The groundskeeper returned with two teas on a tray, and Bhave and Nada sat for a while sipping them in silence. Then Bhave said: “I don’t think you’ve met Shyamala Phadke, the young scholar I’m proposing to you as a partner in this project. I don’t think you’ll need anyone besides her to help you with the editing and translation—if you need any help at all, for that matter.”
“Oh, help would be welcome,” said Nada,“if it’s really help. But if the person isn’t up to the mark, you know, she’ll just be getting in the way. And the mark is extremely high, in this case, because she will in effect be replacing Kshirasagar.”
“Of course, no one can replace Kshirasagar,” said Bhave decisively, nodding side-to-side and making a gesture of dismissal with her right hand, both characteristically Indian movements, “but I’m proposing her to you because, young though she is, she is the only scholar I can think of who shows signs of one day being able to reach Kshirasagar’s level. She’s only twenty-four, but she’s already been around the Institute for almost ten years. I’m now guiding her at the university in her Ph.D. thesis on Bana’s Kadambari, which is of course an extremely difficult literary text. She’s very smart, and I also think that she has the right kind of fresh and unprejudiced mentality for the job. She’ll be here this afternoon. Perhaps you’ll remember having seen her before.”
“Well...” said Nada, unable to completely conceal her skepticism, “if you’re so impressed with her, I look forward to meeting her myself.”
“Ah, that reminds me,” Bhave said with a new cheerfulness. “I received an email from our old friend Saul Levitt a couple of days ago.”
Nada felt a wave of pleasure and surprise that swept away her memory of the troubled present.
Bhave beamed at Nada, and went on: “He says he’ll be here in a few weeks, in July and August, staying in the guest house, as usual. I thought of him just now because it did actually cross my mind that he could collaborate with you on this work. But I immediately realized that he would not be the right person. Saul is very brilliant, as we know, and he can do anything he puts his mind to.
But he’s a loner, he goes his own way, and he is always busy with so many of his own projects. So I’m certain that such a collaborative task would not interest him. But I knew that you would be happy to hear that he’ll be here soon.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Nada rather softly. “I love Saul. We all do.”
Bhave finished her tea, and said, “Let’s go now and have a look at the manuscript.”
They got up and went from the Great Hall into the south wing, which housed the manuscriptorium. Shelves piled with red cloth-bound manuscripts—most of them unknown, even by title, to anyone now working at the Institute—were visible behind the glass faces of tall heavy wooden cabinets, as old as the Institute itself, which stood in rows in the centre of the room. Similar locked cabinets against the wall contained the more valuable collections, and a tall windowless iron cabinet in one corner was for the most precious manuscripts—precious enough, in terms of money or historical importance, that someone might conceivably want to steal them. Despite being a tall room furnished with windows on all sides, the manuscriptorium was a dark dungeon-like space, heavy with constantly accumulating dust which sat ready to rise in clouds from objects that escaped the desultory attention of dusters for more than a couple of days. On the walls, pictures eighty, ninety, and a hundred years old showed the great scholars of the Institute’s first generation sitting on the very same heavy, throne-like wooden chairs that its members still used every day.
On one side of the room, separated by low wooden dividers, was the office of Dr. Gajanan Ekbote, one of the Institute’s senior scholars and officers. He rose from his desk when he saw Bhave and Nada, and joined his hands in namaskar to greet Nada.
“Nada just now arrived,” said Bhave. “We’re here to see the manuscript.”
Ekbote went over to the iron cabinet, lifted a set of keys that was chained to his belt, isolated one, and slipped it into the keyhole. The door creaked open, revealing four shelves piled with the familiar red bundles, and a shelf dedicated to one bundle alone. This he took out with a carefulness suited to the handling of a living thing, and going and placing it on his desk, untied the cloth cords and opened the red cloth, revealing a neat stack of darkened palm leaf pages of about the length and breadth of a shoebox. Within a broad margin, each page contained a perfect rectangle of lines written without spaces in still-black ink, with a few words in red here and there. The hand was neat and elegant, and as Nada knew, the text was almost totally free of errors, the writer having used white paint to correct most of the few he had made. Script, writing materials, and language all indicated that this manuscript must have been produced somewhere in the vicinity of modern Mysore around the thirteenth century. This was the only known copy of the Amrutajijnasa, and was thus possibly the author’s own autograph.
