River of Ink, page 14
When you finally arrived, you were guiding an ox cart, and looked like you had spent a hard day at work. I should have told you straight away, the moment you approached me out of the crowd of people, that this month I hadn’t changed the poem – but the sight of you with the cart threw me off. As soon I saw you, I regretted the cowardice I’d shown in my translation. I don’t know what I’d planned to tell you.
You drew your cart out of the flow of traffic and touched my hand furtively by way of greeting.
‘Asanka, I’m sorry, but I have this job to do. The villagers asked me to do it just this morning. We’ll have to go to the lake another day.’
I tried not to show my disappointment, but my face must have fallen.
‘Anay, Asanka,’ you said, ‘you can come with me. It won’t be fun, though. Before the rains we took out a loan of a month’s kurakkan from a melon village in the north, and they called it in suddenly. I have to take this load up the North Road and along the canal.’
There were sacks of rice and green coconut in the cart. I walked with you through the city, and out of the tall Hanuman Gate, past the stalls that have lined that road for so long that they have brick walls and guttering between them. The market wasn’t as busy as usual. We talked a little as we went, but all I could think about was how my next instalment would disappoint you, and how I could tell you about it. I kept imagining that cove of round stones, and kept my mouth shut.
You flicked at the animal’s haunches with a switch when it strayed from the path, but it wasn’t a strong ox, and the journey was hard. The air felt swollen with heat; sand sprang out of the dunes beside the river and blew across the fields, covering every leaf and bamboo shutter with red grit. Outside the beautiful Lankatilaka temple, with its cavernous hall and towering Buddha statue, the women pulled their sashes over their mouths to keep from swallowing the dust.
We turned off and walked a path above some parched, empty melon fields.
‘You should come and see the poem being read again, when Magha sends it out,’ you said, and I felt my stomach dive.
‘Yes, I should, but I might have to work that night. The chapters are getting longer and more difficult as I go.’
‘I’m sure you can spare one night. You could even be the one to read it this time,’ you said, as though this were what I wanted most in the world.
As the ox tired and the incline of the path increased, you took a rope and helped bear some of the load. I pushed from behind and watched the muscles in your back move beneath your skin, marvelling at how different we were. I remember thinking that rain and red earth might mix, but it takes only a day of fierce sun to separate them.
At a traveller’s rest we stopped, glazed with sweat, and you gave me some nelli you bought – the small, hard gooseberry the farmers are always chewing, so sour and bitter that after chewing one, everything, even water and the air you breathe, tastes as sweet as an oil cake. We sat and chewed them by the verge, and watched the travellers pass by.
‘Is she really so bad?’ you said as we sat there. ‘Your wife, I mean.’
I squirmed a little to hear you mention her.
‘It’s complicated, Sarasi. A long history. Why are you asking about her?’
‘I don’t know. You always talk about her as if she’s so terrible. Like some kind of witch.’
I remember trying to shrug off the question, but you were persistent.
‘I want to know,’ you said, and stuck out your lower jaw. ‘Weren’t you in love once? Did her parents give yours a dowry they couldn’t resist?’
‘It wasn’t such a big dowry,’ I said, and flicked a nelli seed into the ditch. A traveller from somewhere up north was filling his water skin nearby. Some monks were standing by with their bowls out, as it was their begging hour.
‘We weren’t unhappy, though,’ I said. ‘Not at first. There was a time – years, even – when I didn’t think about it. It was just the way it was. Then King Parakrama appointed me. We moved to the city, and everything changed.’
‘How?’ you said.
‘I think she wanted children. She would have loved children. We tried, but none came. It happens, sometimes. Some women just can’t conceive.’
‘Only women?’ you said, but I stood up and brushed the dust from my sarong. ‘Anyway, lots of people never have children. They still love each other.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said. I enjoyed saying it, too, since it was something you usually said to me. How could I explain the way it feels to have your own happiness built on another’s misery? To go off to the palace every day while my wife stays at home and cleans and gossips and cooks. The way rancour builds up between two people the way sickness grows in a wound, until one day you look at one another and each finds a different person looking back.
I took your hand, and we went back to the cart, where a monkey alpha was trying to gnaw his way through one of your rice sacks while his harem looked on from the trees.
‘Get away from there, you little shit-eater!’ you shouted at him, throwing pebbles at him as he ran, and I felt laughter bubble up through my mood.
By the time we reached the town, the midday bells of the city were a distant murmur. The place was full of thin Sinhala melon-growers, who fell upon the cart with the quick anger of the hungry. They shouted at each other, they cursed each other’s mothers and snatched at the polished green coconuts. A man they called ‘hook-nosed Tissa’ was pushed to the back of the crowd. A woman sitting against the wall of one house shouted at them to behave themselves, and I noticed that she was cooking the kernels of jak fruit on a pile of embers.
‘Magha has taken all the melons,’ one man said. ‘pierced our tank, cut down our fruit trees, filled in the canals,’ and though we asked many questions, we received answers from no one.
