Veda Vyaasa,

the author of the Mahabharata

(working title)

by

Kamesh Ramakrishna Aiyer

Current Address:204 Pleasant Street, Brookline, MA 02446

617-335-1520 (cell), 617-735-1863 (eve)

Old Addresses:

77 Cleveland Road, Brookline, MA 02167

2130 Massachusetts Avenue, Apartment 7-C, Cambridge, MA 02140

617-491-3426 (eve), 617-679-7552 (day)

525 Second Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215

718-768-xxxx (eve), 212-322-7817 (day)

10 River Road, #16A, Roosevelt Island, New York, NY 10040

212-935-4310 (eve), 212-322-7817 (day)

Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Kamesh Ramakrishna Aiyer

I. Veda

Hefner, who thought of himself as Hefner, because his mother called him that even though everybody else called him Hef, looked at the package he had just received. It did not go tick-tock, tick-tock. That was a relief. It was addressed to H. A. Lump. He was H. A. Lump. It had been delivered by messenger. The messenger, a harried boy from Eastern Courier had not bothered to get a signature from him. Dr. Rangachari, the psychiatrist at New York Hospital, had sent the package. It must be a transcribing job, he thought. The unusually large and heavy package intrigued him. He wondered why it had been sent by messenger.

It turned out to be an urgent job. The tapes, all seventy hours of them, were of a single patient. Dr. Rangachari had been served a subpoena by the legal firm of Sur, Dev, and Ruda to testify to the sanity of Manmatha Nair. The psychiatrist had spent all that time with the patient but the tapes had not yet been transcribed. Now they were needed in a hurry. The attached note from Janet said, “Hef, We need this asap. Like yesterday. Doc will pay more if you ask for it. Nobody else gets his accent and there’s two of them on this one.” This touch made Janet his favorite medical secretary.

The note went on. “The patient is in custody because he threatened some people and then tried to commit suicide. His doctors and relatives are claiming that Doc’s treatment procedures encouraged him in his madness. They are accusing poor Doc of malpractice. It hasn’t hit the papers because nobody died, but it could become big, bad news. So, we need the transcripts. And don’t wipe any tape, we don’t need that kind of help.”

Hef hadn’t had any work anyway, for some time. The hospital provided a steady stream, and he survived on that. But recently, he had hit a dry spell. He saw himself as one who played a critical role in the process of delivering health care -- helping transfer the mutterings of patients, the immediate wisdom of doctors, the summary instructions to the nurses from audible, barely auditable, record to useful form, to words. Paper words, words that possessed a life, words that could be read, assimilated, and acted upon a hundred times faster than the doctor’s orders on tape. There was a gulf, a vast river, between the doctor’s orders and their implementation, and he, Hefner, was the ford-maker. But, for now the rains had failed, there was a drought, it was as though the sustaining river had dried up. There had been no calls for his services.

Not that he was averse to upping his rates. This was New York, after all, you raised your rates, and they came. You lowered your rates and you risked falling off the train, a speck in the stream of edgy humanity that clogged the streets of the city; you joined the traders with their “I was top dick” stories; you crouched on the street corners with the ex-bankers who had run the savings and loans into the ground; you waited tables with the actors and actresses who were most convincing when proclaiming it; and, you lent your ears to the writers with dog-eared manuscripts railing against the shrinking mid-list. Not Lump, no lumpen he, he would grab this opportunity to raise his rates, he may be a critical cog, but he could look out for himself.

He set up his apparatus, the tape recorder with the foot controls, laid out the earphones, started up his Macintosh, inserted a disk. Microsoft Word. Wait. File. New. What should he call it? He picked up the first tape. Manmatha Nair 165356. He typed it in. The file came up. He then typed along the left edge. <<Insert GChaturthi date in 1995 here>>. He put on the headphones. The doctor’s voice came on with its sing-song intonation, and its strange mix of accents. Hefner was used to this. He typed as he listened.

“November 20, 1994. First session with Manmatha Nair, that’s spelled yum for mother, ay, yun for Nancy, yum for mother, ay, tee, aitch, ay. The last name is yun for Nancy, ay, eye, arr. Nair. The patient is a forty-two year-old male. He was referred to me by Dr. Sydney Harris, who has been counseling Mr. Nair and his wife Janice. Dr. Harris felt that a psychiatric evaluation of Mr. Nair might be useful in her continuing treatment of Mr. Nair and his wife.”

“Mr. Nair is a well-built Indian male, bearded. He has been seeing Dr. Harris for four weeks. Mr. Nair, ‘Why don’t you tell me why you are here?’”

A different voice came on. As usual, Hef scrunched forward in his seat, concerned lest he miss some aspect of this voice he was hearing for the first time. Something moved in his peripheral vision. He ignored it. In his basement apartment, he frequently thought that he saw something move.

“Well, my wife and I have been seeing Dr. Harris for some time because I asked for a divorce. Janice wanted to go in for counseling. um ... Janice is my wife. I agreed. But its pretty useless. My life has changed totally in the last year and there’s really no place for any single person in my life anymore. Staying married to Janice is a chore, and I need to use my time carefully.”

There was silence for some time. Hef had only managed to get about half of it. He rewound the tape and listened to Mr. Nair again. This time he managed to get all the rest. Nair wasn’t going to be easy -- though there were some similarities to Dr. Rangachari, he spoke faster and slurred his words occasionally. Fortunately, his voice was less sing-song. He seemed more comfortable with slang, as though he had been an immigrant for much longer than Dr. Rangachari. Then Dr. Rangachari’s voice came on.

“Tell me, Manmatha, what’s this change that has happened to you?”

“Oh, god, you’re not going to believe it anymore than Janice or Harris did. To begin with, don’t call me Manmatha. Ever since I realized ... well, whatever, call me Veda. My name is Veda now. Ever since I realized the change that had happened to me.”

“Is that a first name?”

“Of course. You’re an Indian. Does it sound like a last name to you?”

“Well, I’ll call you whatever you want. Tell me, Veda, so what changed?”

“You aren’t going to believe it or understand it. I mean, you’re a doctor, a technician, for crying out loud.”

Hef wondered if it was time to get some coffee. This sounded like it would be a tough session. Then Dr. Rangachari spoke,

“Well, Veda means knowledge. So you could be referring to that. Or it could be an anagram of Deva, meaning god. Assuming of course you are referring to Sanskrit. So, you felt you had a good reason to change your name. I’ll listen if you want to tell me.”

“OK. I’ll try. But, get this, this is real, OK. I’m not mad. You know what the Internet is?”

“Yes. Its this network of computers that you can use to get information and send mail. My hospital has just arranged to get me an internet account.”

“Its more than that. Yes, it allows you to access all that information. But the information is not just sitting there like a duck waiting for you to come take a pop at it. Its active, it lives. And it lives in me. That’s what I realized. And the Internet contains all the knowledge that ever existed and that is being generated. That’s why I changed my name to Veda -- I am knowledge, personified.”

“So, you are the internet? Or, is the internet in you?”

“Yes, but you can’t think of it that way. My body is a mere physical presence. But as a result of a change that happened to me, my mind has merged with the Internet. There’s nothing in me that isn’t in the world and there’s nothing in the world that isn’t in me. I am referring to knowledge, you understand. I don’t mean I am God or something. I just can directly access all the knowledge, the human knowledge, that currently exists. Its happened before. Its happening to me now. It might happen again in the future. The last time this happened, it happened to another man called Veda. Veda Vyaasa. That’s another reason I call myself Veda. Vyaasa wrote it all down with the help of Ganesa, and he called it the Mahabharata. I need Ganesa, he could really help me, not you.”

“I see. So you are calling yourself Veda after the author of the Mahabharata?”

“Yes. No. He wasn’t just the author, he was its arranger, the Vyaasa. It came pouring into his head, from the minds of the other poets and story-tellers who wandered around telling bits and pieces of the story. That’s the way the internet pours into my mind. Ganesa wrote it down for him -- I need Ganesa, not a wife, not a doctor, not drugs.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t force anything on you. I would like to know when this started happening to you? I know we’ve been seeing articles about the internet ...”

“That stuff! God, it’s absurd, it’s disgusting. I’ve been involved with the internet since it began in the 70s. I’ve known about it for a long time. It did not even start with the Internet. It started with the Mahabharata.”

“OK, what started ...”

“Look, I’ll tell you about it. Just don’t ask me these dumb questions like Eliza.”

“Who’s Eli...?”

“Shut up and listen. I’ll tell you everything.”

Hef decided he could like Manmatha. Dr. Rangachari did not seem to be able to get a word in edgeways. The cadences of Manmatha’s voice felt comfortable. Hef settled into a routine of listening and typing and rewinding and listening and typing and going on. Hef had met Rangachari a few times. Rangachari liked to talk. He talked more to, sometimes at, his patients than the other psychiatrists whose tapes Hef had transcribed. But, he thought, that’s better than Steve Pochapin who seemed to fall asleep during the longer patient monologues.

It looked like Manmatha’s run would be long. Hef made a cup of coffee. The rich smell encouraged his postponed trip to the bathroom and he went in with the cup. Something new. A hole behind the toilet bowl -- a little piece of the drywall that had been cracked had fallen off. He heard some squeaks. It sounded like there might be mice there. Was that what he had seen a short time ago? Well, he couldn’t do anything about it now, he would talk to his landlady the next day.

He settled back into his seat. Manmatha continued.

“Five years ago, I thought of doing a re-telling of the Mahabharata. You know what it is. Say yes. Or nod. OK. How well do you know the Mahabharata?”

“Mmm. I know the story, but I can’t claim to be a scholar.”

“Right. Nor could I. Well, some years ago, Jean-Claude Carriere and Peter Brooks produced a play based on the Mahabharata. It played in Brooklyn. I didn’t get to see the play, but then a cinematic version appeared in the movie theaters and then PBS produced a six-hour mini-series. Of course, the play barely did justice to the original. It also violated my Indian expectations -- the first time I saw the movie, I did not like it. The actors did not dress right, talk right, walk right. The frame story had been changed to suit a Western audience. The second time I saw the movie, my mind had adjusted itself, and I saw that it was an intellectual tour-de-force. But I did not think it fit in the corpus of work about the Mahabharata. The Indian government, well, the government-run TV company, produced a 100-episode version that was badly acted, awfully directed, with terrible special effects. But that version included folk tales and other stories that were not part of the base story. The TV series was an integral extension of the original.”

Rangachari interrupted, “ My family saw most of those episodes when they came on videotape. They were fun. So you don’t think they were well-done?”

“My Indian friends and relatives thought just like you. I watched many of the episodes. The Indian version fed off an existing body of mythological lore. It took traditional explanations for granted. The Brooks’ version was too sophisticated, too artistic, too modern, too Western in short, the Indian version was too blandly naive. I thought I knew more and I could tell a story based on what I thought was important. You know that there is an ecological issue at the heart of the Mahabharata?”

“That’s interesting,” said Rangachari. “You mean that war reduces the population and all that.”

“No. No, no, no! That’s a misconception. Marvin Harris settled that, but of course, nobody reads him. He showed convincingly that war does not control population directly, it encourages discrimination against women, and discrimination against women helps keep population growth under control. War only helps resolve conflicts between growing populations or redistributes income and wealth, it doesn’t directly control population growth. That’s part of my Mahabharata too. Except of course, now it’s part of everything because I’m it.”

It seemed to Hef that Veda had been speaking faster and faster. Manmatha, he corrected himself. But that was all right, if the poor sod wanted to be called Veda, he’d call him Veda. This was a new one -- a patient who thought he was all the knowledge that existed. He listened on.

“In the Bhagavata Purana, the earth goddess, Bhoomidevi, approaches the gods and seeks redress against the burden she is being asked to bear. Vishnu assures her that he will be born as Krishna and relieve her of her burden. What burden? I wondered. Of course, I have an answer now. Its not an abstract evil or justice or even Dharma, that favorite catchall of our religion. Why was Bhoomidevi distressed, and not Yama, the god of Dharma. Why not Brahma the creator, distressed over his inability to control his creation. Why not Indra, the King of the Gods, straining to filter the data bombarding him through his thousand eyes? Because it’s the Earth’s burden that’s unsupportable, the repeated burning of forest land, the loss of topsoil, the uncontrollable annual floods, the diminishing ability of the land to bear fruit, the ravishing of the Saraswati, the spreading Great Indian desert. The population does not have to grow to increase its demands. Look at America squandering a thousand times more material resources per person than the poor Indian peasant or African sharecropper. The earth goddess of the Mahabharata is bemoaning an ecological catastrophe that she knows will happen. She asks for help. She gets war. That’s the surface. At the next level, she gets what we now call Hinduism. That’s the answer encoded in the Mahabharata. The caste system, the worship of the cow, the non-violence and the violence, the patriarchy, the overt discrimination against women, the vegetarianism, the intricate beauty of its thought, the rank hypocrisy in practice, the whole blooming works, warts and all, is there in the Mahabharata as a solution to an ecological catastrophe. At the third level, this solution was not anything new -- it had already been in place in pre-Aryan India and the invading Aryans did not understand it. That’s why the core of the Mahabharata was once called the Jaya -- it’s the story of the Jaya, the victory, of pre-Aryan ideas over the Aryans, it’s the story of the assimilation of the Aryans into India.”

Dr. Rangachari interrupted. “Where did you get that from? I thought that the Hindu religion was the religion of the Aryans?”

“That’s not what I think now. When I started, I thought I’d write a small story, a didactic masterpiece that would act as a warning signal to the contemporary world. Here, I would say, here was an experiment in social policy. And look what happened. It succeeded beyond its wildest dreams -- Hindu society is the only society to have survived with an intact core for three, maybe six, thousand years. Where, you can ask, are Nineveh and Tyre? Where is Sumer, where the Assyrian horde? Where in the modern world can you find a single human living in the style of the Greeks and Romans? Where is great Egypt that itself survived four thousand years? But, then, (Hefner detected a pause) what a success this was. Increasing impoverishment, increasing rigidity, increasing violence against the oppressed, with the lower castes acquiescing in their oppression for centuries. Watch out, I would say, that as you propose policies to deal with this oh-so-certain disaster, we do not condemn some, no, most people to eternal poverty.”

“Look at India, ye mighty, I’d pronounce, look at India, and cry. For success and failure come like school-friends, plotting, with arms locked on shoulders. My book would be a short book, maybe ten short stories selected from the Mahabharata, transformed into something of my making, illustrating the points I wanted to make, showing the failure of social policy in the land of the Bharatas.”

“That is what I wanted to do. That is not what I did. For the Mahabharata is not a simple thing to be encompassed by a single mind, to be restrained and taught as a single thing, like the single-minded war of the Illiad, like the wanderings of one Odyssey, like the travels of one sailor named Sinbad, or even the tales told over a thousand and one nights to a jaded shah. It is not the history of a single people, it is not Gilgamesh’s solitary trip to the underworld to retrieve a loved friend. I knew then that it would break my mind. But now because I am no longer a single mind but the network, I can grasp the whole without losing my mind.”

