by Basu, Bani
‘If only the truth were simple. Truth has appeared to me in very complex form.’
‘Don’t laugh, Mahanam-da,’ said Neelam. ‘Obesity could be a sign of unhappiness too. It’s nothing to laugh about.’
‘Unhappy? Are you unhappy?’
‘We’re talking of illness. Disease. Not unhappiness.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Might be dropsy.’
‘Impossible. No one can travel or do household work with dropsy.’
‘Could be a glandular problem.’
‘It could. You’re a doctor’s daughter, I’m a doctor’s nephew, let me see if I can diagnose the problem. Is it a thyroid problem? Your eyes don’t suggest it is. Don’t talk rubbish. You’ve just eaten yourself to this state. Do you have a drink or two at parties?’
‘You think a drink or two can do this?’ Neelam began to laugh. Mahanam didn’t see the tears lurking behind the laughter.
The bus had stopped. The passengers got out to stretch their legs. Bikram came up to them with two glasses of sugarcane juice. Handing them to Neelam and Esha, he came back at lightning speed with two more glasses. Giving one to Mahanam, he offered the other one to Aritra in the manner of the Air India maharaja, saying, ‘Here you are Dada.’
‘Pour it over your own head,’ snarled Aritra.
Bikram said, ‘I thought you had to pour cold water on someone’s head. Mistaken metaphor, Dada? That’s the problem with anger. Flouts all rules. You know, don’t you?’
Taking the glass from him, Seema went up to Aritra with a smile. ‘Ari-da, please.’
‘I’m smoking, Seemachal,’ said Aritra with a smile.
‘You can smoke anytime. You can’t have sugarcane juice anytime.’
‘All right then,’ said Aritra, holding his hand out.
Bikram recited loudly, with suitable gestures:
What sorcery is this, friend, what magic do you know
No one can slay a helpless damsel just the way you do
Neelam, Esha and even Mahanam couldn’t help but laugh.
FOURTEEN
The steps were cut into the hillside. The rest house was directly opposite. A quiet place. The guide said, ‘You have a little time to look around on your own, please gather here in exactly ten minutes.’ Ellora had no connection with human habitation, it was distant, not destroyed but abandoned. As though the relationship between its greatness and spiritual values was so deep that it avoided proximity. Ajanta seemed to have come a little closer to human civilization. And humans too had been emboldened to construct a place for rest nearby.
The guide said, ‘In 1817, while hunting here on Ajanta hill, an English soldier spotted rows of arches and pillars on the side of a hill across the river. The Tapti basin lies on the other side of the mountain range, while the Deccan plateau is situated this side. The tiny Waghur river flows here through gaps in the mountains, curving like a horseshoe near the Saatkund falls. This is where the Ajanta caves are situated. There are thirty caves in all. Five of them are chaityas or meditation centres. The remaining twenty-five are all sangharams or viharas. Temples. The tenth cave is the main one. Ajanta was built slowly over the period between 200 BC and 400 AD. Then, with gaps of a few years now and then, the work continued till the seventh century. In other words, it represents almost seven hundred years of work.’
Seema was counting the steps as she climbed. ‘Exactly one hundred, Esha-di,’ she said. The higher they ascended the more did JPJ, Priyalkarnagar and Neelam recede from Aritra’s mind, while the College Street crossing, Hazra Road, Cornwallis Street, Ashutosh Building and Esha came closer.
Entering the first cave temple, Esha said, ‘This must be the last cave built, isn’t it, Mahanam-da? It was carved out during the reign of the Chalukya kings, I’m told.’
She fell silent on walking deeper into the cave. How could this oblong cave with smooth walls, like a gigantic hall, have been carved out of the mountain? What extraordinary architecture. The Kailash temple was huge, regal. But for some reason this cave appeared even more astounding. So cool that it seemed to be air-conditioned.
The guide shone his torch to show the figures of Buddha in the interiors of the temple. Buddha was seated in the lotus position, as in Sarnath. The expression changed depending on the angle of the illumination. From one side he appeared to be smiling, from another, melancholy. And from the front, the Light of Asia was rapt in meditation.
Mahanam said, ‘I don’t know whether the artist meant to bring about this variety in his expressions. If he did, we have to say he was brilliant. But we are invariably reminded of the expressions of the three figures of the sun at Konark. Newly-risen, noonday, and sad and weary at sunset—do you remember, Aritra?’
Aritra said absently, ‘No. The Konark figures of the sun are in Delhi.’
‘That’s the statue from the interior of the temple,’ said Esha. ‘Don’t you remember the figures in blue stone outside?’
