Smiling at his games, she said, “Enough of your pranks. It isn’t fair. If all four of your faces want me at the same time, what am I supposed to do? I’m a one-faced woman. Cut it out. It’s too much.” She stiffened her neck and pulled her face back. Guarding her lips with her hand, she curved her eyebrows and gave him a sharp look, in a pose of charming anger. This excited him even more.
Brahma bent her face forcibly to his, pushed her hand away from her lips, and bit her slightly. As pleasure awoke inside her, a soft moan of enchantment slipped from her throat.
The goddess of speech tried to cover up the moment of ecstasy that had overpowered her deep inside. She was a little embarrassed. Looking for a way to get through it quietly, she pretended her lower lip was hurting, and she turned around, as if angry, to prevent him from provoking her further. I, watching from my cage, understood her feelings from her body language. She was pressing her thighs tightly together and closing her eyes. It was a textbook case.
Brahma, thwarted, having lost the initiative, put on a show of anger. Not wanting to reveal his real feelings, he turned to me in my golden cage hanging from a nearby tree. “My little parrot,” he said, “I’m bored. Won’t you tell me a story?”
“How can I tell you a story? You’re God. I’ll listen if you tell one.”
“In that case, listen,” he said. “Once upon a time, there was a city called Kasarapura, Lake Town. A rich place, ruled by a king called Kalapurna. He conquered all other kings by virtue of his incomparable brilliance. When he had come of age, a certain Siddha called Svabhava gave him a unique gem, a splendid bow, and gleaming arrows. The gem was of a deep red color, the arrows inexhaustible, and the bow could win over the god of love himself. Because the giver was so noble, he carried them constantly. A certain king, called Madasaya, happened to enter the kingdom with his wife, Rupanubhuti and his minister, Dhirabhava. Skillfully using his bow, Kalapurna drove out Dhirabhava. Madasaya and his wife surrendered, and the king made them his slaves. They followed his command and performed menial tasks.”
It hardly looks like a thrilling tale at its start—or, for that matter, in what comes later—yet this is the story that must never be told. It has its own rather unsettling riddles built in from the beginning. Sarasvati asks for clarification:
“Ask him what happened to this Kalapurna. Who were his father and mother?” She taught me [the parrot] to say all this, and I asked these questions.
God said, “A woman called Abhinavakaumudi fell in love with him and married him. His father was a lady called Sumukhasatti and his mother was a fellow called Manistambha.”
The goddess laughed and hugged him. “Relax. Your story is all upside down.” She patted him on the back. “A male mother and a female father? That’s what their names imply.” She couldn’t stop laughing. “Tell me more.”
Brahma, overjoyed and encouraged, hugged her back. With his four faces, one by one, he kissed her, drinking at her lips, twisting his neck into position over and over and stroking her cheeks and neck. One of his faces bit her a little hard, and she showed anger. “You never know when to stop,” she said. “Enough of this. Tell me what happened to the hero of your story.”
