Nada’s daily life during this period had been even more restricted than in years past, when she and Kshirasagar would work together from dusk to dawn, and Nada, never much of a sleeper, would often find time to move about the city and its vicinity during the afternoons.
Now she slept at night, but the whole day was devoted to work: to the preparation of the edition’s text with Shyamala in the mornings, and to translation with Amruteshvar in the afternoons, punctuated by a quiet tea with Kamala several times a day. Her initial work with Shyamala—the combining of Nada and Kshirasagar’s work—had finished some time ago, and they had moved on to the typing up of the translation’s daily increments and the writing of the introduction.
It was this latter task that had today brought Nada to the Institute, to check a few references in the library which had not been confirmable in Kshirasagar’s large personal library at Yadnya. It felt slightly surreal to be venturing this far from the house after weeks in which she had gone no further than the general store and the Sahadev restaurant on Usha Road. During this period she had felt a strange and unexpected serenity.
Avinash had not reappeared after the day of the hijacking; there had been no word from the police; and Nada had gratefully allowed herself to be entranced by the rhythm of her daily work over the whispering illusion of silence that the rains always brought to the city.
The dreams, too, played their part in the growth of this mood: the terror and menace that had pervaded them in the beginning had given way to a comforting familiarity as their images, even the dreadful ones, had settled into a predictable series of scenes, which now felt almost like silent, sympathetic witnesses to Nada’s quest, contributing
to the sense of imminence and promise of those days.
On reaching the Institute at ten-thirty, Nada first stopped in the main building to see if Vimala had
arrived yet; finding that she had not, she came back out by the front door so that she could walk round the main building to the library behind, enjoying the springtime luxuriance that the monsoon had awakened in the Institute’s grounds. A spray of light rain was in the air, and in the east a patch of clear sky was visible which would soon bring a few moments of sunshine. Everything that had been some shade of brown a month before was now some shade of green.
The traffic on Malati Road was scarcely visible through the thick screen of bushes and low trees. The façade of the guest house was alive with rejuvenated ivy, and the area beyond it that had briefly been leased as a plant nursery a decade before was now a jungle whose untrodden undergrowth had almost completely claimed the broken bottles and burned garbage left in the winter by the groundskeepers’ teenage children.
A dog whom Nada knew to be habitually unfriendly observed her from where he lay at the margin of the groundskeepers’ colony, and the colony’s single rooster and his hens pecked and strutted before its small waist-level shrine to the elephant-headed god Ganapati, more revered in Maharashtra state than anywhere else in the country.
Behind loomed Vetal Tekadi, Vampire Hill, a haunt of monkeys and deer where Nada had used to walk with Zoran in the early days, but which she had rarely visited since then (having been there most recently when Avinash drove the bus off its peak). High grass had sprung up around the lotus pond behind the main building, vying with the thickets of vegetation that thrived year-round beside the tanks of drinking water on the covered walkways. Another dog was sleeping on the library’s bottom step when she went in.
No one was in the main hall except a familiar assistant, who lounged half-sleeping on his wooden chair against the wall and smiled at her in recognition. Planning to browse the journals before she searched the card catalogue, she entered the reading room, and had just begun to page through one of them when she heard someone call her name.
“Nada!”
She looked up to see a white man sitting at one of the old wooden tables, the only other person in the room. He was about sixty-five, but his fit, almost heroic physique, his full head of curly white hair, and a strange aura of youthfulness gave the impression of an eternal adolescence, made stronger by the unguarded happiness that now lit up his face.
“I should have expected to see you here at this time of year!” he said, rising to his full height of six-two.
Nada felt her face flood with what must have seemed an almost comical joy. Of course, it was Saul, Saul Levitt, an American Sanskrit professor who was one of her oldest friends, and whose love for Pune, where he had lived and studied for many years, was a special bond with her. She had been so sunk in her struggle with Avinash and the Amrutajijnasa that she had completely forgotten what Bhave had told her on the first day about Saul’s impending stay at the Institute. She felt a piercing regret for the loss of the consolation that this knowledge would have afforded her over these difficult weeks, if she had remembered.
She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. He paused for a moment, then seemed to understand, and came and stood in front of her, smiling.
“I’m in the guest house, of course,” he went on. “I got here three days ago from Mumbai. Before that I was up north in Uttarakashi, since June. You know I’ve built a house there? Don’t really have any serious business I need to do in Pune this time, but you know I always stop here on my way south: so many people and places here I always want to touch base with. And I’ve got two articles to write, and this is always a good place for writing.”
Nada continued to stare at him open-mouthed, embarrassed by her absurd silence, but unable to articulate her happiness. She realized that she hadn’t had a real conversation in weeks with anyone but Amruteshvar and Shyamala, and after so much time talking about nothing but how to kill vampires in Sanskrit, she was finding it difficult to think of the right words for this situation.
It didn’t matter: Saul could talk enough for both of them.
His smile faded. “Hey, I heard about Kshirasagar.
