The Vetala
Page 6
“It was Avinash, of course,” said Amruteshvar, “but long ago, and in a different form. He would have destroyed the whole book, if he could have, but it was
almost impossible for him to be in its presence at all, so he focused all his hate and fear on this most critical point.”
“And of course you remember exactly what the
missing words are,” said Nada.
“Obviously.”
“And you can’t tell me because... if you did, they wouldn’t work, for me, and all the information in the Amrutajijnasa would become impotent in my hands.”
“That’s right,” said Amruteshvar, smiling with a touch of what might have been compassion. “But you can do it, you can figure out what the missing words are. I’ve always known that, or I wouldn’t be here, and would never even have inspired Dr. Kashyap to give the book to Dr. Kshirasagar in the first place. I’ve always had faith in you people, I’ve always known that you were the ones who would finally be able to realize the purpose of my book—and free my brother.”
They sat in silence for a moment. Then Nada said: “It’s been seven hundred years since you wrote the Amrutajijnasa. In it, you say at one point:
vetālo naram āviśya saṃniṣṭhāyā ’ntarātmani
jātaṃ jātaṃ tam anveti yāvan no ’paiti rakṣitā
Which I think must mean: ‘After the vetala has entered a man and established himself in his inmost soul, he follows him through birth after birth, until his saviour appears.’ So how many times has Avinash been reborn since then? And you’re twins. Have you always been twins? Have you been reborn together again and again over the centuries, or is this the first time for one or both of you?”
“We’ve been reborn again and again, together, and
always in the same roles—you must have noticed that Avinash’s name means ‘undying.’ But it wasn’t until this birth that we fully remembered, and realized what was going on. Seven hundred years ago we were what we are now: Brahmins born into a family of scholars, twins born to walk the same path, but destined to be separated by an alien spirit that had entered one of us and inspired him with evil. You know how to think about this, because I talk about it repeatedly, in terms of the story of King Nala and Damayanti in the Mahabharata:
kalir nalaṃ yathā’ viṣṭo vijahāra mano’ lpaśaḥ
vetālasyā’ pi sa tathā haraty ātmānam ātmanaḥ
As Kali entered Nala and took away his mind bit by bit, so does he carry the vetala’s self away from himself.
When my brother was first possessed, I had the means to understand what had happened; I wrote the Amrutajijnasa in order to try to understand, and to free him. In the births between that one and this present one, we have always been brothers, and we have always acted out the same drama of alienation, but we didn’t remember the birth in which it had begun. Once we were rag pickers, once we were farmers, once we were merchants, once we were ministers of a king. Sometimes we were even animals. Always it was the same: we would begin as friends, both of us on the same side; but then a spirit of evil would arise in him and draw him away, rivalry would undermine our brotherhood. Because once the vetala entered him, it never left him, birth after birth; it was only ever a matter of time before it awoke and asserted itself.”
“But I still don’t understand why you need anybody’s help,” said Nada. “Why all this time, why so many births? Why this roundabout way, with you writing a book and then looking for someone to implement its teaching? Why didn’t you write the book, learn what you needed to know, and then carry it out yourself seven hundred years ago?”
“That’s a good question,” replied Amruteshvar. “That was the original plan, and I did almost accomplish it. I was certainly determined and energetic enough. But I lacked one thing.” He sighed. “The vetala’s victim can only be freed by someone who loves him. And in the end it turned out that I just didn’t love him enough.”
“Then why on earth have you come to me?” asked Nada, her voice trembling with controlled rage, her eyes shining.
Amruteshvar looked at her sadly, and did not say a word.
6
An Attempt
Nada found herself in the woods on Vetal Tekadi, Vampire Hill. It was night, and no one else was there, but she felt that she was looking for someone, or that someone was looking for her, as she stumbled along the unlit path, with the city’s lights glowing from beyond the dense hillside foliage, and immediately below, the few dim lights of the Institute.
