Tooth and Nail, Fur and Scale Page 7

  Ha ha . . . it might have been a bit of a fluke, but yeah! I kind of did!

  Amazing!

  We’re walking away from the tree and the man. In the mist, they both look strikingly similar. Crooked, spiky and withered. We exit the cremation grounds, whipping off the sari, which comes undone without any fuss. Underneath, we’re wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt. Finding the phone inside a zippered pocket, we call an Uber.

  We cut it really close with this one.

  What do you think we’ll go as next time?

  Next time? Now that you know how to erase memories, don’t you just want to try possessing other people?

  Meh. I’m not really interested in that kind of thing. I’d be fine never possessing another person in my life.

  Huh.

  Besides, we’re doing so well here! Why try to fix something that isn’t broken?

  Huh.

  Assuming you’re okay with that . . .

  . . .

  Well?

  You know, I think I am.

  Good. That’s good to know!

  The car arrives ten minutes later, and we get inside, discussing what we can watch once we get back home. The driver tries to make small talk, but goes quiet when he realizes that we aren’t too keen on talking to him. After all, we’ve got all the conversation we could want right here in the comfort of our head.

  PISHACHA

  In Hindu mythology, pishachas are a class of demons that inhabit cremation grounds. They’re shape-shifters, and can even choose to become invisible—which is a useful power to have if your original form involves claws, fangs, bulging veins and red eyes that are popping out of their sockets.

  Pishachas prey on humans, either draining our ‘spiritual energy’ or by straight up eating our flesh and drinking our blood. They’re also heavily into the whole demonic possession cliché—entering human bodies, making us sick, messing with our minds, etc. As is usual in such cases, there are mantras and rituals that you can use to expel them and keep them at bay.

  But if you’re feeling a little crazy or you’ve got a cold that just won’t go away, definitely contact a doctor before you call for the exorcist. They cost much less in the long run.

  SAFE HAVEN

  Sharada pulled at the mule’s lead, willing it to trot faster, but the animal brayed insolently and jerked its head away. It was tired, of course, under the huge load of sandalwood that she had forced upon it. She sighed, watching the last rays of the sun disappear through the trees, and lit the small oil lantern that hung from the creature’s neck.

  She knew she had been greedy—she should have stopped cutting and turned back at least an hour earlier. She toyed with the idea of taking some of the wood off the animal’s back—easing its burden—but the thought of leaving a stack of good sandalwood lying on the forest floor for someone else to pick up was . . . irritating.

  So she trudged beside it, and worried. There had been news of travellers disappearing on the forest path, and rumours of limbless human skeletons found in the underbrush. She mumbled mantras that were said to ward off evil, but they felt impotent against the encroaching night.

  They were still miles from home when the mule began to pull away from her, braying shrilly. She caressed its sweat-slick neck and cajoled it, but the beast was inconsolable. The lantern around its neck swung wildly for a few seconds, animating the shadows, before its light went out. She even tried to untie some of the wood from its back, but it kicked out with its hind legs, nearly smashing her ribs in. She retreated just in time.

  She felt, rather than saw, the thing that crashed into the mule’s back from the branches above, snapping its spine instantly. Somehow, the beast kept struggling, and she heard the predator rip its stomach open with fervent swipes of its paws and smelled its bowels leaking on to the forest floor.

  Sharada found herself running blindly down the path. She was aware of a warm wetness creeping through her petticoat, but she didn’t scream. She couldn’t hear it following her, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t coming.

  She soon realized that she wasn’t running aimlessly—her legs were carrying her towards a definite destination. There was a temple upon a hill—a modest stone-carved affair—about half a mile ahead of her. The priest visited it only twice a week in the daytime, and it didn’t offer much protection in the way of doors that could be shut or barred . . . but maybe she could find a cranny to duck into, out of the beast’s reach.

  By the time Sharada reached the base of the hill, a brilliant pain was shooting through her muscles and her breath had become ragged. But she clambered up the slope, fuelled by fear, grasping for clumps of grass to pull herself up by. She finally fell to her knees on stone—smooth, flat granite—and looked up to see a brass bell hanging above her.

