Nada sat down in a chair beside him and poured some water for herself from the metal flask on the table, drinking three cupfuls one after the other, pouring the water directly into her mouth without touching the metal cup to her lips, in the Indian manner. Then she sat with the cup in her hands, staring blankly. “All those people...” she murmured, shaking her head. Her eyes misted. He smiled at her with quiet, deep compassion.
Putting down the cup, she said, “I’m sure you also know that I’ve been having dreams. I’m not even sure how much of what just happened was a dream.”
Amruteshvar was looking at her intently, then let his gaze drop. “I don’t think I have to tell you a lot,” he said. “You’re figuring things out quickly on your own. Things are... coming back to you.”
Nada thought of asking more (What? What is coming back to me?), but then realized that she really didn’t have to. It was all simple and obvious, wasn’t it? An epic of karma of a kind familiar to her from the ancient books. The three of them had been brought together by some event that took place many lives ago, some action which had remained unfinished and which was keeping them bound together until they worked it out and finished it.
What Nada had seen and felt in dream and vision told her that this was a story of love, jealousy, hate—and that she was the centre of it. The vetala that had possessed Avinash was some kind of expression of this conflict, or some outside evil that had taken advantage of the break the conflict had caused, slipping in to join itself to the negative emotion in Avinash, corrupting and confusing the man’s very self, pushing aside and starving what had been good in it.
It was something like what had happened to King Nala in the famous story in the Mahabharata. Nada remembered that Amruteshvar himself had made the comparison once. She would talk to him about this, tonight.
Kamala returned from the kitchen with tea on a tray. Nada and Amruteshvar took their cups, and Kamala went out, leaving them alone.
Suddenly remembering, Nada said, “Shyamala was supposed to come this afternoon. Did she?”
“Yes,” replied Amruteshvar. “I told her you had unexpectedly felt extremely tired and gone to bed, and that she should come tomorrow afternoon instead.”
“God, what will she think of me?” sighed Nada. “And what are we going to do? What is there for us to do, besides wait for Avinash to make his next attack? I don’t even know yet how we can free him. I guess that’s going to be one of those things that you said I have to figure out for myself.”
Amruteshvar smiled slightly, apparently a little embarrassed.
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “But you’re very good at that. And you still haven’t finished reading the last chapter. It will tell you everything you need to know.”
“I have read it through rapidly, which is how I know about the defective verse. But there is so much in it that is not clear. I was looking forward to months of hard work. Fortunately, I have you here now,” she said a little
ironically. “And presumably you can tell me something, can’t you? Otherwise why would you have come at all?”
He smiled again, and looked down, and they sipped their tea in silence.
When they had gone upstairs to the study, Nada opened the manuscript on the desk, divided the palm leaves into two stacks where she thought the last chapter must begin, added leaf by leaf to the larger stack until she had found it. They sat on opposite sides of the desk, facing each other, and paused.
Then Amruteshvar said, “I wrote this book in order to try to understand what had happened to my brother. There was nothing like it in Sanskrit before. I took some information from Sanskrit and other texts on various subjects, but mainly I was compiling and synthesizing what I had learned from the people I was talking to, both Brahmins and non-Brahmins, scholars and non-scholars, people who came close to bhuts and prets, ghouls and ghosts, in their work as funerary ritualists, magicians, physicians, astrologers. Even common, illiterate people could tell me so much that there was no trace of in books. And I put all this into Sanskrit for the first time.”
Yes, she was thinking, yes. She knew this—and here it was. Her mind was infused with a paradoxical alloy of exhilaration and deep calm which pressed aside her
awareness of everything else—the shock and slaughter of the chase, the impending threat of Avinash’s inevitable reappearance.
Amruteshvar was still speaking. “But one of the most important keys was actually a Sanskrit text: the Nalopakhyana, the Tale of King Nala in the Mahabharata. It taught me exactly how my brother had gotten ill, exactly what the relation of his self to his illness was. As you know, King Nala is possessed by Kali, Confusion. Kali undermined and corrupted Nala’s self in the same way that the vetala did to my brother. When Nala abandoned his beloved wife Damayanti, his will was partly his own and partly Kali’s; the reasons he gave himself for abandoning her were his own, but he was also being driven by the alien incubus that was determined to destroy him. The same thing happened to my brother, but in his case there was another cause beside the generic malice of Manyu, Rage. My brother hated me, because we loved the same woman. And that was the dosha—the fault, the sin—that gave the spirit of evil its opportunity to invade him.”
He paused, almost as if he expected Nada to raise some question or objection, as in the past. But Nada knew that he couldn’t really expect this. There was nothing more that she needed to ask. And she knew he knew that. Otherwise there would have been no point in telling her what he was telling her. Now was the time to listen.
He went on. “When the book was finished, it turned out to have a power different from what I had hoped. It did not help me drive the evil from my brother. It was the sum of everything I had been able to learn about the vetala, but knowledge on its own turned out not to be enough. Because I had my own dosha—the same as my brother’s,
in fact, but I guess the spirit entered him and not me because his fault was greater, his love and hate deeper and more conflicted. And that was always what had distinguished us, twins though we were: he was deeper in everything.”
