by KUBOA
Can such a story really happen? Well, it certainly happened in the private narrative Jaliya made for himself as he was sublimely swept away by that cinematic moment. Yet, why didn’t he tell her that storyline? Why not tell her that ‘alternative’ he had sketched in his thoughts? Jaliya’s purpose we may assume was to give expression to a moment that he had been taken into by the magic of cinema, and make Rachana feel drawn to the experience he had become part of. Whereas his alternative was a ‘private rendition’ which is not as fully lived. It was after all in his own mind. And not beyond. What credence could it have unless told as a story of his own? These we may assume lie in the subconscious of Jaliya. If for a moment we are to think of giving a visual dimension in our minds to the final moment in Jaliya’s private version of how Tolstoy’s and Jane’s story ends, it may develop a moment that is in complete contrast to the final moment actually shown in the film, of Tolstoy’s eyes beholding the sight of Jane. She gallops the horses of her carriage to charge faster and faster along the road through a forested terrain in Siberia. He watches her. From a distance in the woods, hidden, unknown to her. He is invisible to her, beholding her departing sight destined for the distances beyond him. And in this final moment, Tolstoy, a criminal in exile, lights a cigarette and keeps watching Jane almost as if fulfilling a secret vow.
Rachana hears the sound of his breath. She realises that it is the first time she hears it consciously. The pause of his words has made his breathing audible to her ears.
“Jaliya...” She turns to him in the darkness “...tell me a story.”
She wants to be taken away into a stream of scenery unfolding from his voice. She wants to move out of the darkness through his words.
He has been called upon to be a raconteur. To take her into a landscape which he is at liberty to create at his will. And what story then will he tell her? Of his own life? Of the lives of so many countless ones such as he and her? Or perhaps of people and events that could only have the chance of being true in a story narrative...
“Close your eyes Rachana...”
...He wants her to take in his words and give them life as her own visions...
“...Think of this story as like a movie...”
...Rachana is free to give the heroes and heroines and their antagonists the faces and demeanours that will make them best suited to her visual tastes...
“...Think that a story of images will flow just for you...”
...And thus begins his story for Rachana.
“...In a time before known time, there was an island. Mystically shrouded in mists, of both heaven and earth...”
An island, he tells her, believed to have formed when a slice of the golden face of Mount Kailas had fallen to the ocean after the trident of Shiva struck against it. This island, he says to her, with all its enchantments had become the abode to four tribes of peoples, whose feats were miraculous and awe inspiring to even some of the gods, who began to envy them and the abundances of wealth they enjoyed that sprang from the heavenly properties possessed by the land...
“...They were called the Helas. Four nations that became a single state, and were called the ‘Siu Hela’, Siu meaning ‘four’...”
...They had been people capable of great mysticism and superhuman feats, yet lived in absolute harmony, with each of the four nations having its own system of laws and norms that applied to every one of its nationals regardless of where they inhabited the island. Jaliya tells Rachana that it was not a system based on principles of territory that made a person subjected to a particular law of that island; it was their kinship to their respective nationhood...
“...The worshippers of the ocean and spirits of the waters, they were the nation of Naga; a people of a complexion of soothing light blue...The sky worshippers, who had their dwellings mostly in mountain regions, who harnessed the energy of starlight and prayed to the wind and the cosmos were the Deva...Those whose deities manifested in the mightiness of great stone boulders and worshipped the durableness of iron were the nation of Raksha ...And the nation that worshipped the earth as the mother of all beings and believed fire as the ultimate enigma holding all secrets of power and life, was the Yaksha...”
Rachan envisions these fantastic people who had inhabited a land in an age unclasped by time. It is beyond myth she thinks. It is whatever Jaliya will allow his words to create in her mind. For her to behold and be witness to.
“...In the middle of their island was a magnificent lake where water lilies of five colours bloomed in the morning and folded their petals to sleep at sunset, and five nocturnal lotuses of different hues would open to the moonlight... and this vast lake which was almost an ocean, had at its middle an islet on which no one of the four nations had ever set foot...”
The shades of the water blossoms, the ones that open to the tender rays of sunlight and the kinds that open to caresses of moonbeams take shape in Rachana’s mind. She tries to drift into such settings of morn and night which blend into each other as reflections on rippling water. It is not the time of these happenings that matter to her but the beauty that beholds her as she lets Jaliya’s words become images...
“...One night, this distant islet came alight as a spark of fire from the heavens fell on it...”
...She pictures this moment as a beautiful mystery violating nature’s norms of night and morn. Imagining the light of heaven coursing a fleeting dawn of crimson...
“...It was learnt by the wise seers of the four nations of the state of Siu Hela that what had descended was a gemstone of unimaginable power and indescribable beauty...”
