River of Ink, page 23
‘I am not a Princess Rukmini to be saved, Asanka. No poor Sita, either. If the Kalinga forces me to marry him, I’ll run. I’ll choose death the way Queen Dayani did. I’ll escape somehow.’
Now I felt tears stinging my own eyes.
‘We can’t run away,’ I said, my voice only a whisper. ‘Not until the fifth instalment is finished. When he finds out what I’ve done, he’ll hunt us across the whole island. We need a head start.’
‘I’ve already stayed in this city once for you,’ you said, as though you had thought it many times.
‘Sarasi,’ I said. ‘If we escape before I’ve finished my translation, he’ll find another poet to complete it. Then this other poet will tell him about all the changes I’ve made – the things I’ve written about him. He’ll have guards at every port, patrols through the forests, and spies everywhere. He’ll put bounties on our names. He’ll send word to Kalinga and the Tamil kingdoms – he’ll hire assassins, mercenaries! There’s no end to that man’s cruelty.’
‘Do you think he’ll let us go, if you finish it? Once you’re no use to him?’
‘No,’ I sighed. ‘But if we had enough time, we could make it to General Sankha’s fortress on Gangadoni: they say the rebellion there is getting stronger. It’d take ten thousand men to seize that hill, and Magha won’t risk a battle just to reclaim some worn-out poet. Once I’ve given him the fifth instalment, we’ll have a month before I have to see him next. That should give us enough time.’
Another two weeks. That’s all I had to put up with, before we could be free. But there was something else, too. The dead voices, and the mad poet who had left them to me. I had to know who was behind them, and with Pushpakumara rotting in the dungeons, I finally had some hope of working it out. I breathed out and let your story settle into me.
‘I’ve never seen the sea,’ I said, realising suddenly how much larger the world must seem to you. ‘Only in poems.’
You reached up to kiss me, and I knew then that the next two weeks would feel like a hundred years. I didn’t believe I could last that long without going mad with fear.
‘It’s Deepavali next month,’ you said. ‘Will you still marry me?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Even if we hold the ceremony in the forest, and the only priests are the monkeys in the trees.’
We lay on the grass until morning. Before I slept, in that halfway place between wakefulness and dreams, I thought to myself what magic it is to close your eyes and die for just a while. I dreamt of chasing you through the dark forest of Ravana’s kingdom, but you were always too far ahead, and my legs were as heavy as water-filled urns. Then the Demon King swooped down and took you from me. I had the sense that I was Rama, but I didn’t know where I was, or what I should do to save my Sita.
When I woke up, you were already gone, and I had to explain myself to the confused-looking guard who found me lying in the grass.
‘I fainted,’ I told him, ‘last night, after reading a poem of such beauty you wouldn’t believe. A poem by Kalidasa – you may not have heard of him.’
The man grunted, struck my leg with the butt of his spear, and sent me on my way.
Chapter Fourteen
The nights only got darker. In the day, the sun baked us all until our lips cracked like elephant skin, until the village waters were sunken mudflats and people flocked to Parakrama Samudra to drink and fill pots. The water shrank a little further every day. I bought a new pair of sandals. The heat forgave no one.
More than a week after that night in the garden, with half of the time until our escape behind us, we met at one of the rundown temples on the outskirts of the city to go through our plan. While not the richest of temples, it was one of the oldest in that district, and had survived Magha’s pillaging well: its pillars were worn and grown with lichen; its bo tree had grown so large that the priests had to prop up its ranging branches with timber. Each temple in Lanka has a bo tree at its centre, and each tree is a cutting from another temple tree. You can follow them back, the way you follow noble families or rivers, until you get to the venerable cutting that the monk Mahinda brought from the mainland, from the tree under which the Buddha himself meditated.
You and I were muttering to each other as we prayed, leaving offerings of water, cut jasmine flowers and sandalwood to the little Buddha statue cross-legged in its alcove. We were satisfied that no one could hear what we were saying beneath the murmuring of the monks, the tolling of the temple bell and the general noise of the market road outside the compound.
