effective. When he heard the queen happily announcing that her daughter was feeling shy and happy at the very reference of handsome men, he declared that he was ready to describe the events that happened during those nights to the palace and the entire nation. Subsequently, he was brought to the palace with regal honour and given a suitable seat at the royal court. Before that, on the third night, the treatment by my great-grandfather was over, and the king to his wife and those twenty men from the hunter clan—whose lives would fall prey to the lethal swords in some days—to their wives and relatives and neighbours, had already shared the spectacular events of that night and thus sparked the curiosity about the events of the previous two days into an overwhelming desire to know more. 

From the day they narrated their versions of experience according to their imaginative and storytelling skills, decking them with flowery descriptions to suit the taste of the listeners, a single experience assumed different shapes and then became a collective folklore known in the name of “Adventures of twenty common men in twenty nights” and started doing its rounds among people. 

Each story demonstrated the prominent aspects of the night as per the secret intention of the storyteller. If one story had the king’s daughter as its central character, another story was simply silent about it.Instead, a golden beetle, which entered the hole in a horn musical instrument thinking it was a tender mango tree leaf, fell asleep in it, transformed into music, and flew away—becoming the central character of one story. In another story, the same horn music drew a picture of a tiger in the air and made it alive. A newly married hunter had privately shared with his wife the story of his sperm that got squirted with her very touch awakened through the peak of tremor from ‘Muzhavu.’ The king’s palace became a huge forest in the story of the hunter.

 In that, the animal he chased had the golden dots on its body, not found anywhere in the world, and a grief in its voice that no one had ever heard before. Instead of killing it with an arrow, he killed it by showing it a deep, yet fresh wound in his hip, yelling aloud a story about their past in which he had been a tiger and the tiger the hunter. That bizarre animal then changed into a king. As the forest changed into a palace, and the king himself in his original form returned to his place. In one of the stories of an old hunter who had been blessed with a lot of girl children, they were flying out, transforming themselves as music that filled the bedroom of the king’s daughter. To facilitate their quest for suitable music for them, their brothers, led by their father, were tearing off the ceiling of the bedroom with Muzhavu. The suitors were scheduled to arrive soon in search of the women. In some stories, a god wearing the wriggling snakes as his plait isolates that night from the vast space of this universe and sets it up as the first day of the world again. He must be my great-grandfather, because he looked ageless. In some other stories, both the king—like a magician creating the pliable gloom of the rainy season even in scorching summer—and his daughter, who had taken the form of an angel in the air, were roaming around. Later, these stories were banned by a government order that they shouldn’t be sung by anyone (of course against the wishes of the king). Those who defied this order were possessed by the spirits of twenty hunters who fell prey to the royal swords and made those singers invisible to the naked eyes of people in the palace. As the ways and means to destroy those invisible people’s magic that had gotten merged constantly with the wind flowing across the city were not known, a scheme with a motive to create confusion was designed by which the royal court poets were summoned to convert those twenty hunters—the central characters in the folk songs—into the kings of twenty generations and the night those hunters participated into different nights of twenty generations according to the length of gaps of the night. The king’s wife confirmed that the folktale of the hunters was thus changed into the adventurous tales of different kings, made it the official version of the tales of the kingdom, and made adequate arrangements to get them sung aloud in temples and public places. There was no dearth of such odd stories in the old city. Leaving this aside, the story narrated by the king, who participated in the events that night along with twenty hunters as arranged by my great-grandfather, to his wife goes like this:

