Skip to main content

And quiet flowed the Beas


The Beas sparkled like molten silver with the gentle touch of the morning sun.  It could not assuage the mutiny that was mounting among Alexander’s soldiers, however.

How long and how far?  Coenus, the general of Alexander’s army, raised the question.  We have come a long way in search of some mirage.  We have bathed in the Tigris and the Indus, played in the Nile and the Euphrates, sailed across the Oxus and the Jaxartes.  We breathed the air of deserts, mountains, steppes and fields.  We trudged miles and miles, thousands of miles.  Of victory, booty, glory and novelty, we’ve had our fill.

Alexander looked into Coenus’s eyes. He saw longing in them.  Longing for wife.  For children.  Father and mother.  No harlot can ever replace the touch of the wife.  No victory can match the smiles of your children.  Eight years.  They’ve been away from their homeland for eight years.

But we are conquerors, said Alexander.  Conquest is our way, our life, and our truth.  There is no retreat for a conqueror.  Extricating from your victories is almost impossible.  It will be like letting the ground slip away beneath your very feet.  The new friends we made will review their allegiances the moment we begin to retreat.  Nobody wants to befriend a loser, a weakling.  The old enemies will return with vengeance, the moment you are on your retreat.  We have only one way, one direction, onward march until our death.

Death, spat out Coenus.  You are incapable of love.  So you speak so lightly of death.  You won’t ever understand the meaning of the sparkle that lights up the eyes of Roxana whenever she sees you.  You are filled with your own self.  A huge Ego, that’s what you are. 

Alexander smirked.  Was Achilles a mere ego?  Is Zeus an ego?  I am the Lord of the earth.  Or will be soon.  I have brought more than half of the earth under my feet.  I will conquer the rest too. 

For what?  Coenus stared into the Beas that was acquiring a penetrating sheen as the sun rose higher in the sky.  “Move out of my light,” the world will repeat what Diogenes told you.

Alexander remembered.  He visited Diogenes because unlike the other great teachers in the country that one man had refused to pay homage to Alexander the great conqueror.  He wished to make his visit dramatic.  Histrionics is part of the helplessness of a conqueror.  “Which wish of yours can I fulfil?” asked Alexander standing majestically before the philosopher who had even refused to stand up from his reclining position on the ground.  “Move out of my light,” was his insolent answer. 

“If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes,” said Alexander to Coenus as they moved away from Diogenes. 

I’m not Diogenes, roared Alexander when Coenus reminded him again of the master of the mind.  The roar struck the Beas producing ripples.  I am Alexander, Alexander the Great.  I don’t turn back.

A murmur arose among the soldiers.  Alexander could feel the murmur rising to a crescendo in his veins.  He went into his tent.  And sulked there for three days thinking that Coenus would come and ask for pardon.  But nothing happened.

So Alexander came out from his sulk.  And accepted defeat.  Alexander the Great is vanquished.  Only once.  By his own men.

But Alexander the Great won’t go back.  There’s no retreat for Alexander the Great.  We will take a different route, ordered Alexander.  We will sail down the Jhelum and the Indus.  To the Arabian Sea.  The great oceans will take us home. 

The oceans will rage for  Alexander the Conqueror. 

The Beas flowed quietly.  








Comments

  1. Nice to go back into the lanes of history with this post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Apart from history, in case you are interested, there is a literary connection too:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Quiet_Flows_the_Don

      Delete
  2. Beautiful write up Mr Matheikal. Loved it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Taking a piece from history, putting it across as literature makes it universal and lets us realize that times and humans have not changed after all through these years and technology

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "... humans have not changed after all through these years and technology." Exactly Datta Ghosh. That's one thing I always wish to say. Right now we have a great leader in India who is not much different from Alexander the Great. :)

      Delete
  4. Well written.. loved that Alexander lost to his own men. Loved it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Its a nice write up. Facts, fiction and interpretation.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. History never ceases to fascinate me, Kokila. For one year I taught history to classes 9 and 10 due to certain unavoidable circumstances. I enjoyed the job and I found my students enjoying history classes. History can become story easily!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Solzhenitsyn’s Many Disillusionments

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died a sad and disillusioned man. Solzhenitsyn was a genuine socialist in the beginning. He fought for the Red Army in WWII. He was a committed Soviet patriot. Equality, justice, and dignity of the workers were his ideals, his dreams. However, Stalin became a brutal dictator and Solzhenitsyn became his vocal critic. As a result, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to the Gulag: a network of inhuman labour camps. Hundreds of Russians were tortured and killed in those camps and Solzhenitsyn was disillusioned with socialism. The Russian Revolution was supposed to have liberated the common citizens from imperial oppressions. However, the new government under Stalin was far more ruthless, unjust, and oppressive than the empire. The socialist ideology became a kind of deity for which everything else was sacrificed, including truth. Writing the story of his life in the camp in The Gulag Archipelago , Solzhenitsyn warned that such systems coul...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Blasphemy in Brahma Muhurta

Dr T S Shyam Kumar: courtesy Pachakuthira At Brahma muhurta this morning, I was reading something profane if not blasphemous. Well, I didn’t even know until I was reading it that Brahma muhurta was the most auspicious time of the day and that it lay in the fourth yama of the night – that is, from 3 am to 6 am approx. Sleep eludes me these days in this period of the night. I wake up in the Brahma muhurta and then I am unable to go to sleep, for some reason beyond me. So I pick up my mobile phone and go to Magzter App. The magazine I chose to read this morning happened to be a Malayalam literary periodical, Pachakuthira . An interview with Dr T S Syamkumar, Sanskrit scholar and teacher as well as author of many books and recipient of some notable awards, caught my attention. This interview was something unique for me and one of the many things I learnt from it is that Brahma muhurta is the auspicious period that begins roughly 1 hour 36 minutes before sunrise and lasts for about...