So Brahma continues, gently teasing out a conventional, rather pallid story about the ups and downs of courtly politics in this King Kalapurna’s city. The details are available in chapter 5. And since the goddess Speech is, as we might expect, very well versed in what she calls “the craft of words” (vaco-racana-kauśalamu, 5.44) and thus perfectly able to see through her husband’s intention, she has no difficulty in instantly decoding the entire story as an allegorical restatement about the lovers’ games the two were playing that day on the shores of the heavenly lake. Kalapurna, the hero, whose name means “moon,” turns out to be the reflection of Sarasvati’s moon-like face in the water. His odd parentage, with a male mother and female father, has a similar poetic and linguistic explanation—and so on through the entire plot of Brahma’s narrative. After Sarasvati’s lengthy exegesis of her husband’s text, she forces him to acknowledge the correctness of her reading.7
But this is, after all, only the beginning. When God speaks, his words become reality. When he tells a story, this story must exist in some time and space. Decoding will only take us, like Sarasvati, so far. The mere uttering of the words is a creative act with existential consequences. It is also a form of playing. Formally, this kind of play is strongly linked to the technique of śleṣa, the paronomastic “bitextual” mode of punning and linguistic superimposition we mentioned earlier with reference to Suranna’s other work, the Rāghava-pāṇḍavīyamu. Śleṣa, literally an “embrace,” conflates two or more levels of perception, expression, or experience. In the present case, as Sarasvati at once perceives, the śleṣa extends systematically throughout the whole of Brahma’s text; each element corresponds to a moment or movement in the field of force between her and her husband. In actual fact, there are three levels operative here, all somehow congruent. First, there is the literal level of the story about Kalapurna, King in Kramuka-kanthottarapuram, Beyond-Smooth-Neck Town. Then, we have the encoded narration of what passed between the god and goddess in the palace, perfectly correlated to some external or objective sequence of intentions and events, and even incorporating a hiatus or silence between the opening of the story and its continuation after the successful episode of the quadruple kiss. Such silence may be a necessary component of any articulated sequence. But the names of nearly all the dramatis personae in Brahma’s story have, in themselves, a much wider resonance; thus we find people named “One’s Own Nature,” “My Heart,” “Love of Beauty,” “Sense of Pride,” and so on. So, either overriding or underlying the correspondence between act and linguistic report is a more properly allegorical level that appears to relate to various epistemic or metalinguistic processes: here Brahma, whose intentionality may, after all, be quite different from Sarasvati’s and also entirely opaque to her understanding, may be saying something about the experience of form, about aesthetic perception, about a natural mode of being or becoming, about empathic identification. Suranna’s God is a philosopher who uses carefully selected words. Add to this, if you like, the fact that the central “hero” of the story, Kalapurna, is himself a double reflection, from face to crystal pillar to the water of the pond; and remember that he is also, at bottom, so to speak, a pun. But the true poignancy of this multiple conflation arises from the presence of yet another, critical level.
In a world where words have weight and consequence, where words shape or actually create worlds, śleṣa is never trivial. It generally presumes a process of congruence among levels of being; more specifically, in the present case, it suggests that the story in Brahma’s mind, once clothed in words, is to be lived out in some still more objectified domain, and not only in the immediate setting by the lake in heaven. Suranna’s novel is largely about this transition from godly speech into lived human experience and about the awareness that is achieved when this transition is internalized and understood. Its heroes will find their place within the skeletal text of Brahma’s playful tale. Indeed, this form of self-revelation recurs regularly, in different intensities, in Suranna’s book. Again and again a story is told, and suddenly someone who is listening to it unexpectedly recognizes himself or herself and says: “This is my story. It differs not in the least from what you are telling us. I know it because I have lived it. You are describing me, but until this moment I did not know who I was. It is all condensed into that one, total word.”
This experience could almost be seen as defining the condition of being human, or, perhaps, of being aware, of having and knowing a self. It applies no less to us, the readers or listeners “outside” the text, than to the characters fully within it. We are living in a story that God has told—actually, to be precise, we are repeating the story, which is an intradivine conversation between parts of God’s self or selves—and, although we in some sense already know the main coordinates of this text, we do not k
now that we know it. Moreover, unless the story is told, always by someone else, we can never discover ourselves. This is true for Sarasvati, as it is true for Kalapurna, and it must be true for us. It is always a matter of recognition. As the Russian poet Mandelstam says, seemingly recapitulating the widespread Indian theme, “Everything existed of old, everything happens again, and only the moment of recognition is sweet.”
