Shakti: The Feminine Divine (10 page)

It was all very suspicious. There was little consensus about the origins or current status of this divine paragon of virtue. Some said she was Vishnu’s consort, while the more fanciful said that she was a mysterious goddess who resided in Shiva’s
heart. Everybody was in awe of her ability to cast spells that altered the very nature of reality. To Sachi that screamed of black magic and witchcraft, and she did not understand why the celestial army was not out there, tracking her down. Her husband was testy on the subject and took the vexing approach of sticking his head up his backside and pretending that the danger did not exist.

The latter walked in just then, interrupting her thoughts. He looked every bit as irritable as she was feeling. He was an indecently good-looking specimen of masculinity with his golden complexion, handsome head of hair and strapping physique. The vitality and sensuality that was such an integral part of him, coupled with the great power he wielded, made him absolutely delectable in every department you could think of. Even his trademark hauteur sat well on his features. Sachi took pride in his good looks and enjoyed flaunting the mighty husband she had chosen for herself.

At that precise moment, the perfection of his features was marred somewhat by the fierce scowl he was sporting, as though he had managed to only just extricate his head from a foul-smelling nether orifice. Sachi wanted to smoothen out his eyebrows, which were joined in a straight bristly line and made him look very much like a mortal Neanderthal, but she controlled the urge. Indra would tell her his problem soon enough. He knew that she could be counted on to bail him out of every sticky situation that routinely confounded him.

In response to her silent command, her attendants stepped in to massage the stress from his shoulders, neck and forehead with scented oils. When his sense of well-being was somewhat restored, they served him refreshments and melted away as quickly as they had arrived. Sachi was particular that their time
together was entirely private, and even whisk-wielders were expected to make themselves scarce while the royal couple conversed.

Indra sighed with pleasure as he imbibed a spirit brewed especially for him and relaxed. It had taken some effort, but he could finally dwell on the doings of his ancient enemy with a measure of calm. Hitherto, that had been drowned out by the overpowering rage which he always experienced when he thought about his friend-turned-enemy, Twastha.

In the early days, they had got along very nicely indeed. Counted among the prajapathis, immensely talented and just about the most skilled workman in the three worlds, Twastha richly deserved the high esteem accorded him by the celestials. In fact, he had built Indra’s magnificent palace and sabha, as well as forged his indestructible vajra. The unequalled splendour of Amaravathi was also entirely thanks to his vision. He had even equipped the celestials with formidable weapons suited to their individual styles, which made them invincible on the battlefield.

Twastha had gifted Agni his spear, which he lovingly named Sakti; Yama was presented with the dreaded staff, danda, which was so deadly that it could take the lives of mortals who merely chanced to look upon it; Varuna received the fabled noose,Varuna pasha; the goad he gave to Vayu; and to Kubera went the mighty mace or gada.

The invaluable services he had performed had been appreciated and Indra had made sure he was amply rewarded. But that was before Twastha had devoted every last fibre of his being towards making himself the largest, prickliest and impossible-to-remove thorn in Indra’s hide.

From the beginning, Twastha had refused to adopt a
deferential attitude towards his king, insisting on treating him like an equal. Now, Indra was not an uptight monarch who demanded that his subjects bow and scrape before him. But he expected a certain decorum to be maintained and the rules of formal ceremony to be adhered to when he was performing his functions as the king of the devas. The divine architect, however, seemed hell-bent on arguing with his overlord and questioning his every move, from his plans for construction to his conduct as their sovereign and spiritual guide.

Indra had grown increasingly nettled, but held his peace. It had long been a policy of his to make sure that the devas did not splinter into warring factions. Things had, however, come to a head when Twastha went against Indra’s express orders and married Recana, who was an asura. Twastha had fought alongside Indra in an almighty clash with their sworn enemies. The celestial hordes had carried the day and the asuras had fallen in huge numbers. Recana was among the captured women. She had been wailing and ululating among the captives when her future husband spotted her and made up his mind that she would be his, for reasons beyond the comprehension of his fellow celestials.

