KRISHNA CORIOLIS#1: Slayer of Kamsa (23 page)

Padmavati looked at Ugrasena. In her eyes, he saw a terrible truth.

She knows what the rakshasa means. She knows!

‘My Lord,’ she said, ‘this is a creature from the netherworld. A being out of myth. It seeks only to delude and confound you. Do not believe anything it says.’

But her voice rang false and her face betrayed the truth.

Ugrasena hobbled over to where she stood, the crook striking the marbled floor of the balcony with a sharp crack. ‘Speak the truth,’ he commanded. ‘I demand it.’

She blanched and turned away. But he caught her arm and pressed upon it.

Slowly, with her head lowered, and tears starting to trickle, she said,‘He was named after Kala-Nemi.’

‘INDEED,’ said the giant towering above the city, its voice carrying to the farthest corner of Mathura, its terrible form visible from every place in the city. There was a tone of glee in its voice now; as if it had finally unlocked a great secret, something it had sought for long. ‘AMSA
OF KALA-NEMI. HENCE, K-AMSA! FOR THAT IS WHO I WAS IN MY PAST LIFE UNTIL THE SURYAVANSHI IKSHWAKU KSHATRIYA KING OF AYODHYA DEFEATED ME AND THE BRAHMARISHIS VASHISHTA AND VALMIKI CONDEMNED ME TO CENTURIES OF IMPRISONMENT. KALA-NEMI.’

Rama Chandra of Ayodhya had defeated this being? Yes, Ugrasena recalled hearing some tales of his derring-do from his preceptor as a boy. Never did he expect to see the stuff of those fireside tales and bedtime stories come to life in this way.

He raised his crook, pointing it angrily at the giant.

‘What is it you seek here now? Why have you returned to prithviloka? And why did you choose the body and form of my son as your receptacle?’

The bulging face stared down at him. Ugrasena saw now that there were things moving beneath the surface of the rakshasa’s
skin
as well, all over his body. Tiny, writhing forms in a variety of shapes, like insects of various kinds – centipedes, millipedes, roaches, bugs, and other crawling creatures – moving here and there, causing the beast’s skin to ripple and bulge at unexpected places and in unsettling ways. He swallowed nervously, not letting himself think of the impossibility of fighting such a being. What weapon could he use against it? How many warriors would it take to lead an assault? Where and how would they strike at it? Could it be wounded? Killed? How?

‘YOUR
SON?’

The being that had once been Kala-Nemi and was now Kamsa issued a sound that made even Ugrasena cringe with pain. It was like a horse coughing right into one’s ear.

The being dribbled as it spoke, its spittle as alive as the rest of its existence. Several writhing forms spattered onto the balcony and coated it in a slimy white fluid. Ugrasena saw one crawling at his foot and brought the crook down upon it, impaling it. A tiny scream of agony reached his ears. He resisted the urge to void his guts over the balcony railing.

‘I
AM NOT YOUR SON, UGRASENA. I HAVE NEVER BEEN YOUR SON. I AM NOT BORN OF MORTAL MAN. AGAIN, ASK YOUR QUEEN IF YOU DO NOT BELIEVE ME. ASK HER WITH WHOM SHE LAY IN ORDER TO CONCEIVE ME. IT WAS NO MORTAL MAN, LORD OF MATHURA. IT WAS CERTAINLY NOT YOU!’

As the being laughed, spewing living saliva, Ugrasena glanced at Padmavati. She had fallen to the ground, her face buried in her hands, weeping bitterly. He felt sad for her, but also anger and disgust. Could it be true, then? Her reaction suggested it was. What did it matter now anyway? The crisis that faced him, that faced them all, was far greater than a mere question of paternity. The future of their entire race was under threat now. He could be an angry husband later, in the privacy of his bedchamber; right now, he was still king of Mathura. And as king, he needed to know the enemy’s intentions.

‘Tell me then,’ Ugrasena said.‘What is it you desire from us now?’

Kamsa looked down at him, then up at the sky, then around. From that height, Ugrasena guessed that the giant could surely see the whole of Mathura, as well as much of the surrounding countryside.

He could probably cover the entire kingdom in a few hours if he leaps and runs. And he could destroy it in days if he wishes.

Finally, the giant completed his examination and looked down again. Ugrasena glimpsed that same hideous smile. ‘ONLY
WHAT I DESERVE,’
Kamsa said with unexpected simplicity, then added: ‘TO
RULE THE YADAVA NATIONS FROM NOW UNTIL THE END OF TIME, FOR I AM IMMORTAL AND THIS REWARD OF ETERNAL LIFE IS GIVEN UNTO ME AS MY JUST DESERTS FOR PAST SERVICES RENDERED.’

