looking at Avinash, “now that it surprisingly turns out that someone is evidently suspicious of the gift—surprisingly, because this is the first I’ve heard of any such suspicion, and as you know I knew Dr. Kshirasagar well, and began studying this text with him more than twenty years ago. In fact, Dr. Chandrashekhar, I’ve also known you for almost exactly the same length of time, and this is the first time you’ve mentioned anything about such a theft.” She felt adrenalized by her confidence in the strength of her argument. Avinash’s bid was clumsy, clearly desperate. She knew he would leave this room having gained nothing.
“Dr. Kashyap did not own the manuscripts in the library, and had no right to give any of them away,” replied Avinash sharply. “No one would have allowed him to do this if he had told anyone about it. The fact that he didn’t tell anyone suggests that at that point he was mentally not quite the man he had been, and indeed there was other evidence of that. The matter was an embarrassment to the Institute, but Dr. Kashyap was influential, and so when it was found that the manuscript was missing, the board of directors decided to simply let the matter drop instead of creating a scandal by raising the issue with him. Now that both the participants in this criminal transaction are dead, and the location of the book has been revealed by the death of the second, there are no tender feelings left to spare. It is ours. Give it back.”
Nada turned to Dr. Bhave. “Doctor, I can assure you that the construction that Dr. Chandrashekhar is putting on these events is not right. But surely the first thing we should do is look at the letter itself.” She turned to look at Avinash, almost with an arrogant toss of the head, conscious that a mocking expectation of her imminent victory must be plainly written in her face.
“Yes, that makes sense,” said Bhave. “Shyamala, would you please go and bring the letter along with the manuscript itself?”
Avinash looked alarmed and confused, and Nada suppressed a smile of excited satisfaction: as she had hoped, he hadn’t anticipated this possibility. He had unwittingly delivered himself into her hands.
She quickly replied, “Let me get it, Dr. Bhave,” and hurried out before Avinash could object.
She half-ran through the Great Hall to the manuscriptorium, opened the iron cabinet, found the folder containing the letter in the pile of notebooks, and took the folder and the manuscript back to Bhave’s office.
When Avinash saw Nada with the red cloth-bound bundle under her arm, the confusion in his eyes became panic. Nada put it down on Bhave’s desk, and carefully took the laminated letter out of the folder. It was written in Sanskrit; she read it aloud, then offered it to Avinash, but he was still staring at the manuscript on the desk, and did not put out his hand to accept it.
“You can take a copy of this back with you,” she said, turning and putting it back in the folder. “You’re also free to examine the manuscript, if you have any reason to. In fact, why don’t you join the research team? You are after all one of the leading experts in the literature on the vetala, if not the leading expert. I actually really like that idea. We need you.”
She carefully, lovingly picked up the bundle of red, and kept her eyes on him as she began to move towards him, smiling slightly, making an effort not to burst out laughing at the brilliant absurdity of her offer, which he could not conceivably accept. “There are just so many things in here that I’d love to show you, that no one else would understand...”
Avinash stepped back and stood with his back against the bare concrete wall, looking like he was trying to avoid cringing. “There’s no point in my looking at it here,” he said in an almost strangled voice. “But I may well take you up on your offer—I will. The project should as much as possible be in the hands of Indians, anyway. I can think of some cultural organizations and politicians who would be very interested to know that the Institute is again favouring foreign scholars over Indian ones.”
He glared at her, and she knew that if he had been reduced to making such empty threats, she had won: the Institute would face no legal challenge from the Dharmika Sahitya Research Institute—if Avinash was even really associated with it at all.
Bhave shook her head sadly and said, “I know Dr. Chandrashekhar is only talking like this because he is angry. But although the book is staying with us, he is indeed most welcome to join the project if he wishes. It will do honour to the final wish of Dr. Kshirasagar to have another esteemed expert working on the text to which he devoted so many years of his life.” She gave Nada a look that suggested she knew what was going on.
“I’ll talk to my institute about this,” said Avinash. “They won’t be happy to hear about the result of this meeting, but if we can’t get our property back then I should at least be involved in the work as the Institute’s representative.”
He moved quickly towards the door, and without turning to look at them, muttered "Punar darśanāya"—a Sanskrit “we’ll meet again”—in a threatening tone, and left.
“Well!” said Nada, looking at Shyamala, “I think this meeting has been sufficiently distressing that we’ll need at least some tea before we’re ready to go back to work. Let’s go across the street to the Hutatma.” She turned to Bhave and the three senior scholars, who like Shyamala were looking a little shaken and confused, as if the first shattering thunderstorm of the monsoon had just passed, leaving behind a sky suddenly clear and serene again. She felt a little sorry for them, but in the exhilaration of her victory was unable to suppress an almost mischievous smile. She bowed slightly, said “Punar darśanāya!”, and looking meaningfully into Shyamala’s incredulously laughing eyes, walked out of the room with her.
