RAMAYANA SERIES Part 4_KING OF DHARMA

by AKB eBOOKS Ashok K. Banker

  The good warrior knows when to retreat, said his guru’s gruff voice in his ear. The code of the kshatriya means nothing if there is no kshatriya left to fight!

  Agreeing with Bearface – sorry, Gurudev – was his mother’s voice in his other ear. Run, Luv, run! You can’t fight them all!

  Ji, Maatr, jaisi aagya, he said in his mind as he began the heavy task of fitting arrows to bow and aiming not to maim or disarm but to disable, possibly kill. I would love to run. But not without my brother.

  “Damnit Kush, where the hell are you?” he said aloud as he began shooting.

  ***

  Kush emerged from the wagon to see his twin brother standing on a pile of lohistone landslide, the edges of the outcrop at his back, loosing arrows with concentrated ease. He appeared to be single-handedly battling what looked like at least five quads of armed PFs, even though PFs never ventured armed and uniformed outside the Ayodhya city limits. Clearly this grama was a notable exception to the usual rules.

  Which makes sense, considering the cargo they’re carrying, he thought as he sprinted away from Luv and to the other side of the raj-marg, unnoticed by either his brother or the men busy trying to kill him. In three deft leaps and grabs he had climbed a tree and was standing on a near-horizontal branch twice as thick as his own thigh. It would have bent and drooped under a grown man’s weight but it took his own lithe form easily, and he steadied his left shoulder against the trunk, took aim at his first target and loosed. The man took the arrow in the meaty muscle joining shoulder to neck, and it popped out through his collarbone with a small explosion of blood. The man yelped like a pup and dropped the javelin he had been about to fling at Luv.

  Without turning to look directly at Kush, Luv cried out with joy. “Kush!” Then added in a disgruntled tone even as he continued loosing and dodging: “Took your time, didn’t you!”

  “Had to make a short visit to the royal treasury,” Kush called back, grinning. He continued loosing, and saw his third target drop, roaring with frustration and fury as he tried to clutch at the arrow sprouting from his shoulderblade. Hit the bone, hurts like blazes. That voice was old Nakhudi’s, who always seemed to know how to inflict maximum pain on the enemy without actually killing them. Only male enemies, as she liked to remind them, grinning to reveal her astonishingly white gleaming teeth in her buffalo-dark face.

  The fight continued for another few moments, the PFs on and around the halted wagons trying with admirable skill to face an attack on two diagonally opposed fronts with diminishing success. Their leader, an efficient and intelligent-seeming fellow, tried to rally his men to use the wagons as shielding, while attempting to send a pair of quads around to outflank Kush – Luv was bolstered by the outcrop which would have taken hours to cut over and around – but the brothers had them at the deadliest cross-angle two bowmen could take, and the broken stones shielded Luv while the tree and foliage shielded Kush, and while many arrows and javelins were aimed at them, none came closer than a single wayward arrow that thunked into the tree branch between Kush’s big toe and its neighbour.

  Then, as fierce fights usually did, this one dissipated like a puddle evaporating under a mid-day sun, and suddenly the captain of the PFs was waving his arms in surrender.

  Kush grinned and dropped down from his perch, making his way cautiously towards the halted wagons. He had his eye on some men at the back who might, if still feisty enough, try to fling a javelin or two as he approached. But every one of them and all the others as well had at least one arrow in their arm, leg or back, and one massively built chap who had refused to settle down with just two or even three arrows had four bristling from his extremities, lying on his back and cursing the sky roundly with a raised fist, turning the air blue with his choice of profanities. Kush grinned even wider, making a note of several for future reference. Living in an ashram community as they did, good curses were hard to come by!

  Luv had leaped up to the tall broken lohitstone boulder, keeping his weapon trained on the PFs as his brother approached. Kush winked at him as he came and saw Luv shake his head in mock-disgust – complaining about the moments when Kush had disappeared from sight earlier. The PFs quietened as he reached them, holding down their moaning and grunting and cursing as they saw the ‘men’ who had bested them up close for the first time.

