The Legend of Virinara Read online

  USHA ALEXANDER

  The LEGEND of VIRINARA

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

  THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST

  ANOTHER BEGINNING

  ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE LEGEND OF VIRINARA

  Usha Alexander is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Only the Eyes Are Mine (2005). An American of Indian parentage, she now resides in India, where she spends time travelling and learning the intricacies of its deep history. Her travel writings and other essays have appeared in various publications, including in The Best Travel Writing 2007 (‘Travelers’ Tales’) and in Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth (‘Travelers’ Tales’, 2011). Find her on the web at www.ushaalexander.com.

  Advance Praise for the Book

  ‘Told with skill and consummate detail, a tale that mixes myth and memory, journeying through ancient philosophies and forgotten truths, taking us back to the Old Times, when the world was young’—Namita Gokhale, author of the bestselling Paro: Dreams of Passion

  ‘Usha Alexander’s novel, The Legend of Virinara, is that rare gift—a beautifully written story about love and war, set in an elegant world of lotuses and arrows. This is historical fiction done right’—Anil Menon, author of the acclaimed Half of What I Say

  For my mother, Dr Malati Kesaree,

  who discovered the power of her own quiet strength late in life

  Shanti’s Family

  Family members who are named in The Legend of Virinara

  ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

  1

  I hardly believe it happened right here—all that fire and violence—where now is stillness. So many decades have passed since then; scarcely a sign remains to stir our memories—no remnants of what we built, no residue of what we believed or practiced. Our fields lay fallow and our monasteries abandoned, while the jungle swallowed up all that remained of our civilization. It’s humbling to witness how quickly, how deftly the forest has wrecked every town and village, sunk every roadway, invaded every field and reclaimed the landscape it had taken us five generations to clear and domesticate, to crown with our pious art and temples.

  However mighty we believed we were, in the end, the wriggling toes of burgeoning trees tumbled every fence of wood or piled stone like children at play; aspiring grasses, shrubs and insects took minutest hold of every brick and beam, serenely dismantling their structures, particle by particle, returning them to the mud from which they’d been wrought; majestic banyans groped great sections of our fortress wall, reaching out along the ramparts and cascading down the sides in a crushing embrace.

  Make no mistake: In our day we were strong and prosperous and populous. Dandavrut, our capital city, my home, was the greatest town of the land, larger and more civilized than the seaport of Dindora on the western coast. Dindora may be the largest town in the region today, but it is—as it was then—a wretched, lawless place, existing only for trade and acquisition. Dindora is a place without vision or poetry. But Dandavrut was a home for ideas, for music and theatre. Monks and nuns, sages, poets, adventurers all passed through our country; the most knowledgeable and enchanting were honoured as guests in our court. Merchants brought their wares upriver from the seaport of Dindora and stayed awhile among us to say they’d relished our good life. We once hosted an entourage of visiting dignitaries from Rome, who remained with us for more than a year. It was through an elder scribe among them that Guruji and I tasted of their Zeno and learned also of Epicurus, whose views resonated with Lokayatan thought in placing emphasis upon the world of the here and now.

  Dandavrut stood at the base of the Iglava Escarpment, where my people said Great Mother Nriyalli had broken the land by stomping her mighty foot when she discovered her husband Behra consorting with her younger sister Dara. But the bond to one’s sister is unbreakable, and that’s why the Dara River still flows into her sister river, and together they flow onward towards the western sea. Our country, Virinara, began below the escarpment and ranged for several yojanas along the Nriyalli River. It was a long morning’s journey by boat from Dandavrut, at the eastern end of the country, to Port Behrut in midcountry, and then half again as far to our westernmost frontier. Dindora seaport, even then an independent town built upon delta islands, where the Nriyalli River finds the sea, was more than a full day’s journey beyond our western frontier.