***

As I have told you many times about it, O queen! You should also be aware of tiger hunting. There are two parts in a tiger hunt. The first part is about forcing the tiger to come out from the bushes in which it is hiding invisibly. The second part deals with chasing the animal when it comes out of its hideout, fighting it, and hunting it with weapons. The first part demands more of the sharpness of our senses than it does in the second. It is not an easy task to bring the hiding tiger in front of our eyes. For that, we need sharper sniffing skills than the sharpness of eyes. The people who had the exemplary skills to assess the distance and the direction at which the tiger was hiding in the bushes with the help of the scent emitted from the tiger’s body were the ones who would participate in the first part. They would then stand at a distance around the bush and play the musical instruments like horns, drums, Muzhavu, and Jandai till the entire patch of the forest shook. Though the tiger is known for its stateliness and physical strength, it is basically a very soft-hearted animal. Even if there was a slight change in the intensity of the collective music played around it, it might have its heart burst and die at its hideout. To avoid the possibility of the entire game of valour slipping into a meaningless one, there were some people specially trained in singing distinctive songs that would tease the hiding tiger to come out. The collection of these songs, commonly known as “The coition of star dwellers,” was actually owned by the hunters who were living in the tents made by the hide of rare animals. They were living, not mingling with the urban people other than at the times of special invitation for such hunts, in the verdant forest areas, which were not yet destroyed, on the fringes of the country’s border. It was from this clan of hunters. Appaiah—our palace barber and the supreme sage—had arranged twenty of them and made them stand at the rear side of the our daughter’s bedroom that night till the start of the third ‘jama’ of the night. I was also made to stand along with them outside. It was true that my heart was deeply hurt, as if torn by thorns, when I saw Appaiah paying me no respect meant for a king. I accept it with shame. When Appaiah entered along with the princess when she entered the bedroom—better say, it wasn’t a casual one, but a forceful entry to hide there!

In the adjacent room to the princes’ bedroom, where the servant maid used to sleep, he  arranged some pillows in such a way that it looked like he was sleeping on the cot, came  out, and sat near the bed of  the princes’ bed .He told me all these after everything was done. At the start of the third Jama of the night, no sooner had they heard the city’s tower bell ringing to announce the third Jama than they had to enter the unlatched bedroom playing  the collective music and stand along the adjacent room wall on the left without stopping their music—this was the order given to them by Appaiah. He had insisted the collective music being played must be in simultaneous consonance with the heartbeats of the tiger and the silence of the night. The men who were standing outside the room, in a hushed voice, were sincerely practising the lines of the song popularly known as “The coition of star dwellers” and rehearsing with their instruments very  seriously. In spite of my earnest attempts to decode Appaiah’s plan, I came to a conclusion that it was beyond my comprehension and thus stopped thinking about it further and started whiling away my time listening to the hunters’ practice sessions on the song. I had gone along with them to the jungle for the tiger hunt. I knew them as ordinary hunters who would just howl and utter some unintelligible sounds while hunting, but never did I know that they would take such sincere efforts to rehearse this song. All my attention would be focussed on the direction of and the moment the tiger would pounce upon, while they were making noise standing in a semi-circle around the bush. I had never given much importance to listen to those songs, as I considered them as a bundle of some rough sounds made in the empty spaces before getting merged with the wind. But I got the opportunity that night to understand that monumental error I had made. O my queen! The hunting chants of Yajur Veda were already hiding in their howls, whistle sounds, and horn musical instruments. But the music vibrating during the rehearsal from those instruments that were being heated up for maximum tension of hide under mild fire was not like the music played by our daughter in the concert on her harp that would sound as if being dipped in sadness. On the other hand, it was like a ophidian venom that changes the colour of the ears of those who listened to it in a matter of seconds. It was a peculiar music that could squeeze the demon out of anyone as if being fed with the thunder. If someone says that only asuras and animals have the pomp to listen to such music, it is likely that you might believe in that.