  Glancing over her shoulder, she picked herself up. The forest fell away, giving way to shrubbery around the hill, and she scanned it, looking for her pursuer. Was it possible that it had been satisfied with her mule? Was it possible that it would let her be?

  She was nearly convinced that there was nothing out there, when she saw it streak from tree to undergrowth—bright orange under the rising moon and patterned with thick, dark blades. Man-eater, she thought, and fled into the temple.

  She squeezed herself behind the stone idol inside the garbhagriha, struggling in vain to bring her breathing back to normal. She began cycling through all the prayers she knew at lightning speed, and when she heard a roar, she prayed in whimpers.

  To her surprise, the roar was answered by another call—this one a deep snarl, backed by a sharp and tinny resounding note. Something she couldn’t place. There was a crash then, uncomfortably close—from inside the temple, she guessed.

  She heard scuffling for what felt like a good ten minutes, punctuated by desperate growls and dull crashes, and it was only at the end that she realized she had stopped praying somewhere along the way.

  Sharada remained crouched behind the idol until she heard the birds chirping and saw the ruddy dawn through the temple’s entrance. Later, she would marvel at how alert and sensitive she had felt the entire time—every insignificant sight and sound from that period would be etched deeply in her memory.

  She saw the tiger sprawled out on the courtyard, and knew immediately that it was dead. Its fur was caked with blood, and two goring wounds stood out against its flanks. Dark streaks on the stone indicated that it had been brutally dragged across the temple’s premises. Its head was caved in.

  She approached it carefully, examining its wounds—and the bloody hoof prints on the stone. She pressed her palms to her brow, which was throbbing with exhaustion and confusion.

  Sharada turned around to face the temple, to offer thanks, and her eyes were arrested by a carving on the nearest pillar, which stood out as if in reply to her unspoken question.

  An elephant’s head stared at her with fierce eyes, atop a lion’s body with a serpent’s tail.

  Sharada brought her palms together and bowed to the little stone depiction of the yali, and quickly descended the hill. Something told her she shouldn’t linger.

  YALI

  If you’ve visited south Indian temples, you might have seen carvings of strange hybrid creatures on the walls and pillars—monsters with the bodies of lions, the heads (or just the tusks) of elephants and the hind legs of horses. Sometimes they’re depicted with wings, and sometimes with serpent tails.

  These are images of the yali, also known as the vyala. These magical creatures are supposed to be stronger than any natural predator, and it is believed that they guard the paths that lead to and from temples.

  THE GREAT UNDERSTANDING

  ‘Rrrrrrrriiippprrr!’

  The sound rang through space and time, and it came from below.

  ‘Eeeyyughh . . . which one of you was it this time?’ asked Mahapadma, rolling up his trunk and stuffing it in his mouth. ‘Thah wash nashhy!’

  ‘Ugh! I’m sure it was Virupaksha,’ said Bhadra, pinching his trunk shut with h
is forelegs. ‘He always ends up eating too much rajma for dinner, and we have to bear the consequences.’

  ‘But I had less than two tons last night,’ Virupaksha said. ‘I think it’s coming from your direction, Bhadra—you stinking liar!’

  ‘You putrid pachyderm!’

  Soon all sixteen of them were trading insults and accusations, occasionally forgetting to keep the world steady on their back.

  Akupara heard the ruckus on top of his shell and sniggered into his claws. The elephants always ended up fighting among themselves. And not one of them ever suspected that the ancient, thoughtful, soft-spoken, venerable Akupara could be the culprit. Akupara loved rajma, but what he liked best was playing a good prank on the elephants.

  ‘Enjoying a good laugh, my friend?’

  Akupara looked up and saw the blue-skinned man standing right in front of him.

  ‘Ah! My lord!’ he said, squinting. ‘Ha ha . . . yes . . . kind of. It averts the dullness, you know, if just for a while.’

  ‘I’m sure it does.’