  I was the last of the royals to leave, first travelling westward by small boat to Dindora. Thereafter, I took up a life of wandering, traversing the land from forest to mountain to sea, just as I’d dreamed of doing as a girl, though the circumstances weren’t what I’d wished for. And though I longed for a chance to cross the ocean, I never did manage it. Once a ship’s captain promised to take me on board as his lover, but in the end, he said my crooked hips and unsteady gait made me a liability at sea. So he left me.

  ‘Shall I write that?’ Bhikku Laxman interrupted, his fingers holding the stylus trembling above the palm leaf. He sat across from Shanti, both of them on clean straw mats under a thatched awning. Beyond their spot of shade, the morning sky was creamy blue.

  ‘Write what? Of course, write it all down. That’s what we agreed,’ Shanti said with mild impatience. ‘If my old hands weren’t too cramped and pained to hold the stylus, I should write it down myself exactly as I tell it—the whole story, as I lived it.’

  ‘But why would you include such sullying details? It’s unbecoming of a rajkumari. How can I put down that you offered yourself wantonly to a sailor!—who then refused you!’ The monk made a bitter face and shook his head.

  ‘Ah, dear Bhikku, after all we’ve lost and all we’ve become, you will still hold onto facile judgements of this kind?’ The monk stared severely at the ground between them as Shanti continued. ‘Yes, I’ve exercised my lust, as a woman might do. I’ve enjoyed the fullness of my heart and even of my body. For a time, I went with a sect who practised carnal meditations to achieve union with divinity. Another time, I stayed celibate for many years. All of these things belong to my life. All of these lives I’ve lived have been my gurus.’

  ‘Great Lady,’ the monk said quietly, pausing to inhale, to still his nerves, ‘I understand as well as you the magnitude of what we’ve lost. I understand you might’ve started down a winding path, drunk with your grief. But why would you wish to be remembered that way? I fear people will misunderstand, Great Lady. You were a supreme rajkumari of a great people.’

  ‘Listen, I am no longer a rajkumari—that part of me was buried long ago. By the time I travelled alone to Dindora, I was without family, without title, without hope. I lived only for the life I made as I went. And after having spent my youth in such a circumscribed role, I wished to know all the rest of life. I wished to find its limits.’

  ‘And did you?—find its limits?’ the Bhikku looked up at her.

  ‘I did.’

  At this, the old scribe tipped his head and closed his eyes with self-satisfaction.

  Seeing this, Shanti hastened to add, ‘But everything I lived, all that I tasted, dear old friend, are what made me. I lived and I ate full, when I was still young enough and there were delights to be had. When I held back, it was by my own choice, not imposed by my station. I tell you, I moved this way and that, touching everything, trying everything, to discover for myself the shape of my own dharma! I tumbled and rose up and walked on. I moved among all types of people, and I don’t regret one moment of it. Let others judge me as they might, but it won’t diminish the fullness of what I’ve done. Now, when my life is nearing its close, I do not run from what I’ve been. No
, I will continue to examine my life—whatever it was and whatever is left of it.’

  After a moment’s consideration, the monk resettled his writing board upon his lap and turned his wrist to loosen it. He said, ‘I don’t judge you, Great Lady. I know you well and respect you highly. Even the Buddha travelled the most extreme paths to arrive at his wisdom.’

  ‘Shall we continue, then?’

  It was only some twenty years ago that I finally returned here to my ancestral lands, called back by the need to remember, to gather up the fragments, to reconstruct the cracked vessel of my life and pour from it my own story. I don’t know if any good will come from this exercise, whether there’s any wisdom to be had from it, but I feel compelled to put down my tale. Who knows why one feels this human urge to preserve and perpetuate ourselves, our visions and desires? Who knows why this need for art, this brazen denial of death and emptiness?