The usual sounds were missing: there was no humming of crickets, no cries of the kokil, the Indian cuckoo. A thick, murky silence seemed to smother everything. Nada was naked, and vaguely concerned that this might become a problem if she happened to meet anyone, but still she stumbled on, until she came to the temple of the vetalaraja, the King of Vampires, at the point where the path turned sharply at the edge of the hill.
A dog lay in the path before the temple, alertly watching her, and as she approached she saw a man sitting on the bench in front. It was Avinash: even though he was dressed in the traditional costume that Amruteshvar wore, she knew that it was Avinash, because she was aware that she had become Amruteshvar, while at the same time somehow still being herself, still troubled by her nudity.
He watched her as she approached. His face was free of the menace and mockery with which she had always seen it invested. She stood before him. His eyes were pleading, desperate. He seemed to be speaking in English, but she couldn’t make out the words, even though she knew what he was saying: Help me, brother. Save me. Forgive me.
She noticed that the dog was lying on the ground behind the bench, looking elsewhere, and realized that it was the bitch they had seen die in the village twenty-five years before.
She turned to the temple, an open, wall-less structure that she had many times come to see, where people sacrificed goats and chickens to the idol of the vetalaraja. The idol, a shapeless painted stone, was missing, and in its place stood the rose-garlanded rakshasa before which Zoran had died.
In front of it, a sari-clad woman’s body hung from the roof by a knotted cloth. Nada walked across the concrete floor, thick with clotted blood and fragments of flesh, and looked up into her face. It was a beautiful face, fair and narrow, calm as if in sleep, with slightly opened mouth and vacant, frozen eyes. Nada contemplated her with mild wonder, and felt a strangely detached pity for her, and behind this, a vague sense, touched with dread, that she ought to know who this woman was.
She looked beyond the body and saw Avinash standing at the far end of the temple floor. He was weeping, again speaking words that Nada could not make out but which she understood: Forgive me, forgive me. She looked past Avinash and saw that it was now Amruteshvar who was sitting on the bench, indistinguishable from his brother in all but his familiar expression of resigned, knowing sadness.
She again looked up at the woman’s face, and realized that it was her own, felt hands of darkness rising to claim her, felt herself being propelled forcefully upward as if to the surface of water. She jolted awake, staring at the ceiling of her room in Yadnya, her heart pounding.
She lay thus for some minutes as her heartbeat slowed and she oriented herself to the current facts of her waking reality, which took some effort, since they were scarcely less bizarre than the dream she had just awakened from.
It had not yet begun to dawn. The mournful, exuberant cries of kokils cut through the silence near and far. The room glowed faintly with moonlight. Cool air poured through the open window. Nada was lying naked on her back under the small bed’s mosquito net.
She thought of her meeting with Amruteshvar, and the task of the coming day. He had declined to stay the night at Yadnya, and had not said where he was going. They had agreed to meet at the Institute in the morning, and bring the manuscript to the house in an auto-
rickshaw—despite his reservations: it would be safer to hire a car, or
even to walk, he had said, but she had
insisted that there would really be no danger if they travelled in her favourite vehicle, and he had yielded to her.
She shifted onto her side and reviewed last night’s
conversation. What Amruteshvar had told her had been more than enough to take in at one sitting, but now that she had put it all together she was thinking of the gaps she would need him to fill.
How had Avinash become a vetala in the first place? Why had he been entered and possessed by this malevolent spirit? That such a spirit should be able to retain possession of his victim through multiple incarnations was novel and perplexing, but somehow less mysterious than whatever mechanism of karma continued to bind the un-possessed Amruteshvar to his brother.
And where did Amruteshvar get the supernatural powers he evidently had if he was not himself a vetala? And most importantly... why her?
She would have to ask him about all this while they worked here together on the text. And yet of course, as he had told her, not all of that work could be done by both of them together: the most important part of it, the cracking of the text’s code, she would have to do alone, because... Amruteshvar didn’t love his brother enough. Whereas she...?
The sky had grown pale with the first degree of dawn, and the kokils’ shouts, cycling from far to near, were growing more frequent. Nada began to drift off again.
