The cairn beyond the crag

It was the an early Indian summer morning. The type that makes one rise rapidly from bed rather than remain tucked in like the mornings in the cold northern lands. Vidrum had arisen from his bed and briskly jogged up to the small temple on the edge of the cemetery that enshrined a 16 armed kAlI. He mentally recited the incantation “krIM krIM krIM sA mAM pAtu devI kAlI bhagavatI vijayaM dadAtu naH ||” He then picked up pinch of vermillion from the old calvaria placed in front of the image and smeared it on his forehead. Thereafter he ran back home and seated himself on the Damaru-shaped cane chair and lazily looked out at the road and the field beyond the compound wall – after all it was vacation time and free from the cares of life he had all the opportunity to just sit and stare. Sipping the coffee his grandmother had given him, staring at the yonder space, he wondered how wonderful it might have been if Meghana of pretty locks was seated as his side. Just then he saw Lootika passing by holding a net and bag with pill-boxes in it. He was surprised. What was she doing in this village of his? After all she was not from these parts. She had always been frosty towards him, perhaps because of her distaste for Meghana, whom she considered superficial and dimwitted. Or perhaps it was her belonging to the socio-economic pinnacle that placed a divide between her and the middle class types. He had heard her refer to Meghana as “j~NanashUNyA” several times. But carried by the surprise of her unexpected appearance he went up to the compound wall and called her, enquiring what she was doing in these parts.

Lootika, it seemed to him, was more relaxed and amenable to conversation in these days of vacation than at school. She said that she was on her way to collect false scorpions and daddy-long-legs in the jungle that lay just beyond the cemetery. She then excitedly showed him a photocopy of a book titled “Chelonethi, an account of the Indian false scorpions together with studies on the anatomy and classification of the order”. This book published in 1906 was so hard to obtain that there was apparently only one copy of it in India. But her relative had managed to provider her a copy from abroad. She then went on tell Vidrum that the Scandinavian arachnologist Carl Johannes With had made an expedition to India at the beginning of the 1900s to discover and describe false scorpions at length. No one had studied these arachnids in detail after that in the subcontinent. Then, Lootika went on that closer to her time there was a naturalist named Krishnan who had spent a lifetime studying these arachnids and wrote a book on them. But then most of his people looked at him much like Tennyson’s wife had looked at Charles Darwin and felt Krishnan must be positively mad to be seeing arthropods where others saw only a heap of desiccating vegetation. Indeed, Somakhya had told her that though there were few men as learned as the old ayya, they would dismissively say of Krishnan in the dramiDa language: “avaruku velayE ille; chumma edo kuppaya nonDiNDu irrupar”. In any case, ever since Somakhya had shown her these arachnids she found them fascinating and finally decided that summer to launch a new study of them. She excitedly remarked that it was truly uncharted territory with discoveries waiting to be made by the observant and the patient.

Vidrum found all this utterly bizarre and felt more sympathy with the detractors of Krishnan than Lootika. He was reminded of the lecture he had heard from an advaita-teaching saMnyAsin where the renunciate clarified that “sapta-dvIpa vasumati” was an example of useless knowledge. Vidrum remarked to himself that if such basic geography was useless then the engrossment in the ways of false scorpions must be the epitome of it. Just then there was a blaring noise from a wind instrument and much beating of drums. Lootika was startled and asked what that was. Vidrum asked her to climb up on to the wall since a procession of the kAlI temple was to pass through the street she was on. It featured the temple elephant and also a buffalo, which was to be eventually be “married” to a horse at the house of a brAhmaNa, after it had made a round to the ritual at the shrine of the sister deity mahAmArI. Lootika was excited by this new distraction and decided to watch it all sitting on Vidrum’s wall. The procession wended its way and the elephant as well as the buffalo copiously defecated on the street in front of Vidrum’s ancestral home. Once the procession had gone past something extraordinary happened. A couple of street dogs came running and rolled vigorously for a while on the dung. Vidrum thought of his renunciate’s lecture and remarked to himself that this must be truly the lower animal birth he was admonishing about, for what else would delight in something as undignified as a viShsnAnaM. But his curiosity was also aroused and he asked Lootika as to what that might mean. She said she was as puzzled as him and would think about it.

Then she gathered her stuff and was about to leave when Vidrum turned to her and said: “Hey it is not really safe for a pretty girl like you to be wandering in the yonder forest all by yourself.”
L: “Oh there is no cause of concern. My relatives are the local IAS officials with some “powers” who administer these regions. Anyone would be a fool to do something to me if they want to remain standing.”
V: “Well but you never know … some desperate rogues…”
L: “I am not as vulnerable as you think.” Saying so she drew out an asi-putrikA with an 7 inch gleaming blade. “I got this from the feral brAhmaNa gardabhImukha.” Then she took out something which looked like a bottle of nail polish and said: “Moreover if that fails here is a secret weapon. I heard you and Somakhya talking about how the Soviet agents used to assassinate people with the umbrella tip. So some days back I talked to Somakhya about making such a weapon for ourselves. Here is the result and herbal formulae remain our secret.”
V: “Ah, I never you were so much a female version of a ‘chupA-rustam’! Good luck with your wanderings.”
Vidrum spent much of the rest of his day sitting and starring or taking circles around his grandfather’s house, much like an ox driving an old oil-press, or reading some mangas. That night he heard some strange howls and went out into the garden to check those out. He saw eyes flashing in the dark and eventually as his own adjusted to the dark he made out the shapes of jackals. They ran on the street in front of his house and, like the dogs earlier in the day, rolled vigorously on the elephant and buffalo dung. He remarked to himself that he should mention this to Lootika in case he saw her the next day.

