“Upstairs, another time, later, Nicole and I had a spectacular fight, to the embarrassment and amusement of patrons and staff.” (Another soft laugh.) “She took the first available flight back to New York two days later—the beginning of the end.
“So I found myself brooding on all this, on what an important place the Hutatma had been in my life. And I felt sad that I would outlive it, it and the Pune it represented to me. I thought of the new house in Uttarakashi in the Himalayas, where I’m planning to retire within a few years, and where I’m planning to die. You know, I’ve always been more of a southern man. My Marathi and Kannada were once much better than my Hindi. But in this final ashrama, this final stage of life, I need the Himalayas.”
He smiled, a little sadly.
“So I paid, and went out. It was dark by now. The rain had thinned to a light mist again, it was a beautiful evening, so I decided to stroll a bit on the Institute’s grounds before going back to my room.
“The old watchman was sitting on his wooden chair in front of the main building. I know him, he’s been around for a few years. I nodded and smiled at him—but not at the upscale young couple with their huge and aggressive golden retriever. You must have seen them before?
Assholes. They bring this dog to the Institute every evening to shit there instead of in the walled yard of their palatial house across the street, and of course no one ever tells them to fuck off.”
They both smiled, but Nada remained silent, and he went on.
“The children of the groundskeepers were playing in the treed area between the main building and the library. The teenagers were milling about. Dogs were lounging and wandering around, or standing among the children, watching them play.
“So I reached the guest house, and sat for a while on the damp stone steps in front of my room. And you know, Nada... I’ve got a tendency to depression, serious depression. I know I’ve told you before, over the years. It’s always there, in the back of my consciousness. I’ve kept ahead of it for some time now, but under the influence of the events of the day, and these sights and sounds, it started to gain strength, this native melancholy, it started to rise and take possession of my mind. What it does is... the way it gets hold of you... I was starting to think of the totality of my life in a kind of mercilessly detached way. This is how it happens. I knew I was in danger. I tried to turn away from the darkest stuff, the two divorces, tried to think of how fortunate I am to have found Lily—better late than never—someone with whom I can peacefully walk the final stage of the pilgrimage, now that the destabilizing passions of earlier life have burned down to a manageable glow. You know, Nada, I’ve... never found it easy to find kindred spirits. With her, I feel safe and sure for what’s really the first time in my life.”
Yes, Nada thought, feeling her eyes mist: depression, the one fatal flaw of this brilliant and good man she had loved and admired for so long. She almost shuddered at the ruthless genius of the evil they were facing.
“But now,” he said, “now I was feeling in my guts this cold, nauseating germ of doubt about the worth and dignity of it all—everything, even the best things. This was a very old and familiar experience for me, so I understood what was happening, I knew that there was really nothing to think about here, that this shift was not due to any new information or genuine insight, but to a darkening of the lens. I knew that what I needed was light, the light of someone else’s company. So I though I might call Lily later, but back in New York it would be too early right now.”
Nada smiled, but she felt that if she spoke she would burst into sobs of anguish. “Oh Saul, why didn’t you come to find me?” she wanted to ask, but she already knew the answer: he had been too concerned about her suffering to allow himself to burden her with his own. So she sat silently and listened.
“I got up. Unlocked my room. Closed the door behind me. Turned on the light, put down my knapsack on the chair, and stood staring vacantly at the scene: the ancient heavy wooden desk, chair, bookshelf, and bed with its mosquito net, the bare stone walls and floor, the door to the washroom, the locked door to the empty main hall. The dust.
“As you know, most Western scholars take one look at these rooms and immediately flee to a hotel. But I’ve always loved the guest house, this had always been a scene of comfort and safety for me. You know, Nicole and I stayed in a room on the other side, when we were both in India for the first time. We made love there for the first time, with each other or anyone. Those days were just full of love: our love for each other, for India, for its languages and literature... We were discovering it all together, we struggled together for the first time through books that I would return to again and again throughout my life, in Pune and in so many places in India and around the world.
“And... here I was again. I thought, isn’t it a profound and beautiful thing, to come back again later and later in life to this place where my journey started? I had always felt that way.”
She could relate. And she knew he knew it.
“Yet now, inexplicably, even this scene was clouded with darkness. The darkness had always invested other scenes and memories, and had always lifted when I came back here—and I’ve actually sometimes come back precisely in order to outrun it when I’ve felt it rising in me again. But now, for the first time, the sight of all this made me feel... pathetic.
“Pathetic! To be sixty-five years old and to find myself back here again, in this decaying third-world dump” (he winced, ashamed) “—that’s how it felt, at that moment—alone, because... what other serious academic would stay here instead of in a hotel or rented flat? To find myself back here, the scene of my first adolescent loves, precisely because... I was still an adolescent, and had never really moved forward or grown up, and everyone else had. I thought, yes, what bullshit is this about ‘authenticity’ and ‘living in the field’? In fact, it was nothing but the typical self-serving auto-mythologization of failure. And I now realized that everyone knew it, and had always known it, everyone except me. I felt like the mist of delusion was rapidly clearing. I saw it all: the indulgent smiles, the shakings of the head, the knowing looks shared between colleagues who I thought were my friends: Well, that’s Saul for you.”
