Shweta Adhyam - [BCS287 S03] - One Found in a World of the Lost (html) Read online

  One Found in a World of the Lost

  By Shweta Adhyam

  The sun hung in the blue sky, the river roared, a breeze rustled through the forest, all unconcerned that a funeral pyre had exhausted itself on the bank. Some distance away, a sacred fire crackled in a quickly built fire-altar. Before it sat Pavitra’s father, as stunned as she herself was. Pavitra, thirteen years old, sat behind him, fiddling with the pebbles underfoot. Little one-armed Mohita sat beside her, aghast at the loss of his hero, Gayatri. Tamarasa, the pack’s story-singer and priest, fed the sacred fire ghee and puffed grains and dried grass, chanting shlokas in praise of Yama, that he might take good care of Gayatri’s departed soul.

  The story sang of Yama asking his son Yudhishthira to name the greatest wonder. Answered Yudhishthira, “Day after day, countless people die, yet the living wish to live forever.”

  Once upon a time, Pavitra knew, people lived to be old. They lay for months on their sick-beds, their families fighting to keep death away. And still death surprised them, cutting short what they had expected to be one more day of medicine and ministration. Now, of course, with Bhoomi, the very ground they lived upon, having turned hostile, they died as Gayatri had: quickly, violently, unexpectedly.

  Bhoomi these days let no one grow old; she did not even let them settle. Once, she had been forbearance itself, letting them tread upon her, rake her for crops, dig into her for dwellings. But, said the songs, she had grown tired of the constant fighting over who owned her. Now she quaked angrily whenever the people’s numbers grew, breaking open and swallowing one, or ten. If they so much as planted a seed or trod a path, her plants turned vicious, with snaking vines and falling branches crushing roofs and carts and shovels. Their food had as much a chance of killing them as they of killing it.

  Despite it all, underneath it all, they still expected to live forever.

  Certainly Pavitra had not thought—no one had thought—that Gayatri, her identical twin, would be next. Gayatri, who was unafraid of the hard life they led, who was decisive in hard situations, who inspired confidence in everyone around. Who more and more was accepted as leader of the pack, no matter that there were people older.

  That Gayatri.

  Gone.

  To a heaven? Reborn? Or—dreaded thought—a hell? Yama only knew.

  They had been tracking a boar, Gayatri and Pavitra, creeping forward quietly through the foliage towards its soft grunts. Then the grunts went silent and they were walking blind. Awfully dangerous, but it was so close and they were all so hungry always. Gayatri had trudged on and Pavitra, as usual, had followed. Apparently they hadn’t been as quiet as they thought, for in a half-breath, the bushes parted and it stood directly in their path, head lowered, pawing the ground, half-again the size of a typical boar. By the time Pavitra could raise her bow and nock an arrow, Gayatri had hefted her axe and taken off at a run towards it.

  Gayatri mistimed her blow, and the boar sank its tusks deep into her gut. Pavitra stood, stricken, not seeing the smallest opening until after the boar had flung Gayatri to the forest floor. Then a volley of her arrows had found their target. Then. Far too late.

  A sob escaped her into the chant-filled air around the sacred fire. Her father half-turned, his face sadder than Pavitra had thought possible, and took her hand. “What’s the matter, my love?”

  “Why am I such a useless hunter, Father? Why couldn’t I have stopped it, saved her?”

  Father faced her and placed a hand on her cheek. His eyes were serious as he looked into hers.

  “Pavitra, do you know how I know, with perfect certainty, that there wasn’t the smallest possibility of landing an arrow?”

  Pavitra shook her head.

  “Because Gayatri is not here.”

  Pavitra nodded, and her father gave her one last look, meant to be fortifying, before he turned back to the fire. He would say that, of course. He would not see, would not admit, that she was terrible at the one thing that kept them all fed.

