The Guardians of the Halahala

by Shatrujeet Nath

“Precisely. So the question we need answered is this.” Vikramaditya narrowed his eyes shrewdly at Vetala Bhatta. “What is Prince Shoorasena’s real motive behind engaging Vanga in a conflict?”

  The king and his chief advisor stood watching the procession slowly disappear over a far hill, when they heard footsteps scrambling up the path. Turning around, Vikramaditya’s eyebrows rose in surprise on seeing Ghatakarpara appear over a rise. At the same instant, the young man saw the king.

  “Uncle, I was told I might find you here,” panted Ghatakarpara. “Please, can I have a word with you?”

  The king nodded as his nephew drew close. But at that moment, Vetala Bhatta, who was hidden from sight behind a tree, stepped into Ghatakarpara’s line of vision. On seeing the Acharya, the prince stopped short and looked around waveringly.

  “Yes?” said the samrat.

  “It’s not... nothing urgent,” Ghatakarpara fumbled awkwardly. “I... we can talk later.”

  Sensing the reason behind the boy’s hesitation, Vikramaditya said, “There’s no better time to talk than now.” Inclining his head toward the raj-guru, he added, “You are among friends, and among friends there are no secrets. Speak boldly, young man.”

  The prince fidgeted for a moment, stealing glances at the Acharya. Then, summoning up his courage, he said, “I mean to... I mean, I want to go to Udaypuri.”

  The king and the raj-guru stared at one another in surprise. “What for?” asked Vikramaditya.

  “To fight the Hunas,” Ghatakarpara blurted out. “I want an opportunity to go to the frontlines. I want to volunteer to oversee the war preparations. I want...”

  “Hold on, hold on,” the samrat quelled the outburst with raised hands. “There is no battle happening anywhere with the Hunas – at least not right now. And Amara Simha has already volunteered to go to Udaypuri.”

  “Then please let me go with him, uncle... please,” the prince pleaded.

  The king once again exchanged a glance with Vetala Bhatta. “But you still need to complete your training here.”

  “Uncle, please,” Ghatakarpara was now virtually on his knees, begging. “My best friend is already a garrison commander. If Atulyateja is fit enough for battle, why not me? The Acharya knows that I’ve trained well...” He petitioned the raj-guru with beseeching eyes. “Please tell the samrat what you told me the other day.”

  Vikramaditya looked at the Acharya, who merely nodded once. But the king also noticed the faint, indulgent smile on Vetala Bhatta’s face. Turning back, the samrat considered the prince for a moment.

  “Fine, you can go.”

  “Yes!” Ghatakarpara almost leaped in elation, his eyes alight with joy. Immediately, the king raised a cautionary finger.

  “But... but... you have to promise me that you will stay close to Amara Simha and follow his orders. If I hear you have been doing otherwise, I will come and yank you back here by the ear.” Vikramaditya smiled to take the edge off his words.

  “I promise, uncle. I promise. Thank you.”

  “Good. Prepare to leave with Amara Simha. I shall send word that you will be joining him.”

  The prince bounded down the hill, unable to restrain his excitement. As the king watched him fondly, he sighed and addressed the raj-guru. “Another of your wards is ready to leave the protection of his nest.”

  “Yes,” the Acharya smiled with pride. “He is desperate to win your approval, which is natural at his age.”

  “Are you sure he is ready for whatever is to come?” Vikramaditya asked with sudden concern.

  “Oh yes,” the chief advisor’s tone was confident. “He has a few soft spots and some rough edges – but nothing that life at the frontier can’t remedy. Between Amara Simha and a couple of battles, Pralupi’s son will discover the stuff he is made of.”

  ***

  The elderly woman sitting opposite Vararuchi and Dhanavantri had a kind, good-natured face. She was plump in a comforting, maternal sort of way, her chubby cheeks dimpling every time she smiled, which was often. Her eyes, almost reduced to slits on account of the fat that had accumulated around them, revealed a charitable disposition, and her overall appearance was one of self-contentment.

  Vararuchi looked up from the plate set before him and caught the woman’s eye. “The food is marvelous, mother,” he said between mouthfuls.

  “Ummph, just fantastic...” Dhanavantri agreed with the earnest appreciation of a gourmet.