“That’s the problem with Janice. She does not understand the scope of this change. She thinks, ‘We’ll have children, maybe that will solve the problem.’ But when I think of sex, I think of Draupadi and her apotheosis. Oh, yes, her apotheosis, for she is the childless mother goddess who resides at the very heart of this story.”

Rangachari interrupted. “This is really interesting Manmatha, but we have to stop for now. I’d like to see you again. In the meantime, I’ll talk to Dr. Harris about a tentative treatment plan. Would you object to taking any anti-depressive drugs?”

Veda stuttered, “Hmm, Prozac or something like that. No real objection. But,” he sounded more confident, “it won’t help with my problem.”

“Well, when you get as engrossed as you are, you sometimes cannot break out of the repetitive and cyclical thinking about a project like this. And Prozac will help you by letting you think about this in a calmer way. So, try it. I’ll write out a prescription that you can start now for a few weeks. And I’ll coordinate with Dr. Harris. Make an appointment with my secretary for next week. You can tell me a little more next week, but this time, I’ll ask some questions so we can focus on what’s making it difficult for you to deal with some of your marital problems.”

“OK. I’ll do as you say. But, it won’t help.”

Hef took off the headphones. That was tape 1, he thought. This was going to be tough.

II. The Madness of Kings

“November 27, second session with Manmatha Nair. Manmatha, I gather you have met with Dr. Harris since I last saw you. Have you been taking the drugs?”

“I’ve been fine. No, I’ve been too busy -- I could not get the prescription filled. Also, you know, my insurance policy has one of those mail-order pharmacies -- its much cheaper for me to get a ninety-day prescription filled through them. Could you make it a ninety day prescription?”

“I won’t do that right away. Take this now and if it helps, we can make out a larger one. I’m sorry that you haven’t started because I would like a report on how you’ve been doing with the drug.”

Hef thought he felt Manmatha squirm. Manmatha squirmed, “Hmm, well, you know, sometimes I’m just too busy. I’ll fill it today as I pass by the pharmacy near my apartment. I hope they are open in the evening. I am doing quite well.”

“Last time, you felt that your head was bursting with being on the internet. Are you still feeling the same way? Is it bothering you?”

“It’s amazing”, said Manmatha, “But this last week, I felt like I was getting it under control. Its still a lot, but then not everybody is called to be the focus of all the knowledge in the world. Its hard, of course, but that should be expected. Janice and Dr. Harris keep talking about my behavior. They don’t understand, of course. You, too, should not really be concerned about my behavior. One cannot expect someone who is the focus of the internet to behave just like other humans. I mean, look at what the Panchatantra says,”

“To ruling monarchs, let no trace
Of common nature cling:

For what is vice in other men
Is virtue in a king.”

“So you have been behaving differently from others?” Dr. Rangachari asked.

“You are doing it again, responding like Eliza” said Manmatha. “I am not a king, but I am different. My goals are different. So, most people will think me insane. Consider Tughlaq. He was called “the Mad” because he tried to introduce currency that was not made of gold and silver but was copper, backed by the state. It did not work. But eight hundred years later, we use paper currency, not even copper, backed by the state, and nobody considers our financial emperor, Alan Greenspan, mad.”

For a brief moment, Hef imagined he saw Alan Greenspan sitting in his private study. His eyes clear, his visage grim-faced, but with inner certitude, he prepared to raise interest rates for the seventh time that year.

Manmatha continued, “That’s the first thing I realized about the Mahabharata -- whenever people do mad things, it tries to rationalize them by making it the action of a god, or making it a superhuman act. That’s because by the time the Mahabharata was written down, the reasons for the actions had been lost, and the poets could not bear the orphaned actions. So they made up divine reasons and changed events to support the divine reasons. That’s the real story of how Bhishma was born.”

“Devavrata, called Bhishma later in life, is the eighth son of Santanu and Ganga, the goddess of the river that the Greeks called the Ganges. Ganga drowns her first seven sons and Santanu keeps quiet because he vowed never to question her actions. Then he does, and Devavrata is saved. The Mahabharata explains this with a story of the Vasus, an octet of divinities, who are cursed to be born on earth for stealing. They plead with the Ganga to be their mother and to drown them at birth. All but the instigator of the theft get drowned. This story avoids explaining anything. Why the goddess Ganga? Why Santanu? Well, there’s a divine story for that as well, and it does not add sense to the basic story. But, if we turn the events of the Mahabharata around and ask ourselves why Bhishma would be called the son of the river goddess, why seven sons of his father were killed, why he had no sisters, we get some answers. As a mere boy, Devavrata dams the river. Devavrata gives up his right to have children and is consequently called Bhishma, the Terrible. But why does he have to do this? It is a plot device that allows his father to marry again and have children. So, I claim, there must have been some restriction set on the right to have children. Why would there be a limitation on the right to have children? I answer -- because there was a population problem. Because the earth could not sustain the population that existed. And Bhishma’s mother died, in a way that made her a goddess to the people. Not any goddess, but the river goddess. That’s because its not the earth alone that sustains a population -- the river is also crucial. The crisis is caused by both land and water. So I came to my version of the story.”

“Santanu, the mad, King of Hastinapur, decrees that each married couple could only have two children, one male and one female, to replace themselves. Any children conceived beyond this limit should be aborted or killed. He has one son, Devavrata, and tries to have daughters. But he only has sons, and they are drowned when they are born. His wife protests against this decree and finally kills herself by drowning in the Ganga. The people of Santanu’s kingdom consider her a martyr to his law. Later, when her son dams the river, his abilities are attributed to his mother’s influence, and she is considered the river goddess.”

“I can imagine writing a soap opera with this story. The King is faced with a problem. He makes a law. The law affects him. He is an honest king and applies it to himself. His wife gets depressed and goes mad. His eldest son, at the age of eight years, remonstrates with him. Incidentally, in the original, the goddess appears to the king eight years after he stops her from killing the baby Devavrata, and presents him with the boy before disappearing forever. In my story, the king patronizes the boy. The mother commits suicide and the boy has to be restrained when he tries to jump into the river to save her. This episode becomes common knowledge around the kingdom and the people adore the boy. He will be their savior.”

“Imagine, then the hungama, when the king marries again and it is discovered that the boy, now fourteen, has given up his right to have children as well as his right to rule the kingdom. What the people don’t know is that the king had an affair with the daughter of the chief of the fishermen of a neighboring kingdom. They have already had an unacknowledged son. They cannot acknowledge him because the king would have to confess to having broken his own law.”

Rangachari who had been sitting quietly impatient all along (how do I known this, Hef wondered, as an image of the puzzled Rangachari flashed in his eyes) interjected, “I did not know that Santanu had a son by Satyavati before marriage? Why do you need that in your story? She’s innocent, you make her look bad.”

“But Satyavati has a son before her marriage to Santanu. This is supposedly the son of the sage Parasara, who visits her father. It is treated as a magical event in the original. She’s only sixteen when Santanu meets her. Her son, the original Veda Vyaasa, the writer of the Mahabharata, could not have been more than a couple of years old at that time. But there is no mention of him, almost as though she does not have anything to do with him other than give birth. Santanu does not seem to know of this boy. The original does not make sense.”

“In my story, Vyaasa is the illegitimate son of Santanu and Satyavati, the sweet-smelling fisher-girl. They give him to Parasara, the head of the Kavi-Sangha, the Society of Poets, to raise in secret. But he can never be acknowledged as the King's son. Devavrata knows about this younger step-brother of his. He acquiesces in his father’s breaking of the law because he does not believe in the law anymore. He doesn’t particularly want to be king, if to be king meant being as mad as his father. Many years later, as Bhishma, having once again foolishly pledged to stay silent as an injustice is perpetrated, he will say bitterly, regretting, ‘The law is obscure. I cannot answer your riddle’ to a distraught Draupadi and set into motion the great personal cause of the final war.”

“But Devavrata does not care to be king for he has seen what it has done to his father. So, instead he makes a vow, the first of the many disastrous vows that make up his life. He vows not to seek to rule, he vows not to have children who would seek to rule, he vows never to make love so that he will not risk having children who will seek to rule, he vows never to marry so that he will not risk having to recognize the illegitimate children of his wives as his own who would then seek to rule, he vows never to seek out the companionship of women so that such a thing might never come to pass. That was Devavrata’s vow, and that was why he was called Bhishma, the Terrible, the Awesome. In the Mahabharata, the sky darkens, lightning flashes, the gods rain flowers on the boy’s head, while a voice proclaims, ‘Bhishma, Bhishma.’”

Hef saw a vision of a melancholy-looking boy, handsome, dark-skinned standing by a strikingly beautiful woman not much older than him, and two older men. The sky was dark, thunder and lightning seemed to be in the air. A sweet smell, possibly of rotting vegetation, filled the air. They were on a river-bank, the river flowing fast and full. The vision passed. Hefner shook his head. What was that? He must be getting tired.

Hef looked at his notes. He was making fast progress. It looked like he was getting things down without a pause. He had not even rewound the tape once, he had typed Manmatha’s words as he heard them. He could barely recall the effort of typing. I must be getting better at this, he thought. He did not feel tired. The second tape was over. He put on tape three.

III. Bhishma and Amba

Tape three was from early December 1994. Manmatha had not yet purchased his pills. Hef knew he would not. Dr. Rangachari remonstrated with Manmatha. This time, Manmatha promised that he would definitely buy the pills. Then he got started again.

“Look, Janice wants me to do the right thing. She wants me to do my duty or something. According to the Manusmrti, my duty is to make love to her and have children with her. But no, that’s not good enough. She wants us to communicate. Dr. Harris wants us to communicate better. That makes no sense. Especially now that I can directly tap into everything there is to know. I cannot possibly communicate all there is to Janice. Look, its hard enough just doing your duty. Look at Bhishma again.”

“Bhishma’s father dies. Bhishma is regent along with his father’s young beautiful wife. He has two young stepbrothers to raise. His father had repealed his population laws a year after his second marriage. One of his brothers will be king. Because there is no king, the kingdom is under pressure from surrounding kings, so Bhishma is frequently off to the front. When Bhishma is thirty-two, Vicitravirya is sixteen and Chitrangada is fifteen. For the sake of the kingdom, to have a king and to ensure a smooth succession, Bhishma and Satyavati decide that they must find wives for the brothers.”

“So they write to the King of Kasi, Kasiraja, asking for his three daughters, just entering puberty, as brides for the princes of Hastinapur. The King misconstrues the request -- he thinks they are to be wives of the old Bhishma and he is repulsed at the idea. Also, this is the first time that one of the rulers of a north-western kingdom had requested a marital alliance with an eastern kingdom -- I’ll say more about that later, I think its the most fascinating discovery that I have made about ancient India. So, Kasiraja replies that he had planned a swayamvara (‘Self-Binding’, the ceremony of self-choice) for his daughters.”

“Bhishma and Satyavati consider the response an insult. So, Bhishma attends the swayamvara and kidnaps the princesses. While escaping, he defeats all the kings and princes who chase him. As he is about to kill the prince of Salva, the eldest princess, Amba screams, ‘I love him, he is still a boy, please do not kill him.’ So Bhishma spares Salvakumar. But later, he tells Amba, ‘If you love somebody else, you cannot marry my brother. It would be rape if my brother forced himself on you. So go to Salvakumar with my blessings.’”

“But Salvakumar, still smarting from his defeat, rejects Amba. ‘You are the reject of another man. He defeated me and then spared me because I was a child. You called me a boy. Go back to him, I will not have you.’”

“Upto this point, my story is mostly faithful to the Mahabharata. In the original, Amba returns to Bhishma and begs him to accept her as his wife. Bhishma refuses to break his vow. Amba goes off seeking a champion who will avenge the hurt that she has suffered by killing Bhishma. But in the entire world, no one dares to fight Bhishma. So, she resorts to penance, the universal Hindu remedy for oppression. The god Shiva gives her a garland of unfading flowers -- the champion who wears it will cause the death of Bhishma. Despite this promise, nobody will champion Amba. She leaves the garland hanging on the palace gates of Drupada, the ruler of Pancala, where it stays untouched by everybody. She then commits herself to the fire and is reborn as Drupada’s daughter. The Mahabharata then makes it really complicated -- Drupada wanted a boy, so he raises the daughter as a boy named Sikhandin. Sikhandin finds the unfaded garland and puts it on. This scares her father. Following this episode, there are complications involving Sikhandin’s marriage to a princess, charges of fraud, and so on. Finally, Sikhandin undergoes a magical, if painful, sex-change and becomes a man. As a man, Sikhandin fights Bhishma in the final war. Since Bhishma knows Sikhandin’s true history, he refuses to fight Sikhandin and is killed by Arjuna hiding behind Sikhandin.”

“Now, that’s the original story of Amba. That story denies the humanity of all its characters. Amba cannot find a champion because Bhishma is known as a great warrior. But, upto that point there is no evidence of Bhishma’s prowess other than his success in kidnapping the princesses. Hastinapur is a small kingdom and there is no evidence that it expanded during Bhishma’s regency. Nothing heroic has happened yet. Suddenly no one will fight Bhishma. Well, with one exception -- Parasurama, already a legend in the time-frame of the Mahabharata, fights Bhishma to a draw. That episode emphasizes the woman’s inability to find a contemporary champion to avenge her. But it has little to do with the main story. The story of the champion’s garland is transparently intended to transfer the role of avenger to the next generation in the form of Sikhandin. The entire story of Sikhandin’s assumption of the championship, his/her sex-change, Bhishma’s refusal to fight him is intended to disguise at least one disconcerting truth. That is, the supposedly heroic Arjuna killed Bhishma when Bhishma was not fighting, possibly when he was unarmed. Sikhandin provided Arjuna the cover or the excuse for the act.”

“So I change the story. I make Bhishma violate his first vow. He falls in love with Amba.”

Rangachari was shocked. Hef knew that. “That’s terrible. How can you do that? You are destroying one of the greatest characters of the Mahabharata.”

Veda said, “That’s what I really liked about this retelling -- whenever I say this, my Indian friends protest. That’s how I know I am right. Bhishma and Amba do not fall in love right away. I wanted to write it so that it developed. I mean, Bhishma is twice Amba’s age. She comes back to him, he gives her his temporary protection. Satyavati is not happy about it, so she tries to persuade Amba to join a nunnery. This works in a soap operatic manner -- Satyavati’s efforts backfire with Amba and Bhishma secretly laughing at Satyavati. With Amba, Bhishma finds himself becoming Devavrata, no longer the melancholic boy of the terrible vow.”