...He tells her of how the heads of the four nations arriving in regal pageantry to a grand assembly decided that it had been a gift from the gods to the nation that proves to be the most ingenious, and thus worthiest to become its exalted possessor...
“...From then on it was a race between the Nagas, Rakshas, Devas and Yakshas to reach the islet and claim the prize that lay waiting for its destined owner...”
...Each of the nations had begun to build a bridge to reach the little landmass in the middle of the great lake. And as their tensions and enmities grew towards each other, devious acts were perpetrated, for each wanted to have an advantage over the other in the race...
“...As the clashes became more fierce, they decided they would all unite to build just one bridge. A single bridge built in amity to claim the gemstone as a common prize.”
...What will this story be called? Rachana now wants to know this very basic of details...
“Jaliya, what’s the name of this story?”
...The four nations had begun building their bridge. From this point onwards they will not turn back regardless of what the outcomes may be. Whether they will reign together in unity, or fall into dissent allowing treachery and avarice to reign over them.
“It’s called, ‘The bridge to Omunkashyu.’ ”
Omunkashyu...The word pervades in Rachana’s thoughts. It offers itself to her. It offers her its form of sound and takes shape as an image. Thus it begins to gain meaning. It becomes a word she can appropriate.
“The bridge to Omunkashyu.” She says it in a whisper to complement the way Jaliya uttered it to her.
How did this word come into being? This acoustic property? A word coined by Jaliya at Rachana’s behest? Is it a word? Is it a word yet? And are we to believe that such an arbitrary act has now given a new verbal sign for Jaliya and Rachana to communicate with?
“Yes, Omunkashyu. The gemstone they were fated to war over.”
Where does this word come from? Did Jaliya pluck it out of the darkness over his face? Can this arbitrary coinage be justified? Does Jaliya even think of any of these matters? No. He is too preoccupied with narrating the developments of the story to Rachana. Yes, it’s understandable. He has in her a completely faithful audience. But what is interesting at this point to note, now, in the aftermath of Jaliya’s liberty taken in coning a word, is how in this act we may see a certain attrib
ute of modernist fiction. The modern novel was birthed by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun whose novel Sult, which was translated to English as Hunger, presents the wild discursive of a first person narrative that was later dubbed as the narrative technique ‘stream of consciousness’. What is relevant from Hamsun’s novel is that the unnamed narrator lying awake in the absolute pitch darkness of a police station cell, in a ‘deep darkness’, which he says does not even allow him sight of his hand held in front of his eyes, creates a word –Kuboaa. The conditions described by the protagonist prior to this coinage take the reader into the disturbing darkness that encapsulates him. A darkness which he says is a blackness unlike what he had ever seen before. A darkness which he terms as a blackness become an ‘extreme element’, he says ‘no one ever before had noticed’. What can we learn of this when we think of Jaliya and Rachana? Yes, the darkness around them does blanket them into a solitude of sorts. But we may be assured it is unlike what the protagonist of Hamsun’s Hunger experienced in that police station cell. No; in the darkness they sit, there is some sweetness that keeps them wanting it. It is their cover. In a way, it keeps their story real. Because intrusions of light right now can rupture the fabric they are weaving to drape them together. But let’s return to the word of Kuboaa and all the modernism it presented in that dark room as the nameless narrator of Hamsun’s novel lay in his cot, terrified of the darkness that he battled against. Kuboaa. Whatever could it mean? Kuboaa, does the sound of it give any indication? This is precisely what battered the mind of the word’s creator as he sat in that darkness which was a blackness as an ‘extreme element’. Hamsun’s protagonist dismisses that it need not mean something as ‘god’ to be a word that carries a meaning worthy of some sense of exaltation. What could be higher than ‘god’ after all? Yet he dismisses very vehemently that Kuboaa does not have to mean ‘cattle show’ either. Oh yes, this defence he upholds very firmly. Possible meanings of ‘emigration’ and ‘tobacco factory’ are also dismissed. And we must keep in mind that all these possibilities spring up and get rejected in the consciousness of a single man who is in an internal debate within him. ‘Yarn’ as a possible meaning to the word when it comes up spontaneously is rebuffed with a tone of aggression almost, as the narrator claims he has a ‘special aversion’ to its meaning. The narrator of Hunger tells us that the most important thing was his ‘discovery’ or what we may even say was his creation; the word Kuboaa. What it will mean is a secondary matter, and asserts it purely as his prerogative. To define in good time, at his discretion being the rightful creator of the word. What then is Kuboaa suppose to mean? One may never know, for it is left undefined of its signifie or ‘signified’. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, hailed as the father of modern linguistics, claimed through his teachings that a word is made up of two main components or ‘sides’. It has firstly an ‘acoustic image’, or the sound element forming a pattern that has auditory distinction, which is known as the ‘signal’ or the more usually used term –‘signifier’. And then there is what is called the ‘signified’ or the ‘concept’ represented by the ‘signifier’. It is this ‘concept’ that has not been assigned to the ‘discovery’ by Hunger’s narrator. After all, there need not be a ‘signified’ be born simultaneously to Kuboaa, since according to de Saussure, the connection between the two are arbitrary and have no inherent link existent from the point of conception. Therefore it is but convention that governs the meanings of these words.
