“Kinship? But Jaliya, the battle of Lord Ram with Ravan, is, well, it is more of a final war between two races. You could say it was between Devas and Rakshas, gods and demons, or between people of the North and South, Aryans and Dravidians.”
“A popular misconception held by people on both sides of the Palk Strait. Chronology is the keeper of clarity. And then there are truths that become shrouded in obscurity because of their sheer antiquity. Such truths can be found preserved in the stories of people who pass it down from one generation to the next. After all it is only the victor who can write history, Rachana. The defeated may only speak of their pasts, and at times they may only say it as murmurs and whispers. The story of the Devas and Asura’s is such a story. A story of two peoples of one root, whose branching out over the course of millennia estranged them.”
The word Asura was born of the word ‘Azura’ he tells her. And the word ‘Azura’ traces its origins to the name of the God of the Persians–Ahura-Mazda, the divinity that incarnated on earth in the form of fire. The most sacred of truths to the Zoroastrians. It is fire that is the giver of all life to the world.
“The Asura’s were the golden haired ones Rachana. The Irano-Aryans who competed with their brothers the Indo-Aryans for supremacy over the known world. The very names of kings who preceded Emperor Ravana of the Yaksha dynasty speak of this truth. Hiranyaksha and his brother Hiranyakashipu, the first name meaning ‘golden eyed’ and the other ‘golden haired’. But of course with the final vanquishing of the Yaksha rule over Lanka, after the victory of Prince Rama, history took over, in the words of the victors. Masters of the earth and sky the Asuras were said to be demons, the unholy, the impious. Their very appearance was taken from them by the words of the victors. Their beauty was distorted to be the image of horror and contempt.”
“Was Omunkashyu their treasure? Was it a jewel they had, that Lord Ram wanted?”
“It was not a jewel in the way the nations of the Siu Hela saw it, and craved for. No Rachana, the Asuras were the descendants of those whose worship of fire gave them mastery over it. It was their boon, to command its power and be unscathed by its wrath whenever it manifested the furies of the divine on the mortal earth.”
Jaliya tells her how the abduction of Sita was the ruse that Prince Rama had wanted to capitalise for his plans to eventually posses Omunkashyu from the mighty emperor. Prince Rama knew of the justness of his rival and how he wouldn’t subject his captive to any torment. Whatever that would happen, would be with consent. There would be no violation of a woman and of her right to chose who may access her body. Jaliya tells Rachana, Prince Rama was aware of the great masculine beauty of his rival. He knew of the frailties of a woman’s resolve, and how the lust of mortals acted.
“He knew that his mighty opponent was aware of the ways demanded by the practices of the Hindus. Sita would be subjected to the ‘fire test’ to prove her purity after having been the captive of the emperor... And this would be the way he would acquire Omunkashyu. From her, Sita, who would be taught the way to escape the harms of fire by the mighty Ravana who would have by then developed a love for her and would have offered her his hand to his royal bed.”
“Omunkashyu was with Ravan?” There is, he senses, some disdain in her voice. Some sense of objection to this direction of the story.
“Omunkashyu. The only thing that would save her life when stepping into the flames. The only weapon, the defence, Sita would have to become immune to the all consuming flame. Omunkashyu, which was in fact the zealously guarded Gini Mantharaya.”
“Gini Mantha-ra-ya?” She speaks the unfamiliar words that had passed her fleetingly in the form of Jaliya’s voice cutting through the darkness. Words she had grasped momentarily as it dissipated back to the blackness it came from.
The word Gini in the Sinhala language means fire, and Mantharaya means spell or incantation. Omunkashyu was a mystical craft that relied on the power of the utterance, to cause fire to be tamed, and controlled. Still to this day, says Jaliya, when Hindu fire walkers in their acts of piety and devotion performed in homage to certain deities make invocations in the form of supplications, there is in those words an acoustic spark of the Gini Mantharaya. The oral transmissions of knowledge through generations somehow find some strands of endurance, becoming encrypted in the vernacular itself. Such truths, says Jaliya to Rachana serve the speaker with benefits that he may not be fully aware of. Such truths, he tells her, as those carried by the power of the spoken word can hold in them the power of life and death.
“The power of the spoken word must never be underestimated Rachana. It was the value placed on the power of the spoken word that made the Gini Mantharaya, called Omunkashyu that caused the land of Lanka to be devastated by the forces of Prince Rama. It caused ultimately the fall of a dynasty, and the end of an empire.”
There is something that withholds the words in Rachana’s head from being spoken. The silence that holds her words have draped them both into a moment of quiet contemplation. A sleepiness hangs over their eyelids now. And the growing silence makes them wonder if they are in fact asleep already. But no, it cannot be so, they each think. A dream cannot be this real they reckon in their silent thoughts.
But, Sita? She couldn’t have been a thief Jaliya. Surely you are mistaken. She is a divine incarnation. A symbol of virtue.
I hope you will see the ways of people Rachana. People are capable of deception, bearing the most innocent and noble appearances.
Would Ravan be so foolish to give her Omunkashyu? Why would he simply just give it to her? After having been with him, what good would it be to let her save herself in the fire test if she is simply to become once more the possession of her husband? Ravan was a demon Jaliya.
