PRINCE OF DHARMA
Page 3
Maazi naroti
In closing, I’d like to quote briefly from two venerable authors who have walked similar paths.
The first is K.M. Munshi whose Krishnavatara series remains a benchmark of the genre of modern retellings of ancient tales. These lines are from Munshi’s own Introduction to the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan edition of 1972:
In the course of this adventure, I had often to depart from legend and myth, for such a reconstruction by a modern author must necessarily involve the exercise of whatever little imagination he has. I trust He will forgive me for the liberty I am taking, but I must write of Him as I see Him in my imagination.
I could not have said it better.
Yuganta, Iravati Karve’s landmark Sahitya Akademi Award-winning study of the Mahabharata, packs more valuable insights into its slender 220-page pocket-sized edition (Disha) than any ten encyclopaedias. In arguably the finest essay of the book, ‘Draupadi’, she includes this footnote:
‘The discussion up to this point is based on the critical edition of the Mahabharata. What follows is my naroti [naroti = a dry coconut shell, i.e. a worthless thing. The word ‘naroti’ was first used in this sense by the poet Eknath].’
In the free musings of Karve’s mind, we learn more about Vyasa’s formidable epic than from most encyclopaedic theses. For only from free thought can come truly progressive ideas.
In that spirit, I urge readers to consider my dried coconut shell reworking of the Ramayana in the same spirit.
If anything in the following pages pleases you, thank those great forebears in whose giant footsteps I placed my own small feet.
If any parts displease you, then please blame them on my inadequate talents, not on the tale.
ASHOK K. BANKER
Mumbai
April 2005
PRARAMBH
ONE
RAMA.
The blow-heat of rancid breath against his face, guttural whisper in his ear. He snapped awake. Sweat-drenched, fever-hot, bone-chilled, springing from his satin bed, barefoot on the cool redstone floor. Sword, now. A yard and a half of gleaming Kosala steel, never out of reach, a bolt of lightning in his fist. Soft rustle of the silken gold-embroidered loincloth around his tight abs. Naked feline grace. Taut young muscles, supple limbs, senses instantly attuned to the slightest hint of threat.
He scanned the moonlit expanse of his bedchamber with the sharpness of a panther with the scent of stag in its nostrils. Barely three seconds after rising from deep, dreamless sleep, he was ready to take on a dozen armed men. Or worse.
But the bedchamber was empty. The moon was full tonight and the room was caught in a silvery net, more than sufficient for his trained eyes to scan the princely apartment. Jewelled ornaments and regal furnishings gleamed richly in the silvered dimness. The far wall, some twenty yards from where he stood, showed him a pale imitation of his own reflection in an oval mirror framed in solid gold. He had heard enough descriptions of his appearance in kavyas composed by the royal bards to know what the mirror would have shown had the light been sufficient. A distinct dynastic resemblance, unmistakably related to one of those towering portraits of his illustrious ancestors adorning the walls of Suryavansha Hall. Classically handsome (the bards would sing), a fitting heir to the dynasty of the Sun. The reality was harder, leaner and more austere. His piercing brown eyes, as sharp and all-seeing as a kite-hawk’s thousand-yard gaze, scoured every square inch as he traversed the apartment with quick military precision, his movements graceful and flowing. Bedchamber, clear. Gymnasium, clear. Bathing chambers, clear. Enemy not sighted, repeat, not sighted.
Circuit complete. Return to bedchamber.
Breathing in the pranayam style, he executed a martial asana that was part attack and part spiritual discipline. In three breathtakingly graceful leaps, it took him to the veranda that ringed one side of the circular chamber. Sword slashing through the gossamer folds of the translucent drapes that could conceal an assassin. Turn, turn, breathe, slice, follow-through, recover, resume stance. Guru Vashishta had trained him superbly. A quad of assassins striking with two weapons apiece would have been hard-pressed to put a scratch on his lithe body.
The veranda was empty.
