The Vetala

by Phillip Ernest

  “Of course you can be here,” she said to him gently, on the first day, as he stood before her with Nada, his face suffused with an agony of inexpressible guilt. “Anyone who loves Nada is forever welcome in our house.” And Nada had laid her hand comfortingly on his shoulder, and looked at Kamala with silent gratitude.

  Although Avinash’s humanity was now obvious in every way, the nature of his particular human character remained, as yet, unknown.

  Except to Nada. Nada knew him, and had known him, really, for twenty-five years in this lifetime alone, since Dr. Avinash Chandrashekhar had not been merely the puppet of Manyu the possessing spirit. This was the mystery of the thing: that Manyu, Rage (like King Nala’s Kali, Confusion), had been both self and other, both own and alien—just like any human passion, but more so.

  When King Nala wavered again and again between abandoning and staying with Damayanti, the wife whom he loved and whose life he had destroyed along with his own, he was struggling with the Confusion that had possessed him. But his confusion was real, and it was his. Likewise, Avinash’s cruel infatuation with Nada and murderous jealousy of Zoran were not so much false impositions on a helpless human host as demonically distorted and exaggerated forms of true love.

  In the weeks when Nada was working with Amruteshvar and Shyamala on the translation of the Amrutajijnasa, her increasingly vivid dreams began to humanize Avinash and illuminate the tragic paradox of the vetala that the text described. During the long gap between Avinash’s hijacking of the bus and his reappearance in the manuscript department, he became real enough for Nada to fall in love with him. She realized that this love was the reawakening to consciousness of a passion that she had first felt when she was Lata, but her subjective identification with her ancient original took more time, deepening over the weeks as her story appeared to her again and again in a more and more integrated and literal form.

  And other tragic love stories began to break through in flashes, which she knew must also be hers and Avinash’s, in other incarnations over the centuries. Though her identification with these was even murkier, they overwhelmed her with a vertiginous sense of the depth of time and fate behind their love, and of the inexorability of the evil that had seized Avinash.

  Since the moment of that evil’s expulsion, the flow of memory had been increasing hour by hour. By now, she simply was Lata, fully and consciously, and was rapidly recovering countless other persons she had been over the centuries, and other Avinashes she had hopelessly loved.

  For him, she knew, the recovery was different, a reclaiming rather than a recollection: he had been fully conscious of the whole centuries-long history since his adolescence, but that memory, like his whole personhood, was experienced as something not quite his own, obscurely withheld from him by some alien occupier whose face he had never seen but whose silently threatening authority he had always felt. With the evaporation of that authority, he had, with violent immediacy, come into sole ownership of a self which spanned the better part of a millennium.

  The change of perspective was terrifyingly disorienting, and he seemed to cling all the more to their love as the one great sure fact in his life. They hung on to each other, as he struggled to accept responsibility for an often terrible legacy of actions for which he had not been fully responsible at the time, and she was buffeted by wave upon wave of returning lifetimes which threatened to sweep her into madness.

  “Lata... Nada,” he would say to her, anguished, “tell me again... that it’s over, that we’re together again, forever. And tell me... that it wasn’t me... that it wasn’t

  really me, alone, who did those terrible things, to you, to everyone.”

  And she would reply, kissing his cheek, “Avinasha... Avinash... We haven’t been ourselves for so long. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t our fault, or if it was, it was so long ago, so many lifetimes ago, that no one could blame us for it. We’ve suffered enough. We are who we are.”

  The easy part was explaining their new relationship to others: they were simply a couple of indologists who had known each other professionally for many years and had in the natural course of events fallen in love. Nada’s parents, who were only vaguely familiar with her professional life and had heard nothing specific about a Dr. Avinash Chandrashekhar, were very happy to hear that she had finally reached the far shore of her long mourning for Zoran and allowed herself to love again.

  Indological friends who had seen something of her nasty relations with Avinash over the years were merely amused by the news of their liaison and engagement, since the development of a professional rivalry into a passionate affair was hardly unknown or psychologically inexplicable.

  Saul and Shyamala, of course, were different: they had in effect been the witnesses at Nada’s incredible marriage, and had thereby become her deepest intimates, a natural culmination of her lifelong friendship with Saul and her new one with Shyamala.

  As for Avinash’s relatives, they seemed to wonder what Nada had done to him: he had always been such an asshole before, and now, overnight, he wasn’t. But his dramatic transformation was easily understood as the natural effect of a great love, and Nada was accordingly welcomed with a warmth that a conservative Karnataka Brahmin family would not otherwise have granted to such an appallingly unconventional choice of bride on the part of their difficult son—even if she was a self-described “intellectual Hindu convert” and could easily “pass” in a sari and more than hold her own in Sanskrit conversation with the most learned of them.

  There was also the supernatural rapidity with which she attained native fluency in Kannada, which could not really be fully explained by the fact that she was now using it more than she had ever had the opportunity to do before.

  “It’s kind of like I’m remembering it from a past life,” she would say, laughing, when they expressed their astonishment and admiration. And Avinash would smile and look down.