The blaring sound of the bell that could tear open the heart, coming out of the bell tower erected at the centre of the city, announced the beginning of the third jama of the night, ostensibly declaring clearly that I was not an asura. At that time, the bell rang with a bang, and all twenty hunters entered the bedroom playing the songs they had practised along with their musical instruments. I also entered the room as the twenty-first person. Before we entered the room’s doorway, the first piece of the Swara of ‘the coition of star dwellers’ song first hit the ceiling of the room in a fraction of a second, returned to its origin, and further struck with other pieces of the swaras coming out of the remaining musical instruments in the air, and thus proved our assumption, that they would fall off as an empty boom bursting out of the chain of music, wrong and instead took rebirth from the coition of different swaras, and then turned into a spectacular ball of sounds that carried the gleam and colours of the rainbow. The collective brightness of that ball reflected all over the room and got scattered into thousands of sparks in every atom of the room. The pieces of the music surging from the floor were striking the ceiling and hit the pieces of the previous music notes that were coming back after striking the ceiling and thus made the entire room soften with the unbearable heat of musical notes. The room was bulging in all four directions, along with other stuff expanding due to the heat of the music, like an air-filled leather bag with its walls growing so thin that they would burst at the very scratch of nails. The decorative items, mirrors made of marble, water cups, bedspreads made of kapok cotton, egg-shaped lamps, the idols of gods who bless us with sweet dreams, and the harp and veena designated for the training of the princess seemed to have devoured the grandeur of the music and stood puffed out. I was astonished at seeing them all  with my eyes that they changed into some hollow blankets. All the items that had lost their weight as they became softened due to heat were trying to fly away from the room along with the bubbles of music. I went to the princess’s bed and encircled its legs with my right leg and stood there. That was all I could do that time. The ecstasy, frenzy, and insurmountable fear that were created by that collective, splendid music did detach me from myself and pushed me into a void from which I would never come back. The music that penetrated me like light, scent, and sound was so taunting that I felt like a drowning man who didn’t know how to swim. Had that stage of stupor continued a little longer, I wouldn’t have been alive to tell you all this story. I would have disappeared, with this mortal body, into the sky, sneaking through the crevice on the ceiling with the elegance of burning flames and my willingness. I had been tormented by a sense of shame that I was unable to bring my own body under my control. I was the only one who was harassed like a dust particle in the gush of sound and its rush. That marvellous song that threw off everything in the room, turning it chaotic, didn’t affect those who were playing it, Appaiah and our daughter, even a little. I wasn’t astonished at seeing those twenty hunters singing that song. They were doing their duties perfectly, leaning against the left wall, in a row, outside the adjacent room, making themselves comfortable to play the instruments. They were the creators of that marvel. The delight of the colourful balls of music, their intensification, their death, and their rebirth - all remained steadfast  in the moves of their fingertips. So, they were unable to change themselves into the colourful balls, losing themselves through the music. I wasn’t even surprised at seeing Appaiah. With his hand strongly positioned at the other edge of our daughter’s decked bed where she was sleeping, he stood immobile, keeping his keen watch through the adjacent room. He was the architect of this phenomenal display of music. He, the one who had seen countless wonders way better than this in his life and been achieving those feats even today. It was expected of him that he could keep himself aloof from that tumultuous whirl without falling into it.

O my queen! It was our daughter I was totally astonished to see. She got up from sleep and was sitting on the bed with her legs cross-folded. Her face bore neither any signs of stifling nor shock. Instead, she was deeply inhaling the sounds of ‘The coition of star dwellers’ and the scent of tender wild flowers with her enticed, raised eyes and nostrils. Her face was brimming with happiness. (Her breast was surging up and down to the tunes of the music). I was caught in between the splendour of the music and our daughter’s trance. She didn’t even bother to stand up to pay her regards to Appaiah and me, nor did she turn her face towards me. She wasn’t even conscious of her presence there. In other words, she was not conscious that I was standing along with the musical troupe. With the coital pleasure of musical notes, with the births of colourful balls and their vacillations and joys, her eyes were  restlessly wavering, hitting, emerging  and throbbing. Seeing our daughter’s extraordinary sheen on her face consumed the torrent of ecstasy very easily, which was otherwise an unbearable one for any ordinary mortal; I was caught in terrible fright. Other than taking her around with me during the city rounds, I had never taken her into the forest for hunting. I thought, being a very young girl, she couldn’t have developed the required maturity to face the ferocity of animals and their body odours. From that very wonderful night till this moment as  I am telling you all these stories, I am unable to change this opinion of mine. It is very sure that she couldn’t have had the opportunity to listen to the collection of songs that includes ‘the coition of star dwellers,’ which is usually played only during hunting. But, lying on her bed, she looked so comfortable, as if  accustomed to the music each day it was played, giving the impression that this hunting enactment with music had been arranged specially for her. Only Appaiah can explain the mystery of this. A bigger doubt as to whether she was alive also started troubling me like a big rat snake crawling into my stomach, curling inside, and causing immense discomfort. Before I could release myself from this confusion, the next scene of that marvellous display also began. A striped tiger jumped out of the curtain drawn at the entrance of the adjacent room. It strode along the bedroom wall, went past the stuff in the room, and then reached the window of the room. It jumped out through the window to the top of the neem tree standing outside, jumped down through other branches, and then disappeared on the meadow as if floating in the moonlight. It all happened within the short time of sixty seconds from the moment we saw it. With that, all the strange events of the night came to an end. Appaiah raised his hands, signalled to those hunters to stop their performance. Sooner the surging music was stopped, the colourful balls that were shining in the room broke and melted. Following that, other things in the room started to regain their old forms rapidly. The entire room had returned to its original state  within a fraction of a second as though asserting that the wonders that I had been witnessing some while ago didn’t actually happen there. The pure air entered the room through the window through which the tiger jumped out as if announcing that everything had ended well. We stood around our daughter, who lay tired and unconscious on the bed. I hadn’t yet come out of my shock I received at the moment when  the tiger came  out through the doorway of the adjacent room. In fact, even the hunters who were playing the music hadn’t  expected that a tiger would come out from such an improbable and unexpected situation like  that. They were trying their best to avoid the danger of playing its rhythmic pace wrong due to their shock of meeting the tiger that appeared suddenly in front of our eyes. When the stemmed-out notes of the music were about to split asunder, the hunters played it perfectly, making it reach its zenith, as they feared any distraction in the music might end up stopping the heartbeats of the tiger standing in the front. I don’t have to tell you about Appaiah. His face didn’t bear any sign of astonishment at having seen something unexpected. I saw him having his eyes steadily positioned on our daughter when the tiger appeared at the doorway. I tried to bring my hands towards our daughter to hold her supportively, thinking that she might scream after seeing the tiger, which she hadn’t met directly earlier. Appaiah stopped me, gestured at me with his eyes, and smiled at me in a way that hinted that I didn’t have to worry about it.