It was her lifelong habit, while living on her own, to rise and begin working at the brahmamuhurta, the holy hour before dawn, but without the text here, and with the Institute’s opening time still hours away, there was no strong reason for her to get up now, and besides, the night before she had stayed up well beyond her usual bedtime talking with Amruteshvar.
Her thoughts began to be coloured by the hallucinatory logic of dream. As she thought of how she would be meeting Amruteshvar at the Institute within a few hours, she saw him, or more precisely felt him, standing in the back yard under the mango tree, while another presence appeared at her window: a huge vatavaghul, a fruit bat, clinging upside down to the window’s bars and staring at her nakedness with red eyes. Just before she sank into oblivion in the pale glow of dawn, she saw that a second bat had joined the first and clung to him from behind, gripping him by the neck with lupine fangs as they both stared at her body on the bed.
Hours later, in the manuscriptorium, Nada lifted the red cloth-bound manuscript from the iron cabinet as Ekbote, Bhave, Shyamala, and Amruteshvar stood by.
“I’m glad we’re getting this done,” she said, gently putting the bundle, still with the rosary, into a heavy metal carrying box that stood waiting on a small writing desk nearby, and closing and padlocking the lid.
She turned to them. “Shyamala, we’ll see you at Yadnya later today, right?”
Shyamala nodded.
“OK, let’s find a rickshaw,” said Nada, effortfully picking up the box and moving towards the Institute’s main entrance while Bhave spoke to a groundskeeper, who went off to hail one. “Yes, I know,” she said,
smiling a little apologetically at Amruteshvar, who clearly intended her to see his expression of silent resignation. “But you know I simply cannot stand riding in hired cars, like some self-styled VIP. It’s just not me. And anyway, what could happen? I have you with me.” He looked down, apparently less than reassured, but she barely noticed: having known him for less than a day, her confidence in him was already unshakable.
“It’s been a pleasure to meet you,” said Bhave to Amruteshvar as they all walked through the main hall. “I hope to see you here at the Institute from time to time while you’re in Pune.”
“Oh, you definitely will,” he replied. “It’s been a while since I was last here, and with the way the neighbourhood has changed, I don’t foresee that there are going to be many places between here and Yadnya that will draw me in.”
Nada had introduced Amruteshvar as Avinash’s brother and another expert in vetalashastra, and left it at that, and Bhave had accepted this, being sufficiently familiar, probably, with the weird atmosphere of secrecy and anxiety that surrounded this book that she knew better than to ask unnecessary questions. Amruteshvar had again softened his likeness to his brother, so that he now looked like a fraternal rather than an identical twin, as he had when he had entered Yadnya.
When they came out of the Institute’s main entrance, the groundskeeper was standing there with the auto-rickshaw, and Nada and Amruteshvar got in.
“Acireṇa,” said Nada to Shyamala, smiling—Sanskrit for in a bit—then gave the rickshaw driver directions in Marathi, and they set off down the sun-baked drive that led to Malati Road.
As they paused on the edge of the busy street waiting to cross it and drive down Tilak Institute Road, Nada glimpsed the driver’s eye looking at her in the small circular rear-view mirror. It was blazing with hate and fury, and its iris was red.
“Amruteshvar!” she shouted. “Get out! It’s him!”
The rickshaw lurched into motion, turning violently to the left onto Malati Road and weaving through the thick traffic of scooters, motorcycles, cars, and other rickshaws as Nada and Amruteshvar were hurled from side to side against each other, Nada protectively hunching over the metal box in her lap.
Amruteshvar struggled to find a handhold, his face unsurprised and determined. Just as he succeeded in grasping one of the metal bars in front of him, they reached the point where the road turned sharply to the left, skirting the Institute’s large grounds. Amruteshvar lost his hold and was almost thrown from the right door, hitting his head on its metal frame, as Nada, fiercely embracing the box, crashed into his side.
