Authors: Aashish Kaul
Three men had emerged from the pavilion's dim interior onto the main landing to see about the traveller. This was what remained of life here. Maybe this was what always remained once the king and his escort had departed after the excursion. Three shadowy forms floating in a parallelogram of flames issuing from the half-damaged, serrated urns on sills and parapets that had yielded their colour piecemeal to time and the elements, time which here was nothing but the elements. Solitary men getting by in age, half slaves, half hermits. What did it mean to them, the war and the subsequent change of power, the weariness of loss? Probably they were not even aware of it, content with collecting food and wood in the forest, watching the sky, listening to the streams, brewing their ale, and smoking and drinking each evening round the low fire. Days alike, empty and peaceful. At most a careful barter of words and movements to sustain them. A bare life, a routine life, a robust life.
One man came down the steps and led the horse away to the stables at the rear of the building, another rushed inside to light the fire and prepare a meal, while the third stood right there, calmly waiting for me at the edge of the steps. They seemed to behave most naturally, as if they had been expecting me, after these many years, on this of all evenings, when the night was bursting with thunder and rain.
On the landing under the roof, the attendant took the dripping cloak off my shoulders. Did he recognize me? I turned and from the sanctuary of softly waving flames watched the sheets of water being ruffled by the wind and charge leaking from the sky and flaring up the night with its deep staccato roar. I could have stood there for hours, watching and hearing the rain, not thinking about anything, forgetting the past and its ties to me.
I changed into dry clothes and settled by the fire, supping from
an earthen bowl a hot creamy broth made of goat's fat and hooves along with unleavened bread with burnt rings that left a faint taste of ashes on the palate. It was an appetizing fare. Afterward, someone handed me a pipe stem and I settled down with the others drinking and discussing, in words that barely broke away from the long pauses that held them, the day's few and common happenings prior to my arrival. The rain drummed lightly afar and the fire crackled from the twigs bursting in flames, releasing a smell of juniper in the spreading warmth. I knew not when sleep levelled with me and when it left me far behind.
Sometime before dawn, the first dawn, the second or the fifth, it was forever dawn, a pallid, rain-sodden dawn, I had a dream. I saw my elephant, not dark and lacerated in the shed when I had last laid eyes on him, but snow-white, like Indra's ride Airavata, with three, four, even five heads, falling from a bluff into a cold blue luminosity, spinning as it fell in slow motion, without a sound, trailing away in his vast bulk into the gap opening under my feet.
We were four friends, all warriors, what else could we be, men chained to their humble, uncertain origins. Men who, to begin with, did not possess even the comforts of a blacksmith or a potter. Men who had taught themselves early the art of survival in the street, who only knew how to handle weapons or swing their limbs fast in combat. To then be recruited into the king's army seemed like good fortune. Food, handsome weapons, a roof over the head, however temporary, some coins to buy drinks each evening, and fresh clothes on the back. This was no small fortune. In return for which we were simply to practice the one skill we knew, and this time without fear of sanctions for the deed was to be done in the name of law or defending the nation's honour. Eventually, two ended up in the ranks on foot, one in cavalry, and I on the elephant. Ours was a bond formed in the early days of scarcity and hardship, from before my ascension to the higher echelons of the court, something which the passage of time, or what was in my case the accrual of sudden privilege, had not diminished in the least. Yet only I had survived the
war, and what was I but this opiate, forlorn figure slithering in between the sheets, watching the rain fall unabated on the world, now hard like a barrage from heaven and now gently in bands of mist trailing over treetops, thinking of the dead.