Nada felt her heart fill with emotion as she looked at these pages that they had so loved and deeply known over so many years, she and the beloved teacher and friend just now departed, and the long-dead lover who had paid with his life for innocently rousing the evil therein described; pages that went back to the hand of a mysterious author who called himself Amruteshvara—“lord of the divine nectar,” or “master of the undead”—who had somehow known this evil intimately, and written to teach the world how to protect itself from it.
Nada’s breath caught softly, and Ekbote looked up. “Ah Nada,” he said, visibly touched, “the manuscript is yours; you will even have a key to this cabinet, if you want. It’s just that it must be kept as secure as possible; that’s why Dr. Kshirasagar wanted it kept here. You understand that even better than we can. In fact, I have no doubt that his main reason for willing it to the Institute was to keep it safe until you arrived.”
Nada recovered herself, rapidly palming away the tears of a moment before, and said, “Yes, I think he may have had something like that in mind. Indeed, we may move it back to Yadnya. I’ll be staying there from tonight. Personally, I would feel much safer keeping and working on it there. I want to see how it feels, how safe it feels, being there again... now that he’s gone.”
“Dr. Kshirasagar’s work is also here, on the same shelf,” said Ekbote, pointing to a string-bound stack of notebooks about a foot tall.
Nada said, “The work that I and Miss Phadke will be doing will have two parts: First, we’ll be making an electronic copy of all the final text so far produced of the translation and commentary; I would have begun to do this this year anyway, since we had almost reached the final chapter. Second, we’ll be completing the writing of the translation and commentary. The first part we can begin immediately, here; the second... our course will be clearer once I talk with Mrs. Kshirasagar. For now, I want to leave something with the manuscript which I think may make it a little safer, though the mere fact that it was in Dr. Kshirasagar’s hands for so long is probably more than enough to protect it.”
She took off her knapsack, put it on a nearby writing desk, and took from one of the inner pockets an akshamala—a rosary of eleocarpus seeds—which Dr. Kshirasagar had given her when she and her lover Zoran had first stayed with them ages ago; such a concentrated symbol of the bond of affection between her and that good man would be an exceptionally powerful deterrent to the creature who had so hated him, she thought. She then re-wrapped the manuscript, and tied the akshamala into the knot of the cloth strings.
“This can go back now,” she said, “and yes, I would feel better if I could have one of the keys to this cabinet.”
Ekbote went behind the dividers to his desk, opened a drawer, and came back with the key. Putting it into the knapsack pocket from which she had taken the rosary, Nada said, “Thank you both so much for your help and understanding—I can feel that you understand. I’m suddenly so tired... the journey... I actually need to lie down right away.”
“Let me give you the key to one of t
he rooms in the guest house,” said Bhave.
“No,” Nada replied, “thank you, but I’m afraid if I lie down on a bed I’d be out cold till morning. I’ll just take a nap on the verandah in front of one of the vacant rooms. I’m still not too old to rough it a bit,” she smiled. “It won’t be the first time.”
She went out into the heavy afternoon heat through the south wing’s door, which still bore the marks of the major event in the Institute’s recent history: a decade before, a mob of fanatics from a right-wing cultural group had ransacked the library and tried unsuccessfully to force their way into the main building, having been whipped into a fury by a local demagogue who had denounced the Institute for its collaboration with foreign sanskritists. Yes, she thought, this new xenophobia, one of the social effects of the country’s rapid economic development and increasing prominence on the world stage, must have played a role in Kshirasagar’s decision to bequeath the manuscript to the Institute. Willing it to her would have been completely self-defeating, since their work on it could not be completed outside of India, and in any case had no meaning there; and the suspicion that he had given away a precious piece of the ancient national past to a foreigner would have endangered both her and it. And it wasn’t hard to imagine why he hadn’t broached the subject with her, as the end drew palpably nearer: she wouldn’t have listened, she couldn’t have faced it.