He checked his perimeter in a sweeping three-hundred-andsixty-degree arc that put him back precisely in his original position, and scanned over the ornately carved redwood balustrade, first checking topside then below. Above, the complex vaulting architecture of the mahal rose up in an ingeniously layered design that allowed efficient guard-watches without the royal residents ever seeing their vigilant protectors, out of their line of sight. But he had to be sure; the sense of mortal dread was too real, too powerful. He vaulted out on to the lip of the ledge that encircled the veranda, flicked the sword from one hand to the other, gripped the sculpted corner of the balustrade, then leaned out over a twenty-yard fall into darkness. In the bright wash of the purnima moon, he could see the helmeted heads and spear tips of the night-watch patrolling the south grounds, moving in perfect unison in the regular rhythmic four-count pattern of a normal chowkidari sweep. Ground level, clear. Topside, clear, all the way to the roof. Silvery gleam of the tip of a lance held in defensive position: roof watch on guard and alert.
Leap down to the veranda. Turn, arc sword in a sweeping action that clears the first circle of personal safety. Circle clear.
Hold stance. Sword blade flat on right shoulder. Cold steel on sleep-warm skin. Breathe. Exhale. Scan down. Move to the far end of the long veranda, twenty yards running the length of the princely chambers, covering the distance in a cheetah-swift instant. From here, he could see down to the western grounds, the distant front gates of the palace and the darkened length of Raghuvamsha Avenue beyond. Again, deserted, except for the night-watch, patrolling alertly even at this silent hour. Armour and sandalled feet clinking and tramping in precisely coordinated rhythms. Quads of four armed and armoured royal guards scouring every square yard in an endlessly overlapping pattern. Squares interwoven with squares interwoven with more squares, in a grid extending outwards in every direction. The grid extending to the seventh wall, the outermost defence of the greatest fortress city ever built by the Arya nations. Ayodhya the Unconquerable.
From the south, a gentle wind, carrying the scent of battle elephants, horses, camels, buffaloes, boar, deer, cow, fowl, a thick murky soup of animal odours. Source: the royal stables and stockyards behind the palace.
Somewhere in the still, silent night, a domesticated wolfhound baying uneasily, as if feeling the same sense of not-quite-rightness that stirred Rama’s hackles. An elephant trumpeting sleepily in response. A rooster clearing its throat, croaking once irritably, then lapsing into silence, stealing a last few moments of sleep before the imminent dawn.
He forced himself to stand down from the martial asana of full alertness, changing the pattern of his pranayam breathing, dialling down his biorhythm using yoga techniques. From battle readiness to mere watchfulness. There was no danger anywhere to be seen.
The night breeze was cool on his sweat-limned body, the air damp with the sweet mist of the river, barely thirty yards from where he stood. As eldest prince—by mere weeks, but eldest all the same—he had the corner suite in the maharaja’s palace, giving him a view of his beloved Sarayu. Even though coyly concealed by his father’s palace, he could smell her. That invigorating mineral tang of glacial flow, a smell that brought back memories of a childhood spent on its banks. The gentle murmur of the river helped him calm himself. His body released its tension in carefully graded stages. Warming down. Sweat cooling on his heated skin. Odour of the royal stables fading away as the wind changed, coming now from the north, carrying the frosty bite of the distant snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas and the delicate fragrance of nightqueen blossom, raat ki rani, from the palace gardens.
Your women ravished, your children enslaved, your city sacked and razed to ashes.
His eyes widened. Full alert instantly. Turn, turn, slash, clear first circle, s
econd, third, turn, turn, slice, jab, breathe, always breathe. In moments, he had covered the seven circles of personal safety. If this had been a battlefield, a dozen men would lie dead or dying around him. Nothing could survive the seven-circle asana. Nothing human at least.
But still, there was nobody there. Neither man, beast, nor asura. What was going on here?
Then he felt it.