  It had always been so. When she and Gayatri were six, they’d been taught to wring the necks of rabbits caught in the pack’s traps. It took them both many tries... but Gayatri had never hesitated. Not even once. Whereas Pavitra only had the courage to try because Gayatri went first. Pavitra’s weapon was the coward’s: bow and arrows, used at a safe distance. Gayatri used the axe. Gayatri could not wait until she was old enough to hunt, whereas it had taken Pavitra a very long time, to understand her responsibilities, to tear herself from Tamarasa’s side and remove her head from the whirlpool of story-songs it was forever in, to learn to shoot arrows. Even after all these years, she only hunted alongside Gayatri and still shed a tear or two for each kill.

  If Bhoomi was planning to doom their pack, she could not have done much better than have Yama take Gayatri and leave Pavitra behind.

  “I’ve nothing more to say to you all!” exclaimed the girl, Gayatri, in frustration and rage. Her father and Tamarasa, they at least ought to have known better, but they were being the worst of all. She picked up her axe. “I’m off to hunt. Perhaps you’ll all have come to your senses when I return.”

  She stalked off into the forest, reeling. In her mind was a terrifyingly real image of being gored to death by a wild boar; she had no idea where the image came from, and no one wanted to listen to her. So clear was the image, it was as if she had witnessed her own death from but a few paces away. Fear coursed through her veins; she fought it for control over herself. A good thing this situation had a ready remedy: find prey, meet it with her thick blade, return triumphant.

  She stopped. Soft hoof-beats sounded on the forest floor. She stepped quietly towards the sounds and saw a grey deer in a small clearing.

  She remembered herself saying, on many occasions, how hunting was like a meditation; how all the world fell away save the connection between hunter and prey, how the danger hummed under her skin like life itself. She remembered the words, but all she felt now was a wrongness. Her legs were like lead, the axe was unwieldy in her hands, and inside her skin she only felt terribly, terribly alone.

  She shook off her malaise. It was understandable—an image of her own death had occurred to her—but this was not time nor place for it. She forced herself to consider her prey.

  The deer, for some reason separated from its herd, nosed the lower branches of a tamarind tree, nudging off ripe fruit. It cracked the thin shell with its hooves and licked at the tangy flesh within.

  The girl chased away her morose thoughts—it wasn’t like her to have them. Deer were notoriously skittish; her usual method of rushing it was unlikely to work. Her hands itched for a bow and arrows, but the axe was her weapon; it was all she had. So she lifted it and—feeling an errant, quickly suppressed pang of sorrow for the beast—hurled it through the air at the deer’s head. A breathless moment later, it met its target with a thunk, lodging itself in the deer’s skull. The deer slumped down in the small clearing.

  But—what was this?—no, it hadn’t. Not all the way. It only sank to its knees. Then, as if it had turned into deer-coloured smoke, it roiled and dispersed and rose, filling out a new form.

  To the girl’s great astonishment, where the deer had knelt there was now a strange being with the body of a woman and the head of a deer. The axe had dissolved in the transformation, as if it were no more than a clod of mud tossed into a river. The girl forgot her discomfort and confusion... and gaped. Did such things happen outside of the story-songs? What next, was the creature to offer her a boon?

  The creatur
e turned slowly around, peering at the trees. “Who was it that bested me?” it asked. “You have just saved me from a curse. Emerge, that I might reward you!”

  Surely this was a trick. Everything sensible in the girl screamed to run away, but she was rooted to the spot by wonder... and by another old memory, resurfacing, of herself saying that no one ever gained anything by risking nothing. And that memory did not let her be cowardly.

  “I see you,” said the creature, walking directly to where the girl was concealed behind bushes. “My saviour.”

  The girl forced herself to leave cover—cowardice did not become her—and stand face to face with the creature. Its eyes danced in mad delight; its mouth quavered in laughter so subtle the girl might have been imagining it.

  “What is your name?” asked the creature.

  “I am... Gayatri,” said the girl, and it felt wrong. As if she were lying. No, worse. As if she were stealing. “Who are you?”

  The creature sighed. “I have been under a curse so long I have forgotten my name. But I am a yakshini, and I remember the way back to my home. Will you accept a reward for having saved me?”

  The girl bit down the ready refusal on her tongue and said, “What kind of reward?”

  “What would you like? Safety and stability, escape from Bhoomi’s wrath? Beauty? Immortality? Simply name it.”

