This is an English translation of “Rajan Magal” a short novel written by Ba. Venkatesan. Translated into English by Saravanan Karmegam.
***
During that time when my great-grandfather was advocating
that there was no gender distinction between nature and its tricks, the women
across the old city had made their spouses and lovers their private barbers and
made them spread all over the country. The barbers were summarily proscribed by
the twenty-third generation soon after my great-grandfather declared that the
old scriptures, which usually praised one’s inner beauty while denigrating the
practice of shaving and growing hair, were in fact all against the barbers.
Those treatises, it was said, written on leaves, were burnt down by women while
making hot water used for making food. The barbers were enjoying new
concessions, fame, and importance with the arrival of my great-grandfather,
while he was seriously involved in endless research to study the possibility of
controlling the sweat secreted through the pores and thus changing the course
of dreams caused by the odour of sweat. People used to say that he had spent
all his youth just to study the art of penetrating one’s sleep. He had been the
most trustworthy disciple of a Kerala Namboothiri during that time. My
great-grandfather—a barber by birth—was in search of a tutor who was beyond
petty caste considerations to learn the holy scriptures that were denied to his
caste ever since the time his voice got broken amidst some years of insults,
mistakes, and fears. At last, he could find a Namboothiri ascetic who went out
of his city, living a life incognito in the woods after being branded as mad by
the mortal human beings who didn’t have the acumen to understand his distinct
wisdom. My great-grandfather joined as his third disciple along with his other
two Brahmin disciples. The first of the two had the power to assess the mass
and weight of things with the help of their light and scent. The second one had
the skill to assess what an object was in its past and what it would be in the
future on the basis of its speed and direction. On the other hand, my
great-grandfather was deeply disturbed to see the art of penetrating others’s
dreams being destined to languish in the forest as a secret known only to four
persons who were aware of its hidden marvels. At that time, when the
Namboothiri, often praised as a saint, wanted to get his upper-caste-born
daughter married to my great-grandfather—a low-born barber—before burying
himself alive in the mud of misery, the only soul left behind that knew the art
of seeing others’ dreams in the entire world was none other than my
great-grandfather. He then thoroughly learned the art of Varmam and
the Sanskrit language that were said to have been closely associated with the
dreams. One of the disciples, wanting to test the art he had learnt along with
his two other friends before learning it fully, escaped the forest, went to the
city, and tried perkily to enter the dreams of a patient. He was caught in the
foul odour of bad dreams and whirls of negativity that caused the disease and
became mentally deranged as he couldn’t bear its severity. He ran out of the room,
jumped out from the fourth floor of the four-storey building, and killed
himself. Another disciple with the same immature and weak mental state faced a
similar fate, lost his mental balance, became demented, and found succour in
the holy land, Kashi. Some unfounded news was floating around that he had
confined himself, obviously never to come out, in the thick forests of Kashi
that were inaccessible to dreams. But as bad luck would have it, my
great-grandfather met his friend after some years at a doomed place, might be
due to his poor wit, and thus invited a steep decline of fortunes in his life.