  “It’s very simple fare,” the woman waved a self-depreciating hand. “Had I known the two of you would drop in, I would have ensured a more sumptuous spread. Why didn’t you send word?”

  Vararuchi merely grunted and shook his head, too busy enjoying the food to respond.

  “We decided to come so I could take a look at your leg, badi-maa. Lunch was never part of the plan,” Dhanavantri paused and grinned cheekily. “Though in retrospect, we couldn’t have timed the visit better.”

  The woman smile indulgently and ladled some more gravy onto the councilors’ plates. “I’m so glad for my arthritis,” she remarked. “Thanks to it, I at least got to see both of you. You people come by less and less these days.” Although there was a hint of disappointment in her voice, there was no rancour – because that was one emotion that Ushantha, first wife of King Mahendraditya, was quite incapable of summoning. In fact, it was this attribute of hers, above all others, that had appealed most to the late king of Avanti. For as long as the king had known her, Ushantha had never grumbled or nursed a grudge, choosing to smile her way through adversity instead.

  Dhanavantri, who had cleverly interpreted Ushantha’s words as being directed mainly at her son, remained silent. Vararuchi too, however, desisted from making any comments.

  “Things are very busy at the palace these days?” Again Ushantha’s question was matter-of-fact, meant neither to stoke nor play on Vararuchi’s guilt.

  The councilors eyed one another, their minds going to Veeshada’s dagger at the same time. “Yes mother. And they’ll probably become even busier now,” said Vararuchi truthfully, but without elaboration.

  Dhanavantri saw the woman’s face fall. “That means I will see even lesser of you.”

  Then, as evidence of her inability to harbor sadness for long, Ushantha brightened. “But of course, as councilors of Vikrama, you’re bound to be busy - after all, he’s now the samrat of Sindhuvarta.” Her voice glowed with genuine happiness for her stepson. “Upashruti will be so proud of Vikrama.”

  Neither Ushantha nor Dhanavantri, who had his head buried in a bowl of sweet yogurt, noticed a shadow pass over Vararuchi’s face at the mention of Queen Upashruti. In a flash it was gone, replaced with a smile.

  “We are all proud of Vikrama,” said Vararuchi, pushing his empty plate toward a servant who was waiting to clear the table.

  With lunch coming to a close, Ushantha and the councilors adjourned to a big bedroom upstairs. The bedroom gave onto a large balcony that offered a panoramic view of the countryside, lush green with paddy fields segmented into little squares by narrow footpaths and canals, stretching all the way to the distant purple hills. Here and there, mango and jamun trees spread their shade for weary travelers and the farmhands taking their siesta. The air was still in the shimmering afternoon heat, with only the faraway metallic tunk-tunk-tunk of a coppersmith barbet disturbing the silence. The scent of frangipani floated in from the open windows.

  “I’ve brought you a liniment of guggul and turmeric, badi-maa,” said Dhanavantri, extracting two earthenware jars from a cloth bag slung over his shoulder. He handed the jars to an old maid for safekeeping. “These are to be applied on the joints every morning and night for the next one month. You can also use warm fomentation to ease the pain. And please, no more cold water baths.”

  Ushantha, who sat propped up on a bed, pulled a face, but quickly offered a placatory smile on seeing the physician wag a fat finger at her in warning.

  “This should give her relief,” Dhanavantri assured Vararuchi as he rose
from the bedside. However, turning back to Ushantha, he added, “I still think you should come and live in the palace, badi-maa. It has all the conveniences, and you will get to see all of us more often. And I will get a chance to tend to your leg more regularly.”

  “No, no...” Ushantha shook her head emphatically. “I’m far happier in the countryside, where I was born and raised. You will recall that I did stay in Ujjayini during the Huna occupation – but life in the city is too stressful for me. I shall move out of here the day you find me a place in Ujjayini that offers me this...” She waved her arm toward the wide balcony and the rustic tranquility that lay piled outside.

  Following the sweep of the woman’s hand, Dhanavantri was forced to admit that badi-maa had a cogent argument against shifting to Ujjayini. “No city can match the calm of the countryside,” he nodded in understanding. “If this gives you peace and happiness, so be it.”

