The Vetala

by Phillip Ernest

  The Vetala

  The Vetala

  A novel of undying love

  Phillip Ernest

  Copyright © 2018 Phillip Ernest

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  The following is a work of fiction. Many of the locations are real, although not necessarily as portrayed, but all characters and events are fictional and any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Debbie Geltner

  Prepared for the press by Kodi Scheer

  Book design by WildElement.ca

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Ernest, Phillip, author

  The vetala / Phillip Ernest.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988130-66-8 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-988130-67-5

  (HTML).--ISBN 978-1-988130-68-2 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-988130-69-9

  (PDF)

  I. Title.

  PS8609.R54V48 2018 C813’.6 C2017-906565-3

  C2017-906566-1

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund, and Livres Canada Books, and of the Government of Quebec through the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC).

  Linda Leith Publishing

  Montreal

  www.lindaleith.com

  Part One

  1

  A DeathPune, 2014

  That morning the news had come to the Lokmanya Tilak Research Institute that Professor Suresh Kshirasagar, its former librarian, had died the night before and willed it a unique ancient manuscript on the vetala, the vampire.

  The news was a rare major event in the Institute’s sleepy world, which continued at the speed of old India despite the rapid erosion of that India that was going on all around it in the Pune neighbourhood in which it stood. The Institute’s older members remembered Kshirasagar well from the days when he had been a daily presence in the library, in committee meetings, and in the tea hut where they gathered several times a day; the younger members, never having even seen him, nevertheless knew him through his enduring reputation for kindness and generosity and a vast but unostentatious knowledge of Sanskrit literature. He had retired some twenty years before, following decades of service during which he met all and became friends with many of the scholars, both Indian and foreign, who continuously passed through Pune’s most famous Sanskrit institution. Almost no one had seen him since that time, but everyone knew that he remained active, having been forced into early retirement by a rare disease that confined him to his home not far from the Institute.

  There he had continued to work on his annotated translation of this forgotten Sanskrit book, about which nothing was known but its name, and that to only a few: Amrutajijnasa, Inquiry into the Undead. He had died before completing it, and in his will had left the manuscript and his unfinished work to the Institute with the condition that it should oversee its completion under the direction of his former student, Professor Nada Marjanovic of the University of Zagreb.

  Despite his reclusiveness, a few friends had visited him in his home from time to time over these two decades. He was much reduced, it was said, by his condition—a wasting disease which left him pale and so weak that even sunlight and open air had become an affliction. But he seemed to be sustained by his enduring obsession with his book. Kshirasagar’s only collaborators on the work had been Dr. Marjanovic, and, some twenty years before, another Croatian scholar, Zoran Vukovic. Marjanovic came to Pune for two months every year, mainly to work on the text with Kshirasagar. Besides his wife Kamala, no one was closer to the childless old scholar than Nada Marjanovic.

  So when, that morning, Kamala Kshirasagar called Professor Vimala Bhave, general secretary of the Institute, to tell her the news of her husband’s death, Bhave knew that her first task would be to email Nada. She would then write to Shyamala Phadke, one of her own Ph.D. students at Pune University, asking her to work with Marjanovic on the completion of the translation: Marjanovic herself would decide how many scholars she would need to help her, but Bhave was determined that one of them should be Shyamala, who at twenty-four had already proven herself to be a formidable sanskritist and scholar. It seemed probable that Marjanovic would come to Pune immediately on hearing the news, since it was May, and this was when she normally came, between the end of one academic year and the beginning of the next in September.

  Bhave wrote:

  Dear Nada, I am so sorry to have to tell you that this morning Kamala phoned me with the news that Dr. Kshirasagar died last night, and was cremated at dawn, only five hours ago. Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that in his will he left the Institute the manuscript of the Amrutajijnasa and his work on it, with the condition that the work should be completed here under your supervision. I will be asking Shyamala Phadke to work with you.

  Dear Nada, I know you will understand me when I say that it is impossible not to feel a bit of gratitude and relief at Dr. Kshirasagar’s death. We both know how terribly he suffered for so long. But we also know how he clung to his life in spite of its painfulness, because he loved his work and knew how important it was. You can live with that best part of him for a while longer. No one is better able to appreciate it than you.

  I look forward to seeing you again soon.

  Vimala

  She pressed send, then went out and sat on one of the benches in the area between the main building and the library. Months of rainless summer heat had turned the Institute’s hermitage-like grounds various shades of brown amidst which the lotus pond, daily replenished by hand, stood out as an oasis of luxuriant green.

  The scene before Bhave’s eyes had changed little over the course of her long career: it had decayed, it was true, but the world the Institute represented, though dying, was somehow essentially timeless. Kshirasagar had been one of the great figures of its Kaliyuga, its Age of Decline, and she knew that many considered her to belong to the same class. There was a new generation that was worthy to succeed them, but they were fewer than ever before, and the present age had little to offer them. Those who could not leave would pass their lives in this fading world, while those who could would flee to universities in England, Germany, America, where the spirit of the old time was in many ways better remembered than it was here. But she at least remembered it, and even younger people like Nada and Shyamala, though they had only seen its dying light, understood it. Something of it would survive for a little while longer.

