Seeing Shastri growing pale, Sitamma asked, ‘Aren't you well? Didn't you sleep last night?’ and she gave him a wooden plank so he could sit in the kitchen.
‘Some five or six months passed like this. Then, I am told, early one morning the boy's mother got up and went to Tripathi. He was meditating in his puja room. This boy's mother was said to be a very graceful woman. Her eyes were exactly like the boy's. She wore the marriage-thread around her neck as well as this amulet. Tripathi told me all this, you see? — I started wanting to say something but I am telling you something else now — this boy's mother set down her trunk before Tripathi, touched his feet, and opened the lid of the trunk.
‘Tripathi couldn't believe his eyes. There were at least two maunds of gold. A necklace, ear studs, bangles, and a gold belt. Not only that, there were also bars of gold. Tripathi showed it all to me. He guarded that trunk like a cobra.
“Think of my son as your grandson, and think of me as your daughter,” Dinakar's mother said, bowing down to God and then to Tripathi. Tripathi touched her head, blessing her, and locked the trunk in his iron safe. Could my two eyes alone be enough to see all that gold? The ornaments were from the days of the Vijayanagar Empire. They were on top, and the bars of gold were below.
‘A month passed after this happened, and Tripathi became attached to Dinakar. He was like a child of the house. Tripathi had him and his mother live in his house, got him educated with his own money. He never touched the gold. But that is another big story …
‘One morning, Dinakar's mother went to bathe in the river Ganga, and she never came back. They found her corpse some distance away. People said she could have slipped into the river. But everyone in Tripathi's house wondered why she had put the amulet around her son's neck just before she went to bathe. Why did she wake her son so early that day, and give him milk to drink?’
Sitamma had begun to cry. Dinakar guessed whose story she was telling. Shastri, sitting with closed eyes, counted his beads.
‘As soon as I saw the amulet, I knew that it contained a Sri Chakra and was from our parts. From which house is this boy, who is his father, why did his mother leave home with a little child? Shastri-gale, you may recite from the Purana, but only Veda Vyas could have written a story like Dinakar's. The whole country thinks this child has grown into a very intelligent man, but this man doesn't even know who is his mother, who is his father, which is his town, so perhaps he wants to believe that God himself is his mother and father and that is why he wears these kinds of clothes and goes wandering here and there.’
Then Sitamma looked over at Shastri and became alarmed.
‘What is it? What is wrong?’ she said, and quickly brought him water to drink.
5
As he listened to Sitamma's words, Shastri felt as if two pairs of red eyes were staring at each other furiously in his head. At times his second wife, Mahadevi, had looked at him silently with just such hatred. And at times he had looked at her in the same way. Later, he would feel puzzled, wondering why such fury burned in him without any reason.
His daughter had looked at him with that kind of hatred when she left home. When he had heard that she was in love with somebody in college, he had felt that burning fury and had said words that should never have been spoken. She too had spoken terrible words to her father. ‘Can I be the same person,’ he had asked himself in wonder, ‘who in reciting a Purana can describe Prahlad or Dhruva with such moving tenderness?’
He wanted to know, yet he felt as if he was always running away from himself. Would the amulet around Dinakar's neck stop this running away? Seeing it had somehow brought him face to face with the my sterious rage inside him. Suddenly realizing that both pairs of furious staring eyes were his own, he felt fresh terror and again tried to turn his mind somewhere else.
Then he said, ‘Sitamma, keep Dinakar in your house for two days. When I come back I will take him to my house in the jungle. He has agreed to stay with me for a couple of days before going to Kerala. I will go now, I won't eat anyway, because it is Ekadashi.’ Although urged not to leave, Shastri went, hired a taxi from the stand, directed it away from the proper road, and entered a forest in which was the ruined temple of a goddess whom he had chosen for special devotion. The taxi had to travel on a path fit only for bullock-carts. ‘I'll give you twice the fare,’ he had said in the tone of the local landlords, and so the driver agreed to venture on the narrow bullock-cart roads. Shastri stopped the taxi in a thick jungle. He told the driver, ‘Wait for half an hour,’ then he pushed his way through bushes, making a path for himself until he stood before the ruined shrine of Bhagavati.
Shastri had been paying two hundred and fifty rupees each month to a poor brahmin from a nearby village to come daily and light a lamp for Bhagavati. At one time he thought of building her a new temple, but had held back from doing so because he feared that the aura of the Devi would suffer if he interfered with the existing shrine. He believed this in spite of knowing that the Shastras allowed the rebuilding of a shrine once the proper rituals were performed. He believed that this very Bhagavati was the fierce goddess who presided over the eyes that were burning in his head.
About a year earlier, unable to stand the daily quarrels with his wife, he had made a vow to Bhagavati and then brought Mahadevi to this place. She had stood before Bhagavati and begun to stare as if in a trance. Then she gave such an intense shriek that it slashed the silence of the forest. Looking at Shastri with her piercing eyes, she started to babble. Her accusations terrified him. How could she know that he had killed his first wife by smashing her head with a wooden lid? Mahadevi roared that she had become the ghost of that wife, and would go on haunting him.
Mahadevi became Saroja herself. ‘Oh butcher brahmin, you killed me by beating me on my head! And were you not about to kill your daughter by your second wife?’
Shastri closed his eyes before Bhagavati and said, ‘Bhagavati, did you make Mahadevi say a lie? Why did you have me believe until now that I was a murderer? Is Dinakar my son or is he the son of that Malayali pundit? Give me a sign so that I may know the truth. Don't make me keep wandering like a wraith.’
But Shastri did not receive any sign, and the blood-red eyes in his head kept on staring in fury.
∗
He made his way out of Bhagavati's forest to where he had left the taxi. Then he directed the driver to take him to another village, some ten miles from Udupi.
In that village, there was only one big house, the one that Shastri had got built. When Shastri was in this house, the burning eyes in his head got cooled. It was the house of his mistress, Radha.
∗