“Amba and Bhishma have to hide their relationship from Satyavati and her spies. Amba knows she is being spied upon and over time, she becomes quite paranoid. Bhishma feels guilty about his violation of his vow. Satyavati suspects that Amba has a lover or lovers and wants her put away. Amba’s fears, Bhishma’s guilt, and Satyavati’s plotting culminate in Amba running away during one of Bhishma’s campaigns. Amba, who is pregnant but does not know it because she is suspicious of all her attendants, suspects that she is being poisoned by Satyavati. Bhishma’s long absence makes her feel abandoned. She did not dare make friends as they would earn Satyavati’s ire. So Amba runs away.”

A young girl in her twenties walks by the river bank. She is dressed in an ankle-length skirt and a loose upper dress. Wrapped around the skirt and hanging from her shoulder is a silken train. She carries a bag. The river is low. Downstream, a docked boat is visible. A number of people, dressed in white appear to be eating.

Hef’s head jerked back waking him. That was an extremely vivid dream. He must have fallen asleep. But the tape was continuing. He rewound the tape a bit and listened to the last few sentences from Manmatha.

“Amba, who is pregnant but does not know it because she is suspicious of all her attendants, suspects that she is being poisoned by Satyavati. Bhishma’s long absence makes her feel abandoned. She did not dare make friends, as they would earn Satyavati’s ire. So Amba runs away.”

Hef looked at what he had typed. Yes, he had gotten that pretty accurately. Actually, there were no errors. So he had not fallen asleep after all. The tape was only half-way done. He continued listening.

“Amba meets a group of nuns, who take her into their care after they discover that she is pregnant. In their ashram, she gives birth to a boy. She calls him Sikhandin. The nuns try to teach her their doctrines of non-violence. But Amba’s mind, with its frequent thoughts of revenge, the continued anger against Satyavati, the growing conviction that Bhishma had played a part in Satyavati’s plots against her, could not accept the nun’s beliefs. She leaves them and goes to Pancala, where the king’s wife feels compassion for her. She attends on the queen in anonymity and her son is raised as a companion to Drupada, the prince.”

When Bhishma returns, Amba cannot be found. He searches for her, but he is cautious because he does not want Satyavati to suspect how deeply upset he is. Satyavati is pleased to know that Amba is gone. Bhishma suspects her of having arranged Amba’s disappearance, maybe even her death. But, since he feels guilty over his broken vows, he is unable to confront Satyavati.

Amba, meanwhile, grows increasingly angry that Bhishma was apparently not trying to locate her. She is even more convinced that he wanted her out. She raises Sikhandin to hate Bhishma as the man who had done away with his father, as well as having wronged her by kidnapping her in the first place. As Sikhandin grows up he vows to take revenge on Bhishma.”

“Amba dies young. On her death-bed, Sikhandin vows to take revenge on Bhishma. She gives him a medallion that Devavrata had given her, the one his mother had given him before she died. Well, this touch was melodramatic artifice. I needed to have some way for Bhishma to recognize his son, without Sikhandin knowing that Bhishma was his father.”

“Sikhandin grows up in the Pancalan court. He is teased by the other children as ‘Sikhandin the Bastard’. He grows up bitter and angry. Not being a royal prince, without a father to acknowledge him, he does not receive the same kind of military training that the prince receives. Sikhandin knows that he will never become a warrior of the caliber of Bhishma.”

“In addition, the kingdom of Pancala traditionally supported the Kurus of Hastinapur. As a companion of the prince, later king, of Pancala, Sikhandin could only nurse his grudge against Bhishma in secret.”

Rangachari was mostly perplexed, Hef realized. “I don’t understand why you are making this so complicated. The original was simpler, even if, as you say, it was miraculous.”

“Well, this is more fun. More melodramatic, more soap operatic. Don’t you see what I am building towards? Do you know the story of Sohrab and Rustum? Rustum, the great Persian warrior, legendary in his own lifetime retires from war. His son, Sohrab, by a wife he abandoned in another land, comes looking for his father. You know, it's a long time since I read the story and I don’t remember exactly how it happens, but Sohrab beats all the challengers that Rustum’s king sends against him in single battle. Finally, Rustum is urged out of retirement and he faces Sohrab anonymously. Sohrab complains that he wants to fight Rustum, but Rustum taunts him as a boy too young to fight Rustum. They fight and Sohrab receives a deadly blow. As he lies dying, he tells his killer that when his father Rustum learns of his death he will surely take revenge. It's very sad, but it is also very effective. I steal it as the ending to my story of Bhishma and Amba.”

“In one episode of the great war, Sikhandin will lead Bhishma into an ambush set by Krishna and Arjuna. Krishna and Arjuna will be a little late for the ambush because Krishna has been persuading Arjuna that it is all right to kill his great-grandfather Bhishma in an ambush. In the meantime, Bhishma discovers that an ambush is to happen. He confronts Sikhandin and kills him in the ensuing duel. As Sikhandin dies, he reveals that Amba was his mother by an unknown man. Bhishma is surprised and disconsolate when he determines that the unknown man was himself. As a result, when Arjuna comes on the scene he sees an unarmed Bhishma holding Sikhandin. Arjuna kills Bhishma.”

“So, my version matches the original in its thematic elements -- Sikhandin is responsible for Bhishma’s death, but the actual killer is Arjuna. Sikhandin is the fruit of Amba’s search for revenge. Bhishma’s vow-breaking in this instance is responsible for his later refusal to break pledges, even when it commits him to wrong courses of action. Nor does Sikhandin being Bhishma’s son change the rest of the story, because none of the participants know it, except the vengeful Amba. And Amba has a real reason to hate the entire Kuru family. Unlike the original, in which one wonders why she did not also seek revenge against her lover who rejected her or the father who would not take her back into his kingdom.”

The tape was finished. Hef stopped the machine and rewound the tape.

Then Dr. Rangachari said, “You have a good sense for story-telling. Have you written any others?”

“Yes,” said Veda, “I don’t think they are particularly good. They tend to be written when I am angry and depressed.”

“That’s interesting,” said Rangachari, “It might help me with your case. Would you like to show them to me next time?”

“OK.” Not reluctant, but not particularly enthusiastic.

Hef’s fingers were still typing. He suddenly stopped, confused. He checked the tape. It wasn’t running. That last piece of conversation had sounded clear and clean. Much cleaner than the sound on the tape. He wondered if he should delete what he had just typed. Then he decided against it. He felt tired. It was late -- almost 2 am.

He went to the bathroom. The hole behind the toilet bowl looked larger. There was definitely something peeking out. A mouse. We’ll fix you, my lovelies, he thought. He looked at the mirror. He must have been working too hard -- those were shadows under his eyes. He brushed his teeth. As he washed his face, he felt the urge to snort. Not hayfever, he hoped. He snorted anyway. He dried himself carefully. Then it was time to crawl into bed.

IV.The Gift

A sliver of sunlight sneaked by the crack in the casement window and splashed across Hef’s face. He blinked, awake. He turned to his bedside clock and waited while his eyesight returned. God, it’s eight, he groaned. He had to get up. But if he just turned a little, the sunlight would no longer break across his face and he could pretend that he had not woken up at all. At least, not yet.

Then he heard the squeak. It was coming from the living room. He threw off his comforter. He sat up. That seemed to consume much if not most of the energy the squeak had conferred on him. He stood up, shuffled past his bedroom door, and looked towards the source of the squeaks.

A mouse appeared to be struggling with a piece of string by the edge of his apartment door. I should get my glasses he thought -- he had left them by the computer the previous night. He shuffled past the door. The mouse, no, it seemed to be bigger than he expected mice to be, did not seem to be afraid. It stopped and looked at him, squeaked again, and then returned to the string it had been struggling with. Hef put on his glasses. It was not a mouse -- it was definitely a rat. And that was no string, it appeared to be a thick cord. The rat took the cord in its mouth and tugged at it. Hef was impressed -- if a human had given a proportional tug, they could have pulled down the Empire State Building, he thought.

As the rat pulled on the cord, Hef heard some scratching outside. The cord seemed connected to something. Let me help you, said Hef to the rat and moved towards it. The rat stopped its struggles and looked at him. You don’t trust me, do you, said Hef. He thought the rat nodded, but he must have imagined that. But it waited as Hef stooped down and pulled at the cord. There was no question about it, the cord was connected to something outside his apartment door.

He opened the door. There was a package outside. He picked it. H. A. Lump was scribbled on it in large letters. Below that it said “Reverently”. He wondered what that meant. It had been delivered by hand but not by some service. It did not go tick-tock, either. Maybe the writer intended to say, “Reverend” he thought. Does somebody here think I am a priest, he wondered.

He opened the package. There was a gift-box, labeled “Chocolate Truffles, from Belgium”. The packaging was original and unopened. Why, he wondered would somebody send him chocolate truffles? He heard a squeak -- the rat was now sniffing by the legs of his dining table. It wasn’t really a dining table -- it was a card table that he had rescued from the street during his student days and he had kept it through all his moves.

He was hungry. The truffles beckoned. He did not fell an urge to make a healthy breakfast -- he had work to do, more tapes to listen to. So he sat at his table and opened the package.

In the meantime, the rat, which appeared to be trying to climb up the table leg, had given up on that endeavor. It made its way to the side-chair to his left and climbed up to the seat. The wrapping was off the package and Hef had just opened the box. A plastic form with holes of varied shape, each hole carrying a colorfully wrapped something, presumably a truffle, stared back at him. Despite the wrapping, he could smell the chocolate.

The rat made a noise. He looked at it. The rat seemed to be a natural part of Hef’s life -- he was surprised that he was not more disturbed by the rat’s presence. The rat reared on its hind legs and stretched its body out towards the top of his table. It wanted up, he thought. I should help it. Hef stretched out his hand to lift the rat, but it moved away. He placed his palm face up in front of the rat. The rat sniffed at his hands, gave a little lick and then climbed on. He then brought his hand up to the table and the rat stepped off. It made its way straight to the box of truffles and stopped. It seemed to be waiting.

Well, What do you want, Rat? said Hef, not expecting an answer. It would be awful, no, awesomely fearful if he received one, he thought. He did not get one. The rat looked at him, apparently blankly. He picked up a truffle and opened it. The rat’s eyes followed the movement of his hands. He held the chocolate morsel delicately with his fingers and brought it to his mouth. The rat’s eyes followed his hand to his mouth. He bit. The bitter-sweet chocolate taste was followed by the sharp contrast of the raspberry filling. He sighed. Then it hit him. He had not sighed, the sigh apparently came from the rat. He looked at the rat, it looked away and started sniffing around the box. Occasionally it would sneak a peek at him. He smiled. I’ll call you King Rat, he said. At these words, the rat faced him and placed its snout across the edge of the box, its snout quivering by, without touching a wrapped chocolate whatever.

So, you want one, said Hef. He unwrapped the second one. It smelled of an orange liqueur. I don’t care for orange, he said, You can have this. He brought the truffle over to the rat. The rat smelled the truffles and then immediately started taking bites off it.

The theobromide isn’t good for you, you could die, said Hef. The rat stopped. It looked at him and then it appeared to grin. I see, said Hef, you are prepared to takes your chances. Well, I have a sweet tooth too, so let’s see how long anything lasts.

Breakfast consisted of snacking from the box. Hef ate one, then the rat did. The rat seemed to have an insatiable appetite for the stuff. Of course, said Hef, you are simply used to the vagaries of the wild as a source of food. And, so, of course, you feel entitled to eat half of my chocolates. Just because you drew my attention to it, does not mean you get equal shares.

Hef counted the empty holes. We’ve eaten twenty, he exclaimed. The rat turned away from him. Its head seemed to hang low. Ashamed, aren’t you? asked Hef. At this rate, you’ll be the fattest rat in the world, maybe the first to die of an atherosclerosis-induced stroke. Why am I talking to a rat, Hef wondered, while the lucid part of his brain, now flush with calories and the chocolate hormones, wondered about the seventy-odd tapes that were left to be transcribed.

The rat jumped off the table onto the chair and then jumped off the chair. It went directly to the bathroom. A few minutes later, Hef heard further squeaks. he turned around. A parade of rats, lead by his rat, invaded his apartment. How do I know that’s my rat, he wondered as he leaped up onto the table and watched the other rats proceed up the chair-legs. One of them was larger than the others, it looked like the one he had been talking to.

Get out, he screamed. Out! Out! Out! The big rat squeaked. All the rats stopped. Out! Out! screamed Hef. The rats turned and headed for the john. The big rat stayed. Hef’s heart slowed down. He climbed off the table. The big rat looked at him. Hef slowly regained his breath. Stop looking at me like that, he said. I did not expect to have a troupe of guests.

Look, Rat, Hef said. I can put up with one of you. Maybe in the future I’ll be able to put up with one more. Or two. But not a dozen. In any case, I can’t feed chocolate to the whole lot of you.

Look, Rat, Hef said. Maybe you’ve adopted me. Maybe I’ve adopted you. This is all very sudden. I don’t even know what I would do with you. I suppose I am not really responsible for you. After all, you were a successful wild rat before you turned up here.

Look, Rat, Hef said. I can’t keep calling you Rat.

The rat squeaked. It ran up the legs of the chair and from the seat extended its snout. Hef put out his palm, it climbed on and he brought it to his face. I’ll feed you, OK. But not your friends. The rat nodded. OK, I need a name to call you by. I can’t just call you Rat.

You’re bigger than the rest, aren’t you. The rat nodded. OK, I’ll call you King Rat. How do you like that? The rat nodded its head again, somewhat slower, as if uncertain. You’re not sure? The rat nodded. But it will do. The rat nodded again.

I’m done eating, said Hef. Do you still want to eat? The rat just looked at him. No? Hef asked. The rat nodded. Hef returned the rat to the chair. The rat stepped off his palm, jumped off the chair, and headed for the bathroom. Hef got up, prepared a cup of tea and went to his desk. He put on his apparatus and started on the tapes again.

V. Draupadi Maahaatmya: In Praise of Draupadi

“December 7, session with Manmatha Nair. Manmatha, how are you doing?”

“Well, I suppose. But I’ve been awake most nights. Have you read the stuff I sent you?”

“Yes, I looked over the materials you left with me. It ...”

“You found it difficult didn’t you? That’s what most people tell me. Especially Indians. Sometimes they think its sacrilegious.”

“Well, I was looking for material that would help me help you. Yes, I suppose I thought some of it was sacrilegious, but that is an aspect of your situation I need to understand.”

“Look, did you read the poem about Draupadi? That will tell you a lot about my current state.”

“I did. It left me mostly confused.”

Hef thought, But why did it leave you confused? It’s simple, isn’t it? Draupadi becomes a goddess. Just listen ... listen carefully ...

The Apotheosis of Draupadi

Marry the brahmin! what a farce! Daughter of kings, serf to Scribblers!

Thus, Duryodhana to Karna, and to Dushasana, showed rage.

