by Aashish Kaul
Thus, later, when a struggle ensued to take control of his grand- father’s empire, he was able to easily gain the support of all concerned and swiftly quell whatever slight resistance there remained in his race to the throne.
Receiving an empire that was already vast and powerful, he brought, over the years, further territories and vassal states under his control through a mix of diplomacy, mediation, and campaign. Because he was neither entirely of the north nor entirely of the south, and of each side in part, many clans identified with him, either out of fear or out of awe, and he was able to bridge the chasm that had forever divided the two races, earning the respect of even those who ruled on the far edges of the world.
But what on the outside joined him to both sides, divided him internally. The deep axe-wound of exile, of homelessness, a fate no hybrid can escape, for it is not of the world but of the mind, unless you take the two to be one and the same, inseparable. As the world contracted before his eyes to something solid and manageable, a tear opened somewhere inside past which a steady stream of diffusion seeped and spread. With the woman he loved beside him and with no kingdom left within sight to conquer, his gaze turned back to probe its very source. First uncertainty, then boredom, then restlessness grew in him. And so came the day when without a word to anyone except his queen and two or three trusted ministers and even to them offering only a tentative sketch of his desire, he slipped out of the palace late one night.
The queen did not once demur when she heard his wish. Only a few years of marriage and she too longs for the gap that is about to open, less a distancing than an acknowledgment of the void into which the ferocity of their feelings had quietly vanished, the void which is the slow, cruel turning of days and years, the millstone whose heavy measured rotation grinds every ambition, every meaning to dust.
At each step away from the city, the ruler in him dies a little and the wanderer awakes, groaning and blinking, or better still, it is the wandering spirit of his childhood that has lain sleeping in the shade for who knows how long.
He heads north, following an instinct, the paths of the past, in the memory of his father, whom he has not seen in years and of whose whereabouts he has not the slightest idea, but also because he cannot go further south before soon encountering the ocean, overfamiliar, billowing with pointless activity, past which there is nothing but more swells, and then ice, teeming with beings that accept his sover- eignty, live in his protection.
It is north he must go, retrace his steps across a continent he has patiently sculpted with all his ambition, tact, and fury, although now like a commoner, like a mendicant traveller if it comes to that, covered in dust with calloused palms and ankles, free of his banners and regalia, his elephants and armies, so that no one gives him a moment’s attention even as he notices everyone and everything.
By the time night falls again, he has been walking without a single halt for a whole day in the forest, his strength on the ebb and mind grown vacant. He finds himself next to a mud hut of a recluse or an ascetic, its low walls a pale blue in the filigree light of the moon flashing through leaves and branches. He asks for water and a place to rest, settling down on the ground against the wall. He drinks from a gourd and his upturned jaw through which the water trickles is blue in the blue of the air. The ascetic hands him a pipe filled with hemp and he is grateful for it. Never having been one for words, he leisurely drags in silence the lush vapours into his lungs to the point of bursting. He thinks nothing, or rather no thought comes to him, not even the memory of his own steps on the forest floor, not even the dry scratching of thorns and shrubs all over his legs and ankles, not the birdsong he has heard throughout the day, not the wind in the trees.
When he is shown into the hut, he shuffles about briefly in the gloom, trying to ascertain his bearings. A floor of beaten mud cracking in places, a much scoured copper pot, two or three spoons, a wooden ladle, half-rotten and losing shape, a pail, a gourd, walls lined with soot. Low flames hissing in a clay stove built in a corner leave a gloss on the dark which is otherwise complete. The anchorite hands the traveller something to eat, the taste of ash and salt, and turns away to douse the fire for the night.
He stretches himself out where he has been sitting and soon sleep lies heavy on him, while his host sits on his haunches in the dark, silent, motionless, his eyes, yellowed from melancholy, hardship or illness, fixed and sparkling like embers deep in a grate.
He is up at dawn, but his host is already in the open, working a small vegetable patch at the rear of the hut. He watches him awhile as the other pulls out a few potatoes and green shoots from the ground unaware that he is being observed. When he finally approaches the traveller, he has in his arms a melon, which he breaks open on a stone and of which he offers one half to his guest. If the older one suspects something in his bearing or manner he doesn’t say so, and for the first time there occurs a brief exchange, more a careful barter of words, revealing hardly anything significant, yet to ears trained to register subtle inflexions, eyes that catch the hint, nothing more perhaps is necessary.
Soon he is on his way. The spontaneous and natural generosity he has received this past night he should not expect so readily to find in future. But the kindness is also the kindness of nature and of those who are close to it and he moves in its protection, every day walks deeper into its fold. He emerges from the trees and treads in open grasslands, waist deep through shafts that bend in the wind, shine golden like waves on the sea. He startles a hare and swiftly snatches it away from the wild grass, wringing its neck and hanging it from his shoulder. To the west the terrain rises into the rocks, and it is to them that he heads in search of a cave to rest for the night. Now he is walking straight into a swollen and distended sun that trembles and drips into space like molten wax, the colour of blood. Near where the climb snakes into the crags, he halts at a pond where egrets watch him from serrated boulders. Along the gravel path winding upward, he collects sticks to build a fire.