  Desire exploded in the girl’s heart at the mention of safety and stability, rest... She quashed it. What would she do in such a world? She was a hunter. But she’d been right, these were gifts that would benefit her pack, gifts worth taking risks for. Even if they came with a large sense of foreboding.

  “Can you make me invulnerable?” she said, giving in to the image of her death, the boar’s tusks sinking into her and what it would mean for them all if she did indeed die.

  The yakshini’s deer-face grinned; she nodded eagerly. She plucked a handful of leaves from a nearby bush and murmured some words over them. As her shloka reached its crescendo, she crushed the leaves and drew a shimmering circle, vertical in the air, with the juice they left on her fingers. The shimmer covered the circle for a moment, then retreated to its edges. Through it, the girl looked into a whole other world, one that was as hard and dry and scrubby as her own was green and wet and mossy, with stone pillars taking the place of trees as far as her eye could see.

  The story-songs said that when Yudhishthira answered that question of Yama’s, and numerous others besides, Yama was pleased enough to bring Yudhishthira’s brothers back to life.

  Pavitra would have no such luck.

  Tamarasa came up to her as she sat cradling Gayatri’s axe, trying to feel her lost sister through it. Mohita, who had followed Gayatri around everywhere, had now attached himself to Pavitra. She had patted him to sleep beside her.

  The ceremonies were complete, everyone had had their midday meal, and all were lounging about in various states of rest, just as they did every day. Soon Tamarasa would sing, lulling them to sleep. Usually, this afternoon rest was Pavitra’s favourite time of day. She especially loved it when the ballad of Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, rang out in Tamarasa’s warm, clear voice, the almost-presence of the goddess binding everyone together in love and understanding. Often, Pavitra would sing along.

  “What would you have me sing, Pavitra?” asked Tamarasa.

  “Why do you ask me?” Pavitra was still thinking of how she could have prevented Gayatri’s death. She had no time to choose songs.

  “There is no one to whom Gayatri was more important.”

  Pavitra looked pointedly in the direction of her father, who sat, morose, some distance away.

  “He has you,” said Tamarasa.

  “Me?! How could you compare me to Gayatri?”

  Tamarasa placed a hand on her head. “In the olden times, dear Pavitra, you would be a child upon the brink of adolescence. You would have just begun to take interest in your family’s trade, or quite another one, perhaps. Your father—or perhaps both your parents, for your mother might have still been alive—would have indulged whatever you wanted to learn, found you an apprenticeship. You would not have had to hunt for—”

  Pavitra pushed her hand away. “Why are you telling me all this, Tamarasa? Do you think I ought to grieve more?”

  “No, my dear, I merely wanted to caution you against mistaking the loss of Gayatri for some imagined inadequacy of your own.”

  “It’s not imagined,” muttered Pavitra. “She’s the daring one. She could jump into a fray with her axe and hack an animal to pieces. She was not—” Pavitra gulped, laid a hand on sleeping Mohita’s head. “She was not useless at... at the important things.”

  Tamarasa went quiet. There was no doubt which incident Pavitra was referring to.

  Some months ago, the pack had crossed the river on whose banks they now sat. They had lashed branches into rafts and poled their way across. Mohita, in the same raft as Pavitra and Gayatri, had stuck his hand in the rippling, gurgling water, laughingly splashing everyone on board as they indulgently let him. Until he screamed, and they saw that a gharial had his arm in its flat jaws, its scaly nostrils flaring in triumph. The gharial and Mohita thrashed against the raft, those on board holding on to Mohita, the gharial whipping its spiked tail, pulling him to itself, threatening to upturn the raft in the process and make meals for its circling fellows. Pavitra was one of those clinging to Mohita, determined that if he were to go, she would too. Her bow and arrows were useless against the armoured hides of the gharials.

  It was Gayatri who ended the impasse. She raised her axe... and hacked off Mohita’s arm.

  It still made Pavitra sick to think of the blood, and Mohita’s screams, and the horrified faces of her people. She never could have done it, but it had been the right thing to do. Mohita survived, and so did everyone else on the raft that day.