She walked to the guest house, a late nineteenth-
century two-storey building with six rooms and a central hall on the first floor and two larger apartments on the second. Circumambulating it, she saw that all the first-floor rooms were padlocked—another sign of decline, she thought: twenty years ago the guest house had always been full of visiting Indian and foreign scholars, though as the years passed and the Institute’s standards and esteem dwindled, more and more of the guests were students from poorer Asian countries who had come to Pune to study English or engineering at the university or one of the many colleges nearby. She and Zoran had stayed here twice for extended periods in one of the upstairs apartments. They were both already close to Kshirasagar at that time, but their intense premarital sex life would have been too embarrassing even for the relatively liberal doctor and his wife, and so they had taken the room here as a place to pass the nights.
The grief that attached to this building for Nada was itself more than twenty years old, by now an ancient and rarely noticed essence of her being; but this new loss, so intimately joined to it, had re-disturbed it, thrusting her back into its embrace, stirring the memories that haunted these scenes, drawing her back to them with a reawakened awareness of what lay beneath their surface.
So she stood before this house, too, as she had stood before Yadnya a couple of hours before, absorbed in a dream of memory and reawakening emotion. But the emotion was still too deep and sluggish with disuse to express itself in tears; instead, it attached itself to the physical
exhaustion that was already mastering her. She almost stumbled up the concrete steps to the first-floor verandah, took off her knapsack and put it on the stone floor in front of room number three, and lay on her back with her knapsack as her pillow, in the shade, in the silence of the Institute’s grounds, with the soft prattle of traffic beyond, and immediately sank into a slumber whispering with inchoate images of the past, by turns comforting and ominous.
3
Avinash Appears
The next day Nada and her new colleague Shyamala were in the south wing working at wooden desks in adjacent cubicles. It was eleven o’clock, and heavy sunlight slanted onto the stone sills of the east-facing windows, while the traffic on Malati Road flashed and rumbled beyond the trees in front of the main building. Shyamala was entering Dr. Kshirasagar’s handwritten translation and notes into her laptop, and Nada was reading through the untranslated final chapter.
At Yadnya the night before, Nada had realized that there was every reason for the manuscript to be taken back to the house where this work had always been done. Kamala needed her there, and Nada had strongly felt the protecting power that the text and its devotees had invested that space with over so many years. She would initiate this process of relocation today. Kamala had readily agreed, saying that Bhave and Ekbote had come to the house on the afternoon after Kshirasagar’s cremation to take the manuscript to the Institute, and at that time, Kamala had felt glad to be relieved of its inauspicious presence. With her husband gone, Kamala revealed to Nada that she no longer felt safe alone in the house with it. But with Nada there, Kamala confessed that she felt no fear—Nada was, really, the only source of joy in her life anymore—and the newly widowed woman looked forward to the consolation of having her surrogate daughter there with her all day, like in old times, instead of at the Institute.
Nada had loved Shyamala immediately—a strong, independent, driven young woman who reminded her of her younger self. Bespectacled and dressed in a Punjabi pantsuit, Shyamala had the surface appearance of a typically demure Tilak Institute girl, but her long unbound hair and a certain unapologetic confidence in her eyes suggested that beneath the surface she might not be quite what she seemed—and this was in fact true, as Nada quickly learned during their first, almost schoolgirlishly vivacious conversation.