  Avinash’s announcement that he would finally seek a permanent position as a Sanskrit professor—which he was certain to win easily either in India or the West—consoled his parents for years of professional waywardness in which he had squandered his dazzling gifts and achievements on aimless postdocs and promising assistant professorships that he had abandoned before allowing himself to take root.

  Despite the unexpectedness and lateness of her

  request, the University of Zagreb was more than happy to grant Nada a sabbatical year, given that she had never requested one before, being a notorious workaholic with no apparent personal life.

  By the standards of academia, Avinash and Nada were still young and beautiful enough to be the superstar couple of their field. Yet their plan was to combine their resources so that they could wind down their careers to the minimum and spend as much time as possible together. Because already, though only in their forties, they were worn out with their indescribable secret tragedies and sufferings, and ready to make an early retirement to the nearest viable equivalent of life’s final restful ashrama—a word that means both a hermitage and a stage of life.

  If Avinash were to get a professorship somewhere in Europe, Nada could continue to work at the University of Zagreb in the downgraded role of assistant professor, which would allow her to stay with him most of the time, travelling to Zagreb perhaps once a week. She had a modest house in the Croatian countryside that she had inherited from her grandmother, and they would find another near his native Bengaluru. And Nada knew they would always be welcome at Yadnya in Pune. Kamala would always be family: indeed, Avinash and Nada were almost the only family she had.

  Thus, they could keep one foot in each of their homelands, dividing the year between Europe and India, as Nada had done throughout her professional life. And they were both ready for such a division of labour:

  unlike Avinash, Nada had had a steady academic career throughout her adult life, and being single and parsimonious, had already saved almost enough to retire, while Avi
nash’s career, and even his life, were in a sense just beginning. Yet even he saw academic work as more of a necessity than a vocation, and Nada knew that he looked forward, like her, to shifting his professional focus from research to the less intellectually engaging duty of teaching.

  “Yeah, I somehow feel that we’ve both perhaps had enough of research on obscure ancient texts and forgotten histories,” she said once, explaining their plans to his family, and she and Avinash laughed, while their listeners smiled uncertainly, puzzled by their secret humour. At this point, their real heart’s desire was to share what they knew and loved, reading beloved books like the Mahabharata and Ramayana together. And maybe, too, there were even books for them to write together. They both felt within themselves a vague stirring of something that they would eventually need to say, and not in the international English of the academy. Something inspired by their own itihasa, their own history, perhaps. Something, perhaps, like their own tale of King Nala and Damayanti.

  As Nada eventually came to understand, Avinash’s relatives were all the more inclined to rejoice in the salvation of their lost son because they were at the same time dealing with a harrowing tragedy that perfectly counterbalanced it: the disappearance without a trace of his brother Amruteshvar.

  Through various embarrassed allusions and accidental references on the part of family members, Nada and Avinash eventually figured out that on the day before the showdown in the manuscriptorium, Amruteshvar had sent a devastating email, in Kannada, to his parents. Nada and Avinash insisted that they be allowed to read it, and this was reluctantly granted to them.

  I have heard of my brother’s outrageous decision to marry a foreign woman. This, for me, is the limit.

  I do not understand why my consistent lifelong devotion to my family and my duty has never won me the concern that you have always shown for my irresponsible—and, frankly, demonic—brother. I admit that he has always been more dynamic and charismatic than me, but this dynamism is superficial, and smells of evil, and the superior giftedness it seems to reflect is illusory.

  Why has my extraordinary career as a traditional scholar and an academic always been implicitly compared to his fragmentary achievements, and found wanting? I have sacrificed to my work even the legitimate possibility of marriage, while he has notoriously corrupted himself with unacceptable women both Indian and foreign. And now this.

  I know only too well how this announcement of his marriage will be greeted: with relief and celebration. But I will not be joining in the celebration this time, as in the past when everyone has rejoiced at each of his new undertakings as a hopeful first step towards self-rehabilitation. This is the end of my self-abnegation on behalf of my unworthy twin, who has always capitulated to a dark side that I have turned away from with natural ease.

  I have never lacked for professional opportunities, and have repeatedly turned down lucrative offers to perform rituals for rich diasporic Hindus in America because of the contaminating effect that travel outside of the country would have on me in the eyes of our family’s large conservative element—an effect that, again, my brother has largely escaped. Now, I will not hold myself back any longer. I will go to America, perhaps even marry.

  In any case, it is no longer any of your business. You will never hear from me again.

  Reading this, Nada felt a searing pity for the Chandrashekhars, who were clearly still as traumatized by this brutal loss of one son as they were overjoyed at the unbelievable recovery of the other which followed immediately after. Amruteshvar’s farewell had taken them completely at unawares, but in retrospect, Avinash and Nada could see that he had been preparing the groundwork for this disappearance for years—and perhaps it had also been simply the inexorable working-out of his nature and destiny, as with Avinash. Nada’s new family told her that they now remembered how Amruteshvar had again and again complained bitterly of the unfairness of the double standard by which he and his brother were so unequally judged. In recent years he had also often mentioned his research into the possibility of living as a performer of rituals in America, and issued veiled threats to make the move that he must now have actually made.