***

After all these, our daughter, with her face that carried an immeasurable agony and an air of familiarity of having known the tiger before, asked in rather a mumbling, lowered voice, “Is it you?” I could hear those words vividly amidst the commotion of the music being played. I couldn’t believe my ears. At the same time, it was impossible not to believe it either when I saw our daughter speaking to an animal in her full consciousness, that too, in front of my eyes. After asking that question, the princess kept staring at the tiger as it walked on. I was standing with an expectation that the tiger might respond to her in human language. Since such wonders stopped happening after the TretaYug, fortunately or unfortunately, no such thing happened and stopped my heartbeats. Once the tiger disappeared from view, our daughter, already tired, closed her eyes agreeably and lay on the bed peacefully with the elegance of a flower garland. The king completed his version of the story with a note that they all came out of the room after Appaiah treated their daughter with an ordinary medication for unconsciousness.

As this story of that night was spread in twenty versions by those twenty hunters, I heard there was a massive crowd assembled in front of the palace entry gate when my great-grandfather returned to the palace on the seventy-fifth day. It was said that the people from neighbouring kingdoms arrived in the city by bullock carts filled with the bags of cooked food three days in advance after ascertaining the date of my great-grandfather’s arrival at the palace and found them scattered all over the roads and lodgings. Other than these people, acrobats, merchants, exponents of dance, whores, and local begging women all arrived seven days before and settled all across the capital. My grandfather used to narrate what he had heard without resorting to exaggeration: that the poets of the capital were unable to recite any poem on the moon, as they couldn’t see it since the illumination of the colourful lights subdued the rays of the sun everywhere, any time. Only the courts of poetry recital were lying vacant in that hubbub. Different types of entertainment and daily free feasts and specific lodgings were arranged to mark the celebration of the recovery of the king’s daughter and the invitations were sent to the princes from other countries to the palace. The Malayali wife of my great-grandfather, his two sons, and a daughter—all four were invited as special guests to the palace to attend to the festivities. (This girl was sent along with my great-grandfather’s wife, who was sent back to her country after many years. After that, he hadn’t seen them nor heard about them till his  death. His male heirs were staying with him, probably for the purpose of procreation and learning. But, as the downfall of my great-grandfather commenced after his direct exposure to the God Sani, he got his craft spoiled and forgot it, which resulted in his sons being thrown into depths of despair without being taught of his craft. We, the heirs of those condemned souls pushed into such perdition, became ordinary barbers in due course of time, completely bereft of the mysterious secrets of the craft, and it was later said that we all then left the job of barbering and were destined to become mere storytellers hiding in the forests.) Amidst all these festivities and commotion, his wife was amazed at seeing her husband still flipping over the pages of old books with the same shaking hands without participating in any merriment. He was said to have told her proudly that not a tinge of vanity of being the true architect of all those unrestrained celebrations didn’t even fall on the tip of his clothes. During that time when the people were crowding in the palace ground eagerly, to hear the stories of the two midnights, the king’s daughter was also very much interested to know what had happened to her. In spite of persistent grilling queries from the king and his wife, she couldn’t recollect what had happened to her. She only remembered that the thought of men was not as repugnant as earlier. On the day my great-grandfather was scheduled to venture out of his room to visit the palace again, a separate seat had been arranged for the king’s daughter to listen to the story along with other people. It was kept on a separate pedestal four feet below my great-grandfather’s seat. The king and his queen were seated equally to my great-grandfather. Others, including the palace physician, were given seats in a row on the pedestals three feet below his seat. The royal family accorded such honour on rare occasions only to some specific individuals. The people were free to sit on the bunds erected on the palace ground, floor, and the statues. It was said that ninety-six days and two hundred and thirty men were needed to repair the artifacts, ornamental plants, and grass bed that were left almost smashed due to the unrestrained expression of happiness of the people during the revelry. The anecdotes mention that my great-grandfather narrated that story of the nights—which had attracted the attention of the world even before it was deliberated—into two parts in two nights. They hinted that his proficiency in his craft was reflected on the first night and his perspicacity and discernment were in the second. Some other anecdotes mention that the time didn’t move ahead from the moment he started narrating the story, and hence his entire narration did just end up at the moment he started. They further mention that the full moon that was descending on the west when he started narrating the story did stop moving and was hanging there frozen. The wind that was flowing across there when he started narrating the story was caught in the whirl, unable to escape. The sundry thoughts that were chased away from everyone’s hearts at the time he started narrating the story couldn’t enter their hearts again till he completed the story. They saw his story that began at the very first second of the first jama of the night was still on the same first second of the first jama of the night without moving ahead. Some other anecdotes mention that, when those people who came that day began to tell their distant relatives who couldn’t come that day this story—both the longest and the shortest one, which encapsulated both untoward incidents and unfortunate deaths within a span of time between inhaling and exhaling—they had to spend two whole nights in the very introduction of the narrative.