‘General Sankha will save us,’ one old woman kept wailing. ‘He will protect us,’ but no one was paying her any attention, and I assumed she was mad. Soon suspicious glares began to shoot in your direction, and there was one comment to the effect that the Tamils were Magha’s servants and spies. We left the village in haste, and I thought that you struck the ox’s sides with more strength than necessary for an empty cart.
Our explanation for the villagers’ behaviour came when we took the second road out of the village, down through the forest paths. The air became full of the noise of many flies, and it became clear from the smell that something had died on the road ahead. As the sight came into view, we slowed, and the empty cart knocked to a halt behind us. Beside the road, Magha’s soldiers had nailed the bodies of three men to a grove of coconut trees. Their skins were dried leather, their mouths yawning open. Beneath them, someone had painted the word ‘rebels’ in Sinhala and Tamil on a split plank. A terrible dryness rose in my mouth, and I saw your eyes turn wide and hard as glass beads, but what put stones in both our hearts for many days was the woman nailed between them, with a different sign beneath her.
‘Taking down the bodies of rebels is an insult to the King,’ it said. ‘An insult to the King is treason’, and I wondered if Magha himself had ordered that this warning should be written in Tamil, in a perfect metrical couplet.
I didn’t see you for several days after we saw the bodies by the side of the road. I’d promised to go to Aliyagama to see the reaction of the villagers to my cowardly instalment, but luckily I didn’t have to invent an excuse. The day the copies were sent out to the countryside, Magha ordered me to see him in the throne room.
I told you that I couldn’t attend the reading with a tone of deep regret. We spent that day in my room, you talking and writing and lying in bed while I sat at my desk, translating and listening to you, too nervous even to count the days since I’d last unwound your cloth.
‘Asanka, what’s wrong?’ you asked me at one point. ‘Why do you keep wringing your hands like that?’
‘Am I wringing them? I didn’t notice.’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘I’m just nervous,’ I said, and put my hands on my knees. ‘Nervous about seeing the King. And about you. I don’t think you should go to the village today. It’s too dangerous, Sarasi. I saw omens.’
‘How could it be dangerous?’ you challenged me. ‘And what omens did you see?’
‘Well, I – I didn’t see any exactly, but that herdsman who always comes to the temple with his cows told me that two of the guards’ horses have – have eaten each other.’
‘Eaten each other? Asanka, that’s horrible – did that really happen? And what’s that got to do with me?’
‘I just – Sarasi, I don’t want you to go.’
‘Everyone’s expecting me,’ you said, and pursed your lips. I knew that if I pushed the matter, you’d start to question me, so I dropped it.
When the hour approached, you left me with a kiss, and although I felt desperately alone once you’d gone, I at least no longer had to maintain the lie. Each breath of that dry air was like a cupful of sand. It was uncommonly hot.
I paced my chamber alone, and awaited the summons, imagining you walking through the jungle. I’d translated the poem so accurately that month that I wasn’t even afraid of my meeting with Magha. I watched dark koels flit between the flowers of the mango trees that lined the citadel wall, and imagined you reaching the cow path, leaving your twig offering suspended from a branch. I paced round and round, stopping on each circuit to run my fingers over a quartz Buddha statuette in one alcove, something bought the previous year from a tradesman travelling from Anuradhapura. A lizard crawled across the ceiling, then down the wall, then behind the mess of cushions and vases and silver boxes that littered the space behind my writing table. I imagined you walking down the field path to the village, each step a step closer to learning the truth about this month’s instalment.
Despite my confidence in the King’s reaction, my stomach still gave a little dance of fear when finally a servant rapped on the door and told me that Magha was waiting. The man had a jackal look, like an old hunter who has only recently left the forest. I walked with him along the terraces to the throne room, and the few palace workers still tending to the gardens looked up at us as we passed, tipping large urns of water on to the hard ground with anguish in their faces. Several times, my escort looked as though he wanted to speak to me, but it wasn’t until we reached the stairs to the second highest floor that he told me his name.
‘I am Janaka, my lord. Listen – I should warn you,’ he said, with the sympathy of a conspirator in his eyes. ‘The maharaja isn’t pleased.’
I felt very hot suddenly.
‘Not pleased?’ I enquired, careful to use the man’s own words. ‘Because of the rebellions? Or the heat?’
‘No, my lord,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘The Maharaja keeps shouting about your poem. About Shishupal, and his eyebrows. All the servants are scared.’
My toes caught in the hem of my sarong and I stumbled forward. The servant put out a hand to help me.
‘Are you all right, my lord? You look sick.’
I was blind with fear. The only notion in my head was that my caution, my reticence in the writing of the third instalment had been for nothing. Magha had found me out. My cowardice had come too late. Perhaps in ceasing my mockery of the King I had merely drawn attention to it, the way one sometimes only notices the chirp of the cicadas when they stop.
My first impulse was to run. I wanted to gather my belongings and escape the palace for ever, out into the forest. I could hide in your village. The people there had liked me, whatever they might think of my latest instalment. There, you and I could spend every day together, in the shade of the forest canopy – we would walk and hunt, forage for food; we would build a house hidden among the palu trees.
