The King of Lunatics - 2

Image by Gemini AI

Read 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.”