King of Lanka

by David Hair

  ‘Then you must be related to Amanjit,’ Vikram grinned.

  Amanjit punched him on the arm gently. ‘Vikram lets his mouth get him into trouble too, as you can see,’ the Sikh laughed. He had been in good humour on their journey north. Once more, they felt they might be on the right track again.

  Varun Kapoor chuckled gently. He was a tiny man with white hair sprouting from the back and sides of his skull, in stark contrast to his bald pate that was darkly tanned and spotted with age. He walked with a limp. ‘Come, come. This way. Tim sahib awaits.’

  Vikram felt a small frisson of remembrance, to hear Tim Southby so titled. Varun led them through a cluttered and untidy house, full of mementoes from all over the world.

  ‘So much junk, eh?’ Varun waved a negligent hand about him. ‘My “dust collectors”, I call them.’ He paused in front of a bronze metal piece, crude and primitive. A dancing girl. ‘This is from Harappa,’ he remarked, handing it to Vikram. ‘No, it’s not the famous dancing girl statue that everyone studies. Just a lesser version we found. I kept this one secretly. A little naughty I know, but there wasn’t much goodwill at the dig when they finally reopened it. Too many memories.’

  Then he was opening the door, and Vikram followed him into a room where an ancient European man was seated on a cane chair, staring out the window, through the trees towards where the river gleamed. His clothes were casually expensive. He wore an outdated tie, a plaid jacket and trousers, despite the heat. Vikram glimpsed an aluminium pole where the ankle should be, the only visible evidence of the Englishman’s missing leg. ‘Tim sahib?’

  Southby blinked. ‘Don’t call me that, young man,’ the Englishman said, not unkindly. ‘Too many memories attached.’ He extended a sun-blistered, finely wrinkled hand. His face was leathery, his thin hair white. ‘I’m Tim Southby. You must be Vikram?’

  ‘Yes sir. And this is my friend Amanjit.’

  Southby shook both of their hands, then indicated a sporty-looking Englishman of thirty-odd, who was reading the back pages of a newspaper. ‘This is my grandson Michael. He has no interest in history or archaeology at all, do you Mike?’

  ‘None at all, Granddad,’ the Englishman replied smoothly. ‘If it doesn’t involve a ball and a bat, it’s not worth knowing.’

  The two old historians rolled their eyes at each other. ‘The younger generation, eh! A lost cause,’ Varun winked at Vikram. ‘Excepting yourselves, my young sirs.’

  ‘Absolutely sir. I am a keen student of history and—’

  ‘And I’m a keen student of cricket,’ Amanjit put in. ‘This is more Vikram’s scene than mine.’ He bobbed his heads toward the two old men, and backed away. ‘Do you follow the IPL?’ he asked Michael.

  Michael Southby grinned. ‘Of course, though I prefer the Test scene.’ Michael shook Amanjit’s hand solemnly. ‘Shall we go into the lounge and turn on the telly? It’s the third day of the Test match in Australia, and it sounds like we should leave the old-at-heart in peace.’ Amanjit and Michael exited, chatting cricket, shutting the doors behind them. Vikram took a deep breath, and tried to order his thoughts.

  Tim Southby smiled at Vikram. ‘“Old-at-heart”. Is that what you are, young Vikram?’

  Older than you could realize. ‘I don’t mind the phrase, sir. I like it.’

  ‘You don’t mind us speaking in English? My Hindi is very rusty these days.’

  It was never really that good anyway, Tim sahib. ‘I will do my best, sir.’

  Firstly, Vikram told a fiction of how he was related to Ramesh the chai-boy. It was simple and sounded plausible: he told them his family had fled Pakistan after the raids by the Muslim National Guard and reached India, settling in Rajasthan. ‘What happened at the site, sir, when the Muslim National Guard came?’

  Tim Southby related in hushed tones his memories of that awful day. When he was done, they sat silent. Vikram had to fight down a rush of nausea. His own memories of that day were very shaky, but he could still remember Mehtan Ali—Ravindra—driving in those spears, first into poor Kamila while they made him watch, and then into him …

  ‘I wish I could give you some comfort, young man,’ Tim Southby said softly. ‘But your ancestor Ramesh died horribly, along with that little girl.’