Muladeva said:

Hail, King! On the new alliance, That comes to your door by fated choice

Your joy at this welcome event, I hasten to praise and rejoice.

Duryodhana said:

What joy is this, Muladeva, what alliance, I am non-plussed.

I have lost a lovely maiden, and lost Panchala too for us.

Draupadi, whose beauty haunted me, and all she deigned to smile at

Her father, King of Panchala, now welcomes brahmins on his mat.

Muladeva said:

Not brahmins, but your lost cousins, Arjuna the bowman won her

Draupadi weds not one, but five, by wish of Kunti their mother.

Hastinapur and Panchala, by family bonds now made one

Our people stronger by this choice, easing our progress to the sun.

Duryodhana said:

Don’t laugh at me, Muladeva, never mock me, Muladeva

The Pandavas are dead and burnt, bodies carrion, worms their favor.

A chorus of voices is heard:

Rejoice! The Pandavas now live, they marry Draupadi all five.

All hail the returning princes, all hail their beautiful bride.

Duryodhana said:

My enemies live! They prosper, I cannot bear the sight of this

Married to all five, its a joke, what shy maiden could five men kiss?

Its a joke, I say, else a plot. There’s more to this tale, else five men

Cannot share a single maiden, how will she their desires pen?

Come Karna, come Dushasana, I must know more of this marriage.

You, Muladeva, stay in sight, I’ll make you earn your own portage.

If indeed they now share the bed, maybe later they’ll fight instead.

Thus unnaturally wedded, I would see the five butt their heads.

Five at one time? how will she survive the expression of their needs

This is their calamity, I wish to see them split like reeds.

Muladeva, magic-maker, you shall show me what I seek now

You cannot, dare not refuse me, I wish to see them making love.

Muladeva said:

Lord, you do not know what you ask! Such magic casts its shadow back

On us the casters, and our lives crumble, render our vision black.

Duryodhana said:

Can you do it? Lie and you die. What I learn shall help me disunite

Them, sow dissension, rouse anger. I shall rule by power of night.

Muladeva said:

On your head be it. For my part, I want no gain from this magic

My eyes I’ll bind, my ears I’ll plug. Watching lovers is not my shtick.

The sun sets, it is the first night. Draupadi waits, the eldest knight,

Yudhisthira kisses her lips, revels in her hair, dark as the night.

Duryodhana, Dushasana watch, Karna watches too unseen

Unheard, unloved, untouched, unmanned, they watch the pair learn love’s fiery keen

Draupadi cries, her first lover, his need fulfilled, his love needing

Her fulfillment, he tends to it. Draupadi cries, this man loving.

Draupadi’s cries heard by watchers, three silent, unseen and unknown.

The others outside, her four husbands, wonder at her cry and her frown.

In their hearts a touch of doubt lies, they wonder who Draupadi likes

They wonder too, can she love all, is there one who her fancy strikes.

Is it Yudhisthira, first love, is it Arjuna, the winner

Nakula the handsome charmer, strong Bhima, or Sahadeva?

That first night, Draupadi loves him, her first lover, Yudhisthir

He did not cause or set the stage for the frown that settled on her.

For she had sensed just the thin edge, the cross-eyed jealousy of three

Voyeurs, mingled with the stouter love of her husbands and Kunti.

That feeling evanescent, she shrugs off the frown, face now gay,

Happily greets mother-in-law, welcomes with co-husbands the day.

The magic holds the three in thrall, the day passes in a dark haze.

They must watch all the love-making, the tantric spell has made them stay.

The second night is Bhima’s turn, he loves Draupadi in the dark

Her legs wrapped around hip and thigh, Draupadi revels in his stalk.

She rides effortless, one hand bore her weight, the other caressed

Her breasts, her face, her ears, her lips, all swollen with joy possessed

Flushed with love, loud she cried out, loud the cries the Pandavas heard

Heard them too the owlish three, their powers disabled, watched, waited

Their impotent hate led by eye and ear, fed Draupadi’s rajas

Her co-husband's love fed tamas, Muladeva fed sattvic ras.

That second night, she loves Bhima, the strong lover carrying all

their earthly burden freeing her, free to rise, ever free to fall.

Yudhisthira held back the thought, was the last night happenstance

Will she be not disappointed, when we return to sexual dance.

The next day, Bhima joyous beams; enervated he’s drunk on mead

Draupadi triumphant, willful, the Pandavas victory cede.

Still in thrall the three to magic, from dawn to dusk the day passes

No strength to move, to change, to end, life moves slower than molasses.

The third night, champion Arjun, loves the lady with song and dance

His poetry charms, kisses tingle, his voice her skin with goosebumps spans

When passion’s play then has its turn, her wet welcome, he fills the sita

Twice, thrice, four times, they try to burn each other out, but poor Lethe

Cannot dim their loving passage, the day breaks with Arjun’s pent up

passion past post-coital peace. He loves her, he is sure she loves him.

The enchanted ones, their passions unfulfilled, but in magic spent

To feed the princess’ inner being, to show by day in strength no dent

Her husband’s marvel, we are out, but Draupadi is as ready now

As that first day, when eyes aglow, she came to Kunti and made bow.

Draupadi smiles at memory, of Arjun’s tales and compliments

As thought deepens so does her love, for the winner, by deed intense

The brahmin boy, no brahmin he, strung the bow a task skilled and bold

Had with mirrored aim, hit the eye of turning fish, on pole of gold.

The fourth night, handsome Nakula, with his perfect lips he kissed her

His almond eyes praised her beauty, his long fingers her breasts did bare

Her nipples stroke, her back did rub, his tongue worship from head to toe

Her cup full, for he loved her too; he was stag, she became a doe.

His body shaped, strong yet supple, she kissed his elbows, neck, shoulder,

His long hair she ruffled and stroked, his chest she bit, cried as bolder

He entered slow, but speedily came her climax with his to join

A duet they sang, painless joy, for which samsara has no coin. (replace “samsara” with “the mundane”?)

Short was the night, the kisses long, her lovers wait, and smile she must

Sahadeva, last, felt like least, impatient as a bull in musth.

But three bulls falter, bulls no more, their senses locked, yoked in halter

Tantric mantra, yantric reasons, fight not to pull plow and colter.

Their men whisper, our masters’ mad, they gaze sightless, they sigh causeless

Kill Muladeva, so they say, but frightened men don’t rouse princes.

She’s a wonder, say the princes, Nakula lags, but she’s about

In matters of kama, we admit, Draupadi has put us to rout.

The day passes slow, slower, for Sahadev, last to the altar,

Brothers tease, smiles from his lady, he is ready for disaster.

Shy Sahadev, sensuous boy, Nakula’s twin, fifth of Pandu

Draupadi welcomes him, her fifth, mate, lover, beau, this one she must woo.

He touches her as if fragile, glistening shell found by shore of sea

Off Kanya’s cape. She holds his hand closer, she must kiss, press his knee

His clothes undress, and permit give to him to bring his lips to kiss

Her cheeks, her hair, her neck, her lobes, her breasts, her tits, such is not dis-

-Respect for her, this is what she would he did of his own free will.

A game she makes, now an expert more than he at the sexual mill.

The game he gets, the game he plays, the game he wins, with ling rising

He mounts, he rides, he cries, he dies, for her this is cake with icing.

Ready again, the game resumes, Sahadeva, stallion, would ride

Her as a mare, she lets him fill, as does the river-mouth the tide.

The three watch and wonder at the youngest Pandava’s stamina

Dimly aware of their own loss of resolution and of strength

Growing unease that this knowledge has come at cost of loss of self

Duryodhana’s search for revenge not reachable by power or pelf.

The night passes and again, she, drawing on the prisoners’ strength

Has sakti left to greet the day, Sahadev sleeps, resting at length.

Duryodhana roars, let us go, Muladeva, why are you slow

To close the tantric mantra that holds us four to this, we must go.

Muladeva said:

I try my lord to say the words, but ‘tis not time else I’d succeed

My throat is choked, there must be more, Draupadi’s lovers don’t concede

Duryodhana said:

More lovers! she was a maiden, now she’s had five lovers five days

If you will not, tell me, I will! I cannot endure this weak haze.

Muladeva said:

These are the words, but beware Lord! A spell like this is not for nought.

I dare not say them, I will write, read if you will, the words you sought.

Duryodhana reads, his voice chokes, he falls breathless, his face is blue

Karna runs, gives him breath of life, breathes into him life that’s his due

Karna said:

Friend! Brother! Do not take the risk! Have your men say the words that end

Our sentence. Barons are warriors, not for you words that suicide send.

The men demur, they’ve seen the choke that held their master in its yoke

On threat of torture, one did try, the princes let him die of stroke.

Muladeva said:

Do not, oh, King! force end to this. When I can speak, I will close it.

By day you are free, but at night, if Draupadi lusts, here you’ll sit.

Duryodhana raged. No one, no outsider shall know of this.

Draupadi shall not laugh at me, no enemy would this chance miss.

Kunti to Panchali said, Dear! Rest a while, your husbands tarry

Your looks are vital, your eyes glow, the calls of kama can harry

My sons’ pleasures are your doing, your rejoicing is their sowing

I am well pleased, you are darling, cherished like eyes, love is growing.

Draupadi said:

Mother, my own! Your five sons have filled my heart with laughter, my cheek

With blushes painted; days and nights stilled with comfort mind’s rushing creek.

I am young, growing younger still. Your sons have made me happier

It behooves me to care for them, Kama’s arrows all of us sear.

With smile, with touch, with kiss and coll, with secret words, and meeting set

All five that night go to her bed, she laughs to see them in her net.

They blush, they stumble, they mumble, apologize to each other

But she stops them, “Stay husbands mine, I love you all, it's no bother.”

Draupadi said:

Your hearts wonder who I love most, but I love all quite equally

Every night we spend together, my strength grows incomparably.

I feel I must, I know not why, spend this night with all of you five.

Yudhishthira said:

Beautiful and virtuous spouse, we are husbands, yours to revive

Your kamasic wish shall command, your desires are ours, we comply

Tell us, dearest, what we shall do, tell us love, round which moon we fly.

Bhima said:

Yudhishthira speaks the dharmic path, I admire boldness in craft

Of kama craft, you are the queen, Of kama craft, you are my raft.

Arjuna said:

I won you, girl, with my arrow, you beat us, maiden, with flowers

Never have we shared a lady, this is game for sincere lovers

I love Yudhishthira and Bhim, also Sahadev and Nakul

My heart leaps to think that we can, as brothers share the sexual.

Nakula and Sahadeva said:

Sounds like fun, let us not tarry, the lady’s waiting, we did marry

Her, didn’t we, all in a flurry, lest Kunti’s words no weight shall carry.

Then they set to worship a-bed, their lovely wife with kiss, caress,

Rake, rub, lick, touch, smell, blow, suck, tuck, toe to yoni, navel to tress.

Duryodhana, Dushasana, Karna, Muladeva, spell-bound

Watched this ceremony in trance, wishing it were the last time round.

Their men watched speechless, eyes in shock, as the princes loosened their clothes

And, eyes unseeing, with penis stiff, did stroke and mutter, make oaths.

Again and again and twice more, did the princes twitch in sex throes

But without relief, without sperm, their bodies turn to color of loess.

All night long the torment lasted, all night long did the Pandavas

Toil to fulfill wife’s desire, drained of strength were the Kauravas.

In this drama was Draupadi, receptacle of love and hate

And worship too of the common Muladeva, maker of fate.

All this poured into Draupadi, the love she returned full measure

The hate strengthened, also worship transformed her into goddess.

She blazed light at Pandu’s sons, who marveled at her complexion

They knew not why, but their worship intensified, no distraction.

Sakti into Draupadi flowed, poured out as love for her husbands

She pleasured herself, pleasured all, mouth, hands, linga-yoni aasans.

Sakti into Draupadi flowed, poured out as hate for the peepers

The flow did mark with jealousy, brains with paths twisted like creepers

Sakti into Draupadi flowed, poured out as grace for the ‘mancer

Muladeva wept unbeknownst, he alone knew what had chanc’d there

For a brief moment the Goddess, in Draupadi had taken birth

As a result would Draupadi, win, suffer, fight, then leave the earth.

For when the Goddess incarnates, the vehicle must be made pure

Before death. By jaya, sorrow, purpose, love, hate and pain inure.

The blaze of the Goddess passing, broke the spell of Muladeva

Released the worn-away Karna, released the passive Kaurava.

Their memories wiped, they look out, they wonder what to make of it

Their men wide-eyed can just mumble, the Goddess made them lose their wit.

The Pandavas wake at the dawn, Draupadi sleeps, they smile and preen

They did her in this time didn’t they, it was a night fit for a queen.

In Praise of Draupadi

O Panchaala putri, O Pandava patni,

Your love of five did make a glow that lit their world

Dushasana killer, destroyer of Karna

Rouser of jealousy in King Duryodhana

Dark, winsome, beautiful, full-blooded warrior girl

Goddess for a moment, Goddess for eternity

Killer of Kauravas, all hundred met their doom

They fell afoul of you, fools to insult Devi

Dushasan’s blood did wash your hair of insults gross

Karn’s death by Arjun’s bow, burn crass innuendoes

I adore, worship you, grant me grace to see you

Make me Muladeva, suffer me to praise you.

Hef’s hands swept out as his chair fell backwards. His earphones were wrenched off his head as he struggled to get out of the chair. He must have fallen asleep and dreamt the whole thing, surely Manmatha had not recited the poem to Dr. Rangachari. It had been a very vivid dream. He set up his chair and looked at his computer screen. The last few lines were:

I adore, worship you, grant me grace to see you

Make me Muladeva, suffer me to praise you.

That sounded like the poem he had been hearing. He looked at the tape -- it was almost over. He had listened to thirty minutes of tape. He rewound the tape a little and replayed it. Dr. Rangachari’s modulated voice came over, “So what have you done about getting a divorce?” Manmatha replied, “Well, not much. She’s gotten herself a lawyer though.” This did not sound like the poem he had just written down.

Hef carefully rewound the tape, repeatedly replaying segments from it. There was no poem. He was sure he had heard the poem. But it was not on tape. Why would I make up a poem about Draupadi? Who was Draupadi anyway? She had five husbands. But didn’t he just make that up?

Was he going mad, he wondered. First the rat, now this. I should have eaten a better breakfast he told himself. Maybe the chocolates had made him hallucinate. Had he really talked to a rat? He shook his head. He should get some real food.

He went to the cupboard and pulled out a package of cereal. Then he put out two bowls on the table, poured the cereal out onto both bowls. He got some milk and a glass of orange juice and sat at his dining table. He added milk to both bowls. With a spoon he started eating his cereal. A few seconds later, the rat came and sat on the chair. Hef gave it a hand up to the tabletop. It sniffed at the cereal. It started eating. They had breakfast together.

Hefner then went to his desk and sat down to do some more transcription.

