Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  Vishnumitra rose to greet the stranger but his father had already waved the children to silence. His father loved wanderers and outcasts, having been one himself for so long. In a few minutes the stranger was seated on a low wooden seat under the pipal tree. Water was brought for his hands and feet, and to drink. That was what he had stopped for: water, and five minutes of rest before wandering on to the town twelve miles away. Later Upamanyu would tell Vishnumitra: I stopped for five minutes and stayed five years—I, who have never stayed in a place longer than a month!

  All these years later Vishnumitra wondered why Upamanyu had stayed so long. He had always thought it was because of the love that had arisen between them, the love of brother for brother and friend for friend; but now he was not so sure. Perhaps all that had been an illusion. His mentor and dear friend, who had taught him sword-fighting and filled his ears with the knowledge of a world far greater than the little ashram, may have had other reasons to linger. Who knew if even Upamanyu were his real name?

  Every morning Vishnumitra would recite verses from the Charaka Samhita for his father. Upamanyu would be leaning against the wall, his mane of hair tied casually into a knot, his eyes bright with curiosity. Maitreya would explain each concept.

  “Prana is the life-force. Some people call it breath but it is that which comes before breath. In every healthy living being, prana flows unimpeded through its designated channels. Sickness is when there is a blockage or abnormality in the prana flow, and then the healer must restore its pathways in order to restore health....”

  “But is prana not the same as blood?” this from Upamanyu.

  “No, indeed. Prana cannot be seen, heard, or felt, except by the one trained in the ancient art of healing. Such a practitioner can tell the state of the prana flow when he feels the patient’s pulse, for the quality of the flow is reflected in the characteristics of the pulse. But the true sage can induce in himself a state of direct prana perception, in which the flow of prana appears manifest to the inner eye as the flow of the Ganga is manifest to the outer.”

  “Can you do this, Guruji? Will you teach me?”

  Maitreya laughed.

  “It is not so easily done. It takes the discipline of years. You will have to set down your traveling staff, my son, and study like Vishnumitra here. I myself have only touched the edge of that perceptive state. This knowledge is very arcane; I have found one version of it in a Tibetan text that I found by chance. But here too the greater truth is hinted at and concealed in a morass of lesser truths. This is the language of the twilight, as they say. It takes a lifetime to interpret these hints and intimations.”

  “Teach me, then, Guruji! For you I lay down my staff. You will find your pupil unused to instruction and too full of questions and impatience, but he will be grateful to be schooled....”

  What Vishnumitra realized was that his father was in fact pleased. Later he wondered if Upamanyu had reminded his father of his own youth. Upamanyu’s habit of asking questions as though he were issuing a challenge in a duel instigated in Maitreya delight instead of anger, and in fact Vishnumitra spent the next few days hating their guest, thinking himself less loved, a boring, overly obedient, dull sluggard of a student. But it all changed when Upamanyu asked Vishnumitra if he would help him achieve a better hand—his writing was atrocious. After that they went for walks in the forest, swam in the river, and engaged the village youth in games like kho and stick-fighting. Upamanyu revealed himself to be skilled with stick and sword, prideful and quick to temper, but just as easily recovering his good nature. In the forest one day Upamanyu brushed his hand across a chameli bush. Its white, scented flowers were like stars.

  “Do you think plants have prana, too, Vishnu?”

  Vishnumitra thought, with a little surge of triumph: so you don’t know everything, my friend!

  Aloud he said:

  “They do. My father has not yet taught you about cosmic prana. The prana that is in us flows into us and out again, and into and out of other things also. I don’t quite understand it myself. But once, during meditation, he achieved the deepest state of prana perception—just for a few seconds—and he told me later it was like rivers of light falling out of the sky, flowing in and out of everything. Like the delta of a river, small streams coming together and then flowing apart....”

  “That’s what I want to see,” Upamanyu said enthusiastically. Ahead of them the Ganga lay silver in the semidarkness. They sat on the bank in companionable silence.