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How does all this work out in the novel? Perhaps the central point is the lack of isomorphism between the god-spoken story, which already contains all who unconsciously are living it out, and their subjective experience. No character experiences the story in anything like a schematic manner; his or her perspectives always emerge in the gap between the bare structure and the rich exfoliation of that structure moment by moment. Brahma himself hints at this inevitable transformation as the story becomes manifest in reality: “The story,” he tells Sarasvati, “will expand a little into branch-stories, depending on the listeners and the context” (śrotṛ-janâpekṣânusarambuna, 5.61). Expansion (vistāra), here, actually suggests transformation: as the narrative embodies itself, each name acquires new meaning—sometimes more than one meaning, depending on context—and the events ramify in unexpected ways while retaining the lineaments of the prophesied frame. Words, that is, retain their canonical shape and phonetic structure even as their semantics shift into new spaces. Each time someone hears or repeats these words, they have a new, contextually appropriate meaning. For example, in Brahma’s story there is the minor figure of a king called Madasaya, “My Heart”—a meaningful nuance in the complex dialogue between Brahma and his beloved wife. But when this very Madasaya turns out to be an almost autistic king totally ruled by his cunning minister, it takes a moment of poignant revelation to bring out the true meaning, for him, of his own name. After the four young pandits, Vedas One through Four, manage to steal into his presence and explain to him how real scholars were being driven away from the palace,
The king was ashamed that he had allowed himself to be influenced by the weakness of his priest and had therefore turned away scholars deserving of respect. “That’s probably why people call me Madasaya—Deluded Heart,” he said. “Just look how I behaved. Swayed by the priest, I couldn’t see my own scholars.” [6.168]
The name, phonetically identical with that given by Brahma but reflecting a different parsing of the Sanskrit compound, suddenly reflects an entirely new reality. This kind of shift in meaning occurs regularly throughout the novel.
So we are living in a divinely framed tale that we, at best, perceive dimly, and that even God himself, the only one who knows it completely, cannot fully predetermine. The details, the meanings, the experience, the relationships and connections—all these unfold in a contingent manner and with an astonishing range of shifting perspectives. The story itself changes as it takes place. This perception, so subtly worked out in precise and believable ways, allows for great psychological depth and penetrating insights.
Take, for example, the relationship between the two primary figures, Kalabhashini and Manikandhara. Incidentally, neither of these two appear, under these names, in Brahma’s master-narrative; they embody the prehistory of Madhuralalasa and Kalapurna, respectively. Yet, in effect, the novel is their story. It is not so much Madhuralalasa and Kalapurna’s love and marriage that provide a central axis for the story—although the last two and a half chapters of the book do focus on this theme, in a specific manner that we analyze below. This axis is rather formed by the strangely oblique relationship between Kalabhashini and Manikandhara. Their story is one of conflated confusions, projections, and superimpositions that, taken together, describe the adventure of discovering one’s love.
Kalabhashini is a courtesan—therefore, knowledgeable about sex and free to fall in love. Ostensibly, from the very opening of the novel, she is infatuated with Nalakubara, the handsome, divine companion of Rambha, the most beautiful courtesan of the gods. With single-minded determination, she schemes to find a way to make love to Nalakubara. Effectively, this requires that she assume Rambha’s bodily form—a gift she extracts from her teacher, the sage Narada. Manikandhara, seemingly absorbed in Yoga and meditation on God, is easily diverted from this course by Rambha, sent by a jealous Indra, king of the gods, to seduce him. A shocking story of duplicates and lookalikes unfolds from this point. Manikandhara makes love to Rambha until she, at the height of passion, calls out the name of her “real” beloved, Nalakubara. Deeply hurt in his sexual ego, Manikandhara takes on the form of Nalakubara, by the power he has acquired in Yoga, and returns to Rambha. In the middle of their lovemaking, he hears Kalabhashini’s cry and rushes off to save her. She, however, has by now assumed Rambha’s shape, and in this form makes love with Manikandhara-as-Nalakubara. Has she then achieved her life’s goal?
Yes and no. She thinks she is with her longed-for lover. Only later, as the duplicates confront one another—and later still, when the story is retold at the temple of the Lion-Riding Goddess, when both Kalabhashini and Manikandhara confess to their disguises—does it transpire that she was deluded in the surface identification. But this moment of truth actually produces a much deeper recognition and reveals the latent, mostly unconscious search for the truly desired partner. A twisted path has led to a straight conclusion. At the Lion-Rider’s temple, Kalabhashini herself states the conclusion that she has arrived at through such devious ways. She is speaking to Manikandhara, whom she suddenly sees in an entirely new light:
My mind is at rest. I was worried all along, wondering who that ugly-minded man [that is, the pseudo-Nalakubara] could be who made love to me by tricking me. Now I have nothing to regret. Don’t think your love was something I didn’t want. I thought I wasn’t worthy of you, and I didn’t know your mind. So I turned my heart away whenever I saw you. You’ll never know how much I was captivated by your arresting beauty, your superb music, your perfection in every way. You made me happy all the time. Only my heart knows. There’s no point in talking about it all at this point.