‘I have skins of water,’ you were telling me, quietly, and covering your lips with your fingers tented in prayer. ‘About five seers. Some rotis from the kitchens, too. And the matchet. They’re hidden under some cadjan in the roof of my house.’
As you told me about all your preparations, the routes you thought we should take, the supplies you’d already left at key locations, I felt increasingly useless. What had I done but sit in the city and write?
One of the nearby monks, a man who was both old and ageless, like a tree clinging to a high cliff, was praying loudly.
‘Keep the Buddha’s tooth hidden from the King,’ he was pleading in a cracked voice. ‘Keep it hidden, keep it safe until it returns to us.’
For the past week, Magha had been away in his chariot, marching his army up into the hills. Rumour had it that he was trying to extract information from the peasants there about the whereabouts of the tooth relic. No King of Lanka had ever ruled without it: by that point I think Magha realised this, and he would do anything to find it.
‘Fill any man’s purse and he’ll betray his chief, his kingdom, his friends, his children,’ I said, under my breath. ‘But these common people would endure any torment before they’d betray that tooth.’
‘You have to love something more than yourself,’ you said. ‘It’s how you go on.’
‘He won’t find it,’ I said. I had to say it. After all, if Magha could find one man’s tooth hidden somewhere among the endless caves and passes of Mount Kotthumala, then he would be able to find us, too – wherever we found to hide. Our fate and the fate of that tooth seemed in those days to be tied.
Soon, raised voices began to be heard outside the temple, and the official-sounding rattle of one of those annoying declaration drums. It looked like a crowd was gathering, too. There were jeers, shouts, the sound of armoured men walking and spears rattling together.
‘Is there some kind of parade happening?’ you said, although you didn’t sound sure. I went to the doorway, where a young monk of maybe ten years was bowing, and blessing everyone who entered.
‘What’s happening outside?’ I asked.
‘The prisoners,’ is all he said, and murmured his benediction to an old lady climbing the steps. ‘They take them past here some days. On the way to the spike.’
I felt a crawling beneath my fingernails and stepped outside into the sun, where a crowd was gathering in the verges and on the rooftops. Soldiers were marching a skinny band of prisoners down the street, all chained together and marked with burns and bruises. You came up beside me and touched my arm.
‘Asanka, we shouldn’t watch,’ you said, but your voice was quiet. Some in the crowd shouted insults at the soldiers.
‘I . . . I recognise one of them,’ I said, and shielded my eyes from the sun. ‘That man, being marched apart from the other prisoners. He was a servant in the palace. He warned me one day, about one of Magha’s rages.’
Janaka, his name had been. The man who had almost carried me to the royal quarters on the day I’d thrown up over the balcony. Now he stumbled along with one eye closed and swollen up like a plum. I remembered how he shared his bag of fennel seeds and sugar with me in a moment when I thought I would die.
A crier was walking ahead of the prisoners, rattling his fingertips between every declaration on one of those tight-skinned drums they always carried.
‘All of these men have been condemned to die on the spike!’ he was announcing over and over in a clipped, high-pitched voice. ‘They have allied themselves with the thief and brigand Sankha, and made war against their king. The most treacherous among them was even a servant in the palace, passing secrets to the enemy! For this they will die in agony. All of these men have been condemned . . .’
Jeers began to sail in from the rooftops, and a purply mangosteen came flying through the air too, thudding against a soldier’s shield. The culprit disappeared down the other side of the houses. One of the soldiers loosed an arrow into the trees as a warning, and people ducked for cover. From the alleys behind the buildings, I heard the cry I had learnt to expect: ‘Death to Shishupal!’
You tugged at my elbow.
‘Asanka, you look so pale. Come back inside. Was he a friend of yours?’
I followed you in, back to the monks and the cool of the temple courtyard.
