In the adjacent room to the king’s daughter’s bedroom, where the servant maid used to sleep, my great-grandfather, Appaiah, arranged some pillows in such a way that it looked like he was sleeping on the cot, went out, and sat near the king’s daughter. 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 their instruments 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 their instruments very attentively. 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 on the probable hideout from which the tiger would pounce upon them when they stood in a semi-circle around the bush, making noise. I had never given much importance 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. It was like a snake poison 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 becoming 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 were all sitting in the moves of their fingertips. So, they were unable to change themselves into the colourful balls 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 seeing. 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 splendor 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 restively wavering, hitting, and taking rebirths. 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 the time I am telling you all these stories, I am unable to change my opinion about her. 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, 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 could have detangled this mystery. 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 marvelous display of a hunting scene 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 eccentric events of the night came to an end. Appaiah raised his hands, signalled to those hunters to stop their performance. Sooner the music that filled the room was stopped, the colourful balls that were shining a while ago broke and melted. Following that, other things in the room started to rapidly regain their old forms. The entire room had returned to its original state 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 to announce 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 the tiger went out through the doorway of the adjacent room. Truly, even the hunters who were playing the music couldn’t have expected that a tiger would come out from such an improbable situation such as that. They were trying their best to avoid the danger of playing it 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 a blind expectation that the tiger might respond to her in human language. Since such wonders stopped happening after the Treta Yug, 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 all 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 sent to the princes from other countries to the palace. The Malayala 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, I hadn’t seen them nor heard about them till my 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 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.
To be continued…
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