Reincarnation

I was trying to finish this story before 1st August, 2008, so that I could enter a short-story competition in Portland, OR., for a festival called Wordstock, with the organization-ing of which a friend from Whitman is involved. I had to travel as I was in the process of writing it. But, I think the real reason the story didn't reach an end was that I lacked clarity about the story: I knew what I wanted to write, but I had scant idea what the story was about. Shit don't work that way in writing. Thoughts don't make ideas. Nice is never enough to be good.

This is *NOT* history. It is inaccurate on many levels. If you can't spot where, well...

I have highlighted the sentence I like best: it is campy, purple, but also almost completes the whole story on its own.

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It had rained hard all morning, but the sun was mild and pleasant for a July afternoon. I was throwing peanuts at monkeys in Pashupatinath when a man introduced himself as Lakkhan, reincarnated as Lukky Das Kayastha. He seemed to find me familiar, the way he brushed with his palms a rain-pitted stone to sit beside me.

“Been a long time,” he said to me. “Been waiting, a long time.” He spitted towards the river. There were a hundred steps of smooth-faced stone between him and the river: spit trickled over the stubble on his chin, both hands went up to wipe away the wetness. One swipe from the left, another from the right, coarse palms over the chin like sandpaper on splintered wood.

He smacked his hands together to let off a poisonous puff of snuff that tickled my nose and made him sneeze, once, twice, three times. He took the yellow towel wrapped around his head and opened it. Incense, sweat, charcoal and smoked-meat scents from the pyres across Bagmati lifted like individual flakes of ash released from a downy hold. Although it wasn't very hot at all, my spine had over it a sheen of moisture: I felt flaps of air ripple outward from Lakkhan as he snapped the towel, once, twice, before folding it into a triangle to put over his head, corners reaching past his folded knees to scabby ankles. Under the towel, he was all bony bumps parcelled in translucent brown skin, aglow from within, as if a wire-ribbed lantern of butcher-paper carefully abandoned by the wayside after a mist-filled morning's tryst.

I did look twice to make sure he didn't float an inch or half above the stone steps. He had gathered a mouthful of tobacco spit to nobly swirl in his mouth, capsuling it in neat bulges under one cheek or another, until the slender girl who gave us a wan smile moved on to sights better suited to long-lensed Japanese tourists like her. Then he spitted towards the houses on Chabahil hill. Like a pigeon spying out of the corner of its dumb, round, alert eyes, he bobbed and shifted from one foot to another, moving at least three quarters of an inch closer in my direction. He and raised his chin and brows at me. I shook my head, said “Nothing,” without really saying it.

“Such a long time you took coming,” he said in a heavily accented Nepali. “Been waiting a long time.” Was that a tourist-appeasing trick of his ilk, the one-legged, two-tongued ashen brood inhabiting the numerous small shrines across the Ram temple? “Don't recognize?” he asked again. I smiled, discomfited, embarrassed by the knowledge that I did know this man once, when I was much younger and needed his blessings and marijuana to get high in the evenings. “Babaji?” I hazarded.

“Ho, ho!” Lakkhan laughed. “What Babaji? I'm no Babaji!” He pivoted on one toe and one heel to face me, clutching with force the crotch of his inadequate dhoti, banging his knees together for emphasis. “First time only we are meeting. Still don't recognize?” His face leaned closer in with eyes wide.

“There we met,” he pointed across the river to the Panchadewal temples. “There, there, there, there,” he pointed to the temple of Birupakshya, the smaller bridge over Bagmati, the temple of Ram, a tin door under a stone upstream on Bagmati, from where a leg and a wisp of waist-long beard tentacled in search of some sunlight. I wanted to ask him when. “Long time ago,” Lakkhan said. “Not yesterday, not three month ago—in another life. Long time ago.”

“Another life?” Lakkhan nodded. He no longer looked in my direction, as if he had held his end of a bargain by telling me when we had met before. His chin jaunted up again, pointed all over the place as he hugged his knees and knocked them together as if they were the teeth of his other body, let loose to chatter.