  When I returned here, I searched for days through the tangled wilderness, until I found this selfsame banyan tree where my Guruji’s ashram had been, where I used to sit with him and study. And here I built my own ashram. By cutting and training the hanging roots of the banyan, as he’d taught me, I’ve fashioned small hollows within the spread of this great tree’s loose girth and constructed simple huts of bamboo, vetiver and thatch. In the earliest years, I kept but two or three students, young wanderers and seekers from as far away as Dindora.

  But then, some years ago, new farmers started moving into the area, clearing out small circles of the forest to till ever-widening plots of lentils and to graze their cows. Some have grown curious about my ashram. Today, there are two handfuls of villages scattered within three yojanas of my ashram, and students come to me in a steady stream. To them, I’m a kindly but curious old lady, a teller of gaudy tales, thinker of esoteric philosophies, a long-toothed sage with wiry hair.

  But they don’t know how we lived here before. They eat the fruit from our old mango trees and gather the herbs that flowered out from our gardens into the wild, but they don’t wonder how this wilderness came to be filled with ready food. When they dig to plant their gardens, unearthing fragments of the past—I’ve seen old coins and broken medallions dangling among the beads around their necks or tied into their hair—they make up their own stories about the artefacts they find. They say that these bits of metal are the glimmering tears of a jilted goddess, that the broken potsherds and arrowheads fell from a tussle between gods and demons. I always laugh when I hear this, for in some way what they tell is also a kind of truth, metaphorically—though it’s not clear who among us were the gods and who the demons.

  ‘—Ah, but you are telling the end of the story,’ interrupted the monk, lifting his stylus to look at her, his eyes curious and eager. ‘You should begin at the beginning.’

  Shanti nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’re right, Bhikku.’ She paused, sweeping the stray wisps of hair from her face and smoothing them to join the strands of her topknot, though they slipped down again. Bhikku Laxman often thought that when its gloss reflected the sun, her hair glowed like burnished silver above the blackbrown of her forehead, adding to the regal bearing she still projected in such thoughtful moments.

  In the shade of the forest across the small clearing that surrounded them, two girls milked a cow. Other youths sat around a small cooking fire, boiling water, their occasional laughter drifting across the yard. Apart from that, the only other sounds were of the morning birdsong and the ceaseless drone of the forest insects. After a moment, Shanti said, ‘Beginnings are very tricky, you see. Any true story has many beginnings, like many streams leading into the same river. Which stream to follow, which to privilege above all the others?’

  The monk smiled. ‘Great Lady, your story is also in part my story, and I wish to hear it in full, so far as fullness can be captured or spoken in the words of mortals. Tell me all the beginnings as you know them, and I shall write them out. Let the river of your story flow in full measure.’

  2

  It was here, under this banyan tree that I first saw Narun.

  I’d stopped by, unannounced, to look in on Guruji because he was ill. Bursting into his hut and kneeling beside where he lay prone on his sleeping mat, I fanned my beloved teacher. I wiped his face with a wet cloth and made him sip some water.

  ‘Look at you!’ I exclaimed. ‘This is it, Guruji! I must now insist that you come live in the Palace with me.’ He groaned with displeasure. ‘I won’t hear any objections. The last of your students have all left since two fortnights back. Who will look after you now? I can’t leave you here on your own—’

  It was then that Narun stealthily approached the rear opening of the hut, half hidden within the brown tangle of roots, leaves and shadows of the banyan. In contrast to the style of Virina men, Narun’s hair fell in loose, broad curls about his shoulders and chest; it was braided back from his face to the middle of his head and tied there with thin cords of sinew. He wore only two overlapping flaps of leather, concealing his loins, front and behind, and two meagre strands of ancestor beads draped about his torso. I thought he looked poor because his beads were fashioned from bone and boars’ teeth, worse than those of the meanest peasant. Apart from a few tiger claws and teeth tied around his upper arms, his adornments were so much more humble than the multiple strands of cowry shells, carnelians and rubies that rattled about me in those days.