My great-grandfather says this: everyone kept paying me visits to thank and appreciate me for saving the royal heir with my magical craft. In fact, I only owe them my thanks for giving me an opportunity to sharpen my book knowledge that was lying unused for long and give it a fresh appeal. When I think about my hard-learnt, wonderful art that could penetrate into one’s sleep to see their dreams had been used to save the royal heir from meeting her end, I am really proud of having realised the fullest use of it. I take this opportunity to extend my regards to the king’s wife, who set aside all the hatred and disbelief that everyone had for my words by having immense faith in my craft and giving me full freedom to use it. Now, I start telling the story as she ordered me to do so:

The eccentric disease with which the  king’s daughter got infected was not  only the resultant effect of mischievous bad dreams. The medical scriptures say that the bad dreams can only threaten one’s healthy mind and body but can’t destroy it. Those bad dreams can only take advantage of the weakness of those bodies and minds affected by the misalignment of actuality and dominate them. The king’s daughter was affected simultaneously by a bad dream (How could we say it was a bad dream?) and a weird manifestation of reality that got unimaginably aligned with those dreams. The reason behind its eccentricity was that the manifestation of reality she had experienced outside was, in fact, the dreams of another living being. It was just accidental that I found it out. I must thank God for that. If I hadn’t found that, I couldn’t have cured the king’s daughter with the defective knowledge in my craft, which was still limping to reach its fullest ability to penetrate the dreams. Indeed, it is wrong to address the disease which had affected her a disease. It was a subtle indication of the future. I was unable to decode its signals. It may be associated with the destiny of the royal family. I sincerely believe that no one would be able to decode it. I don’t want to speak about it anymore. Let us talk about what had happened. (This was how , out of love for the people and the king, my great-grandfather didn’t tell anyone about his and his country’s destiny he had realised.)

My wife was aware of the fear and hesitation that had engulfed me that night I went out to see the king’s daughter’s dreams. None of the medical treatises I have mastered ever mentioned anything about anyone, including the physicians, entering the dreams of a young girl. I came to understand at that moment, to my shock, that all the art expositions had been silent about women’s dreams. With that, I had no hesitation to declare that the art in itself was defective. Only the good or bad effect I would be earning from this experience should be included in those treatises to serve as an antidote to this defect. The dreams of a young girl are very elegant. Secretive. They are as sacred as her virginity that only belongs to her. They possess incredible wonders, colours and scents. I still believe that anyone other than her, especially a man, would never get permission to see it. However, maybe due to some circumstances, I had been destined to see a woman’s dreams. Now, due to similar circumstances, I have been forced to tell that to everyone. I have come here to share my experience with the pure heart that this disclosure will help amend the existing scriptures and the women who are suffering from such diseases like her elsewhere in the world. I sincerely permit the sins for having done this to engulf me. Let the god forgive me.

