‘What, Shastri-gale, you insist that I should come, but when I come you are not there. Every day you disappear. But your wife treats me with great courtesy.’
Karunakara Pundit took a pinch of snuff, then continued in an intimate tone, ‘Your wife didn't reply to me when I asked her whether you have changed your bed-chamber. Perhaps I shouldn't have asked that question when you were not there … But tell me, do you find that the house is more peaceful now?’
The charm of Pundit's words calmed Shastri's mind. Pundit went on, ‘I have asked you this because whenever I come to your house I see an angry spirit hiding in some dark corner or other, lying in wait to get hold of you. It is no ordinary spirit, but a bloodthirsty one. So you must keep meditating on the mantra that I gave you.’
‘I came to ask you not to come in the evening, but in the morning. I am rarely at home in the evening — I have another garden that I have to look after. There is some disease in the coconut grove.’
Shastri tried to say this in a friendly manner. Earlier, he had imagined that Pundit did not know of his relationship with Radha. Yet now he felt frightened because, if Pundit could hear a spirit hiding in a corner of the house, wouldn't he know everything?
‘Do you see something red burning in your brain?’ Pundit continued. ‘If, by God's grace, everything goes well, you will feel cool eyes opening in your heart. Until then, you will never be free from the bloodthirsty spirit. Such spirits make you roar “me me me” and so there is no peace for you. Think of the blue sky, imagine yourself floating in it, and meditate. I have prayed to my ishtadevata that she should warn me if either you or your wife is in danger. You requested that I come in the morning, but that's not possible for me. I have my own vows to keep, and patients come to see me.’ He took another pinch of snuff and said, ‘Look here, I too have a weakness. As long as we live in the body, we are all human. Kama, krodha, moha, leave no one untouched.’ Pundit laughed and gathered his dishevelled hair into a knot. Shastri remembers that he burned, seeing how attractive Pundit looked as he tied up his hair.
Feeling he was under a spell, Shastri wanted to shout, ‘Don't come home when I am not there!’ If only he could say this, Pundit's spell would be broken. But he could not make the words come out of his mouth. ‘If this Pundit has such a spell on me, what about Saroja?’ Worrying over this, he drove his car back to the village. ‘Pundit looks like a great connoisseur, perhaps he eats some special thing to make his breath smell so intoxicating … and what sandal-paste does he put on his body?’ he wondered.
As soon as he reached home, Shastri began to fidget, thinking ‘Saroja cooks and serves my food, gives me coffee whenever I want, but without speaking or looking at me, and even when she does look, her eyes still seem to be gazing far away. But when she sits with a book, her eyes appear to fix on something. Then she seems so absorbed, it's as if she is communing with herself. When she is stringing jasmine flowers her teeth bite her lower lip and she smiles as if sweetly conversing with the stem of the flower. Sometimes she puts her hands on her hips and, gazing at the parijata tree, hums to herself. All these things she does when she thinks that I am not looking at her. Otherwise, she is like another ghost in this house.’
Shastri began to feel anguish whenever he prepared himself to sleep with Saroja. After lying by her side for a while and finding himself unable to do anything, he would get up and go to Radha. One night, telling himself that Pundit probably would not come, he went to Radha, who made him drink almond milk and advised him not to come to her house, but to sleep with his wife.
She tried to teach him ways of seduction by showing him what he should do around the thigh, around the yoni, how to set the scene to win over Saroja. Shastri felt very envious, thinking that some other man must have done all these things to Radha. ‘It's not as if you have no such knowledge. Why should I have learned it from anyone else?’ Trying to console him, she continued, ‘Have you forgotten? What have you not done to me when you brought me to this house, and what have you not got me to do to you? It seems a wicked spirit has entered you and made you dull’ she laughed. Shastri was shocked to hear her speak about the spirit in the same words that Pundit had used.
The next day, wanting to test his suspicions, he went at his usual time in the evening to Radha, but waited until eleven o'clock before coming back home. Pundit's car was in front of his house. His heart began to pound heavily. He feared that he might murder two people that night.
Trembling, he pushed the door to his house. It was not bolted. ‘What guts!’ he thought, wondering in his rage at their boldness. His ears were ringing from the blood that was rushing into his head, and along with the ringing in his ears he heard the alap of music. ‘The bastards must be going at their work together with the music on the radio,’ he thought. His legs felt weak. The music was coming from the puja room where Pundit had conducted the ritual. He must have already made her naked there, telling her she would become sacred. Now the bastard must be giving her womb his gift of seed. Shastri groped his way to the door of the room. It was closed. He pushed it open.
Ten buds of light were burning in two brass oil-lamps. Between them sat Saroja, hair over her breast, one leg folded under her, playing on the tamboura. Although Shastri had pushed open the door noisily, her eyes remained closed. She kept on playing the tamboura brought from her mother's house as if his coming there was of no consequence at all. He knew that she had been taught music, but he had never heard her sing like this.
In front of her, Pundit was sitting in the lotus posture. Not looking at Shastri, yet aware that he had come, he signalled for Shastri to sit beside him. Pundit began to join the alap. Now his voice would merge with hers, continue where she stopped, and she would anticipate and join him again …
‘Arrey, he's playing host to me in my own house!’ Not knowing what to do, Shastri sat. Saroja finished singing, touched the tamboura to her eyes, and put it down. In the soft cool light of the oil-lamp, nothing was clearly visible. Shastri held his breath, feeling the red eyes hastening to open in his brain. At the same time, he thought, ‘No, I would not be able to beat and kill either Pundit or Saroja. I have become impotent.’
When the music ended, Pundit said to Saroja, ‘I will come tomorrow,’ and left the room. Shastri heard him slip on his chappals. Then heard the sound of his car starting. Then the drag on the first gear, and then the silence of all sounds receding. And then, in the cowshed, the now-and-then sound of the cows’s bells as they chewed. And then no other sound. He thought, ‘There must be only ghosts now, silently walking back and forth on their turned-around feet’
Saroja got up and, as if nothing had happened, went to the bedroom. Shastri collapsed where he sat, as if he had died and become a ghost.
Then a strange thing happened to him — a fearful sound arose in his closed mouth, as if he had become a cruel beast secretly wandering among the deep bushes of a thick jungle.
The sound he made was a long sound, going higher and higher, then falling and falling into silence, terrifying him even when silent … and then it began rising again. It was a moan, and it was the bellowing of a cruel animal.
No human animal could produce such a sound.
Shastri felt that his body was making a sound more terrible than the cruellest language, something like the empty husk of a language. Inside him now there swelled a huge prideful demon that could eat language, that would destroy the waves of alap created by Saroja's divine throat a little while ago. It was something that could destroy all beautiful and tender things, kill the earth's inborn urge for good, for what nurtures the roots of plants and trees, for what makes birds build nests for their young, for what gives insects the power to move. Moaning, full of the enormous malevolence inside him, he moved with long strides to his bedchamber. He lighted a lamp and looked down at Saroja as she was drifting into sleep.