  Later, as Vararuchi and Dhanavantri rode back toward Ujjayini in silence, each lost in his private thoughts, Vararuchi pondered over the physician’s invitation to his mother to come and live in the palace. The moment Dhanavantri had made the suggestion, Vararuchi had known what Ushantha’s reaction would be. He also knew the real reason behind his mother’s reluctance to come to the palace.

  Brahman by birth, Ushantha had always known that her marriage to Mahendraditya was a contravention of tradition – Kshatriya kings were ordained to wed Kshatriya princesses, and only children begot by such alliances were legitimate heirs to the throne. Ushantha had also known that tradition would impose upon Mahendraditya to marry a Kshatriya, who would then bear him the rightful heir of Avanti. So, she had stubbornly resisted the idea of shifting to the palace, and when Queen Upashruti arrived as Mahendraditya’s new bride, Ushantha had made it a point to keep as far away from Ujjayini as was possible. Vararuchi recalled how it had taken all of Mahendraditya and the Acharya’s skills to persuade his mother to live in Ujjayini during the Huna invasion, and how she had left the city the moment Avanti was rid of the attackers.

  “Your chhoti-maa is the queen of Avanti, but both she and I know that hers is a marriage of convenience,” Ushantha had once explained to him. “I am the one true love of your father. And while there’s a lot that a woman can bear, no woman can live with the knowledge that her husband loves another more dearly. Upashruti doesn’t have a choice in the matter, but by residing in Ujjayini, I don’t want to be a constant reminder of her lower status in the king’s life.”

  Vararuchi turned to look back at the old mansion that he had explored endlessly as a child, before Mahendraditya had taken him to the palace to be placed under the Acharya’s tutelage. It stood all by itself in the middle of the paddy fields, now half-concealed by a thick copse of trees, wrapped in moldering solitude. The sight depressed him, yet Vararuchi realized that his mother was right in picking it as her sanctuary. Despite everything he had done for Vikramaditya and the royal household, he knew Queen Upashruti disliked him intensely for who he was; the Queen Mother’s jealousy would have known no bounds had Ushantha also been in the palace.

  Heaving a sigh, Vararuchi faced east again. The two- hour ride back to Ujjayini, which lay across the Kshipra, would be full of bitter memories.

  ***

  The tantric mandala, drawn with turmeric paste and vermilion, was crude in design but complex in character. Covering almost the entire surface of the rough-hewn granite table, it was made up of an elaborate grid of concentric circles and dissecting radials set inside a six-pointed star. The intervening chambers of the grid were patterned with obscure markings and hieroglyphics, and small mounds of white cowrie shells were placed on the six vertices of the star. At its vortex, where the radials came together, six pieces of human vertebrae lay in a random scatter.

  It was these bones that consumed the interest of Sage Shukracharya. He leaned over the table, propping himself with spread fingers, and stared minutely at the vertebrae, assessing their relative distances to one another and the distances between them and the cowrie shells.

  Although a deva by descent, the sage wasn’t very tall, yet he was strongly built, with broad shoulders and a deep chest matted with graying hair. His face, lit by the glow of a smoky lamp, appeared fair, and was covered with a thick iron-gray beard and moustache under a curved, beak-like nose. The highlight of the face, though, was the black eye-patch that the sage wore over his left eye – which called attention to his good eye, burning with feverish intensity as it darted from one corner of the mandala to another.

  After analyzing the bones for a while, the sage picked a pair up. Cupping them in his hands, he closed his eye and breathed an ancient mantra, before casting them back onto the mandala. Bending in eagerness, he once again peered at the bones. With rising excitement, he repeated the procedure a third and a fourth time, picking different sets of bones and invoking different mantras on each occasion. Every time he threw down the vertebrae, his breathing quickened, until sweat stood out on his brow.

  Having collected and thrown all six bones down the fifth time, Shukracharya almost ceased breathing as he interpreted the mystic signs. Finally, he raised his head and fixed a glazed eye into space, his lips spreading in a slow smile of triumph. Snapping back into action, the sage swept the vertebrae into a leather pouch with a definite sense of purpose. He tucked the pouch into his waistband, snuffed out the lamp’s flame between forefinger and thumb and marched out of the sparse room.

