This is an English translation of “Rajan Magal” a short novel written by Ba. Venkatesan. Translated into English by Saravanan Karmegam.
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This new city, which is celebrating its birth anniversary today as a grand festival, truly has two faces—one, its history, and the other, its story. The history of this new city dates back to the time during the reign of the Nayakkar king, who built a huge lake as expansive as a sea, beautiful verdant gardens, fort complex, and fortifications on its banks for his people to live there. Its story had already been chased out of the city along with its animals and gigantic trees, which once thrived at the places where palaces and gardens were standing tall majestically now. The one who wrote its history wouldn’t know that the forest that thrived there before the history of that city did, in fact, exist on the walls and corpses of a self-serving kingdom it had swallowed up.
The immortal storytellers who were living as remnants of the old city with their melancholic thoughts knew about it. Even that old city swallowed up by the trees was built after destroying the forest that was once lush and verdant there.
Time has never been interested in moving the universe along a straight path. It lets the events spin around and just watches them—turning what is below to above and what is above to below, layering the new upon what emerged before, and obscuring what has vanished.
The tussle between nature and man would never end in the world of stories. Putting it in other words, this very interminable conflict is actually the stories. When one defeats another and the ignominy of the defeated is written as history, the remnants of the defeated hide under the history and thus escape the possibility of being fully decimated. It is this battle between the histories and stories that keeps the days and seasons in perpetual spin. The story in the history becomes a history, and the history in the story becomes a story, and thus they lose their indispensability in their perpetual spin. The stories of the destroyed old city swallowed up by the luxuriant forest that once stood there were still alive among the indigenous people who were living aloof in the woods that were waiting in silence far away from the city.
One of the stories had its version that the roots of that big forest that swallowed up the city were nothing but the curse of a palace servant maid who had been orphaned on false charges.
One story told that the branches of the forest were the foolishness of the king, who was longing for a male child despite having a female baby, which conferred him prosperity in abundance.
Another story narrated that the aerial roots of the forest were the hapless death cries of twenty hunters who happened to see the king’s daughter sleep with her clothes lying loose.
Another story inclined to say that my great-grandfather, who was belittled at the later stage of his life for having brought bad luck into the kingdom, was the breath and darkness of that deep and vast forest. Those indigenous people collect these scattered narratives, string them together, and have the ruined old city tied to their memory again.
The old city was governed by the twenty-three generations of the royal family. The kingdom was under the reign of the twenty-third generation during the time of my great-grandfather. This generation was gifted with a peculiar aspect that other generations couldn't boast of. Even the royal astrologers in the palace, in the later part of the generation, could never come to a conclusion whether it was stroke luck or a bad omen.
That capital had been ruled by the male heirs of the kingdom before the present generation my great-grandfather lived in. All these male heirs did contribute their parts and kept their generations flourishing with the innate skills and talents they were gifted with. It was rare to find the specific characteristics of one generation in other generations. But each generation was gifted with some specific individuality, which might be due to the blessings of the god, so as to compensate for it. For example, the wild animals in the twelfth generation of the royal family never intimidated the humans, and the humans never posed a threat to them, and the animals enjoyed freedom to roam around the city.
It was said that the time was so favourable that the men and cattle from the kingdom would go into the forests any time without fear.
It was an adage that did its rounds in the kingdom that the tiger and hare would drink water in the same pond, standing close to each other. There were a lot of anecdotes in the royal lineages that the untrained, ferocious wild animals would form a formidable frontal barrier during the battles, stand by the soldiers as their protective cover, fight the enemies before them, and get mowed down by their swords. (Tigers had a special place in these narratives). On the contrary, during the reign of the next generation—the thirteenth generation—it was said that the movement of the wild animals was greatly curtailed on the street and rendered it almost impossible. The battlefields of the thirteenth generation were normally filled with the army of men who were as wild and ferocious as animals. The hunting of wild animals became a much sought, famed sport during the reign of the thirteenth generation. My grandfather would say that he had heard from his forefathers that it was during the rule of the thirteenth generation that the golden tigers, which enjoyed the honour of having a place in the flags of the old kingdom, sporting their skin without black stripes, had started becoming extinct. It was also said that the palace standing in the centre of the city in which the royal family had been living for ages was built by the king of the thirteenth generation after razing an old Kadamba tree that stood so majestically there and banishing the tiger out of its dwelling, which had been living at the topmost branch since its birth. It was the time of wise men who were known for their skills of winning in war and hunting of animals by devising war plans in the hunt and applying the tricks of hunting in the battles. It was generally believed that the weather that prevailed in the rule of one generation couldn’t be found in another. (But the old tiger, which had been living in the perfectly protected bedroom lying on the third floor of the three-story palace, with its full consciousness for several generations, shook the foundations of this belief.
The traditional occupation of my great-grandfather, who lived during the rule of the third-generation king, was barbering. He was responsible for the wealth and fame that barbers were enjoying in the old city. At the same time, he was equally responsible for why barbering was treated as a third-rate profession after his time. Till the end of the twenty-third generation in the old city, people believed that barbering was just a menial task that required no specific set of skills other than steady hands that carefully shave off the hair without cutting into the flesh. Barbering was not treated as a menial job in the old city. Yet, there were no suitable places available in the kingdom for the barbers who were just depending on this profession to make their living, just like any other profession.