VI.The Telling

Dr. Rangachari said, “It left me really confused. You want to get divorced from your wife and you write a poem about a woman becoming a goddess through sex. What exactly is missing between you and your wife?”

“Sex.” said Manmatha. “Sex, for one. Of course, she doesn’t understand what this story is about. Yes, she realizes that this is important for me and maybe even important for the world, but ... She does not realize that with the changes I’ve undergone, sex is unimportant, but its also the most important thing. She says, ‘Man, you talk like a book.’ and when she calls me ‘Man’, I know that she doesn’t only not get it, she’s not about to compromise. And, of course, talk like a book -- I am a book, so to speak, not an ordinary book, not a mere book if you will, but a book that criss-crosses itself, criss-crosses the world, criss-crosses the net.”

“So she doesn’t understand you? Are you seriously making that old charge?”

“Look, its not that she doesn’t want to. Or that, I wouldn’t want her to, under other circumstances. She can’t. This thing is too enormous. Consider that the first time the story is told, it almost destroyed the first pan-Indian empire.”

“Really?” said Dr. Rangachari.

“Yes.” said Manmatha. “Initially, when this story came to me, I thought I had composed it, but I have realized now that what I composed was the truth. Kautilya told the story to the emperor Chandragupta Maurya, and as a result, the emperor walked off and starved himself to death. And his grandson, Ashoka, ...”

Hef felt Dr. Rangachari’s frustration and chagrin. “Hold it, I did not intend you to tell me ...”

“You asked.” said Manmatha. “And once you ask, I’ll tell you. Don’t worry, you’ll get paid. Aren’t you supposed to let me talk, anyway, so that I’ll not kill myself like the great Maurya emperor?”

Hef felt Manmatha dragging off Dr. Rangachari and himself, prisoners to his mania. Manmatha said ...

The Frame Story

This was going to be the frame story when I was thinking of this as a minor novel. I needed a way to get into the story. I did not want to start with ‘It was a dark and stormy night when Indra and his cohorts rode down the hill on their ponies, swords slashing at the unfortunate Dramila peasants who dared to oppose them.’ That wasn’t my story anyway.

My story was to be about the arrogance and hubris of the ruling classes who designed social systems for their subjects to live under. And hubris is best reflected on, shown in retrospect, not shown in the present and not told. So my story began with Kautilya talking to the Emperor Chandragupta about the Arthashastra that he has just written. Chandragupta found the book a bit dry, maybe even boring and wanted to know why Kautilya had not spiced it up a bit. And so Kautilya started telling him a story that he had heard during the years he had been exiled by the Nandas. He had met a person who called himself Vyaasa. Vyaasa had told him a strange story that he claimed was the true story of the Mahabharata.

So Chandragupta wants to know how he met Vyaasa and it turns out that Kautilya had met a street magician named Muladeva. Muladeva had taken him to see the Vyaasa, in the nick of time, so to speak, as that very day the Nanda’s soldiers came hunting for Kautilya and failed to find him. He would have been dead, instead he spent two weeks listening to the story told by a sick Vyaasa. Vyaasa dies after he tells his story.

Now, Muladeva is an interesting character -- I have no interest in magic, but despite myself, Muladeva pops up everywhere. I am not sure what to do with him, he is too simple-minded, too straightforward, too basic. In any case, Vyaasa tells Kautilya about an organization called the Kavi-Sangha, the Society of Poets, founded by Vasistha, the great brahmin sage. The Society aimed to help organize and to record the migration of the joint Dramila-Aryan people from the Saraswati-Indus Valley to the Gangetic plain where they met the forgotten third people of the Indian sub-continent, the yellow-skinned easterners, called variously the Gangaputras, the sons of the Ganges, or the Adityas, the people of the sun.

Initially the migration was peaceful, but as pressure from the Northwest continued, it became more violent. Finally, a coalition of the southern and eastern peoples of the plain won a great victory ("Jaya") over the northeners. It was, in retrospect, not a victory, because the migration continued peacefully and overwhelmingly. Some of the events leading to this victory were then recorded as the Mahabharata.

This is not a simple story, because every tale in it raises questions. Answering those questions meant going further into the past. As a result, the Vyaasa told Kautilya the stories that he knew from the origins of a migration of nomadic tribes into the Indus Valley, where they met the matriarchical, matrilineal, and urban civilization of the Dramilas. The tribes, let me call them the Aryans, married into and ultimately displaced the ruling families of the Dramilas. Vyaasa’s stories matched in strange ways the tales that Kautilya knew of the gods and goddesses of his religion. The actual events of that first Aryan migration had been forgotten and replaced with divine tales.

You must understand, Manmatha said, that in 2000 BC, the Saraswati-Indus valley civilization extended over a greater area than Sumer, Egypt, and all the other West Asian civilizations put together. We have few records now, but the records that exist in Sumer and Egypt indicate that this was a fabulous land even in those days. Now, I don’t know what it takes to make a land fabulous, but it definitely takes wealth, lots if it. And wealth comes from people, lots of people. The Indus Valley civilization must have been the most populous, the vastest, the greatest civilization that the Aryan tribes pouring out of the steppes encountered. The Aryans called ruling clans “Brahmins” from the word “brih” meaning “vast”. The Aryans called themselves “Arya” meaning “companion” or “comrade”, maybe even “noble companion”. Their leaders were called “kshatrapati” or “satrapa” meaning ruler. The initial spurt of battles between these groups ended with a muddled Aryan victory -- they ruled, but the brahmins authorized their rule, reluctantly at first. But later the brahmin’s role changed to one of performing a legitimizing ritual for the Aryan rulers. In this way, the Aryan tribes assimilated into India. The Aryan “invasion” of India was thus not particularly different from subsequent invasions of India. Barring the British, of course.

So Kautilya told the Maurya the tale he heard from Vyaasa. And because he was an emperor, he did not have much time, but once a month, he set aside the time to hear this tale. It took sixteen years. As the tale progressed and its ramifications became clear, he became progressively pessimistic about his role as emperor. The great victory of the story was no victory. The social system that came into being as a result of the victory was an oppressive debilitating one that the emperor himself could not change. The Vyaasa too warned against the hubris of believing that an emperor could change society in any positive way. Finally, the party that won the great victory, the Jainas, or victors, had frittered away the fruits of that victory. The emperor concluded with the Jainas that winning the rule was no victory.

So one day, while touring the southern boundaries of his empire, Chandragupta hands over his staff and umbrella, the symbols of his rule to his son Bindusara, and abdicates. He rides away leaving a stunned entourage. When they go searching for him, he is not found. Bindusara accuses Kautilya of treason and imprisons him. The emperor’s grandson, Ashoka, vows that he will never listen to the words of a brahmin.

Of course, as we all know, when Ashoka comes to power, he destroys the kingdom of Kalinga killing over 100,000 combatants and non-combatants. In shock after the mass killings, he becomes a Buddhist. So he doesn’t listen to brahmins, he listens to Buddhist monks instead. He hears a rumor that his grandfather had become a Jain monk and starved himself to death. In a fit of anger against the Jainas, he orders a bounty of a gold coin for the head of each Jain ascetic. His brother who had gone into the forest for some years and had allowed his hair to grow wild was mistaken for a Jain and his head turned in for bounty. Again, no good comes out of actions that come out of telling the story of the Mahabharata.

So I set the telling of the story in a story of victories, not really victories. That’s the real story of the Aryan conquest of India, as it is the story of all the other conquerors of India. Victories that were not victories. Until the British. But the British are also a part of the same story. However, in that case, the social system that had saved the core culture of India for three thousand years failed -- instead, it delivered the wealth of the country to the British without murmur. That is also a victory that was not a victory. In the process, a land of fabled riches became a land of enfeebled poverty.

“That,” said Manmatha, “is what my story is about. The failure of the grand plan drawn up without the support of the people it was for. It failed in the short run, but it appeared to succeed over the span of a few generations. Then, it seemed to fail again in that longer perspective. But the hope persisted that maybe it would work fine in the long run, over hundreds of generations. It seemed to succeed. Then that failed, too. So maybe the successes and the failures had nothing to do with the plan and its consequences. Maybe there can be no eternal plan and every such plan has to be changed every few years, every generation, every few generations, every era. So maybe the pain that the ruled put up with, the oppression of the caste system, the cycles of famine and feast, ultimately did not pay off.”

Rangachari interrupted, “Manmatha, Its almost an hour. Your time is up.”

“I haven’t finished.” said Manmatha.

“Look,” said Rangachari, “I’ve let you go on this way because you seemed intent on talking about this. And, yes, I find it interesting and if this were a cocktail party, I would be listening to you. But unless this helps with your problem, I cannot continue to treat you like this.”

Manmatha smiled, “So why not come to my apartment and I’ll tell you more of my story over dinner. You don’t have to bill me. Maybe I could bill you and then you need not feel unprofessional.”

Rangachari laughed. “No, that’s not likely. Next time, if you start on the Mahabharata, I will terminate the session and inform Dr. Harris that I am not able to continue treating you. Have you been taking my prescriptions?’

“OK, OK, I’ll stop. Yes. I have been taking the Prozac. It doesn’t do anything for me, doesn’t even give me a stomach ache. I have an idea.”

“Prozac doesn’t cause stomach aches, it has very few side-effects. What’s your idea.”

“How about if I taped my stories and left them with you. Then, you can listen to them on your own time and don’t have to feel unprofessional.”

Hef thought he heard Dr. Rangachari mutter, “I won’t have to listen to them at all.”

But what he said was, “I can’t promise that I’ll be able to listen to them. But if it will help you focus on making progress here, I’ll do what I can.”

The tape was over. Hef took off his headset and stretched. This had been a hard session. The names were new and he did not recognize them. He wasn’t even sure he had spelled them correctly.

It was time for lunch. He ordered pizza from Domino’s and turned on his TV set. A talk show was on ABC. He did not recognize anybody. “Why do I have a TV set?”, he wondered. “I never turn it on. Well, hardly ever.” He switched channels. Nothing. Again. And again. Finally, he hit a Spanish station. Or was it Portuguese? He wasn’t sure. A voluble talk-meister was excitedly pointing to a large wheel attached to a tractor. Two other men stood around with serious looks on their faces. In the background, a scantily clad woman hovered. Something was going to happen. He sat back and waited for his pizza to arrive.

VII. The Visitor

As the announcer’s voice rouse to a satisfying, exciting pitch, one of the bored men alongside got into the tractor. Hef then saw that the tractor was standing across a trough of mud and the wheel was in the trough. The camera cut to the announcer’s face and then they broke for a few ads. “This must be the high point,” Hef thought. “I thought they were selling the tractor, but I must be wrong. Can they have ads within ads? Is it legal?”

He heard a squeak from the bathroom. “King Rat,” he called, “Come here. You might enjoy this.”

The rat came waddling out of the bathroom. “You look bigger, King.” Hef said. King Rat was bigger. Whereas before, just this morning, the rat could sit on his palm, now it would definitely not be able to do that. It must have doubled in size. Hef wondered if this was because of all the chocolate he had fed the rat earlier that morning. That was unlikely, he thought to himself.

The rat came up to him and then, with an agility that surprised him, it jumped up onto the couch. Hef reached over and with one cautious finger rubbed its head. It preened. How amazing, though Hef. He had not expected that. A loud satisfied squeak came from the rat. It looked up at him, and opened its eyelids. “Those are big eyes,” Hef said, “I thought you would have tiny beady eyes. I guess your eyes have grown too.” The rat closed its eyelids and its eyes became slits. Now they were more like the eyes Hef had seen in pictures of rats. Beady eyes, in slitted lids, obnoxiously threatening. He stopped scratching the rat’s head. Then the eyes opened again. “You are really pretty,” he said, “If only you did not look so dirty.” As soon as he said that he felt apologetic. “I didn’t mean that.” he said. The rat did not look like it had heard him. It turned around and faced the TV set. The ads were over and the announcer was back incomprehensible words tumbling out of his mouth.

The tractor moved and the wheel turned. Hef realized that he had missed the significance of what looked like a large container of leaves hanging over the wheel. Somehow, he could not make out how, as the wheel turned, a leaf was snagged by a hook. It wasn’t a leaf it was a whole seedling with a little ball of earth around its root. The seedling was brought around to the trough of earth and released into a little furrow (sita, Hef thought to himself. Why did I think of that word, he wondered. Maybe it meant furrow or something like that. But in what language? Had Manmatha used it? He could not remember).

Then like magic, the seedling dropped into the furrow, a little spoon followed to tamp it into the ground. In a few seconds, twenty seedlings lay nestled in the soil. The announcer walked by pulling each one out, showing the audience how firmly they were embedded in the earth. He could imagine the meaning of his words. “Look how firmly this bambino is attached to mother earth.” The words and the picture of a tractor and a transplanter contrasted with the announcer’s natty three-piece suit and tie and the men standing around. Suddenly it was all over. Everybody was applauding, the announcer, his side-kicks, even the brightly smiling willowy scantily-clad blonde woman who came up and lead one of the two sidekicks off-stage while the announcer went on talking. It wasn’t over for she lead him to a booth with his name on it.

Hef did not know what was going on, but this was too funny. There must be a premise to this, he thought. Maybe its an agricultural quiz show for the newly arrived Portuguese farmer briefly resident in Brooklyn. On-stage they were taking the plants away. He thought they looked like tobacco plants. Or at least the way he imagined tobacco plants looked. Maybe they were introducing the immigrant Portuguese farmers to tobacco farming in a Brooklyn backyard. There must be things that were grown in Brooklyn backyards to make a profit. Maybe tobacco, too.

Thinking of tobacco reminded him that he had not smoked a cigarette after breakfast. He did not really need to smoke, he never did when he was engrossed in his work. But, he usually felt the urge after meals, or when waiting for meals, or when he thought about food and was not doing anything else.

He rummaged around in the closet till he found the shirt with the packet of cigarettes and came back to the couch. The rat followed his movements carefully. He opened the pack and took out a cigarette. He leaned over and tapped the end of the cigarette firmly against the cable reel he used as a coffee table. The rat’s head went up in the air and sniffed. Hef looked at the rat and said, “Hey, I don’t have to ask for your permission, do I?”

The rat said nothing. Hef wondered if he was going crazy. He had just argued with the rat and the rat couldn’t even talk. He stuck the cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a lighter and took in a deep breath. His eyes closed as he inhaled and felt the satisfying warmth fill his lungs. Suddenly, he felt a jerk and the cigarette was no longer in his mouth. He opened his eyes.

The rat was on the floor, the cigarette in its mouth. “Hey! You can’t do that.” shouted Hef. He jumped on the rat, but the rat scuttled away just out of his reach. It had made a mess of the cigarette, which was still lit, but was now slowly losing itself into the floor.

