Book of Destruction
Page 12
Futile is this argument, I told myself. Gathering my strength I cautiously walked backwards till my back touched the gate. It opened by itself. The man did not try to stop me. I thought hopefully that perhaps it was not allowed for him to cross the gate of ‘our own place’.
I turned around and walked quickly across the gates of ‘our own place’ and then of ‘our place’.
Outside, the darkness had thickened, as had the cold. Amber traffic lights blinked idly at the traffic junctions and street lights struggled to illuminate the streets in the enveloping fog. Rapidly walking through the darkness and the cold and turning corners one after another, I reached the main road. The roads were all deserted and shutters were down at every shop. I didn’t see any of those homeless, directionless and so-called fragmented people out. Right or wrong, everyone appeared to have reached home. The night is not for journeys but for home and hearth. And yes, for worship and sacrifice.
Sacrifice! The night spells out sacrifice. Sacrifice of victims, devotees and the Godhead itself. Finally away and out of all ‘places’, now I was in a position to quietly mull over all that the master of ceremonies had said. He had described the last form of sacrifice as the greatest of all sacrifices. A kind of sacrament of the Lord. He had told me that the artist-tailor redeemed the souls of people by first breaking their bodies, then manufacturing new ones suitable to their souls before clothing them in suitable garments. He had also said that they had not killed the tailor, that it was worship, not murder; their way of giving thanks to him, a prophet, who had created a new genre of beings. In a moment it flashed through my mind that I hadn’t seen the tailor struggling on the grill. ‘This cup is the new testament in my blood’—did he say this as the knife sank into his neck? ‘Take, eat, this is my body.’ Was I witnessing the passing of the old testament to give birth to the new, in those gory moments played out in ‘our own place’? The old testament that gave abundant instances of the former ways of sacrifice the master of ceremonies had mentioned, but not a single case of the sacrifice of the Lord himself? Seshadri had asked me to investigate the Assassins and Hasan had given me the task of studying the art and history of tailoring. If so, what was the tailor’s assignment for me? What were his doubts and apprehensions that I was supposed to pursue and solve? Good God!
God! God does not pass. Or, does he? Is there such a phase? I thought of Bengal, the land of Kali worship.
Bengalis have a near monopoly on the theme of Kali. Someone had once shown me a number of variations of the deity in a chart form, right from the benign Gauri, Parvati and Durga to the fierce ones like the blue Kali and the dark Kali whose eyes and tongue were the only visible parts in the darkness of her being. Among them I had seen an unusual one, Chhinnamastaka, who in her lower left hand holds her own severed head. A jet of blood spurts from her neck feeding the open mouth of the severed head. I remember thinking that there could be nothing beyond this, as here was the goddess sacrificing herself, the ultimate sacrifice. Is that how The Book of Destruction, or, for that matter, The Book of Creation, ends?
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First published in Malayalam as Samharathinte Pustakam by DC Books, Kottayam 2005
First published by Penguin Books India 2012
Copyright © P. Sachidanandan (Anand) 2012
Translation copyright © Chetana Sachidanandan 2012
Cover illustration by Sanya Glisic
Cover design by Bhavi Mehta
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-01-4306-846-4
This digital edition published in 2012.
e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-741-5