Overwhelmed by grief over the loss of her loved ones, Recana had been tearing out her hair and beating her breasts when Twastha expressed aloud his desire to marry her. Indra had been appalled and was concerned that the lovelorn loony had sustained one blow too many to his head; he had seldom seen a less attractive woman. It was bad enough that she was shrieking in misery and shredding her clothes in a disgusting display of grief, but the tears, phlegm and spittle that ran freely down her ugly face truly repelled the king of the heavens. Worse still were the curses she kept pronouncing on
their heads between racking sobs. It boggled Indra’s mind that Twastha wanted to marry this hideous creature, who had just announced that their genitals would shrivel up, rot and fall out, while they would roam on earth as blind beggars, having sold their mothers, wives and daughters into prostitution.

Ill judgement of this magnitude was hard to surpass. Intermarriage between the devas and asuras was a sensitive subject. Indra was angered because he virulently opposed such matches and Twastha, despite being aware of it, was deliberately antagonizing his overlord.

‘I forbid you to marry that abhorrent creature!’ Indra had admonished him sternly. ‘It would be the zenith of foolishness for you to even consider bedding that foul witch for a few moments of transient pleasure, but you want to ascend new heights of stupidity by marrying someone so far beneath your station. How would you all like it if I married the first bitch in heat that crossed my path and insisted the lot of you pay obeisance to your new queen? Whatever has gotten into you? If I did not know you better, I would question your loyalty to me.

‘Do I have to remind you about what happened to Maya, the vishwakarma of our enemies? The son-of-a-bitch wished to emulate you, so he performed penance to win Brahma’s favour and acquired for himself unlimited skills in the field of architecture. Thanks to him, his animalistic brethren, whose natural habitat had been dank caves or smelly hovels no self-respecting pig would set a slime-covered hoof in, now live in palatial mansions comparable to the best in Amaravathi.

‘Maya should have been content, but he had to overreach. High on hubris, he built himself a colossal palace of gold in a beautiful forest. With that as a lure, he seduced Hema, one of our apsaras, and they had a daughter named Mandodari.
Narada told me that the little half-breed was destined to marry Ravana and their son would defeat me in battle and come to be known as Indrajith. Naturally, I had to put an end to their sleazy affair by allowing my vajra to claim the life of that scoundrel Maya before his wife and he populated the three worlds with the mongrels of their forbidden passion. Surely you have sense enough to learn from the mistakes of lovestruck ninnies without seeking to emulate them?’

The other celestials, hopped up on victory and bloodlust, nodded in agreement. They had laughed at Recana, hurling a few choice epithets at her and making lewd suggestions about how her foul mouth could be better employed in their service. Rather irrationally, Indra had felt, Twastha had erupted in fury and bodily attacked the ones who had besmirched his future bride’s non-existent honour. Twastha had never forgiven him for the events of that accursed day, and Indra had also been less than delighted with him for going against his direct orders.

Needless to say, Twastha had been apoplectic with rage when Indra had married Puloma’s daughter. The general consensus was that Sachi was a heroine who had delivered them from her evil father. Of course, a harsher view that may have triggered a controversy of epic proportions would have unleashed the wrath of the wielder of the thunderbolt. Twastha, urged by his well-wishers, did not directly attack his new queen, but he always made it a point to address her as Pulomi, in a not-so-oblique reference to her parentage.

Now the antagonists had reached yet another low point in their relationship.

Sachi had grown impatient with Indra by then for straying too far into his cavernous memory. ‘Why don’t you tell me what is bothering you, instead of staring vacantly into space?
Frankly, you are dowright irritating when you do that and it makes me want to shake better sense into your head.’

Indra sighed again, but this time it was inwardly. He wondered for the umpteenth time why he kept forgetting that when in need of sympathy, he would be better off going to his dear mother, Aditi. But instinct had led him to his loving wife’s arms and there was no turning back now.

‘It is the same old bloody thing!’ Indra told her. ‘I deal with a threat, make it go away and before I get a chance to catch my breath, a fresh one pops up, far worse than the previous, and on and on it goes. Sometimes I am tempted to place a chimpanzee on my throne and take off from here, so that I can become a bum and live happily ever after.’