“I’ll just get another one.” said Hef to the rat. “Squeak.” said the rat. “Oh, yeah.” said Hef, “This time I’ll be too high for you to jump and take it from me.” The rat squeaked again, a number of times. “I don’t care what you think. If this is a problem, you can go back where you came from.”

Hef picked out another cigarette. There were only two left. “And not only that, I’ll go buy a whole case of cigarettes.” he announced. The rat looked up at him and squeaked once more. Its eyes looked sad. Then Hef realized that there were sounds coming from the bathroom. A large number of rats, maybe two dozen came scuttling out. They were all more or less normal-sized, about half the size of the King. King Rat squeaked again. The rats came towards Hef. Hef scurried back towards the couch, then stood on top of it. “Hey. What’s the big deal?” he said. “I’ve been good to you. Can’t you let me smoke in peace?”

Hef did not think he was scared of rats or of other animals. But this was too much. The rats came up on the couch and three, no four, of them started up his leg. He brushed one off, but two more took its place. It was a losing battle. He realized that they had not bitten him yet. “I hope you aren’t rabid,” he said, “In any case, don’t bite. I surrender.” He held up his hands. King Rat squeaked.

One rat ran up his hands and took the cigarette case out of his hands and let it drop to the couch. Another rat picked the cigarette from where he had dropped it. A third picked up his cigarette lighter. “Hey, I need that to light the stove if it doesn’t come on.” said Hef, desperately, wondering if he was going to wake up. He did not know it would be better if it turned out that he could talk to the rats.

King Rat squeaked again and the rat holding the lighter let go of the lighter. The other rats picked up the pack, the cigarette that he had not lit, and the damaged cigarette and between them pushed their way to the bathroom. Just as they disappeared into the bathroom, the doorbell rang. Hef heaved a sigh of relief.

He went to the door and opened it. It was the pizza. “You ordered from Domino’s?” said the man. “Yes” said Hef. “Twelve-thirty-two.” Hef looked in his pockets for money and as he counted it out, he heard the toilet flush in the bathroom. The man saw the strange look in his face. “You don’t have enough?” he asked. “No,” said Hef, “I just heard my toilet flush all by itself.” “That happens all the time at my apartment,” said the man, “I keep complaining but the owner would rather waste water than fix the toilet. Landlords -- the same everywhere.” “I think its rats,” said Hef. He counted out thirteen dollars and added fifty cents. The man laughed. “Radiation,” he said as he took the money and left.

Hef put the pizza on the dining table and went to the bathroom. There was a small piece of cigarette paper and some tobacco floating in the toilet bowl. He went back to the dining table. The rat was sitting on the chair. “I don’t have to take this from you,” he said, “I’m still shaking. How dare you get rid of my cigarettes?”

The rat turned on its back and wiggled its our legs in the air. It stretched its head out and squeaked. Hef looked at it. “With one thwack, I can kill you.” The rat seemed to nod its head. Hef picked up a knife. The rat looked at him and whined, a mournful whine, that made Hef hesitate. Then it stretched its neck out some more. Its eyes stayed open, watching the knife carefully as Hef brought the knife to its throat. As he touched its neck with the knife, it whined again and closed its eyes.

Hef held the knife there. One-one thousand, two-one-thousand, he counted silently. At ten-one-thousand, the rat opened its eyes again and looked at him. He tried to look back dispassionately. “I can kill you anytime,” he said. “You know that.” The rat rolled its head. “You want me to feed you.” The rat rolled its head again. “But I can’t smoke.” Roll. “I’ll rephrase that. Can I smoke?” The rat shook its head. “Is that a no?” Roll. Where had he seen that gesture before, Hef wondered.

“I’ll have to think about this.” Hef announced. “In the meantime, please join me for lunch.” The rat reached up -- it was big enough now that it could bring its front paws to the top of the table from the chair. It jumped to the table top. Hef opened the pizza box. He picked out a slice for King Rat. He sprinkled a slice with garlic salt and munched.

Hef was hungry. By the time he was done he had eaten three slices. But the rat had eaten three too. Where did all that pizza go, he wondered. He drank a large glass of water. The afternoon events had exhausted him. He sat down in front of the TV set and fell asleep.

VIII. Vishnu

“Dr. Rangachari,” said Manmatha, “You don’t want us to discuss my deepest thoughts at our meetings. So I am making these tapes so you can listen to them in your spare time. But I know that you won’t. You’ll get them transcribed, and then, if you have any spare time, you might read them. The person transcribing the stuff won’t understand me, won’t comprehend my accent, won’t know how to spell the words, will start knowing only that I am crazy. How can anybody transcribe without understanding?”

Hef winced. This was apparently the first of the tapes that Manmatha had dropped off with Doc. “You’re wrong,” he thought “I’ve worked with Doc so long that I get your accent and it does not matter if I misspell the strange names you make up. And if I have to spend a little time figuring out the standard spelling for some name, that’s all right. That’s my job, it’s what I get paid for. And since you’re so damned persnickety, well, I’ll make sure that it is spelled right.”

The tape continued. “To the transcriber. I’ll spell words the first time, or at least once, so just watch it. Otherwise, the good doctor will enjoy a laugh at your incompetence.”

Fuck you, thought Hefner. What gave Manmatha the right to believe that.

“I’ve seen Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, all you foreigners make a hash of my name. I don’t mess up anybody’s name, I can usually spell it right the first time...”

Oh, yeah, thought Hef, what about mine.

“... though I confess that I did not know that Hugh was pronounced ‘you’ not ‘hug’. I was in a discussion once and somebody mentioned You Hefner and I could spell Hefner, but I had no idea that they were talking about the owner of Playboy.”

La-di-da, thought Hef. So you can spell my name.

“This is about Vishnu, spelled vee-eye-ess-haitch-en-you” said the tape. “We know that Krishna is one of Vishnu’s incarnations, and all that. So he is already a key figure in the Mahabharata. But he was also incarnated many times before. Krishna’s actions and the various roles he plays do not lend themselves to simple characterization. He is portrayed as being blue in color but that really means dark-skinned or black. The only reason we don’t say black is because Indians have a thing about dark-skin. That attitude goes back a long way, probably as long ago as the Aryans who defeated the dark-skinned Dravidian people and ruled over a people they despised.”

“So, here’s a dark-skinned god and in his first incarnation, as a fish or Matsya, spelled, em-a-tee-ess-why-a, he does two things. He saves Manu from the Flood, and he also protects the Vedas and gives them to Manu after the waters recede. The Vedas are supposedly Aryan in origin. So the question to be answered is, why is a dark-skinned god the savior of the Aryan Veda and what does this have to do with a fish?”

“There is also an incarnation of Vishnu as Hayagriva, the horse. This incarnation is not one of the standard ten incarnations of Vishnu that most Indians are familiar with. But in this incarnation, Vishnu, the horse saves the Vedas. The Aryans probably introduced the horse-drawn war-chariot to India, so this could make a little more sense -- it is easy to imagine that the Aryans worshipped a horse deity.”

“The mystery deepens when you discover that in some versions of the horse story, the horse is a demon who steals the Vedas and Vishnu as Matsya, the fish, defeats the demon horse and retrieves the Vedas.”

“The mystery begins to unravel itself when you realize that some of the Sumerians used to worship Dagon, usually represented as a fish-man or by a dolphin. Now, Dagon is not a native god, but appears to have been a god of a land called Dilmun, which appears to have been a major trading center located on the island of Bahrain. The people of Dilmun would have been more familiar with the sea and with dolphins, so it is possible that Dagon was a Dilmunite god. But Dilmun was at one end of a major marine trade route whose other end was along the Indian coast-line, possibly as far as the Indus Valley. And Dagon could have been the god of these seafarers in the third millennium BC.”

“From Sumerian accounts, it appears that the sea trade was a rich one. With wealth goes influence and power. So, even if the fish-god was not native to the Dravidians of the Indus Valley, Dagon may have been worshipped by the Indus Valley people. And when the Indus flooded as it frequently does to this day, people would have taken refuge with Dagon’s boats and ships and ridden out the storm. Hence, the legend of the fish-god as the savior of people and families after a flood.”

“But then, why is the fish also the savior of the Vedas, the Aryan religious books? In this connection, we should consider the term to be sui generis. The story has changed from the original. Some valuable documents were saved, possibly the holy books of the Dravidians. For all we know, if the Indus Valley people were anything like the Sumerians, they cherished their account books. Of if they were like the Egyptians, they cherished the land records of tilling-rights. Those might have been something worth saving. In any case, something was saved.”

“You realize, it might not have been a book in the sense we recognize it. They did not have paper or even papyrus and there are no tablets from the Indus valley like we have from Sumer. But maybe Dagon’s people saved a priest or bard who had memorized the scriptures. That would explain Vishnu’s Fish incarnation.”

“We come to the mystery. When the Aryans attacked, Dagon saved the scriptures once again, this time from the Aryans, the horse-people. Hence the story in which the horse demon is vanquished by the fish. But ultimately, the Aryans come to rule, the cultures assimilate and the Vedas are transformed from the purely Aryan Rig-Veda to the four Vedas, containing both Aryan and non-Aryan elements. The political conflict between Aryan and Dravidian is no longer prominent and as a result the portrayal of the horse as demon is no longer necessary. On the contrary, now the Aryans must be portrayed positively, so the story gets changed to have Vishnu as the horse protecting the Vedas.”

“Once Vishnu becomes the horse and protects the Vedas, the story loses its conceptual strength. That’s why this incarnation is no longer prominent -- once the Aryans won, the new Vedas no longer needed protection by or from the horse.”

“Similarly, every one of Vishnu’s other incarnations derives from some event in the history of the assimilation of the Aryans into the agricultural civilization they found there. Each story by itself does not have sociological, anthropological, or cultural significance; rather they tend to be stories of individual events, heroes, and villains. Only as a group, do they have meaning. Take the story of Prahlada, spelled pee-aar-a-haitch-ell-a-dee-a and the fourth incarnation of Vishnu, the man-lion called Narasimha, spelled en-a-aar-a-ess-eye-em-haitch-a.”

“The traditional story is that the demon king Hiranyakasipu tries to make his son Prahlada, renounce his belief in Vishnu. Hiranyakasipu has defeated the devas in battle, has enslaved them, and occupied their city. But these are the pre-Vedic great gods who become the post-Vedic lesser gods. They do not include the post-Vedic supreme trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. The demon, by his devotion to Brahma, has received a boon of near-immortality from Brahma. The demon’s son learns to worship Vishnu. The demon demands that his son deny the divinity of Vishnu. The boy resists, the father decides that he should be killed, but none of the attempts succeed because Vishnu protects his devotee. Finally, Hiranyakasipu demands of his son, ‘I do not see this Vishnu you constantly worship? Is he in this pillar?’ and kicks the pillar. The pillar breaks in two, and Vishnu in the form of a man-lion (Nara, meaning human, and Simha meaning lion) grabs the demon and in keeping with the terms of Brahma’s gift, tears him apart with his claws (neither hand not weapon), on the threshold of his palace (neither inside nor outside), at dusk (neither night nor day) and so on. Then Vishnu blesses his worshipper Prahlada, installs him as the king and departs.”

“In this story we see all of the following elements -- the Aryans, represented by the devas, were not always victorious. The frequent episodes in Indian mythology in which the demons defeat the gods and rule over them indicates that the Aryan invasion of India, if it happened, was not a smooth operation consisting of victory followed by victory. Someone or something called Nara-simha, the “man-lion”, helped the son of a “demon” king over-throw his father and rescue the Aryans from servitude. One of the demon’s many attempts to kill his son consists of asking his sister Holika to take Prahlada into the fire with her -- she has a boon that she cannot burn. But, by the grace of Vishnu, she burns and Prahlada does not. Holika’s death is celebrated annually at the bacchanalian spring feast of Holi.”

“Holi, incidentally, is largely a lower-caste festival, not an upper caste one. It is also usually associated with a partial breakdown of caste hierarchies in some parts of India. One might expect that if this celebration was associated with the liberation of the gods there would be a larger upper-caste element to the celebration. Well, maybe not. In any case, one would not expect to associate a spring festival with this particular story.”

“This is what happened. For an extended period of time, the Aryan tribes were living as the subjects of a matrilineal, possibly matriarchical, Dravidian state. An annual spring festival was a feature of this culture. The state’s highest ranking matriarch was called the Holika. The Holika’s brother, or other man that she trusted, functioned as the army chief (tanist, to use a Greek term). I think that every so often, possibly annually, but probably once every eighteen years (coinciding with a solar eclipse, perhaps) the tanist was sacrificed by the Holika. Possibly, they were both sacrificed together. The sacrifice ritually happened by fire (neither man nor beast nor god), at dusk (neither day nor night) and in a bonfire in a hole dug in the ground (neither inside nor outside).”

“Hiranyakasipu was a powerful army chief who had arranged to survive by never being the official tanist, but always the power behind the throne. That is to say, he had contrived to make himself immortal (a gift from Brahma, the "vast" one, being the people, his supporters). During one such period, his son Prahlada was tanist and was due to be sacrificed with the Holika. But Prahlada kills the Holika or maybe lets her die and escapes. Prahlada’s rationale for this sacrilegious act after having served as tanist is that he no longer believed in the old ways, but had converted to the beliefs of the Aryans. In any case, he finds refuge among the Aryan tribes. Among them he foments rebellion.”

“Hiranyakasipu now tries to kill Prahlada, but is unsuccessful. Prahlada forms a band dressed in lion-skins called the Narasimha and successfully defeats his father. His father’s death is presented to the populace as being in fulfillment of the Holi sacrifice that he had been sacrilegiously avoiding. He was not killed by fire but by Narasimha, and it is possible that he died at dusk fighting on the threshold of his palace. There may even have been a pillar (the original Trojan horse) containing an assassin who actually killed Hiranyakasipu.”

“I should point out that some of the details of this story do not appear in the myths or legends of any other culture, while others do appear in other culture myths. Some details even get repeated in other myths from India. I believe that it is extremely important to get even the trivial details that are not duplicated right, while it is less important to get the duplicated ones right. That’s because it is possible that the duplicated ones were grafted on to the story over the millennia, while the unique ones are survivors from an original tale, if at all believable.”

“But, and this is important, Hiranyakasipu’s death is also the last time the tanist is the Holi sacrifice. That’s because Prahlada is the first Dravidian tanist to be de facto king. His victory is a victory for the patriarchical Aryan way of life. But, matrilineal succession continued unchanged in other Dravidian states at least until the later incarnation of Rama, a story I will tell you later. One immediate effect of Prahlada’s success was that the Aryans now had greater power in the state. Prahlada would have rewarded his soldiers and their families with land. This would not have been popular with his own people but neither he nor they would have had a choice. This sets the same state up for the next step in an Aryan takeover. That is the story of next incarnation of Vishnu as the dwarf, Vamana.”