  Kamila must have been Kamla reborn, Vikram thought sadly. He wondered where Sue Parker was, then brought his mind back to the matter at hand. ‘Sir, I knew that Ramesh was killed. It is of some comfort to know more. But I do not wish to think about it any more.’

  ‘Don’t be carrying anger in your heart, young man,’ Varun Kapoor put in quietly. ‘It was long ago. There are too many such stories, but gradually they are laid aside. Prolonging a vendetta solves nothing.’

  Vikram thought about Ravindra, and vendettas that last for millennia. But he shook his head dutifully. ‘I am not here seeking fuel for a new fire, or to restart an old one. All I seek is knowledge.’

  ‘Then it is my privilege to be of assistance,’ Tim Southby rasped, his voice slightly emotional. He looked as if those dangling, impaled bodies still haunted him.

  Vikram took a deep breath. ‘Sir, one of my studies in university is the Ramayana. What do you think about the epic? Is it a true history? Or something else?’

  Varun Kapoor blinked owlishy. ‘No small question that one,’ he chuckled. ‘How much time do you have?’

  ‘I have wondered whether the epic is linked to the Indus Valley Civilization,’ Vikram responded, partly in truth, but mostly because he wanted to narrow the discussion down to Tim Southby’s specialist subject. If his brief life in Harappa had any significance at all, then surely Southby’s recollections were the key.

  Varun glanced at Tim Southby, who was still staring glassily into space. ‘Tim, that would be your area, I fancy.’

  Despite appearances, the Englishman had heard every word. ‘Of course, Ramesh. I’ll tell you what I know and surmise on the subject.’

  Ramesh … Vikram didn’t interrupt to correct the name.

  Southby sipped his tea, collecting his thoughts. Vikram waited patiently until he was ready. From somewhere in the house, a cricket commentator made terse observations, and he dimly heard Amanjit and Mike Southby chatting. Then the old man began to speak.

  ‘The Ramayana was probably written in 300 BC—no earlier than 400 BC. They say Valmiki begun it here in Ayodhya. It spread throughout South East Asia as Hinduism spread, and changed as it travelled, though the core of the story remained the same. Obviously, it looked back to a prior period. But the problem with mythology is that it is never pure history. Myths usually contain elements of allegory—an elephant can symbolize all manner of things, or simply be an elephant, for example. Myths can tell convenient lies—designed to convey a claim to territory by pretending that a certain tribe had always dwelt on those lands, or justify the imposition of a law or a ruler or a religion. And phrases can mean many things. How literally do we take phrases like “son of God”, for example? All myths contain such problems. But raising questions about them can be dangerous, as myths encapsulate things that are important to the people that propagated them. Varun here is a good example—his article about the history of Ayodhya has brought violence upon him from all sides—because he told too many truths, and questioned too many vested interests.

  ‘Myth can also contain aspects of ritual—a myth about a man killing his father and sleeping with his mother might be taken literally, or convey some moral message, or refer to a ritual of inheritance. Or all three. The interpretation of mythology is literally a minefield!

  ‘So, on to the Ramayana! Was it real, you ask! If so, where? Was Rama born a few yards away here in Ayodhya? Was there really even a Rama at all? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone can claim categorical knowledge—they can only choose to believe or disbelieve. What I have come to believe is that there may have been, which is a limp kind of answer, but we cannot be sure, with so little reliable evidence. Those who say that all the evidence is in the sacred text are blinding themsel
ves to what these texts are: collective cultural memory repositories.

  ‘The earliest civilization in India was the Harappan or Indus Valley culture. 3000 BC to 1500 BC, approximately. Quite advanced, certainly for its time, and for later times too. It ended when the Indus Valley lost the capacity to support life in the numbers it had. Probably this was to do with over-farming and the rivers drying up. Earthquakes may have changed the river courses. For years we thought there was some “Aryan invasion”, but the archaeology doesn’t support this. It seems the people simply gave up the now arid lands and left, and became absorbed into the more backward Suryavansha tribes to the east, in the Ganges river plains. It may be possible that the Ramayana chronicles this fall from grace, and perhaps some undiscovered military actions of the late Harappan period. Perhaps “Ravana” was the last king of the Harappans. But that is only speculation.