A foul presence, like the nostril-clogging stink of wild Southwoods boar five days rotted and worm-infested. Maggots seeping out of blood-encrusted orifices. Mulch and mildew. The raw, fetid stench of deep jungle.
He felt the heat of a living breath on his face, heard the rasping gravel of a voice in his ear. A voice like rock scraping across glass. It isn’t my imagination. Someone—something—is here with me. Invisible, unseen, venomous as a stepped-on cobra.
You will watch your birth-mother savaged beyond recognition, your clan-mothers and sisters impregnated by my rakshasas, your father and brothers eaten while still alive, your race massacred, your proud cities pillaged and razed—
‘Who’s there? Show yourself, you coward! Face me and fight!’
—and when you think you can endure no more, when the horror is over and every living mortal is enslaved or converted to my cause, when you have suffered as much torture as any of your kind can endure and still live, then I shall snuff you out and start all over again. The samay chakra, your sacred wheel of time, will repeat the cycle of birth and suffering infinitely. You will wish you were in hell then, for even the underworld of Narak will seem a blessed escape from the living nightmare of mortal existence.
‘Damn you! Show your face!’
Boy. You still do not understand. See for yourself then. See the future and tremble.
And in a flash of blinding light, Rama was transported.
TWO
He stood in the Seers’s Tower, the highest point in Ayodhya. The stone tower rose like a sword in the sky, an awe-inspiring achievement of Arya architecture as well as a perfect lookout post. Such a tower existed in every Arya city from Gandahar to Ayodhya, to alert the citizens to an approaching enemy host. But it had been more than two decades since the Arya nations had tasted the bitter salt of war. And Ayodhya itself had not once in its proud history been under siege. Hence its title, Ayodhya, literally, the Unconquerable. Even the seven legendary seer-mages who had raised the tower with the mystical power of Brahman had not found reason to assemble within its impregnable walls for hundreds of years.
This circular chamber of the tower’s topmost level, nicknamed the Seers’s Eye, was damp and musty with disuse, the grey flagstone floor frosted over by night dew beneath Rama’s bare feet. He turned and turned again, sword prescribing the arc of the first circle. The elements were wilder here in this edifice of sorcerous architecture, carrying a sense of ancient times when war was a way of life and places like this were all that kept the Arya nations a sword-length ahead of their mortal enemies. He listened carefully, but at first all he heard was the whistling breath of Vayu, the wind god, blowing through the windowless openings and the distant growling of Indra, the god of lightning and thunder, threatening to unleash a storm even though the monsoon season was months away.
Then he heard it.
There. Below the howling of the wind and the distant growling of thunder. A sound like nothing he had heard before in his fifteen years of mortal life. Yet he knew at once what the sound meant.
War.
It was the sound of war.
Within Ayodhya.
For the first time since coming awake, he felt a needle of fear pierce his heart. He started to freeze, muscles locking reflexively; then, with an effort of will, he forced himself to maintain his breathing pattern. He moved forward, towards the dark maw of the windowless aperture, and faced the most shocking sight of his life.
Ayodhya was being raped.
A great war raged in its streets. A huge army of asuras had breached the seven gates and invaded the city. The three defensive moats were choked to overflowing with the corpses of the inhuman races of the asura army as well as the bodies of the city’s mortal defenders. The rich crimson of human blood mingled with the multi-hued life-fluids of the alien invaders, lying splattered in swathes everywhere he looked, flowing into and polluting the sacred life-giving Sarayu herself. The river was dark and heavy with the offal of death, her pristine purity turned into a corpse-gutter.
Asuras of all sizes and shapes butchered Ayodhyans. Rama had heard countless tales of asura atrocities before, nightmare tales from the Last asura War that he knew still haunted his father on moonless awamas nights such as this one—for awamas was the night when evil flourished—but never had he heard of or envisioned such atrocities taking place within the walls of his home city, mighty Ayodhya herself. In a single glimpse, his entire world tilted and went out of balance. A thousand impossible sights filled his vision, threatening to drive him insane.