Again he shook his head. His mouth tightened into a frown.
“I stood there, and... and I felt myself physically falling into the abyss, deeper than ever before. I stared at this room. And it was clearer and clearer to me that it represented my whole worthless life in miniature. I stood there for what felt like a vast period of time. And then my gaze dropped to the bare stone floor, and my despair hardened into conviction. I knew what I had to do. This place, whose true wretchedness was now plain to me, had been the theatre of my story until now. It was also the right place for my story to end.”
Nada shook her head.
“The minutes drew out to an eonic length. I kept staring at the floor. After god knows how long, with what felt like... geological slowness, I raised my head and looked at the ceiling fan. My decision had become a force and will of its own. I saw myself... moving slowly and resolutely forward on an unknown course that I nevertheless trusted to be the only true and right one. It was like... an abyss of conscious solipsistic hell gaped on one side of me, and on the other, a truth infinitely superior to my own helpless selfhood offered the perfection of annihilation and oblivion.
“I... my hands... put the chair under the fan. The sari I had bought for Lily... my hands knotted one end of it round my neck, and began to bind the other end round the base of the fan. I knew I wouldn’t even pause before kicking the chair away, because... there was nothing to think about. I had had my whole life to think, and the irrefutable conclusion of that life’s failed logic had now been revealed to me in the very place where I had struggled for so long to find it.”
He smiled ironically. Nada didn’t smile.
“Indian philosophy hadn’t let me down. I had attained enlightenment.
It was time for moksha, final release.”
A bitter laugh.
“And then... I fell. I dropped hard into the chair. Knocked it sideways and spilled onto the floor with it. Hit my head on the bottom of the bookshelf. I... found myself lying on my back, with my legs bent and turned to the side, and the chair leaning on top of them. The sari had settled over half my face, it was covering my left eye. I looked up at the fan, which was crazily swaying back and forth. I remembered where I was and what I had been doing. But I somehow felt as if I had just now woken up. The line of thinking of the past minutes or hours now felt like something not quite my own, like a phantom will that had been leading me on towards an end that was at once deeply and originally mine, yet at the same time, paradoxically, alien and new.
“And I could feel... that I was no longer alone. There was another consciousness in the room, invisible and vague, yet tremendously and dreadfully present. And I could feel that it was... confused, consumed by a struggle between pity and hate. While I lay there, waiting for the outcome.”
Nada was staring at him, fully present with him, both now and at the moment he was describing.
“I became aware that images from my ancient past with you had been stirred, which I had had no need to consciously revisit in many years: our first meeting here at the Institute; our day-long conversations while walking around the university campus and the countryside near Pune; the hours we’ve spent together after conferences, sometimes with Victoria—my second wife, you remember her—in European, North American, Indian cities; the times you’ve visited me at my home in New York; my one visit to yours in Zagreb.
“And seeing all these scenes brought together for the first time, I was struck with a sense of tenderness at the deep intimacy they revealed, and... and I realized that it was to this tenderness that I owed my life: this was what the other presence, whatever it was, was feeling, along with an incomprehensible hatred of me, and rage at
having been thwarted by its own pity. And this struggle was still going on, invisible but overwhelmingly present, above and all around me in the room, while I lay waiting—for mercy, fury, madness, death...”
His voice was trembling slightly. He appeared to be struggling to master a rising agitation. And Nada experienced it as her own.
“I was seized by panic. I... scrambled to my feet. I threw myself against the door, burst out of the room, stumbled down the stairs, with the sari... trailing from my neck. I ran down the drive, out the second gate, across Malati Road, down Tilak Institute Road—the streets were empty—down I know not what side streets and lanes, with the sari trailing from my neck, getting tangled around my legs, tripping me...”
He shook his head.
“I just ran, ran, ran, tumbling on the ground again and again, getting up again... until I was standing in front of the door of Yadnya... pounding on it with both fists...”
His voice was a whisper.
“... screaming your name...”
He was staring at her with shining eyes, his face radiant with terror.
She sat next to him on the sofa for a long time, holding his hand until he became calm again. Kamala entered and quietly sat down.
Then Nada said to Saul, “This happened because he knew that you told us about the second manuscript, which we didn’t know about before. I knew he would know that you had told us, because he’s around us and he’s in our minds, but I didn’t know when or how much he would know. And I still don’t know what he’ll be able to do about it now. He can’t touch these manuscripts himself, either in his own body or even in a possessed one, at least not without intolerable pain.”
She glanced at Kamala, whose face had darkened with remembrance—and perhaps, too, she thought uncomfortably, with some other kind of distress.
“And he hasn’t been able to use possession to get at the first manuscript,” Nada went on, “because he can’t possess Amruteshvar, or even me, maybe because it would be too painful for him, and no one else gets near it, and anyway, by now he’s not as afraid of it, because at some point over the centuries, someone—used by him, obviously—managed to delete that quarter-verse that was the key to the whole book’s efficacy.”
