“Listen, dear sir,” she whispered in her best conspiring tone, “I’d like to rendezvous with you very much. But not here. I mean, there is my reputation to consider, don’t you think?” She giggled at him, and he winked back. “Why don’t you come to my house next week during the spring festival when everyone will be too drunk to notice. Come at the first watch of the night.”
The minister smacked his lips and snorted like a wild boar. “Next week it is, my love. Ah! I have been waiting for this…” He released her arm and went away whistling.
It was only after the minister departed that Upakosha allowed herself to feel the severity of the situation. She steeled herself for a solution—there was, after all, more than a week to plan. But then things worsened rapidly. The very next day Upakosha went back to her customary place at the river, where she was accosted again before even entering the water. This time it was the sleazy royal chaplain. He did not assault her—that was not his style—but apparently he had seen her with the minister and threatened to expose her immorality. He demanded sexual favors on the spot. She made the same plans with the chaplain, but told him to come on the second watch of the festival night. The very next day beautiful Upakosha was approached on the street before her own house by the head magistrate. The fat official had an evil gleam in his eyes as he touched the woman in an overly familiar fashion. And so Upakosha had to make the same arrangements one more time, but for the third watch of the night.
She cursed her beauty and her loneliness, vowing now to stay inside, away from the greedy eyes of lechers. That same day she sent one of her maidservants to the merchant Hiranyadatta to withdraw money for presents honoring Brahmins. The girl returned after some time, without the money but with the merchant in tow. The man barged inside, displaying his righteous indignation, and said, “Your husband left no money on deposit, madam. How dare you send that servant to me.” Upakosha knew he was lying and merely waited to see what he wanted. And sure enough: “Of course, if madam needs a small loan, I might be able to extend her some credit…But I do require something in return.” The mistress of the house looked at him coldly; she told him to come the following week, on the fourth watch of the spring festival night.
On the night of the spring festival, the prince’s minister arrived as planned, looking as elegant as a hill-station manservant. He was ushered in quietly, his excitement barely contained. However, Upakosha told him that unless he bathed, she would not see him. That seemed exacting but not unreasonable, so he let himself be led off by the maidservants into a pitch-dark back room where he was stripped and given a simple undergarment for his bath. The maids then smeared him from top to bottom with a thick coating of lampblack mixed with fragrant oil, telling him it was a special soap. As they were luxuriously—ever so slowly—rubbing him, the second man, the chaplain, arrived. The minister heard the noise in the front rooms and asked who the guest was. The girls told him that it was a close friend of Vararuchi and an important member of the palace. The minister panicked and begged to be hidden somewhere. It just so happened that a large trunk was conveniently situated nearby, so the naked man was hurriedly ushered inside and told to keep very still.
The chaplain then enjoyed the very same treatment, but before his soaping ended, the magistrate arrived. Then he too was rudely shown into the very same dark trunk with the minister. By the time the merchant was being led into the inner rooms at the last watch of the night, the large trunk hosted three naked members of the royal court. None knew the identity of the others, though all shared a profound desire to escape harm and embarrassment. But the trunk was locked shut.
At the final watch of that romantic night, Upakosha, holding a lamp, led her newest guest—the merchant—to the trunk and said, “Give me the money that my husband has deposited with you for my use.”
Seeing that the room was empty the merchant allowed himself to scoff. “Dear lady, I told you that I would give you that money, but only after you satisfy me.”
The woman responded strangely. “Listen to the words of the merchant Hiranyadatta, O gods.” With those words said, Upakosha put out the lamp and summoned the maids. The merchant was stripped, then covered roughly with the lampblack.
As soon as he was smeared head to foot, the girls shoved him out the door and told him to go home. The man yelled at Upakosha, “You will never get that money now!” However, he slithered home as quietly as a black garden snake, helplessly trying to dodge the dogs that nipped at him. He felt too humiliated to look at his own servants as they scraped and rubbed the sticky lampblack off his entire body.
The next morning Upakosha went to the court of King Nanda, where she was a welcomed guest. She formally accused the merchant of trying to steal her husband’s money. The king summoned the merchant, who appeared promptly, barely dried off from his long wash. As he heard the charge, the merchant looked at his accuser with a contemptuous sneer and responded, “I have nothing belonging to that woman.”
But Upakosha declared immediately that she had witnesses. “Your Lordship,” she said, “when my husband went to perform austerities in the Himalayas, I placed the household deities in a box for safekeeping. They are the witnesses that what I say is true.”
The king agreed to have the trunk brought to court, and Upakosha spoke directly to it. “O gods, tell the court exactly what you heard the merchant say. Speak the truth and then go home. Otherwise I shall either open the box in court or set it on fire.”
The voices coming from the box were heard very quickly and clearly. “Yes, truly, the merchant admitted that he had the woman’s money.” The merchant then threw himself at the king’s feet, confessing his guilt and begging the clemency of the court.