Love... If only a woman could fully know how her beauty can claim the world of a man without unsheathing a single sabre. And once he becomes hers, ‘her survival’ is all that matters to him. Yes Rachana, Sita’s beauty beguiled Ravana. She claimed his world. It is true...kingdoms have fallen because the beauty of a woman became the universe of a man.
And Lord Ram used such trickery? Such callous trickery using his wife? How can the divine who protect Dharma commit such unjustness? No Jaliya, Lord Ram could not have resorted to unrighteous scheming as that.
If you think Prince Rama was unrighteous, you forget his form Rachana, it was ‘human’. How else could he have defeated Ravana who was granted by the boons of Brahma invulnerability from gods, demons, serpents and wild beasts? It was only through a rival in the form of the fallible ‘human being’ could Ravana be felled. The divine, if ever they assume the form of the human, acquire all our fallibilities as well. It is only ‘human’, after all, Rachana.
Sigh... But there is something romantic in that story. The way Ravan truly loved Sita and the way he treated her. Coming in his sky chariot he took her away. He fought Garuda’s nephew Jatayu in the air and killed him when he tried to stop Ravan from taking Sita. She must have admired his great strength and power. The courage he had to uphold his own honour. Perhaps it was Ravan’s acts that really proclaimed the value of Sita. She lives in history today because of him, Ravan, the demon King from Lanka.
There is something very unusual to Rachana in this condition of things. The silence that pervades and prevails seems almost stilled. As if somehow the quiet has demarcated their space to be separate from the rest of the busload of passengers. And what about the passengers? What indications are there that they are still onboard? Neither Jaliya nor Rachana have heard any stirrings from fellow travellers of this all night journey. They cannot all be sleeping like the dead? Could they? It certainly isn’t how Rachana knows this journey to be. The journey she generally makes every Sunday evening from Nandyal.
“Jaliya, have you any idea what the time could be?”
“The time?”
“Yes.”
The face of his wristwatch not visible to him, Jaliya gets out his cell phone. No light comes off it
s screen. The battery is dead. His thumb presses the ‘power’ button but the mechanism simply refuses to respond.
“That’s strange. I thought there was still some life in it before I’d have to recharge it.”
“It doesn’t get switched on at all?”
“No. How about yours?”
She reaches down to her trouser pocket and discovers her cell phone’s battery too has run out of life. It won’t respond to be switched on for even a second to offer them at least some specks of illumination.
“Very strange.”
“Yours doesn’t switch on either?”
“I know the battery was fully charged when I left for the bus station.”
“How strange.” A contemplative tone couched those words. Somehow there was a subtle sense of relief in it, like when you are compelled to a moment of inactivity that becomes a respite; one that is secretly welcome.
“Are we alone Jaliya?”
“Alone?” An almost stupefying question he thinks. How does a person respond to that?
“Yes, that’s what I am wondering. Are we?”
“We are inside a bus loaded with passengers Rachana. I don’t understand.”
“But are we?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are we actually in a bus full with passengers?”
How can Jaliya respond to that? Her question has him almost meditating on the words that he must interact with and produce his own corresponding thoughts to in a verbal response.
“How could we not be? We got into one in Nandyal, I don’t understand Rachana.” Yes, truly Jaliya is perplexed by Rachana’s ontological questions.
“This isn’t how this ride goes Jaliya. By now we should have passed several small towns. They are usual short stops along this route...” There is some staidness in the way she said it, he cannot help feel unsettling.
“...And the passengers who go on this journey don’t all fall asleep in a total silence. There isn’t any sign of their presence. Not a sound.”
“As if everyone else just switched themselves off.”
“It’s so strange.”
Yet it is true. There isn’t the vaguest sound coming from a being other than the two of them. These are Indians after all, thinks Jaliya. Their presence is so undeniable at times. There is a certain jarring way about most of them.
“Do cinema halls ever become like this?” Her voice is a tease. He is jostled out of the daunting feeling that sought to overcome him.
“Cinema?” She senses his face grow a smile, by the sound of how he says– “Cinemawa pilliyak!”
“Cinema-wa... pilli-...pilli-”
“Pilliyak!” His soft laughter in the darkness is a welcome sound to her.
“Pilliyak?” Her giggle complements the moment.
How exactly do they sound to Rachana? What could they mean to her? These Sinhala words that Jaliya poured out into the darkness? To her they are but sounds that may hint of some possible guessable meaning. The ‘signifiers’ may have found some landing on her lips, but they are not yet demystified to her. Words from a land that she has only yet encountered through the young man she sits next to.
“A friend of mine once said it Rachana. He is a writer, back home, in Sri Lanka. I noted it down in my memory, made a mental note of it. I thought there was something very profound in that line, though he just cackled it out towards the end of a night of drinking. His senses becoming doused by the arrack, yet keeping focus on the topic a group of us discussed with a lot of interest, cinema.”
