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 woman. 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 men—in the world they had created for themselves 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 betraying 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 unachievable by women but achievable only by men. 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. It infuses the peculiarities, which are in no way inferior to that of dreams, and mysteries into the reality to 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. The messing up caused by the mixing of the benefits of 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, was the very bizarre disease that had afflicted the king’s daughter now. 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 like jaggery paste, 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.
To be continued...
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