He seemed to pause and think for a moment, then his face brightened grotesquely as he beamed with insane delight. ‘YES.
IT IS SO. I AM YOUR NEW KING AND, AS OF THIS MOMENT, I CROWN MYSELF KING ETERNAL. BOW TO ME, MATHURA. BOW ... OR DIE!’

eleven

A pall of dread hung over Mathura. The Yadavas set great store by signs and omens, all of which were ominous. Calves were born stillborn or deformed. Milk was curdling everywhere in the kingdom; even freshly drawn milk lay in frothy lumps in the pail. A mysterious illness swept the kine population; many believed that it was engendered by the vile effusions the giant Kamsa had exuded. Hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle died and more continued to die in the weeks that followed. Sown fields were picked clean of seeds by birds. Crops ready for harvesting were suddenly found devastated by rodents, vermin or fungi. Yokes cracked, uksan’s legs broke and they had to be put down, horses went mad and attacked their own syces, elephants went into masti outside of season, rampaging through the villages, causing havoc. One moment the sky would be promisingly overcast, the next, it would turn cloudless. A river broke its banks and washed away an entire village even though it was late summer, almost autumn; there was no logical explanation for the deluge. Other rivers dried up overnight, leaving fish gasping and dolphins flailing pitifully on the riverbeds. The villages they served reached drought- like conditions despite a record monsoon. Strange phenomena appeared in the western and eastern skies, as if the sun was about to rise at midnight, or had just set at midday. Brahmacharya acolytes who had been able to recite thousands of Vedic shlokas found themselves perfectly blank-headed, barely able to stammer a few lines. Water drawn from the sweetest wells came up foul and rancid. Newborn babes found no milk in their mothers’ breasts; others choked in their cribs and died of unknown ailments. People saw their dead ancestors move about amongst them, warning of impending doom, urging their descendants to migrate to distant lands. Soothsayers, astrologers, priests, madmen, philosophers, poets, cowherds ... all agreed that a great and terrible disaster was imminent. Many predicted that the extinction of the Yadava race was nigh. Nobody laughed or disagreed.

The reign of Kamsa had begun.

twelve

Kamsa smiled as the masons worked. He had reduced himself to his normal size, but still seemed somewhat larger than before. Vasudeva had observed that each time he expanded into a giant and then regained his human form, he appeared a little changed. Once, he noticed something creeping beneath the skin of Kamsa’s arm, sluggishly, as if unable to move as energetically in human flesh as it would in a bigger, rakshasa body. Slowly, as Vasudeva watched discreetly, it seemed to be absorbed back into the arm. On another occasion, Kamsa’s face reduced to normal human size along with the rest of his body, but the eyes themselves remained rakshasa-like, the contrast between the human face and rakshasa orbs horrifying to behold.

Vasudeva wondered if something in Kamsa’s substance changed each time he underwent the transformation. If, perhaps, eventually, Kamsa would become all-rakshasa, with no trace of the human left.

It was a chilling thought. Kamsa was already the terror of the land.After the day of his execution –‘the day of my rebirth!’ as he called the day, demanding that it be made a public holiday in Mathura to be celebrated by all Yadavas henceforth, on pain of death – he had initiated a pogrom of terrible efficiency. His aides-de-camp, Bana and Canura, had miraculously survived the battering by the crowd on Vasudeva’s wedding day. They had been scheduled for execution following Kamsa but were freed and reinstated to his side, and had been proclaimed mahamantris by him. There were seven mahamantris already in place at the royal court, and since no more than seven could hold the post at any time, Kamsa had killed the other seven, leaving only Bana and Canura to manage the day-to- day administrative affairs of the kingdom. He had also slaughtered the rest of the court officials, nobles, and others who had either opposed him in the past, disagreed with him privately or publicly, or offended him inadvertently. When each one was brought before him for ‘trial and sentencing’ under the new ‘justice system’ that he had initiated, he seemed unable to recognize several of them, but shrugged and gave the command for execution anyway.

The new execution platform, constructed overnight to replace the old one that Kamsa had shattered as a giant, soon turned red with the blood shed over its planks. Nobody came to witness executions any more, for, often, Kamsa would point randomly at the crowd and say that he recognized a woman who had once giggled when he was passing by, or a boy who reminded him of a long-ago playmate who had won a race against him, or some such whim, and the person would be dragged up to the platform and executed then and there. All grist for the mill.