The three slain, and one of them not even in the war, but during the brief armistice that resulted from the younger of the two enemy princes being mortally wounded by our arrows. This brave warrior, my friend the foot soldier, who had given battle fearlessly while managing to save himself from the enemy's blows for so many days, dead with a long knife in his navel, half the blade shining up from the naked flesh, in a room above the tavern, back in the safety of the city's walls, a place to which he had come running the moment the fighting was suspended to slake his passion for a crotchety barmaid, who on the night in question clearly surpassed herself. Murdered out of petty jealousy or anger or some arcane impulse by the most unsuspecting of agents, the same one you can see standing at the side of the cot, hands red with blood and heart madly pounding and white with shame at what she has accomplished without ever intending to. Fortunately for her, she would go unpunished, for the custodians of king's peace are busy elsewhere, looking out, facing an enemy more formidable than a trembling woman beaten by her own crime. One dead and the other constrained to flee, both victims of drives neither could have fathomed in full.
Another killed in action toward the end of battle. Thrown off his horse in the thick of bleeding and warring bodies, and swiftly dispatched to his end by three spears fixing him to the earth at once.
And the third, whom I loved best, the poet, the soldier in front ranks, the maker of charming verses, a rarity, a warrior and a poet, a poet warrior, dead on the first day, all poetry gone out of him. Just at the moment the battle was over. Clubbed to death by that general who some said was a god whose name was Anjaneya. That spy who had entered the palace before the war and had managed to escape after being arrested. But what would it have mattered, this day or the next. On foot, death would have caught up with him one way or
another. But on the first day itself, and that too when the battle was over. In stark contravention of the rules of war. A barbaric act. Immoral. Unforgivable. To first rein in the chaos and to then snap the reins yourself. Lay down rules of conduct, cast your net far and wide, and then smartly evade it to satisfy your lust for blood.
My eye was on him as the fighting drew to a close. It was then that I saw the general or the spy or the god coming straight at my friend, who had just a moment ago freed himself from his adversary, disposing of the latter in a hand-to-hand fight, first giving him a clip behind the knee that made his legs cave in and, while his body was helplessly sinking to the ground, fastening his fingers in the victim's nose and breaking his neck with the bottom of a fist, vertebrae and all, extreme work from which my friend was still reeling, when the general yelled at him, demanding engagement. Something like a foreboding, something like a stab of pain, went through my chest and, snatching my mace from its hold, I leapt out of my seat on the elephant's back. I was still on his head, balancing my bulk to run down the trunk and jump into the fray, when the conch shells began to blow, and my sprint was arrested in mid air, hesitation crept round my legs for I felt he was safe now. But not for the attacker, who could simply not control himself, and packed my friend's death in the melancholy moans of the conches, even when he had seen my friend drop his weapon in response to the call for the close of battle.
But once we were alive and together. Often after a long day of suffering the useless etiquette and tiresome verbiage of the courtiers, when my heart would yearn for the rustic music of the street, the sounds and rhythms of my past, for one never outgrows the language of one's youth, I would find them at one or another tavern, lying in drink or rollicking with laughter, or tugging at the soiled skirts and sarongs of the waitresses flitting between the tables, delaying them from their work a moment to flirt or to coo in their ears, lifting the smooth, opaline earlobes on their tongues, or simply rolling dice with other habitual drinkers and degenerates in a corner under a weakly burning oil lamp. After the extreme richness and the clean,
soft redolence of the palace, the spirit fumes and the smells of food, tobacco, opium, and bodies so close together made the air in the tavern strangely liberating.
Not that this was the only distinguishing factor between my two haunts. It struck me sometimes, wanderer in different worlds, how unalike were the thoughts and talk of people in the two places. Here, there was no trace of the issues that troubled the great minds at court, the unapologetic strategies and politics of domination and aggression, whether inside the kingdom or beyond its frontiers, the prevailing social and economic conditions, the levy and timely collection of dues, the maintenance of order, suppression of dissent. Not here the sublime talk on art and dialectics, not here the perennial indulgence in silks, jewels, exotic artefacts, not here the elocution, not here the mindless hedonism, unless the term could be applied to men and women living through their labour and instincts alone, speaking fast and without much care, simply to communicate with no desire to impress, full of varying, intense passions in the throes of life. When I thought along these lines, I saw not two worlds but many, an infinite series of mutually exclusive, heteroge- neous groups, neither arising from nor influencing each other. Or only minimally. Of this the priests in their liturgies and thinkers in their towers, moneylenders in their tills and sculptors in their stones, monarchs in their dreams of conquest and queens in their unending games and diversions were all equally guilty. Even their tongues bore little resemblance to each other, already specialist jargon was deforming and alienating them, some more than others. Each busy contributing to the whole or divining its ways according to their own peculiar biases and none influencing anything in the end. Sometimes it felt that life moved on not because of, but in spite of our efforts and dealings. Whereas the same day dawned on all, it didn't end the same for everyone. We were a tissue of sentiments that couldn't be reconciled, an ongoing tussle of contrasting, bewil- dering values, of beauty, knowledge, speculation, ethics, commin- gling, separating, combining anew, rising willy-nilly above a sea of
violent drives like whales coming up to draw breath. Meaning certainly could be had in this, but meaning itself could not be found.