Mahanam said, ‘The sculptor must have felt that that prince who had renounced his home because of the pain of his fellow humans could never have forgotten the agony. Perhaps the artist in him could not accept the detached sage, indifferent to both joys and sorrows. So these expressions of happiness and sadness had automatically emerged alongside spiritual peace from the hands of this talented sculptor.’
On Mahanam’s request the guide now held his light up to the depiction of Avalokiteshwar Padmapani. Here the Bodhisattva held a bloomed lotus in his right hand, with a bejewelled crown on his head, diamond ear rings, and a necklace of one hundred pearls round his neck. The artists of Ajanta were particularly adept at painting pearls. Avalokiteshwar was standing in the well-known Tribhanga posture, immersed in his thoughts. Opposite this painting was the one of the Avalokiteshwar Bajrapani. The human world was infested with decay, death and disease. How could the Bodhisattva devote himself selfishly to private worship? Negating the lustre of ornaments and attire, of luxury and lavishness, the rapt, meditative compassion of Avalokiteshwar shone through.
The colours of the photographs in the Unesco albums were too loud. The actual colours were much more mature, subdued.
‘So much better than the prints, aren’t they, Esha-di?’ said Seema.
‘That’s just what I was thinking.’
In the tiny chamber deeper within the cave, a huge panel showed Buddha rapt in meditation and the attack of the lord of death Mara. Accompanied, obviously, by soldiers. Mara’s three daughters were present too.
Mahanam said, ‘They’ve come to disrupt his meditation, but they might end up joining it themselves.’
‘Siddhartha’s power is so much stronger in comparison that Mara’s daughters have also fallen under its spell,’ said Esha. ‘They’re defeated in the sense that they are overwhelmed.’
Bikram said, ‘These paintings are not lifelike at all. The bodies are bent and twisted in ways that are not even possible while dancing. Did they all learn Odissi?’
‘Art is never lifelike,’ said Aritra. ‘Look at the full figures, they’re completely neglected waist downwards.’
Moving further ahead, Bikram said, ‘Oh, this is paradise! Indra’s court in Amravati! When the fortunate go to heaven, this is how the nymphs make them sit on thrones and entertain them. How nice! To ensure that people do good deeds out of their greed to go to heaven, the disciples of Buddha went to so much trouble to carve out caves and make all these paintings.’ Winking at Aritra, Bikram said, ‘What do you think, Chowdhury-da, should you and I start earning some piety?’
The guide said, ‘This is a tale from the Jatakas. The Mahajanak Jataka. The Bodhisattva was born as King Mahajanak. Here he is announcing his decision to abdicate and renounce the world, which is why Queen Sibali looks so dejected. The singing and dancing have stopped. The ladies of the palace are engaged in consultation and speculation.’
‘Good god,’ exclaimed Bikram.
Esha stopped in front of the image of Princess Krishna. She was the one whom Esh
a had dreamt of. Thrice in succession. After seeing the pictures in the Unesco album. Dark-skinned. Downcast eyes. How had the Buddhist artist learnt of such depths of despair? The melancholy of Avalokiteshwar was not the same as this suffering. ‘Look, Ari, how miraculous this grief is. It pervades the entire cave.’ Esha sounded desolate. ‘They may look different— Sibali, Mara’s daughters, Sumana, this princess—but they’re the same in one way. Companionless. The finest men in the world have burdened a solitary woman with the sorrows of the entire world and renounced earthly life.’
Seema said, ‘I’m telling you Esha-di, without one person’s suffering another cannot achieve happiness. Are you saying this Princess Krishna is also Yashodhara?’
‘Excellent idea, Seema,’ said Esha. ‘Could be. While Mara was under attack, and Siddhartha was acquiring his status of Buddha with great pomp and ceremony, perhaps an artist was reminded by this scene of the suffering of the queen in the joyless palace in Kapilavastu. It could also be the case Seema that the bereft, unhappy female character seen everywhere in all these tales from the Jataka and the Buddhacharita has been depicted symbolically. An open symbol of womanhood. You can analyse it as you like.’
Mahanam was standing behind them, listening. ‘Don’t you have something to add, Neelam?’ he said.
Neelam’s eyes were brimming with tears. ‘What can I say, it seems to me that this is a hapless woman who has got so many things and yet got nothing, for whom getting everything has been negated, turned into a failure, by the one big thing she hasn’t got.’
Smiling, Aritra said, ‘Since I used to write poetry once upon a time, I had assumed I was the only poet in this group. That I was the only one who could understand the artists of Ajanta correctly. Now I see my notion was completely wrong. Not me, it is these three women here who are the real poets.’
