Vanara Read online

  Angada: Son of Baali and Tara

  Karthy Veerarjuna: A pirate king in this novel. He ruled from the mythical Mahishmathi (not to be confused with the Mahishmathi of the Bahubali world) on the banks of the Narmada. He is said to be a Vidhyadhara in some Puranas. He conquered many kingdoms and looted them. He is also said to be an avatar of Sudarshana Chakra as per some Puranas (Narada Purana). He is also known as Sahsra Bahu Arjuna or the Arjuna with a thousand arms. He defeated Ravana and imprisoned him. He was beheaded by Parashurama.

  Nala: The sculptor and builder among the Vana Naras

  Hanuman: A learned Vana Nara, minister of Sugreeva, a wise man

  Chemba: The tamed wolf of Baali

  Ravana: the Asura emperor who ruled the prosperous kingdom of Lanka

  Vibhishana: The sly brother of Ravana

  Dundubhi: A giant untamed bull, often thought of as the demon bull or Rakshasa

  Mayavi: An Asura chief who owned many fighter bulls like Dundubhi.

  Vijaya: A young Vanara warrior

  Rama: The prince of Ayodhya

  Lakshmana: Rama’s brother

  Sita: Rama’s wife who was abducted by Ravana

  Soorpanakha: Ravana’s sister who was mutilated by Lakshmana

  Chapter 1

  His mother was in the hands of a man who was not his father. He was dressed like his adoptive father, wore the sacred ashes like him, but this man was younger. The eight-year-old could not control his tears. She was kissing him when he stumbled into his mother’s room with a sparrow-nest he had found. There were three sparrow-chicks in it and they were twittering sweetly. His brother had climbed high up the palmyra tree for the nest when he had insisted that he wanted it. He wanted to show it to his mother and ask her for some millet to feed the chicks.

  The boy stood transfixed at the doorstep—blushing, embarrassed, afraid and angry. He was old enough to know that his mother was cheating on his father. They still weren’t even aware that he was there. He wanted to run away, yet he stood there transfixed. He needed to scream, but no voice would come out of his throat. He gulped, and his mouth felt dry. Hot tears streamed down his cheeks. Unwittingly perhaps, he must have let out a sound. The man turned his face towards him. Their eyes met for a moment and the man scowled. The boy felt scared and looked at his mother. His mother hadn’t opened her eyes. Her face was filled with a beauty and pleasure that the boy had never seen before. She stood, wrapped in the man’s arms, her lovely face thrown back and her lustrous black tresses falling down like coiled snakes, kissing her waist.

  ‘Run, monkey.’ The man’s bark made him shudder.

  His mother opened her eyes, looked at the man and followed his gaze. The boy saw his mother’s eyes widening in surprise and then blood draining from her face. The boy’s thumb went into his mouth. The sparrow’s nest he had been carrying carefully so far, fell from his hand. He saw his mother hurriedly prising away the man’s hands from her waist and rushing towards him. The boy removed his thumb quickly. He knew his mother was angry. She was going to scold him for sure. He was too old a boy to suck his thumb.

  ‘I’m sorry, Amma,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Sugreeva.’ She stood before him, her face flushed red.

  The man chuckled from behind and tightened his dhoti. ‘Tell me, Ahalya, is this brat my son or his?’

  His mother didn’t reply. She was now leaning before him. She placed a warm damp hand on his shoulders. Poor sparrows, the boy thought, looking at the nest that lay scattered on the mud floor. He should not have brought it here. He should not have come here at all. The birds were chattering in fright. His mother lifted his chin and for a moment he stared deep into her eyes, which were brimming with tears. Sugreeva was aware of her misplaced clothes and her untied hair. He turned his face away to look outside. His skin burned with shame. His vision turned hazy and the Tungabhadra river that simmered in the summer sun faraway appeared as if it had dissolved into the sky. His brother might be swimming there. He wanted to see his brother. He would know what to do.

  ‘Son, don’t tell anyone.’ He heard his mother’s voice crack.

  ‘Oh, why should he tell the old man, dear.’ The man walked towards them. He stepped on the nest carelessly and crushed the chicks. The boy turned away, horrified at the dying squeaks of the birds. The man cursed and kicked the nest away from his way. As he approached, he leaned before the boy and glared at him. Sugreeva was watching the sparrow-chicks twitching in their death throbs.