Just like the dreams of any other young women in the world, the dreams of the king’s daughter  were also about her male partner. Like any other young girl in the world, she was also very fond of having such dreams. When I got to know about her during my days with her, I understood from her discernment and the level of comfort that she had created her own image of her lover in her mind and he had been living with her for a long time. He was just as inevitable as death. His body parts looked imageless without specificity and with the quality of water that regains its shape from dissipation. But he was a very handsome man. Though it was not possible to view the beauty of his parts individually, his presence and the scent of the dreams were clearly telling that he was very handsome. How consciously these young handsome men who couldn’t be seen anywhere in the world are living happily in the dreams of women! But yet the reality remains that those handsome men wouldn’t be fit to live with their mortal body. Though that handsome man’s image looked smoky, his movements were tenacious. He entered through the right window of the king’s daughter’s bedroom with the weightlessness of a gentle breeze. No sooner had he entered the bedroom than the bed alone grew to ten times the size of the palace. The chariot-like bed of the king’s daughter assumed such a mammoth proportion that a chariot drawn by eight horses could run on it incessantly for two full days. The clouds and stars were travelling from one corner of the sky to another above the bed. The craftworks found on the things kept in the room evolved into separate items. The scent of the flowers grown in the room went beyond the dreams and spread outside. Since every tiny particle in the room grew multiple times, their natural hues put on the brightness and the heat of the sun, and had both of them roaming in the room bathed in sweat. The king’s daughter was cheerfully flying around with her lover in the space by creating such a splendid dream world for herself and mumbling the lines of some sensual songs in the room. His smoky form didn’t trouble her in any manner. She cuddled him with flesh and blood as if he were a real man. She kissed him on his lips, chest, navel, and below navel. Both of them shared most intimate, private teasing, which my ears might find offensive. The colours, the scents, the sound of laughter, the elegant waves of clothes amiably merged, and the celebratory howls that could wake the world up from its slumber had all assumed an immaculate purity in them. It was all because of my craft that I have been doomed to face this unfortunate time to tell all those untainted events that even God wouldn’t defile with His words.

***

They were playing ‘hide and seek’ and ‘blind man’s buff’ for a long time. At the end of each game, one hugged his or her opponent very tightly as a mark of victory over them. Every game they played had this as its target. I was in fact amused and at the same time happy to see them cuddling so tightly as if they could find only a tiny place in their palace of dreams—which was as big as a huge pristine forest—that didn’t have enough space for two people even to stand. After spending most of  their time in the world of  dreams, they returned to their bed. The king’s daughter lay on the cot at her usual place, stretching out her body, readying to sleep. Her friend emerged from under the cot, swirling, kissed her legs first, covered her with his kisses all over, and went near to her face. The eyes of the princess were teary and closed, with immeasurable peace, ecstasy, and expectation. Dear courtiers! It was at that time that something terrible that could tear open one’s heart happened! The unhappy incident that had been tormenting the king’s daughter happened at last. Her friend, who went very near to her face, suddenly spat out on her face. Within a second his smoky form got dissipated and disappeared. The spittle spat out from his extremely handsome face, having no blood and flesh, threw out the foul smell of the bad dream all over the room and was spilling like a thick white substance on the face of the king’s daughter. She woke up from her sleep out of utter shock, repugnance, and wretchedness. I could make a right guess on the very subsequent night that her dreams during every night were ending that way.  But the pitiable king’s daughter, who was waking up with shock, kept forgetting every night what she had seen in her dreams due to the aggression of her wake-up. Because of this, her friend—who spat out the spittle on her face the previous night—would come the next night and play with her as if nothing had happened; and she would permit him to play with her without any misgivings only to get her face smeared with spittle at the end of the game. This continued for long. He had kept spitting out on her face every night like the tip of a spear thrown at an improbable speed. This persistent shock got settled at the bottom of her heart, turned into a fear and repugnance towards handsome men, and eventually left this beautiful woman’s heart devastated. While the king’s daughter couldn’t understand the reason behind her eccentric behaviour, I was left seriously confused without knowing the cause behind her friend’s behaviour till next night. 

...To be continued