In the adjacent room to the princes’ bedroom, where the
servant maid used to sleep, he arranged
some pillows in such a way that it looked like he was sleeping on the cot, came
out, and sat near the bed of the princes’ bed .He told me all these after
everything was done. At the start of the third Jama of the night, no sooner had they
heard the city’s tower bell ringing to announce the third Jama than they had to enter the unlatched
bedroom playing the collective music and
stand along the adjacent room wall on the left without stopping their
music—this was the order given to them by Appaiah. He had insisted the
collective music being played must be in simultaneous consonance with the
heartbeats of the tiger and the silence of the night. The men who were standing
outside the room, in a hushed voice, were sincerely practising the lines of the
song popularly known as “The coition of star dwellers” and rehearsing with their
instruments very seriously. In spite of
my earnest attempts to decode Appaiah’s plan, I came to a conclusion that it
was beyond my comprehension and thus stopped thinking about it further and
started whiling away my time listening to the hunters’ practice sessions on the
song. I had gone along with them to the jungle for the tiger hunt. I knew them
as ordinary hunters who would just howl and utter some unintelligible sounds
while hunting, but never did I know that they would take such sincere efforts
to rehearse this song. All my attention would be focussed on the direction of
and the moment the tiger would pounce upon, while they were making noise
standing in a semi-circle around the bush. I had never given much importance to
listen to those songs, as I considered them as a bundle of some rough sounds
made in the empty spaces before getting merged with the wind. But I got the
opportunity that night to understand that monumental error I had made. O my
queen! The hunting chants of Yajur Veda were already hiding in their howls,
whistle sounds, and horn musical instruments. But the music vibrating during
the rehearsal from those instruments that were being heated up for maximum
tension of hide under mild fire was not like the music played by our daughter
in the concert on her harp that would sound as if being dipped in sadness. On
the other hand, it was like a ophidian venom that changes the
colour of the ears of those who listened to it in a matter of seconds. It was a
peculiar music that could squeeze the demon out of anyone as if being fed with
the thunder. If someone says that only asuras and animals have the pomp to listen to such music, it is
likely that you might believe in that.
The blaring sound of the bell that could tear open the heart,
coming out of the bell tower erected at the centre of the city, announced the
beginning of the third jama of
the night, ostensibly declaring clearly that I was not an asura. At that time,
the bell rang with a bang, and all twenty hunters entered the bedroom playing
the songs they had practised along with their musical instruments. I also
entered the room as the twenty-first person. Before we entered the room’s
doorway, the first piece of the Swara of ‘the coition of star dwellers’ song
first hit the ceiling of the room in a fraction of a second, returned to its
origin, and further struck with other pieces of the swaras coming out of the
remaining musical instruments in the air, and thus proved our assumption, that
they would fall off as an empty boom bursting out of the chain of music, wrong
and instead took rebirth from the coition of different swaras, and then turned
into a spectacular ball of sounds that carried the gleam and colours of the
rainbow. The collective brightness of that ball reflected all over the room and
got scattered into thousands of sparks in every atom of the room. The pieces of
the music surging from the floor were striking the ceiling and hit the pieces
of the previous music notes that were coming back after striking the ceiling
and thus made the entire room soften with the unbearable heat of musical notes.
The room was bulging in all four directions, along with other stuff expanding
due to the heat of the music, like an air-filled leather bag with its walls
growing so thin that they would burst at the very scratch of nails. The
decorative items, mirrors made of marble, water cups, bedspreads made of kapok
cotton, egg-shaped lamps, the idols of gods who bless us with sweet dreams, and
the harp and veena designated for the training of the princess seemed to have
devoured the grandeur of the music and stood puffed out. I was astonished at
seeing them all with my eyes that they
changed into some hollow blankets. All the items that had lost their weight as
they became softened due to heat were trying to fly away from the room along
with the bubbles of music. I went to the princess’s bed and encircled its legs
with my right leg and stood there. That was all I could do that time. The
ecstasy, frenzy, and insurmountable fear that were created by that collective,
splendid music did detach me from myself and pushed me into a void from which I
would never come back. The music that penetrated me like light, scent, and sound
was so taunting that I felt like a drowning man who didn’t know how to swim.
Had that stage of stupor continued a little longer, I wouldn’t have been alive
to tell you all this story. I would have disappeared, with this mortal body,
into the sky, sneaking through the crevice on the ceiling with the elegance of
burning flames and my willingness. I had been tormented by a sense of shame
that I was unable to bring my own body under my control. I was the only one who
was harassed like a dust particle in the gush of sound and its rush. That
marvellous song that threw off everything in the room, turning it chaotic,
didn’t affect those who were playing it, Appaiah and our daughter, even a
little. I wasn’t astonished at seeing those twenty hunters singing that song.