In spite of all these, the world knew about him as the only
learned man who had mastered the art of getting into people’s sleep to see
their dreams. When he returned to the old city in the middle of his youth along
with his wife, the people could understand his distinction like a dead lamp
being understood by its inherent brightness. Although half of the city was
speaking about him indirectly, saying that he was also mad like his teacher,
and the king—being the head of the twenty-third generation—was also embarrassed
at the candid campaigns and actions of my great-grandfather, the aura of the
latter obligated the king to place my great-grandfather, who had transcended
the distinctions made in the name of gender, society, wealth, caste, and
knowledge, equally among other erudite courtiers and honour him. Apart from
this, a separate quarter was allotted to my great-grandfather on the palace
campus. The king didn’t allow him to do barbering for his sustenance. He was
living happily in that small palace-like house along with his Malayala wife and
the children he got from her till the day he was expelled from that house due
to his master’s curse. He came out of his room only to attend to the barbering
needs of the royal family and spent his remaining hours in the house on
rereading the treatises he had already learnt, practising them, and researching
new ways to understand them. People would say that the seat allotted to him in
the court was always lying vacant without his presence. It is very common to
see such eccentric men confine themselves in a solitary room. Isn’t it? They
never show themselves and their erudition for a public display and make them
look silly. Though my great-grandfather had a formidable reputation for having
mastered rare skills like them, he never attempted to show off his skills in
inappropriate circumstances to gain fame. The ever-shining flame of his skills
that was burning in him, and its lustre reflected on his face, were just enough
to bring him the fame he would have ever wanted. When the learned men in the
court asked the king how a barber who was just confining himself in a room,
unable to prove any of the skills with tangible demonstration, could enjoy such
a reputation in the court, the king told them, “The time of peace can never be
the time of bitterness for any talented swordsman. The healthy people can never
be the enemies of a good doctor. An erudite man will always want that no one
should fall into such a miserable condition, which might require the skills of
the erudite man to help the latter to come out of his misery. But at the same
time, the erudite man will always keep his skills sharpened, expecting the
worst of such situations. It isn’t my intention to keep Appaiah (my
great-grandfather’s name) in my palace permanently. But he, as a rare gem, not
easily accessible to all of us, shouldn’t remain absent from this palace when
we need him the most. I would like to remind you all that it is not he but we
who should be proud of having him in the court. I am also proud of the fact
that I am able to run a healthy administration of this country, which doesn’t
force him to evoke his skills.”
My great-grandfather used his rare skill of getting into the
dreams of others while sleeping only four times in his entire life. Our
hereditary narratives indicate that all those four circumstances of its usage
actually proved to be the turning points in the life of my great-grandfather.
The first instance was that unfortunate incident in which he tried his hands,
obviously before gaining adequate mastery in that, in testing that skill with a
patient along with his two friends who were also learning it along with him. It
was his good luck that when he initiated his skill on the patient, it was
already past midnight, and thus the patient’s dreams were found void of vigour
and couldn’t be differentiated from his actual sleep. With the god’s blessing,
my great-grandfather escaped the biggest danger that awaited him, ostensibly
caused by his temerity of being a youth and the pride of education he boasted,
like his other two friends. These developments, when brought to his master’s
attention, caused a profound despair in him for his other students while making
him feel immensely happy for my great-grandfather’s escape, apparently due to
his special love for him. He warned my great-grandfather that any such daring
attempt to get into someone’s dreams was as felonious as making a hole in the
wall of someone with the intent of stealing from his house. It was said that
the master forgave my great-grandfather that time and allowed him to continue
as his disciple due to his immense love for him. But after many years, he entered
his middle age, which is often touted to be the garden of intelligence after
the hasty spiral of his youth got over. He was again prompted by a desire that
had spoiled his senses to test his skills, totally against the dictum of his
master, on our great-grandmother—the master’s daughter cum his wife—when she
was sleeping. This audacity resulted in the master’s warning turning into a
curse, which snatched his rare skill away from him and rendered him forgetful
of it completely. The fourth usage of it had been destined to be the last usage
of that rarest of the rare crafts, which he had learnt arduously all through
his youth. Being fully aware that the design of his destiny would force him to
use his craft a fourth time, which, by all means, would bring him a perpetual
disgrace and disrepute, my great-grandfather had no qualms about making this
revelation public, giving the least attention to his private predispositions.
Interestingly, the unfortunate third usage of the craft, which sowed the seeds
of his destruction many years ago, had, in fact, made him enormously famous not
only in his place but also overseas without even hinting at a sign of
destruction at the time of its usage. It was because of his intelligence and
intuitive skills that shone along with the clout of his craft at that time.
There were occasions when thousands of students from abroad were lining up to
become his disciples. But my great-grandfather didn’t accept any of them as his
disciples because he thought he hadn’t yet attained the complete knowledge in
his craft. He remained discontented with the limitations of his craft that had
allowed him only to be a spectator of the dreams by watching them from outside.
