THE CURSE OF BRAHMA (16 page)

‘Father!’ Devki exclaimed as she hugged Ugrasena.

‘Wh-What happened?’ Ugrasena stammered as he saw the scratches on Devki’s face and her bedraggled condition. Then his gaze fell on Kansa lying motionless on the bed, and he took a sharp breath. His chest and abdomen were bandaged all over and yet the blood had soaked through the layers. There was no visible sign of life, and it appeared that Kansa’s soul had already departed his body. Ugrasena moved hesitantly towards his son and tentatively touched his forehead to smoothen the locks of hair covering Kansa’s eyes. His lips were quivering with suppressed emotion as he sat beside the lifeless body of his son and took his hands in his own.

‘Don’t leave me, my son!’ he whispered through a haze of tears, as he kept rubbing Kansa’s palms. ‘Don’t leave me yet!’ he repeated to himself over and over again.

‘Your Majesty,’ the royal vaid gently touched the king’s shoulder. But Ugrasena was in a world of his own and did not respond. The vaid looked pleadingly at Devki. He was afraid that the trauma of Kansa’s death would kill Ugrasena, who was already frail due to his prolonged illness.

Devki shook her head helplessly. She did not know what to do either. She couldn’t believe her giant of a brother was dead
. It can’t be, dammit! You can’t die like this
, she thought angrily, as the dam broke and the tears threatened to drown her in her own sorrow.

‘The wounds were too deep, my child. I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything,’ the vaid tried to sound professional but his voice choked towards the end of the sentence. He willed himself to regain his control, ‘We will need to prepare the body…uh…the prince, for his final journey,’ he said in an attempt to shift his thoughts to something that he could do in order to stop thinking about the young prince’s death.

Ugrasena still sat mumbling to himself. But now his voice trembled with an unnatural excitement. Devki strained to listen to what he was saying. She froze as she heard the words.

‘He is alive…he is alive. My son is alive,’ Ugrasena was rambling incoherently.

Devki glanced in the direction of the vaid, who shook his head sadly. ‘The king is in shock,’ he whispered gently to her. ‘It happens when one is faced with a trauma as big as this.’

Devki was only half-listening to the vaid. She was attentively looking at Kansa’s body and suddenly caught an unmistakable movement of his arm. She wasn’t sure whether Kansa had actually moved his arm or whether the king had shaken it unknowingly while rubbing her brother’s palms. She walked towards the bed to take a closer look at Kansa’s body.

And then it happened! Kansa opened his eyes and his pupils gleamed with a bright green light. Devki wasn’t sure whether it was her imagination or she actually saw the flash of green. It was there for a moment and then it was gone, replaced by the brown pupils that she had always adored.

She turned around excitedly towards the vaid, ‘He is alive…he opened his eyes just now,’ she said exultantly.

The vaid rushed to the bed. The eyes were closed now. He gave Devki a confused stare, trying to decide whether she had imagined it, but Devki was pointing at Kansa’s torso now. The vaid followed her gaze and his mouth fell open at what he saw. The bandages covering Kansa’s wounds were beginning to dry up on their own. It was happening at an imperceptible pace but there was no doubt that it was happening. The vaid also noticed something else. He pointed at Kansa’s arms to show Devki what he saw. The scratch marks on the prince’s arms seemed to be vanishing before their very eyes. It was almost as if the skin surrounding the scratch marks was closing over to shroud the cuts, healing them completely.

‘What sorcery is this?’ Devki whispered in amazement, as she saw the cuts healing on their own, one after the other.

‘Not sorcery, dear; in some people the cells replicate and grow back much faster than in others. This is why it takes some people a long time in having their wounds healed, while others heal much faster,’ the vaid explained.

He examined Kansa’s body more closely, ‘But I must say I have never seen a man heal so rapidly in my entire life. The prince’s cells seem to be replicating and growing back at a faster rate than any other case I have ever seen or heard about.’

‘His heart has started beating,’ Ugrasena whispered, still not taking his eyes off his son. The king was still in shock but he had regained some of his composure, now that Kansa showed signs of being alive.

‘Your Majesty, I’m going to take his bandages off,’ the vaid said motioning respectfully to the king to move aside.

‘What? Won’t that cause the wound to bleed again?’ Ugrasena said in an unsure tone.

The vaid pointed at Kansa’s torso, ‘The bleeding has stopped, Your Majesty. The healing will be faster if I open the bandages and let the wound breathe freely.’ For once in his life, he didn’t wait for the king to give his concurrence, as he started to carefully remove the bandages.

‘Wait!’ Ugrasena commanded. ‘How can the bleeding stop so suddenly?’

The vaid sighed ‘I can’t explain how, Your Majesty. This is the first time I have seen something like this. But I do know that the bleeding has stopped completely,’ he said, putting the palm of his hand on Kansa’s bandages and showing the king that his hand was dry.

Seeing Ugrasena’s uncertain expression, he continued, ‘Sometimes the body clots at a much faster rate. In the prince’s case it has happened at an unprecedented speed. If I don’t open the bandages now, the wound might start festering inside.’ He waited impatiently for Ugrasena’s reaction.

‘Father, let him open the bandages,’ Devki urged, as she patted Ugrasena’s arm reassuringly. Ugrasena reluctantly nodded his agreement and the vaid proceeded to unravel the layers of bandages covering Kansa’s torso. There was a loud gasp from the vaid as he undid the final layer. He motioned to Devki and Ugrasena to behold what he had just seen. The wounds on Kansa’s torso, including the spot where the pisaca had pierced his abdomen with his deadly spike, had almost completely healed.

‘Lord Shiva be praised!’ Ugrasena breathed in relief as he kneeled down to thank the God. Devki mumbled her gratitude to Shiva too, as she gazed upon the now completely healed body of her brother.