‘Bums…’ Sachi wrapped her lips around each syllable with the full force of her dislike for such spurious statements, ‘do not get to have a happily ever after. As befitting those who are named after an appendage that ejects bodily wastes, do nothing worthwhile and shamelessly live off their betters, they are treated with contempt. Even if they were to drop dead, none would mourn the loss of one. It ill befits the king of the gods to aspire towards such a despicable station. So let us not talk about becoming bums and discuss this new threat, which has unmanned you so.’

Thinking fondly of his mother and bestirring himself from the defeatist attitude that was making his wife question his masculinity, Indra spoke again, ‘It is that damnable Twastha. As you know, that bugger went and married Recana, an asura bitch, despite my express orders. If that were not enough, the two of them are the proud parents of a son who has grown up to be increasingly powerful and the trio are probably plotting, as we speak, to wrest power for themselves. He did all this just
to give me grief over a bit of friendly advice in the distant past.’

‘The son is called Trishiras, isn’t he?’ Sachi murmured. ‘Some know him as Vishwarupa. I believe he is one of those annoyingly virtuous individuals who are pious to a fault, with a nauseatingly charitable disposition. My sources tell me he has three heads and it is the prevailing belief that he is thrice as good as the most accomplished of the gods on account of it.’

‘That is a stupid lie!’ Indra protested. ‘Why would anybody want three empty heads? My spies tell me that he imbibes soma with one head, studies and recites the Vedas with another and the third is employed in meditation at all times. It is a cheat sheet for being intoxicated, erudite and enlightened all at the same time. I think it is all nonsense that Twastha made up to hide the obvious fact that his brat is a deformed freak, who provides three times the room lice need to deposit their eggs on.’

‘You mentioned meditation,’ Sachi replied, not bothering to muster up a smile for his paltry attempt at humour. ‘If he has been as involved in study and prayer as you suggested, my guess is that he has become an ascetic to be reckoned with. And given the extent of your agitation, I assume you have already sent your apsara whores to distract him from his penances, but not only did they fail, they were entirely counterproductive and managed to send his merit levels soaring. Personally, I am not interested in these holier-than-thou types who want to waste their time under the influence while pretending to chase after universal secrets that nobody cares about anyway. However, I am sensing that he has somehow gotten under your skin. Why is that?’

That was the thing about Sachi. There was none more cold-blooded than her and yet, nobody was more finely attuned to
every nuance of his volatile character than she was. Touched despite himself, Indra opened his heart to her. ‘There are two types of enemies—the first make no bones about wanting to triumph over me in battle and park their undeserving backsides on the throne that is meant solely for me. It is a relatively simple thing for me to take them down. They are dangerous, but I cut my teeth on this kind of villain!

‘The second type of enemy is more dangerous because he is subtle. You could gather all the intelligence you want, but wind up with nothing more than a warrior’s honed instinct setting off alarms in your head, which you ignore at your peril. It sounds paranoid or laughably fanciful when put like that, but I could not be more certain that my destiny is linked to Trishiras in some terrible way. That pestilential creature was conceived in pure hatred of me, and he is the living embodiment of the ill-will his parents bear towards me. It is not merely a guess, given the fact that I was there when Recana was spewing filth from that sewer of a mouth, calling down terrible imprecations on my head and swearing that death and putrefying privates were to be my fate.

‘Trishiras may not be aware of all this and may genuinely believe that his purpose of existence is entirely for lofty and noble pursuits. But the truth is that he is a weapon created for the sole purpose of ending my reign. If I ignore my gut, then it is only a matter of time before he makes a stinking corpse out of me and a widow out of you.’

Sachi did not spook easily, but Indra’s impassioned speech and prediction of imminent death and widowhood chilled her to the bone. She rallied quickly though, keeping the paralysing fear at bay before she carefully formulated a reply. ‘The good news is that your reconnaissance missions and your own acuity
have given us a valuable heads-up. Wariness makes one canny and I believe you can avert this disaster waiting to happen, if you strike swiftly and surely. I have always wondered about the roundabout tactics you employ in taking down your enemies. It is galling that you rely so much on that glorified gigolo Kama and his ridiculous flowery arrows, when it would be more sensible to rely on real arrows.