  The sage traversed a series of labyrinthine passages lit by dim torches, each passage leading deeper into the bowels of Patala, till he came to a dead end, his path blocked by a solid wall of hard rock. Raising the index finger of his right hand, Shukracharya drew a large rectangle on the rock face, where a portal magically opened. Passing through this gap, the sage stepped onto a high ledge that was cut into the sheer rock cliff that rose steeply behind him. Below him, the crevice plunged to meet the raging currents of the Patala Ganga, the accursed river doomed to flow inside Patala for eternity.

  Across the wide chasm, on the opposite bank of the Patala Ganga, stood a large edifice made of polished volcanic glass, black in color – the famed black crystal palace of Hiranyakashipu, Hiranyaksha and Holika, the sibling-consorts who ruled the asura dominions. The structure, a jagged ring of spiked towers – ten in number, and uneven in size and height – jutted out of the ground like a fossilized eruption, the tower in the center of the cluster rising high into the black sky littered with stars. Diffused starlight reflected off the towers’ smooth, flat sides, while their edges and angularities gleamed white and sharp, like razorblades.

  His eye fixed on the palace, Shukracharya stepped off the ledge, heedless of the perilous gorge that stretched in front of him. For a fraction of a second, his feet hovered over empty space, high above the churning rapids of the river. Then, out of nowhere, a Mind Bridge appeared underfoot, thin as gossamer and frail as the mist, to support the sage in his crossing of the chasm. Once the sage was back on firm ground on the opposite bank, the mysterious Mind Bridge unraveled and dissipated in the eddying wind.

  Inside the palace, Shukracharya made his way through countless halls and antechambers guarded by vampire bhootas and pishachas, who paid deep obeisance to the sage as he passed by. At last, the sage arrived at the Court of the Golden Triad, where several high-ranking asuras were already gathered around the foot of a wide throne, also made of black crystal. Asura lord Hiranyaksha was presiding over the assembly, while his sister-consort, the Witch Queen Holika, sat to his right.

  “No, this will not do,” Hiranyaksha’s voice rumbled in displeasure. “We shouldn’t be happy with ourselves for harrying the outlying colonies of the devas. What are we? Scavenging crows, nibbling at bits and leftovers? No, we are the mighty asuras, descended from Diti. We must strike at the very heart of Devaloka. Our aim should be to take Amaravati.”

  “Amaravati is extremely well defended, my lord,” cautioned one of the assembled asura generals. “We have tried to take it many times and failed.”<
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  “So are we to accept that the devas are unconquerable?” Holika’s tone was icy as she considered the general with her cold blue eyes, set deep in a face that was both enticing and forbidding in its beauty. Her red lips were full and inviting, yet a subtle hint of menace lurked just under their surface. Her complexion, like the rest of her body, was lustrous gold, but there was a sinister aspect to the shadows that formed from her features.

  The asura general wilted under the Witch Queen’s gaze. “The devas and unconquerable? Never!” Hiranyaksha smacked his thigh with his fist as he glared over the assembly. “We will take Amaravati apart brick by brick, even if it’s the last thing we do. I want all of you to devise plans to invade Devaloka. When my dear brother returns from his penance to take his place by my and Holika’s side, I want to gift him Amaravati. And its ruler in chains.”

  “Noble thoughts indeed,” remarked Shukracharya, making his way into the court. “Hiranyakashipu would be very pleased to see Indra as a prisoner in Patala.”

  “Greetings, mahaguru,” Hiranyaksha rose from his high crystal throne at the sight of the sage. The asura lord was an imposing figure, tall and heavy, a pair of thick ram horns on his forehead adding to his stature. His dark, hairless face was craggy but handsome, with deep lines running down his cheeks to a strong, stern jaw. His eyes were bright golden in color, the same shade as Holika’s skin, but they retained a dark, brooding quality as they appraised Shukracharya.

  “I’m glad you agree that it’s time to take Devaloka,” Hiranyaksha continued as he descended the steps from his throne to meet his high priest. Gesturing toward a vacant seat flanking the throne, he added, “Do join the discussion, mahaguru. Your wisdom and guidance would be invaluable, as always.”

  The sage made no move to accept the seat. “Much as I see the need to move against the devas, there are more important things to discuss right now,” Shukracharya looked the asura king in the eye before glancing at Holika, who had climbed halfway down the steps. “The bones have spoken and revealed some very important tidings.”