They were doing their duties perfectly, leaning against the left wall, in a
row, outside the adjacent room, making themselves comfortable to play the
instruments. They were the creators of that marvel. The delight of the
colourful balls of music, their intensification, their death, and their rebirth
- all remained steadfast in the moves of
their fingertips. So, they were unable to change themselves into the colourful balls,
losing themselves through the music. I wasn’t even surprised at seeing Appaiah.
With his hand strongly positioned at the other edge of our daughter’s decked
bed where she was sleeping, he stood immobile, keeping his keen watch through
the adjacent room. He was the architect of this phenomenal display of music.
He, the one who had seen countless wonders way better than this in his life and
been achieving those feats even today. It was expected of him that he could
keep himself aloof from that tumultuous whirl without falling into it.
O my queen! It was our daughter I was
totally astonished to see. She got up from sleep and was sitting on the bed
with her legs cross-folded. Her face bore neither any signs of stifling nor
shock. Instead, she was deeply inhaling the sounds of ‘The coition of star
dwellers’ and the scent of tender wild flowers with her enticed, raised eyes
and nostrils. Her face was brimming with happiness. (Her breast was surging up
and down to the tunes of the music). I was caught in between the splendour of
the music and our daughter’s trance. She didn’t even bother to stand up to pay
her regards to Appaiah and me, nor did she turn her face towards me. She wasn’t
even conscious of her presence there. In other words, she was not conscious
that I was standing along with the musical troupe. With the coital pleasure of
musical notes, with the births of colourful balls and their vacillations and
joys, her eyes were restlessly wavering,
hitting, emerging and throbbing. Seeing
our daughter’s extraordinary sheen on her face consumed the torrent of ecstasy
very easily, which was otherwise an unbearable one for any ordinary mortal; I
was caught in terrible fright. Other than taking her around with me during the
city rounds, I had never taken her into the forest for hunting. I thought,
being a very young girl, she couldn’t have developed the required maturity to
face the ferocity of animals and their body odours. From that very wonderful
night till this moment as I am telling
you all these stories, I am unable to change this opinion of mine. It is very
sure that she couldn’t have had the opportunity to listen to the collection of
songs that includes ‘the coition of star dwellers,’ which is usually played
only during hunting. But, lying on her bed, she looked so comfortable, as if accustomed to the music each day it was
played, giving the impression that this hunting enactment with music had been
arranged specially for her. Only Appaiah can explain the mystery of this. A
bigger doubt as to whether she was alive also started troubling me like a big
rat snake crawling into my stomach, curling inside, and causing immense
discomfort. Before I could release myself from this confusion, the next scene
of that marvellous display also began. A striped tiger jumped out of the
curtain drawn at the entrance of the adjacent room. It strode along the bedroom
wall, went past the stuff in the room, and then reached the window of the room.
It jumped out through the window to the top of the neem tree standing outside,
jumped down through other branches, and then disappeared on the meadow as if
floating in the moonlight. It all happened within the short time of sixty
seconds from the moment we saw it. With that, all the strange events of the
night came to an end. Appaiah raised his hands, signalled to those hunters to
stop their performance. Sooner the surging music was stopped, the colourful
balls that were shining in the room broke and melted. Following that, other
things in the room started to regain their old forms rapidly. The entire room
had returned to its original state within
a fraction of a second as though asserting that the wonders that I had been
witnessing some while ago didn’t actually happen there. The pure air entered
the room through the window through which the tiger jumped out as if announcing
that everything had ended well. We stood around our daughter, who lay tired and
unconscious on the bed. I hadn’t yet come out of my shock I received at the
moment when the tiger came out through the doorway of the adjacent room. In
fact, even the hunters who were playing the music hadn’t expected that a tiger would come out from such
an improbable and unexpected situation like that. They were trying their best to avoid the
danger of playing its rhythmic pace wrong due to their shock of meeting the
tiger that appeared suddenly in front of our eyes. When the stemmed-out notes
of the music were about to split asunder, the hunters played it perfectly,
making it reach its zenith, as they feared any distraction in the music might
end up stopping the heartbeats of the tiger standing in the front. I don’t have
to tell you about Appaiah. His face didn’t bear any sign of astonishment at
having seen something unexpected. I saw him having his eyes steadily positioned
on our daughter when the tiger appeared at the doorway. I tried to bring my
hands towards our daughter to hold her supportively, thinking that she might
scream after seeing the tiger, which she hadn’t met directly earlier. Appaiah
stopped me, gestured at me with his eyes, and smiled at me in a way that hinted
that I didn’t have to worry about it.
