Maya's New Husband

by Neil D'Silva

  But Bhaskar learned the hard way that perfection doesn’t always pay. One day, he drew a young girl as nature had made her, with her wide-eyed squint. His art was near perfection, something that could be hung in a museum for connoisseurs to muse over. However, instead of payment, all he got was a barrage of abuses in his dear departed mother’s name from the girl’s irate boyfriend. This taught him an important virtue, a virtue that all artists must know—the virtue of embellishment. He learned what people wanted to highlight and what they wanted to hide, and he learned to draw exactly what they wanted.

  Some might call this pimping of art, but in Bhaskar’s case, it only helped to increase his clientele. He earned a reputation and a few steady patrons. Time moved on.

  ***

  After a couple of years of drawing on the streets, one day a particularly well-dressed man came and sat on the chair he had arranged for his pavement studio. “Draw me,” the man said and Bhaskar set to work. The man looked every bit a sexagenarian and he had his fair share of wrinkles and a cleft lip, which made drawing him a particularly sensitive affair; but Bhaskar knew now how to choose the right profile and omit the undesirables. When he was done, the grey in the hair looked distinguished instead of ungainly, and the cleft lip was as appealing as a ramp model’s pout. He showed the picture to the man, and he showed his appreciation in the form of large pink currency note, the largest that Bhaskar had ever held in his hands. At first, Bhaskar was afraid to even touch it, for he did not want his hands to leave ungainly smudges on it.

  A week later, the man returned with his family. Bhaskar drew every member of his family, and he was again suitably impressed.

  The happy customer came back for several months, once or twice a fortnight, and every time he got some work done from this amazing pavement artist and went away happily. “I am making an album for myself,” he would tell Bhaskar each time.

  Finally, when he had been coming for six months, the man asked, “Would you like to work in a better environment?”

  “What kind of work?” asked Bhaskar.

  “The thing you do—draw—and other kinds of art.”

  “I don’t know. I like it here, and I earn enough,” said Bhaskar. He did not want to leave something that was in his hand for something in the bush.

  “All right,” the man said. “Take your time. But if you decide to, give me a call. Here is my card.”

  Bhaskar tucked the card into his wallet without seeing it. He had a wallet now, bought from a vendor in a train, and he even had a little money in it. He forgot about the card for the rest of the day, but when he was on the train back home, he remembered it and took it out of his wallet. It read in bold sans-serif font:

  Rajkumar Purohit, Principal,

  Madam S. Khanna High School for Boys

  ***

  Several weeks after that, one day when Bhaskar was sitting alone in his room, eating his simple meal of potatoes and chapattis that he had trained himself to cook, there was a knock at the door. That surprised him, for he never had any visitors. He had a few acquaintances here and there, but they never came to his place; it was always he who went to meet them whenever he wished to. When the knock persisted, he rose from the floor, and without bothering to put his shirt on, went to answer it.

  He was puzzled to see a man dressed all in black and red. The visitor had a copious amount of facial hair that made all other features indistinguishable. He wore several beads of various kinds around his neck. He vaguely recalled seeing the man somewhere, but then one sees hundreds of faces in the city every day.

  “Who are you?” Bhaskar asked.

  The man entered the house without answering. He was strong for his age. He took Bhaskar unawares and pushed him. Then, locking the door from inside, he sat on the bed.

  “I repeat—who are you?” Bhaskar asked. He could have easily overpowered this man and thrown him out, but this man seemed to be a mendicant of some kind, and he did not wish to hurt a holy man.

  “I am your father,” he said.

  At that, Bhaskar kept looking at him long and hard. He had pictured his father a thousand times during all those lonely nights. He had seen him as a bandit, a rich man’s spoiled son, a vagrant on the street, a criminal rapist, a politician, a prince, and even a film star. There was a phase in his life when he suspected every man he saw even in slight communication with his mother to be his father. But never in his wildest dreams had he imagined his father to be a hermit.

  “But you are a sadhu,” Bhaskar said.

  “Not a mere sadhu!” the man said. “Most people confuse us for sadhus. But I am an aghori.”

  “What is an aghori?”

  “An aghori is a divine follower of Lord Shiva, the destroyer, the one who maintains the balance of the universe. We are the true bhakts of the Supreme Lord. We are above all earthly ties and bonds and we help the Lord maintain the balance. You exist because of us; you exist because we clean up the bad to make way for the good.”

  “But, I don’t understand…”

  The ascetic glared at him with piercing eyes.

  “How can I be your son?” asked Bhaskar, avoiding his gaze.

  At that observation from the young man, the aghori’s face turned to one of utmost dejection. “Son, I, Aghori Bhutachari, have faced the scariest ghosts of this world, lived in the most haunted places, tortured this body of mine in the most unimaginable ways,” he said, “but there is only one thing that I am frightened of. The Day of Judgment. For, when that day will arrive, my sin will be weighed against my penances, and the sin that I committed in my life—my only one sin—will far outweigh all my penances. Even if I sleep on a bed of nails for the rest of my life, my penance won’t be enough to erase that one sin.”

  “What are you talking about, Baba?”

  “I was in a deep meditative state, sitting at the haunted crematorium grounds, with this divine skull in my hands, when I first saw her, a nubile girl who stole my heart. She came up to me for my blessings. But, it was her mistake! Women are forbidden from entering the crematorium grounds, except when they are dead, of course. She should have stayed away. But what is fated cannot be reverted. She came, she touched my feet, and I blessed her. However, she stirred something within me that I could not understand. I remained perplexed for days on end, hoping that she would come again. She angered me because she had disturbed my tapasya, but at the same time I wanted to see her again. She put the devil in me. I had to quieten this devil. One night, I went into the village and found out her house. I smeared this oil upon my chest. This oil—the extract of wild berries mixed with ginseng—is a very devious potion. It creates temptation. She was awake, and she welcomed me. She gave me food. Not the kind I usually eat, but I ate. She fanned me, and gave me milk. And then she gave her body to me. In that one moment, as my seed left my body, I realized I had fallen from grace. I realized all those years of penance meant nothing. I had become like her, an inferior materialistic mortal without bhakti, and I began to hate her. She held my hand, but there was nothing to be done. I had to pull myself together. The other aghoris came to know of my sin, and I feared they would punish me with death. They would smear my ashes over their heads and my flesh would become the food of their stomachs. I ran away. Like a coward, I hid in the forest and stayed naked and ate unmentionable things for twenty-two years. And, at the end of my tapasya, when the Lord himself came to me in a dream and told me I was forgiven, I came back. But, the star had fallen. I was never taken back into the world I was in.”

  Bhaskar heard this long tale with dumbstruck awe. There were still a hundred questions in his mind but he saw the truth in what the man spoke. Then, from the folds of his robe, he took out a human skull. “Do you have something to drink?” he asked.

  Bhaskar was unnerved at the unabashed display of the skull, but he let that pass. He poured the man some water. “How did you know I am your son?” he asked.

  “An aghori knows everything. You were never hidden from me. Your aura pulled me to yo
u. Everyone has an aura that identifies them, and an aghori can see that from miles away. How can I not recognize my own aura which is in you? Was Anasuya’s death peaceful?”

  “She died peacefully, five years ago, in this same house.” And then Bhaskar remembered where he had seen the man. “You were at the crematorium, weren’t you? When mother died?” he asked.

  “Yes. I saw her dead face,” the aghori said. “You don’t know how much I have tried to forget her in all these years. I wanted to reach out to you in some way, but I was afraid I would sin with her again. Then I saw her, devoid of life, and I saw you. But, it was your aura that told me you were in this city. We were destined to meet.”

  “Where do you live now?” Bhaskar asked.

  “I have no house. I have been ostracized from the community. I no longer belong anywhere. I am the Fallen Saint as they call me.”

  “Would you like to live with me?” said Bhaskar. “A lonely life is difficult.”

  “No one knows that better than an aghori does,” the old man said. “I will live with you. I will change your life for the better.”

  ~ 17 ~

  The Severed Toe

  The transformation had been slow. Living with an old aghori who claimed to be his father, Bhaskar’s life had begun undergoing inevitable changes. It wasn’t easy for him to accept this man as his sire at first, but he was undoubtedly intrigued by the austere life he led. That was the initial attraction between them, more like a curious student is drawn to an expert teacher who is a proponent of a fascinating art.

  “Ghora means obscurity, that which is hidden from everyone’s view,” the old man told him once. “Aghora is the opposite of that. An aghori lives in the darkness but he brings to light that which cannot be seen. People with less knowledge term this in different ways. They call it the supernatural, the occult, the paranormal. Perhaps there is a thin dividing line there. In my life, I have seen what people haven’t seen. The unknown does not frighten me anymore.”

  Bhaskar sat at his feet, somewhat amused and mostly bemused by his words. But more than his words, it was the man’s lifestyle that held Bhaskar’s interest more.

  He wore no clothes most of the time. At most times, he wore nothing but ash, which he called bhasma. “This is the holy bhasma of dead people who are cremated,” the aghori told him once. “By smearing it over myself, I create a communion between the living and the dead. It helps me build a bridge into the unknown.” And, on the rare occasions that he wore anything over his body, it was an old cloth either black or white in color. “This is a shroud,” he elaborated. “The only clothes aghoris wear are those obtained from the bodies of dead people.”

  He didn’t eat anything for three days after he had started living in Bhaskar’s house. Then, on the fourth day, he went out for a spell and brought back a bag. The bag contained something soft that Bhaskar could not make out at first glance. Then the old man undressed, sat down on the floor in front of a pyre he had built himself, his back absolutely straight, and poured out the contents of the bag on the floor next to him.

  It was some kind of meat.

  Bhaskar wasn’t averse to eating meat. In his initial days of squalor in Mumbai, his mother had fed him all sorts of things to stay alive. “What is that?” he asked the aghori.

  The sage did not answer. He began igniting the firewood and placing them neatly onto the spit, sprinkling tallow from the meat on it so that it would burn better.

  Then, when the fire was a bright golden yellow, and it was so hot that it radiated heat throughout the room, he began placing pieces of the flesh near it, looking at them with appreciation as they began to lose their softness and converted into tough succulent fiber. They gave out an aroma of pork that Bhaskar had once eaten at a fellow artist’s house.

  “Is it pork?” asked Bhaskar, undeniable fascination highlighting his eyes.

  “No,” the man said. “The meat you mention has about the same taste as this, but a seasoned aghori can make out the difference just by looking at it.”

  When the meat was cooked halfway, he took it out of the fire and placed it in his skull vessel. He did the same with the remainder of the flesh and filled the bone bowl with chunks of the meat.

  “Now, we eat,” he said.

  Bhaskar looked at him with a strange kind of fascination.

  “Today, you shall take a step in a new direction,” the hermit said. “This is not meant for everyone; there are only a handful few who are chosen into this path and decide to walk on it. It is a path of great responsibility. It is the path of appreciation of the Great Destroyer, the Neelkantha, who consumed poison so as to provide the elixir of life to the gods. The Great One weeds out the undesirable elements from this world and helps bring in the new. This is what an aghori spends his life doing—destroying the remains of things that are of no viable value anymore. We are scavengers, and the scavenger’s role is a decisive one. We are no ordinary scavengers; we realize the worth of what we scavenge. We see worth even in what the world denounces as waste. Such as these… these mortal remains.”

  “Which animal’s mortal remains are these?” Bhaskar asked one more time.

  “Of a newborn. A human newborn.”

  At that, Bhaskar recoiled in horror. He had been seated in a straight posture with his purported father in a yogic asana, but this bizarre revelation made him spring up to his feet, and he stumbled to the corner of the room in the most clumsy manner.

  “Do not be surprised,” said the old man. “What unnerves you? That this is human flesh? But it is my job to cleanse it from the face of the earth, and to ensure the powers of the universe that went into creating it do not go to waste.”

  “You… how did you get human flesh?” he asked.

  “It is the order of nature,” the hermit said. “A one-year old, dead, was brought to the crematorium by his parents for the final rites. I procured him in ways I cannot tell you. Now it is my duty to consume this flesh, because human flesh is a divine creation, and putting it to waste is a great sin. By consuming it, I perform my divine duty. I absorb the destiny of this child, and being the seer that I am, I know this child was meant to have a stellar future had he not died from his disease.”

  He performed a kind of ritual and put one of the morsels in his mouth. Bhaskar slumped onto the floor, aghast at the scene unfolding in front of him. But, the old man put the flesh in his mouth as though it were a piece of everyday food. He chewed on it for a while and swallowed it, and he continued the entire process without any expression. He did it like it were a duty he was meant to perform, like it were some kind of ritual that had to be done. He did not do it out of appreciation for this particular brand of food, and that is what horrified Bhaskar more.

  But, in that horror was a fascination. As the man ate morsel after morsel of the flesh, slowly emptying the skull of its contents, Bhaskar witnessed the transformation in the man. From a haggard hermit, he seemed to evolve into a purposeful being, a creature filled with some strange kind of power that he could not fathom.

  When the last morsel was left in the skull, he held it out to Bhaskar. “You could be a part of this divine legion.”

  Bhaskar slowly progressed towards his father, curiously looking at the piece of human meat that beckoned to him from the skull. He did not find it despicable now. On the contrary, he felt rather drawn to it. He felt as though his life had gained some purpose. Perhaps this had been the path that he was meant for, the path that had been eluding him for so far.

  Bhutachari held the skull out for the longest time, waiting for the young man to muster enough courage to approach it. “It calls out to you,” he said. “The Shakti calls out to you.”

  Bhaskar took the morsel out of the skull with his trembling hands. Something overcame him in that instant, something that defied any definition. Then, closing his eyes, he put the thing in his mouth and swallowed it.

  It surprised him that he didn’t throw up.

  Instead, he felt a mysterious kind of gratifica
tion—a realization that he was somehow meant to do this.

  Gradually, the fascination for the meat increased. The first time was with reluctance and revulsion, but when the flesh was in his mouth, he felt an appeal for it. “It was love at first bite,” he later told the old man, much to the aghori’s disdain.

  “You are not supposed to enjoy it,” the hermit had thundered. “This is a thing of our belief; it is something that is meant to be done. We consume human meat because it is valuable to us; it must not devolve to its ground elements.”

  He did not discuss his newfound fascination with the old man anymore, but he waited for the days when he would forage some more human meat and bring it home. He did not mind where it came from, eventually he even stopped asking whether the meat belonged to a little child or an old man, just as one doesn’t ask whether the mutton they are eating belongs to a ram or ewe or a lamb. He was only hooked on to the fact that he was eating something he had begun to enjoy.

  It was sometimes just the muscle, sometimes an organ such as a liver or a kidney, and at one time he even brought a brain. “We only consume what would otherwise be wasted,” the aghori told him. “Whatever is obtained is not mine alone. Everyone has to perform their duty; it is a shared vocation.”

  Was the man really his father? The question haunted Bhaskar at times. Why had he begun to believe that this eccentric naked man who ate human flesh and smeared ash over his shrunken penis was his father? There was no way he could prove that; the only evidence was his own word. But, when the bonding over the unconventional food happened, Bhaskar did not bother to ask whether the man was his real father or not. He did not want to jeopardize his only chance of procuring something that he had really come to love.

  On the days he could not bring home any human meat, Bhaskar started becoming restless. He was much like an addict of a narcotic drug, and when kept away from the object of his interest, he began to show signs akin to withdrawal. On one such day, he went out of the house with a nervous disposition, and when he came back, he held in his hand a dead rat.