THE STERADIAN TRAIL: BOOK #0 OF THE INFINITY CYCLE

by M. N. KRISH

  Divya laughed. ‘You should be in politics.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Venus stopped writing and asked.

  ‘You do the balancing act quite nicely. You keep mentioning your mother, but what you’re actually doing is taking a dig at my cooking skills and my mother’s.’

  Busted, Venus grinned. ‘Sorry. Shouldn’t have included you in the list. Not fair to you,’ he said and resumed writing. ‘Only people who cook should have their dishes critiqued.’

  Divya threw the towel at Venus but he caught it and flung it back at her. She missed the catch and it ended up shrouding her head. She peeled it off and said, ‘Tell me, how come you didn’t even bother calling me in the holidays but decided to come here all of a sudden?’

  ‘Why didn’t you call?’ Venus shot back.

  ‘I was the one who called last time, remember? It was your turn this time.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve been way too busy lately.’

  ‘Busy with what? Project?’

  ‘Yeah, project and also other things. Remember the paper I presented at the conference last month?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Had to do some follow-up work. What about you? What were you doing on the campus yesterday?’

  ‘There was this seminar by a prof from US. Lara had invited him.’

  ‘American guy or some alumnus on vacation, beefing up his résumé?’

  ‘American.’

  ‘What did he talk about?’

  ‘Oh, he just presented some new algorithm he’s developed.’ Keeping Venus’s inferiority complex and drooping morale in mind, she didn’t say anything further. ‘Hey, guess what this week’s movie is?’

  Before Venus could respond, Meenakshi hollered from the kitchen. ‘Divvy! Come and eat before food becomes cold again.’

  Divya loaded her plate and came back into the living room. ‘So, could you guess?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Venus said.

  ‘Titanic. Saw the poster today.’

  ‘Titanic? Really? How many times will they keep showing the same movie?’

  ‘Keep quiet. They showed it only two times before,’ Divya said, having watched it on both occasions.

  ‘It’s so bloody long. They have to start the show Friday itself. Only then can it end on Saturday evening. Let’s go watch something else.’

  ‘What!’ Divya said. ‘Does it mean we’re going to a movie on Saturday?’

  ‘What else is there to do?’ said Venus.

  ‘Concert?’ Divya said.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Venus said. ‘I’m surprised you’re even suggesting it after last year.’

  Divya’s family had a season pass for the December music festival in the city and she had decided to use it with Venus last year, taking him to a classical violin concert by the twins, Nambisan and Natesan, only to find him asking her in the end, ‘Was it good?’

  ‘No, I’m suggesting because of last year,’ Divya said. ‘I need to make you a little civilized before you leave this country.’

  ‘Not on Saturday, maybe some other day. Let’s just stick to a movie – but no Titanic please.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Also, no English or Hindi, only Tamil.’

  On any other day, Divya would have insisted on English or Hindi. The recent obsession with blood and gore in Tamil movies really sickened her vegetarian sensibilities. But Venus was on the mend and she didn’t want to say or do anything to send him crawling back into his shell. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But we should make sure we find a movie I can watch without asking you in the end, “Was it good?”’

  16

  Though Urmila could smell something fishy when Lakshman returned home earlier than usual in the evening she couldn’t tell what it was exactly. She would never have guessed that he was planning on drinking with Joshua for the third day in a row. She wasn’t even aware that Joshua had put off his return and extended his stay in the city. She’d heard the muffled ringing of the phone in the middle of the night but had forgotten about it when she woke up in the morning. Distracted as he was by Rishi’s comments at the stadium and then by his daily grind, Lakshman didn’t get the chance to fill her in till the evening.

  Urmila could easily see through the scheme when Lakshman told her he was going to meet Joshua at the Oceanic to discuss something important. She had been married to him long enough to decode what going to a hotel to meet a friend usually entailed. ‘It’s three days in a row!’ she snarled.

  ‘True. But after how many months?’ Lakshman shot back.

