The King of Lunatics - 2

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They tell this story in the village below the hill. In the years I have carried this story, it has grown a little at the edges, the way stories always do. The heart of it has remained unchanged, however, in spite of a whole millennium and a half that has passed since the time of our protagonist.

Those were the days when kings ruled in Valluvanad and the Bharathapuzha ran fuller than it does now. A Brahmin scholar named Vararuchi was counted among the nine gems of King Vikramaditya’s court at Ujjain, and it was said that grammar and logic sat in his head like lamps in a temple, always burning, never flickering.

Vararuchi loved a woman he was not permitted to love, a woman of the Paraya caste, the lowest in the land. He didn’t know who she really was. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gone anywhere near her. Panchami was found floating in the Bharathapuzha and was adopted by a poor childless Brahmin without knowing anything about her low-caste origin. During his long wandering in search of wisdom, Vararuchi met Panchami and was enchanted by her wisdom and beauty. 

The two went walking and walking, seeking wisdom and meaning. Twelve children were born to them as years passed by. Vararuchi didn’t permit Panchami to carry any of the children with them. “God who gave mouth to the child will also give it food,” Vararuchi said when Panchami questioned his order to abandon the child on the wayside.

Each of the twelve children was rescued by different people belonging to different castes. The child who went on to become the protagonist of our story was raised by a family at Naranam in the Palakkad country which is now a small district in Kerala. The child grew up lean and quick-eyed, with a laugh that arrived before his words did. He studied the Vedas under masters who found him, at first, a delight, and then, quite soon, a problem. He learnt everything they could teach him. Then he began to ask questions that they could not answer.

He was too wise even for the learned men, what to say about the ordinary folk! So they all called him Bhranthan, Madman. Thus he became Naranath Bhranthan, the Madman of Naranam.

“Master,” the boy from Naranam asked his teacher, “if everything we do is strictly bound by our past karma and dictated by destiny, why are you angry at that fellow? Didn’t destiny decide he would forget the verse today?”

“Acharya, the stars tell us which day, which time is ideal for which action. So will our house alone stand if a deluge carries away this entire village because you built this house after consulting the stars?”

The gurus first called him too young for such questions. Then they thought the questions were dangerous. Finally, they declared that he was not normal. Bhranthan. Madman.

“The flaw is not in my lack of understanding,” the boy said to himself. “The flaw is that I understood.”

In a kingdom of twilight, where shadows are truths, seeing the full sun is insanity.

Bhranthan grew up and became a man. He soon left the family that had raised him and hit the roads. He owned nothing that could not be carried in one hand: an iron-tipped staff, a small copper vessel, and a piece of cloth. When he was hungry, he begged for food. But not readymade food. He asked for a little raw rice, some lentils, a handful of vegetables, and a pinch of salt.

“Why?” the women asked. “Is my cooking not clean?”

“Your cooking is clean, mother,” he would say, laughing. “But a man should know how to make his own meal. If I learn to eat from every hand, one day I’ll have to smile at every face. I’d rather cook badly and laugh freely.”

So he cooked for himself, one meal a day, on three stones that served as his oven.

He had a schedule that never changed and people noticed it sooner than later. Every morning he came to the foot of a hill near Thiruvegappura, a modest hill of laterite and scrub above the paddy flat, and at its foot lay a great round boulder.

He put his shoulder to that boulder and pushed it up the hill. His left leg that was afflicted with elephantiasis protested. “Wait,” he said to his left leg, “until the day comes when I’ll get the elephant shifted to the other leg.”

At noon, more or less, the boulder reached the zenith of the hill. Naranath would stand there, at the top of the hill, look out over the green valley – the herons in the shallow ponds, the Western Ghats rising blue and enormous in the distance – and then step aside to let the stone go. Down the hill.

It rolled. It gathered speed as it moved down. It bounced here and there and came thundering down the slope, raising dust, and settled at last, breathless, at the very spot where it had begun its upward journey.

Naranath Bhranthan laughed watching the whole game. Madman.

It was not a mild laugh. It was the laugh of a man who had seen the funniest thing in the world. The laugh rolled across the valley louder than the stone had, and it could be heard, people swore, two villages away. He clapped his hands like a boy at a fireworks festival. Then he wiped away the sweat from his forehead, picked up his staff, and walked down to beg his lunch as though nothing of matter had happened.

The stone continued to make its motions, upward and downward, day after day, like a sacred ritual.

***

The King of Lunatics – 2

This is the Second and final part of a short story based on a folklore in Kerala. Read the first part here.

A merchant from the low country once stopped his bullock cart to watch the whole performance from start to finish. He had already heard of this madman who was apparently a reincarnation of someone called Sisyphus in ancient Greece. This successful merchant had connections with big traders of all sorts. He had warehouses in three towns, a fine house, and a name that opened doors. He watched the madman heave the stone to the summit and surrender it to gravity. Something in the merchant’s heart shifted. Merchants don’t tolerate such waste of energy or of anything for that matter.

“Why do you do this?” he demanded when Naranath came down the path. “Every day, the same stone, the same hill. What do you profit?”

Naranath looked at him with eyes the merchant would describe to his grandchildren years later, eyes that were not the eyes of a madman at all. Naranath answered the merchant pleasantly, as if discussing the price of pepper.

