The King's daughter (ராஜன் மகள்) by Ba. Venkatesan Part - 3

This is an English translation of Ba. Venkatesan's short novel "Rajan Magal". Translated into English by Saravanan Karmegam. 

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Considering the possibility that my great-grandfather might take it as an affront if the chief minister was sent to him to discuss the issue of the king’s daughter, the king’s wife went herself that day to my great-grandfather’s residence. That day when his house door was knocked on and he was called out did actually coincide with the king’s daughter’s sixteenth birthday and thus kicked off the first day of his impending ruin, as many who had wished to write this anecdote years later predicted it. Though the prediction of that day did take different directions due to many reasons, it was true that it still remained an irrefutable reason behind the unquestionable fame that my great-grandfather enjoyed beyond the seas. My great-grandfather, happy at her visit, acknowledged before her that the personal visit of the king’s wife at his place, who had never shown up her face anywhere in her life under any circumstances other than the corridors of the palace, was the biggest honour the royal family had accorded to him and his family. He happily accepted her plea not because it was the order from the king, nor because of the servitude of the king’s wife, nor because of the likely fame he would enjoy soon, but because of the king’s wife’s endearing words that the king’s daughter would remain his only most affectionate disciple ever. It was said that he treated the king’s daughter for sixty-eight days, which included the last day when he could chase away the tiger that was responsible for the dark dreams of the king’s daughter from her bedroom. Though my great-grandfather could identify the disease that was waiting to trouble her at the very moment she was introduced to him some years ago, he started his treatment from the beginning strictly according to the medical treatises, which prescribed that even if the disease was extremely strong, it still wouldn’t deserve to be fed with ‘amirtham.’ With his hands, everyone believed that it was sufficient to cure her disease. ‘Beginning’ meant a medical approach to the first category, usually a normal one, among the three variants of foul odour that stays up and nurtures germs in the body. It was called a pure medical usage. In this first category, the tongue is controlled by the bad odour that occupies the interiors by penetrating the parts of the body. The people who get sick with cold fever and jabber subsequently due to drenching in rain will fall in this category. It is just an average example. Even in this category, there were thousands of magics caused by the germs in the patient’s voice. The usage of rare herbs and sometimes the patient inhaling the breath of the physicians who chewed those herbs instead of the patient himself played important roles in this medication. The king’s daughter was initially administered this treatment. My great-grandfather tried it, as he suspected that the soft nerves of the female body might have gotten misaligned with the moves of Varmam due to the forceful learning of it, which was essentially designed for males and caused the spurt of words just opposite to what she had thought. This type of treatment went on for thirty-three days continuously. After he concluded that the bizarre utterances of the girl were not due to the effect of the first category of bad odour, he assumed she must have been affected by the germs that used to attack the voice from one’s memory and began administering the medication to address it after a gap of three days.

The fact that the unfortunate death of ancestors who were blood-related would have a specific odour did constitute the foundation of scriptures on magic. It was said that the smell of incomplete death would wait for some generations and rest in peace only when it was sniffed by someone in their progeny perfect in beauty and intelligence. A king who was born blind and disease-stricken lived for thirteen years in the third generation before he died. The second type of medication was tested on her with the suspicion that the smell of this king could have penetrated the memory of our damsel.