  The flat sound of a metal disc struck with a mallet announced the first tea break, and the scholars, most of them old and slow, began walking from the Institute’s several buildings towards the tea hut. Reflected sunlight flashed from the heavy traffic on the roads bordering the Institute, beyond the summer-wasted trees and untamed undergrowth of its large domains. Claimed from a barren hillside on the city’s remote periphery more than a century ago, the grounds were now extremely valuable real estate at the centre of a vast urban area. A host of developers were desperate to sweep away this useless cluster of falling-apart old buildings which stood in the way of proud new apartment complexes with pretentious names like Symphony and Monte Ville. A ravenous modernity pressed ever more heavily upon the Institute’s borders.

  For all Bhave knew, Kshirasagar’s translation might be one of its final utterances, one of its last acts of devotion to an ever more deeply forgotten classical past. Bhave didn’t know much about the Amrutajijnasa, but she knew that a great scholar had dedicated
most of his life to it: it must be important, must, like all ancient books that survive, preserve some perennial truth that the present age needed to remember and pass on in its turn. This work of preservation was the work to which Bhave, too, had dedicated her life. Her role in bringing about the completion of Kshirasagar’s edition would almost certainly be her own final act of devotion.

  The greetings of two colleagues roused her from her meditation, and she got up and joined the slow procession of the Institute’s old guard.

  2

  The Manuscript

  Professor Nada Marjanovic stood on the sidewalk of Usha Road, staring at Dr. Kshirasagar’s house on the opposite side.

  It was her house too, this house named Yadnya, Worship. The days she had spent here over the last twenty years and more had been the most precious of her life. This was where she had learned the best part of her life’s craft with her most important teacher, where she had been in love for the first and only time, and she and her lover had shared their discovery of the country and literature they adored, while being cherished by Kshirasagar and his wife as if they were their own children. Here Nada had returned to grieve after the unreal trauma that had shattered that beautiful dream, robbed her of her love, crushed and burnt out her ability to love, and hardened her mind into a weapon of vengeance. And this was where Nada had returned to train herself for that revenge.

  She couldn’t remember how long she had been standing here. People were passing frequently, typical residents of this posh quarter, many of them on their way to the nearby gymkhana, and many looked at her, she being perhaps a bit more conspicuous than the usual foreigners, who were not as rare here as they were in the old city across the river. Nada was tall, slender, olive-complexioned, with a narrow, beautiful face, and long black hair drawn back in a ponytail that added to the general impression she gave of being twenty-five instead of forty-five years old. In a sari or Punjabi pantsuit and with the right body language, she easily passed for a fair Indian rather than a gori, a white woman, but today she was dressed Western style, in pants, shirt, and a brimmed sun hat, with a large knapsack containing all she needed for her regular trip to her second home, so she was getting the attention due to a striking, unchaperoned white woman who looked like she might not know where she was going.

  But of course she knew her way around, better in fact that many of the younger people walking past her. As she always did when she arrived back in India, she had taken an auto-rickshaw, the three-wheeled taxi of Indian cities, from Swargate bus station only as far as College Road, so that she could wade back into her India through streets that she had walked, alone or accompanied, for twenty-five years. And this time the need to reconnect was greater than ever, because what had been the most precious surviving thread of that past, going back to its beginning, had been cut.

  Nada turned and began to walk slowly through this neighbourhood that was a palimpsest for her. A year ago she had been walking in the opposite direction, towards Yadnya, thinking of how close she and Kshirasagar were getting to the heart of the Amrutajijnasa’s mystery after so many years of slow, careful reading of the text—a mystery epitomized by one of its final verses, whose meaning, the key to the whole book, had been stolen from them by some ancient vandal who had rubbed out its third quarter.

  Kshirasagar had been weak, weaker than she’d ever seen him before, but not obviously ailing. He had always known that his illness was degenerative and terminal, so he, Kamala, and Nada had always expected him to get a little worse every year. Last year, Nada had seen that the decline had been sharper than in the past, but she had merely taken this as a sign that he had crossed the threshold of his final phase of life. During those three months, as usual, Nada had lived in her room, sleeping from dawn till noon, doing her own work in and outside of the house until Kshirasagar woke at sundown, and then working with him on the text till sunrise.

  The sessions were intensive, but frequently punctuated by talk about other things: Kshirasagar’s eighty years lay lightly on him, despite the ravages of his illness, and his interest in his work and the world beyond it remained as vigorous as it ever had been. Kamala ministered to them with tea and meals, and joined their conversation at those times. She was intelligent and educated, but not a sanskritist, so she could not work on the text with them. But she knew the Amrutajijnasa as well as anyone could without reading it. She had to: this book had cursed both her husband and her to live like nishacharis, night-dwelling demons, and robbed them of the simple happiness they had deserved to share.