  ‘Others place the Ramayana in the later post-Harappan “Vedic” period. After the fall of Harappa, the Harappans probably spread across the north and were absorbed into the Suryavanshi. New kingdoms were founded. Wars were fought. Alliances made and broken. The kidnapping of Sita may be a romanticised “Helen of Troy” story used to justify a campaign in the south—at the time the south drew its influences and possibly its bloodlines from East Africa, not the north. Note the invention of a subhuman race of “monkeys” used to describe the people of the south—a hint that the northern Indians did not believe that they shared ancestry with the southern peoples.’

  ‘So Lanka was Sri Lanka then?’ Vikram asked, as the old man paused.

  Varun Kapoor grunted. ‘Here we go! You shouldn’t ask old heretics like us such questions, young man!’

  Tim Southby tapped his armrest. ‘Neither Harappan nor Vedic culture spread into the south, Vikram. Certainly not in the Indus Valley period, and only to a small extent in the Vedic period, until the Mauryan Empire conquered most of the south. But the Mauryan Empire was after Valmiki wrote the Ramayana, unless the Ramayana was written later than we think.’

  ‘So you’re saying that the Ramayana could relate events of the Harappan, or Vedic periods?’

  ‘Or it may be entirely fable,’ Varun Kapoor interjected.

  ‘If it concerns the Harappan period,’ Tim Southby went on, overriding his friend with a smile, ‘then it is likely to have taken place entirely in that region. If it relates to the Vedic, then it is possible that Lanka is Sri Lanka, as tradition dictates.’

  Tradition surely does dictate that, Vikram thought, remembering the power of the myths that had ensnared them at Vibhishana’s court. ‘You don’t think so, do you sir?’

  Varun Kapoor laughed aloud. ‘A perceptive young man, this,’ he said to Southby. ‘He can read you like a book, I am thinking!’

  Tim Southby chuckled. ‘Varun thinks that I am obsessed with Harappan culture, and want to site everything within its bounds. We scholars are prone to this—we want everything important to fall within our sphere of expertise. Varun has the same fault,’ he added with a smile.

  Varun slapped his thigh merrily, as if this were an old joke they both enjoyed. Vikram waited patiently.

  Southby grew serious again. ‘Well, young man. It is my view that the Ramayana is based within the Indus Valley, and is concerned with the end phase of that period. Ravana is associated strongly with the area—he wed his wife Mandodari in Mandore, which is in modern Jodhpur, and he is still worshipped there. Virtually all of the early parts of the tale are based in that region, barring those set here in Ayodhya, which are, when you think about it, the parts pertaining to the victors, and not the vanquished.

  ‘So, if the Ramayana is about the fall of Harappa, then I believe we can look at the Harappan sites for our alternate “Lanka”. To play the part, it would need to be an island with a large Harappan site on it. There is such a place. There is an island in the Rann of Kuchh that is surrounded by salt flats in summer, and that floods after the monsoon. It has an ancient causeway servicing it still, and a large Harappan site discovered in 1967. It seems to have been occupied on and off until the late Harappan period, right through to 1200 BC, though it seems large-scale population abandoned it in the 15th century BC. If I was a betting man, I would place my “historic” Lanka, if such a place exists, there.’

  Vikram had been listening with rising excitement. An island. A causeway. An ancient settlement. ‘Where is it sir? What is it called?’

  ‘The locals call it Kotara,’ Tim Southby replied. ‘We called it Dholavira, on Khadir Island.’

  Interlude

  The Ambush

  Jharkhand, North India, June 2011

  From where he stood, the soldier could see barely thirty yards in any direction, except the slash of cloudy sky above. The platoon was in a ravine, working their way north-west towards a village where reports said that insurgents had been passing through, looting food and killing wantonly. He’d seen the misery these terrorists left behind, and he sorely hoped they were still in the village when they arrived.