  So long ago, it had been. It amazed Vishnumitra to think that the ashram had so long withstood the depredation of time and prejudice. His father had been a maverick, a madman. An outcast who had given up the Brahmin’s sacred thread to marry a Muslim woman and not even insist on her conversion, let alone the various purification rituals! It was said that while she performed Hindu rituals, such as the chhat fast, she also kept to her daily Islamic prayers! So Maitreya had lost caste and status, been turned out with his wife to roam the world. In his late youth he had finally found this place by the great, slow river, where among the trees a new kind of ashram had been founded. Eklavya, where any child could come to learn, irrespective of caste or creed or religion. The Brahmins kept their sons at home but in time the other castes sent their children, afraid to miss out on such an education. Apart from learning the duties of a householder, they would learn mathematics, music, astronomy, Ayurveda, yoga, tending a garden, cooking, sword-fighting, and wrestling. Maitreya found teachers from the ranks of swordsmen and wandering dervishes, Sufi healers and itinerant craftsmen. So in time the children of petty tradesmen, Hindu or Muslim, sat with those of cowherds, rich landowners, and the occasional defiant Brahmin and sang their multiplication tables, or learned to cook and eat together and thus destroy both caste and religion. But what they created, Maitreya would say, was more important: a hybrid culture, a din-i-illahi made real, imbued with the best of both traditions. Friendship, community, a temple of knowledge.

  And it was that. In the kitchen Vishnumitra’s mother Tasleem took the clay pot of rice off the earthen stove and carried it out to the courtyard, swept clean by the children. There was a daal and some vegetables, and berries the children had picked in the forest. Everyone was sitting cross-legged on the ground, in a row, waiting to be served. The platters were made of dried, woven leaves, and soon each held a mound of rice, the famous red-tinged rice of that region. Many years after he had left home, Vishnumitra remembered the aroma of that rice: rich, earthy, with a touch of walnut. Whenever he met a trader from those parts he was sure to buy enough red rice to last him some time.

  And in the nighttime, sleeping in the open under the stars, with the crickets singing in the undergrowth, and from the forest the low, sweet call of a koel. His father would tell the small ones stories of pirs, or gods, or kings.

  “…And so Krishna became the King of Dwarka, but his friend of childhood, Sudama, remained poor even as a grown man. He lived in a hut with his wife and children, and they were hungry many times. One day he decided he would go to Dwarka to see his old friend. All he had that he could bring as a gift was a bag of rice, just the kind you ate today. So he walked all the way to Dwarka....”

  It was an old, comforting story: the friend, Sudama, in his rags, with his lowly gift, being laughed at by the courtiers until the King saw him and came to him and embraced him, and expressed inordinate delight at the gift of rice. And Sudama spent a few days with Krishna, and when he returned home he found that his fortunes had changed. Where his rude hut had been, there stood a mansion, and his wife and children were well-fed and well-clothed.

  “…So, children, wherever you go when you are grown, may you remember your days together and be friends to each other as Krishna and Sudama were....”

  Somewhere a queen-of-the-night bush was in bloom; its heavy scent was wafted by the breeze from the river. In the quiet after the story, Vishnumitra stole a glance at his friend, who was stretched out in the next pallet. He wanted to touch Upamanyu’s
hand, to make real his feeling that they were and always would be as Krishna and Sudama had been to each other, but shyness held him back. Upamanyu’s fine, clever face was soft with moonlight, and listening.

  And after all, Upamanyu had been the first to leave. He wanted to go to Tibet, he said, to look for the lost books on prana lore. But even before that Vishnumitra had sensed a restlessness in him, a preoccupation. He had known, but not admitted to himself until years later, that what called to Upamanyu was not just old palm-leaf manuscripts on prana lore but the long journey, the new sights along the way, and new adventures. He was tired of staying in one place. It was time to move on.

  He had gone away one day with promises to be back in a year or two. There were disturbances from the South: the British invaders were marching North. Nothing was certain.