“And this second copy must have that verse intact,” said Saul.
“Right,” said Nada, “and so he has to destroy it at all costs. He’ll do anything, attempt anything, attempt to possess anyone, at this point, maybe even me and Amruteshvar. We’ve got to get into the manuscript department—immediately, tonight.”
By now Saul had completely recovered, and a growing resolution showed in his face. “But how are we going to get into the Institute now?” he asked.
“I have a key,” Nada said. “Bhave gave it to me when the first manuscript was still there, so that I would feel safer. The guard will be asleep, and even if he sees us we’ll probably be able to reassure him. We’ll need Amruteshvar—I’m sure he’s about to appear out of nowhere at any moment anyway. Yoo-hoo, Amruteshvar! You can come out now! And I feel like we should at least tell Shyamala—I feel like it and I don’t feel like it, because this will be mortally dangerous, but she would never forgive me if I didn’t give her the choice, and there’s justice in that.”
“Is there anything we should bring?” asked Saul, “Like, garlic, holy water, a figurine of Ganapati? I guess a crucifix wouldn’t be very effective.”
“Very funny,” said Nada, smiling. “Actually, I need you to come with me mainly for comic relief.”
They both laughed.
Nada glanced at Kamala, expecting that at least a little of their sudden levity would have communicated itself to her. But Kamala looked even more distressed than she had a moment ago. Something new seemed to be agitating her, something other than the danger that Nada and the others were about to face.
“Kamala,” said Nada in Marathi, concerned, comforting. “Don’t be afraid. It’s true that this will be dangerous, but we will survive, and win. Amruteshvar is very powerful, and now, with this new weapon, this second manuscript, we can’t possibly fail. We will certainly destroy the vetala. Within hours it will be all over, all these years of fear and suffering.”
Kamala shook her head and looked down, and Nada was shocked to see tears. Kamala had always been so quiet and reserved: although Nada had always felt the depth of her love for her husband and Nada, she had never seen her openly display such strong emotion, and this sight was almost as frightening and ominous to her as Saul’s terrible appearance minutes before.
“Nada,” Kamala said softly, hoarsely. “This... this second manuscript... Dr. Kshirasagar... he knew about it.”
Nada stared at her open-mouthed.
Kamala went on, struggling: “He didn’t even tell me... but... I came to know. And he told me never to tell. Because...”
She raised her eyes to look straight into Nada’s.
“Nada... The danger... It’s... very, very great.”
Kamala stepped forward and embraced her tremblingly, with a desperate strength. Nada enfolded the much shorter woman in her arms, and stared ahead, filled with a tumult of love and pity, dry-eyed with dread.
Nada phoned Shyamala. Weeks of Sanskrit vampirology and Nada’s weird behaviour had no doubt sufficiently prepared the young woman for such a bizarre midnight proposal, and she said she would arrive at Yadnya by scooter within the half-hour.
Waiting for her, Nada and Saul sat in silence with Kamala—red-eyed but again outwardly calm—as Saul rapidly read through the Avinashalatacharita, softly murmuring the verses to himself.
When Shyamala arrived, the three of them set out on foot through the deserted streets. At one point, Nada glanced at them, hoping to assess their state of mind, and felt reassured to see that both of them, even Saul, appeared to share her mood of calm determination. From Malati Road they entered the Institute’s grounds by a hidden path which would unavoidably bring them within sight of the guard�
��s post in front of the main building.
And there he was, sitting awake, alarmingly, on his wooden chair, looking towards the empty street not far to their left, but evidently not seeing them, even though Nada had immediately stopped short in the most suspiciously guilty-looking way.
“After clouding the minds of hundreds of witnesses to a demonic bus hijacking, this is nothing,” said Amruteshvar as he stepped out of the leafy darkness on their right. Nada turned and looked at him with complete unsurprise, and all four laughed softly at the absurd predictability of it.
They proceeded round the back of the main building to the door of the south wing, where Nada took out the key, opened the padlock, gently worked back the bolt and opened the door, and softly closed and bolted it behind them when they had all crept inside.
A weak pale glow from a few scattered tube lights outside shone through the windows and revealed the large room and its contents in basic outline.
“Saul, you said you knew where it would probably be?” Nada whispered, thinking of the guard in front and the groundskeepers’ colony not far behind the south wing.
“It will be with the C manuscripts, if it’s in the same form as the copy you have. I’ve never seen it, only a reference to it in some long-forgotten catalogue when I was looking for something else. The C’s are over here, in this cabinet.”
“It won’t be there,” said Shayamala in a voice that struck Nada as weirdly hard and cold. “I’ve seen it before. It’s smaller, it’s with the D’s, over here.” She turned on a flashlight and began to move in that direction.
“You’ve seen it before?” said Nada, in a whisper sharpened by incredulity. “Shyamala, why the hell didn’t you ever tell me?”
“It’s here,” repeated Shyamala as if Nada had said nothing, standing in front of one of the heavy wooden cabinets and directing the flashlight’s beam through the glass onto a red cloth-bound bundle well above her head.
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