“Again, we have a demon king Bali, the grandson of Prahlada, who conquers and rules over the gods. The gods appeal to Vishnu, who gets born as the dwarf son of Kasyapa, the father of the gods and the demons. He comes to Bali, who, incidentally, is famed for giving gifts to brahmins, and asks for as much land as he could take in three steps. Bali gives it with a smile, but in two steps Vishnu encompasses both earth and heaven. So, to fulfill the gift, his third step is on Bali’s head and this pushes Bali into the nether worlds.”

“This might be a simple fantasy, but Bali is celebrated as the good king of Kerala. Once a year, at the festival of Onam, his “people” celebrate him and his mythical rule. By the special dispensation of Vishnu, Bali spends that one day on earth. Bali, by all accounts, was a good demon. He ruled justly, he did not commit any crimes. His only fault was that by ruling the gods, he aroused their jealousy.”

“Imagine, if you will, that after many years, the small community of Aryan warriors have been given many gifts by the rulers of a Dravidian state. Finally, some king decides to stop this practice. Or perhaps, the non-Aryan public starts complaining about the power and privileges enjoyed by this small group of Aryans -- ‘We gave them a little, now they want more. When will their demands cease?’ But by this time, the Aryans are the power behind the throne. The small Aryan community grabs power. The king, Bali, escapes or is exiled to the south. Maybe, he even reaches the coast of Kerala.”

“In both these stories, the role played by Vishnu was to legitimize a change in the way the state was ruled. Vishnu, the Maintainer of the universe, is not averse to an occasional revolution. Then we have the story of Rama, Vishnu’s incarnation who benefits from the revolution.”

“I set both the Prahlada and the Vamana episodes in the Indus valley. The lion is native to Africa and West Asia, but the Indus valley is usually considered the eastern end of its range. The Indus Valley seals for example have tigers and crocodiles but no lion. The Dravidians did not know of lions. The Aryans, on the other hand, would be familiar with lions. The occurrence of a man-lion incarnation for Vishnu implies that the events may not have happened in the heart of India. Of course, it could have happened outside India, but the Indus Valley is the first potential Indian site.”

“The story of Bali must also take place at a time and place when the Aryans were not in power but were poised to achieve it. By the time we get to the Mahabharata, “Aryan” is synonymous with nobility – they have achieved power. And the events of the Mahabharata are set near Delhi, the gateway to the Gangetic plain. So, it makes sense that the story of Bali, like that of Prahlada, takes place in the Indus Valley, west of Delhi.”

“So these two stories of Vishnu’s incarnations, Narasimha and Vamana, can be interpreted as the story of an Aryan takeover of Dravidian states. The next incarnation, that of Parasurama, is strange. It is not clear what it is or how to interpret it. But, the first clear thing in it is that Parasurama is a brahmin. And that brings up to the mystery of who the brahmins were.”

Rangachari interrupted, “Time’s up. We need to focus on your problems next time, not your stories.”

“Okay, I’ll stop. But, I don’t intend to stop.”

Hef yawned. The tape was finished. This was more than he expected. He had been able to transcribe almost continuously, as though the words and phrases were familiar. His fingers were tired. He needed a rest. He took off his earphones and lay down for a mid-day nap.

He closed his eyes. He thought he fell asleep right away. But at the same time, he thought he saw the rat come out of the bathroom. It was followed by a number of smaller rats. He felt that he could not be bothered. In his dream state it appeared that King Rat snuggled up to him, while the other rats silently took up places around him. Then they waited for him to wake up.

Half an hour later, he woke up. No rats in sight. He sighed and got up to continue working.

IX.Parasurama and Rama -- the brahmin and the charmer

The next tape was also one of Manmatha’s productions. Hef wondered if he would ever hear Ranga’s mellifluous Malayali accent again as Manmatha took off.

“You know what an anomaly the next incarnation of Vishnu is. Parasurama is a brahmin but he uses his battle-axe, the “parasu”, to kill 21 generations of Kshatriyas. He does this because a king drapes a dead snake on his father’s neck as an insult. There are alternative myths that explain his killing of Kshatriyas, but in just two sentences we have a universe of speculative potential.”

“The battle-axe is an Aryan weapon -- it is found in conjunction with Indo-European settlements all over Asia and Europe. The Brahmins are not supposed to be war-like, and in fighting the Kshatriyas, Parasurama was acting out of character. The Kshatriyas mustg be considered Indo-European -- the root “kshatrap” or satrap is recognizable in ancient Greek and ultimately in English. The Sanskrit word for snake is “Naga” and this is the traditional name for the non-urban peoples indigenous to India. It was probably what these people called themselves.”

“But what is the significance of a Kshatriya draping a dead Naga on a brahmin? We can understand this when we realize that the peaceful brahmin is a construct of post-Vedic India. The surprise for students of Indian mythology is that many demon kings were brahmins and were warriors. Hiranyakasipu was a brahmin. So was Bali. In addition, Rama, the next incarnation of Vishnu, will be opposed by the demon king Ravana, also a brahmin. In general, we do not hear about demon Kshatriyas.”

“When we come to the post-Vedic periods, brahmins are the masters of ritual. No ceremony, no celebration can proceed without brahminical approval and participation. Except for Iran where the Magi exercised similar powers, none of the other Indo-European mythologies describe a group with similar powers.”

“My argument is that the urban-agricultural Dravidian culture was governed by brahmins. The culture being matriarchical, it was Brahmin women who conducted the rituals and the brahmin men, lead by the brahmin tanist, fought in wars. After Prahlada, inheritance remained matrilineal, but the ritual responsibilities were transferred to the men as the matriarch steadily lost power to an increasingly militarized rule. After Bali, an Aryan ruler replaced the Dravidian with the ruler being legitimized by brahmin priests performing the ritual on behalf of the Aryan king. That is, the Aryan Kshatriya stepped in for the Dravidian Brahmin but did not perform the rituals directly. Most likely this happened because they did not know the rituals and believed that the rituals were necessary to legitimize their rule in the eyes of a large population.”

“Parasurama was a brahmin who did not accept this usurpation of royal power from the brahmins. The incident of the dead Naga was the immediate cause for his initial killing of Aryans. The Nagas and the Dravidians may have co-existed (more or less peacefully) for many years. In the face of alien Aryan invasion, they may have had a de facto alliance. An Aryan king, having dispossessed Parasurama’s father of his kingdom and driven him into exile, insulted him by executing his Naga allies and sending their bodies to him. Maybe there was some other degradation of the Nagas. Parasurama’s father, conscious of his powerlessness, counseled patience, but Parasurama took revenge after his father’s death.”

“Other versions of Parasurama’s story focus on his loyalty to his parents – his father asks his sons to kill their mother because she had ‘looked at a passing gandharva and lusted in her heart’. All his sons refused except Parasurama. When asked to choose a boon, he of course asks for his mother to be returned to life, but that does not absolve him of the crime of matricide.”

“Parasurama is archetypal -- for 21 generations, the Dravidian brahmins opposed Aryan rule. It is even possible that for 21 generations (almost 400 years), Aryan attempts to defeat a Dravidian kingdom were rebuffed and the Aryan invaders killed to the last man. This would mean that for almost 400 years a Dravidian state or states held back the Aryan tribes. But ultimately, like Parasurama, they retired exhausted and allowed the Aryans in. But in the process, Parasurama kills his mother -- i.e., the culture is transformed into one that values men more than women for their military prowess.”

“The result was that the brahmins were disarmed -- they lost the rule but retained the right to perform rituals. It is possible that the shaman associated with the Aryan tribes would have been accepted as a brahmin -- the traditional picture of the Aryan sage, the “rishi”, is more in keeping with the shamanistic image than the brahminical one.”

“Most Indians would consider the notion of brahmins as rulers strange. But this is one of things that can be confirmed historically -- when Alexander invaded India in the 3rd century BC, he had to fight with cities on the Indus ruled by brahmins. Alexander’s historians do not report on the political structure of the Brahmin state, but they did not have a king, so I assume it was a brahmin oligarchy that ruled. A thousand years after the Aryan invasion, Brahmins were still ruling some states.”

“So I assume that it took approximately four hundred years for the Aryans to change from being interlopers to being accepted as legitimate rulers. The story of Parasurama is the story of how Dravidians resisted the change using the weapons brought in by the Aryans.”

“Why is Parasurama considered an incarnation of Vishnu? This can be understood if we look at the role played by Vishnu in the man-lion and dwarf incarnations. In neither story does Vishnu defeat the demon and rule in his stead. Rather, Vishnu blesses and legitimizes the new ruler. But that is exactly the role played by the brahmins via their rituals. Vishnu represents the brahmins and for four hundred years, Vishnu did not legitimize Aryan attempts to rule the Dravidians. Parasurama is the Vishnu who said no. And in the final analysis, Parasurama does not fully accept the Aryan victory -- he fades out, exhausted. That is why when Alexander invades India he still found brahmin cities -- there were still pockets of resistance surviving.”

“After Parasurama comes Rama and for the first time Vishnu is incarnated as a Kshatriya and as a direct participant in battle. Rama kills the demon Ravana because he has kidnapped his wife. But before we arrive at this denouement, we have to traverse a strange adventure story in which Rama wanders over much of India. This is the first story of Vishnu’s incarnations that is an epic poem in its own right.”

“Rama, the heir apparent of Kosala, a kingdom in the center of Gangetic plain is exiled for fourteen years from the kingdom and leaves with Sita, his wife, and Lakshman, his devoted half-brother. After some wandering around by foot, they decide to spend the exile in the forest of Panchavati in the Deccan Plateau. Despite the distances involved (over six hundred miles in a straight line from Ayodhya to Panchavati) these wanderings take very little time. While at Panchavati, Sita is kidnapped by Ravana and taken to Sri Lanka, an island twenty-six miles off-shore and eight hundred more miles to the south. With the help of a mythical monkey kingdom, Rama builds a bridge across the sea and battles Ravana and defeats him. The fourteen years of exile being over at this point, Rama returns in triumph to his capital Ayodhya, the trip accomplished quickly in a mythical air-chariot.”

“This basic story is placed in India; unfortunately, the mythical geography does not match the real geography of the Deccan. The time taken by the heroes to traverse the real geography is ridiculously small. In addition to being a hero, Rama is a god, an incarnation of Vishnu, but he is not aware of his divinity at this point in the story and does not exercise any divine powers. The story of an exiled prince who battles the arrogant kidnapper of his wife with the support of another people could be situated almost anywhere. But the story of Rama has significant elements unique to Indian legend -- other story traditions have princes who rescued damsels in distress from overbearing fathers, evil uncles, charming magicians, confused djinns, and so on; other traditions have stories of princes battling their enemies with the help of other heroes and animal friends; other traditions have princes attaining magical powers to achieve their goals, but Rama’s story varies in significant ways in each of these elements. Rama rescues his wife, not a damsel in distress or some woman that he then falls in love with; Rama enlists the support of the monkey king’s brother by treacherously killing the king and crowning the brother (amid some fast-talking to justify the treachery); Rama’s heroic companion is his half-brother (brothers, especially half-brothers, are rarely companions of heroes); another heroic companion is the monkey Hanuman, who devotes his life to Rama; Rama, despite being god incarnate, does not use any magic powers to achieve his goal. That is, the story of Rama is largely realistic except for its location and the supposed nature of its characters (animals, demons, etc.).”

“So, I place the story in pre-Sumerian Elam. As the Aryans entered the Persian-Elamite plateau, they encountered an Dravidian civilization. Conflicts happened, maybe a wife was kidnapped or ran away with a Dravidian ruler, and an Aryan chief collaborated with a monkey-totem tribe, or possibly a rural population, to overthrow an Elamite urban city. Sri Lanka is the sanskritized form of Ilan-kai, the Tamil version of the name. Eelam (or Eezhum, a closer pronunciation) is the Tamil name for a mythical Tamil homeland. Archeologists have decoded Sumerian but not Elamite and nobody knows how the Elamites pronounced their own words or what they called themselves -- what is known is that the Elamite language is related to the Dravidian family of languages. The base story of the Ramayana is the story of the destruction of an Elamite city by an Aryan tribal chieftain by a mix of guile, charm, and diplomacy. The story was not particularly memorable except to that tribe. When they then migrated east to India, the story of Rama came with them.”

“Just like the story of Prahlada and Vamana, the base Ramayana rationalizes and legitimizes Aryan rule over a Dravidian population, represented by the monkey-totem people. In that sense, the Ramayana was not a necessary story and one could ask why Rama is one of the most important incarnations of Vishnu. The answer lies in that the base story accumulated associated sub-stories that went beyond legitimizing rule over a people -- these sub-stories legitimized switching to a patriarchical-patrilineal system of inheritance from the Dravidian matriarchical-matrilineal system.”

“The interesting components of the Ramayana are the sub-stories not the main story. The sub-stories are set in the sub-continent while the main story is a residue from an earlier time. We can begin by examining the story explaining Rama’s exile.”

Hef yawned. Rangachari’s sing-song voice and the unaccented monotony of his words usually made it difficult to transcribe his words. But Ved was even more difficult than Rangachari and today he seemed particularly difficult. Hef rubbed his eyes. Then he took of his earphones and leaned back. He drank some water from his glass. He poured a little out on his hands and rubbed his face with it. He leaned forward again and reached for the earphones. His head buzzed and the earphones seemed to grow blurry. He pulled them towards him and this time the words came clearly.

“Ostensibly, King Dasaratha, Rama’s father, had given a boon to his third wife Kaikeyi (meaning “daughter of Kekaya”) when she nursed him back to health from a battle wound. Kaikeyi took a rain-check on the boon that she cashed when Rama, son of the senior wife Kausalya, was to be proclaimed as heir-apparent. She demanded that Rama be exiled for fourteen years and her son, Bharata, be the heir-apparent. The King felt obliged to fulfill his promise but after Rama leaves, he dies of a broken heart. Bharata follows Rama to his forest exile and entreats him to return as the legitimate king, but Rama insists on fulfilling the terms of his father’s promise.”

“This episode is accepted as intrinsic to the plot. Rama needs to go on exile to get on with the story and he does it in an act of fidelity to his father’s wishes, thus proving himself to be the perfect son. What, then, is wrong with this episode? It begins with his mother Kausalya, that is, “daughter of Kosala." This is a name usually given to the daughters of the king of Kosala, not his wife. Unlike Egypt, there is no Indian tradition of rulers marrying their sisters, or, unlike the Semitic tradition, of husbands referring to their wives as “sister”. There is, however, a matrilineal custom of the brother of the ruling matriarch being the military commander, her daughter in line to be the next matriarch and her son being the next military commander supporting his sister. In addition, in the Jain tradition, Sita and Rama are brother and sister, not husband and wife, and they rule jointly after the return from exile. This would be one way to interpret the matriarchal mode of power-sharing from a patriarchal standpoint. That is to say, there may be other ways to resolve the contradiction. Specifically, Kausalya is the matriarch of Kosala, her children and heirs are Sita and Rama, and Dasaratha attempts a patriarchal revolution.”