  Maitreya knew he wouldn’t be back, and he kept his disappointment and sorrow to himself. Vishnumitra’s heart broke. The world became empty to him, and every familiar place reminded him of Upamanyu’s absence. Only a few years later his father died in a skirmish during the confusion of the first British incursion North. Vishnumitra ran the ashram as best he could until his mother died. Some years after that the news came that the new King had banned the practice of the ancient arts. Vishnumitra could have kept the ashram going with all the remaining disciplines, but its existence was already a thorn in the side of the new provincial governor, who frowned upon such sacrilegious intermingling of caste and religion. Vishnumitra had no heart left for trouble. When the ashram closed he found that the wanderlust had come to him after all.

  He set off into the world, not knowing what it held in store for him. He hid his true occupation, calling himself a scribe or a scholar, practicing his healing arts when they were truly needed. He found that if he stayed in a place more than a few days after a healing, others would come to him in the dark of night, begging for help to save a life or work a miracle. Sometimes he could do something; at other times he found himself on the run like a criminal.

  But what he valued most was the discovery of those already versed in the arts; although few were superior to him, it was a delight to be able to discuss the finer points of prana control and manipulation, and the techniques to restore harmony for different conditions. When he met such people he taught them what he knew and learned from them as well. He found that his travels could help connect one practitioner with another, across cities and villages. And as he wandered, he picked up companions who wanted to be trained in the art. Mostly young people who became his family.

  Now they were all scattered, doing the same work he had set out to do. Except for Shankara, who was dead.

  After all, it was the bag of rice that did it.

  The clerk in the royal court had shaken his old head as he watched Vishnumitra sign the document of challenge. He had reluctantly agreed to submit the bag of rice that Vishnumitra handed him with the scroll. “He will not see you,” he had said, darkly. “He turns away all…nearly all who challenge him.”

  But the summons came two days later. The King would receive Vishnumitra—not in the Diwan-i-Khas but in his private room atop the tower. In the hour of twilight.

  In the late afternoon Vishnumitra hired a boatman to take him to the opposite bank of the Yamuna. He chose a small pipal tree on the bank and sat down in the lotus position. Slowly he steadied his wildly beating heart. In the golden light the fort was a vision in red sandstone and marble.

  Breathing slowly, Vishnumitra calmed his body, balancing out the prana flow in the two main channels on either side of his spine. He felt the slow shock of kundalini energy flowing up the sushumna channel toward the crown of his head, a wave of exhilaration, of limitless strength flooding him. He let his consciousness flow and become one with the prana, softening the flow in the seventy-two thousand distributaries of the subtle body. In this deep, receptive state he opened his inner eye. With years of discipline he had come close to mastering what his father had taught him: the perception of the mahaprana, the cosmic channels of the life-force. He saw the mahaprana as a faint skein of unearthly light, limning every living thing: tree or grazing cow, or the waiting boatman. Raining down from the vastness of the sky were the greater channels, joining and connecting one life to another, from the smallest beetle now crawling along his arm to the King himself, awaiting him at the palace. When Vishnumitra had first glimpsed this cosmic marvel, two years after Upamanyu’s own initiation, he had asked his father the same question Upamanyu had: from whence did the mahaprana flow? What was the source of it, beyond the sky? His father did not know.

  Slowly Vishnumitra drew himself out of the meditation. He brushed the beetle from his arm with infinite tenderness and watched it scuttle away over the rock on which he was sitting. He waved to the silent boatman. It was time to go.

  Between the fort walls are wonders: gracious gardens abloom with flowers, fountains that sing as water soars up into the air, a metal woman dancing in the center of a stone circle. Officials in small groups leave lighted rooms and confer in the scented gloom, as lamps flicker on, creating moving shadows. Vishnumitra is deep in the centered peacefulness that any glimpse of the mahaprana affords him—he has accepted what he must do, with all its moral ambiguity. Dharma is dharma, and if it is his fate to commit murder of one dearer to him than a brother, he will meet it like a scholar and a man.

  To his surprise the King meets him at the base of the tower. His face is luminous in the light of the lamps; he makes an impatient gesture and his guards leave his side, watching from several paces away, out of earshot. Vishnumitra hesitates, but the King is holding out his arms.