Oncoming vehicles loomed before them again and again as the rickshaw dodged through traffic moving in both directions. Amruteshvar had again gripped the bar in front of him with both hands and was evidently waiting for an instant when he could release a hand and lunge at the driver. He hissed something in a strange Kannada that Nada was not able to follow, and the driver shot a backward glance at him over his right shoulder. His face was unrecognizable, a stranger’s, flabby, middle-aged, and unshaven—the real driver whose body, like his vehicle, had been hijacked by the vetala for his own purposes—but the hate that wrenched that face was Avinash’s, as were the red eyes and the fangs in its snarling mouth.
He snapped his gaze back towards the road, where a bus was towering before them like a moving wall. Its horn shook the air as it attempted to avoid a collision by veering to its left, but the rickshaw driver now drove straight for the bus.
Amruteshvar threw his arms around Nada and hurled himself forward, bearing her out of the left door at the instant of impact. They tumbled onto the road, Amruteshvar still wrapped around her, as the bus ploughed into the rickshaw with a glassy thud, its right wheels missing them by inches, and hurtled past them, dragging the crumpled vehicle which had turned onto its side and lodged under the bus’s fender, projecting from it on the right. Pinned beneath the wrecked rickshaw, the driver’s body trailed behind it, his arms dragging, his face leaving a path of gore on the pavement. The bus struck aside cars, motorcycles, and scooters as it veered off the road and crashed into the rocky face of a low hill on the margin of the
Institute’s land.
Amruteshvar and Nada lay in the middle of the road, with vehicles flying towards and past them in both directions, Nada still desperately clutching the metal box to her chest. Amruteshvar sprang to his feet, grasping Nada by the arm. Vehicles continued to dart around them, horns sounding and tires screaming. Veering to avoid them, a car struck Amruteshvar’s side with a dull metallic sound of impact and bounced aside as if it had struck another car as Amruteshvar moved towards the roadside, pulling Nada with him. For just an instant, it occurred to Nada that not only had she survived, but she was completely unscathed, and not only was she unscathed, but she had never lost hold of the box.
When they were off the road, Nada heard what sounded like a series
of explosions. She looked towards the bus some twenty feet away, and saw body after body bursting through the windows and tumbling lifeless onto the ground. A figure was moving around inside.
Amruteshvar began to run towards the bus. Nada stood watching him, fiercely embracing the box, still focussed on their mission, thinking of how they could get away as quickly as possible and get the manuscript safely to Yadnya.
She called after him: “Amruteshvar! The manuscript! We... we have to get out of here!”
Without stopping or looking back, he shouted: “People are going to die—because of us.”
She felt a nauseating wave of shame. Yes, it was true. Because of her. She ran after him, slowed by her burden, which she awkwardly continued to press against her chest with both arms.
Passengers’ crumpled, bloody bodies lay on the rocky ground to the vehicle’s right and rear where they had fallen after being hurled through the glass; on the other side, they continued to hurtle through the windows. Except for the explosive sound of breaking glass, a dreadful silence invested the scene, and as she approached, Nada understood its cause: no one who had survived such brutal injuries could have had the strength even to groan, and she doubted that many had survived.
Nada looked up and saw that the figure inside was Avinash, recognizably himself this time, but dressed in the uniform of the bus driver and with massive wounds on his head and shoulder. He looked straight at her through one of the glassless windows, his red eyes blazing.
Before she could react, she perceived a sudden movement to her right, and looked to see Amruteshvar running and leaping over bodies to reach the rear door, where a dark young girl in a blood-soaked sari lay crumpled on the bottom step, her trembling hands weakly groping at nothing. He stooped over her, caressing her head with both hands and intently looking her over, then tenderly lifted her and laid her on the ground between two other bodies.
Then he turned, his own face now suffused with a cold fury that made it indistinguishable from his brother’s, lunged into the doorway and up the stairs, and hurled himself on Avinash, who received him grinning and open-armed. The impact shook the whole bus, lifting it momentarily off the ground with a shower of glass from the shattered windows.