Mahanam said thoughtfully, ‘Three women of the twentieth century can see the truths of life in paintings from the seventh century. Can you gauge the immensity of this artist’s success? What would he have done had he been here today?’
‘I’m sure he would have exclaimed, “Wow!”’ said Bikram.
FIFTEEN
Each of them reacted differently to their tour of Ajanta. No one had paid any attention to Bikram throughout. Not even Seema, who seemed to have gathered new strength and stood in Bikram’s path like a challenge. Bikram hadn’t realized this clearly. But he had experienced a certain discomfort with Seema from the time of their trip to Ellora and Ajanta. Seema seemed to have become someone, a positive person with a distinctive personality.
The dark-eyed, cry baby whom he had eloped with from her Chunchura home fifteen years ago, who had taken a lot out of him over these past fifteen years while he had tried to rid her of her pouting and weeping, whom he now considered little more important than the bronze figure in the landing of his house in Thane, that very same Seema was now reprimanding him with polished language and subtle gestures, without sounding as though she was nagging him. Seema was speaking. Esha had turned towards her with wonder in her eyes. Mahanam, Dr Mahanam Roy, was talking to her as an equal, as though she was a fellow-speaker at a conference. Aritra Chowdhury had placed his hand on Seema’s shoulders delicately, as though they were fragile and valuable. Like the panels at Ajanta, a sequence of these images appeared before Bikram’s eyes like a living fresco. He was not the painter, in fact he was not even being accorded any importance as a viewer. The images were actions and reactions to one another. Bikram’s 500-watt eyes had no effect on them, they were illuminated by some other source of light. Bikram could not understand this fresco. While the figures on the Ajanta panels were virtually unclothed, the characters in this living fresco were covered with some fine transparent muslin over their regular clothes, which made the familiar appear half-familiar, and the half-familiar, completely unfamiliar. He could not recognize Seema clearly. Aritra Chowdhury was now a total stranger.
Only in one of the caves had Bikram had the opportunity for receiving public acknowledgement. The guide said, ‘This cave was probably used as a lecture hall. Stand at the centre, one of you, and say or sing something. The rest of you will hear it as you would on loudspeakers, complete with the echo.’
‘Why don’t you go, Bikram-babu,’ Esha said.
Bikram had forgotten his music these days. He remembered only a few favourites that he had sung many times. In a deliberate attempt to vent his anger, he started singing a self-composed parody:
‘Poor woman, you lurk behind the sage as his partner
You dangle from the langur’s hands like a grape Why can’t you be the sweet and sour pickle with my bread
Poor woman.’
The notes spread to every corner of the cave. How amazing this auditorium made by the Buddhists was. Bikram felt very self-satisfied under the impression that, after all these years, he had finally injected some life into a place where the sages must once have bored young apprentice monks with a stream of instructions. Seema said, ‘I want to sing a song too, may I?’ ‘Of course,’ said the guide. Seema took a position within the circle of attention of her audience, and sang a few lines from Rabindranath’s ‘Chandalika’.
Then, kneeling suddenly, she sang in a high voice and a different scale, ‘Buddhang saranang gachhami, Sanghang saranang gachhami, Dhammang saranang gachhami.’ I turn to Buddha for sanctuary. I turn to the Sangha for sanctuary. I turn to Dhamma for sanctuary.
A tall, plump foreigner with an innocent face drew a cross on her breast, raising her blue eyes to the ceiling. The two Japanese young men knelt, joined their palms, and softly uttered a prayer in their own language. ‘Would anyone else like to sing?’ asked the guide. The first song that Bikram had sung had put him in the mood for a ghazal, but Seema had sprinkled holy water and dampened the atmosphere. Realizing that his singing wouldn’t be received well, he walked out glumly.
The Buddhist workers had filled one cave after another with nude paintings. There was no doubt that these works of art were the result of suppressed libido from the succession of days spent in these caves without women for company after renunciating the world. As was the case with Khajuraho or Konark or the Jagannath temple. Their mentors, the Arhats, used to live in great happiness watching all these blue films, which Bikram had absolutely no objection to. But why not call a blue film a blue film! Who’s protesting! If you dress it up in the garb of religious wisdom, though, that’s another matter. Just like the alcohol-drinking tantrics and the bhairavi chakra of women and sexuality. But the images were not sufficiently arousing sexually. Unlike the sixty-four yoginis at Khajuraho, who made you break out in a sweat. These were dull, no spice, like Rabindra-Nritya in comparison to Kathak or Mohiniattam. Unless it was a hot mutton do-piyaza or murgh musallam, or at least beef kababs, Bikram couldn’t savour it. And then half the colours had worn off, the plaster was peeling, why would anyone waste an entire day on all this unless they were absolutely mad?