It actually wasn’t mentioned in the online groups, I didn’t hear about it till Vimala Bhave told me when I arrived. You know I knew him too. Back in the seventies he knew everyone, and all us foreigners, but then he got sick, and most of us he never saw again. But I saw him every few years, down at his house—yeah, a couple of times you were there too. But no one was closer to him than you, obviously. Really made me sad when I heard about it. But Vimala was right, it was as much a blessing as anything.”
Nada was still smiling, but now tears began to flow, and she let out a soft sound which was both a laugh and a sob, averting her eyes from his.
“Ah Nada,” said Saul, and hugged her, and she hugged him back, rapidly becoming aware of how much pain she still carried over this loss. Amruteshvar was not exactly a great consoler, and anyway, after his early confessions about his history with Avinash, the focus with him had always been the text. And Kamala, like Nada, was a silent griever, a habit she had probably cultivated as a result of always having had so little family to depend on.
But at last, Nada found words: “Let’s go over to the Hutatma.”
“Yeah, great idea,” said Saul. “Let’s hurry before they replace it with a Costa Coffee or some other such abomination.”
He turned back to his table, packed up his laptop, left an already-written note on top of the pile of books he was using, and together they walked out, regarded curiously by the assistant half-sleeping on his chair.
The clear patch of sky Nada had seen to the east was now overhead, and sunlight briefly held the field. The bell would soon be rung for the day’s first tea break, and a few people were now to be seen here and there.
“I’m writing a paper on a spirit possession I attended in Andhra Pradesh a few months ago,” said Saul, as they started walking towards the Institute’s main gate. “I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to read any of my work in recent years?”
“Of course,” she said, still finding it a little difficult to get the words out. “I rea
d everything you write.”
“Then you’ll know that that’s the subject I’ve been working on the most lately, possession,” he said. “Always too many pans on the stove!”
He smiled, and she smiled with him.
“My interest in that goes back to the seventies,” he said, “to when my wife and I used to roam around the countryside on foot in search of sacrifices. In one village we came to in Andhra Pradesh, there was a possession going on: people possessed by the spirits of the Pandavas and Draupadi, from the Mahabharata. It was ritualized, dramatized, you know?—with scenes from the Mahabharata acted out.”
Shyamala rode through the main gate on her scooter.
“Hey Shyamala!” Saul shouted.
“You know her?” asked Nada, a little surprised, but not very, since Saul got to know everyone eventually.
“Oh yeah, of course. She’s quite the up-and-coming young star, isn’t she. I know she’s working with you on your text—what’s it called, the Vetalajyotsna or something?”
At this, Nada stopped in her tracks and doubled over, laughing and laughing in a fit of cathartic release. This was such a typical Saul Levitt joke: jyotsna, moonlight, was a common name for Sanskrit commentaries because of the idea of illumination, but combined with vetala, the name it produced—“Moonlight of the Vampire”—was almost unbearably funny.
“The Vetalajyotsna! Oh god, Saul, I love it.”
“What, that’s not what it’s called?” said Saul, smiling, gratified by the effect of his pretended gaffe, so emblematic of his peculiar genius.
Nada was in tears of hilarity by the time Shyamala approached, smiling but mystified.
“Nada and I were just talking about possession, and then I guess she started giving a demonstration,” Saul said to Shyamala. “We were on our way to the Hutatma. Can you join us?”
“Sure,” Shyamala replied, and they proceeded out the main gate.
When they had sat down and ordered tea, and Nada had recovered herself, she turned to Saul and said, “So you were telling me about this possession you attended in Andhra Pradesh ages ago, and then you attended another one there more recently, which you’re writing about?”
“Yeah, but the two aren’t connected,” he replied. “The later one wasn’t related to anything in Sanskrit:
the possession was by a local divinity, a goddess, who entered a female medium. It was a medical ritual: the goddess was a disease who had infected several people in the village. But my perspective on these possessions is always fundamentally sanskritic, because I’m fundamentally sanskritic, and there’s so much about possession in Sanskrit literature, more than people realize—certainly more than anthropologists realize. You know, I have no formal anthropological training, all my degrees are in Sanskrit. But I’ve spent more time ‘in the field,’ in this field, than most anthropologists, because,”—he sipped his tea—“the field is where I live.”
It was true. Saul had always been the Indiana Jones of academic Sanskrit studies, a discipline he had entered mainly in order to fund his long periods of wandering around India with a knapsack full of Sanskrit books. Nada had largely modelled her career on his.
“But I’m too close to this right now because I’m writing about it,” he said. “I need a break. I don’t really know much about the book you guys are working on, the... Amrutajijnasa, right? Have I finally remembered it right?”
Nada laughed. “You never really forget anything, Saul.” She glanced at Shyamala, who was sitting quietly, as if she didn’t want to be noticed, evidently fascinated by this old friendship between her admired senior colleague and another extraordinary scholar.
“What a weird use of the word amṛta,” he said. “It’s unique, so far as I know: elsewhere it always means something immortal or divine, particularly the divine nectar, of course. But here, it really is like a direct translation of the English word ‘undead.’ Do you know where that word comes from? Is it in other European languages? Like Croatian?”
Nada nodded. Then she said: “Our work has... taken a new turn lately.”