  His name was Private Suresh Goel, Rifleman of the 3rd Platoon, 2nd Battalion of the Mahar Regiment. He was twenty-two years old, a second son with no interest in the Pune-based tailoring business of his father, little formal education (he’d frittered his school days away on cricket and truancy) and few prospects. He wasn’t a good catch and didn’t like the girl his father wanted him to marry. So he left home at eighteen and joined the army. They had been the best four years of his life. He’d made friends, seen some of India and even a little of the world during a brief peace-keeping stint in Timor. Sure, it could be boring, but there was seldom much stress—he didn’t have to worry about how to earn a living or what to do next—there was always someone to give an order and make up his mind for him. He had money in the bank, two uniforms, and his INSAS rifle, an Indian made variant on the Russian Kalashnikov AK-47. He didn’t need much else. He was small and wiry but he was fit and strong enough to lug his gear all day and still be up for an evening run. He’d never thought to grow up as a soldier, but now he couldn’t imagine anything else. He’d been the smallest of his brothers when he left, but none of them would dare push him around now like they had.

  His platoon consisted of twenty-eight men: three sections of eight riflemen plus a second lieutenant in charge, a sergeant, a radioman and a medic—were strung out a little due to the confines and undulations of the ravine. There was easy walking on a larger path just half a kilometre west, but that path would be watched. The insurgents were accomplished at leaving traps and ambushes, and this landscape—sheer cliffs, thick vegetation and a tangle of rough-hewn hillocks—was a lethal maze. The air was damp and the rains had come early, pouring life into the vegetation, which burst from every nook and cranny. The air was laden with the scent of frangipani and rotting leaves, and despite the rains the heat was still oppressive, weighing on the air.

  His skin tingled suddenly, as if he had just received a mild electrical shock, pulsing through him and earthing in the mossy boulder he was working his way past. His lungs tightened, and for an instant it was hard to breathe, and then the sensation was gone. The birds fell silent in that same instant, then lifted into the air in an unnerving whoosh of wings.

  He hit the dirt, and flicked the safety on his rifle off.

  ‘Ajit?’ he called softly to the man in front. He glanced behind, dimly making out Manoj behind him looking about with nervously jerking eyes. He gestured to Manoj—a new recruit that summer—to go to ground, then shifted his eyes forward, and crawled around the boulder.

  A repeated clicking noise met his ears as he made out Ajit a few yards ahead in the fog—he was a big man with a pudgy face who operated the platoon’s radio. Right now he was cursing fluently. ‘Did you feel that?’ he asked Suresh.

  Suresh nodded. ‘That feeling like electricity?’

  Ajit screwed up his nose. ‘Yes. It shorted out this damned radio. Now the whole thing is dead, like there is no battery.’ He reached into a pocket, and withdrew a heavy black cartridge.
‘I’ll try the spare.’

  Suresh looked back, to where Manoj was coming around the boulder. The young recruit wore a frightened look on his face, but breathed easier as Suresh signalled for calm. Then behind Suresh came a sound like a swooping bird, and Ajit gave a strange cough.

  Suresh spun his head, in time to see Ajit clutch at a long arrow that jutted from the back of his left shoulder with a feeble arm. His face looked bewildered and then it lost all expression, as he simply rolled his eyes and slumped over his radio set. The replacement battery cartridge fell from his limp grip into the mud.

  ‘Ajit?’

  His brain caught up with his eyes, as he realized that more arrows were fizzing down from the forested slopes above. He pressed himself flat as more struck the big radioman. He glanced back, where Manoj was transfixed in terror, as shafts rattled about him. He heard screams of pain and fear all down the line, and someone shouting orders to return fire, to shoot damn you shoot!

  All down the line, the air was filled with all manner of battlefield noise, shouts and screams and orders … but no actual gunfire.

  Suresh Goel wormed into the lee of the boulder, trying to pierce the gloom and make out targets. He grabbed Manoj’s shoulder, to instruct him to go back the other way, and find the next squad, but his frantic whispers fell on deaf ears—the boy rolled over at his touch, two arrows in his side, his eyes round and empty. He’d not even made a sound as he was struck.

  Suresh wriggled deeper beneath the crevice, as deep throaty calls, more like hunting tigers than men, echoed from high above. He peered between two boulders at giant, fantastical shapes that detached themselves from the mist—big men in some kind of costumes, with horned helmets and demonic face-masks … or so they seemed.