The Hutatma Hotel at the corner of Malati Road and Tilak Institute Road was an old-fashioned vegetarian restaurant of a kind that had been more common in the
Institute’s neighbourhood before the creeping modernization of recent years had begun to pick them off, replacing them with posher, more expensive restaurants and coffee shops, some of them international chains, which catered to the rich kids attending the neighbourhood’s many colleges and preparation academies. Like the Institute itself, the Hutatma was becoming an anachronism; the Institute’s employees, especially the younger ones, had always hung out there, but it was rapidly coming to seem more of a refuge than a hangout.
“I’ve always loved this place, and I’ve always loved its name,” said Nada: “Hutatma, ‘the self-sacrificing’. Quite a heavy name for a restaurant—and more appropriate for a non-vegetarian one, wouldn’t you think?”
Shyamala laughed.
They went in and sat down, and when tea came, Shyamala said, “A frightening character, this Chandrashekhar. I’ve heard of him before. His family has produced many famous scholars. He’s never worked at the Institute, but he’s appeared here from time to time over the years. Dr. Kshirasagar knew him, they say, and there was some kind of history between them—not good, I think.”
Nada looked down. She had thought ahead about this conversation too, but in this case, she still wasn’t sure what she was going to say.
“But I was a bit surprised that he seemed to know you so well,” said Shyamala.
“We go back... a long way,” said Nada. “I knew him both in Europe and here in India. We aren’t friends,
just in case that wasn’t obvious. When I was still an M.Phil. student at the University of Zagreb, he came to attend our conference on vetalashastra, literature on vampires. He was doing his Ph.D. at the University of Bonn, also on vetalashastra—an incredible coincidence, because at that time no one was studying vetalashastra, not in Europe, not in India. It wasn’t even a recognized area of study in indology—we intended the conference to address just that.
“So... it was very, very interesting to meet Avinash Chandrashekhar. He was a couple of years older than me—than us, me and my partner Zoran, partner in work, partner in life: we were going to be married.”
“Ah,” said Shyamala with sympathy and surpri
se, and what might even have been a touch of guilt for having broached what was beginning to sound like it must be a traumatic subject.
Nada allowed her face to register a grateful acknowledgement, and she continued.
“Yes, Avinash Chandrashekhar: he had the tremendous advantages that conservative southern Brahmins bring to the field. His family, you may know, was the typical hybrid, with feet firmly planted in both the past and the present: very orthodox, very learned, but at the same time thoroughly modern, in other ways. Some of his relatives are traditional scholars and priests, some are university professors (and not just of Sanskrit), some are IT professionals.”
Shyamala nodded. “I know the type.”
“Don’t we all!” laughed Nada. “And don’t we all
admire and fear people like him.” Shyamala smiled in an “I hear you” kind of way, and Nada felt, as she often did, a surge of affection for the younger woman, so kindred to her in intellect and spirit.
“So he was raised to be a pandita,” said Nada, “a traditional Sanskrit scholar—Sanskrit is as much his first language as Kannada is. But in adolescence he rebelled, deciding to go into academic Sanskrit studies instead—actually not a very grave rebellion, in such a family.”
“Indeed,” said Shyamala. “They say the South Asian Studies departments of American universities are full of people like him.”
“That’s true,” said Nada, “and I’m sure you’ll see that for yourself someday.
“So, at Bonn he was writing his Ph.D. under Professor Virgiliu Munteanu, a great Romanian scholar. But you could almost say that, in a sense, Munteanu was studying under him, since Chandrashekhar came to Bonn with the text he was determined to work on. When applying, he had said he was going to write his dissertation on the vetala in Sanskrit literature, but when he got to Bonn, he showed Munteanu this manuscript he’d brought with him, a totally unknown text titled Vetalaviveka—‘Definition of the Vampire,’ something like that. Munteanu was completely fascinated: the vetala described in this text (as in ours, the Amrutajijnasa) was in so many ways the vampire he knew from his own childhood in Romania—and we know him in Croatia, too.”
“Oh... right,” said Shyamala. “Croatia is close to... Transylvania! Isn’t it?”
Nada laughed, and so did Shyamala, perhaps a little relieved to see that she hadn’t inadvertently offended her.
“Yes, you’re absolutely right,” said Nada. “So, yes, it was very exciting to meet Chandrashekhar at the conference. When we organized it—Zoran, and I, and our Ph.D. supervisor Professor Dragan Klobucar—we thought the Amrutajijnasa was the only text of its kind, and that therefore no one else was likely to be studying vetalas, since of course the previously known Sanskrit literature on vetalas is not very substantial. We had the text of the Amrutajijnasa—a copy of it—that Kshirasagar had shared with Professor Klobucar, and we thought that was all there was. That was our first exposure to this book that was to become so important in our lives, and our introduction to Dr. Kshirasagar, who had met Klobucar in Pune.
“The conference was small: a few scholars and graduate students from European and North American universities presented papers. But naturally what we really wanted to hear was Chandrashekhar’s paper. And it didn’t disappoint: it was a revelation. It made it sound like his book, the Vetalaviveka, was very similar to our Amrutajijnasa, and contained most of the same types of matter, but not as fully treated. The main difference was that it lacked anything corresponding to the Amrutajijnasa’s final chapter, Amrutashamana, ‘Killing the Undead’—or more precisely, putting the undead to rest, giving them peace.