"In fact, there is more in the Ramayana that supports this view of Kausalya's role in the Ramayana. In the original, Dasaratha is unable to have children, and decides to perform the Putra-kameshthi yagna, a ritual intended to provide him with children. He is advised that the purest and most appropriate person to officiate at this ritual is the young rishi Rishyasringa. Rishyasringa performs the ritual -- at its conclusion, an angelic being appears and delivers a bowl of rice pudding to Dasaratha. Dasaratha divides it equally between Kausalya, his senior wife, and Kaikeyi his favorite. Both Kausalya and Kaikeyi feel sorry for Soumitra, Dasaratha's third wife and give her half of their portions. As a result, Kausalya gives birth to Rama, Kaikeyi to Bharatha, and Soumitra to the twins, Lakshmana and Shatrughna."

"This story of how Dasaratha's children were born is cute, but is totally unnecessary qua story. It does not explain anything else that comes after and does not add any character, other than to indicate that Dasaratha must have been pretty old. So, why is it part of the Ramayana at all?"

"The answer, I believe, lies in the character of Rishyasringa. The name Rishyasringa translates as "One-horned Antelope" and he is probably the origin of the Greek and Western legend of the Unicorn. When Rishyasringa was born, his father divined that he would either be a great dynast or a great rishi. Being a rishi himself, he decided to raise the boy as an innocent in seclusion (a theme to be repeated in the historical story of the prince Siddhartha who became the Buddha). The boy grows up to adolescence, pure and innocent in the ways of the world. Meanwhile, the nearby kingdom of Anga suffers from a series of debilitating droughts. The king is advised that there is a young innocent rishi who is so pure that if he set foot in Anga, the rains would surely fall. The king sends emissaries to Rishyasringa's father who refuses to let anybody near his son. The king's daughter, Shantha, volunteers her services. She arranges to make Rishyasringa's acquaintance when his father is absent, and pretends to be a brahmachari like him, celibate and bookish. They become friends and she teaches him new pleasant games. When his father discovers this, Shantha begs his forgiveness. Rishyasringa, innocently, expresses his desire to continue his friendship with Shantha. The father is caught between his anger and his desire not to hurt his son. Rishyasringa then visits Anga, bringing down the rains and, like the Unicorn, bringing spring to the land. Rishyasringa and Shantha are married."

"The story sounds innocuous and cute. But … Shantha is the adopted daughter of the king of Anga. Her real father is Dasaratha, the supposedly childless king of Kosala. Dasaratha apparently gave her to the king of Anga because the king of Anga was childless. This does not make sense!"

"However, if Shantha is Kausalya's real name (Kausalya is not a name but a descriptor), then Rishyasringa would be Kausalya's husband. Under the matriarchal system, he would visit his wife, the matriarch, but not live with her. He would live with his own family. If Dasaratha is Kausalya's brother, then he would be the military ruler of Kosala. If Rishyasringa is Kausalya's husband, then his daughter would be the legitimate heir to Kausalya, and his son would legitimately be the next military ruler of Kosala. That is to say, Kausalya's daughter, Sita, and Kausalya's son, Rama would be the heirs to the kingdom of Kosala."

"Incidentally, Rama and Sita as the children of the unblemished Unicorn by the Virgin who brings it out into the world, are then the 'perfect' beings. And Rishyasringa's father's premonition of the fate of his son's progeny would be fulfilled -- they would be rulers not wise men, and they would found a great dynasty. And then this is the reason for the story of Rishyasringa to be part of the mangled Ramayana, not the simplistic tale of needing the purest person on earth to officiate at a ritual."

“Why would Dasaratha want to change the matriarchal system of his ancestors? His wife, Kaikeyi was the princess of Kekaya, a kingdom to the extreme Northwest of India. By the time Aryan influence reached Kosala, Kekaya would have been thoroughly Aryanized and inheritance would have been patrilineal. Kaikeyi is living with Dasaratha in Kosala, a thoroughly non-matriarchal practice. The story goes that Dasaratha had been wounded in the wars that he fought against the demons as an ally of the Aryan gods. He recuperated in Kekaya and Kaikeyi took care of him. He fell in love with her and married her. He may not have realized that she expected to follow him to his country as was the practice in hers."

"Kaikeyi followed Dasaratha to his kingdom and discovered the vast difference in her status under the two systems. She expected to be queen, she wasn't. She had even less power than she might have had in her own country. Probably, people looked at her strangely as an exile from her own legitimate locus of power and therefore somebody to be pitied and avoided."

"Kaikeyi may have explained to Dasaratha the difference in the systems of inheritance. Dasaratha might have been seduced by the possibility that he could use his power to change the Kosala’s rules of inheritance and pass power on to his own children rather than to his niece and nephew. After all, he had diligently kept the kingdom secure and in good shape -- why should his children not benefit? Of course, Kaikeyi may have legitimately expected her son Bharata to be the next ruler. There is no need for the silly story in the Ramayana of a pledge of two boons given by Dasaratha to Kaikeyi. Of course, most Kosalans probably opposed such a palace revolution. It is possible that Bharata, having being raised among a matrilineal people, accepted Sita’s and Rama’s right to rule and was opposed to his parent’s machinations. It is possible that Rama and Sita fled into exile to escape a plot to kill them, and Lakshmana joined them. So, when Rama and Sita return from exile and rule the kingdom, it is an affirmation of the matrilineal system of inheritance.”

“But the assault on Sita's legitimacy continue -- in the Ramayana, Sita is forced to prove her fidelity to Rama after the battle with Ravana. Then, when she refuses to be re-tested to convince the skeptical public of Kosala, Rama exiles her, not knowing she is pregnant with his twin sons, Lava and Kusha."

“But the matrilineal version of the abduction of Sita must differ from that in the base story. When a man marries a woman who is the future head of her family, he would normally come for brief visits to her family home. She would visit him rarely, if at all. If she visited him in his home and then he prevented her from returning to her own home, that would be abduction. This kind of abduction must have been a frequent occurrence at a time when the matrilineal system of inheritance was under attack. The outraged relatives of the matriarch, or even a matriarch-to-be, would demand her return with her children. This would prevent her children from being held as hostages in a foreign land, where they might be raised without attachments to their mother's native land). The relatives of the matriarch would not necessarily do anything until she became pregnant, but once they discovered her pregnancy, she had to return for reasons of state. Suppose that Sita, the future matriarch, marries Ravana during her exile. She stays with him during her exile and he welcomes her into his city during the period, but he refuses to let her go when she becomes pregnant. Rama, still in exile, must get her back to retain his right to be the next military commander! After a battle her lover and husband Ravana is killed and she is returned. Her life after that is tragedy, as she has twin sons but no daughters. But in the meantime, Rama may have developed notions of being the progenitor of a line of kings. He may not have wanted Sita to have any daughters, so she would not have been allowed to re-marry 'because she has already proved to be disloyal to Kosala' once.”

"But, if Sita was the errant matriarch returning after an absence of fourteen years with sons raised in a foreign land, she and her sons would have been legitimately viewed with suspicion by the public. The Kosalan polity might genuinely have fears and suspicions about them. She and her sons might have had to prove their loyalty to Kosala. Despite being the matriarch, she might have been held in seclusion, her powers curtailed. Rama might have developed his father’s disease and wished to be the dynast. But, it is possible he did not have any sons, that Sita did not have any daughters, and Sita did not marry again after Ravana had been killed in the battle to regain her. Sita would have found her sentence unjust -- her initial banishment, the death of her husband or lover Ravana, her seclusion, and any mistreatment of her sons. It is possible that her sons, Lava and Kusha, finally fulfilled the male dream of creating a patrilineal dynasty. In the Ramayana, Sita does not die -- instead she appeals to her mother, Bhumidevi, the Earth mother-goddess, to save her from Rama’s injustice and the Earth “swallows” her up. This is clearly metaphorical. But for what? I think that the metaphor is that the Earth-goddess, the mother of all the matriarchs withdrew her last representative Sita from an unjust male-dominated world. Thus, the tradition of matrilineal descent came to an end, to be replaced with Aryan patrilineal descent.”

“That is to say, despite the injustice of replacing traditional matrilinearity with revolutionary patrilinearity, Rama authorizes the change. And that is why Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu, the compromiser.”

Hef laughed when he heard Vishnu being called the compromiser. Certainly, as Krishna, he had frequently been caught in compromising situations with milkmaids, maidservants, princesses, anything in a sari.

The tape was finished. Hef was tired. It was past eight, he needed to eat, he wanted some human company. He heard a car door slam. He looked out the casement window -- his upstairs neighbor Dorothy was back. He watched as her trim, stockinged legs moved up the steps. Then they vanished. The door to the apartment complex slammed. A few seconds later, he heard a slam from the door to the apartment above him. He heard the clickety-clack of heels on wooden floor. Occasionally, he wished that she would get a carpet. He reached for his phone.

X. Sita Maahaatmya

There was a buzzing sound on the phone. He shook it and pressed the ringer a few times. The buzz would not go away. "Drat," he thought, "Just when I thought it was time for a break." Then he seemed to hear a faint voice on the phone. A woman's voice, high-pitched, with an accent reminiscent of Rangachari. He stuck the phone closer to his ears and crouched down in his chair. The sound seemed to be clearer. The computer monitor was making an irritating noise -- he turned it off. The sound came clearer and urgent. Hef listened.

The Apotheosis of Sita

Sita's Lament

Mother, Mother, why do You abandon me too?

My death or my retreat Your cause will it defeat.

Brothers, father, mother Uncle, aunt and sister

Have each in their wisdom Departed my sanctum.

Hearts and minds inclosed.

In Praise of Sita

O Kausalya mata O Kausalya devi

O Kausalya putri O Kausalya kanni

Your birth from the ploughed field Make our plantings succeed.

Your death in the fallow field Prepares us for the year.

Unicorn's innocence Shantha's virgin sweetness

Made you and your brother Made you the child of spring.

You loved fiercely and died A thousand deaths of shame.

Your loyalty never faltered, shivered, or shook.

Forgive us our lack of Faith in your strength and being

Forgive us our lack of Love for you in sorrow.

XI.“Sundari”: The Rat behind the curtain

Hef jerked up. He was a little dazed. His right hand was pressing the telephone hard into his ear. A loud dial tone had woken him up. He remembered why he had picked up the telephone and dialed his upstairs neighbor's number.

“Hi, Dee. Hef here.”

“Hi,” said Dorothy. “I just got in. How have you been?”

“I'm alright. I heard your footsteps.”

“I’m sorry. Did I wake you up? Sleepy head! When are you going to get a real job?”

“Hey, I’m doing a major job right now. I’ve been working all day. They’re going to pay me a bundle. I’m famished, you want dinner at Al Amir?”

“umm...”

“My treat.” cajoled Hef. King Rat was looking at him. Hef looked at King Rat and winked. He could not make out the expression that seemed to be forming on its face. He winked again. King Rat blinked its eyes once, a slow deliberate blink. “You can’t wink.” Hef mouthed.

“Nooo... you’ve been in bad shape, Hef. Have you paid your rent this month?”

“Really. I can afford it. This job pays double-rate and its long.”

“Well, in that case, I’ll let you twist my arm. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

King Rat was still looking at him shaking its head slightly. “Disapproval,” thought Hef. “You disapprove of me?” That wasn’t it though -- the look was different from the one he had gotten when he tried to smoke. “Its all right.” Hef said. “Dee’s a nice girl. Whenever I treat her, she treats me back.” and winked again. The rat looked embarrassed -- he was now looking at him sideways and looked away when Hef tried to return the look.

Dorothy and Hef go to the restaurant and return to his apartment for a drink. They talk, then she puts on some music that Hef has and she waltzes by herself. Hef joins her, a bit clumsily. She chides him for being such a klutz, he protests, they fall back on the couch and start fooling around.

Everything is going great till she sees the rat. She is scared. She wants Hef to get rid of the rat.

Hef refuses. They fight a bit. Then Hef says something extremely personal about Dorothy that she cannot believe he knows. When she asks him about it, he cannot explain. Dorothy is scared and suspicious.

Dorothy runs off.

XII. “Shivam”

“Damn. damn, damn, fuck, damn, fucking damn!” Hef shouted at King Rat. “Why did you do that?

Who is Shiva?

The Lord of the Grand Trunk Road. The Lord of the Dance of Commerce.

Kasi and Hastinapur

Ganesha.

Daksa

Kumara

XIII. Dravidakathasaritasagar

Skanda

Hef has an omniscient episode -- he hears Ved tell Thurber’s story to his wife and sees their lack of mutual understanding.

XIV. The Props

Hef discovers some props, takes them home. Doesn’t know what they are.

He plays a little with them. The rat comes out.

He sits on the rat. Strange. The rat seems to be disappointed.

He calls a 900 number and hears an unusual tape.

XV. Nagaraja

Nagercoil

Hastinapur, Nagapura

Hef has omniscient episode.

Dilmun

The nectar of immortality, the flower of immortality, the drug of immortality, the snake.

XVI. Shiva Maahaatmya

The Apotheosis of Shiva

In Praise of Shiva

XVII. Khandavaprastha: “Satyam”

The story of the birds in the forest

The story of the half-golden weasel

what are animals good for -- cows, pigs, and camels

The gorilla story

XVIII. The Mount

Hef plays with his pet rat, riding it around his room

It makes him put on the props.

It prevents him from eating meat.

Suddenly remembers that it is time to deliver something. Decides to do it himself.

XIX. Bull session

Krishna and Arjuna discuss the Gita.

Hef sees Ved and Janice arguing about feminism, long-term goals, etc..

XX. Jarasandha

The significance of Kurukshetra and Indraprastha and Panipat.

The alliance of the south and east against the north and west.

More Hefnian omniscience -- he hears this without actually putting on the tape.

XXI. Vishnu Maahaatmya

The Apotheosis of Vishnu

In Praise of Vishnu

XXII. Veda’s arrest

Rangachari gets a call about Ved being arrested. Janice accuses him of malpractice because he encouraged Ved in his fantasies. Hef sees what happened --

Ved spams the internet. He gets hatemail. He responds with threats. The FBI is notified. The police come to warn him. They arrest him and accuse him of assault against the police.

Janice leaves Ved. Hef transcribes that conversation too.

XXIII. Vighneswara-sambhava -- The birth of the Lord of Obstacles

Hef is done -- he mails off the package.

As he comes back, he is in a fugue. Things around him begin to seem insubstantial. Some things seem to be clearer. Nothing is comprehensible.

He realizes that there is something he had left undone -- he recalls Veda’s call for help on the first tape.

He mounts his steed, puts on the props. The window blows open and he flies off to save Veda.

XXIV. Ganesha-Mahaatmyaa – In Praise of Ganesha