But I knew that there were soldiers at the city gates, guards at the doors of the palace. I looked up at the concern in the servant’s face, and thought that perhaps the hardness in his features was that of a soldier. Perhaps he was one of Magha’s spies, there to test my guilt: the King might already have ordered him to apprehend me if I attempted to leave.
Escape plans flew through my head: the windows were too high, and the dry ground too hard; I hadn’t the strength to test the sewage chutes. I imagined feigning a sudden, natural death, but they would surely cremate me with lime, and I didn’t know how to stop my heartbeat at will, the way I have heard some yogis can.
Even if I could escape, there was nowhere for me to hide. Now that Magha knew what I had done, he would hunt me down like a boar, burn every village until he found me. He would torture all the palace servants for information, and one of them would tell him that you and I were lovers. Perhaps he already knew – perhaps you’d been arrested as you tried to leave the city, and were already in the hands of his soldiers. He would have you tortured, and the thought was like having white termites burrow under my skin.
There was no escape. I had no choice but to follow this servant to my death, up through the shaded upper galleries of the palace. I looked out at the city for the last time, at the flags snapping in the wind and the smoke making its shapes over the walls. A wave of nausea passed through me, and when the throne room was fewer than twenty steps ahead, I vomited twice over the parapet, on to the roof beneath. A servant below cried out in disgust and disbelief. I knew that my face must have been as pale as a demon.
My escort gave me a pouch of sugar crystals and fennel seeds, which I chewed gratefully to take the taste from my mouth, and he made the sign to ward off the upasagga plague.
We climbed the remaining steps together – I, staggering like a drunk, the servant bearing some of my weight on his shoulder – until we reached the door to the royal quarters and he left me with a kind look. The guards opened the door and nodded as I passed. Magha was inside, the shutters and curtains drawn. There were bodyguards half-hidden in the corners, and he had his back to me.
‘Ah, Master Asanka,’ he said in his milky voice, turning around. ‘Please come in.’
‘Yes, Maharaja,’ I replied.
Magha had recently commissioned a large and expensive map of Lanka from an expert brought in from Persia. It was draped over his table, the island a bulging, distended thing, spilling down the cloth. Mountains in the south. Plains in the north. The three great rivers. My entire world. Magha sat down at the map before he spoke.
‘In the last age, Asanka, the men were as tall as giants,’ he said to me, using his thumb and forefinger to measure out a giant beside one of the ink mountains. ‘Did you know that?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
He leant back.
‘Giants. In the age before that, they were even taller. And in Krishna’s age, and Rama’s age, they were unimaginably huge. Imagine seeing Rama stand before you,’ he said softly. ‘Towering above the trees. Imagine how small you would feel.’
He stretched himself over the map then, casting his shadow across it. Oil sputtered in a lamp. He ran his finger from the tip of the teardrop, along the trickling land that joined us to the far shore in the north. A broken baby’s cord.
‘A man so large he could build this bridge, with Hanuman’s help. Large enough to conquer the demons who lived here, whom Ravana gathered in a nightmarish horde throughout the jungles.’
‘He was a mighty man,’ I said, my throat dry.
Magha leant forward so his palm splayed on the map.
‘I’ve read the latest instalment of the poem. The similes were beautiful, your poetry was skilful. But I noticed that you’ve made a mistake, Asanka. Do you think I’m the kind of man who tolerates mistakes?’
‘No, Maharaja, please, Maharaja—’
He cut me off.
‘Asanka,’ he said. ‘I’m very angry.’
He didn’t seem so angry. Still, I saw my whole life spinning before my eyes – not my past, but my future, disappearing into nothing like unbaked mud bricks in the high monsoon. Warm evenings with your head on my bare chest, children clapping and laughing as I read out clever poems that I had written for them, the smells of food drifting from the house where we would live together among the palms. I thought of you then, sitting in your village and listening to my poem without changes, and knew that everything was lost.
‘Ten million apologies, Maharaja. My shame is burning like a billion suns,’ I began to mutter, and he raised his hand.
‘Do you know what your mistake was, Asanka?’ I said nothing, and Magha stood up. There was a soft laugh playing beneath his voice. ‘Then how can you apologise?’
He stood up from his map. A bodyguard moved in the shadows.
‘I loved your rendition of the first parvas, Asanka. When Sri Magha writes about King Shishupal. Throughout those pages, the King’s foolishness and hypocrisy were wonderful. The poet’s description of Shishupal as a corpulent, sweating oaf who would eat a demon disguised as a goat without even realising – his enormous eyebrows – all this made me laugh out loud. I never realised that a poet of Magha’s skill and majesty could also be so—’ he paused, ‘humorous.’
I felt the last of the blood drain from my face, and Magha laughed to himself again, Shishupal’s eyebrows bouncing above his eyes.
‘But now,’ he said, ‘now it seems that this foolish, evil king is quite a misunderstood character. In fact, he’s barely been mentioned at all in the last three parvas. Can you explain this? And what of his majestic eyebrows? Have they disappeared? Did some jealous lover shave them from his face?’