She was longing to open up to Saul about what had been happening. Now that Kshirasagar was gone, Saul was really the only person in the world who could understand. In fact, he would be able to completely understand everything, intellectually and personally. He knew almost everything about her, even the business with Avinash. But so much had happened since Kshirasagar had died, so much had been revealed, and it was all so incredible and terrible.
Saul would believe her, he alone had seen enough to know that everything that was happening to her was possible and real. And by now Shyamala had become a friend, and knew or suspected enough that Nada felt she could tell her as much as she could tell Saul. But how to begin?
“We’re now working with the scholar who is the ultimate authority on the Amrutajijnasa and vetalashastra. He contacted me on his own. He and I are finishing the translation. He’s given us profound insight into the text, and especially into its historical background. There’s a tragic story behind it.”
“You’ll have to tell me about this ‘ultimate authority,’ ”
said Saul. “I’ve probably met him. But who’s this text attributed to?”
“A certain Amruteshvar,” said Nada, “who lived in a village near modern Mysore in the fourteenth century. He had a twin brother. Avinash.”
At this, a flicker of concern passed across Saul’s face.
“Both were brilliant scholars,” Nada continued. “Superstars of their time, really: young, brilliant, beautiful. Not really rivals, but almost, they could have been. Avinash was engaged to be married to a girl named Lata. And Amruteshvar fell in love with her. He didn’t do or even say anything, but he fell in love with her, and it became obvious to both Avinash and Lata. It corrupted the brothers’ relationship, and Avinash’s mind.”
She felt her words tumbling forth, released. Saul and Shyamala were staring.
“It was just like the way Kali entered King Nala, you know, in the Mahabharata? Just like that. Avinash began to change. He’d always been this very gentle and good person, but now he started attacking his brother, first verbally, then even physically. Everything that had been good and beautiful about him became corrupted and poisoned. He became suspicious of Amruteshvar and Lata. And she killed herself, she hanged herself.” Nada was crying. “And then Avinash killed himself too.”
There was a long pause. Saul and Shyamala sat speechless. Then Saul asked, “How do you know all this? Is the story told in the text?”
“No,” said Nada. “Amruteshvar told me the basics, but then I... found out the rest on my own, and... I know.”
“Amruteshvar...?” said Saul. “The author of the text? How...?”
Nada looked him in the eye, and with that he understood.
“I know this story,” Saul said.
“How...?” said Nada, almost whispering.
“I’ve read it,” he said, “and I’ve also seen it. Once. In a village in south Karnataka. A possession. There’s a tradition down there, very small and local. They tell a story, this very story that you’ve just told me: the souls of these three enter people, and they re-enact it. I found out about it through friends in Mysore. I was allowed to witness it, and was working on an article about it, but I put it aside for the time. It was going to be a lot of work, it would have to be a series of articles, because there were also texts, like I was saying: tellings of the story in Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam, but also one in Sanskrit, which they actually have in the Institute library right here.”
“I... I’ve never heard of this before,” Nada murmured.
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “This is a very small local tradition; no one, Indian or non-Indian, has ever written about it. It was really a scoop for me, but I was going to have to keep coming back to it for years. And you know, I’m always doing too many things at once.”
&
nbsp; “What’s in the library here?” asked Shyamala. “It’s a printed book?”
“Yeah,” said Saul, “old, like from the thirties. What’s it called... aha, just Avinashalatacharita, The Story of Avinasha and Lata. It’s short, a few hundred verses, no chapter divisions, easy Sanskrit. That edition has a short
preface in Sanskrit, but I don’t remember it, don’t remember if it says when the poem was written. Come on, let’s go find it for you! We can ask Bhave to let us take it to the manuscript department and compare it with what your book says—oh, but you say the story isn’t told there.”
“Why... would we take it to the manuscript department?” asked Nada. “The Amrutajijnasa is at home, at Yadnya.”
Saul looked incredulous. “But there’s another copy of the Amrutajijnasa in the manuscript department! You mean you didn’t know?”
9
An Ancient Tale
“Hello...?” said Nada tentatively, knocking lightly on the swinging wooden divider that served as a door to the general secretary’s office. “Dr. Bhave?”
“Yes, hello,” came Vimala Bhave’s voice from the other side. “Is that you, Nada? Please come in.”
Nada pushed on the divider, which swung inward with a creak of expanding metal springs.
Bhave looked up from where she was sitting at her desk. “Ah, and it’s not only Nada, but also Shyamala and Saul Levitt!” she said, turning in her seat, smiling with pleasure. “Nada, I haven’t seen you in weeks! I was going to write you an email and let you know that Saul had arrived, so I’m happy to see that you’ve found each other.”
Nada smiled. “Yes, I’ve been out of touch, totally absorbed in the work Shyamala and I are doing. And it’s actually in connection with that work that we’ve come here at this particular moment.”
She glanced at Saul and Shyamala. “Saul has just told us about a book in the library that Shyamala and I didn’t know about, and that has extremely important implications for our work on the Amrutajijnasa. Could you...?” She let her voice trail off.
The Vetala Page 9