“What do you gain, brother? You build your warehouses. They will fall. You pile up your money; you will leave every coin of it on this side of the grave, for not one anna has ever crossed over. You raise your sons, and they grow up and go their own way, as you went yours. Every day of your life you’re rolling your own stone up your own hill, and you have never once looked at it long enough to laugh. At least I know that my stone will come down.”

The merchant opened his mouth to answer but he found nothing in it. He drove home in silence, and the people who knew him said that afterwards he was a different man: less hurried, willing to sit in his courtyard on an evening doing nothing.

“Whatever has happened to you?” His wife asked one day.

“I met a man on the road who was not mad,” the merchant said and his wife wondered whether her man had gone cranky.

The merchant could not forget what he had seen at the summit of the mountain. The madman, who was the sanest man he had ever seen, had stood right on top of the hill and shouted to the sun: “Uchayaayoda? Uchiyilaayoda?” Is it noon yet? Are you at your peak?

Was the man challenging the sun? Was he challenging the universe? Or was he hurling that question at his fellow human beings? At noon, the sun casts no shadows. There’s pure light all around. Are you standing in the light? Did this man mean that? Who knows!

It was not only the merchant who was fascinated by this man. Once Naranath sat for the better part of the day at the edge of the market road, watching a column of ants hurry past his bare feet, counting them, his lips moving, as seriously as a moneylender counting coins. A rich man passing by stopped, partly out of curiosity, partly because it is the habit of rich men to check on anyone who ignores them.

“Madman,” said the rich man, “how many ants have gone by?”

“Five hundred have gone,” said Naranath, “and five hundred more are to come. When those five hundred also go, everything will be clear.”

The rich man laughed and went his way. The laugh stayed inside him like a stuck fishbone. Five hundred gone, five hundred to come.

Five hundred. The figure possessed a quiet, hypnotic weight in his mind. Beneath the floorboards of his bedroom, tucked inside the shadow of a secure vault, 500 gold coins lay resting – each one a minted promise preserved against the rust of time. He was still in his prime, still gathering, still forging ahead. By his reckonings, if providence granted him eighty years upon this earth, the remaining half of his life could yield another 500. Yet the thought arrived like a cold draught through a closed door: What if the arc of his years was cut short? What if the night fell before the ledger was complete?

In that fragile quiet, a subtle shift began to ripple through the rich man’s inner world, quiet as the turning of an invisible tide. He remembered his physician telling him a few days back, “Lighten the load.” He decided to lighten the load. And he began to feel much better.

This is how it was with Naranath. The ordinary folk called him mad, and they were not wrong. And yet…

And yet they knew there was something about this man that was deeply troubling. A man who disagrees with your deepest assumptions silently, cheerfully, and without once trying to convert you is far more disturbing than one who argues.

What happens when such a person encounters a goddess? In the case of Naranath, it was no lesser a goddess than Kali that stood before him.

Naranath was sleeping in a cremation ground enjoying the warmth of the funeral pyre that had not died yet. In the midnight, weird sounds began to be heard. First, far off, hoots and howls, shrieks and wails, and a laughter than would have curdled any man’s blood. Not Naranath’s, however.

The air grew thick with the pounding of a thousand invisible drums. A violent clatter and clangour shook the branches of the peepal tree above him, instantly swallowed by the sharp chime of heavy anklets and the sweeping swish of a celestial girdle.

The howling jackals fled into the dark. The shrieking crickets fell dead silent. If you were there, your heartbeat would have been the loudest thing in the world then.

Yet Naranath remained still, breathing evenly as if cradled by the chaos.

Then the tumult collapsed into an absolute, suffocating stillness. The shadows parted. Goddess Kali stood before him – towering, terrifying, the very mistress of these cremation grounds.

Naranath slowly opened one eye, looking less like a mortal before a deity and more like a sleeper whose afternoon nap had been needlessly interrupted.

Kali looked down at the lean man stretched out on the ash, her eyes flashing with a mixture of dark amusement and astonishment.

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” Kali asked, her voice vibrating like a low drum.

Naranath would have laughed loud had he not been feeling drowsy.

“Who are you?” Kali asked.

“I am you,” Naranath said. “And you are me.”

Kali loved that. She burst into a laughter that was like the sound of a massive boulder rolling down a hill.

“Well, since I’m here before a mortal, I’d like to give you a boon. Ask me what you wish.”

“I need nothing.”

“But people must not say that Kali met Naranath and went away without giving him anything. Ask for something.”

Naranath was quiet for a while. The embers in the funeral pyre were dying out slowly.

“If you insist, grant me this boon: take this elephantiasis from my left leg and put it on my right leg.”

Kali laughed again. “Tathastu, let it be so,” she said.

The whole retinue of ghouls that accompanied Kali laughed too.

Life became laughter that night. Life was a long laughter for Naranath anyway.

“Madman,” people said the next morning to Naranath looking at his legs, “what has happened to you?”

“Goddess Kali insisted on giving me a boon,” Naranath told them candidly. “I asked her to shift my elephantiasis from the left leg to the right.”

The people stared at him, then at each other, and they understood.

“This man is not merely mad,” they concluded. “He is the King of madmen.”