The germs causing such diseases were known as the germs of memory. They would cover the consciousness of the patient with the thick ring of water. They achieved their old solid forms first through the immediate interaction with the voices of patients that was caught in the ring of memory and then stabilized their solid forms through slow interaction with the outer appearances of the patient. In other words, the germs entering as the memory would then start enacting the patient’s past right in front of his eyes and thus hide the present from view. Being a highly skilled barber, my great-grandfather, who was aware of the ways through which the germs would enter, their behaviour and their association with the sweat pores, had readily trimmed the tip of the princess’ lock of hair, the curly hairs grown behind her earlobes, and the tender hair strands found on the upper part of her left elbow. The ring of memory encircling the patient’s consciousness needed to be weakened with the help of some rigorously chanted secret mantras and the stench from burning the rare varieties of herbal plants. Sometimes the usage of extreme medications might be needed. Since my great-grandfather was very certain in the beginning that the king’s daughter’s disease was not that severe, he didn’t attempt using harsh measures. After employing some experimental medications, he came to understand that there were no signs of germs of memory, which forced him to conclude that he didn’t have any means other than getting into her dreams. Twenty-two days had already passed in the second type of treatment. He said that it would take a week for the girl to recuperate from the tiredness of the first two types of treatments and to see her dreams in normal situations. My great-grandfather also needed one week to get himself prepared and returned to his room after announcing that he would be back after fifty-eight days. During that one week, he behaved as if he were out of his mind. After he entered his private room straight from the palace, he never attempted to come out of the room till the eighth day, the day he went back to the palace. He didn’t even try to complete his meals and other essential duties. He didn’t stop me from entering his private room. During that one-week period, he never asked me any questions other than only one. He began to read the books he had already learnt from the beginning again. Those old books were falling on him like a sprinkle from the loft. He was just shivering amidst those books as if he were perpetually drenched in rain and snow. He was repeatedly flipping over the specific pages of those books that dealt with the strictures on whose dreams shouldn’t be seen by whom under any pressing circumstances. His activities reminded me of both the entertainer and the chief priest of the palace. He must have walked at least three thousand ‘yojanas’ with his restless steps across his private room and read that particular part of the book seven thousand times. He was still indecisive, unable to come to an acceptable conclusion as to whether it was right to get into a young girl’s dreams or not. So pitiable a soul he was that he had been forced to ask my suggestion on this subject after growing enormously hopeless about his enviable erudition, his scholarship, and the depth of knowledge. He was profoundly afraid that the purity of his scholarship would be defiled with it. When he wept in front of me like a child, asking whether it was right under the strictures of holy texts to see the dreams of a young girl, which in fact carried the level of secrecy, energy, and scent of sexual coition despite it being done with the approval of the girl concerned and purely for the sake of medical understanding, I saw his robust, well-built frame had gotten dwarfed to two feet in height as if being forced to stand nude in front of ten young girls. I was also unable to answer his question. He left for the palace, visibly perplexed at his indecisiveness. For the first time, I heard him cursing himself for having made the mistake of learning that craft. We were left with nothing other than comforting ourselves by praying to the god.

However, everything went well with the will of God. The story ended with a note that my great-grandfather returned to his private room after three days with the fame that made him famous overseas and, above all, with the peace of mind that the purity of his scholarship had not been spoiled. When my great-grandfather—who went inside the king’s daughter’s bedroom the previous night, which hadn’t ever witnessed the presence of men in its existence, carrying an unfathomable, mounting burden in his heart to see through her dreams—opened the door the next day, the people around him were astonished to see the clarity, serenity, and resolute look that were found settled on his face. On the second night, my great-grandfather said that he wanted to sleep in the adjacent room attached to the king’s daughter’s bedroom, usually allotted to her servant maid. It was reported that many in the royal family grew suspicious and felt insulted by it. But the king’s wife, who knew about my great-grandfather and his eccentric ways of doing things and wisdom very well, gave her consent immediately. The next night was spent with the king’s daughter sleeping in her chamber while my great-grandfather slept in the adjacent room, which had no doors but was separated by a thin curtain. The next day, my great-grandfather, who got up from his bed before the king’s daughter woke up, announced that the treatment was over. The enthusiasts who had come there from abroad to witness his marvel got their eyes struck with the lightning of his laughter that erupted out of immense happiness and got them blinded with it, as they were not accustomed to watching his face earlier, and returned to their countries. On the third morning, my great-grandfather, while coming out of the room, told the king’s wife that if some twenty hunters were permitted to stay in the king’s daughter’s bedroom on the third night with a half preparation meant for a tiger hunt, the medicine would be ready. The king grew terribly uncomfortable with the idea of permitting unknown men into the bedroom of his daughter, which he considered a bigger sin than the Godhra line of royals getting defiled. The king’s wife, who hated my great-grandfather years later, was now ready to do anything for the cure of her daughter. It was decided that the girl’s father would also be permitted to stay in her bedroom that night, apparently to convince him that it was a part of remitting that so-called sin. The traditional folktales used to mention about the king’s daughter jokingly that even the disease that affected her had the power of twenty men. When my great-grandfather approached the king seeking his permission to leave for his residence after the treatment was over, the king’s wife requested my great-grandfather to narrate what had happened in the room during those two days for the sake of everyone knowing about it. Acceding to the request that it was his duty, he explained to her it was against the ethics of the craft to describe its details before ascertaining the complete benefits of the treatment and requested her instead to wait for a few more days before going back to his residence. From the words of the king’s wife while she spoke about her daughter’s marriage for the nineteenth time on the seventy-second day that her daughter had been released from her bad dreams after her shock at seeing a tiger that jumped out of her bedroom and had finally regained her old charm, my great-grandfather was satisfied that his craft and guesswork had proved to be effective. When he heard the queen happily announcing that her daughter was feeling shy and happy at the very reference of handsome men, he declared that he was ready to describe the events that happened those nights in the palace in public. Subsequently, he was brought to the palace with regal honour and given a suitable seat at the royal court. Before this, on the third night my great-grandfather’s treatment was complete, the king and those ill-fated twenty hunters whose lives would soon fall prey to the swords narrated the spectacular events of that night to their wives and relatives and neighbours and thus sparked the simple interest in the listeners to grow into a mass desire that craved the events that occurred during the past two days. From the day they described their versions of experience as per their imaginative and explanatory skills to suit the expectations of the listeners with flowery words, the single event of experience was then perceived in different stories and then became a part of folklore in the name of adventures of twenty men in twenty nights and started doing its rounds among people. Each story demonstrated the prominent aspects of the night as per the secret intention of the storyteller. If one story had the king’s daughter as its main character, another story was simply silent about it. Instead of it, one would find a golden beetle, which entered the hole in a horn musical instrument thinking it was a tender mango tree leaf, slept in it, and flew away after its metamorphosis into music, as the main character. In another story, the same horn music drew a picture of a tiger in the air and made it alive. A newly married hunter had privately shared the story of his sperm with her that squirted at the very touch of her during the peak of musical vibration from ‘Muzhavu.’ The king’s palace became a huge forest in the story of the hunter. In that, the animal he was running after had on its body the golden dots not found anywhere in the world and a grief that one wouldn’t hear. Instead of killing it with an arrow, he killed it by showing it a deep, yet fresh wound, yelling aloud a story about their past in which he had been a tiger and the tiger the hunter. That bizarre animal then changed into a king. As the forest changed into a palace, and the king himself in his original form returned to his place. In one of the stories of an old hunter who had been blessed with a lot of girl children, they were flying out, transforming themselves as music that filled the bedroom of the king’s daughter. To facilitate their quest for suitable music for them, their brothers, led by their father, were breaking open the top of the bedroom with Muzhavu. The suitors were scheduled to arrive soon in search of the women. In some stories, a god wearing the wriggling snakes as his plait isolates that night from the vast space of this universe and sets it up as the first day of the world again. He must be my great-grandfather, because he looked ageless. In some other stories, both the king—like a magician creating the pliable gloom of the rainy season even in scorching summer—and his daughter, who had taken the form of an angel in the air, were roaming around. Later, these stories were banned by a government order that they shouldn’t be sung by anyone (of course against the wishes of the king). Those who defied this order were possessed by the spirits of twenty hunters who fell prey to the royal swords and made those singers invisible to the naked eyes of people in the palace. As the ways and means to destroy those invisible people’s magic that had gotten merged constantly with the wind flowing across the city were not known, a scheme with a motive to create confusion was designed by which the royal court poets were summoned to convert those twenty hunters—the central characters in the folk songs—into the kings of twenty generations and the night those hunters participated into different nights of twenty generations according to the length of gaps of the night. The king’s wife confirmed that the folktale of the hunters was thus changed into the adventurous tales of different kings, made it the official version of the tales of the kingdom, and made adequate arrangements to get them sung aloud in temples and public places. There was no dearth of such odd stories in the old city. Leaving this aside, the story narrated by the king, who participated in the events that night along with twenty hunters as arranged by my great-grandfather, to his wife goes like this:

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As I have told you many times about it, you must be aware of what a queen tiger hunt is. There are two parts in a tiger hunt. The first part is about forcing the tiger to come out of its hideout, the bushes where it is hiding invisibly. The second part deals with chasing the animal when it comes out of its hideout, fighting it, and hunting it with weapons. The first part demands more of the sharpness of our senses than it does in the second. It is not an easy task to bring the hiding tiger in front of our eyes. What we need is sharper sniffing skills than the sharpness of eyes. The people who had the exemplary skills to assess the distance and the direction at which the tiger was hiding in the bushes with the help of the scent emitted from the tiger’s body were the ones who would participate in the first part. They would then stand at a distance around the bush and play the musical instruments like horns, drums, Muzhavu, and Jandai till the entire patch of the forest shook. Though the tiger is known for its stateliness and physical strength, it is basically a very soft-hearted animal. Even if there was a slight change in the intensity of the collective music played around it, it might have its heart burst and die at its hideout. To avoid the possibility of the entire game of valour slipping into a meaningless one, there were some people specially trained in singing distinctive songs that would tease the hiding tiger to come out. The collection of these songs, commonly known as ‘The coition of star dwellers,” was actually owned by the hunters who were living in the tents made by the hide of rare animals. They were living, not mingling with the urban people other than at the times of special invitation for such hunts, in the verdant forest areas, which were not yet destroyed, on the fringes of the country’s border. It was from this clan of hunters. Appaiah—our palace barber and the supreme sage—had arranged twenty of them and made them stand at the rear side of the king’s daughter’s bedroom that night till the start of the third ‘jama’ of the night. I was also made to stand along with them outside. It was true that my heart was deeply hurt, as if torn by thorns, when I saw Appaiah paying me no respect meant for a king. I accept it with shame. When Appaiah entered the king’s daughter’s bedroom, the king also entered along with him, though his entry could better be termed as forceful entry to hide there.

…To be continued.