Later,
my master gave me ten days of rest to prepare myself for the third
level of the test, the last and extremely difficult one. In that period, I relished
different types of foodstuff that I had never tasted during my days in the hermitage.
My master had ensured that drinks made of different aromatic herbs were given
to me continually during that period. They kept my body cool and awfully tired,
requiring sleep of many days, and numb like wood so that the body wouldn’t roll
out on sand while sleeping, thus leaving the clothes sloppy and lying
haphazardly. When I received all these from the hands of my master’s
daughter—here sitting beside me as my wife—they had kept me in a long, deeply
resting sleep as the titillating dreams kept coming out of me. I was
disdainfully proud of those treatments given to me for passing the second stage
of the test without any adverse remarks. Only a little later could I understand
that those compliments were hiding in them the scent of treachery, like the way
the sacrificial goat is offered with the new clothes, perfumes, and garlands.
To corroborate this, my blood became almost frozen when I heard my master’s
advice and directives for the test on the day I was getting ready to face the
third stage of the test. I was terribly stunned at what he had said. My master
told me, unlike the first two stages, that the craft wouldn’t be used on the
animal that was subjected to the third stage during its dull moments when the
food was getting digested in its stomach. Further, he said, “My dear student,
you have already learnt thoroughly what the animals see in their dreams and how
those dreams are born and disappear in it. Now, you are going to know the
meaning of those dreams in human language. You must understand that you have
now been assigned the tremendous task of passing this to the future generations
the way our ancestors - who had converted the dreams of animals into words and
given them to us in the form of scriptures - did. The animals don’t create
their dreams only in sleep like the humans do. They undertake tiny, temporary
sleeps in every specific moment of their life and then perceive the worlds of
those moments as their dreams and have the power to enjoy them. So, at times,
you will also lose your sixth sense
while attempting to read the dreams of an animal with five senses. Let you be
mingled with all the places it moves, all the scenes it sees, all the places it
visits, the food it eats, and all the moments it indulges in sex. Only at that
time will you understand how this universe is perceived in the eyes of animals,
which create dreams every moment and leave them in the form of this universe. The
day when you are satisfied that you have converted the colours and scents you saw
in the first stage of the test into words and chants, you would come to meet me
again.”
My
master, then, bought the same cow that he had subjected to experiment during
the first two stages of the test from its owner after paying him an amount,
removed its nose-rope, ferrules in the horn, drape on its face, and the cloth
from its body, and wiped off the vermillion from its forehead and the decorative
colourful patterns drawn on its body, rendered it totally naked and set it walk
ahead of me. Terribly shocked at his order to take off all my clothes and start, I earnestly pleaded him to allow me to wear at
least a loincloth. That seer (ok) who knew all three dimensions of the
universe, first vehemently denied my request but later allowed only a small
loincloth, mumbling some words out of his discomfort with it. From that day, I
was wandering behind the cow like its shadow. O courtiers! It was not a day,
not a season; it was two complete cycles of summer the cow made roam behind it
- through the jungles, urban areas, depths of water bodies, ridges, fields, and
shrewdness of people who allowed it to enter their houses and accumulated their
fortunes by giving it jaggery, rice, and coconut stalks during special
occasions - as an ascetic having no bond other than the cow. When it was
chewing its food, I saved myself from the severity of cold sparkles generated
during the clash of seasonal cycles inside its dreams. Neither did I eat nor
sleep during that entire period. I came to know that, before this experiment,
the sleep and hunger induced by the aromatic drinks prepared by my master’s
daughter—my present wife—during the time I thought was most enjoyable in my
life were actually fed to me as medicines to take a toll on my eyelids and
stomach at the time of the experiment. The cow I was following remained
completely indifferent, as if it wasn’t aware of someone following it, and lay
and rolled out wherever it wanted. It slept with its eyes open. It was gleeful
in completely drowning its pure nudity in the water bodies, covering its body
with the sand and then shedding the dried sand. During winter, it used the
exhalation on its body to keep its interiors warm. During summer, it licked its
snout where the inhalation takes place, thus making the air cool before making
it enter its body, and ejected out the excess heat by twitching its skin. As
these actions of the cow, which were otherwise impossible tasks for a human
being kept teasing my intellect and insulting me incessantly, the urge to
complete the experiments as soon as possible and go back to my place began
badgering me. (Only after my marriage did I understand that my urge to go back
home had in fact been burning like fire due to the thought about my master’s
daughter). Hence, this forced me to resort to a foolish act of deliberately
bringing the experiment to an abrupt end by way of hastily converting the cow’s
actions into words. I tended to believe that apart from those jaggery, rice,
coconut, grass, and hay that appeared as dreams in front of the cow roaming
nude, even the air, temperature, and other sundry scenes were also looking like
its food. It first appeared to me in the first autumn during the period of
experiment that the cow identified anything that came in front of it by
sniffing and licking. I caught the cow, which was walking in front of me,
reined it with the rope inserted through its nostrils, and walked on haughtily
holding the rope’s knots and reached my master. My age blocked my vision from
realising the biggest mistake I was making. I announced before him, proudly,
that the animals perceived this world as their food and their dreams brought
taste to anything they saw. Only when I saw my master falling unconscious on
the patterns drawn on the floor in the front yard with his eyes blocked, losing
his balance at the very moment of my boastful declaration, did I understand my
mistake. The moment I came to know that my failure was so poisonous that it
could bring death to my master, I began to hate myself. Before this woman—my
master’s daughter who later became my wife—came to the front yard searching for
her father, I tossed the nose-rope and my loincloth onto the ground as a
telltale sign of my presence there and left that place immediately with a
pledge that I would return as a victor before my master could regain his
consciousness.