‘A friend of sorts,’ I managed. You watched me with concern for some time. We took some water in a jug and walked around the bo tree three times before pouring it on to the roots, saying prayers as we did with chapped lips. The water mixed with the red dust in little rivulets, before seeping into the earth. The leaves shifted overhead, and their noise seemed unbearable suddenly, like the shrilling of a thousand insects. I was sweating and cold, even in the heat.
I don’t know why this death stuck with me, among all the others I knew who were killed that year. By that point it had become normal for lords to simply not turn up for a meal one day, and never be seen again, or for monks from district temples to turn up dead and mutilated in irrigation ditches. Magha was slaughtering rebels in the south every day, and floggings and executions had become part of Polonnaruwa’s daily life – as normal as the ringing of the temple bells at the allotted times of day, and the riots over food and water. But for some reason all I could imagine as we said our prayers that day was the poor servant I had met only once, who had shown me kindness, being hoisted high into the air over the long iron impalement spikes beneath the wall. Being slowly lowered, lowered, lowered, until the point where the executioners jumped and grabbed on to his feet, pulling him down the spike with their weight until it left his body through the throat. The screaming turning slowly to gurgling. They say some men take days to die. I dreamt about that for many nights afterwards – that he was still alive, legs twitching, glassy eyes still blinking – and I always screamed when I woke.
Amid all the horror of that time, one remarkable thing happened. I was struggling to sleep on one of those nights, and you had been called to work in the kitchens for the King’s early morning return to the city. Our plan of escape was still running through my head, over and over. The thousand ways it could go wrong. I rose out of bed in darkness, and opened the door to my balcony to cool myself. I could just make out the shapes of bats threading between the eaves, and the city’s jagged line of deeper black against the sky. A sea of tiny lights.
There were mosquitoes, and I soon retreated inside to peruse my half-empty alcoves. I lit a lamp, and in the corner of my vision I saw the gold on the sari Magha had given you catch the light. It was still where you’d left it; I hadn’t had the strength to touch it, to move it out of sight. Turning my back to it, I pulled books from the stone one by one, and flicked through their pages. The Ramayana first: I read the passage where the demonic Ravana, disguised as a hermit, tricks Sita into offering him hospitality before whisking her into the sky on his chariot. I snapped the book shut. My fingers found the Mahabharata next, and I let the book fall open to a random page: the part of the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna in his universal form: ‘You are without beginning, middle or end; you touch everything with your infinite power. The sun and the moon are your eyes, and your mouth is fire; your radiance warms the cosmos.’
This, too, I closed. The Shishupala Vadha even swam into my head, but I batted this thought away. I paced my room for a while, and the floorboards creaked beneath my feet with the sound of an old barge. These grand Sanskrit poems did nothing for the itch in my chest, and I thought of the bag that I had hidden in the swampy ruins of the old stupa – the sad, waiting lovers of the Kuruntokai. I began making the walk in my imagination, out into the dark of the scrubland at night, and before long I realised that I had to go. I left my bed, tied on my clothes and my new sandals, and crept out of the door.
The night was a madman’s dream. There was no moon, and the grey monkeys cackled in the trees and among the rooftops: ‘aaach, ooch ooch ooch’.
I found my way by memory through the streets of Polonnaruwa. The night guards at the gate questioned me and rifled violently through my bag.
‘Where are you going so late?’ they sneered. ‘Got a common girl in one of the lake villages, have you? I hope you’re paying her parents well.’
‘No, I – I have to see the sunrise from the temple,’ I told them. ‘For the poem. The poem I’m translating for the King.’
They exchanged looks as they searched me, but as I had no baggage, only a lamp, oil and tinder, they didn’t stop me, only held their hands out for payment, not meeting my eye. I looked into my coin purse, and brought out a handful of coins of all different sizes and shades of alloy, with different kings and different signs punched on their backs, and dropped it all into their hands. They didn’t count the money, just nodded and nudged me past with their spear butts. I wandered out into the countryside.
