Bending to touch their father’s feet to take his blessings in the traditional Arya way, Bharat and Shatrugan rose again with eyes glossy with emotion. They turned and strode out of the hall, followed closely by Drishti Kumar and Pradhan Mantri Sumantra, leaving only the maharaja’s personal quad of bodyguards and a few other soldiers, who began removing the body of Bheriya.
Dasaratha descended the steps of the royal dais. He walked to his travelling seat. The four bodyguards were standing at its corners, waiting for him to be seated.
The maharaja glanced once again at the fallen Vajra lieutenant’s body, now being carried out by the palace guards. His haggard mouth twitched with a faint ghostly smile as he watched the body being taken across the parliament hall to the yawning open doors.
A figure stood silhouetted in that open doorway, the outline leaving no doubt that it was Guru Vashishta.
As Dasaratha hesitated, his hand on the top of the travelling chair, the guru strode forward, advancing towards the maharaja.
Guru Vashishta gestured to the palace guards lined up alongside the royal dais.
‘Leave us.’
The officer in charge of the quad glanced uneasily at the maharaja. Dasaratha, standing by the travelling seat, his bodyguards ready to raise it once he sat, nodded once. The officer gestured to his men and they filed out quickly and efficiently. The maharaja looked at his bodyguards and dismissed them as well with a gesture. They left unhappily. Twice today they had been ordered to leave their master alone; both times, the maharaja had encountered trouble.
Without bothering to look back, Vashishta spoke briefly, a single line from a four-line verse.
The hall doors slowly swung shut of their own volition. The last of Dasaratha’s bodyguards leapt out of the way just as the massive doors came together with a reverberating crash. As the echoes died away, the guru walked down the long approach to the royal dais.
‘So, Dasaratha, you have dispatched the army to Gandahar and Kaikeya.’
Dasaratha inclined his head slightly, showing the spiritual adviser formal respect. ‘Yes, Guru-dev.’
‘And this information regarding the asura invasion plan was brought to you by the Vajra Kshatriya?’
‘Indeed, Guru-dev.’
‘A man named Bheriya, who served as second-in-command to Captain Bejoo, the trusted commander of your personal Vajra fighting force.’
‘Yes, Guru-dev.’
‘This Bheriya informed you in a private audience that Ravana’s troops had set sail from Lanka and were heading towards the delta of the Sindhu river. Thence they would travel upriver as far as they could sail, then continue north on foot until they reached Gandahar.’
‘Yes, Guru-dev.’
The guru had reached the travelling chair. He was a yard from the maharaja. The two men were face to face.
Despite his decrepit condition, Dasaratha was a large man, a big-boned, well-built warrior who had spent a lifetime engaged in martial pursuits. His muscles sagged sadly, his skin was liverspotted and grey with age, his hair thinning, pouches under his eyes, deep furrows scarring his forehead and cheeks. But he still retained some vestige of his former glory; if not the full strength of the formidable raj-Kshatriya personality that had made allies feel proud and enemies hesitate. He was still a maharaja, and he looked it.
He met the guru’s eyes and held them for a moment. Then he looked down, as was appropriate in the presence of a seermage of such great stature. Vashishta had stood thus before each one of Dasaratha’s ancestors, guiding the Suryavansha dynasty for over eight hundred years. And even those centuries of service were only a fraction of the seer’s seven thousand years on this mortal plane. Dasaratha was king indeed; yet Vashishta was a maker of kings.
And a destroyer as well, should he choose to become one.
But it was not his awareness of the seer’s superior power that caused Dasaratha to lower his gaze and incline his head. It was sanskriti: the Arya code of conduct that required that elders be shown respect and humility under all circumstances.
But what the maharaja did next was not called for by Arya sanskriti. He shut his eyes.
Guru Vashishta approached Dasaratha. As he came closer, the seer’s eyes fastened on Dasaratha’s face with the full intensity of his searching gaze. It was as if a blazing torch was being held to the maharaja’s face.