  FIVE

  “You should have seen their faces,” Kush said, slapping his thigh with delight. “They looked like brahmins who had eaten ashubh bhojan by mistake and didn’t know whether to spit it out rudely or swallow it and violate dharma!”

  “And they had so many arrows sticking out of their arms and legs,” Luv said, “if they stood close together in a bunch, they would have looked like a giant hedgehog!”

  Both boys laughed in the high-pitched tone of young men whose voices had not been altered by maturity yet.

  Nakhudi grunted non-commitally, shaking her head wistfully. “You boys. One of these days, you’ll run up against someone who’s a match for you two, and there will be hell to pay. How many gramas have you held up and robbed until now?”

  “Nakhudi!” Luv said plaintively. “We didn’t rob anybody! We just took back a fair share of what Ayodhya takes from the people unlawfully, that’s all.”

  “That’s right,” Kush said, equally outraged. “Whatever we took from those gramas belonged to the people, and we took it to give it back to the people anyway. So it wasn’t robbing!”

  Nakhudi looked at their two young faces, identical chins turned up stubborn to point at her, dusky cheeks flushed with their recent adventures and their present outrage. She shook her head slowly. She had been picking out berries from her thatched basket to offer them: the boys loved berries and she always kept some just for their visits. She put down the handful of choice berries she had picked out lovingly from the basket and stood. Her head almost bumped the roof of her little hut when she drew herself to her full height, for it was built low to withstand the sweeping monsoon winds that sometimes washed this hillock in the midst of the deep woods. She glared down at the boys. Standing to her full height, she topped their tousled heads by easily twice their height; she was taller than any woman they had ever seen, taller than most men they knew, and her scarred broad face, flat nose, shining dark eyes and formidable bulk all combined to give her a fierce aspect. She used all of that as well as the hoarse voice that lent her an air of danger and made her seem angry even when she wasn’t, to deliberately intimidate them.

  “Listen to me, and listen well, for I’ll only say this once,” she rasped, poking an outstretched finger into Luv’s chest and then at Kush’s chest. To the boys, strong as they were for their age, it felt like being struck by the blunt end of a thin staff or rod. She cracked her knuckles and stretched her hands, as if limbering up for more aggressive action, which only added to the air of threat. “Ayodhya makes the laws in this part of the world. By Indra’s hundred eyes, what am I saying? Ayodhya is the law. This jungle may seem unpopulated and a long way from any city, but it’s still part of the Kosala nation. And by law, it falls under Ayodhyan jurisdiction and governance. That governance includes the right to tax the people as required from time to time. So don’t call what they take unlawful.”

  They glanced at each other doubtfully. Suddenly, the same two young bowmen who had stood upto an entire grama protected by armed warriors had been reduced to just two startled young boys. It had taken only a change of tone and attitude on Nakhudi’s part; the hermit woman always had that effect on them. Part of it was a result of the respect and awe they felt for her warrior skills and longstanding comradeship with their mother. But they were also scared of her. Nakhudi when angered was a fearsome thing to behold. For reasons they could not wholly fathom, she was clearly angered now. And they didn’t like it one bit.

  “Now, you boys may feel that after the droughts and famines and other ill winds that have harried the kingdom over the last several years, Ayodhya ought not to be taxing the people and I can’t say I disagree with
you. Kali Herself knows that times are hard enough as it is, and the tax is only one more back-breaking burden piled on top of too many others. But that’s not for you or me to decide. That’s Ayodhya’s decision. And if Ayodhya chooses to levy the tax, then that makes it a lawful tax. You boys saw the suffering of a few people who reside in these remote parts and felt sorry for them. So you decided to hold up a grama or two – or is it three? How many is it anyway?”

  She snapped her fingers right by Kush’s ear, loud enough that it sounded like a twig snapping underfoot.