The words of Jaliya now tell Rachana of how the mystical allure of Omunkashyu began to enflame the hearts of the leaders of the four Hela nations, to break their accord. He tells her how the lustful cravings for possession of power and beauty began the fiery war. As streams of water arose in the form of serpents answering the prayers of the Nagas, mountainous stone boulders became living giants to aid their devotees the Rakshas, and the supplications of the Devas evoked the winds to become arms of death delivering force, while the element of fire moved as wanton waves and walls of destruction to the calls of the Yakshas.
“They became desperate, and resorted to crafts of magic that plagued their whole land with devastation...When stone was brought to life, taking the form of giants moving to come near the precious stone, to claim it, walls of fire rising as high as mountains would wrap them, and under the intense heat the might of stone would shatter... And it seemed the Yaksha nation had been able to lay a final fortification around Omunkashyu, depriving anyone from coming close enough to possess it...Yes Rachana, the winds of the Devas though they blew the fires asunder could not douse them for good... The claimant of the gemstone seemed to be the leader of the Yakshas who was learning the mystical craft of a certain mantra that would make him immune to fire, so that he can walk through it unharmed and claim the prize...The elements themselves seemed to be at war Rachana, and in a final desperate attempt to stop the Yakshas from winning, Virupakkha lord of the Naga nation conjured a great body of water to force through the firewall with his daughter riding inside, having taken the form of a female cobra... This regal creature was to swallow the gemstone and no sooner then was to exit the inferno with the tide sweeping out...”
Jaliya narrates to Rachana how the Naga princess after being bathed in the pulp of blue lotus petals and white sandalwood took the form of a sapphire skinned serpent. She bowed in obeisance to the mighty Virupakkha, her father, and followed him out of his palace that looked out from atop a cliff to the emerald sea.
“...A mountain like column of water rose from the ocean...”
The eyes of the Naga princess, he says, gleamed as though she was witnessing an epiphany, a calling to her own self. The ocean in its boundless vastness was answering to their supplications. And as the incantations of Virupakkha flowed intensely, she realised that the ocean too would have to be paid its dues.
“...She took flight on that river of water moving through the air...”
The saviour, as her father saw her, who would deliver Omunkashyu to him and his nation, moved fearlessly through the flames and claimed the gemstone into her, and rode out with the emerald waters rising skywards to return to whence they came. And as that river, moving serpent like through the air, moved past the terrace of Virupakkha’s palace, he raised his hands in homage to the great waters and bade his beautiful daughter alight to his arms. The royal serpent turned once more to her human form with the gemstone, in all its dazzling glory, held in her hands, for her father’s sight.
“...Her eyes were misty and sorrowful Rachana, they didn’t sparkle as before...”
Omunkashyu had brought great suffering to the Siu Hela. And the princess knew from the moment she saw the ocean deploy a great river to her father’s bidding, it was meant to end the mindless warring.
“...She bade her father farewell with her silent gaze, and rode with the water into the ocean.”
It had been the only way to end the destruction that engulfed their land and its peoples. To her it had been an act of setting balance to the order of things. Of realising the course of destiny. It was a sacrifice, and not a betrayal.
“It ended the suffering in her land.”
“Yes. It was her destiny.”
“And then what became of Omunkashyu?”
“No one knows Rachana. It remains a mystery.”
The word mystery moves out of his lips like a whisper with the likeness of a wisp of hair that moves across the face when touched by a gentle wind. Mystery; Rachana feels the sound of that word hang before her dissipating gently into that comforting darkness. The warmth of his hand just a hair’s breadth away from hers. And she sighs to the silence that now rests around them.
She thinks it is wonderful and strange how sleep has not claimed either of them although the hour should be quite late by now. It has to be the charm of storytelling she thinks, a smile lurking within her. Jaliya now wants to hear her voice come to him past that thin veil of blackness. The warmth of her arm, resting beside his, wafts to him. This sensibility causes him to wa
nt more of her being to manifest against the blackness that deprives them proper sight.
“Rachana.”
“Yes Jaliya?” He loves how she speaks those two words together. It affirms his presence as much as hers. It affirms their togetherness in this innocuous fulsome dark of the night.
“Have you ever thought of becoming a writer? Like your name means?” It isn’t a question in jest, she knows. But more like a probable invitation. To allow her a voice, bespeaking who she is beyond the details of what is seen of her. The world after all may judge of what it sees of us and what we allow it to see of us. What then can we reveal in the darkness of what we are, but cannot be seen as?