***
After all these, our daughter, with her face that carried an
immeasurable agony and an air of familiarity of having known the tiger before,
asked in rather a mumbling, lowered voice, “Is it you?” I could hear those
words vividly amidst the commotion of the music being played. I couldn’t
believe my ears. At the same time, it was impossible not to believe it either
when I saw our daughter speaking to an animal in her full consciousness, that
too, in front of my eyes. After asking that question, the princess kept staring
at the tiger as it walked on. I was standing with an expectation that the tiger
might respond to her in human language. Since such wonders stopped happening
after the TretaYug, fortunately or unfortunately, no such thing happened and
stopped my heartbeats. Once the tiger disappeared from view, our daughter,
already tired, closed her eyes agreeably and lay on the bed peacefully with the
elegance of a flower garland. The king completed his version of the story with
a note that they all came out of the room after Appaiah treated their daughter
with an ordinary medication for unconsciousness.
As
this story of that night was spread in twenty versions by those twenty hunters,
I heard there was a massive crowd assembled in front of the palace entry gate
when my great-grandfather returned to the palace on the seventy-fifth day. It
was said that the people from neighbouring kingdoms arrived in the city by
bullock carts filled with the bags of cooked food three days in advance after
ascertaining the date of my great-grandfather’s arrival at the palace and found
them scattered all over the roads and lodgings. Other than these people,
acrobats, merchants, exponents of dance, whores, and local begging women all
arrived seven days before and settled all across the capital. My grandfather
used to narrate what he had heard without resorting to exaggeration: that the
poets of the capital were unable to recite any poem on the moon, as they
couldn’t see it since the illumination of the colourful lights subdued the rays
of the sun everywhere, any time. Only the courts of poetry recital were lying vacant
in that hubbub. Different types of entertainment and daily free feasts and
specific lodgings were arranged to mark the celebration of the recovery of the
king’s daughter and the invitations were sent to the princes from other
countries to the palace. The Malayali wife of my great-grandfather, his two
sons, and a daughter—all four were invited as special guests to the palace to
attend to the festivities. (This girl was sent along with my
great-grandfather’s wife, who was sent back to her country after many years.
After that, he hadn’t seen them nor heard about them till his death. His male heirs were staying with him,
probably for the purpose of procreation and learning. But, as the downfall of
my great-grandfather commenced after his direct exposure to the God Sani, he
got his craft spoiled and forgot it, which resulted in his sons being thrown
into depths of despair without being taught of his craft. We, the heirs of
those condemned souls pushed into such perdition, became ordinary barbers in
due course of time, completely bereft of the mysterious secrets of the craft,
and it was later said that we all then left the job of barbering and were
destined to become mere storytellers hiding in the forests.) Amidst all these
festivities and commotion, his wife was amazed at seeing her husband still
flipping over the pages of old books with the same shaking hands without
participating in any merriment. He was said to have told her proudly that not a
tinge of vanity of being the true architect of all those unrestrained
celebrations didn’t even fall on the tip of his clothes. During that time when
the people were crowding in the palace ground eagerly, to hear the stories of the
two midnights, the king’s daughter was also very much interested to know what
had happened to her. In spite of persistent grilling queries from the king and
his wife, she couldn’t recollect what had happened to her. She only remembered
that the thought of men was not as repugnant as earlier. On the day my
great-grandfather was scheduled to venture out of his room to visit the palace
again, a separate seat had been arranged for the king’s daughter to listen to
the story along with other people. It was kept on a separate pedestal four feet
below my great-grandfather’s seat. The king and his queen were seated equally
to my great-grandfather. Others, including the palace physician, were given
seats in a row on the pedestals three feet below his seat. The royal family
accorded such honour on rare occasions only to some specific individuals. The
people were free to sit on the bunds erected on the palace ground, floor, and
the statues. It was said that ninety-six days and two hundred and thirty men
were needed to repair the artifacts, ornamental plants, and grass bed that were
left almost smashed due to the unrestrained expression of happiness of the
people during the revelry. The anecdotes mention that my great-grandfather
narrated that story of the nights—which had attracted the attention of the
world even before it was deliberated—into two parts in two nights. They hinted
that his proficiency in his craft was reflected on the first night and his
perspicacity and discernment were in the second. Some other anecdotes mention
that the time didn’t move ahead from the moment he started narrating the story,
and hence his entire narration did just end up at the moment he started. They
further mention that the full moon that was descending on the west when he
started narrating the story did stop moving and was hanging there frozen. The
wind that was flowing across there when he started narrating the story was
caught in the whirl, unable to escape. The sundry thoughts that were chased
away from everyone’s hearts at the time he started narrating the story couldn’t
enter their hearts again till he completed the story. They saw his story that
began at the very first second of the first jama of the night
was still on the same first second of the first jama of the night
without moving ahead. Some other anecdotes mention that, when those people who
came that day began to tell their distant relatives who couldn’t come that day
this story—both the longest and the shortest one, which encapsulated both untoward
incidents and unfortunate deaths within a span of time between inhaling and
exhaling—they had to spend two whole nights in the very introduction of the
narrative.
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