My
education, which should have been completed within one cycle of the season, got
into another cycle due to my foolishness and arrogance, which thus invited
unwanted troubles. Since I gave up the piece of cloth that was used to cover my
genital from dangling along my thighs, I had lost the least number of words to
share with others, which the confidence of having that cloth offered me. Along
with the animal that led me, I also completely entered the world of no words
and distinctions. But at the same time, I had to remain with the consciousness
of a human in order to create the words I came across by being away from that
world. My total nudity taught me that the real test had just begun. Now, I
could clearly hear the words my master mumbled when I refused to take off my
loincloth. Haven’t I told you that I had understood in the first test that the
universe appearing in the dreams of the animals was full of complex colours and
scents? Now I could see them assuming particular colours and scents at specific
moments. I could progress faster in a very short time to become an animal that
enabled me to see the dreams of a cow turning red and dark when it chewed its
food. In the eyes of the cow, this world appeared red and dark when it drank
water by dropping its cone-shaped face into the water till its eyes were
drowned, cleaned its breath by lifting its face against the wind, wallowed in
mud full of putrid stuff due to rain and small insects, and gave its body to
some small birds to pick the ticks. Along with it, as my surprise shot up, I
could enjoy a comforting, warm temperature coming out of those dreams. That
temperature was ringing into my ears a heavy serenity not heard in any corner
of the world. It troubled me as if it was very familiar to me and something
that had disappeared from my memory due to some curse. I could understand that,
being an animal among the animals; though I was unable to decode how they
perceived this universe in their dreams into words, I was still able to see
them as scenes in my view. I was hopeful that I would be able to discover a
device that could capture the dreams into a language. Very soon I got that
opportunity. But what actually happened was that it was the device that found
me on its way as its tool. The device that had found me was a dark bull whose
eyes looked like that of a chaste woman. When I and the cow were on our usual
journey through a region that couldn’t be termed either a village or a town,
suddenly in between us there
appeared a well-grown bull—with toned,
rounded twin humps, sharp horns looking upward as if tearing off the sky, broad
thighs, reddened eyes, and a massively drooling mouth. Before I could regain my
senses from the shock, that mammoth male animal that stood hiding the cow from
my view touched me with its erect pizzle, licked me, and pushed me aside. Then
it mounted on the cow with its front legs up and pulled the cow to its side
like a thunderbolt falling upon a tree. All these things happened within a
fraction of second. Lying onto the
ground, I saw the cow’s body, in reflex, was shrinking small in size and
finding its place between the bull’s legs, and its dreams turning reddish dark
hastily. In the eyes of the bull that still remained mounted on the cow from
the rear, were reflected the same reddish dark dreams spilling out everywhere.
That time too, the temperature I was familiar with and later forgot came out of
that dream and fell on me. Conquering my arrogance of my age that made my
master fall unconscious, I was watching just
like a spectator all these events patiently lying on the ground. Very
shortly I realised with tears that the bull which abruptly came in between to
separate the cow from me, earning my momentary wrath, was actually sent by the
God as a connecting agent to unite me with victory. Losing no synchronicity, as
if declaring that the universe was nothing but the world of animals’ dreams,
which was not about getting closer after parting but about dipping and
ascending, the bull was performing its vertical moves of that world on the cow’s
rear. After a long time, the bull brought its heavy frame to the ground that
shook with its weight and turned its eyes—that had turned normal, losing its
reddish darkness—toward me and glanced at me lovingly. The white cow that had
never even turned a glance at me all throughout the journey, for the first
time, turned its eyes welling up with the tears of love towards me. As the cow
was standing at its place, the bull came near me as I lay down, threw its warm
breath onto my body, licked it with its tongue curling all over, and spoke to
me in an elegant language of the nature that belonged to the ‘wordless’ world.
Soon it shrank and disappeared in the wind the way it had appeared. Before my
mind could understand its language, my phallus grew erect and extended towards
the cow without my initiative, as though my body had understood that language.
Immensely happy, I got up, cried, and pounced on the cow, which was awaiting me
with its open vulva lips. Placing my palms firmly on its back, I lifted my body
and inserted my penis into its vulva, from which the sperm of the bull was
still dripping. With the reflex of having been released from my body, my penis,
more elongated than my height, entered the cow’s body, skidded through its
flesh, tissues, layer of fat, blood, and the tender nerves in its interior and
grew. At last, with the eyes of my phallus, I saw the real appearance of the
universe, which the animals perceive every time with the help of each sweat
pore on their bodies.
To be continued…