  Those times, the heart of Nada’s life for twenty years... all over, all gone. She could feel that the loss still wasn’t quite real to her, and the reality of it stood behind her like a threatening phantom.

  She zigzagged down streets and backstreets, making an indirect way towards the Institute. She stopped at one of the the food stalls in front of Bhandarkar Park to eat a bowl of bhel, puffed rice sprinkled with a sauce of chopped tomatoes, onions, and spices—she knew she would be served tea immediately upon sitting down in Bhave’s office—then set out for the Institute five minutes away.

  In the main office, her arrival was not unexpected. People chatted with her warmly in Marathi—the mother tongue of most people in Pune and the state of Maharashtra—and shared condolences with her about Kshirasagar, dead only a week before. It was noon, and Bhave was sitting at the large table in the Great Hall talking with two southeast Asian Buddhist nuns when Nada walked in.

  “Ah, Nada, there you are. I’m just finishing here with these two ladies from Laos who have come to Pune to study Pali. This is Professor Nada Marjanovic from Croatia, a very old friend of all of us at this Institute.”

  Nada smiled at them, joining her hands in namaskar, then sat down at the table while Bhave continued to discuss the nuns’ plans with them. One of the Institute’s groundskeepers went to prepare tea.

  When the nuns were gone, Bhave sighed and said,

  “Ah Nada, this is usually such a happy day for us, the day of your arrival. It’s the end of an age: nothing is going to be the same now that he’s gone. And yet the same work has to be completed—without him. That will be painful for you, but it will also be part of your mourning, and when it is finished you will have done your funeral rite for him, and will be ready to move on to the next stage of your life. We’ll go and look at the manuscript in a moment.”

  “How’s Kamala?” asked Nada softly, feeling her smile fade a little. She had thought of stopping at Yadnya first, as she often did, but upon seeing it had realized that she wasn’t quite ready.

  “Kamala is all right, not devastated,” said Bhave. “Naturally she feels something of the same relief I mentioned to you in my email. But of course her life is all of a sudden profoundly empty. I don’t know what it can hold for her after this. I think Dr. Kshirasagar, too, worried about that, and that may have been one of the reasons that he wanted the manuscript to be taken out of the house as soon as he died.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Then Nada said: “We will very probably get a visit from Avinash Chandrashekhar, and soon.”

  Bhave looked at her, apparently mystified.

  “He will know,” said Nada, answering her implicit question, her voice quavering just a little. “He always does. You don’t know everything about the Amrutajijnasa and its history, but you know it’s complex, and... terrible, and you know that Avinash Chandrashekhar has always been deeply involved in it—for longer than any of us, actually. I don’t like having to come out and say it, and you probably don’t need me to, but... he isn’t a good person.”

  Bhave winced and looked down, as if simultaneously registering her shock at such a bold statement and her tacit acknowledgment of its truth.

  “He’s going to want very desperately to seize the manuscript, even though he can’t actually touch it,” Nada went on impetuously. “He has always known that Dr. Kshirasagar had it, but he couldn’t get near him, bec
ause Kshirasagar was too... noble—I can’t explain. But he doesn’t fear me the way he feared him, so the manuscript is more vulnerable now. It must be kept locked up with the other most valuable ones.”

  Nada felt herself growing agitated, giddy with anxiety, grief, lack of sleep. She was aware that she was talking too fast, saying things that wouldn’t make sense to Bhave, and that Bhave was looking at her with concern. But these were things that needed to be said, somehow, and right away.

  “We should even consider the possibility of me doing this work in Kshirasagar’s house itself,” she said. “This would make sense: everything we ever used in the study of the text over more than twenty years, every book, manuscript, and piece of correspondence with other scholars, is in Dr. Kshirasagar’s study in Yadnya. And it would be better, it would be safer, for it to stay in a space where so much good work has been done, where so much merit has been generated.”

  “We will consider this,” said Bhave, clearly trying to sound reassuring. “We have a very free hand. This is not like other projects of the Institute: everyone knows that this was your work with Kshirasagar, and no one is wanting to take control of it and refashion it according to his own ideas. The board will not reject any of our requests. Dr. Kshirasagar willed the manuscript to the Institute because he wanted it to be in safe hands, not because he needed it to be in this building itself. And I know, Nada, that he considered the safest hands to be yours. But he couldn’t very well have willed the manuscript to you, a foreigner—with the attitudes of some people being what they are. Its existence was known. People would have wondered where it had ended up—and they would have guessed.”

  “Yes... yes, you’re right about all this, of course,” said Nada, allowing herself to sound more confident than she really felt. Bhave smiled demonstratively.