the return of devavrata
1
Born of water, into water, the boy knew no other world.
It would not always be thus. Someday, he had been told, he would leave here for another place. His mother had told him this, in a quiet time, her body swollen and expanded to its widest, spanning banks miles apart, trailing enormous skirts of silt. He loved her at these quiet times, when her icy mountain rage had mellowed to a somnolent trawl, flowing majestically down to the ocean. She cradled him gently in a pocket of warm current, his belly filled, his heart content. He was little more than an infant then, still unable to forage for himself or wander freely on his own. As they drifted together, she said in her softest voice, “Devavrata.”
He looked up at her with round, expectant eyes. She had formed a face from the current, her gentle face. An errant trout drifted into the space behind her large rippling eyes, realized into whose presence it had foolishly wandered, and flicked its tail in panic, flashing away. He gurgled with amusement. Her water-sculpted visage dimpled its cheeks at him and playfully intertwined warm and cold tendrils between his toes and fingertips, tickling him deliciously.
When his delighted laughter subsided, she continued. “My son, soon you shall have to go away from me.”
Away.
His little mind puzzled over the word, the idea. Away? he repeated soundlessly, and then wagged his finger in a familiar gesture. Less a specific question than the act of questioning, that tiny finger wagging translated into an entire range of universal, eternal, childish queries. What is that thing? Does this have a name? Who am I? How did this happen? Or his perennial favourite: Why?
“You will have to go to live with your pramaataamaha for a while.”
Again, the little finger wagged, and he emitted a gurgling babble, trying to imitate the sound she projected into his mind. “Pramaa…maa?”
“Your great-great-grandfather. Our ancestor. From whose loins our lineage flows.”
She paused, her watery forehead creasing as she pondered some minor disruption in another part of her sinuous length. Enclosed in her embrace as he was right now, conjoined with her own vast being, he could almost see through to the source of the disruption. A gathering of two-legs about a hundred miles downshore were sacrificing a bull on a stone slab at water’s edge, chanting ritual verses to his mother. He knew how much she disliked blood sacrifices, and his face pinched in empathy. He felt her shudder as the bull’s neck was hacked clean through with a bladed weapon sharper than the fangs of a longtooth, and red fluid gushed over the stone, melding with her own arterial flow. Her watery face began to freeze into that icy visage that terrified him, then subsided with an effort, as she reminded herself of his presence, and of how her last outburst had set him to howling uncontrollably in anguish. He felt everything: the white frothing of her anger, her swirling awareness of his closeness and sensitivity, then the slushing calming of her emotions. Yet even through the opacity of her self-control, he still could feel her pain at the senseless waste, her despair at the two-legs who foolishly thought that by taking the life of another living being they could enrich their own. He even sensed briefly her decision to wreak retribution—she would send a flood surging up the banks to wash out the dwellings of those who had planned the sacrifice—then her resolve shut him off, like a wall of cold ice floe cutting off a hot spring fluke.
He tried to reach up to her face and comfort her, but of course, his stubby fingers touched only water. When he put the finger to his mouth—an action as natural and inevitable to him as breathing itself—it tasted salty. That intrigued him. But then she regained control of herself and smiled reassuringly, if sadly. “You are the iron in my blood, my son. But you belong to another world. To their world. Someday, you will have to go live among them. It is only meet that you prepare yourself. And I know no one better than your forebear to undertake the task. Listen well to everything he tells you, Devavrata. Learn well. The lessons he teaches you will echo down the hallways of history someday.”
Again, he made that little gesture: Why?
She shook her head, the watery tendrils that stood in for her hair waving like reeds. “There is no answer to all your whys, little one. You shall understand when the time comes. Your mind is bright, brighter than all the fishes in my realm put together. You will do well under the great forebear’s tutelage. And after you are done, you will come back to me for a while. And we shall bask in warm tides again awhile, you and I, and you will tell me of the things you have learned, the places you have been, the sights you have seen.”
Places? Sights?