  ‘It’s all right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Umm . . . it causes a bit of a tremor in the world, but that’s okay—the world is heading for another population explosion anyway.’

  ‘Oh! That’s good then,’ said Akupara too quickly, only to realize that he hadn’t really understood what the man meant. ‘Isn’t it?’

  The blue-skinned man sighed.

  ‘I can stop if you like. I don’t want to cause any harm . . .’ Akupara put on his most sincere face, widening his eyes and thrusting his jaw out.

  ‘Well.’ The man shrugged. ‘To tell you the truth, Akupara, it doesn’t really matter that much. Rather, it won’t in a few moments.’

  Akupara raised an eyebrow. The blue-skinned man could be quite cryptic sometimes. ‘Er . . . why do you say that?’

  ‘Because I’m afraid you’re going to be gone soon.’

  Huh, thought Akupara. ‘What do you mean? Gone where?’

  ‘Just gone. Gone from the universe.’

  What? ‘I-I don’t understand, my lord . . . is the universe disintegrating already? I thought we’d have at least another trillion years or so to go . . .’

  ‘No, no—the universe is just fine. It’ll change a little bit, but it’ll stick around. But you, specifically, and those elephants on top of you? You’re going to go.’

  A shiver ran down Akupara’s spine. Over the millennia, he’d had several weird conversations with the blue man, but this was a bit much! ‘But I’ve been here since the beginning!’ he said. ‘And isn’t the universe everywhere? Do you mean that I’m just going to . . . vanish?’

  ‘Well, vanishing isn’t the proper term, really. It’ll be more like . . . like you were never here to begin with.’

  ‘Huh!’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘Yes, of course! Hmm . . . it’s slightly hard to explain, but the gist of it is that humans are on the way to figuring out that your existence is . . . well . . . it’s impossible.’

  ‘Wha—? Ha ha ha!’ Akupara was unable to contain his laughter. ‘What do you mean, my existence is impossible? I’m right here!’

  ‘Look, there’s no reason to get upset.’

  ‘I’m not . . . I’m not upset. I’m just—that’s a ridiculous reason!’

  ‘Okay, listen. Let’s start with the earth. What is its shape?’

  ‘The earth? It’s a—like a three-dimensional circle, right?’

  ‘A sphere?’

  ‘That’s right. A sphere.’

  ‘Was it always a sphere?’

  ‘Umm . . . yeah? Wasn’t it?’

  ‘You’re right! It was. But not really . . .’

  ‘What do you mean, not really?’

  ‘Well, you see, a long time ago, humans didn’t know that the earth was a sphere. In fact, they couldn’t imagine it being anything but flat. Because from where they’re standing, that’s how it looks.’

  Akupara blinked.

  ‘But at one point—even though you don’t remember it—the earth was that way. I mean, from the way it looks now, it’s actually impossible that it was ever anything but a sphere—but the fact is that it was once as flat as a dinner plate.’

  ‘Huh! I’m sure I’d remember that.’

  ‘Well, that’s kind of the point. Once humans proved that the earth was a sphere, it became so that it always was that way.’

  ‘Wait . . . how come you remember this—that the earth was once flat?’

  The blue-skinned man sighed again, looking a bit embarrassed now. ‘Well . . . the fact is . . . I’m supposed to just . . . know things. Mankind believes I know everything that ever was and ever will be—that I’m omniscient. And so I am.’

  ‘Okayyyy . . .’

  ‘I told you it’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Okay, but what are you saying then? That, like it was with the shape of the earth, somehow these humans are going to figure out that I can’t exist, and so then I won’t?’

  ‘Mmhmm.’

  Akupara’s shoulders slumped under his shell and his face fell. ‘But why? Why do they get to decide what’s possible and what isn’t? And why does it have to be me who disappears?’

  ‘Heyheyhey, big man! Don’t be so glum! This is just the way it goes, and it’s nothing to be sad about.’

  ‘But I—I don’t want to not exist!’

  ‘It’s not as bad as you think, Akupara! You won’t even know the difference. I promise you.’

  ‘Has this happened before? Have any other creatures disappeared because they were just disproved by humans?’

