Mark de Silva - Square Wave

They gorged on the pink meat, the skin sweating fat and blood. They dug out the marrow from steaming bones. There was too much. Two of the birds were tossed into the marsh. Their crisp bodies, their taut, charred skin shrunk tight over bony scaffolds, their gaping bellies, they watched it all sink in brackish waters. Manaar, the northernmost province where entry and exit were possible, was close now, and they had the full stomachs that might carry them through this time.

But the king’s men had not been far behind. They were soon overtaken in the swamps. Their lead had been lost roasting birds. The Englishmen saved their lives by playing off the dash as an especially wide merchant wander.

Darasa took Rutland through the covel only for contrast with the proper Buddhist temple they were headed to. He related how the jaddeses sometimes appeared mad, and it was then that they were taken for gods, not devils. Advice was sought. The people would pose questions of many sorts, practical, metaphysical, political, personal. The priest would answer all in the same tone, riddling and frenzied by turns, and his words would achieve a gravitas they could not approach in saner moments.

Unlike the jaddeses, Darasa said, the people could be inhabited only by devils, not gods. But they talked much the same as the priests then. Rutland had seen a man in the forest writhing and shaking. First he thought it a case of the sacred disease — epilepsy — or snakebite, perhaps; but as he approached to give succor, the man started mixing local sayings and proverbs, and indeed some European ones too, into novel, unimagined maxims, deforming and inventing meanings, so much so that though the grammar of sense remained, Rutland could not follow him.

He was convinced that something intelligible was said, if only his capacity to comprehend could keep pace with the man’s capacity to pronounce. He couldn’t call them ravings. Rutland had heard those many times, in Yorkshire and St. Andrews, by his ostensibly possessed countrymen. Maybe it was they who merely had the sacred disease. For the Sinhalese man’s speech did not bear much resemblance. In the British cases, there was just the simpleminded repetition of a few phrases, invocations of the Devil and of God: nothing nearly so complex and creative as what he was hearing from this man.

He wondered whether the Sinhalese possession, then, was the genuine sort, and what had come before, in his homeland, were merely the babblings of the mentally deficient. Or could it be that the devils possessing the Sinhalese were simply cleverer than Satan? Perhaps this was owed to their multiplicity, their regional grounding, each devil having his province and jurisdiction. Might there be spiritual specialties, smaller expertises exceeding any single intelligence, ones that issued not in universal claims, but in both ones tailored to the region of origin and ones that were crossbred, the most fertile of all, which correlated to the various routes one might traverse the country by?

Rutland conveyed to Darasa what he could of these thoughts, which put the monk in mind immediately of the prophet of the god without name. The god, or anyway the prophet, first made himself known by a trail of fallen dewals , temples of the gods, which were bound to the covels by a common commitment to idolatry (both sorts were held in less regard than the vehars, the proper Buddhist temples). The prophet claimed, through his messengers — he, like his god, was never seen — that the nameless one had commanded that the other gods’ temples be razed.

Over several months, collapsed temples appeared across the north, from Trincomalee through Anuradhapura. Chunks of clay with branches running through them lay scattered about, no less than the people’s offerings. The relics included arms (some of them European), clay figures (some of them Virgin Marys), and collections of household objects that were also the symbols of embedded gods. These were all carefully defaced, the clay figures dismembered, the swords bent in two and displayed in their abasement.

The people shrugged off the nameless one at first, but as his destructive powers grew, and the wreckage accumulated, their allegiances shifted. Next to the rubble of the dewals the villagers would leave fresh victuals and new items to be enchanted by the god.

The prophet, finding so much success, thought he might be not only a god but a king. Through his messengers, prophets of the prophet, he declared his intentions to establish a northern kingdom that would overlap Rajasingha’s.

The king had been happy enough for the prophet to rule over the next world. But not this one too. He dispatched soldiers to the north to monitor the remaining dewals. Eventually, in the night, the prophet and several of his disciples were discovered undermining a temple. The squat Dravidian and his assistants were brought before the king, who asked his name. Munjan. This incarnated god was bisected. The resulting aspects of the man-god were incinerated in the center of town, just outside the royal court. In the morning, in front of the smoldering pit of Munjan’s bones, there were flowers, victuals, and relics.

Rutland and Darasa came to another clearing, this one with rice paddies, clusters of coconut trees, and livestock, all managed by local farmers. They paid their taxes in harvests, Darasa said, and not to the king but to the vehar, where they maintained its monks. The king provided men to help collect the produce, look after the livestock, cook the meals, and serve the food as needed, when the farmers themselves could not.

At the center of Ratukela, holy satellite partner of Belemby, was the vehar, just as the administration was at the center of the king’s townships. None but the townsmen were admitted to pray. Women, even the best of them, were thought in some way unfit to affirm the destruction of want, the prime doctrine of the Buddha.

At noon the townsmen would serve the monks food and give offerings to paintings or drawings of past ones. The monks arranged themselves in a row, with space for the likenesses that were interspersed among them. The men would move down the row, ladle in hand, each offering a different dish to the monks. With a nod a monk accepted, with an extended hand he declined. The plates of the likenesses were always piled highest, as only they never refused.

Rutland and Darasa regarded the stone vehar, sober yet grand. The roof’s lime-whitened edge was inlaid with onyx in a pleasing but inscrutable pattern. The temple dated back centuries at least, and the current Sinhalese builders could not match the skill of the originals, which meant that every renovation was also a defacement, an aesthetic and perhaps spiritual diminishment. So the Buddhist priests, the senior ones especially, liked the vehars restored as little as possible. As long as the walls didn’t collapse, and the roof mostly held the rains at bay, they preferred the unreconstructed shelter, vulnerable though it was. Rajasingha was pleased to go along with this, as it came at a savings to him.

They entered the temple from a side entrance and went up a set of stairs to a long, narrow room full of loose papers and bound books stacked on the tables, the benches, and the floor. Darasa headed toward the back, but just inside the door, Rutland saw what looked like an Arabic scroll with a set of calculations in familiar numerals at its center. A trader’s tally sheet. Next to that was a small book of recipes in a Germanic language, probably Dutch, he couldn’t tell.

Beyond the stacks were several sea charts laid out on benches, the oddest of them being a map buried in the face of a jester. A hood — the left half yellow, the right orange, with belled tassels — was pulled tight around the world-face. It merged with the jester’s suit, which was in the same colors, trimmed with gold piping, and decorated with medallions at the shoulder, as a ranking army officer’s might be. There was an inscription to the jester’s right: