But I could find out a secret in the king’s daughter’s bedroom that triggered my hope to reach out to the reason behind it. Haven’t I told you that the king’s daughter kept forgetting her dreams once she got up from the bed with shock? I didn’t need much time to make her sleep again. She slept calmly after a brief conversation with me. As her words didn’t carry any signs of dreams, I didn’t ask anything about them. Only after the night wind entered the room carrying the scent of neem after she slept did I see the window of the room kept open. I came to know about it later from my disciple. I had an intuition that the god was trying to tell me something furtively with that open window. I had told I could spend the whole night sleeping on one of the long beds laid in the king’s daughter’s bedroom. There was still a long time for the night to go. I got up and went near to the window. The top branch of the tall neem tree from the palace garden was standing near the bedroom, branching out into the window. In that area—which had a lesser number of security guards due to the faith reposed on the twelve-foot-high wall with spears fixed on its top—I saw two pug marks trailing from the grass bed in the garden, climbing on the tree, and jumping into the bedroom. Then, it slinked along the wall, went past the stuff stacked up in the room with an ease as if they didn’t exist, and entered the adjacent room where the maid was sleeping. I thus began to have a hope to find out the reason why the dream-lover of the king’s daughter spat on her face.
***
With this, my great-grandfather’s story of the first night (the story of inhalation) came to an end. The people and the members of the royal family who were listening to his story dispersed, unwilling though. Those who were permitted to stay back were just whiling away their time, chattering. Their conversations were centered on the dreams of the princess and the enigmatic pug marks that jumped into the palace bedroom through the neem tree. All of them tended to believe that the servant maid, who was supposed to guard the sleeping princess by being awake, was the one who had willingly allowed the person to whom the pug marks belonged, and began hating her. They announced aloud that her crime of stabbing in the back was unpardonable and made her misconduct reach far away through the seasonal winds that passed through the capital. The people living in faraway places also began loathing the maid of the king’s daughter. Their guesses, which put the number of stars into shame, were predicting the possible punishment the king would give after completion of the story the next night. The maid’s house, located somewhere in a small village away from the capital, was set ablaze that night. Her old parents living in that house readily accepted being burnt up alive in fire for giving birth to such a wicked woman. This news reached the palace only nineteen days later after the incident happened. The entire capital mourned for that incident only after nineteen days. All the people, who hated her to the extent of killing her when the story was narrated the previous night, now realised their mistakes during the narration of the story next night. With their implicit seeking of her pardon, they comforted themselves that they could absolve themselves of their sins. But when that innocent servant maid, to her utter shock, came to know about the injustice meted out to her after nineteen days, she cursed my great-grandfather wholeheartedly for leaving the story at an inappropriate juncture the previous night that had rendered her an orphan. She then jumped out of the window through which the tiger went out from the king’s daughter’s bedroom and killed herself by jumping onto the spear erected on the wall. On the other hand, the king’s wife, who returned to the palace after the story told the previous night, was also cursing my great-grandfather mouthful for disclosing the erotic dreams of her daughter in front of the big crowd, that too, in the presence of her parents. She remained sleepless that night, troubled by a commonly accepted thought that a woman’s mind is created in her father’s imagination, whereas her body is created in the fantasy of all men. She was terrified to see in her imagination the erotic dreams of her daughter spilling out of her closed eyes were reflected as flowers on her nostrils, a smile on the corner of her lips, the red hue on her cheeks, and the taut pearls on her breasts. She was unable to imagine that twenty-two men were watching those changes on her body that could enamour anyone. She kept her husband away from hatred, as he was the father of her daughter. Other than the king and my great-grandfather, she couldn’t find any plausible reason to forgive those twenty hunters. She then ordered her guards secretly, without the knowledge of the king, to behead all those twenty men who played the collection of songs called “The Coition of Star Dwellers.” Those hunters were brought to a place of execution without the knowledge of anyone, and summarily slaughtered. The eyes and tongues of their family members were shut under the huge compensation they received and the burden of their allegiance toward royal family. It was said that the sequence of many auspicious events, including the marriage of the king’s daughter and the fame of my great-grandfather, shot up at great speed to the peak only after these murders. The king came to know after many days about the murder of an untarnished girl and the twenty hunters who played the music to soothe his senses. He then took responsibility for all those unfortunate events that occurred under the shadow of his bright reign, fell irreversibly sick, and became bedridden. One of the stories says that my great-grandfather came to know, from the hysteric laughter and yells of the queen at him when he was expelled from the palace years later, that she did want to get my great-grandfather killed along with those twenty hunters. But she kept her plan of killing him aside due to her sense of gratitude that had overwhelmed her seeing his personality, wisdom, and illustriousness on the day she left after listening to the story. She remembered the old wisdom and comforted herself that the one who saw the dreams of a young girl without any qualms and disclosed them without any scruples would die of the thoughts of those very dreams. Unfortunately, that wisdom proved to be true. Destiny was bringing him the image of the king’s daughter sleeping with her curvaceous waist and flaccid breasts again and again and was troubling him for days. He was longing for his early death in those days after the third usage of his craft, trying to absolve him of the sins of his mind defiled with the impure erotic thoughts, which was otherwise abstemious. But the poisonous seeds sown by the king’s daughter’s dreams, to which he stood as witness, and her sleep kept growing fast as per the wishes of the king’s wife and against his wishes. Even long after the king’s daughter was married to a handsome and healthy prince after her complete recovery from the disease, and the people almost forgot her, my great-grandfather was still roaming with the undying passion due to the effect of seeing her dreams (which he understood only after the third usage). While he forgot the last part of the treatise on dreams that stipulated that the dreams of women shouldn’t be seen by men, he remembered the part that explained the dreams that attained eternal beauty without ageing as they were not contaminated by seeing them, and then drawn into a pathetic state of mind to penetrate the youthful dreams of his own wife, who was widely respected across the old city, without her knowledge. Destiny blocked his wisdom in such a way that he remembered neither the tenets of the scriptures nor the promises he gave his master in this regard. In the dreams of that middle-aged lady, his wife, he visualised her as a young woman in her youthful days before marriage when she was his master’s daughter brimming with stiff assets and scents, and he let himself have the sense of erotic pleasure that the men of wisdom usually despised. At that moment, the anger of the scriptures he had antogonised and the curse of his master he betrayed brought in front of his eyes two apparitions. My great-grandfather was shocked to see himself in one of them in which he, who hadn’t yet crossed his middle age, was standing as a complete old man with grey hairs being brushed aside as a subject not worthy of serious consideration by his own youthful wife. In the scene that was both the second apparition and bloodcurdling, he saw his childhood friend, who was believed to have disappeared from the eyes of this world after being devastated due to the ill effects of the patient’s bad dreams years ago, coming out of his hideout and appearing in front of the master’s daughter with his strong body that hadn’t lost its vitality. While he was climbing on the taunting steps of death, with his eyes opened forcibly by the curse, he saw both of them fully nude, playing the game of seduction on the very steps made as their bed, and had all the craft he learnt all through his life completely slip out of his mind that moment. After that, he never attempted to find it out anywhere. His face turned like a burnt firewood, withered, as the lustre of his craft that was shining had been put out.
To be continued…