  ‘Keep your mouth shut, boy,’ the man hissed. Sugreeva kept looking at the chicks that lay lifeless now. A breeze that wafted from without flurried the feathers and a few loose ones flitted in circles, a finger breadth above the floor.

  ‘Look here when I speak.’ The man slapped Sugreeva hard. His mother held the man’s wrists. Sugreeva glared back defiantly.

  ‘You’re scaring me, boy,’ the man chuckled. His mother tried to say something, but the man raised his palm and she fell quiet. She tied her hair into a bun, stood up and walked away from them. Sugreeva wanted to get away. He tried to run, but the man held his wrist tight.

  ‘Listen, you are not to speak a word about this to anyone. It does not concern you, so why are you bothered?’

  ‘Indra, please,’ his mother cried from the corner. She was not facing them. She was arranging the manuscripts of his adoptive father, Sage Gautama, in a neat pile in the corner. But Sugreeva could sense that she was tense.

  ‘This monkey needs to know that he can’t squeal. Not that I’m scared of your old man, that impotent fool, Gautama, but I don’t want him to spread the word and make our meetings difficult.’ He turned back to Sugreeva. ‘Boy, she fed you and many urchins like you when you were hungry. She is the mother of the ashram. She will do what she pleases. So you will keep your mouth shut, understand? If she wants to sleep with anyone, that is her business.’ Indra shook his shoulders. Sugreeva looked at the dead sparrows. A teardrop traced its way down to his chin.

  ‘Please, don’t make it worse. He is just a child. Let the boy go. He won’t tell anyone,’ he heard his mother say.

  ‘He daren’t. No one crosses the King of Devas. I have a doubt that this brat is one among my many sons. I don’t know how many women I would have bedded so far and this monkey-faced brat might be one of them,’ Indra chuckled.

  ‘That’s enough.’ Ahalya rushed to them and freed Sugreeva. She dragged him out and slammed the door shut. Sugreeva heard Indra laugh from inside. Ahalya took him aside. His mind was still with those dead sparrows. He had made a mistake. What would he tell his brother Baali now? Baali hated to see anybody get hurt. Sugreeva had promised Baali that he would take care of the sparrows before he had agreed to get him the nest. Now that he had got the chicks killed, Baali would be mad at him.

  ‘Were you even listening to what I said?’

  Sugreeva was startled by his mother’s words. He nodded, though he hadn’t heard a word.

  ‘Sparrows,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Sparrows? What are you blabbering?’ Ahalya asked. ‘Never ever breathe a word. Not to your brother, not to my husband. I fed you and your brother when you were this little.’ Sugreeva stared at her hands showing how little they were when she had found them. Were he and Baali as small as the chicks?

  ‘You’re too small to understand. Now don’t bother about what grown up people do. Be a good boy and play. Go for a swim. Hunt. Climb trees. Do whatever you Vanara boys do,’ she smiled at him. He nodded.

  He wanted to argue with her. He didn’t belong to the Vanara tribe. There was nothing called the Vanara tribe, his brother had told him. Their tribe was Vana Nara, the jungle men, a name given to them by the Deva Brahmins. Forest was their home. Vanara was a slur, an insult used by all higher castes. It meant monkey men. But even his adoptive mother used it. He looked at her with empty eyes.

  ‘So what are you waiting for?’ she asked as she washed her hands. She had touched a Vanara and had to purify herself. She smiled at him.

  ‘Ahal
ya,’ Sugreeva heard the King of Devas’ voice booming. Indra, his mother’s lover and killer of sparrows, was calling from inside. His mother was getting impatient.

  ‘Sparrows,’ he muttered.

  The door flung open, startling Sugreeva. He saw Indra standing at the doorstep, glowering at him. Sugreeva gulped hard. Indra hurled something at him, grabbed Ahalya’s hands and went inside. The door slammed shut in his face. Sugreeva saw what lay down at his feet and his heart sank. The nest and the dead chicks lay scattered around him looking grotesque, twisted and broken. He picked them up gently, not wanting to hurt them anymore. He gently caressed the lifeless birds, trying not to cry. Sugreeva wanted to see his brother Baali. At once. He jumped to the courtyard and ran, calling out his brother’s name aloud. Somewhere on the way, the dead birds slipped from his hand and were forgotten forever.