  ‘Still, three days straight?’

  ‘Only because Joshua’s here. Once he leaves, there’s going to be nobody.’

  ‘That’s what you say,’ Urmila whined.

  But deep in her heart she knew it was true.

  Though not averse to alcohol in any of its multifarious avatars starting with Benadryl, Lakshman loved his beer. There was nothing that lifted his spirits like a bottle of well-brewed beer in hand, a platter of well-fried tikkas on the side and the company of a well-tried friend across the table. They were the holy trinity. While the first two were available for a price, the third wasn’t. Therein lay the rub. Lakshman did not have even one trusted friend in town to break a bottle with him. He was a product of an era where spells of prohibition and control in the state had reduced drinking to a clandestine ritual like human sacrifice. People often smuggled in their elixirs from across the state border – from Andhra or Pondicherry which followed a wonderful French tradition and never let the taps run dry – and guzzled them down in the privacy of their homes. The culture of secrecy and social stigma continued even after the government loosened its control, leaving Lakshman with no friends inside or outside the campus who were able or willing to been seen with him in a bar.

  Lakshman could not bring himself to go to a bar alone. Nor could he drink at home in secret solitude like many people did on campus. Not with Urmila in the house. She had voiced serious objections to his taste for alcohol right from the start, her oft-repeated line being: ‘My parents would never have given my hand in marriage to you if they’d known you were like this’. Though she gritted her teeth and came to terms with all her husband’s frailties over the years, there was no way she was going to let him bring this particular habit home. First she didn’t want him poisoning the minds of her children; when they grew up she didn’t want him polluting the contents of her fridge. Lack of friendly company in the bar and manly freedom in the house left Lakshman high and dry, more or less transforming him into an ascetic over the years. The only times he had his fill these days was when an old friend from abroad visited the city. So much so that even Urmila couldn’t be averse to his plight. She thought about it for a moment and decided to give him a long rope for one more day.

  But not without tacking on a rider.

  ‘Eat, drink and be merry. But don’t come back home for the night if you go anywhere near meat. Here I am, trying to get through Margali as piously as I can, and here you are . . . Can’t even go without meat for thirty days . . . Your clothes from yesterday . . . smelling of stale chicken. Yuck, turned my stomach. Couldn’t you at least put your clothes in the machine by yourself?’

  Lakshman only had his younger son Ashwin in Bangalore to blame for this. Coming under the sway of some swamiji there, he arrived home one weekend and declared that he had turned into a vegetarian. Their neighbours Rishi and Ahalya in whose house Ashwin practically grew up felt sufficiently inspired by the young lad that they too decided to follow in his footsteps. Not willing to be left behind by their neighbours, Urmila too joined the party. In stages. First, she gave up eating meat. A few weeks later, she claimed to have developed a revulsion and stopped cooking it in the house. A few more weeks later, she couldn’t even stand the smell and started barring Lakshman from cooking or eating it in the house. If he sought succour at a restaurant in
the city, she would refuse to touch him with a ten-foot-long pole when he returned home. ‘Parents are supposed to be role models to children,’ she’d say. ‘We’re blessed with a son like Ashwin and here you are, the father, who does not even have half his willpower. Such a shame.’

  The holy month made the offence particularly severe now. It was through a stroke of good fortune that Urmila allowed him into the bedroom after the tikkas last night, though he squandered it away by turning the bed into a trampoline. But that was yesterday. She was in no mood for such concessions today. A repeat performance with the tikkas was surely going to leave him languishing for the night, not in the reading room on the upper level but out on the street, in the cold of Margali, and it wasn’t lost on him.

  ‘Okay, I promise I won’t eat any non-veg today,’ he said as grudgingly as he could feign. ‘Not even scrambled egg. Not just today, but till the end of Margali. Happy?’

  ‘But don’t go overboard. My brother Parasu’s visiting the city and may come to stay with us tonight. I don’t want you walking into the house like a cart missing a front wheel, smelling like a sugar factory.’