Now, he was overseeing what he termed the ‘restriction of facilities’ for the ‘former’ king and queen Ugrasena and Padmavati. Since he had declared himself King Eternal, Ugrasena and Padmavati were redundant; their very presence an offence to the current sovereign.

Arya tradition required Raj-Kshatriyas to spend the third, autumnal phase or ‘ashrama’ of their lives, vanaprastha ashrama, in the shelter of the forest. In point of law, Kamsa was correct. By tradition, Ugrasena ought to have retired to a hermitage in the forest by now, Padmavati accompanying him voluntarily as was the custom, and have been available to his children and former citizens as a mentor and advisor, the physical remove from active politics and prohibition against owning property or accumulation of wealth ensuring that he could never become a political rival to his heirs. Ugrasena was well past the age. In fact, he was on the verge of sanyasa ashrama, the phase of complete renunciation when a Raj- Kshatriya devoted his energies and remaining lifetime to the contemplation of godhead, preparing himself for union with the infinite power of Brahman, the all- pervasive. The only reason Ugrasena had remained on the throne until now was because he had known that Kamsa was ill-prepared to take on the task of running the kingdom. That, and the enduring strife between the Yadavas had kept him on the throne, draining his dwindling strength in statecraft when he ought to have been enjoying the fruits of his long life and considerable accomplishments.

Kamsa reasoned, in the convoluted thought process that he had developed since his ‘rebirth’, that since Ugrasena had failed to take vanaprastha ashrama at the prescribed time, regardless of his reason for flouting tradition, he had consumed part of Kamsa’s birthright. Kamsa reminded those listening that he was not Ugrasena’s son, but Padmavati’s. Since Arya dynasties and society were matriarchal, he was the heir to the throne and, as Padmavati’s eldest son, entitled to reign. Since Ugrasena had deprived him of his entitlement, he had committed treason against Kamsa, the rightful king, and as such, Kamsa was justified in doing whatever he pleased with him. This was a gross simplification and distortion, of course. In point of law, if Ugrasena could be proven to have transgressed by wilfully denying his heirs and the kingdom their rightful change of liege – which was clearly not the case here – then, in that unlikely scenario, Ugrasena might perhaps have been banished into permanent exile, to spend his last years in the wilderness, never to return to Mathura. Under the circumstances, this would have been a merciful sentence as well as the right one under dharma.

But Kamsa had chosen instead the sentence he was now overseeing.

Vasudeva watched with great sadness as a hundred masons, bricklayers, stone workers and other artisans
and craftsmen worked feverishly to complete the task given them. They were building a wall around the private chambers of Ugrasena and Padmavati – not the entire palatial mansion, which was a veritable palace in itself, and which they had formerly occupied, but a tiny section of the same, barely more than an apartment. It was, in fact, the apartment that housed Padmavati’s maids and was, as such, grossly unfit for a queen, let alone a royal couple. It had been stripped of any ‘luxuries’ and filled instead with dirt, assorted plants, and even insects and rodents specially brought from the woods and set loose inside the rooms. The roof had been painted half blue and half black.A hole had been made high up on a wall, and a pipe trickled water from this hole into one of the chambers, which in turn spattered on the muddy floor beneath, turning it to mush, and it was apparently up to the occupants to provide a pathway for this ‘river’ to flow neatly through their ‘domain’. There were no facilities for the two occupants to use as a toilet; merely two medium- sized chambers filled with this assortment of filth and vermin. Two tiny windows set high near the ceiling let in whatever little light and air could find its way into that claustrophobic space.

This, Kamsa said proudly, was to be their vanaprastha ashrama. Their forest abode!

And to ensure that they remained within this space as surely as they would have remained in an actual forest, he was having it walled in. Even an elephant would have a hard time breaking through the two-foot-thick stone wall he was getting built, rising from floor to ceiling. No door remained to enter or exit the ‘forest world’. From time to time, some raw vegetables – herbs and roots and tree bark, and the occasional fruit – would be pushed in through the high windows or the water pipe to perhaps be found and eaten by the residents or, if they were not quick enough, their fellow inhabitants.

Kamsa turned to Vasudeva and said cheerfully: ‘There; it is done. Isn’t it marvellous? They shall be so happy in their forest world. So restful! I think they will become true yogis in no time at all.’