Amid that unbearable ecstasy, I was struck with a sudden
realization that the dark red hues and the temperature that had become dreams
themselves by occupying the animals’ dreams, the intoxicating scents, and the
deep silence as if drowned in water were all, in fact, the womb of a female
animal. It was revealed in the space of my realization that what I had
occasionally perceived as the universe through my journeys along with the cow
was nothing but the place of my birth, the womb. I perceived through my eyes of
wisdom pulsating restively inside the cow’s stomach that the animals were
seeing the entire universe as their birthplace, while the man—in the world he had
created for himself by isolating the words from them—were just building metal
palaces, huts made of leaves, houses made of tiles, and shelters made of hide,
thus making replicas of their birthplaces they lost out of their memories to
find solace for themselves. Prompted by this simultaneous state of bliss from
the revelation and the unbearable state of agony about the foolishness of
people, I remained in the womb of that female animal in the form of my phallus
for a long time, ostensibly reluctant to detach myself from it. The time for us
to complete our journey and to return by the same route we came by had then
arrived. This time, the cow refrained from showing its resplendence, followed
me as a meek animal licking me lovingly, and made me feel proud of myself.
***
The moment I stepped into the hermitage, my master, after his
recovery from the long oblivion, came running to the front yard and greeted me.
At once he saw the mud smeared on my body, the scent of fat that was radiating
in all directions, my penis that hadn’t yet lost its erection, and the cow
standing behind me. He—the saint—declared aloud that I had passed the test
successfully and hugged me tightly with his body. He asked me to come in. When
I stood hesitantly seeing my nudity and his daughter, the girl who would become
my wife in a short while, my master reminded me of the stricture of the
scriptures that offering anyone other than the beggars the holy cloth at the
doorway would amount to a sin that could take him to hell. Further, he said,
“Other than a grown-up man, nudity of any living being will not make a woman
feel shy. Till you get back your clothes that you had abdicated, you can never
be considered as a man.” Encouraged by my master’s words, I entered the
hermitage, received the clothes from the woman without any misgivings, and took
a bath. After freshening up, when I was about to sit on the seat set below that
of my master’s, he stopped me, made me sit on the seat equally placed as his,
thrust in my hands a set of Thamboolam and coconut, poured some water on it,
and then announced that he was going to get his daughter married to me as a
reward for my victory. He then asked me to narrate my experience on the journey
to please his ears. At the moment he announced me as his son-in-law, this woman—with
her face reddened with shyness—avoided showing up in front of me and was also
listening to my experiences of the journey. From the day I set out on my
journey following the cow to the last day I returned with the cow following me,
I narrated every bit of my bizarre experiences in detail so as to please my
master’s ears.
My great-grandfather, who reminisced about his childhood days
and achievements through his story in this manner, resumes his narration
further: While I could understand that among the animals, blessed with the
ability to enter the wonderful world called dreams without hassles, it is the
animals, not the man, that consider this universe as their dwellings (or their
birthplaces), sometimes it didn’t occur to me that I should know what would
follow after those animals are banished from their dwellings by the selfish and
arrogant species, the humans. My stay in the hermitage was over by then, and I
left for this city along with my wife. These incomplete questions that betray
our attention are generally the reasons why learning is left flawed. This story
I am telling now carries the answers for the question I have never asked myself
and how I got it from the bedroom of the king’s daughter that made me literally
die with shame for being indifferent towards it these many days. This story
constitutes, that way, the continuation of my quest still being protracted
without my knowledge, though, due to my second usage of the craft on dreams. It
just means that there is one more stage I need to pass in this test. Doesn’t it
mean that I need to overlook the presence of my master too? It is only time
that brings us the lessons we have missed learning due to our carelessness and
the tests we have missed writing, through unexpected men at unexpected places.
Isn’t it?