Amruteshvar’s face showed the expressionless seriousness that it always wore. And yet Nada could almost have believed that it was suffused, almost imperceptibly, with the same serene joy that she was feeling, and that was perhaps visible in her own.
“So I could not be the one to use the knowledge that I myself had assembled,” said Amruteshvar. “But that knowledge turned out to have a power that I had not foreseen: in the physical form of this book, it was a weapon, dangerous in itself, capable of harming and terrorizing the vetala, if not of destroying him. Only in the right hands could the knowledge destroy. And as I eventually realized, there was only one right pair of hands.”
He was finished. And Nada knew it.
She said, “So our chapter is Amrutashamana. Shall we begin at the beginning?”
Amrutashamana, “Laying the Undead to Rest,” was the name of the final chapter, the last of ten which purported to give a comprehensive account of the vetala—or, as the text no less frequently called him, turning an ancient term for divinity on its head, the amṛta, “the undead.”
The ten chapters were:
Amṛtasaṃbhava, “Origin of the Undead”;
Amṛtavasana, “Where the Undead Lives”;
Amṛtāhāra, “What the Undead Eats”;
Amṛtaśakti, “Powers of the Undead”;
Amṛtaśarīravṛtti, “The Physical Nature of the Undead”;
Amṛtasaṃtati, “How the Undead Reproduces”;
Amṛtacitta, “The Mind of the Undead”;
Amṛtābhijñāna, “Recognizing the Undead”;
Amṛtanivāraṇa, “How to Ward Off the Undead”;
and Amṛtaśamana.
Over more than twenty years, Nada had worked through nine chapters, reading on her own, with Kshirasagar, and in the beginning also with Zoran, and toget
her she and Kshirasagar had produced an annotated translation of them. They had been working separately on the Amrutashamana when he died, and the first order of business for Nada and Shyamala was to conflate their existing work on this chapter; then they would have to translate and annotate the remainder, a process which would have taken an unknown number of months, maybe years.
This work would have been more slow and difficult without Kshirasagar and his consummate mastery of language and history, but with the end so close, and the present necessity so strong, Nada would have been driving herself harder than they had done before, and Shyamala—who in the work thus far had fully lived up to Bhate and Nada’s favourable impression of her—would surely have continued to prove a worthy accomplice.
Maybe Kshirasagar had also felt an urgency as his own end neared: comments he had made to Nada in his last year, in emails and in person, hinted that he knew that any day could be his last. But his anxiety would have been different from the one that drove Nada now. For Kshirasagar, finishing the edition of the Amrutajijnasa meant resuscitating a lost ancient account of an evil that had dealt him a lingering death stroke. Perhaps by so doing he could save unknown victims in the future, but he could not save himself, nor could he save his destroyer—and in any case, the vetala was to them a creature of pure and simple evil in those days, a monster that had wrecked both their lives.
For Nada, there was now a much more immediate motive for finishing the edition: her own present protection, yes, and the exorcism of the event that had been the defining trauma of her life; but also, no less importantly, the salvation of the monster himself, who had unexpectedly been revealed as the tragic protagonist of the Amrutajijnasa.
Avinash had a history with earlier chapters, in which he was a good man, with a brother and a family; in which he was a lover—perhaps, like her, bereaved in love, but in any case a victim of the vetala no less than she herself. Avinash, she now realized, was someone to be loved. A man she could herself imagine loving.
Nada and Kshirasagar’s practice had been to make their own separate translations during the greater part of the year, while Nada was in Zagreb, and then, while Nada was in Pune from May to September, to reread the text and conflate their translations, then proceed together beyond the point where their finished work ran out.
Now, Nada divided her days between conflating the translations with Shyamala, beginning at eleven in the morning, and translating with Amruteshvar, from four in the afternoon. The Amrutashamana contained a hundred and twelve shlokas, verses. Nada had translated and annotated fifteen, Kshirasagar twenty-two. So Nada and Amruteshvar had read the original text from the beginning, then begun their translation at verse sixteen.
Reading the text with Amruteshvar was a new and strange experience. With Kshirasagar, Nada had always felt the silent presence of a vast erudition which would reveal itself in unhesitating corrections, comments, and explanations that unostentatiously intimated the vastness of the store from which they emerged.
With Amruteshvar, that presence felt infinitely vaster. He had, after all, written the Amrutajijnasa, but it was more than that: he embodied the world in which this book was born, a world which was only very faintly reflected in even the deepest present-day panditya—traditional Sanskrit learning—to say nothing of the yet more emaciated erudition of English-based academic scholarship.
Sitting at the desk with the manuscript in front of her, Nada would read the shloka aloud and translate it; then Amruteshvar, seated behind her and to her right, with eyes closed, would repeat her translation with
corrections; then she would write this version down, with pen in notebook, an old-fashioned practice to which Kshirasagar had stuck even after becoming computer-
literate, and to which Nada had also become loyal.