“Such wonders as even your salmon-quick mind cannot imagine. Because that is what learning is, child. An unending quest down an endless river course, gorging yourself upon wisdom and lore, until finally, someday, if you are good—nay, if you are very very good, and very very clever,” tickling him again and again, drawing a chorus of pleased chortles, “he may let you go down to that greatest treasure house of all learning, the repository of all the wisdom of all the ages, the place where even I must bow my head and deposit every last possession every day, in homage to the mother of us all, the mother of all knowing.”
And she whispered the word into his ear, her watery lips tickling him into a paroxym of giggling ecstasy. “Kathasaritsagara.”
The ocean of stories.
2
Young and carefree as he was, the idea of parting seemed incomprehensible. His life thus far, brief as it had been, had been idyllic. He was a prince of the river, and spent his days in childish abandon, traversing the course of his mother’s realm, doing as his heart desired. Everyone hailed him, even the sleepy-eyed longtooths and snapping-mouthed stonebacks who were each lords of their own stretch of the flowing world. All revered him, and many came to love him quickly and intensely; wherever he went, at all times, hundreds of watchful eyes kept vigil over him, and in the unlikely event of a crisis, a veritable army of quick silver fins and flashing teeth would come to his aid in an instant. But what could harm the son of the river in his mother’s own realm? He had no enemies here, and his mother made sure that his only potential rivals, the landlocked two-legs, were always kept far out of reach. He glimpsed them rarely, for his mother’s girth was prodigious, her depths not easily fathomed, and on those rare occasions that their paths crossed, he regarded them with disinterested eyes, forgetting them before they were out of sight. The river was his oyster and he its most perfect pearl.
At times, such as the moment when he had sensed his mother’s anger at the sacrificial slaughtering of the bull, he thought of the land-denizens as crude, violent, brutal beasts without the elegance or intelligence of his fellow water dwellers. He hated it when they polluted his mother’s expanse with their offal, their refuse, or even their charred corpses, which they floated downriver at certain spots his mother called ‘burning ghats’. She seemed undisturbed by this daily pollution, even contented, and he came to regard it as some part of the natural way of things; in time, he even began to glimpse that they actually worshipped her, and that their consigning of their remains and materials to her flowing course were their way of honouring her. Still, he regarded them with a puzzlement tinged with disapproval.
When the time came, he was playing with a group of young darkfins. He was old enough to clamber onto their backs, and clutch their fins, urging them to race through the bracing, high waters of his mother’s upper course. He loved clasping their slippery backs, feeling their powerful muscles seethe and cord beneath him, clutching those rubbery fins as tightly as his chubby little arms and hands and legs could manage. Even when one of the younger ones drove too fast, and he lost his grip and fell off, he was undaunted, laughing and chortling with ecstatic glee. He feared nothing; neither the boulders dotting the white water rapids where hapless land animals often dashed out their brains, nor the yawning abysses where his mother split herself into dozens of falls plunging thousands of fish-lengths to crash deafeningly in a miasma of vapour and sound. He went
over the falls shouting his joy, knowing that no harm could come to him in his mother’s realm. Sensing also, besides, something of his true nature. The force that surged in his veins, calling out to and answered by his mother’s endless coursing, yet filled also with some greater power, a power he did not know the name of yet, but which burned fiercely within his blood.
They had come through the rapids, down the falls, and were mulling about in the enormous marshlands where his mother tarried briefly before continuing her progress down the alluvial plains. The darkfins were darting craftily around him, teasing, touching him gently with their snouts. This was longtooth territory, and normally they would never come here. But they were with him, and he went where he pleased. He sensed the presence of many longtooth, dozing lazily on the surface of the marsh, on the banks, sunning themselves to awaken their sluggish blood. They bristled first at the presumptiveness of the darkfins invading their sanctum, then sensed his presence and yawned benignly, nodding a cursory greeting. A nilgiri stag, head bowed with a full crown of antlers, shoulders high enough to reach the lowermost branches of the highest sala trees, splashed through a shallow pool, almost stomping on an ancient longtooth. The ancient one ignored the challenge: the stag was in masth, and she knew better than to engage a nilgiri in that state.