  “So don’t try to console me,” continued Pavitra to Tamarasa. “The whole pack has sustained a great loss today.”

  “No doubt. But we do still have you, and your bow. Your heart may not be in hunting, but you are still strong, and valorous, and your aim is impeccable.”

  “What makes you the authority on where my heart lies?”

  A grim smile played upon Tamarasa’s lips. “Because I have heard you sing.”

  The words fell like arrows upon Pavitra’s heart. It was true, for in the moments she was singing, she could forget what a burden it was to be alive. If only singing brought them food, too. “I cannot waste my time on music.”

  “I know,” Tamarasa said, sadly. “But for now, you can let us take comfort in your existence, and tell me what to sing.”

  Pavitra’s heart immediately and selfishly called out for the songs of Saraswati, but she knew she did not deserve happiness and comfort, not now. “Isn’t it obvious? Sing of the warrior goddesses whom Gayatri took so much joy in. What else?”

  “That’s what will make you happy?”

  Pavitra, unwilling to discuss it further, looked straight at Tamarasa. “Yes.”

  Tamarasa gave her a strange look but complied. She started with a ballad about the demon Mahishasura and the bloody end he met at the hands of Chamundi. She sang of Sumbha and Nisumbha, demon brothers destroyed by Kalika and Ambika, the dark and light aspects of the Supreme Goddess, the Devi. She told of Durga, and Kali, and innumerable others, reaching a crescendo with the death of Raktabija, the demon whose drops of blood, when spilt, sprang to life as his exact replicas.

  Each note, each word, landed upon Pavitra’s ears as a lamentation that she was alive while Gayatri was not. And she gripped Gayatri’s axe, letting the regrets beat her heart, willing her sister alive, in vain.

  And then Tamarasa changed register.

  She sang the songs of Saraswati. The soft notes carried images of beauty, of gentleness, of learning. Pavitra tried to push them away, but the music cradled her heart, holding it, letting it rest. She wanted to tell Tamarasa to stop, to return to singing about the warrior-goddesses... but instead found hers
elf picking up the notes, singing, full-throated, full-hearted, until Tamarasa’s voice faded away and Pavitra’s carried the song alone. She poured in all she had until she had sung every single song of Saraswati’s.

  Then, even as she breathed deeply to regain her breath, her eyes drooped, her head sank to the pebbled bank, and she slept.

  When the girl, Gayatri, stepped through the yakshini’s shimmering circle in the air, she found herself in a clearing bathed in soft-crimson twilight, amidst scrubby bushes, stunted trees, and stone pillars that stretched as far as she could see. There was also a permanent brick fire-altar painted in red and white stripes, with small metal pots by its side. The place looked like the temple ruins her pack sometimes came across, except roofless, in vastly better repair, and infinitely multiplied. She felt a pang—of what, she didn’t know; just that she wasn’t supposed to feel it.

  “Where is this?” she asked.

  “My humble abode,” said the yakshini, her deer-face crinkling into a smile.

  The girl’s skin prickled, but she ignored it. She’d known that coming here was a risk; she had to arm herself now and be ready.

  “Now,” said the yakshini, completely at ease in this world she claimed to have been away from so long, “I must go gather some herbs for the ritual, and some firewood, and perhaps some dried grass. Make yourself at home.” She let out a sharp whistle. “My friend here will see that you don’t get lost.”

  Dried leaves rustled, and the girl froze as an immense king cobra sidled into the clearing.

  “Aheendra,” said the yakshini, and the girl realised with a shudder that she was talking to the snake, “we have a guest. Guide her back if she wanders too far, will you?”

  To the girl’s great incredulity, Aheendra nodded. Whoever heard of snakes obeying commands?

  The yakshini traipsed off, leaving the girl with the king cobra and the pillars.

  Aheendra drew itself up further, flared its hood, and fixed its black, beady eyes on the girl. She froze, sure she was to die in an instant. But it must only have been a warning, for then Aheendra subsided, coiling itself up in a pile of leaves, its slick, mottled scales rustling through the brittle brown, and promptly went to sleep.