“When Zoran delivered our paper, which focused mainly on the difficulties of understanding this final chapter, Avinash seemed beside himself with some kind of rage.”
“Somehow... I don’t find that too hard to imagine,” said Shyamala, laughing a little uncomfortably.
“Right,” said Nada. “That’s exactly how he was acting. While Zoran was reading, Avinash sat listening, but his eyes were wild, furious. The question period after the paper ended up being longer than the presentation itself. Avinash was the only questioner. Zoran (who was a more advanced sanskritist than me) did most of the talking, with me and Professor Klobucar contributing from time to time.
“Naturally Avinash’s questions were fascinating to us. We learned as much from him as he did from us, since he was able to cast light on many points in the text that had been obscure to us—though some of that light later turned out to be deceptive. He was particularly eager—very eager—to know about the final chapter. He had so many strong opinions about how the obscure passages in it should be interpreted—and in particular the book’s great mystery, the verse near the very end which reveals the one thing which the vetala-killer must know, without which no method of killing him can be effective. That verse is defective in our text. The third quarter is missing: the palm leaf has been rubbed through at that point—deliberately, without a doubt, because the rest of the text is almost entirely intact.”
Nada smiled playfully. “Have you read ahead?”
Shyamala looked embarrassed.
“I hope you have!” laughed Nada. “So maybe you’ve found it already:
na śastreṇa na śāstreṇa nihantuṃ śakyate ’mṛtaḥ
Not by weapon, not by lore can the undead be killed.
And then there’s the missing quarter, and then the end of the verse:
mumukṣuṃ śamayet tu tam
... one can lay to rest him who longs for release.
“Avinash insisted that the missing quarter must have mentioned some kind of weapon or poison. We had thought of that, since it’s the obvious supposition, but I had always had a feeling that that couldn’t be right, because the preceding part of the chapter lists and describes those things. This verse had to be unique: it comes at the end of the chapter, like the key to the whole thing. And it seems obvious that someone else, at some time, also thought it was special—special enough that it couldn’t be allowed to survive unmutilated.”
They sat for a while, sipping their now lukewarm tea for the first time.
“So what happened then?” asked Shyamala.
“You must have begun to collaborate, all of you in Zagreb and Chandrashekhar and his guide in Bonn?”
“That would only have made sense, wouldn’t it,” said Nada, “but it didn’t happen that way. In Zagreb, Avinash and his guide Munteanu said that we would get together, compare the texts, work together on the Amrutajijnasa, our book, the problematic one. Munteanu seemed really excited, and no wonder, but it was obvious that Avinash was reluctant. I could still see that mysterious fury in him, like he was indignant at having to share the Amrutajijnasa with anyone, even though we had it and he didn’t. That’s the way it had felt during the question period: he wasn’t asking, he was demanding what was his.
“When he got back to Bonn he wrote to us asking for his own copy of the manuscript, but we wouldn’t do that... Scholarly jealousy—not at all towards Avinash and Munteanu, but it’s just dangerous to have a copy of a unique and important text floating around out there when you’re still trying to uncover the heart of its mystery. So we told him that work on the Amrutajijnasa would have to happen in Zagreb. He wrote back that we would arrange such collaborative sessions in the future, and in the meantime we would keep one another informed about our work on our respective texts. But we never heard from him, to the disappointment of everyone else, including Professor Munteanu.”
“So that’s the whole story?” asked Shyamala. “I’m ... surprised. It doesn’t seem to explain the bitterness I felt between the two of you when you met in Bhave’s office. I’m sorry, but it’s difficult not to mention what I noticed, since we’re talking about this now.”
“No, don’t worry, I’m not a private person,” said Nada. “There is more to tell, more did happen later—here in India. Maybe I’ll tell you ab
out that too, sometime. It would explain the bitterness. But it’s a very strange story, difficult to tell. And even more difficult to believe.” She let her gaze drop to her now almost empty cup. “Sometimes, I’m not even sure that I can quite believe it myself.”
Shyamala looked a little embarrassed at the intimate direction the conversation had taken.
“Don’t worry,” Nada said again, looking up and giving her a reassuring smile. “But let’s finish here and get back to the Institute. I haven’t yet readjusted to Indian time,” she laughed, alluding to the notoriously leisurely pace of all kinds of business in India, “so, you know, I’m actually still in quite a hurry to finish as much as possible today.”
The bill was brought, placed as usual on top of a little steel dish of anise seed breath-freshener. Nada put two ten-rupee notes in the dish and sprinkled some of the seeds on them, and they went out into the street blazing with the heat of May.
4
The Road January-February 1992
Those weeks with Zoran on the road in Maharashtra and Karnataka had been the best days of Nada’s life. They started off together from the Institute’s guest house not long after dawn one late January morning, when they could still see their breath. The sun’s first touch through the trees was still sweet, not the iron beam of heat it would be by ten o’clock, when they would begin to cling to the shrinking shadows of the roadside as they passed through the thinning suburbs and into the open countryside. The theoretical ultimate goal was Bengaluru a thousand kilometres to the south, but they never really expected to get that far before they had had enough and gotten on a train back to Pune in some village, at some point weeks in the future.
The Vetala Page 3