The blue glow of Brahman flashed in the guru’s eyes, growing steadily brighter. It grew and grew until it was a beacon of searing intensity in the chamber. Had anyone been present at even the far ends of the vast empty hall, they would have been compelled to turn away or shield their eyes, so bright was the glow from the guru’s pupils. Motes of gold and silver danced in the blue light, and a few strands of red winked in and out of the streaming waves emanating from the seer-mage’s sun-bright pupils. The light swirled around Dasaratha, enveloping him in a cocoon of dazzling intensity. His white vastra caught the light and absorbed it, making his very skin seem to turn blue. Dasaratha gasped, his arms pulled away from his body by the uncontestable power of Brahman.
The maharaja’s eyes remained closed, but it was evident that the effort was taking a toll. Sweat poured freely down his face and neck, staining his vastra. The lines and furrows around his eyes deepened to knife cuts, his ashen colouring tinted deep blue by the supernatural light. He grunted, his head jerking this way, then that. A great struggle was taking place.
Dasaratha’s feet left the ground. The blue cocoon of Brahman light raised him up, and he rose towards the twenty-yard-high ceiling of the parliament hall. His arms were at right angles to his body, his legs apart, like a man bound akimbo by invisible ropes. His lips parted, showing once-strong white teeth now turning grey with age and decay. His nostrils flared, seeking to draw breath but inhaling only the pure aquamarine light. He floated upwards until he was midway between ceiling and floor. There he hung suspended in the cocoon of Brahman.
Guru Vashishta began chanting a mantra. His voice was strong and clear but soft, loud enough to be heard by the maharaja suspended above, but not by anyone more than a few yards away. This mantra was not meant to be recited in the presence of mortals. It was a mantra reserved for devas. Yet Guru Vashishta had to resort to its use now; he had no other choice. There were no mantras that could free a mortal from the possession of an evil asura aatma. Only this one, a mantra meant to give a mortal the power of a deva for the brief fraction of time needed to expel the demonaic spirit from his mortal form.
Vashishta continued chanting the mantra. He built to a climax, the musical Sanskrit rhythms rising in pitch and intensity until they were no longer mere words being spoken aloud, but threads knitting the eternal fabric of space and time itself, infusing the possessed maharaja with the light of Brahman, forcing the shakti that held the universe together to enter into every pore, every cell, every atom of the maharaja’s being. Suffusing them the way the blue light suffused every square inch of the assembly hall—even the far side of pillars and the depths of the darkest crevices. Leaving no place for the evil aatma to hide. Once the searing light of Brahman became too much for it to bear, like a rat caught on a sinking ship the asura aatma would either drown in the flood and be absorbed into the flow of Brahman itself, or flee.
It resisted as long as it possibly could. Then it could withstand no more.
Ten yards above the floor of the hall, Dasaratha’s mouth opened to release a shrill scream. A piercing banshee wail of dismay and disgust. The scream carried through the walls and doors, making the bodyguards and palace guards waiting outside look up nervously and shudder. Strange times had come to Ayodhya. Dark times.
Then the maharaja’s eyes flew open.
They were blood-red. They resembled the eyes of the corpse of Bheriya when it had begun to transform into the imitation of its lord and master, sprouting the nine extra heads. But no heads sprouted from Dasaratha. Only the eyes glowed bright jewel-red for a moment, blazing with a fevered ruby light that tried to dispel and destroy the light of Brahman. Tried but failed.
Then the eyes closed, and the maharaja slumped in midair, his body turning limp and lifeless.
The blue cocoon of Brahman holding him up vanished, winking out as abruptly as a torch doused in a pond.
Dasaratha plummeted like a sack of grain.
The guru caught him easily.
On the tip of his right forefinger.
THREE
Once, the River Shona was a flourishing, powerful stream all of fifty yards wide. Now it was reduced to a mere ten yards of shallow but still cheerfully flowing clear water. To either side of this rivulet lay twenty yards of old riverbed, exposed to the sun and sloping upwards on either side until it joined the valley floor. The riverbed was mostly pebbles over gleaming yellow sand, literally the gold, or sona, that had given the river its name. Over time, the name had lapsed into the commonspeak pronunciation, which tended to turn the Sanksrit ‘s’ sound into the easier-to-pronounce ‘sh’. Hence, Sona became Shona, and so it stayed.