  Chapter 2

  Baali was perched on a rock overhanging a cliff. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and went back to what he was doing. The sun was beating down on his bare back with a vindictive intensity. A hot breeze blew, covering Baali in dust, and then everything became still again. Rivulets of sweat traced their path over his black skin and pooled under his cracked feet. Baali tried to spin the Arani twig once again. He had seen the mendicants doing that in the Ashram. They spun the pointed Arani twig on a hole dug into a wooden plank and chanted mantras for hours. Baali had seen the twig smoulder at first and burst into flame. That was how holy fire was made. Baali was not sure whether it was the magic of the mantras or the spinning of the twig that made the fire. He knew no mantras and he was never allowed near the sacrificial altar where the Brahmin mendicants performed their rituals, but he was always fascinated with fire. He had got a discarded Arani twig and had rushed to the rock to conduct his experiment. He had spent some time in the morning to get the sparrow-nest for his twin, Sugreeva. The thought of Sugreeva made him smile. Though they were of the same age, Sugreeva always considered Baali his elder brother. Baali had no one else in the world, except Sugreeva. The boy is a dreamer and trusts everyone blindly. he needs to be protected, thought Baali. He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and went back to spinning the twig.

  A whiff of smoke rose from the tip of the twig. Baali paused to smile. He whistled a long-forgotten tune and resumed his work rigorously. He pushed some dry leaves into the stone depression and blew hard as he continued to twirl the twig. Baali paused to catch his breath. His palms had grown red with exertion but he looked at his handiwork with satisfaction. The thin waft of smoke had dissolved into the air, but he was feeling elated. Sage Gautama, the head of the Ashram, had barked at him when he had asked how fire was made. The sage had lectured Baali that fire was sacred, and it was not something Vanara boys should even think about, let alone learn how to make. Fire hid in the trees and in the sky, the sage had said, and it was the mantras that set the fire free. The world was made of five elements—fire, water, earth, air and sky, and the fire was the most important among the five. Those who controlled fire, controlled the world.

  The fire burst with a snap and licked the dry leaves. The fire needed no magical chants to appear. It had come to him, a low-caste forest dweller, just by rubbing a few twigs. It needed only effort and perseverance. That he had in plenty. Baali watched the flames consuming the leaves and pushed more of them into the fire. The fire cackled, and Baali slapped his thigh hard in satisfaction and laughed out loud. Agni, the fire God, didn’t discriminate between the Brahmins who knew Vedic chants and a poor Vanara child. Did he think himself as Vanara? He paused. He always hated the slur, but had no power to protest against it. His desperate attempts to correct other children in the Ashram had always ended in disaster.

  But one incident amused him still. It had happened during last summer, just before the monsoon clouds had arrived across the western mountains. Baali chuckled to himself as he remembered it. A Brahmachari had called Sugreeva a monkey, a Vanara, and his brother had come to him crying. Baali decided to give the high-born boy a taste of his own words. Baali and Sugreeva had climbed up the Banyan tree and hid behind its branches. They lay in wait for the Brahmin students to appear. Baali had carried a reed basket full of ripe mangoes. Sugreeva was scared that they were committing a sin by acting against Brahmins, but Baali assured him that they were just making the words of Brahmins come true. They would show what monkeys could do. The two brothers sat sucking the ripe mangoes. Baali carefully collected the mango seeds after they had sucked the last strands of their juice. The sweet smell of mangoes attracted bees and birds who flocked around them. Baali amused Sugreeva by allowing sparrows and crows to eat ripe mangoes from his hands. They weren’t afraid of him. When Sugreeva asked how they could be so trusting of him, Baali replied, ‘They return the trust you give them. You trust them not to peck you and they trust you not to catch them.’ Before Sugreeva could reply, the students of the Ashram had arrived for the lessons. The brothers watched them sitting cross-legged and chanting mantras in Sanskrit. They were waiting for the sages to arrive. Baali chuckled at their chants, and the boys paused and looked up at the tree fearfully.

  A carefully aimed throw of sucked mango seed splashed on the face of the Brahmachari who had called Sugreeva a monkey. There was an uproar from the Brahmin students. Baali grinned at them and scratched his dark body like a monkey. Then he threw his next seed. That too found the mark.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he cried as he threw another sucked seed, ‘they’re just mango seeds.’

  A boy cried indignantly, ‘Vanara, it’s disgusting.’