“No problem if you don't recognize,” Lakkhan said. “First time I saw myself, I didn't recognize either. Like thief slinking in night through a sugarcane field, this dark face, ribs showing here and here. How would I recognize? Now you say this is not the face of a friend,” he cut a circle around his face with a finger.

“I am sorry,” I said. “You know, I have a shoddy memory. It is okay if you remember me from somewhere.”

“I remember you from here,” he put a finger on the stone under us. “Okay if you don't. That was two hundred years ago. You were in the service of the mad king, and I was his animal.”

As I listened to Lakkhan, sights and sounds around me changed. The pretty Japanese girl was sixty yards to our right, but I could hear the silk between her thighs rub on itself as she shifted tentatively towards the edge of the high embankment over the river. If Lakkhan hadn't raised his arm to point across the river to the temple of Birupakshya, I think I would have succeeded in hearing the fare quoted to her by the taxi-driver who drove her there, from the spill of his voice still echoing in the folded spirals of her ears.

I did remembered. In a different month, with a different sun hesitantly blanketed over a fog-breathed river, I saw Lakkhan squatting outside the temple of Birupakshya, his hands joined in prayer, not to the statue within, but to a bare-bottomed king.

“No, lord of lords, father and mother and owner, protector of cows and brahmins, no, exalted being, supreme radiance, no, don't!” Lakkhan rubbed his nose on the threshold of the temple. Inside, King Rana Bahadur Shah, grandson of the great Gorkha emperor Prithvi Narayan Shah, lord over all lands between the impenetrable jungles of Bihar and the northern deserts, between Tista and Sutlej rivers of the Gangetic plains, stood with his pyjamas around his ankle, eyeing the stone face of Birupakshya-buried-to-the-waist.

“Lakkhan,” he called out, “tell me again, slave, why I can't?”

I remembered also the afternoon that had brought these men together. I was holding a parasol of thin gold ribs under peacock eyes over the king's head as he sat by the temple of Ram, smoking hashish from an ivory and jade chillum, half-attentive to the ramblings of a toothless fool that had recently emerged from a cave under Kanchenjungha after six years in the darkness, feeding on heads of bats and drinking the drool of snails while he waited for enlightenment. Across the river, a girl of thirteen descended from the temple of Pashupatinath, an end of her widow's white dhoti draped over a shorn head, an ugly companion holding her elbow. She walked into the water and kneeled, as if to disappear in the cold, clear water, until a bunch of hibiscus floating downstream came to rest against her submerged head. The thin cotton dhoti soaked through with the color of her skin when she stood: the glaring eyes of her small breasts searched for us. A ridiculous bunch of hibiscus crowned her head. Water trickled down her sides and created, from air and dhoti pinched between the knees, a body of light, a crotch of mysteries, two buttery thighs and the graceful descent of limbs in aqueous dissolve.

In a flash, the king had thrown the chillum and was running down to the river. I ran after him, catching air with the parasol, letting a hundred peacock eyes flutter first on their gold hinges, then flake and trail up the stone steps. The king bounded down stone steps and leapt clean over small shrines, sometimes stepping off the smooth heads of the sixty-four shivalingams filing down to the river. The girl looked up. Her ugly companion, perhaps a few years older, but darker and with teeth thrown askew from being born into a slave ancestry, stepped forward in her own horror at the approach of the bounding beast. The ugly girl confronted the king, hit him squarely across the face, curled her fingers around the handlebar of his royal mustache, uprooted it. I had to spear her through with the tip of my parasol to separate her from the king when she tried to force him underwater, clinging to him like ivy around oak, grinding his waist between her legs, clamping herself over his bewildered face. The king stood, rubbed his shoulder where the parasol had grazed him, climbed out and sat inside the temple of Birupakshya the-wide-eyed, their madness contained for the moment.

The toothless fool, perched above everybody else, cackled and tittered, yanked at his loincloth to tie it around his head, pointed at the king and jumped. The king stood and faced the fool and everything else in the distance between them. He twitched the royal face where pink flesh declared the absence of the royal mustache, and walked away.

