The Mahabharata Secret (17 page)

He shouted to the others and pointed to the dots.

It seemed that these were caves which had been hidden behind the statue with no record of their existence. Within minutes, ropes and rough climbing equipment were organised and two nimble-footed Afghans began climbing up the rock face.

Baran was one of them.

They quickly scaled the cliff, using to their advantage the jagged surface left behind by the breaking of the statues. Baran’s fellow climber, a younger man, reached the caves first and disappeared into one. He came out quickly and, with a shout of disappointment, climbed to the next one.

Baran reached an opening and pulled himself over the edge and into the cool darkness of the cave. He blinked as his eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom inside.

But there was nothing there. It was a small, shallow cave, barely four feet deep and not more than five feet from floor to roof. He quickly clambered his way to the next one.

His fellow climber had finished exploring the third cave and was on his way down.

‘It’s useless,’ he cried to Baran. ‘There’s nothing in the caves.’

Undeterred, Baran kept going. There was no way he was going back without checking the second cave. He knew there would be jibes at his manliness and jokes about age catching up with him, with the younger man checking out three caves in the time he had taken to inspect one. But he also knew that the taunts would be worse if he turned back now.

He reached the last cave and pulled himself in. It was slightly larger than the earlier one and its interior was shrouded in darkness. It had to be quite deep.

He switched on a flashlight and shone it around the cave. The back wall was discernible now, at least 25 feet from the opening. There was nothing to be seen here, though.

Hoping to find something of value, Baran walked deeper into the cave, stepping warily and crouching to avoid hitting the ceiling, While the cave had been sealed for long enough to ensure there were no wild animals here, he wasn’t so sure about snakes. The light from the torch lit up the rocky walls as he walked past them. They were bare.

Suddenly, he spotted something white on the floor.

He kneeled and focused the flashlight to get a better look.

What he saw chilled him to the bone.

It was a human skeleton; bones that appeared to be very old.

The skeleton was intact, not a bone out of place. The bones lay on the stone shards that made up the floor of the cave. Baran couldn’t imagine how or why, but the man seemed to have died here, in this cave.

There was something else here, half-buried in the gravel.

Baran trained his flashlight on the object. It was metallic, but unlike any metal he had ever seen. He pulled it out and examined it; the circular metallic slab was smooth on one side and had grooves and inscriptions on the other. In the centre of the slab was a hollow scooped out of the metal.

Baran stared at the slab for a few moments, trying to fathom its nature and purpose. The metal was dark, appeared really old, but was not rusted. He hefted it in his hand to assess its value. It was light. He made a face; it was probably worthless.

Disappointed, Baran scoured the ground around the skeleton with the flashlight one last time before he reported his find. Then, he saw some tattered strips of bark, bound together, scattered as if they had been thrown there by someone.

He quickly tucked them along with the metallic slab into the folds of his robe.

Suppressing a triumphant grin, he made his way to the cave opening to announce his discovery, of the skeleton, to the crowd below.

Once Baran had come down, the men gathered in a huddle before the local commander of the Taliban, Hamid, who beckoned to Baran. ‘Now, let us see what you have found.’

Baran’s chest swelled with importance. He now sat before Hamid in the little semicircular space left by the crowd at the very front of the gathering.

Hamid examined the texts. Though a bit frayed at the edges, and torn in parts, they were still in surprisingly good condition considering their age. He leafed through the strips of bark and attempted to read the lines that were inscribed on them.

Finally, he looked up, his face betraying his frustration.

‘I can’t read these,’ he announced. ‘The script is unintelligible. Who knows what they could be? Perhaps his shopping list?’ He chuckled at his own joke and the crowd laughed with him.

Hamid gathered up the texts and tossed them at Baran.

Next, he picked up the circular metallic slab and studied it, turning it over in his hands, frowning at the inscriptions and grooves that marked one face. Something struck him. He stuck one finger out and rubbed it across the inscribed face of the slab. To his surprise, the toothed wheel on the slab moved under his touch. He grinned and looked up at the men seated before him, then tossed the slab to Baran.