Night finds him sitting on a rock at the mouth of a crevice into which he will crawl and be safe from the wind that is growing ever fierce by the minute. To one side he has built a low fire upon which the soft flesh of the hare he recently flayed lies roasting and crackling. The cold makes his eyes water and the dark passes through this teary sieve to explode at the far edge in a shower of light. They fall, the stars, in wide arcs along the curve of outer space and are instantly born anew back above in the heavens. Later, when he slips into the stony gap like a snake, he hears the wind breaking against the rocks, receding, breaking again, as if the earth itself is drawing and expelling breath. For a while he follows its rhythm, lying flat on his back, slowing the beat of his heart to the heartbeat of the world. He feels neither fatigue nor the need for sleep, in fact his mind is calm and alert, utterly empty. Now and then as the wind changes its course, in the brief perfect silence that reigns in the air, he hears faintly the wolf-howls from the edge of the jungle, a half- day’s march behind him.
At noon the next day he enters the water, wades through it knee- deep, acutely aware of the currents or the slightest of declines under foot, difficult to detect by the eye, that in no time could transfer him to the centre of a treacherous whirlpool. He knows his way well through water, through the bare, uninhabited islets that are to follow one another between slim, fluid intervals, for he has crossed and re- crossed this route countless times in the past, on his trips and campaigns to the north, but always at a remove, always on horseback, on boats or elephants, and never on foot, never like this skirting danger so close, gasping for breath at every other step, never immersed waist deep in the sea, the colour and abundance of its life seething about him.
On and on it goes, land giving way to water and water turning back on the land’s edge, for a day and a night and beyond, while he lives on frugal supplies of food and drink. Thirsty and hungry he finally steps upon the peninsula and for a moment it seems that the entire continent is tilting under the weight of his parched soles. Or is i
t he who bends forward, his centre of gravity sinking down the perineum?
He moves on, and the land or his feet slowly find a new equilibrium. Too fast has he gone in the past, with too much on his mind, and it is so that he is seeing this landscape for the first time. Soon enough he walks into a grove, picks up and bites hungrily into the fruit that lies strewn everywhere. He comes upon a settlement and the tribesfolk, taking him to be a holy mendicant, seek his blessings, bringing him first pudding and buttermilk, and then a dish of rice-balls in a thin sulphur-yellow curry, strong and savoury, with a hint of coconut. They offer him lodgings and he decides to stay for the night.
He is woken up by the scuffle of feet, sounds of something resembling a skirmish, a woman’s wail, the restless beat of a horse’s hooves. He is out of the hut in no time. Outside it is a scene of mayhem. A thatch is burning, shooting balls of fire into the sky. Bandits. One comes charging straight at him, pike in hand. He leaves him in the mud, the blade deep in the victim’s breast, blood spreading under his convulsing form that is fast growing cold. He pulls another down from his horse and finishes him with two solid blows of his hand, breaking the rogue’s neck with the second. He takes the sword of the one fallen and climbs onto the horse. He kills three, maybe four of the attackers, and the remaining flee in terror from his demonic wrath.
He dismounts at last and the tribesmen are around him, kneeling down in a circle, children and women closing in from behind, seeking his protection. Is he not already their protector, the final protector past a series of protectors? Did he not promise safety to these lands and their people when he brought them under his dominion long ago? No, he is too far, too high up to make good the pledge of his protection to those who need it, those at the far reaches of his empire, those who so openly share their food and dwelling with him, their king. It is only now, perhaps for the first time, that he has acted as a true sovereign. But it is too late, too different now. He is in search of something else. For the moment he can do no more. And he cannot halt his journey here, though where he is headed he knows not.
He leaves before dawn, moving northward but at a slant to the east. And even at that slant, his path makes other slants, so that when he travels through the forest he ends up on the crags by the beach and when he walks along the shore, the sand shining like steel and the water a dull grey, rippling past his gaze, he reverts to the lush comfort of trees again. He steers clear of people and soon he vanishes like a column of smoke into the landscape. For days, for months, he turns invisible.
When one sees him next, he is much changed. The elements have had time to work upon him. His skin has gone coppery, even leathery in places, indeed stretches taut over his bones such that he looks gaunt from certain angles and his eyes, deep set in their sockets, have a reddish gleam in them. His hair, long and matted, coils into a topknot over the dome of his skull, and his beard is brown and dense. He is living near the mangrove forest which sprawls over an immense alluvial delta through which the Ganga passes on its slow, meandering course to the bay. There, near a pond, is a cluster of huts, where the adepts live, a community of men and women who spend their days practicing arcane rituals, asceticism and alchemy. It is the cult of the goddess, the dark one. With them he has settled and is seen at dawn sitting before the square brick altar, performing oblations and intoning hymns to the god of fire. Each day he goes farther into this world of arcana, a world of flesh and dream, of breath, fire, and mercury, ringed in by the sea-forests, by majestic crocodiles, elephants, and tigers, by friendly dolphins and birds of the air, by bands of rhinos and wild buffalo, by greedy scavengers.