You know what else? Once when I saw you, the name Manigriva came to my mind. It’s very much like your name. There’s that story about how Narada cursed him and his older brother to become huge trees. I kept thinking about that. As a result of that scare, my desire to enjoy your body completely disappeared, as if I’d sworn an oath. From that time on, my mind turned toward Nalakubara. He resembles you to some extent. It was some terribly inauspicious moment that I set my eyes on him. I was focused only on the external form. I thought I was making love to Nalakubara, but actually it was you. I was incredibly lucky. It was like being pushed off the roof and landing on a bed of flowers.
So ultimately, and mostly unknown to herself, Kalabhashini was fulfilled in love, though only in the course of making love to her longed-for lover in the guise of the man she thought she was in love with. She even has an explanation, certainly worthy of Freud, to offer for the initial suppression of her feelings for Manikandhara. It remains only to add that Manigriva—the interfering association that diverted Kalabhashini’s attention from Manikandhara—is the name of another son of Kubera’s, like Nalakubara, the ersatz beloved. We will return to this point.
As for Manikandhara, a very similar, complementary conclusion will apply. For an extended, passionate moment, he thought he wanted Rambha—and had attained her. Yet when he heard a woman scream and immediately rushed to the rescue, did he not unconsciously identify the voice as Kalabhashini’s—a voice he had heard over many years of musical practice in Dvaraka? His leaving Rambha, for whose sake he had “become” Nalakubara, and his response to Kalabhashini’s call reveal the more profound desire. He confirms this surmise himself:
“Let me confess. I was afraid of Narada, so I never let anybody know. My mind was on you all the time, all those years, during our music lessons. At last, my dream came true. I was lucky.” (4.16)
The two lovers have found one another through indirection, a rather long and intricate process of disguise a
nd conflation; and they are, at this point, also about to lose one another again. But the indirection is in no way incidental to the statement about love. In fact, it seems to be at the very core of the psycho-physical experience of loving. The compounded mistakes both lovers make are, in fact, what eventually bring them to one another. Desire fulfills itself, in this perspective, precisely through and because of displacement. A strikingly similar theme turns up in Suranna’s great predecessor, Peddana, where human generativity seems to depend upon some such process of impersonation and sexual delusion.8
Suranna’s implicit theory of human loving requires a sense of a many-layered mind that is often opaque to itself. Look again at the process that leads Manikandhara and Kalabhashini to one another. Initially, both love one another without recognizing this. Both suppress their love out of fear, real or imagined, of being punished or cursed (by Narada). There is something more to this mostly unconscious fear. Narada is famous as a trouble-maker who feeds off others’ quarrels; but in the present case—as in nearly all cases in the classical mythology—the strife he generates ultimately aims at producing self-knowledge and self-realization in the participants. Suranna offers a deep reading of this mechanism. On the surface, it appears as if Narada wanted to humble Rambha, who offended him by boasting of her beauty and, as its direct result, her lover Nalakubara’s undying love for her. To this end, Narada sets up a complex scheme, in which Rambha finds herself faced with severe competition from her own double—as does Nalakubara. But the deeper aim of this entire episode has little to do with Rambha and Nalakubara. It has everything to do with Kalabhashini and Manikandhara, who can discover one another—or, more precisely, their abiding love for one another—only in this way.
Narada’s plan is perfectly calculated, as we see from the moment he grants Kalabhashini the ability to assume another woman’s form. Listen to the way the boon is formulated: “Now you will happily make love to the man you wanted, a man so beautiful that he could win Rambha’s heart. Trust me. Go home.” Like every other such pregnant statement throughout the novel, this one is precisely worded, with an internal ambiguity that allows it to mean different things as the context develops and a deeper awareness comes into play. As Manikandhara himself rightly points out at the moment of full recognition, the wording clearly suggests that Kalabhashini would realize her love for someone she already desired, someone similar in form and beauty to Nalakubara, Rambha’s lover (munnu nīv’ātmalo gorinaṭṭi kāntu rambhā-manoharâkāru).
The Sound of the Kiss Page 23