  A man might have turned fifty and be into the third decade of marriage but he still had to keep up appearances in front of in-laws. Cursing his fate, destiny, karma and every other philosophical idea he didn’t believe in usually, Lakshman exercised moderation as he huddled up with Joshua in a quiet, dimly lit corner of the Oceanic’s bar. Opting for vegetable pakodas instead of chicken tikkas, he gave his undivided attention to Joshua as he revealed his motivations as well as his lurking fears . . .

  17

  Though Joshua held that the real logical starting point for anything went back to Big Bang one way or another, when he ran a rewind-search of his memory to trace the origin for the current crisis, it came to a stop much too soon: at a conference he’d attended in San Jose several years ago where Fasal Godot Dushert, a freshly minted PhD from Stanford, had presented a paper on Panini’s grammar and Natural Language Processing in one of the breakout sessions.

  Panini had captured the entire structure and syntax of Sanskrit grammar in a set of about 4,000 sutras organized in an eight-part opus called Ashtadhyayi. While linguists and cognitive scientists were drawn to Panini for his analysis of morphology, phonology, semantics and generative grammar, he also managed to attract another tribe of people. The precise and compact organization of Panini’s sutras, their algorithmic structure, their context-free nature, formal hierarchy and algebraic underpinnings – all resembling those of advanced programming languages – tickled the fancy of computer scientists. What was particularly amazing was that Panini had developed such a sophisticated system not anytime in the recent past, but over 2,500 years ago.

  Sparked off by Panini, Joshua developed what gradually evolved into an abiding interest in the mathematical advances of ancient societies: Egyptian, Mayan, Aztec, Ionian, Greek, Chinese and Indian. As he learnt more about them, he began to feel that it wasn’t necessary that every invention and discovery of the ancient world should have come down to the modern world; some of them could still be lurking somewhere, waiting to be found. He decided he would spend a little time on the side angling in the murky backwaters of history and see if any prize catch ended up on his hook. He took up a new hobby of researching the intellectual advances of ancient civilizations and accumulated a wealth of knowledge about them in a few years. However, he did not really stumble upon any eye-popping finds. It was like arriving at a maze knowing it had a hidden treasure but without any idea where the point of entry even was. A complex interplay of factors – millennia long time-spans, lack of reliable documentation, incomplete information, cultural and linguistic barriers, dearth of objectivity, racial and political bias of historians and limitations of historical research in general – sent him round and round in circles. But he was able to glean one curious fact during the course of his research: scientific innovations and discoveries in the ancient world were not always rooted in intellectual curiosity; they often stemmed from compulsions of religion, ritual or superstition.

  And this little nugget of insight was what provided Joshua the much-needed wormhole into the maze.

  Joshua’s knowledge of Indian history and civilization, enhanced by his repeated visits, made it amply clear that besides being the land of Panini, the country was home to the most ritualistic and superstitious peoples from time immemorial. While some prehistoric civilisations vanished into oblivion and some others broke with the past and embraced modernity, losing or wiping out much of their legacy in that process, India remained steeped in millennia-old tradition even in modern times. Some of the torchbearers of that tradition remained alive and active to this day, nestling among the milling crowds in cities and towns, like in Kanchipuram.

  ~

  Joshua’s exploration of cultural centres in India led him to Kanchipuram, a temple town just outside Madras with a very long history. One of the seven mokshapuris, hailed as Nagareshu Kanchi for being the epitome of a city, it was a crucible of culture, learning and religion and served as the capital of the Pallava Empire that flourished between 6th and 8th centuries AD. Over the centuries it had been reduced to a third-tier town that was often not even marked on the map of the country. But in its heyday, it was a prestigious seat of learning, in addition to being a political capital and centre of commerce. The city was dotted with schools where the curriculum consisted of a boggling blend of religion and reason, science and spirituality, philosophy and poetry, astrology and astronomy, meditation and mortal combat, yoga and warfare, mathematics and mythology, agnosticism and rituals, logic and superstition. All kinds of faiths – Saivism, Vaishnavism, Tantra, Shakta, Jainism, Buddhism – thrived in the city and every school of philosophy – Dualism, Non-dualism, Fatalism, Atomism, Nihilism, you name it – had its patrons.