Rakshasas twice as tall as men, roaring with exultation as they impaled human soldiers on their enormous antlered horns, then using their curved yellow talons to tear open their bellies and suck the steaming entrails into their hungry mouths.
A quad of palace guards encircling a rakshasi, her sagging breasts suckling two hairy infants that clung with tenacious stubbornness to her waist. The guards jabbed the rakshasi with their longspears, trying to contain her and shepherd her away from the palace gates. He guessed that they were squeamish about killing a female, a mother at that. Their moral strength was their downfall. The rakshasi grasped their spears and twisted them around the necks of the soldiers as easily as winding wool. She grabbed a soldier in each hand and held them high in the air. Her infants screamed with delight and tore the guards open, one feeding greedily on dripping intestines, the other sucking the spray of blood jetting from an unfortunate soldier’s throat with relish, as if it were mother’s milk.
Everywhere Rama looked, rakshasas were killing and devouring Ayodhyans with terrifying ease. For every rakshas that fell or was wounded, a hundred of Rama’s fellow countrymen died horrible deaths. Most of those eaten weren’t even killed off properly; he could see hundreds lying with their bellies torn open, crying for merciful death. Rakshasas strode over them, trampling their wounds underfoot as they sought new victims on whom to inflict their terrible butchery. They were the forerunners of the asura army, heading the invasion and leading the rest of the inhumans into the city.
Pisacas followed in their wake, clicking their insectile mandibles as they swarmed noisily through the streets, seeking out and destroying their prey. They inflicted a double violation upon their victims: first tearing open their soft flesh with their razor-sharp claws, then squatting above the agonised Ayodhyans to deposit their loads of greenish-black crystalline eggs. Then they exuded a viscous fluid that instantly sealed the gaping wounds. Only then did they move on to other victims—a single Pisaca impregnating dozens of humans in this manner. Their victims would survive the few hours it took for the eggs within their ruined bellies to hatch and the tiny swarms of crab-like infants to feed on their warm-blooded hosts, eating their way out of their bodies. Most asuras combined warfare with the eating of enemies. Only the Pisacas used their enemy to breed as well.
Nagas, giant cobra-like beings with a human head and torso but with yard-long forked tongues and serpentine lower bodies and long tails. They slithered through the alleyways and up walls, finding the strays and those who tried to flee the more organised invaders. Rama saw a group of Nagas converge hissing on an unarmed Brahmin mother and her two shaven-headed sons. The raised hoods mercifully hid what happened next. When the hoods parted, the three Brahmins lay prone on the street, their skin turning blue from several twin-puckered bites.
Uragas, enormous reptilian brethren of the Nagas, flowed slimily among their cousin species, their enormous python bodies swollen with telltale lumps—the Ayodhyans they’d swallowed alive. Their deceptively human faces were cast in the appearance of beautiful girl-children, a detail that only ad
ded to the horror of their violations.
Yaksas, the anthromorphic races. Even though Rama had grown up with tales of their magical antics, he had never heard of Yaksas being openly malevolent. They were generally benign, lovable but mischievous pranksters who used their morphing abilities to tease and entertain, not to kill and maim. Here, their mischief was vicious, their antics deadly. He saw a group of Yaksas morph into a herd of horses as they turned a corner and came face to face with a troop of citizens armed with an assortment of farming implements and kitchen weapons. The Ayodhyans paused to let the horses ride past, realising their mistake only when the Yaksas tore into them like predators rather than the gentle herbivores they were masquerading as. Hooves flailed, smashing skulls like ripe pumpkins. Powerful equestrian teeth ripped necks and bit off limbs. Half-ton heavy battle-horse bodies trampled screaming humans underfoot, shattering bones and smashing organs. Elsewhere, other Yaksas were using their morphing abilities to disguise themselves as elephants, camels, deer, dogs, swine, even an unlikely band of murderous buffalo, loping along with horns dripping blood and gore.