Shyamala represented a newer strain. She had gone to an English rather than a Marathi school, where she had learned German as well, but unlike most of her English-educated colleagues, she had taken a serious interest in the intellectual realms opened to her by these Western languages, without forgetting that Marathi and Hindi were her mother tongues, and that they were more than just instruments of everyday business, having long literary traditions of their own. Her parents were academicians from traditional but liberal Sanskrit-knowing Brahmin families which had in the past produced many social reformers and Freedom Fighters in the struggle against the British. They had raised their daughter, as they would have raised a son, to feel that life was hers for the taking, and had not sought to have more children after her. At twenty-four she was unmarried, but was not waiting until her thirties, like most of her less modern contemporaries, to find a possible mate: to their quiet scandal, she had a boyfriend, and by their behaviour with each other the two of them gave no reason to think that they were saving themselves for marriage. Nada couldn’t have dared to hope for a more sympathetic companion in her present work, and very soon came to feel that she had found not only a brilliant junior colleague, but probably also a lifelong friend.
One of the groundskeepers came and told them in Marathi, “Bhave Madam has called you.”
“This is it,” thought Nada, and took a deep breath, preparing herself for what she expected to be the first round of a new agon with her old enemy. She and Shyamala got up and walked with the groundskeeper through the manuscriptorium and Great Hall into the north wing.
When they came into Dr. Bhave’s office, Nada saw her at her desk with three senior scholars (two men and a woman) seated to her right and a man of about Nada’s age sitting across from her. He was dressed in shirt, pants, and jacket, which covered what seemed to be a lean but muscular build. His hair was long and tied back, his skin dark, his face round but clearly sculpted, with a broad nose, full lips, and large but narrowed eyes which shone with a smoldering attentiveness. As soon as Nada entered, he stood to a height of over six feet, held out his hand to her, and smiled, revealing large and perfect teeth that chilled the warmth the smile seemed intended to convey. Nada kept her expression unchanged as she accepted his hand.
“You must be Dr. Marjanovic,” he said in a rich voice with the slight accent of the English-educated speaker of Kannada, the language of the southern state of Karnataka. “What I mean, of course,” he continued, beamingly addressing the whole room without taking his eyes off Nada, “is that Nada must be Dr. Marjanovic by now, since of course we are very well acquainted, but have not seen each other since she was still writing her dissertation for the University of Zagreb.”
Nada nodded and
did not smile, holding his hard stare with her own, then looking towards Bhave. “Dr. Chandrashekhar and I knew each other well, years ago,” said Nada, “but we’ve been out of touch since then. I’m not too surprised to be meeting him again in these circumstances. We’ve both been on the trail of the vetala all our academic lives, though we’ve been coming at him from somewhat different directions. It was inevitable that our paths would cross again, sooner or later.”
“That our paths would cross! You make it sound like such an unfriendly business!” he laughed.
Then he spoke in Sanskrit, fiercely and harshly, and so rapidly that the other Indians, unused to the conversational use of the language, could not catch it. Without missing a beat, Nada replied equally rapidly and in the same tone, raising her defiant eyes to meet his. She felt a shudder of confusion go through the room: Western sanskritists who could speak the language at all, let alone fluently, were extremely rare. Their exchange had in fact consisted of nothing more than a formal greeting on each side, but the manner in which they had spoken suggested the violence of a personal quarrel.
Avinash held her gaze with what looked like the mingled mockery and admiration of an old enemy, then continued: “But I have to confess, there is unfortunately a slight element of conflict in the circumstances that bring us together again today. I am here as the representative of the Dharmika Sahitya Research Institute of Mysore, whose name will be familiar to all of you. Dr. Kshirasagar’s will has revealed the fate of an extremely important manuscript that went missing from the Institute’s library in 1986. We naturally assume that it came into the good doctor’s hands in a completely innocent fashion, but now that its whereabouts have been revealed, we want it back. It is ours: the Tilak Oriental Research Institute has no legal or moral right to it, and we expect that it will immediately be handed over.”
Bhave looked shocked at this, and seemed to be about to say something, but Nada spoke first, having fully rehearsed herself for every possible contingency that this scene might present. “Dr. Kshirasagar received the manuscript as a gift from Dr. Kashyap, who was then the Dharmika Sahitya Research Institute’s librarian; this is documented by a letter that Dr. Kayshyap wrote at the time, and that came to the Institute along with the manuscript and Dr. Kshirasagar’s translation and notes. It’s only right that you should read it for yourself,” she said,
The Vetala Page 2