He aspired to see his progress in his craft, which would enable him to penetrate
not only sleep but also dreams so as to control the wonders of this world as
per his wishes. Even his master, Kerala Namboothiri, hadn’t reached that stage.
Only after he could conquer such skill in his craft would he become eligible to
become a tutor to others, he thought. After he spent his time barbering the
king and important people, he just confined himself in the room during the
remaining hours, leaving his children under his wife’s custody with all the
amenities arranged outside his room. Other than some visible changes in his
outer appearance after the third usage, the wealth and fame he earned were
still unable to diminish or change the insatiable thirst he had for his craft.
The intriguing disease of the king’s daughter did thus have the privilege of
making the ‘world famous’ third usage of the craft possible. But the genesis of
that disease had its start from the woes of the king of the twenty-third
generation.
I told that all the generations of the royal lineage in the
old city were, till then, thriving with the male heirs. Didn’t I? The
twenty-third generation, which gave my great-grandfather shelter in its palace,
had its first-ever female heir to rule over its kingdom. It wasn’t an
overstatement to say that that female heir enjoyed a formidable reputation for
ruling the kingdom in the later years better than the male heirs born to date,
with efficiency and compassion. But the king was deeply worried in the beginning
that the “Godhra” chain of his royal lineage would be broken with the entry of
the female heir. You can assume that his fear had come true. Later, there were
some astrological extrapolations that the skirmishes, bad omens, famine, and
ill effects of the Kaliyug that occurred in their respective realms in the
capital city were all due to inadequate rectification of the Godhra that was
defiled with the birth of a female heir. They are in no way related to our
story and hence do not require our attention. The king, because of this fear,
was performing ‘yagnas’ in demand of a male child till he got tired of
listening to the complaints about the decreasing virility of his youth. His
grief slowly tiptoed from his bedroom, went past the corridors of the palace,
went down the steps, and spread across the country, making everyone suffocate
with it. As the people started performing ‘yagnas’ individually, maybe out of
love for their king, seeking a male child for him, we were informed by our
grandfather that the old city in which our great-grandfather once lived was now
filled with male children born out of the blessings from ‘yagnas’ conducted all
over the city. Since the kingdom of the twenty-third generation was destined by
the god to have only a female child, the royal family didn’t receive any
benefit from yagnas conducted by the king and his people. Perhaps due to this
unavoidable certainty, while spending his time and other resources on yagnas
and charity, the king carefully made the arrangements to nurture his daughter
to possess the power, character, and education of twenty-two men. There were
people who complained that the king’s lack of faith was one of the reasons why
the yagnas had been ineffective. But the king’s daughter’s successful
acquisition of all the skills she was taught made her critics happily regret
their impudent, foolish remarks, and, in a way, it did compensate for the
griefs of the king as well. People used to say there was no human being alive
who had mastered the administrative skills and war tactics that could rival
hers. It was so arranged that the girl would learn the art of ‘Varmam’ from my
great-grandfather. My great-grandfather refused to impart to her the training
on ‘Varmam,’ recusing that it wasn’t meant for women known for their lumpy,
firm breasts and flat private parts. Unlike other war tactics, its finer
aspects had been designed for a male body known for its flat chest and dangling
private parts and its delicate movements as against the women’s body, he
argued. The persistent requests of the king and the girl’s undying interest in
learning the art rubbed his conscience that he shouldn’t demean their requests
anymore.
There were anecdotes that pointed at other reasons behind it.
When the king’s daughter, after she had attained her age, went to him with her
undying desire to become his disciple for the first time, my great-grandfather,
an extremely talented barber, told her on first sight that the tender hair
grown in her vulva had become white and she would face problems one day due to
bad dreams later in her life. Having already been briefed clearly about his
temperament, the girl became paranoid with the thoughts about bad dreams. She
requested my great-grandfather to inform her when her pubic hair would turn to
its normal appearance. My great-grandfather assuaged her worries that her pubic
hair which had got the white layer of senescence would turn to its original black
when she got rid of her bad dreams. Unable to decode this whirl-like reply, the
king’s daughter was scared to ask him the explanation of it and spent many
sleepless nights after that with the hope to understand his words. Only in the
later stage of her life did she understand with experience the hypnotic hands
of the youth that exposed the very reason for her sickness as its antidote.