The word ‘Cinemawa’ is explained to Rachana as an ‘acquisition’ of the English noun to the contemporary Sinhala dialect with the suffixation of the ‘wa’ sound, which serves more or less in the functioning of the ‘the’ article. And what of the ‘pilliyak’? She is curious beyond the tones her voice suggests. The word itself has an amusing sound, she thinks jovially. Amusing, yes surely, amusing.
“Pilliyak. It’s the singular form of the word ‘pilli’. Pilli in the Sinhala language, Rachana, relates to a form of witchcraft, voodoo. An evil spirit would be summoned by a kattandiya, a voodoo practitioner, and this spirit would then take an earthly form, it could be of a man, a woman, a dog, or even some deadly venomous arachnid like a scorpion. This conjured creature or ‘form’ is a ‘pilliyak’. A creature neither naturally of our world, nor of the intangible spirit form. But it will do the bidding of whoever summoned it, unquestioningly. And there is only but one order made to such a creature. To find and kill a given victim.”
“How horrible!” Somehow the darkness that was innocuous, throughout this journey so far, seemed to slide over her a coldness. It made her shudder. And somehow the earlier phonologically amusing ‘pilliyak’ that plopped onto her ears and popped out of her lips seems abhorrent.
“That is the sole purpose of a ‘pilliyak’. It takes form in the world of men only to end a life of some unfortunate person who will suffer an unimaginably violent death within mere hours of coming into contact with it. Becoming uncontrollably feverish the victim will erupt finally into a maniacal seizure and howl out shrieks gripped in a state of horrific insanity, ending his misery as his mouth spews blood and the body falling lifeless.”
She feels the coldness of this night air move on her. It’s as if it wants to settle on her like a second skin that will subtly claim her, cocooning her into a state of vulnerability. No, she will not let it claim her. And be spirited away to sleep.
“Once, many years ago, when I was a schoolboy, I was told about this form of witchcraft for the first time by the grandfather of one of my friends. We were sitting in the veranda of his grandparents’ place in their old village, a place nestled in a cool hilly region...” Rachana senses Jaliya’s nostalgia rising quietly in him. His words have now broken the skin of coldness the darkness slid over her.
“...There were three of us sitting around him with cups of hot ginger tea. It was a quiet evening Rachana, outside the veranda the night enclosed the geography, making the mountains in the distance to appear as silhouettes. The flavourful tea we relished with every sip. The steam rising from our cups gently curled in the coolness of the air. He then told us, our friend’s grandfather, of how he had heard as a boy the story of how four traders had once been the victim of a ‘pilliyak’ in their very village. A story that made the cool of the night air turn into a coldness on my skin, making a slight shiver run in me... It had happened when the village was just beginning to get set up, he told us. People had moved in from different directions to find better prospects for both trade, and crop cultivation. There had been only four shops in the whole village, owned by four cousins who had pioneered the founding of the village. The story goes that one morning a rodiya had come to the shop of the eldest of the four traders. A rodiya is a member of the very lowest caste. They are the outcastes, the ostracised. Their ancestry being founded on the ignominy of having slaughtered and eaten the flesh of a cow during the olden days of Sinhala kings. It was such a heinous barbarity in the eyes of the people at the time, the perpetrators of the sacrilegious act, their families, and their progeny were condemned as the ostracised, the ‘Rodee’. They would visit villages for paltry trade and labour hoping to earn some sustenance, but would not be allowed to reside within the borders of any village. They would have their own encampments, settlements in outlands closer to the wilderness. And so, that rodiya, a young man who had no money on him had asked for a half pound of salt, urging the tradesman to accept a cured python skin as payment. The rodiya had been scoffed at and told sneeringly that if he has no money on him, to ask his mother to come by nightfall in lieu of payment. The humiliated young man pained by the hooting laughs of the villagers who were at the shop had walked with his head downcast. But, he had turned back and asked the trader if he would in fact give the half pound of salt if his mother were to visit him at nightfall. The merchant had boisterously laughed and said that if she stays with him till dawn he will give her not half but a whole poun
d of salt! The men had roared in laughter as the young rodiya simply looked at his antagonist dejectedly and said with a hapless sigh, that he will tell her to come see him. That evening, at dusk, a middle age woman had come to each of the four shops and spoken to each of the tradesmen. Asking which of them had wanted her to call on him on the matter of the half pound of salt her son had told her of. The story goes that none of the traders had been able to even respond to her query; they had been seized with fright at the sight of her face. Her eyes had been simply two empty black holes. By daybreak the following morning all four shopkeepers were dead. Throughout the night they had been gripped in a demonic fever and howled and screamed like wild animals until the sun came up. And blood had flowed out of their mouths, before collapsing lifelessly... Rachana, the rodee people to this day are feared for their deadly witchcraft.”
“What a frightful story! The pilliyak is an awful thing Jaliya! Why would your friend ever think of comparing the cinema to that?”
Rachana sounds genuinely perturbed over what she feels is an affront made upon the art of the moving image. An assault on the most appealing form of storytelling bequeathed to the modern world.
Truly a legitimate question. Why? What was behind that remark? After all the romanticism he has spoken of to her about the mesmerising ways of cinema, after telling her of that rapturous experience of watching The Barber of Siberia, why did he say such a thing?