Of course, King Nanda could not control his curiosity about the trunk, so he asked Upakosha’s permission to look inside. She smilingly agreed, and the lock was broken open. Out then came three dark, dazed figures that looked like lumps of coal. Someone yelled suddenly, “Hey look, it’s the prince’s minister…and the chaplain…and magistrate!” They were all nearly naked, cowering in embarrassment. The room exploded in laughter and whistling, while fingers pointed at the scrawny black limbs of the distinguished men. Even the king could not restrain himself and screamed in merriment. After the noise subsided, King Nanda asked Upakosha what it all meant, and she told him about the entire affair.
The king summarily ordered that all four men be deprived of their property and exiled. Then, looking admiringly at the young woman, he announced, “This virtuous woman is my sister. Anyone who harasses her in any way is assaulting the very throne.” He then sent her home, accompanied by an honor guard.
Now that was more like it. My feet were cooling off, and here was Scheherazade with an old man’s voice. I enjoyed not so much the predictable ending as the way the librarian delivered it, playing mischievously with cadence and rhythm.
“I’m glad you liked it,” he said, as he waved his walking stick in the air. It was knotty and rough—bilva wood, I thought. “There are quite a few more of these stories, you know, about resourceful women and their suitors, mothers-in-law and other pesky villains.”
“Still, I have to confess that I find it a strange story to be telling on a pilgrimage. I’m surprised you told it.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s not religious.”
The old man, who was sitting next to me, turned in surprise, as though he had never heard the word “religion” before. He was scratching his chin as he said, “All I promised was to tell you stories that would take your mind off your feet, remember? Did I not keep that promise? And besides, what do you mean by religion? What is a religious story?”
He didn’t seem to be philosophizing or setting me up for an intellectual ambush. I felt comfortable telling him that I thought it was obvious. “A religious story would have to be about God, faith, or salvation. And often, telling it would be an act of worship.” I was thinking about the scroll of Esther on Purim.
“If you
wish, that is precisely what our story is like.”
“What do you mean?”
The old man remained quiet for a few moments and stared at the nearby trees. “There are many ways of putting this, I’m afraid,” he began apologetically. “To begin with we are on a pilgrimage, are we not?” I tried not to show him my face as I grimaced internally, but thankfully he shifted the direction of his argument. “The way I’d like to understand this story, if you’ll bear with me, is this. The woman can be the soul, just like the nymph in ‘The Minister’s Death.’ Her husband would be social morality, the scoundrels are the attachments of the senses to their objects, and the king is the guru. It’s a story about learning to renounce sensual attachments as a first step on the path to salvation. All the mischief and low comedy, that’s just a way of hiding what is truly going on, or at least saving it for those who wish to see…Don’t you think?” He looked at me expectantly.
Two things were clear to me. First, the old man did not improvise this interpretation; he had thought of it previously. And second, by the way he was looking at me now, he did not expect his cleverness to impress me at all. Well, I wasn’t going to let him down. “If you’ll pardon me, sir,” I was speaking with the exaggerated politeness of a smart-ass graduate student, “that’s a crock of buffalo manure. It’s just plain ridiculous. I mean, you’re being completely arbitrary—the woman is the soul! Please!”
The old man laughed, in what looked suspiciously like relief. “Of course it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? The nymph in that other story was clearly a spiritual figure and this woman here is just a…heroine. And the story is obviously about lechery because the characters are lecherous. We know it’s about ingenuity because the woman is ingenious. The boundary between the obvious meaning and the one I gave is plain and simple, no?”
“Damn right it is.”
“Can you then spell out for me just as clearly the exact boundary between what is religious and what is not?”
I started to feel like the cocky chess player who just discovered he had entered a backgammon tournament. But I refused to change course. “I understand what you’re getting at, but the story is still not about religion. Maybe it touches a few religious themes—a lot of stories do—but it is not about religion properly speaking.”
“I can see your mind is made up, and you wish to stick to a distinction you value—I must respect that, of course,” he spoke gravely. “But you might look at how you use certain words and concepts when you think, mostly abstract words like ‘religion’ or ‘philosophy.’ ‘Religion,’ my friend, is an empty word—it stands for nothing whatsoever.”
That made no sense. Sure, I used concepts such as “religion,” or “biology,” or “education”—that was true, but so does everyone. That makes them real—the fact that by convention we know what we mean when we say them to each other. I didn’t even know what “empty” meant coming from him, so I told him so.
The old man answered slowly. “If you think of religion as some thing bounded and distinct from other things, such as lust or disbelief, then you have no idea what it means to have faith or to engage with God. It is as though you favored studying the sciences of life over living. Since I know that this is not the case with you, I must conclude that you simply do not trust your intuitions. You let your categorical mind run your life. And what’s worse,” he added, “you’re spilling the juice out of a good story.”
All of this was too theological for me. I think he noticed because he suddenly apologized for “getting ahead” of himself, by which he meant, of course, me. I have to admit, though, that for once I did feel like a pupil.