People would say that my great-grandfather, who knew beforehand that the king’s
daughter would be affected by some eccentric sickness, would have found it
difficult to reject her, probably due to the intense sense of pity he felt for
that girl. He accepted, halfheartedly, to teach her the art of Varmam. But
within days, he understood what he had thought about her was completely wrong.
I have heard many stories that speak about the brilliant days the king’s
daughter spent with my great-grandfather to learn lessons. They were also
equally eccentric, like the dreams we see. My great-grandfather used to
reportedly say that he had learnt some mudras he had not yet learnt in Varmam
from that girl. He used to tell his disciples during his routine laments in
Sanskrit that it was the thoughts pertaining to the period of him being the
master to the king’s daughter that had actually kept him alive a little more at
the time when he was under severe mental stress caused by the curse-induced
forgetfulness, the life without any disciples, and loneliness without a spouse.
My great-grandfather told me way before she came to him to learn Varmam, she
had already possessed endless wisdom in the art of Varmam, and he had seen the
very spirit of the art had gone deeply into her, becoming inseparable from her
wherever she went to learn that. Feigning her learning in front of me for my
satisfaction, as if she were serious about the very basics of varmam that
involved touching the body parts with other body parts, stopping its movement,
or bringing it under our control, she then made me understand that there
existed a stunning skill with which one could stop some parts of the body, and
if wanted, even the heart with the mere look and sounds from the mouth. During
my attempts to learn that spectacular skill, I came to know that only females
had been blessed by the god to master that skill. Despite my enormous amount of
training, my dry, masculine eyes couldn’t capture the art that came out of her
green eyes that matched the lustre of water drops shining under the sunlight.
It seemed that my curses in those days on God for not blessing me with the
birth of a female had sowed the seeds of my destruction in me. How could I have
denied the fact of her eyes hiding in them a splendor that could match the
supreme feat of conquering dreams, usually perceived to be the ultimate stage
of penetrating one’s dreams? Aren’t the artistes unfortunate souls who die
after being pulled by beauty despite knowing well that beauty kills? With the
help of her feminine clairvoyance, she had been aware of the impending steep
decline of my clan and the dark future of the royal family; that probably
explained well why such a talented woman came to me to learn lessons. It was
because of her goodwill that I shouldn’t be mowed down by the unbearable
grandiosity of the sacred scriptures I had been learning while being tormented
by my forgetfulness and loneliness; she faked herself as my disciple in order
to teach me about the humdrum of my art. Truly speaking, she possessed the
physical power and sharp intellect that could match that of twenty-two men and
the kindness that they lacked. Later, by falling into a disease that no one
could diagnose, she paid her tribute to her teacher in the form of offering him
an exemplary opportunity to treat her and thus earning him an inconceivable
distinction in life.
The disease my great-grandfather usually referred to did come
out in the form of an eccentric desire from the king’s daughter when she
reached her marriageable age. The king, who had already been pestered with the
pain of not getting a male child, shivered like a snake under thunder at
hearing it. It was at that time his body started growing fragile with sickness.
His wife, the queen, was somehow managing the administrative affairs and family
issues with remarkable courage and sensibility. It was the queen who first
initiated the talk about their daughter’s marriage. When the girl was fourteen,
her mother wanted her daughter to be married, as she felt there was nothing
left in the lessons of administration, war tactics, and world affairs that her
daughter might still want to learn. The king was also not very interested in
the beginning in taking a resolute decision about his daughter’s marriage. Even
the girl, who was equal to twenty-two men as far as courage and intelligence
were concerned, didn’t show any visible interest in her marriage. The king’s
wife had a discreet discussion with these two and managed to convince them to
accept on the ground that a girl not getting married even after her fifteenth
year of age would bring ruin to the royal family. The king, who was already
troubled with the astrological findings that his royal Godhra line would be
broken by his daughter’s husband, readily accepted this marriage proposal, as
he was aware that preventing a girl’s sexual consummation—which was akin to her
entering heaven—would be a greater sin than anything else. The king’s daughter
didn’t oppose any of the arrangements made for her marriage. She had only one
condition: her would-be husband must be a blind man and stricken with illness.