The next day Vidrum spent the time constructing geometric figures using his old compass box. In one such construction he observed the incenters of the 4 triangles with the diagonals of a cyclic quadrilateral as one of their sides formed a rectangle. He did this construction again and again and found that irrespective of the cyclic quadrilateral he got a rectangle. He wondered why this was so and roamed out that evening to make circles around his grandfather’s house. Just then he caught sight of Lootika who was returning from her false scorpion and opilione hunt. He called out to her and told her of the jackals and his constructions of cyclic quadrilaterals. She was also unable to prove why always a rectangle is obtained but hoped work more on it. She in turn excitedly showed Vidrum her drawing of a false scorpion attached to a fly.

At that point Vidrum proposed that the next day they should probably climb up a crag that lay in the midst of the jungle and explore the environs of cairn that lay beyond it. Atop the crag lay a shrine whose deity was called chauryalakShmI. A legend which Vidrum had heard claimed that thieves after their plundering expeditions used to come to worship this deity. There were rumors of buried wealth in its vicinity but also one that people who tried to take it would be killed by the thieves. Lootika was immediately game because she felt it might give her the opportunity to explore a more diverse array of ecological niches. Accordingly they set off the next day. Vidrum had picked up goodly billhook from his grandfather’s collection which came in many shapes and sizes. He was confident that with that muscular billhook he could defend himself sufficiently against any local rowdy who might take a chance. After scaling the steep crag and reaching its top Lootika and Vidrum went their own ways. Lootika was carefully turning leaves and stones and picking up her scorpions – interestingly she found that the version which Somakhya had shown her prowling in the used-book store was common even in these wooded environs near the cairn. After digging for a while in the vicinity of the chauryalakShmI shrine Vidrum went on to explore the circumference of the cairn. He remembered that Somakhya had described these as remnants of the megalithic people who probably brought the Prakritic languages to southern India. There, after some scratching around he found two implements that were somewhat out of place vis-a-vis the megalithic era – an old rusted billhook with an inscription in a West Asian script and the barrel of a gun. He carefully collected these and that afternoon Vidrum and Lootika returned, both immensely pleased with their spoils.

Some weeks later Vidrum was back in his town and went to meet Somakhya. They spent a long time palavering about how their vacations had progressed. Vidrum had much to say, from the rectangle within the quadrilateral, to the animals wallowing in dung, to the climax of his metallic finds. He asked Somakhya what the origin of those implements might be. Of course Somakhya had no answer but only felt a bit envious of that Vidrum had found stuff so interesting. Some days later Somakhya was engaging in ball-making as he did during most summers those days: He had gathered a large mass of raintree pods and was de-seeding them. Then he took the fruit walls and was crushing them with a stone pestle to obtain a paste with which to make the ball. As he was hunched pounding the pods, Lootika, who was prone to display of childish activities on occasions, stole up from behind Somakhya and covered his eyes with her palms. As a result, rather than take in the pleasure of the sparSha with Lootika he now smashed his own finger with the stone pestle and was in deep agony. Lootika wanted to help but he shooed her away because he did not want to be seen in her presence as he ran to the elders for some help. Soon his wound got infected and he lay in bed with a high fever, perhaps in a delirium induced by the bacterium.

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Perhaps it was during this delirium or perhaps it was under the influence of the opioid he had been administered after the physician had lanced the wound, Somakhya saw something like a dream. It was small nR^isiMha temple in well known town of the mahAraTTas. A mahArAShTrI brAhmaNa from the clan of the kauNDinya-s arrived at the temple. He was unlike many of his coethnics of the age, who were closer to what the old ayya samarapu~Ngava had to say about them in his travelogue through bhAratavarSha a few hundred years ago: “neglecting the shAstra-s they are more like a mArvADI of the 3rd varNa or a kAyastha account-keeper”. He took out a text of the R^igveda and began his daily pArAyaNa, that day starting with the 9th maNDala. He still belonged to the world that was crumbling around him; his clansmen still performed soma rituals and his community still counted several who knew one of more of all the 4 veda-s in entirety. He too had hoped to be a R^itvik who might perform rituals all the way up to the great vAjapeya with its long-distance shooting contest and grand 17 lap chariot races.

At the same time the heavy air of defeat still hung all around – he had not yet entered his teens when he saw with his own eyes the catastrophic defeat of the Indian army in the first war of independence, many of whose leaders had been his own coethnics. Some of his own relatives from the extended family had been slain in the great battlefields of North India in the attempt to shake off the shveta-shavasAdhaka yoke. The news had reached him of the genocide of Indians in the north. In his own circles he had heard the story of how a coethnic who had protected an Englishman and his girl from being killed during the Indian attack was skewered like a kebab by the bayonet of the very same Englishman at the end of the war. He had learned English in school and had read in person the account of the total genocide conducted by the pretasAdhaka warrior Hugh Rose in Jhansi: “No maudlin clemency was to mark the fall of the city.” As he ended for the day with the gAyatrI “siShAsatU rayINAM vAjeShv arvatAm iva | bhareShu jigyuShAm asi ||” his mind wandered towards the catastrophe of the first war of independence again. He had a conflicting thought run through him. After all the shruti had just said that the soma was drunk by victorious warriors conquering like indra and soma with their horses racing with booty. After all the great vAjapeya was performed by the victorious Arya, with bow held aloft, whose horses had trampled upon his vanquished foes and beaten his land flat beneath their hoofs. So what was the point of performing the vAjapeya when bhAratI, who is invoked to come at the beginning of every rite, was bound by the pretAchArin-s.

Continued…