  The boy didn’t flinch but said sullenly, “Three so far. But one was only—”

  “Be quiet while your elders are talking.” She continued decisively, “So you hold up three gramas in as many seasons, and take a wagonload from each one. And you distribute the contents of that wagonload to the poorest, most needy people you can find around here. And it’s true, the few people who live here in this Durgaforsaken jungle are really poor and truly needy. And it’s a great service you do them, by giving them those provisions. I don’t deny that one whit. But make no mistake about this one truth: those wagonloads of goods you take by force don’t belong to the people anymore. The minute Ayodhya’s tax-collector’s claim it, it belongs to Ayodhya. So you are robbing Ayodhya. I’m not saying it’s not for a good cause; indeed, I agree that it’s a very good cause. But that doesn’t make it right, or just, or even lawful. So don’t go fooling yourself about the rightness or lawfulness of what you’re doing. Understand?”

  Both boys glared at her with such identical expressions of righteous indignation on their handsome young faces, she was instantly reminded of someone else. A man’s face, older, leaner, darker-complected. Much darker-complected, for they had inherited their mother’s wheatish colouring and more than a smidgen of their grandfather’s lightness of skin. But the features were the same. So much the same that looking at them now, with those defiant expressions on their young faces, it made her want to grin and burst out laughing. She restrained herself. She knew how much they respected and looked up to her and this was an important lesson she was giving them. Their mother had been right. ‘Be a friend to them, Nakhu,’ she had said quietly to her at the beginning, when she had first come to live here. It had been soon after she had rebuilt her old ties with her old friend and sometime mistress and they had grown close enough to speak heart’s truth to one another again. ‘Be the friend to them that I cannot be, because I am their mother. And as a friend, teach them the things that they will not heed if I try to teach them. For oftentimes, young boys and girls will heed the same advice when given by an outsider when they would shrug off a parent saying the same things.’ And Vedavati, as she was now called, had smiled wistfully and shaken her head before going on with more than a trace of sadness: ‘Because my boys are growing up already. And I fear they may be growing too fast.’

  Nakhudi had taken her former mistress’s and lifelong friend’s words to heart. She had wanted to give the twins this talk ever since they had burst into her hut last monsoon, flushed and bursting with pride from the thrill of having successfully waylaid the first grama and having taken an entire wagonload of grain from the tax collectors. But she had remembered their Maatr’s words, gritted her teeth, and bided her time until now. She had even laughed with them and celebrated their ‘success’ at the time, although when they returned in the autumn to crow about waylaying the second grama, her smile had been forced and her joy a pretense. This time, she could not take anymore. It was time to stop being a friend and be something more. Perhaps even past time. A grama guarded by six or seven quads of Ayodhyan PFs? Parvati protect us all! Even allowing for some youthful exaggeration, they had still put their little heads into a tiger’s jaws this time. It was one thing to hold up a tax grama or a trading grama and take away some grain or other provisions. This new shenanigan was in a different league altogether. She shuddered to think what would have happened had their little adventure gone awry. After all, for all their skill with the dhanush-baan, they were still just boys. Not yet adolescents. And if they continued on this path, not likely to achieve that stage of maturation. Yes, Vedavati, she said silently now, your boys are indeed growing up too fast. And I think there is nothing anyone can do to slow or stop it.

  “But I can correct you at least,” she said aloud. They both frowned simultaneously, and where their frowns met in the center of their foreheads, between their brows, two little diagonal crinkles appeared, like tiny crow’s feet. Her heart leaped with emotion. Their father had the exact same crinkles on his forehead when he frowned. That little detail, more than all the similarities of face and body shape and attitude, brought home to her once more just who and what they truly were. And why it was so important that they be bred right. She raised her palm, showing it to Kush, who was closest – and this time he did flinch, for she was close enough to slap him if she wanted, and an open-handed slap from her would hurt far more than just harsh words. But she only placed it on his left shoulder, firmly and quite gently in fact.

  In a much gentler tone, she said, “I can correct you and show you when you’re wrong. For that is what friends do for one another. And it is time you realized that you have gone too far. By taking on this grama today and injuring all those PFs, you’ve not just stolen another wagonload of provisions from the tax collector, you’ve challenged the military might and authority of Ayodhya herself. And that’s not something you boast and laugh about, young men.” She patted Kush’s shoulder affectionately, tempering her tirade with friendship now, before she lost their trust entirely. “That’s all I want you both to understand. As a friend who cares about your well-being,” she added, looking from one to the other slowly.