Experience counts for a lot when it comes to needling a parasol through a slave girl, and at that point in my career in His Majesty's service, I still struggled with the technique. The king walked on, leaving me, his servant and shadow, forty paces behind. From the western gate of Pashupati, where the golden bull keeps guard, the widow girl rushed out with three large men behind her. They were wrestlers from her village, loyal to her father, it seemed, and duty bound as brothers to avenge the death of her slave girl. The king's regal indifference notwithstanding, one of the wrestlers swung down his bamboo stick upon the king. Of course, I rushed forward with a khukuri and separated the man with one upward stroke.

What followed is well documented in the accounts of Baburam Acharya, Pandit Dhanajaya Shashtri, Buddhiratna Bajracharya, William Kirkpatrick, Sylvain Levi, Mahendra Johnathan Pradhan, Kaushalya Devi and Hiroshi Takeda. I won't say I remember events as they unfolded that day, because I have also read about that day in the histories written by Acharya, Pradhan and Takeda. I wouldn't bet one way or other if I were to be quizzed on exactly how much I remember and how much must be the impression of what I have read. My knowledge of those years must be a compact of experience and information; I might have seen the evening, but the sunset, surely, was dreamed up.

In any case, all major sources agree that the king returned three hours later, with a mask of sandalwood paste on his face, wearing a scarlet robe of silk that trailed on either side of Makardhwoj, the second strongest elephant in his stable. The young widow's retinue, eighteen villagers in all, were weighted down with chains and placed between Gaushala and Aryaghat, eighty-two paces for man and thirteen strides for the elephant between two bodies, with the young widow seated on a freshly prepared pyre at the end of the line, just outside the temple of Birupakshya. A runner brought the king's message from Gaushala-- “Would you do His Majesty the honor of becoming his third queen?”

Kantivati, Kantamati, Kantawati, widowed daughter of a Mishra brahmin, mortified at the prospect of remarrying with no hair on her head, wearing red again, letting that demon with handlebars over his mouth touch her with his eyes, turned her head to the north and said no. Another runner came after a few minutes. “Sri Sri Sri Sri Sri Maharaj Rana Bahadur Shah Bahadur Shamsher Jang Devanam Sada Samar Vijayinam, King of Nepal, asks you to reconsider,” he said, presenting to her a head scarf in which a pool of blood and hair had been carefully carried to her from the feet of Makardhwoj. “No,” said the girl, shivering in her thin dhoti, shrinking farther atop the pyre. After two more turbans came Lakkan Das, wrestler, scholar, jester and warrior, burdened with wisdom, on his knees to rub his nose in the ground beneath her feet. “Sister,” he said, “You are our mother and you are our daughter. There is a madman who comes for you. Elephants and turbans are sport to him. There is no sin where a king stands. Save us. Save your mother—she is but three boys away from the elephant. Save your brother—he is waiting for this runner to return, his head already under the elephant's foot.”

Kantawati married Rana Bahadur Shah, after making him kneel before her as Lakkhan kneeled before her. She had three conditions for the king—let my people go, make my firstborn son the heir to your throne, and marry my younger sister, so that she may take care of my child once I am gone. The king, his mask of sandalwood paste now dry, blood clotted over the corners of his mouth, solemnly called me to open a parasol of gold brocade in scarlet silk for his betrothed. Kantawati, my queen, alighted from the pyre, stepping firmly on the furrow Lakkhan had drawn with his supplicating nose.

In less than 10 months, Kantawati, all of fourteen years, gave birth to Girvanyuddha, a sickly boy with her large eyes. I spent many nights fanning Rana Bahadur Shah as he slept outside her door when he returned intoxicated from Pashupatinath, after an evening of opium and hashish, and couldn't get her to come to him. On other days, when, waking after the second hour of the morning, he went for a gallop and bath along Bagmati and returned with a fresh pot of yogurt from a farmer's wife, or mangoes from Bhimsen's garden in Thapathali, I pulled a fan of yak tails and peacock feathers, as the king, with his head on his wife's lap, read to her Maithili ballads written by his poet father, Pratap Singh Shah.