‘Keep them,’ he declared grandly. ‘The texts are worthless if they are not readable. And the metal object is a toy. Definitely of no use to us.’

Whether Hamid considered them worthless or not, the texts and the disk were centuries old. Baran decided that he’d keep them as a souvenir of the destruction of the infidel statues. And who knew, they just might have a price on the black market in antiquities.

Little did Hamid or Baran know the true worth of the texts and the secret buried within them. For the second time in 1,500 years, the texts had been discarded by those who couldn’t see beyond the words inscribed on them.

21

Present Day

Day 6
Bairat

Vijay and his companions stared in horror at the wall of rocks that now blocked the exit. Vijay grimaced. ‘I should never have got all of you into this.’

Radha responded immediately, her eyes flashing, ‘You didn’t exactly coerce us into coming here. We came of our own volition. And now, we...we,’ her voice faltered as she couldn’t bring herself to articulate their situation.

‘Guys, you gotta see this.’ Colin was staring in the opposite direction.

The others turned to look.

All that remained of the wall with the hidden doorway was a heap of rubble on the cavern floor. What lay before them now was the secret chamber. The far wall of the hidden chamber was polished smooth and lined, from floor to ceiling, with inscriptions that they couldn’t read. And in the centre of the wall was a hollow receptacle in which something glinted brightly at them in the light of their lamps.

The dust was beginning to settle and all thoughts of their predicament were momentarily forgotten in the excitement of this discovery. This, then, was the true secret of the cavern.

‘What is it?’ Vijay found himself whispering, though he didn’t know why.

Shukla was beside himself with excitement. He had already begun to translate the inscriptions and was visibly delighted with what he read.

‘It is a summary of one of the books of the Mahabharata.’ He couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice and it trembled as he spoke. ‘The
Vimana Parva
. This is amazing.’

Colin had advanced swiftly to the object that was shining in the niche and he gave a whoop as he studied it.

Vijay and Radha hurried to Colin’s side while Shukla remained glued to the writing on the wall of the cavern, reading it with undisguised pleasure.

‘What is it?’ Vijay asked, as Colin reached into the recess and brought out the object.

They all stared at it.

It was a ball that, at first glance, appeared to be made of glass. Colin slowly held his hands out and they realised that it was actually a perfect sphere carved out of stone and polished to a degree that it shone and took on the appearance of glass.

Vijay placed the rock ball carefully in his bag. He didn’t know what it was, but if it was concealed in a secret chamber in this cavern, it had to be important.

Radha walked to her father’s side. ‘What is it, Papa?’ She knew her father had read the Mahabharata a 100 times over, if not more, and could quote verses from the epic. There must be something different about the inscriptions on the wall to get him so excited.

Shukla couldn’t contain his excitement. His eyes shone as he looked at her. ‘The book which is summarised here is the
Vimana Parva
. The Mahabharata consists of books, each one narrating a section of the tale that is reflected in the title of the book; the
Karna Parva
is the story of Karna, the
Bheeshma Parva
is about Bheeshma Pitamah, and so on. But I’ve never come across the
Vimana Parva
in any version of the epic that I’ve read. As far as I know, it doesn’t exist.’

‘What is this book about?’ Vijay had come up and heard Shukla’s explanation. He gazed at the wall with interest.

‘A
vimana
is a flying craft,’ Shukla began. ‘There are several references to
vimana
s in the epic.’

Vijay remembered hearing stories from the epic that involved flying machines narrated to him by his uncle years ago. ‘What is the story in this book?’

Shukla opened his mouth to reply, but there was a shout from Colin, who had wandered off to explore the rest of the secret chamber.

‘There’s a stairway here!’

Vijay walked over to Colin, who was peering into a crack in the wall. They examined the crevice in the light of the lamp. It led to a niche from which a stairway rose, cut into the rock, spiralling upwards and disappearing into the darkness beyond the reach of the lamplight.