  ‘It happens all the time! Whole universes have gone out without a trace. Gods have passed on. Pantheons have been overturned. And it’s just going to keep happening.’

  ‘Till when?’

  ‘Till it’s all gone. All the magic. All the fantasy. Everything that can’t be sensed, probed and studied will cease to exist. There will come a day when even I’ll be nothing more than an abstract concept, if that.’

  ‘And that doesn’t bother you?’

  ‘Nah. Like I said, we won’t know the difference. In the end, the only thing that will remain is the adversary—the personification of everything that is evil. Because, you see, humans don’t really find it convenient to take the blame for the bad things that they do.’

  Akupara thought about this for a long time. A very long time. And all that while, the blue-skinned man floated right there in front of him, so close that Akupara saw two of him.

  ‘What about the elephants?’ he said finally. ‘Are you going to tell them too?’

  ‘I already did,’ said the man. ‘I’m omnipresent as well.’

  It was then that Akupara realized that the arguments about the mysterious flatulence had stopped. He raised his head as far as it would go and looked as far back as he could. And from the corner of his eye, he saw the elephants looking at him with shocked expressions.

  ‘It was me, guys,’ he said. ‘I was the one who did it.’

  He couldn’t tell if they were surprised by his confession. They were already looking as stunned as possible.

  ‘We’re apparently disappearing from existence,’ said Mahapadma.

  ‘Yeah. I heard.’

  ‘It’s kind of depressing.’

  It kind of was. Akupara was on the verge of tears himself. But the blue-skinned man had said he’d never know the difference, and he believed the guy.

  ‘Don’t worry, man,’ Akupara told the elephants. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  Akupara turned to the blue-skinned one, who had drifted far enough away to be seen clearly. And for the first time, Akupara noticed that he wasn’t really all that human-looking. He was a bit scaly, really. The armour on his back looked kind of like a shell, and his gauntlets were wide and tipped with claws.

  ‘So, how do we do this?’ Akupara asked.

  ‘Well, to begin with, you have to realize that you don’t exist.’

  ‘Hah
!’ said Akupara. ‘You make it sound pretty easy.’

  ‘It is! You wanna do it now?’

  Akupara shrugged.

  ‘Let me ask you a question,’ said the blue man-reptile-elephant thing. ‘What are you?’

  Akupara inhaled, puffing his chest out. ‘I’m Akupara,’ he said. ‘I hold the elephants up on my back and they hold up all of creation.’

  ‘No, no. That’s not what I meant. What are you? A tortoise or a turtle?’

  ‘Huh? What’s the difference?’

  ‘Well, the main one is that tortoises live on land and turtles live in water.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Where do you live, Akupara?’

  It had never occurred to Akupara to look down. Everything he had ever known had been above him. He held it all up. The elephants, the world, the gods, the demons, heaven and hell. Everything. But what held him up?

  Akupara looked down.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and was gone, without so much as a poof.

  AKUPARA

  According to some texts in Hindu mythology, Akupara was a ginormous turtle (or tortoise or terrapin) that carried sixteen elephants on its shell, who then balanced the world (or sky or universe) on their backs. So all of existence sort of depended on Akupara doing very little—which might be why there aren’t too many references to him anywhere.

  ‘Akupara’ apparently means ‘unbounded’ in Sanskrit. I take that to mean that he was infinite in size. He’d have had to be, right, to hold up the universe?

  But then the Mahabharata says he lived in a lake in the Himalayas, so what do I know?

  In a lot of old books, Akupara is conflated or confused with Kurma, an avatar of the god Vishnu. Probably because they were both tortoise-like creatures that held up great weights. Vishnu, as you might know, is supposed to be the preserver of the universe, and is usually depicted with blue skin.

  The whole turtle-that-holds-up-the-world thing seems to be kind of a running theme in mythologies. The ancient Chinese thought that the sky was held up by a giant sea turtle that (sadly) had its legs cut off. Some Native American traditions believe that earthquakes are caused by the World Turtle stretching under the weight on its shell.