  In a sense, Amruteshvar had not died, either literally or through self-exile. In this birth, as in all their previous ones going back to the beginning, everyone had seen the brothers as two facets of the same man, gifted in the same ways and to the same degree, the difference being that Avinash’s nature was touched with fire, with an edge of intensity that constantly threatened to destabilize him, but which also carried the possibility of a nobility which Amruteshvar had always resentfully felt to be just beyond his grasp. But in death he had attained it, ennobling not only himself, but both of them. In the reborn Avinash, both Amruteshvar’s steadfast goodness and Avinash’s fierce brilliance realized and perfected each other at last.

  And in fact, Nada and Avinash did not feel that Amruteshvar was gone. One day, as they sat together on plastic chairs in the small yard behind Yadnya, in the evening shade of the ashoka and mango trees, Nada said, stroking his hand, “You know, love, I sometimes wonder if, by sacrificing himself, he didn’t just free the three of us from our tragedy. I wonder if he didn’t free himself entirely—from the cycle of rebirth, the world of suffering and illusion. I wonder if it wasn’t his moksha, his liberation. I mean, what he did... embodied and realized all his vast intelligence and insight...” (She felt her eyes shine with unshed tears.) “It wasn’t just about the vetala. It was about life, about everything. It was the culmination of a great soul’s struggle with existence.”

  And Avinash replied, “I... I think so too. But often... I also feel that somehow, at the same time, his individual consciousness has survived. I... I know you feel it too,” he said, looking into her eyes, “I can feel that you feel it too—that he’s somehow still here with us, around us, or... within me, that he’s somehow merged with me, and that we’ve finally become the single person it always seemed that we ought to have been. That’s how it feels to me. And such a thing is not unknown in the literature, the tradition. It’s happened before.”

  “And anyway,” she said, laughing, “nothing that has happened to us was possible. So anything is.” She squeezed his hand, with a look of serious, deep feeling. “Yes. He’s here.”

  Saul returned to his room the very next morning after the night in the scriptorium, and though he and Shayamala were able to report that the groundskeepers had cleaned up the mess, neither had heard anyone say a word about what was thought to have happened. Nor was anything reported in the newspapers.

  A few days later, Nada emailed Vimala Bhave, ostensibly to tell her that the edition of the Amrutajijnasa was now complete, but really in the hope of learning something about the reaction to the scene of destruction they had left at the Institute. Vimala made no reference to it, beyond this possibly cryptic remark:

  “This is happy news indeed, which marks the end of a long and difficult struggle for you and all those who have worked to solve the mystery of the vetala. May he rest in peace!”

  Some days after they began to venture forth from Yadnya, Nada and Avinash went back to the Institute for the first time since that night. This was their furthest journey from the house thus far. At first they had not planned to end up there, but when they found that they had reached Tilak Institute Road, they realized that they were ready, and turned left towards the old hermitage.

  When they got there, they sat on one of the benches in front of the library. It was a sunny, hot, beautiful post-monsoon day, but the rains had not yet stopped completely, and the grounds were still as luxuriantly green as they had been weeks before. Saul had long since vacated his room in the guest house and flown back to New York to prepare for the new academic year. Shyamala was now tutoring undergraduates at the university, and was not coming here as often. The few scholars and groundskeepers they saw from time to time came and went without noticing them.

  After a time they got
up and strolled arm-in-arm along the paved path. In front of the library’s second, disused entrance, ash from Amruteshvar’s funeral pyre was still visible on the pavement and ground. A gleam of light in the grass caught Nada’s eye, and she stopped and bent to look.

  It was Amruteshvar’s ring. Jewelless and faded though it was, it was still a miracle that it had somehow not yet been found by someone else. Nada picked it up, and they wept together for the first time since that night. Deep and terrible as were the emotions that had buffeted them in the intervening weeks, it was not until now, in the vicarious presence of the tragic hero to whom they owed their love and freedom, that they had felt safe enough to let themselves go.

  Avinash put the ring on, and they embraced. They knew that this had been their last incarnation apart, and that nothing would ever separate them again. At some time in the inconceivable future, events in a shared life they could not now imagine would bring them hand-in-hand to the final liberation that awaits all souls. But for now, the one they were living at this moment was as good as forever.

  Glossary

  Words are Sanskrit unless otherwise stated. The common romanized form of most words is followed by a more precise transliteration with diacritical marks, which are only occasionally used within the novel’s text.

  akshamala (akṣamālā): “necklace of eleocarpus seeds”, a sacred, auspicious object

  amṛta (pronounced amrut or amruta in Marathi): “immortal, not dead”; also the name of the divine nectar of ancient story

  Amrutajanmakatha (Amṛtajanmakathā): “Story of the Birth of the Nectar”, a fictitious Sanskrit text

  Amrutajijnasa (Amṛtajijñāsā): “Inquiry into the Undead”, a fictitious Sanskrit text