For some time now, a dog has kept him company, follows him everywhere, at times running back and forth, at other times moving in circles around his moving form, like a planet tied to a shifting sun. At night, it sleeps with him, huddled together on a deer’s pelt inside the outmost hut. On moonless evenings, when ceremonies for the goddess take place, when the drum booms and the flames cut fiery swoops on the air, when metal enters bodies and flesh meshes with flesh, pure terror shines in the animal’s eyes, and it is afraid of the master it so loves, in fear it mewls like a kitten, before going completely still. In those nights, as he dreams of a tiger decimating herds of bison in open grasslands, and later riding the same tiger over snow-blocked passes, the dog sits on its hind limbs, cowed and shivering in a corner.
At the onset of spring, he again treads north, and the animal is glad for it. Through fields of maize and barley, golden under the noon sky, he observes the diffused outline of the first hills. At first hardly a smudge on the horizon, their form grows clearer with each step, acquires weight, until he can see beyond a mustard field, yellow on green, the sheer slate-blue bulk of the mountains, snow etched in their folds, rising from the earth’s womb. He, his dog following, heads straight toward them and reaching the top of a knoll he watches from a breach in the pines the rays of the declining sun throwing them into stark relief.
He moves through wave upon wave of oaks, pines, and walnut trees, through a forest of rhododendrons oozing red blossoms, through mighty cedars and evergreens that block the sun and make the air cold and damp, past lakes that shine like molten silver in the clear light of the moon, and it is so that he is no closer to those tall peaks cutting into the sky in all their silence and splendour. He looks for food and the dog looks with him, sometimes splitting away on its own, but returning always to share its find with him.
On the sixth day, he has left the tree line behind and the landscape grows rocky and bare before him, there is snow by the wayside, with only eagles for company, and they too few and distant, soaring and circling in the thin air over the summits, and suddenly he is upon the high mountains, skirting along a foot-wide track at the edge of a vertiginous gorge that collects the terrible echo of the river gushing hundreds of feet below. At dusk, he hits upon a nomad trail and soon finds a group making camp on a high plateau by the edge of a small lake. He joins up with them and although he understands nothing of their dialect, he is given a bowl of soup with mutton fat in it, his dog likewise, and is ushered toward the campfire. Under a heavy canopy of stars, with the fire crackling in the logs and the tribe’s wild shaggy oxen tinkling their bells and releasing puffs of breath from their shiny muzzles, very white against the chill of the night air, he sits with the rest of the group that is singing or talking in whispers. The dog curls up in the hollow of his legs, and he stares long into its wet eyes, the fatigue visible in them, perhaps even the first signs of illness, and deep in their solitary island, he hums softly to it.
Early at dawn the nomads break camp, and he goes with them, falls in line behind one of the couples, their young daughter, a child really, observing him from the back of an ox, never letting him out of her sight. Men and beasts go slowly in file up the mountain. A night passes, half a day. Now there is ice everywhere, although it is beginning to thaw in places. The track lies frozen, and they inch ever cautiously up the pass full of snow. Within an hour’s march from the night camp, his dog had coughed up blood, and because it kept faltering and falling behind more and more as the ascent steepened, he now walks with the animal resting across his shoulders and he feels its laboured breath on the nape of his neck.
Wherever the sight travels, there are just mountains. Fold upon fold of rock and ice, a feeble sun skipping through tatters of cloud. He walks in a kind of daze, in a spell cast by some mountain spirit, and he is long past the top of the pass, can already make out a beige landscape merging with the bluest sky in the distance, when the form girdling his neck suddenly feels cold and heavy. No throb, no pulse reaches him from the animal’s flesh, and he hopes that it left him at the high point of the path, up there in the clouds.
He keeps descending as before, holding the dead animal up close. If the others notice, they say nothing. The girl has gone to sleep on the back of the ox, its blanketed hump her pillow. At a bend in the road stands a cairn with an old flag fluttering from its crest, and it is here that he leaves the carcass for
the birds that depend on it.
They go down fast now, on the other side of the mountain face, and the dry earth stretches before them into a lunar wilderness. Crags raising their shoulders above the low shrubs that cover them, meadows and patches of grass watered by thin icy channels where agile, skittish goats graze in their own blue radiance, and soon there are not even shrubs, only cactus-like plants and rocks that glisten with quartz and salt. Dry, loose earth wraps the unending landscape in a mantle of ochre and brown, and tiny round stones scrunch underfoot. The tall peaks of the Himalaya refract like crystals behind them.
When they are on the high plains again, the caravan halts. The sun declines in the west and they decide to pitch camp for the night. This is the final stop before the group splits. The larger of the two will continue north the next day, while those remaining will turn west. It is west he will go. By a happy coincidence the family he has become familiar with over the past few days heads west too. He has picked up enough of their strange speech to make meaning from the short low grunts and gestures that do service for words here.
Night falls like a clap from heaven and a fierce chill reigns, stars glitter sharp and cold like jewels and the sky is of a black that shines with its own darkness. By the fire he sits, sipping the dry, heady liquor that leaves in its wake a taste of burnt wood in the mouth. By now used to his presence among her kind, the child crawls into his lap and he slowly sings her to sleep.