All sound was amplified in the darkness. I tripped often once the light of the guardhouse was behind me, and I imagined snakes and spiders creeping across the path. Soon I became convinced that I would step on any manner of unclean and deadly creeping thing, and trod like a man on a mat of thorn scrub. Parakrama Samudra spread into the night on my left, boundless and black, and I stumbled along beside its shore. At one point a black snake slid off the dyke into the shallows, and the moon in the water shivered. I made a list of rare things.
A son-in-law beloved by his bride’s father.
A copper tweezer that’s good at plucking out hairs.
A well-dressed ox driver.
I passed the statue of Buddha at the Gal Vihara sometime later, and though there wasn’t enough light to see his features, I could feel rather than see his hulking form, and the cold in the air that surrounds stone.
I reached the copse sooner than expected, creeping along the elephant road with the utmost care and my ears alert to any sound. When I got there, I pushed my way through the undergrowth. Remembering the monitor lizards that lived in the pool, I sat down to fill my lamp with oil and strike tinder. I regretted it immediately: the light it cast did nothing but illuminate the wall of darkness around me, and I stumbled down into the crater almost blind. It was a nightmare wasteland at night. The ragged stones of the stupa rose out of the earth like teeth, the fronds of the trees like a sea of blades, and the dark movements of the monitors slopping about somewhere in the water. I tried to stop my body from trembling.
This was exactly the kind of place where rakshasas, demons, would lurk – that was the thought I was trying to keep buried as I stumbled about the ruins. Lanka was once their island, so the stories say, and perhaps if Vijayabahu had never come and driven them into hiding more than a thousand years ago, theirs it would have remained: venturing out at night to slake their dark lusts, disturbing sacrifices, desecrating graves and causing madness, changing shape and practising black medicine, spreading disease, scraping at window shutters with their venomous fingernails, feeding on human flesh and spoilt food.
There was the slithering sound of a monitor’s tail sliding over mud.
‘Poets can make people believe anything,’ I told myself. ‘They’re just stories. Just stories . . .’
I said it many times until a flurry of bats took flight all at once in the trees, and a wave of panic passed over me. I ran to the stones so that I could put my back against them, and waited for the beating of my heart to slow. I felt ashamed of myself: quivering, scared of rakshasas in the darkness, just like a little boy.
‘I am a man of learning,’ I said to myself. Ravana’s rakshasas, whoever they were, weren’t demons. Probably just simple folk living out their lives in the jungle. In a thousand years, people will probably tell such stories about us, just to scare their children.
When I’d regained my breath, I made my way over to the fallen Buddha statue. The pool had shrunk even further since our last visit, and as I lifted my lamp, the bright eyes of the monitors glinted like yellow topaz in the dark.
I found the bag where I left it, wedged in the arm of the old Buddha. The blanket of ferns I’d covered it with was brown and brittle when I brushed it aside. I opened my satchel like a child does a gift, handling each of the books one by one, cradling them, feeling their weight in my hand. They were as beautiful and precious as newborn children. I opened Kuruntokai at its first few pages, and read:
In the darkest depths of night,
when all have surrendered
to sleep’s sweet embrace,
their slander coming to an end,
and the broad earth itself slumbers,
bearing me malice no longer,
I alone can find no rest.
I slumped back against the old Buddha and drank in the night air, and with every breath I could feel the hornets in my head become drowsy. In the light of my small lamp, I sat and read all of Kuruntokai’s ‘Poems of the Wasteland’ section, and then moved on to the mountainsides, where the delicate blue kurinji flower blooms once every twelve years. The lover who journeys across the desert and finally returns to his joyful beloved, his fortune made.
When I’d finished, I closed the book gently and slid it back inside the bag. I sat and looked up at the sky. I love the Tamil Kuruntokai because it’s poetry about waiting and longing in shaded gardens, poetry for people who don’t have the wise Krishna to advise them before their battles, who don’t have a monkey god ally to help them build a bridge across their seas, who have no chakra to hurl at their Shishupals.