In war alone, then, there seemed a common ground. Here, at least, the enemy had been set apart, given shape and size, a corpore- ality that could be ruined, here, on the battlefield, was the longed for meeting point of our disparate positions and biases. Was this truly the reason why wars were waged?
One evening I found the poet drinking with two foreign sailors, who had a smattering of our tongue and were telling of their fasci- nation with the gold in our city, how even the mud huts had streaks of gold in them, interspersing this with their adventures on distant coasts and among strange tribes, the aggressive nature of our women, the majesty of our ports, the high export tariffs on certain herbs and spices, the strength of our ale that brought on bouts of homesickness. On and on went the baritone voices, rising from a level deeper in the chest than usual, attesting to their otherness, to each speech its own home in the heart. My friend went along nodding his head, half-listening, half-smiling, bent on scratching words over the heavily indented and marked wood of the table at the end of the patio. Above them the lamp flickered and swayed in the wind that went sighing along the wall, surrounding them lay the dark awash with stars. The other two of our group were away with their regiments. I slipped beside him wordlessly on the bench, and tried to make out the script that was being written over or perhaps re-writing the remains of those that had gone before, etchings emptied of all meaning, or simply empty etchings, made for no reason but to keep the hand and the mind employed while one waited for company or thought one's deepest thoughts. I could see nothing. The words lay dissolved in that age-old palimpsest of wood. I looked at him, and he moved his lips to my ears, breathing the words slowly into them, with a weight that aroused wonder, and at once I saw rising from the chaos of scratches four spidery forms of perfect beauty. The words, the wonder, distilling something from nothing, consciousness entering matter.
Sometime during the night the rain had stopped. As suddenly as they had built up, the clouds faded away and the moon shone in a vast halo over a silent world. The silence pushed me further down into sleep, and I did not awake until late the next day. For several days I had not stepped out of the building and, used to this inner migration, I lingered inside and on the landing for a long time before climbing down the steps to the still wet earth. I retraced the path I had come by for a while, and then took a branch that went along a swale and up into another ridge. Countless rivulets ran down the forest floor into valleys hidden from sight. In the distance, lone white columns of smoke rose obliquely from the wet green hills. More travellers?, more hermits? How had they survived the deluge? The road was still soft, and in places mud reached up to my ankles. The sun lay low on the horizon, the breeze cool and smelling of earth and leaf. Suddenly, there came in view a gigantic iron bell in a rotting wood shelter, open to the four winds, high up at the end of the path. Solid and heavy, a ton or two in weight, it was the last remaining relic of the lost age, its purpose and splendour now forgotten and irrecoverable, the work of gods or giants or beings from beyond. Who else could have put it up here? Behind it at some distance a tree had been caught in the evening's receding light, its leaves grading from silver to pink under the gloss. Black and heavy and imperishable, the bell reflected no light. Its gong, if it could have been moved by a human hand, would have sounded for miles. At the centre of a fluid, unstable universe, this was the one incor- ruptible object. A moon-moth, lighter than a feather, sat still on its dark curving bulk, creating a contrast inhuman in its beauty. Just then a crow broke into a harsh trailing caw, which went through the setting like a shard of glass goes through flesh. But maybe the simile will not hold. Or only partly.