Only after my great-grandfather, who had that city as his native place, went out of the city before his adolescence set in to roam in the Malayala land- lying beyond the hills in the western side, well known for the practice of black magic- in order to learn the art of entering other people’s sleep and witnessing their dreams returned to his native in his youth and proclaimed standing boldly in the junction of the four corners of the city, thus attracting the attention of people and exclusive consideration of the king towards barbering that it was not just a profession to shave off one’s head, then the world began to understand a truth behind barbering that it was something that shared an unbreakable affinity with other extraordinary disciplines such as medicine, magic, varmam, and sexual pleasure. My great-grandfather proclaimed that a skilled barber would be able to achieve remarkable changes in the moods and activities of individuals by way of controlling the secretion of sweat through opening the sweat pores, exposing them by shaving off the required amount of hair—keeping less or more—according to the structure of one’s body. A barber had an innate understanding of physiology and body temperature. He further said that a barber’s hands that shave would only know the hair as a nerve running outside the body before one’s brain could understand it, and the efforts of a barber to distinguish the beneficial hair strands that must grow along one’s skin from the poisonous hairs that one should avoid while shaving were in no way inferior to the quest of a learned man who tries to find out the worldly truth from the pages of the Upanishads. From that day, my great-grandfather made the people aware of the importance of barbering; getting their hair shaved off and waiting in queues for it became one of the important matters that everyone wanted to share with others proudly.
Those who suffered from a high temperature made a bun out of their hair above and walked, exposing their neck and back to the wind direction. Those who were shivering due to a cold fever let loose their hair to flow down to cover their bodies.
The erudite, who wanted to evade the attention of ‘evening demons’ known for luring them away from their wisdom, would plead with barbers to tie up all the nerves on their heads at the back with the help of hair strands and make sixteen tiny tufts at the tip. The men who had the agony of not being able to enjoy sexual pleasure let their hair remain as a wet plait and returned home content. In contrast to this, for those who wished to remain ascetic despite being in a family, the barbers made a special plait covering the tip with silk cloth. Even the ascetics who went into the forests, forsaking their mundane lives, did accept the eighth part of the rules of facial beautification by way of allowing their hair to grow thick and unfettered on their face, without getting it shaved off. The “Suyamwaras” (bridal selections) ended up in great confusion, as the neatly attempted barbering on the hairs in the cheeks and upper lips had made all the men of the old city handsome and healthy. Our genealogical anecdotes say that the men from other countries would never be able to meet any man with an odorous mouth and booger-running nose or hear male voices that threw the abusive words at others. Not only that, but in that old city where women wouldn’t seek the services of barbers nor did women themselves work as barbers, the women also had tender hair under their arms and on their vaginas—in accordance with the Samudrika traits, which mentioned that the exquisiteness of men is visible in the exposed body parts while the beauty of women is seen in the hidden parts—that was said to have the energy, beauty, and curative powers that matched the spiked hair growing on men’s faces. The preachings of my great-grandfather that these hairs shouldn’t be ignored were still living afresh in the memory of the women of the twenty-third generation living in the capital. When my great-grandfather announced that the responsibility of grooming, adorning, and caring of the sacred private parts of women’s bodies that could be seen only by their husbands and fantasized about by other men was not only lying with women but also with men, it attracted a huge uproar from menfolk, and at the same time, it could garner a surreptitious admiration from womenfolk. Upon being compelled by the royal court to stop such slander campaigns, my great-grandfather dropped another truth in public courageously that the preachers and priests used to undertake the task of barbers to attend to their spouses’ needs secretively and thus earned the wrath of educational institutions and temples. (Later, it was the owners of these institutions who poured ghee into the cruel fire of slur that engulfed my great-grandfather to prevent the fire from going out and help him burn completely). Seeing my great-grandfather unstoppable in his campaigns on the secrets of hair decking that reached the Paraiyar women in the lower strata, the women in the upper strata began worrying about their husbands' probable wavering of mind. My great-grandfather suggested that those women could trim their thick pubic hair from the navel to the vulva as thin as black eyeliner and thus gave them back the peace of mind they had lost. The women who were married to a man who she didn’t like could trim their pubic hair like curly wood chips falling off while chiselling. The women who wanted to get the men they loved could draw the upper cleavage of their clitoris in the form of a fish. The women who hadn’t yet given birth to babies could trim the hairs in their underarms and between their thighs to the minimum and keep them wet like the new tender grass bed found after rain. The women who sought liaison with men could shave their entire body below the neck to keep it as silky as pebbles and spotlessly clean. Let the mothers, who knew about the barbers who could predict the time of girls attaining their age by a mere touch to distinguish the nature of hair that changes from its sand-like roughness to the strong silver wire-like stiffness, prevent their daughters from facing disgrace while menstruating in an undesirable situation.
...To be continued
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