As the Siddh-ashrama procession emerged from the wooded hill road into the Shona valley, the evening sun picked out the mineral stones in the riverbed and turned them into a glittering display of jewellery fit for a queen. The first to step on to the bed were the Vajra bigfoot, their ponderous feet raising a crunching sound on the pebbles and shale that sounded like a thousand silbuttas grinding spices at once.
The crunching grew louder and more varied in intensity and rhythm as the Brahmins and brahmacharyas followed, and by the time the Vajra horses and chariots joined in too, it sounded like a herd of elephants munching on sugarcane stalks.
Brahmarishi Vishwamitra went down to the edge of the water and stood gazing at the low evening sun, his staff held loosely in his right hand, ang-vastra flapping in the gentle breeze. It was cooler here than on the main marg they had been on before the incident in the hills, Rama realised, and the thickly wooded area alongside the river shielded them from the low sun’s rays.
He and Lakshman stopped beside a large boulder that bore the signs of water erosion over centuries, perhaps even millennia. The boulder was still mossy in places, indicating that the river had been in spate last monsoon season. The two black-clad Kshatriyas who had been walking just behind them stopped a little distance away, conferring quietly.
Lakshman indicated them without actually pointing or nodding his head. Rama and he were familiar enough with one another’s looks and gestures to know what the other was referring to without needing to be led by the nose.
‘What do you think their story is, brother?’
Rama shrugged. ‘Why shouldn’t they just be what they say they are?’
Lakshman shook his head. ‘Something doesn’t fit. The bigger one said he was a Jat. The other one clearly isn’t a Jat. So what are they doing together? Jats don’t mingle well, as you could see for yourself during that fight with Bejoo-chacha. They’re fiercely loyal to other Jats but they regard all non-Jats as potential enemies until they’ve proven otherwise. A Jat wouldn’t be travelling with a non-Jat and fighting back to back with him.’
‘How do you know the shorter one isn’t a Jat too?’
Lakshman sighed and looked down at his hands. They were still stained with blood from the encounter. Not his own blood though. ‘Because if he is, then he’s the shortest Jat I’ve ever seen. The Jat clans are the tallest Aryas, remember?’
‘Maybe he’s young. He seemed young to me, maybe our age. Maybe he hasn’t finished growing yet.’
Lakshman shook his head. ‘I think there’s a law that says even Jat newborn babes have to be at least six feet tall.’
Rama smiled. ‘A law?’
‘A maharaja’s law,’ Lakshman said solemnly.
Rama looked at his brother, trying to picture a newborn Jat babe, swaddled in black from head to toe, over six feet tall and lying on his back, bawling for milk. Lakshman seemed to be imagining the same picture: both brothers broke into helpless laughter, startling the Brahmins bustling around the riverbed at first, then drawing smiles and grins as the ashramites understood that the paroxysm wasn’t some rare variety of Ayodhyan affliction, simply two young boys sharing a good laugh. Even the gaunt, lined face of Vishwamitra, standing by the riverside, reflected a wisp of amusement at their hysterical attack.
When they had regained control of themselves, Rama punched Lakshman in the shoulder. ‘Don’t make jokes like that. These Brahmins think of us as the heroes of Bhayanak-van. We have a reputation to live up to now.’
Lakshman punched him back. ‘So? Heroes can’t laugh once in a while? Next you’ll say we can’t go into the woods to relieve ourselves because they musn’t suspect we’re human! Or maybe you think we should wait until nobody’s looking and then sneak away? And while we’re at it, we should sleep with our eyes open and never drink or eat either so they think we’re avatars!’
Rama put a hand on Lakshman’s chest and pushed him. ‘Who says avatars don’t drink or eat or sleep or … act human? That’s why they’re called avatars, not devas, silly! They’re just reincarnations of devas born in human guise.’
Lakshman pushed Rama back. ‘So maybe the Brahmins think we’re devas. Immortal, invulnerable, superhuman.’ He pretended to tap his chin thoughtfully. ‘And I bet devas don’t have to go into the woods to relieve themselves. Not more than once every thousand years or so!’