  As a hub of scholarship and dialectics, the city played host to public debates on the nature of the Ultimate Reality between various schools, including a point of view which argued that there was no such thing as Ultimate Reality and it was an illusory notion. These debates were profound as well as acrimonious and the losing gurus often ended up converting en masse with their students to the winning school of thought. Given all this background, Joshua did not find it surprising that Bodhidharma, the first Zen patriarch and guru, in the sketchy and scattered information available about him, was often reported as a native or resident of Kanchipuram before making his much-celebrated journey to China.

  There was one particular institution in Kanchipuram that sent light bulbs flashing in Joshua’s head as soon as he found out about its existence: the Sankara mutt, the monastery propagating the doctrine of Non-dualism or Advaitha.

  The idea of Non-dualism, which came close to some Buddhist schools like Zen, given their common roots in Vedanta philosophy, held a special intellectual appeal for Joshua. He wasn’t sure which side of the binary divide he was on, the Oneness or Ekatha of Advaithis or the Emptiness or Shunyata of Buddhists, but he was nevertheless bowled over by the precepts of Non-dualism. He found out about the mutt devoted to this philosophy when he chanced upon an article about its reclusive pontiff who had completed hundred years, most of it in service of the mutt. Though the nature of Ultimate Reality had long ceased to be a burning issue in India and gurus were no longer bandying words with each other in public forums, the mutt continued to train priests and scholars and house a library containing stacks of ancient texts. The devotion to Non-dualism and the library were enough enticements for Joshua and he decided to pay a visit to the place during his very next trip to India.

  ~

  Lakshman listened to Joshua, spellbound. ‘So you went all the way to Kanchipuram?’ he asked, incredulous.

  Joshua nodded.

  ‘When did you go there?’ Lakshman asked, dousing a pakoda in pudina chutney. ‘I’m sure you must have gone through Madras. How come you didn’t tell me?’

  ‘It was three years ago
,’ Joshua said. ‘I did tell you about my India trip though not about Kanchipuram. You weren’t in India at the time, remember? You were in the US for some conference.’

  ‘Oh, during that trip?’ said Lakshman, wincing. ‘Conference’ was the code he had used for fund-raising and ‘fund-raising’ was the euphemism for another thing. Lakshman had accompanied the director to the US to network with the thousands of well-placed alumni there and appeal to them to make a contribution to their alma mater. But the alumni had other plans. They ended up using the conference for catching up, exchanging cards and networking with one other. The two professors were more or less cut off from the proceedings and wound up returning home with just a few coins in the cap. Lakshman preferred not to be reminded of the episode. ‘What did you do exactly in Kanchipuram? You’re making me very curious,’ he said.

  ‘That’s what I’m coming to,’ Joshua said. ‘Heard of Sulba Sutras?’

  ‘Come again, what sutra?’ Lakshman crinkled his face and said.

  ‘Sulba Sutra or Shulba Sutra or Sulva Sutra or however you guys call it. I’m told people mix up their v’s and b’s in this country. Any of them sound familiar?’

  ‘No, there’s only one sutra I’ve heard of and it doesn’t start with the letter s,’ Lakshman said.

  ‘I should’ve known,’ Joshua laughed.

  18

  Joshua approached the Kanchipuram mutt with more than a little apprehension. He wasn’t even sure if he would be welcome within its precincts to start with. During his visit to temples in India, especially in the finicky south, he was often stopped by signboards or authorities from entering the worship area outside the sanctum. He knew that it was illegal for temples to bar anyone from the worship area no matter what their religion, but he had no desire to kick up a row and stayed within the limits allowed to him; the agnostic that he was, he was visiting as a tourist and not as a pilgrim and saw no point putting the faithful in a spot.