‘I wonder where it leads to,’ Colin mused.

‘Probably a hidden exit.’ Shukla and Radha had joined them. ‘Most ancient structures, especially when carved into rock or built underground, had two access routes. For ventilation and as an escape route in case one got blocked up for some reason. Considering what was concealed in this chamber, they would definitely have ensured that there was more than one way to get in and out.’

They looked at each other, their hopes rising. Perhaps they could still make it out of this underground prison.

‘I’ll go first.’ Vijay started up the stairway. Shukla and Radha followed him, with Colin bringing up the rear.

The staircase wound upwards. At regular intervals, holes were visible in the walls of the staircase.

‘Ventilation shafts,’ Shukla explained. ‘They probably lead to openings in the hillside that allow fresh air to circulate in the cavern.’

Their progress began to slow down and they began to wonder when they would reach the top. Suddenly, the stairway ended and opened up into a small square rocky chamber.

They stood for a few moments, getting their breath back after the climb. Vijay looked at Shukla, concerned, but the linguist nodded back at him reassuringly to indicate that he was fine.

They shone their torches around the little chamber but there was no joint or crack in the wall to indicate a hidden doorway. The walls were solid rock. In one corner was a short staircase that ended abruptly halfway up the wall.

‘What now?’ Vijay wondered.

Radha saw it first.

In the roof of the chamber, just above the stairway in the corner, was the square outline of an opening. Vijay advanced up the stairway until he stood on the top stair, crouching, and studied the stone slab that seemed to be their passport to freedom. He extended his hands and positioned them against the slab and tried pushing it open. It was heavy and didn’t move.

Vijay beckoned to Colin, who immediately bounded up the stairs and joined him.

The two friends looked at each other and nodded. With one accord, they pushed against the stone slab.

Nothing happened.

They stared at each other, helplessly.

There seemed to be no way out.

Where It All Began for Farooq

Farooq sat back in the black Mercedes and mulled over the verse he had discovered in the cavern at Bairat. He wasted no time on thinking about the group he had left trapped in the cavern. His thoughts flitted back 11 years in time to his first meeting with the European, shortly after he had joined Al Qaeda. Columbus, the man had called himself. Farooq smirked, amused even after all these years; if the man had to choose an alias without people knowing it wasn’t his real name, he couldn’t have chosen a worse name. But then, again, it didn’t matter what the European was called. He was powerful and could deliver on his promises, using a vast network of politicians, businessmen and criminals across the globe, as Farooq had witnessed several times in the past 11 years.

Columbus was tall and distinguished looking. He oozed power and wealth from every pore. In his first meeting with Farooq, he had left a deep impression. Not the least because, as a parting shot, he had shared with the scientist a secret known to few people alive.

The secret of the Nine.

‘Someday,’ Columbus had asserted, ‘we will find the means to unearth the nature and location of the secret they hid.’ How the man had come to know about the secret and what gave him confidence in the truth the myth hid, Farooq hadn’t known at the time, but Farooq hadn’t revealed his own great secret— which was also connected with the Nine.

It was amazing, Farooq thought, that just one year later, when he was forced to go underground, he had met Mohammed Bin Jabal. Perhaps it was destiny.

Farooq was deeply religious, having been raised in an orthodox Islamic family, and his father had enrolled him in a
madrasa,
which had a deep impact on him. He had grown up believing that Allah had a plan for him and today he was firmly convinced that he knew what that plan was. And what a grand one it was!

It had to be more than coincidence that Bin Jabal had shown him ancient texts and a metal disk that bore inscriptions that no one could decipher. But Farooq had cannily got them translated, suspecting that there was something of importance in the texts and the disk. He had been right.

He had shared the discovery with Columbus and the journey had begun; a journey that was going to culminate in the next few days with the discovery of the secret of the Nine. They had come a long way since then. The texts had led them to a hidden location where they had found artefacts that further reinforced their beliefs. They had redoubled their efforts to find the missing links that would lead them to the secret.