  The boy yelled as a half-eaten mango hit his mouth and splashed all over his face.

  ‘We have licked them clean, Swami,’ Baali shouted.

  ‘Apacharam, Apacharam!’ the boys screamed in horror.

  Sugreeva joined his brother in the celebration, and the brothers threw the mango seeds and ripe mangoes they had collected at the Brahmin boys who were screaming and shouting from below. One of the boys attempted to climb the tree but slipped and fell down.

  ‘Go and croak your mantras like a frog, you wimp,’ Baali shouted as the boy lay down sobbing. Some boys resorted to throwing stones at the two Vana Nara boys, but none of them reached even half the height. Baali mocked their poor aim and strength.

  ‘Enchant some blades of grass and make them the mighty Brahmastra. If you’ve not learned that trick, try cursing and making us real monkeys, Swami,’ Baali taunted. Sugreeva was laughing so much that he was clutching his belly.

  Soon, the sages in the Ashram assembled around the tree. They were furious. They asked Baali and Sugreeva to come down and Baali climbed further up the tree in reply.

  ‘We’re monkeys, and we live up in the tree,’ Baali said dangling dangerously from a branch that swayed in the wind. ‘You’re the ones who seek Brahma or whatever, the ones who know magical chants. Bring us down using your mantras and prove you’re Brahmajnanis, holy ones.’

  No number of curses brought them down. As the night fell, the two monkey boys were still perched high on the tree and the entire Ashram lay in wait for them to come down. The Brahmins knew that their magical chants may have been useless in capturing the monkey boys, but they had a more potent weapon. What holy mantras could not achieve, hunger could. The boys would have to eventually come down to quench their hunger and thirst. They waited under the tree with sticks and stones, ready to pounce upon the monkey brothers the moment they came down.

  The brothers spent a defiant night on the branches and Baali told Sugreeva the tales of their Vana Nara tribe, the tales of valour and the tales of the jungle. From the swaying branches, they watched a full moon rising over the Gandamadana hills and painting the valley silver. They saw the gushing Tungabhadra afar and reminisced of their frolicking when they took the cows to bathe. From afar, a night bird sang a melodious note and it triggered the primordial urge in the monkey boys to sing. Sugreeva sang with a sweet innocence. After a pause, Baali joined him smilingly. Baali’s vo
ice that had started to break added a rugged flavour to a song that was as old as the hills. The Brahmin boys who were keeping vigil, frowned at the odd rhythms and tunes of the wild that refused to obey the narrow straits of their canned music. The monkey song reverberated in the air, as free as the breeze and as fragrant as wild honey. It fell on them like rain, gentle, soothing and sweet. The forest responded with a vigour that the men of books could scarcely fathom, and a thousand crickets and fowls of the night joined the symphony. Far away, across the brooding hills, from the deep jungles, someone sang back. They were the men of the forest, the Vana Nara, to whom the forest belonged. Their songs merged and rose to the heaven, as a plea, as an admonition, as an accusation of betrayal. Their songs melted in the air and dissolved forever.

  Baali woke up first. It was yet to be dawn but he was used to waking up early. His brother was sleeping in his arms. He looked down and saw that their pursuers were still waiting for them to come down. In the Ashram, the sages had started their rituals of pouring ghee and assorted twigs into an altar of fire. They chanted in an unnatural language which they called refined or Sanskrit. Baali resented that they called the language of the monkey tribe Prakrut, the natural or unrefined. It was natural for the invaders to see anything of the vanquished as inferior. The sages, who denied reality for the sake of the unknowable, invoked strange gods who they had brought from their arid cold lands. They continued to invoke them in the steaming tropical jungle where their fire altar looked ludicrous. They had forcefully taken over the land of the Vana Nara and many of their tribesmen had withdrawn deeper into the forest, fearful of the civilization that was marching at them with an unrelenting pace. Baali and Sugreeva were orphans left out of some forgotten war, raised in the Ashram as service hands. Their position was well defined. They had to wake up before anyone and clean up the place. They had to carry the night soil away. They were not to be seen when the sages and their disciples woke up, for the Vana Naras were impure. They were not to touch anyone and had to carry a broom on their back, so that the sacred Ashram wouldn’t be defiled by their footmarks. They had to hew the wood and bathe the cattle. They had to clean the beasts that were sacrificed for pleasing the unforgiving gods who had marched along with the trespassers.