It was at this point that their new method most sharply diverged from the old. Over the years of their collaboration, Nada and Kshirasagar, after finalizing the translation of each verse, had then proceeded to spend a good deal of time, sometimes hours, consulting a small pile of works which they had found to have anything to say about vetalas, and incorporating that matter into the note on the verse.
With Amruteshvar, the books sat idle on the shelf, and even when he did cite some of them in the course of his commentary—delivered clearly and unhesitatingly, as if reading finished text from a page, but with eyes closed—they no longer seemed the distinguished authorities they once had, being outnumbered now by a much larger collection which had evidently survived nowhere but in the vast library of Amruteshvar’s memory.
And they were superseded not only in number: that little pile of books—the Mahabharata, a few other major Sanskrit works, plus a handful of obscure old printed texts and encyclopedias in Sanskrit, Hindi, and Marathi—seemed wretchedly meagre in comparison with the ones that dominated Amruteshvar’s commentary, books on astrology, alchemy, black magic, and medicine that had had a great deal to say about vetalas and upon which the Amrutajijnasa was directly based.
For Nada, the new vista that thus opened up was at once intoxicating and frustrating: her sense of the text’s background was infinitely enriched by these citations, yet this enrichment was doomed to remain known to her alone, because citations from a treasure trove of lost and unproduceable texts could have no scholarly credibility. What would the footnote sound like? “I thank Dr. Amruteshvar, an undead scholar from fourteenth-century Mysore, for making these previously unknown works available to me”?
So the list of works cited remained the same as before, and the notes on the verses were not noticeably deepened by this enormous new access of information. But Nada could live with this irony, because scholarship, or at least that kind of scholarship, was no longer the point.
The final chapter, Amrutashamana, was about “laying the undead to rest.” The term amṛta had been defined in the book’s first chapter, Amrutasambhava:
vetālaḥ preta evā ’sti kena cit pratijīvitaḥ
mṛta āsīn mṛto nā ’sti tato ’mṛta iti smṛtaḥ
The vampire is a dead man who has been brought back to life by something. He was dead, and is not dead, and therefore is he called undead.
The same chapter said that the vetala is a spirit who enters and inhabits a living person in the same way that Kali entered King Nala (a simile that the book made much of, and frequently returned to):
anyo naro ’mṛto ’nyaś ca yas tv āviśati taṃ naram
tiṣṭhaty anyas tathā ’nyasmin yathā ’tiṣṭhat kalir nale
The man is one, and the undead who enters that man is another: one dwells in the other as Kali dwelt in Nala.
Further on, the possessing spirit was said to be Kali himself, and the vetala was evidently the victim, the man
possessed:
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 take the vampire’s self away from his self.
This ambiguity—who is the possessor, who the
possessed?—ran throughout the book, but began to be emphasized in the Amrutashamana, particularly with respect to the problem of the vetala’s will and responsibility:
anyāviṣṭo hi vetālo na jānāty ātmano manaḥ
ātmano ’pahṛto ’nyena cā ’nyabhūto ’pi cā ’tmanaḥ
For being possessed, the vampire does not know his own mind: he has been stolen from himself by another, and has become other than himself.
na svecchayā naraṃ hanti vetālo me ’ti vismara
vetālo ’pi hi saṃbaddho mumukṣaty antarātmanā
The vampire does not of his own volition kill a man: do not forget this; because the vampire himself is bound, and longs for release with his inmost soul.
Beyond their literal meaning and literary context, Amruteshvar never had anything to say abo
ut what such verses might mean, and though their application to Avinash was obvious to Nada, she nevertheless found Amruteshvar’s principled silence exasperating sometimes. But more and more she understood why it had to be this way: if she had been told outright what she was now piecing together from the text and from her increasingly full and lifelike dreams—almost a rival reality at this point—she would never have believed any of it. It had to come from within her, because it was there. And if this much was there, then everything was there, including the eight missing syllables that were the key to everyone’s freedom.
At night, as she lay naked on the bed amid the shifting heat and cool of the room, waiting for the precious visions of dream, aching with a longing of which she was ever more conscious, she would hear and murmur the words that mocked her from the far shore that she needed to reach, where all of them would be happy and at peace, and where two of them, she now knew, would be reunited in love:
mumukṣuṃ śamayet tu tam
May she lay to rest him who longs for release.
Part Two
8
An Old Friend
That morning Nada had come to the Institute for the first time in weeks. It was now late July, and the monsoon, crazed and mutilated by climate change, had at last managed to gain a weakened foothold, bringing hard rain to the nights and to part of every day a full month after what had been the normal date of its arrival when Nada had first started to come to India. Though much reduced from the robust classical form in which Nada had come to know it, it was still recognizably the familiar season of clothes never quite dry and umbrellas rarely closed, of shining streets hissing with traffic, of dogs that slept the day away curled and shivering in the refuge of sheltered walls and unused doorways, of a rich greenness that possessed the hills and the Institute’s hermitage-like grounds overnight.
The Vetala Page 8