Then, the marsh, the surrounding woods, the river, the very cataracts themselves, pounding down with the frenzy of giant hammers, seemed to grow still.
The darkfin nearest to Devavrata paused, his snout twisted to one side, tail turned the other way. The boy saw his fin ripple, as if sensing the approach of a great predator. But there was no predator here. At least none that dared attack a companion of the prince of the river. Nor could he sense any land dweller anywhere for miles around.
He reached out to touch the darkfin, a young male named Youngslick on whose mother Devavrata suckled often, and with whom he shared a bond akin to bloodwater.
Youngslick’s flank shivered. He raised his snout and issued a bleat in his high-pitched keening language. To Devavrata, just learning of the many moods and nuances of emotion, it tasted of fear and of something darker. An emotion beyond expression. It was reflected in Youngslick’s sudden thrashing of his tail, then the darting forward movement, followed by an equally vigorous backward push. Devavrata’s eyes widened as he floated in the pocket of warmth that always enveloped him, and he stared in confusion at Youngslick’s bleating bout of panic. Finally, a louder call echoed through the marshy byways, issued by Motherfin, the leader of the pack, and Youngslick grew completely still. Turning to glance at Devavrata, his dark eyes flashed apologetically.
Until, he squeaked, in his cyptic darkfin way. And then flashed forward with astonishing speed that Devavrata, despite his own prodigious skill, could never hope to match. His tail flickered darkly through the sluggish marshy byways, heading toward the main body of the rivercourse, calling and answering the rest of his herd as he went.
For the first time in his short uneventful life, Devavrata was completely alone.
3
Without warning, the warm pocket dissipated. He was left, abruptly, in the cold marshy effluent. He thrashed disbelievingly. Since his birthing, he had never known discomfort or deprivation; the cold water felt searing to him at first, like the runoff from a hot spring, then, his skin tingling, pulse racing, he began to feel the bone-deep chill permeating. It seemed to pass through his skin and flesh without resistence, seeping directly into his marrow.
Maa! he called frantically. She had never failed to answer him, even when embroiled in a crisis herself. For she was the river, and nothing could happen in her realm without her knowing. Yet as several moments passed and the freezing water continued to swirl sluggishly around him, and nothing happened, no response came to his call, he repeated his plea, louder, more fervently. Maa, something’s happening! Come here, maa! But she did not come, did not respond. He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t understand what was happening, or more importantly to him, why it was happening.
He thrashed, losing heat even faster, dissipating his energy, and when, too late, much too late, he finally stopped flailing, the cold enveloped him in a tighter embrace than he had ever felt before. An invisible fist grasped his heart; icy shards pierced his brain, and he slowly lost feeling in the tips of his fingers and toes. Finally, he stopped struggling, and tried to outlast it, but nature took its toll: Heat fled his little body, and cold became his new wetnurse. By the time he lost sensation in his feet and hands, it was too late to act. Not that he could have done much; he had often seen the bodies of frozen creatures floating downstream like dead logs, never once dreaming he could end up thus himself. He had been warned often by his mother not to go too far North, but he was not that far North at all—this was longtooth territory, after all, and they craved the warmth. Somehow, instead of the omnipresent pocket of warm water that had cuddled him ever since he could remember, a pocket of icy cold Northern water now clutched him mercilessly in its grip. He had always been so well protected, the very idea of danger was beyond his comprehension. Now he learned both the shocking pain of a mother’s betrayal and the indifference of nature to its denizens.
He floated for what seemed to be an eon, his body curling up instinctively into a foetal fist. Finally, when all resistence was gone from him, the water around him began to swirl in strange currents, pushing him upriver. It was not the gentle, cushiony way his mother always moved him; these gestures were brisk, matter of fact, designed simply to shift him from this place to that. Still overwhelmed by the shock of the event, he slipped in and out of consciousness, and in his moments of relative lucidity, saw that he was being moved upriver steadily, until, shortly after, he knew he was approaching the basin where the cataracts broke their fall. The very bubbles of air in the water danced with the reverberation of that mighty mass of icy water shattering on granite.