  “They weren’t provisions,” Luv said sullently, looking down at the dungpacked floor of the little hut that had been home to Nakhudi these past two years.

  “What was that?” she asked sharply.

  “He said, they weren’t provisions,” Kush replied. “The wagonload we took today. It was something else. Something different.”

  And he shot her a glance that was at once a defiant challenge as well as a triumphant comeback: See? We’re not just young children to be corrected and talked down to. We did something today that children could never do.

  Nakhudi swallowed. Something stirred deep inside her belly, some long-sleeping snake of forgotten fear.

  “Show me,” she said shortly. And prayed to all the avatars of the Goddess she could name.

  SIX

  The ashrama of Maharishi Valmiki was peaceful and quiet in the yellowing light of dusk. The red ochre robes of the rishis and senior brahmacharyas stood out in clear relief against the rich green darbha grass nourished by the recent rains, while the white dhotis of the younger acolytes caught the fading light and seemed to glow as if illuminated. The sky above the hermitage clearing was purple broken by clusters of gold-tinged clouds that clung to the last light of the descended sun. Brahmins went about their evening chores, their clean faces and hands testifying to their recent completion of sandhyavandana in the nearby Tamasa river.

  Most of the rishis and brahmacharyas deftly avoided crossing paths with or coming face to face with Nakhudi. Even though she too was clad in the faded yet still serviceable rust-brown garb of a sadhini, a female hermit on the same spiritual path as they, the ashramites still seemed to prefer to give her a wide berth. She barely noticed, striding across the center of the ashrama directly towards the thatched mud hut on the extreme North Eastern corner, set sufficient distance away from the remaining structures to afford the ashramites a modicum of privacy from the only unattached female resident who inhabited it, yet close enough that the hut was not entirely separated from the ashrama.

  The soft questioning voices of the curious acolytes fell away behind Nakhudi as she turned down the short path that led to Vedavati’s hut, nestled in a small cluster of sala trees. She did not need to turn to see if Luv and Kush followed her. This was their home. Where else would they go? Besides, it was Veda
vati she had to speak to urgently. Kali grant there is still time to set this right, she prayed silently, even as a sinking sensation in the pit of her belly told her that it was already too late. The damage was done, and quite likely the price would have to be paid when the time came. But they’re just boys, she thought, just boys doing what they thought was the right thing to do in a wrong time. Surely they would be punished too harshly for not realizing what they might be getting themselves into? Yes, said the voice inside her head, but you knew what they were doing and could have stopped them. It need never have come to this.

  She ground her teeth in frustration and stopped at the doorway of the hut. Like all huts in all ashramas, it had no door to speak of, merely a curtain of jute hanging across the open entranceway. She parted the curtain with her hand, swatting it aside, and peered inside. Nobody home. Well, Vedavati must be around somewhere. She would have been expecting the boys home in time for sandhyavandana. Nakhudi remembered belatedly that she had forgotten to stop and ensure that the boys underwent their evening ablutions as required by ashrama rules. She had had bigger things in mind than rituals.

  She looked around, uncertain. Where could Vedavati have gone at such a time?

  “By the river,” Luv said from behind.

  Nakhudi turned away from the entrance, allowing the jute cloth to fall back into place. She looked in the direction the twins were staring and saw Vedavati coming up the path from the river, an earthern pot balanced on her hip. Looking at her erstwhile mistress’s roughcloth robe, matted hair, and subdued aspect, not to mention the lines of age showing on her face, the charcoal-grey streaks in her hair, and the weariness in her eyes, Nakhudi felt a deep pang of sadness. Had she not known all that had transpired those ten long years ago, she might have been persuaded into believing that Sita was still in exile, the same exile in which she had been ten years ago, before the events that led her and then Rama to Lanka and altered their lives forever.