This is an English translation of “Rajan Magal” a short novel written by Ba. Venkatesan. Translated into English by Saravanan Karmegam.
***
Truly speaking, this new
city, which is celebrating its birthday as a grand festival, actually had two
faces—its actual history and its story. The history of this city dates back to
the time when the Nayakkar king ruled and built a huge lake that had an expanse
of the ocean where the God Perumal dwells and beautiful buildings, a fort, 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 selfish kingdom it had swallowed up. The immortal
storytellers who were living as a remnant 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 wasn’t interested in moving the function of this universe on a linear
path. It lets the things spin around and just watches them. Bottom going
upward; top coming down. Hiding the things that were showing up and showing up
the things that were disappearing. 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.
Another story told that the branches of the forest were the foolishness of the
king, who was longing for a male baby despite having a female baby, which
offered him all the bounties. Another story narrated that the aerial roots of
the forest were the hapless cries of twenty hunters' deaths 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 broken
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, couldn’t come to a conclusion whether it was 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 ripe that the people 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 seen 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 the 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
understanding the dreams of humans by penetrating them, returned to his native
in his youth, stood at the four corners of the city, attracted the attention of people and exclusive consideration of the king
towards barbering and proclaimed that it was not just a profession to shave off one’s head,
did the world understand a truth behind barbering that it was something that
shared an unbreakable affinity with other extraordinary treatises such as medicine,
magic, varmam, and sexual pleasure. My great-grandfather declared 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’ who
were known for robbing them of their wisdom, were standing in a queue in front
of the 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” 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
preaching 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 maintaining, decking, and upkeep 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 which earned him 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 buttocks in a fish shape.
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 bubbles 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 unwarranted situation.
...To be continued