The gigantic sculpture of Buddhadeva’s Mahaparinirvana —his death, the release of the already released—had overwhelmed Neelam. A sal tree on either side, his disciples kneeling near his feet, the abandoned begging bowl in Ananda’s hand. Kushinagar. The architecture had captivated her more than the paintings, the sculpture more than the architecture. The Neelam who had climbed up the hundred steps to the Ajanta hill was not the same one who had climbed down the same hundred steps. Someone addressed her from behind the chaityas in a sweet, sonorous voice: ‘Samma-ditthi, samma-sankappa, samma-vaca, samma-kammanta, samma-ajiva, sammavayama, samma-sati, samma-samadhi.’ The right view, right thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. Not once, but again and again.
Sarnath. Siddhartha seated with his hands in the Dharmachakra Mudra gesture. He had just attained the status of Buddha, and was saying, ‘O five sages, comprehend the fundamental reason for the agony of our earthly ties. Longing and desire are the root causes. The longing for sensual pleasure, the desire for satisfying o
neself. How can these be uprooted? Forsaking longing and desire without leaving a trace is the real way.’
Indeed, what have you done all your life besides travelling from one longing to another desire? How turbulent youth had been, how tumultuous. Enriched—or was it besmeared—by hundreds of hunting expeditions. It was terrifying now to even recall all those devoted, lusting expressions. Someone had watched over Neelam from concealment to ensure that her sexual indulgence did not take her too far on the road to perdition. He had done what he had to. Neelam began to pray ritually after this. Only, what was it but a prayer to desire? A demand for compensation—or a plea to get back what she had lost—was woven into her sacred offerings of flowers and fruit. This form of worship was not genuine. It was self-deception, cheating too. See what a devoted disciple I am, I don’t even drink a glass of water before offering it to the gods. Having walked around the ten caves at Ajanta, Neelam had understood what worship really meant.
The devotion, offerings, chanting, resolve, meditation and self-sacrifice of a multitude of devotees had been frozen in stone by the lines and the flow of the works of art here. Their sharp intensity had remained alive for more than thirteen hundred years—samma-ditthi, samma-sankappa, samma-vaca. Om namah, Buddha dibakaray, gotam chandimay, sakyanandanay, nama namah.
Buddhadeva had given householders the right to be Buddhists too. They would follow the eightfold path. It wasn’t important whether you were a Buddhist or not. It didn’t make any difference whether you followed a specific religion or not. But with this gigantic sculpture of Buddha’s Mahaparinirvana before her, would Neelam be returning to the same home? How constricted it was, how impure its décor. What a strong smell of desire pervaded every corner—cigarette packets, beer bottles, meat, onion, garlic, envy, suspicion, rage, adultery. How would the great one enter there? He might be able to shrink his body, but how would he minimize his soul? Neelam said in her head—you have done me a favour by visiting my house, Esha. The glittering curtain in front of my eyes has been lifted. This is what they mean when they say hiranmayena patrena satyasyapihitam mukham—My Lord, Sustainer of Lives, your dazzling effulgence covers your face. A veil of false lustre is drawn over our eyes. We see it whenever we look, we think we are happy. We live in a fool’s paradise. The truth will not be visible till this veil falls. I give Aritra to you, Esha. One day I had snatched him from your hands. I had felt great pride, huge self-satisfaction, a tremendous sense of victory that the brightest object of women’s desire in the College Street area had left you for me. How selfish that pride was. I can feel in my bones now how wrong it was, how childish. I am returning Aritra to you. I give Mahanam to you too. Once I had deceived, yes, deceived, Mahanam. He did not punish me, demanded no compensation. But if he wants, if he really wants, I’ll give Pupu to him too. When I go back I will reveal the truth to Pupu. I will not increase the burden of my sin by hiding from her the identity of the great man whose child she is. Pupu is quite calm and mature, if I explain to her properly she will definitely take it well. And if she didn’t, if she forsook Neelam out of hatred and hurt, Neelam would bear that too. Her heart would break but she would bear it. She had got so much in life without paying for it. Pay now, Neelam Joshi, pay with your own hands, and then you can reach out to what is valuable, what is priceless. Neelam had effectively transformed herself into Rati, Mara’s daughter. She kept thinking of what Mahanam had said, ‘They’ve come to disrupt his meditation, but they might end up joining it themselves.’ If it was possible for Mara’s daughter herself to begin the act of devotion, would it be absolutely impossible for Neelam Joshi Chowdhury to purify her entire life up to now?