  The braids are held back, the face open, young as when Vishnumitra last saw him, filled with humor and intelligence, and at this moment—yes, this is so—the King’s eyes are moist with tears.

  “Dear brother! Vishnumitra!”

  Vishnumitra cannot but accept the embrace, feeling tears pricking his own eyelids while simultaneously his mind warns him not to deviate from his purpose.

  “Upamanyu!”

  “Hush! Only to you, my friend!”

  They stand apart, looking at each other. Vishnumitra feels his purpose like a burden whose weight he can hardly bear. Under other circumstances this would be a joyous reunion. He breathes deep.

  “You know why I am here.”

  “We will talk of that in a few moments. As a condemned man, surely I have a right to ask for one last wish: a walk with my brother in the gardens? Come now, do not deny me!”

  The old, affectionate, mocking tone. Vishnumitra’s composure is shaken; he finds himself being led through the magical garden, with one wonder after another being pointed out. His heart is a traitor—this is what he has yearned for since Upamanyu left: this reunion, where he is Sudama to Upamanyu’s Krishna, treated like an honored guest. Now the King’s guards fling open the great doors of a large, circular building surrounded by Ashok trees. Within are bright lights, the hiss of steam and the noise of metal upon metal. Mechanical men are working in clusters, monitoring pulleys and wheels, fitting together beautifully wrought pieces of metal with exquisite precision. Vishnumitra, his mouth agape in wonder, understands nothing, recognizes nothing. What are they building? This is no manufactory of horseless carriages.

  “This is my personal laboratory,” the King says with pride. “For these many years I have become interested in the forces of nature apart from…from the life-force itself. I have read the ancient Yunnanis Aristut, and Sukrat, and our own atomist schools. I have perused the barbarian vilayati scholar Niyuton. You have seen for yourself what wonders their discoveries have brought to us! Yet what I seek is to understand how these different imperatives, these forces are related. Observe, my friend!”

  He hands Vishnumitra a wooden tray upon which silver wires have been arranged in a rectangular array. Within this lattice are small canisters of metal. The King asks Vishnumitra to place his finger in such a way as to bridge a gap between the wires. Vishnumitra does so and feels the faint
est shock, a jolt not unlike the sting one feels touching a metal gate before a thunderstorm. Not unlike the first experience of kundalini energy for a beginner. He jerks his finger away, raises startled eyes to Upamanyu.

  “Ah, I see you are wondering if I have captured a storm in a few pieces of wire! Or is it a jolt of prana? So similar, yet the two forces are different—this one arises from inanimate matter, and the other from life itself! A mystery, is it not?”

  They emerge from the chamber; the doors clang behind them, and a sweet silence descends. In the lamp-lit dark the King is leading him to the tower. Courtiers and guards watch curiously from afar.

  The stairs spiral upward and at the top there is a door, and a room furnished relatively simply—a small Persian rug over the marble floor, a low divan, a few chairs. A table with neat stacks of paperwork. Shelves filled with books— forbidden books! The Charaka Samhita, the works of the great physician Sushruta, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, works on the tantric mysteries, tomes in Tibetan, Pali, and Sanskrit, and in languages he does not know. Vishnumitra stares at the books and then at Upamanyu, who is smiling indulgently as an older brother might.

  “You’ve seen what I’ve wrought in this kingdom, dear brother. And yet through all these years I have been alone. A decade ago I sent my spies to find you, but all they found was the ashram, abandoned, and you flown. And now you stand before me, bent upon revenge. And yet when we embraced there were tears in your eyes in answer to my own. Dear friend! Let us forget about this challenge! I have needed you for a long time, and you are here at last.”

  Vishnumitra feels his purpose weakening. The promise he has made to his art, to his dead, feels now like a burden whose weight he can hardly bear. Bitterness and sorrow rise in his throat like bile. He wants to say: why didn’t you come back and keep your promise? Why did you abandon me? Why did you betray us all, betray the prana vidya itself?