  But this man’s vigour belied the poverty of his dress. Even in the dim light that filtered through the banyan, I saw how his skin glowed, dark as the richest loam. Neither was his build stringy, like that of a pauper, but full and robust as a warrior’s. In his left hand he gripped a great bow and with the other hand he gripped his left forearm. He remained in this taut, wary pose, staring at me as curiously as I did him.

  Although his sudden appearance had startled me, I didn’t cry out. I knew instinctively that this rugged figure was hiding from my guardsmen who waited along with Palli in the clearing outside the front door, as well I knew he intended us no harm. Of late, the guardsmen had been harassing any forest folk they found, in retribution for the brutal attack of Fire Night, a month before. Though the attacks of Fire Night had stunned and terrified me—and all the residents of Dandavrut and the whole of Virinara—I wasn’t eager to help the guardsmen find another victim for their bloodthirsty wrath.

  Guruji tugged at my arm. As I leaned close to his face to hear his whispers, his breath in my ear was hot with fever. ‘This man is Narun,’ he said. ‘He is kind and just, as much as any man you’ve ever held dear, and more than most. Next to you, dear child, he is my other worldly joy. Remember his face.’

  Narun and I studied one another, alert and open, peering across a chasm of position, lineage and all the worldly signs we take to define us. I still can feel the electricity in my skin, the whispering flush across my face and breasts and belly as I looked at him, the space between us charged with unyielded knowledge of ourselves, of each other.

  ‘I’m Shanti, First Rajkumari of Virinara,’ I whispered at last.

  Narun said nothing, only tipped his head and then stepped away, receding slowly into the lap of the banyan. Without a sound, he was gone and I felt vaguely bereft, as though something between us had been missed.

  Turning to Guruji, I exhaled sharply, suddenly aware that I’d been holding my breath. Guruji whispered, ‘Narun, his mother and brothers and sisters, they’re my blood kin from my mother’s side. For many years, they’ve cared for me and looked after me well. And now I must ask you for help on their behalf. I will ask you to go to them.’

  ‘My help, Guruji? But why? How?’

  ‘Shh! We can’t speak of this now. It’s too dangerous,’ Guruji warned. With a flick of his eyes, he indicated the presence of the guardsmen outside the flimsy door of his hut. ‘I’ll come to you at Birdbath Island and explain everything once I’m well.’

  3

  We called it Fire Night, the night that half a quadrant of Dandavrut was swallowed in a great conflagration that cl
aimed nine lives into its voracious maw and tore at dozens of others. It left bodies maimed, fortunes destroyed, spirits inconsolable. Fire Night was the single largest disaster in the town’s ninety-eight year history. Its story might have grown into legend, had our generations survived to tell the tale. But it was only the first blow in our undoing. For the terror of Fire Night changed us, awakening a sickening sense of our vulnerability, our helplessness, and laying bare our truest selves.

  Oh, to be awakened in the dead of night by desperate shouts and dreadful screams! See how my skin prickles at the memory!

  Alarmed by the commotion, we rushed out from our sleeping pavilions, wondering what could be so frightfully amiss. Yet we found the Women’s Garden still and empty, apart from ourselves—I with my sisters and mothers, maids and servants, the women of Illara House and Gold House and all the children of the Palace standing startled and dishevelled. After a moment, we realized that the panicked shouts came from the city streets beyond the Palace walls. Only then did we look up, above the treetops and the high wooden ramparts of the Palace, to see the orange glow of fire, pale and distant at first, but raging higher and brighter with each passing moment. Soon we could hear its roaring ferocity as great tongues of flame lashed the black sky.

  Knowing the Women’s Garden was the safest place in the land, we gathered the children and ran to the lotus ponds, where we sunk ourselves into the mud among the skittering frogs. All around us ashes fell like dry, black rain. We looked to one another in bewilderment and fear. None of us were able to offer answers or consolation, so we stayed quiet. It appeared the world might come to an end outside the Palace, while we remained trapped within. All we could do was huddle in the dark water and hope for another dawn.