The vaid shivered involuntarily. He knew what neither Devki nor Ugrasena knew. No mortal could have healed as fast as Kansa had just done!

The cavernous room appeared even more sinister today to the three creatures than it had on their previous visit. The terracotta lamps shed their dim light around the room, making shadows appear out of nowhere. The windows were open; and outside the wind howled with a fury that was ominous in itself. The pisaca steeled himself to face the wrath of the Dark Lord. He knew he had failed him and would have to bear the consequences. His serpentine tail had almost recovered from the bruises received at Kansa’s hands, but his head was badly wounded. The blood loss had been severe. In the haste to report to his master, he hadn’t found time to get it attended to.

The bonara balanced himself on his lone taloned foot. The loss of his other limb hurt him sorely. It wasn’t just the physical pain. His two talons had been his prime tools of imparting death to his enemies. The loss of one talon hit him psychologically. Yet at that moment, the bonara was more concerned about dealing with his master’s rage at the failure of their mission than with anything else.

The kalakanja gingerly rubbed his eyes. They hurt where Kansa had dug his thumbs during their fight. His vision was still hazy and he had difficulty in focusing his eyes at one place for too long. He was as scared of the Dark Lord’s anger as his other two companions, but he wasn’t overtly perturbed. He knew their master’s rage would be directed mainly at the pisaca as he was the leader of the mission. It was primarily his failure.
Poor bastard
, he thought.
The master is going to fry him alive
, he chuckled to himself.

The door to the room opened as the shrouded figure of their master glided in noiselessly. The deafening noise of the wind howling outside suddenly seemed subdued. As if on cue, the lamps began to burn with an eerie intensity. The only sound in the room was the crackling of the embers in the lamps, interspersed with the heavy breathing of the three creatures. They waited for their master to speak.

‘You—failed—me,’ rasped the Dark Lord. The voice was strangely calm. Yet that in itself made it all the more menacing.

‘My L-Lord, it was m-my mistake,’ stammered the pisaca, trembling in fear.

‘Silence!’ thundered the shrouded figure. The calm tone was gone. The pisaca cowered, his tail twitching involuntarily.

‘You have both received grievous injuries,’ the Dark Lord glanced from the pisaca to the bonara. The voice was devoid of emotion; it was a matter-of-fact statement. The two creatures lowered their eyes in shame. They were considered to be amongst the deadliest assassins of Pataal Lok and they had not only failed their master; they had also come back thrashed and mutilated by a bunch of mortals.

The Dark Lord moved towards the kalakanja, who too lowered his eyes at the approaching figure. ‘You seem to be in pretty good shape,’ he said softly.

The kalakanja gave a weak smile. He didn’t know whether the master was praising him or being sarcastic. He shrugged his shoulders, ‘I did my best, My Lord. I killed ten of the enemy soldiers.’

The shrouded figure nodded, reflecting some interest in what the kalakanja was saying, who was elated to have his master’s attention. He continued proudly, ‘I would have killed that mortal prince too, My Lord…had the soldiers not arrived at the scene.’

‘Hmm, yes! You would have done that indeed,’ he said softly. The kalakanja’s chest swelled with pride.

‘And is that why I sent you to Madhuvan in the first place? To kill those puny soldiers and that mortal prince?’ The voice was a whiplash now and the kalakanja froze with fright. All his smugness evaporated in an instant as he realized his master had been toying with him.

The Dark Lord whispered some mantras under his breath. As the intensity of the mantras grew, the shrouded figure grew in size, till he was face to face with the towering frame of the kalakanja. The terrified creature stared into the piercing eyes of his master, and knew he would never forget this sight for the rest of his wretched life.

‘
You let your lust for that woman get into the way of killing her,’ he rasped. ‘You failed me.’ The voice came from somewhere inside the kalakanja’s head and he knew the master was addressing him specifically. The kalakanja wanted to tell the shrouded figure that it would never happen again, that he would make up for his failure, that he wanted to beg for one last chance to make his master proud of him. But he was unable to get a word out. His tongue twisted inside his mouth and his lips contorted in unimaginable agony. He felt his body lose control over his limbs as the blazing eyes of the Dark Lord continued to gaze at him. And when he thought it couldn’t get worse, he felt his breath get stuck somewhere deep inside his throat and he felt the torture of suffocation drowning out all other sensations. In the last fleeting moments of the creature’s miserable existence, the Dark Lord lifted his veil and showed the kalakanja the face that only a handful of people had been allowed to see in the past two hundred years. Even as the last breath of life escaped the kalakanja’s mouth, he knew he would never see such a ravaged face as he had seen in his last moments. The memory of the disfigured face would haunt him forever in the lowest pit of hell, where he was being damned for eternity by his master.

The bonara and the pisaca saw the kalakanja disappear from sight in front of their eyes. The Dark Lord still had his back towards them. He pulled the cloak around his head to cover his face again, and turned around to face the remaining two creatures. They shivered in anticipation of their own deaths as the towering figure of their master approached them. The Dark Lord stopped a few feet away from them and chanted another set of mantras. His body came down to its normal height.

He moved in the direction of the bonara, ‘You fought bravely,’ he said softly. The voice was calm again. His rage seemed to have been washed out with the kalakanja’s death. He pointed his index finger in the direction of the bonara’s severed limb and began chanting a mantra that the two creatures had never heard before. They realized it was a mantra from the Dark Lord’s past, invoking some potent energy. A radiant blue light darted out of his index finger and enveloped the severed limb of the bonara entirely. As the passion of the mantra grew, the radiance of the blue light intensified. And before their very eyes, the pisaca and the bonara saw in awe as the severed talon was reconstructed out of thin air.