Here, a remarkable thing occurred—the first of many remarkable things that were in store for him on this extraordinary adventure, although of course, he had no way of knowing that just then.
The waterfall paused.
One moment its deep dull pounding filled the swirling underwater world he inhabited, a sound as relentless and eternal as water and air itself, the next moment, it had fallen silent. There was no interval between the first and the second; it was as if a giant hammer had frozen in mid air, poised above the anvil. He blinked, trying to wake his brain up. It was hard; yet he sensed, despite the frigidity enveloping his body, the force that had abducted him desired that he stay awake and alert. That he be aware of what was occuring and where he was going. He felt the cold ease its hold upon his skull. It still felt as if crystals of ice were lodged in his head, but he could think, and see, and know, although his emotional responses seemed suspended, frozen. Perhaps that was not caused by the cold, though; perhaps that was his own survival instinct, pushing away fear and outrage and self-pity to a deep pocket where it could not interfere with the vital functions of watching and waiting. Naïve and ingenuous as he was, he had not lost hope; indeed, he was only conserving energy until a suitable time came. A time for what, he had no idea, but he must be ready when the opportune time came, and emotion would only confuse and obfuscate. He did not think these things through in any methodical fashion, simply glimpsed the sense of this course of action through an instinct more ancient than logic, wiser than philosophy.
The force that had brought him upriver now began to move him up the frozen waterfall. He saw the body of water part, moving aside with a peculiar slowness that suggested neither liquid nor solid movement. He felt nothing except the intense cold and the sensation of being moved, but he thought he heard a faint groaning of protest from the unnaturally frozen body of water as he was pushed through it, upwards. At the top there was a sensation of pressure, then he was bouncing along the surface of the river again, and the water was gushing below him, past him, rushing headlong towards the waterfall. The transition was instantaneous. One moment the water was still, the ne
xt instant it was hurtling as it had hurtled for eons. His progress upstream continued thus, the force that governed him pausing waterfalls to enable it to push him up with least resistence, then releasing the falls as he gained the top. More than once on this long journey, sleep found him and flicked him into unconsciousness with the careless ease of the very young and very innocent. From time to time he would open his eyes and gaze out from his protective bubble and see only the river flowing downstream past him, and would sink back into the clutches of sleep again. He was aware of the fauna of the river all around, but every tadpole, newt, fish, wetback, stoneback, and longtooth steered clear of his path, avoiding him. He had seen them behave thus only once before, when his mother, fat and engorged with a monsoon flood, had borne him upriver to a safe pool to wait out the stormy weather. On that occasion they had ignored him because they were too busy saving their own lives. This time it was different: it was as if they feared him. Later, while he dozed, it came to him. It wasn’t he they were scared of, it was the force taking him upriver. A force that could halt waterfalls in mid-flow, and override even the goddess river herself. A force that could abduct the river’s only son and not meet any resistence.
A time came when it seemed that the cold was too great to bear. The first time, he thought he would surely freeze now, as even his spittle began to crackle icily. But even as temperature of the surrounding water dropped, his bubble warmed ever so slightly, just enough to offset the drop. He still remained much colder than he had been accustomed to, but he never froze. So the force was benign, he knew. It abducted him, controlled him, transported him, but would not permit him to come to harm. What was it? Why was it doing this to him? He tried once to flail out in impotent anger, fisting and kicking uselessly. He could not even penetrate the protective bubble. Instead, for one heart-stopping instant, his tiny sphere was permitted to absorb the temperature of the glacial waters he was passing through: the sudden shock of the cold stilled his rebellion at once. He curled in upon himself at once, trying to cover his little near-bald head with his tiny fists, gasping in indignation. After that, he lay quiet and still and let himself be taken upriver. He slept more now.
MAHABHARATA SERIES BOOK#2: The Seeds of War (Mba) Page 16