***
Our king has been spending his entire life in yagnas and
charitable works for a male heir. Let God bless him to get what he wanted. At
the same time, he has been nurturing his daughter with the willpower and
physical power matching that of twenty-two men. Not disheartening his faith in her, his daughter has mastered
all the arts spectacularly. I am really proud of having her as my student. She
was the one who made me know about a wonderful craft that neutralises the enemy
with a mere stare without touching. I have no qualms about telling this. Her
gaze had the power of extraordinary beauty and radiance that arrests not only
the body parts of humans but also the crudeness of incipient animals, the
movement of insects, and even the breath of plants. The craft of arresting the
movement of inanimate, lifeless things was yet another wonder born along with
her. One day, when she was learning Varmam from me, she stopped the movement of
the flow of sand in the sandclock with the power of her gaze. All my daily
routines, the time of food, the number of texts I needed to read, and the
amount of sleep were turned upside down. With certainty I can say that there is
no man living around, either in this city or any other country, who can match
her radiance. In spite of being enormously gifted with these talents and
praised by everyone as one having no match, she was deeply troubled, agonised
even without her knowledge, at her father’s continuous attempts towards getting
a male child through yagnas, obviously due to his conviction that she was still
not equal to yet another drop of his sperm. Yet, she—who had mastered the
learning of twenty-two princes before her youth—was still unable to decode the
agony that had been tormenting her. She was completely haunted by an illusion
that there must be something found in abundance in men which women would never
be able to achieve. This illusion turned into sleeplessness in sleep during
nights and stupor in her skills during the day. Around this time, the youth of
the king’s daughter brought forth an incident that truly threw her virgin
feelings into despair and made them panic. Nothing to get surprised at. The erotic
treatise says that no one would be able to tell when, where, by whom, and by
what the feelings of a young girl who is in search of her pair would be
aroused. Anything as small as the blossom of a flower, or the stroke of a
breeze, or the loneliness of the night, or the music from the harp, or a mere
touch of a woman, and other than these, even the death of a small bird, or the
body withered in diseases, or the eyes welling up with tears would be enough to
be a reason for the arousal of the pair-seeking desire in a woman. In those
days, her youth was not only a stage in her life but also her vision. It just
transforms whatever touches her into masculine appeal and keeps her happy. Further,
it infuses the peculiarities, which are
in no way inferior to that of dreams, and mysteries into the reality and keep
playing its games. This leaves the young girls perplexed, as they sometimes
treat the truth happening in front of their eyes as the residue of dreams and
most of the time, oddities of dreams as truth that happened in front of their
eyes. Even in the case of the king’s daughter, an unbelievable truth assumed a
smoky proportion of dreams and left her perplexed. This type of truth could
occur only once in one lakh probabilities, that too in one woman in one lakh. Hence,
the disquiet caused by the yagnas the king conducted and her pair-seeking
desire due to the effect of a spectacle she witnessed on one night some months
ago, gotten intermixed and thus became the very bizarre disease that had
afflicted the king’s daughter. She witnessed that view only one night when she
was neither sleeping nor awake. But it had been happening for generations in
the royal family. It had thus become a negligible occurrence during the rule of
the twelfth generation. It then became a rare occurrence at the beginning of
the thirteenth generation and disappeared, not to be seen anywhere before the
end of the thirteenth generation. It then became an archaic anecdote wiped out
from the memory of this city. But its scent has been navigating through the
generations. This scent was passed over through each period, secretly, like the
chain of regal Gothra and bloodlines. In all the streets of the capital, this
invisible, smoky form of the story—the archaic story of a tiger and hare
drinking together in the same pond, standing near, living amiably with the
people—was mixed up with the dust of the city, visible all over its walls, and
still stood relevant today. The truth was, it wouldn’t be able to go anywhere.
It was the secret—a splendid vision of the previous generations that had been
famous before the thirteenth generation—that the king’s daughter had seen on
that night many months ago when she was half-sleepy. Yes! What she saw was the
soul of a wild animal—which was living happily with its mysterious form at the
top branch of the Kadamba tree that had been converted into a bedroom during
the thirteenth generation—jumping into the bedroom daily through the window
kept open, in search of warmth to the skin of its memory that had turned numb
in the freezing winter of the jungle. It was an old striped tiger that thrived
on consuming the memories of its jungle life. That anecdotal tiger, with the
memory of its past, was spending its nights sleeping under the cot in the
adjacent room for nearly ten generations without catching anyone’s eyes and
without being a reason for anyone’s dreams. It was the king’s daughter who saw
it first in the form of a pleasing breeze. The arrival of the right time of its
salvation and the keen eyes of the princess, which wouldn’t allow anything to
escape, were the reasons behind it. She was a wonderful girl who could
mesmerise even inanimate things with her single stare. There was no wonder why
the smoky form of the anecdotal tiger—which lived as shadows during the nights
and dust during days—roamed the streets as the relics of the memories of the
thirteenth generation fell into the eyes of the king’s daughter and thus lost
its enigmatic presence. That tiger would never visit the bedroom again. Its
life wandering without peace had gotten frozen at the sight of the king’s
daughter and thus ended forthwith. It could have gotten its salvation it was
longing for generations by now. On the third day it was chased out of the
palace bedroom; the veins of the old anecdotal tiger that weren’t accustomed to
the freezing cold of the midnight must have gotten shrunk and tautened, jamming
the pulse of its memory by rendering it inactive and stopping it. But dear
courtiers! It was not a single old tiger. There are still thousands of wild
animals wandering all over this kingdom with their smoky forms and pleasing
hearts as sweet as jagggery being unable to get away from the scent of the
golden days in which they had remained as tales in the breath of ordinary men
and enjoyed their lives on equal footing with the people. They are creating
this city in their dreams and making it spin around. Hiding behind the walls of
the bedrooms, with their marble-like eyes, they are still watching those who
are listening to this story, their ancestors and their progeny, with awe, with
love, and with longing. I pray to God, in front of this king, to bestow this
kingdom with the female children gifted with the luminous eyes to see those
animals in mortal forms and give them salvation.
***
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