No one could understand why a girl, who could match twenty-two men in
intelligence and willpower, spoke such words. It was the eccentric disease that
had afflicted the king’s daughter. She was a very beautiful girl. My
great-grandfather praised that the luster of her green light-emitting eyes had
shaken the foundation of the art of Varmam. She used to travel along with her
father to various places in the kingdom to get trained in person in
administration. It was said that the parts of the country that received the
scent and freshness of her body, which had merged with the wind during such
expeditions, would develop a distinctive power to withstand three harvests in a
year for three consecutive years without rain. Her portrait was not available
in the palace because even the best painter in the world, who once visited the
palace, expressed his helplessness in bringing her frame into a picture. It was
said that, in the later part of her life when everything had turned normal, the
messengers who ventured into different kingdoms in search of suitable suitors
for her were, in fact, carrying the light of her eyes and voice in small vials.
Any words spoken in praise of her beauty would never be an exaggeration. The
messengers sent in sixteen directions to find the suitors for the girl were
first sent to the best poets and tutors in the palace to get trained to express
her beauty eloquently. Her beauty kept growing brighter, penetrating the time,
and mixing up with the imaginary narratives and sensual descriptions. The
king’s wife consulted all learned men to find out why her daughter, with such
an enviable beauty, wanted to have a blind and diseased man as her husband. The
king, on the other hand, stricken with sickness, was whining all the time on
the bed that the administration of the old city, which had some possibility of
flourishing even at the cost of the broken Godhra chain of royal lineage, was
now facing the probability of getting broken without any heir to name.
Initially the king’s wife paid the least attention to the meaningless rants of
his daughter and brushed them aside as a blunt attempt of young girls with the
fresh blood flowing in their youth to create a tension in others and attract
their attention. When she met with the same stiff stipulations from her
daughter while initiating the talk of marriage for the fourth time, she
appointed some men to keep a watch on her daughter’s activities. The king’s
daughter was closely watched till she retired to her bed at the top of the
palace to sleep. The close confidante of the king’s daughter, who would sleep
in the adjacent room, pledged her heart that she hadn’t seen any unknown man at
any time of the midnight. The king’s wife comforted herself that the dangerous
part of her daughter’s youth was not affected by any secret that could possibly
be the cause of postponing the marriage. But when she grew confident about it,
she was afraid that the sickness that had affected her husband would affect her
daughter as well. When they talked about the marriage the eleventh time, our
damsel again placed her stipulations without any qualms that forced the king,
whining on the bed, to get up, run out, put his hands around her neck, and
strangle it to kill her. The girl helplessly cried that she was innocent and
ready to accept anyone blind and disease-stricken, picked by her parents, as
her husband. She said that she felt a bizarre puke coming out of her abdomen
uncontrollably at once when she happened to see handsome men, and she didn’t
know why it happened. She shed tears as she had become completely broke. There
hadn’t been anyone in the whole twenty-three generations who could have cried
like that. Before this matter reached my great-grandfather, her most
affectionate male, the king’s wife had exhausted trying all her tricks on her
daughter. The stars at the time of her birth and the stars at the time she had
attained her age were revisited and deeply scrutinised once again. A passing
word of a passenger that the splendid horoscope of the king’s daughter had some
‘dosha’ in it did actually ignite the fire of yagna towards absolving the dosha
and kept its flame alive along with the fire of yagnas that were burning
perpetually in search of a male child. When everyone turned to my
great-grandfather at last, seeking his help to solve this issue—after all the
physicians brought from various countries who had no intuitive skills to find
out the reason that was actually lying frozen in white amidst the thick, curly
pubic hairs of her vulva, coupled with their inability to see any visible sign
of disease on her body—the king’s daughter had already completed her sixteenth
year as the king’s wife feared.
...To be continued.