A sensation that had been pressing under the surface of my consciousness suddenly floated to the top, and I became aware that my feet were burning again. The ground temperature was well over ninety. Not as bad as hot sand, of course, but the effect of the rest was wearing off for some reason and so was my resistance to the old guide. What had started out as an ambiguous sensation on the first few steps below and then developed into heat now felt like a new blister, though I couldn’t find any. The old man was watching with interest as I inspected my feet for blisters. I was ashamed to let him see my feet; they were so white and soft next to his cracked leathery soles. There were no blisters, but the skin was sensitive to the touch—rubbing my hand over the skin felt exquisite. I sighed, and the old man startled me with a throaty laugh.
“Was that pleasure or pain, that sigh of yours? I think perhaps you should put your shoes back on, my friend. You’ve already climbed enough steps to impress Shiva.”
“No, I’m fine. It doesn’t really hurt.”
“Of course not. I can tell your feet are fine, but there seems to be something else that hurts you, I’ve no doubt about it. I can’t help noticing that something hurts you. You’re sitting there, rubbing your feet, but you appear to be enjoying that. Meanwhile—please stop me if you think I’m intruding—you’re constantly shifting your torso. You straighten your back to a full stretch, then collapse it. You bend right, then left; then you twist one way and the other. The whole time you grimace and sigh. And what’s strangest of all, you don’t even seem to notice doing it! Whatever it is—and I’ll wager it’s your back—you must have had this problem for a very long time.”
I only half listened to him. He had a way of voicing his words so you could make out the thoughts without having to pay attention, as though you had just thought what he said on your own. I suddenly realized that my back was killing me, worse than usual. People would notice my discomfort when it got this bad, but I usually managed to draw their attention to something else. I hated the concern, the empathy, but mostly the advice that invariably followed a discussion of my pain. This seemed different though. The old man showed more interest than empathy and was himself so weather-beaten, so scrawny and tough, that I didn’t expect the squeamishness that often gave birth to people’s empathy. That made me more inclined to talk. I almost wanted to talk. He had been telling me stories in the heat—you could see how hard the breathing came for him. So I told him how my back became such a mess.
It wasn’t much of a story anyway. I had been paying for my graduate studies by working for the Bath County electric company, BARC, in the western hills of Virginia. I worked as a climber in a crew that mostly cut right-of-ways for middle-class urban refugees building new homes in the hills. On that particular day in mid-December, the owners of a brand-new little mansion decided to get rid of a huge elm tree that was crowding their kids’ playground gizmo: swings, slides, that sort of thing.
We didn’t normally do this kind of work, you know, tree service for private homes, but one of the limbs was close enough to the power line that our foreman agreed. The tree might have been dying anyway. We had to get a rope over a branch to control the fall of the tree—so as not to damage that damn swing set. I was one of two climbers on our crew. I wore a leather belt and steel spikes for climbing up the tree and carried a chain saw on a hook on my belt. I would spend most of the day working on the trees. That day the rope got tangled on one of the outer branches, so I crawled out to get it. Bill, the foreman, said I didn’t have to, and normally I wouldn’t have. But I had just had a mid-morning coffee and doughnut, and my normal bravado was jacked up with a huge sugar and caffeine rush.
Anyway, I don’t remember exactly what happened. Most of what I know Bill told me a couple of days later, in the hospital. He said the branch just snapped, and I came crashing down. On the way down—it was a long way, over thirty feet—I hit several branches, which was good because it slowed my fall. Unfortunately, one of those branches cut a huge gash down the right side of my back, ripping the muscles. I landed on the playground set, broke several ribs, and punctured my right lung. There were all kinds of other, minor injuries too. Because of the damage and the scarring, the muscles on both sides of my back were uneven, and there was a constant pull on the spine. Then there was the scar itself, which I couldn’t reach. That’s what I hated the most—not being able to
touch the scar when it burned or itched.
The old man was smiling the whole time I spoke, not a smile of compassion or understanding, like a rookie nurse, but one of a coconspirator. He reacted as though we shared a secret, something that only the two of us could possibly know. But I had no idea what that might have been. I stood up, became aware that I was stretching myself in an exaggerated fashion, and walked back to the path.
“You see,” he said, “our tradition insists that all of life is some kind of suffering, like an ache that’s always there although we are sometimes too distracted to notice. Even the things that seem right are off center. At some point in life we need to realize this and look directly at the pain. Then we can move to the next stage. May I tell you another story?”
THE BRAHMIN’S QUEST FOR MAGIC
There was once a city in these parts much larger and more glamorous than Mysore. It was called Ujjayini, a glorious town where even Shiva chose to make his residence. The noblemen there lived in palatial estates, while the Brahmins were all learned and modest. Stiffness was seen only in the breasts of the women, fickleness in the rolling of their seductive eyes. The only darkness in Ujjayini was the deep of the night; crookedness was displayed only in the lines of the poets.
In this city of palaces and temples lived a young Brahmin named Chandrasvamin. He was kind and well educated, a member of a prestigious family that had served the city’s kings for generations. Chandrasvamin had one weakness, however—gambling. He was enslaved to gaming in all its forms, from taking bets on the weather or the turns in the flight of geese to casting dice in the city’s luxurious gambling halls. And like all compulsive gamblers, the renowned Yudhisthira included, Chandrasvamin was both incompetent at gambling and completely blind to that fact.
Climbing Chamundi Hill Page 7