Roberto Calasso - Ka

Śaryāti appeared humbly before the anthill. He saw clots of blood where Cyavana’s eyes had shone their light up toward Sukanyā. Śaryāti said: “My daughter Sukanyá is careless, but she means no harm. Relent, we pray you.” “Sukanyā…,” came a distant voice from the anthill. There followed a few short words: “What can I do but curse her — and all of you with her? Or, alternatively, marry her.” “I shall have to get advice,” said Śaryāti.

They talked it over for a long time. Sukanyā was so desirable that her family had for years been dreaming up plans for gaining the greatest possible advantage from her marriage. Alliances, land, palaces… “Sukanyā would certainly bring us a treasure or two,” said one counselor abruptly. “But the Brahmān’s curse means losing everything. We have no choice.” So Cyavana’s proposal was accepted.

Sukanyā saw father, friends, dogs, and elephants head off in a huge cloud of dust and chatter. Perhaps she was never to see them again. Cyavana, her husband, had crept out of the anthill and appeared in all his ancientness like a sheath of smooth bone. That night Sukanyā tried to run away. But she hadn’t gone a pace or two before she found a shiny black snake in her path. Sliding out of the anthill, it arched up to glue itself to her body. Sukanyā stepped back, her face suddenly mature, and fell silent for long time. Beside her the motionless Cyavana did not even raise his eyes.

Her life with Cyavana was one of unyielding monotony. Having once let her rancor and nausea overflow, Sukanyā was surprised to find herself taking a secret pleasure in looking after her decrepit husband. “Since my father has consigned me to this man, I must do it,” she said to herself at the beginning, gloomily determined. Then she was forced to admit that she wouldn’t give up dressing and undressing. feeding and washing that old man for anything in the world. They spoke only rarely, but Sukanyā felt Cyavana’s eyes on her at every instant of the day. It was as if his gaze gushed up from a glowing well. Even when she indulged in her favorite pastime — that of imagining furious and exhausting lovemaking with splendidly handsome men, whom she had never known, going from one to the next in her fantasies — she knew that Cyavana never left her: on the contrary, it was when Sukanyā pictured the most violent and subtle erotic gestures that he slipped into her mind. And it was not a persecution. Her pleasure was kindled by the presence of that eye, the tightening of that, imperceptible cord that held them together.

As she was walking in the forest, gathering what scanty food there was, Sukanyā thought: “Cyavana and I: the people we most resemble are Agastya and Lopāmudrā. Time and again, and for such a long time too, I keep thinking of the words to that hymn I heard as a child: ‘For many autumns I’ve done my best, night and day, for many mornings, that make us older. Age chases beauty from the body. Must men never go to their women?’ But when Lopāmudrā said those words, she could already feel her beauty, her great beauty, fading — and I have only just grown to be a woman. Then Agastya was still a vigorous ṛṣi , while Cyavana is a poor heap of bones. Lopāmudrā could look back on her life as a caravan laden with emotions. I can recall but a few syllables of the hymns I heard people singing in distant rooms. My life begins beside someone who has already seen to much of it — and denies me the intemperance I crave. If anyone were able to watch us here in our solitude, they would say that Cyavana burns his entire self in tapas , and I in my desire for a lover. And that we shall never be able to meet. Yet I feel it is not so. When I touch him undressing him or when Cyavana leans on me, I know that we are lovers. In the web of his wrinkles, I meet his eye and something gives in the middle of my breast. Then I think of the other words of that hymn, words I didn’t understand at all, or frankly even care about, where it says that ‘the powerful ṛṣi had cultivated the two colors.’ Perhaps Agastya knew to attend not just to his own fierce exercises but to Lopāmudrā’s fierce desires too? Was there a way of emerging victorious from the ‘battle of the hundred stratagems’ that desire casts us into — or rather, desires, since ‘the mortal has many desires’? Is it possible to comply with the desire that rises ‘from here, from there, from everywhere,’ without losing oneself? And is it true that the earliest ancients, who spoke of the truth with heavenly beings, never got to the bottom of — the truth? Cyavana and I have never spoken about such things, as if they didn’t exist, as if he were nothing more than a worn-out ascetic and I a restless girl, homesick for her friends’ chatter. Yet I’m constantly speaking about them inside my head, and it’s his voice that answers me. One day I even remembered two lines of the hymn they used to whisper behind my back, because I was still a little girl. But I won a bet with one of my sisters who was already a woman, and as a prize I forced her to tell me what they said. ‘Lopāmudrā makes her man melt, the foolish woman drains the groaning sage dry.’ When I remembered those lines, I thought that I would like to be as foolish as Lopāmudrā myself. And, while I was thinking that, Cyavana, who was sitting in his usual position, smiled at me like a man of the world and asked me for a bowl of water.”

One day Cyavana said to Sukanyā: “What do you think I was doing, while I was under the anthill? I was waiting for you. Not just because I desire you, but because I need you. And you still don’t know why.” The last words were spoken as though to himself. Then he went on: “When you appeared in front of the anthill, I called you, but you didn’t hear me. My voice was too faint, and your mind was elsewhere. But you couldn’t help noticing my glittering eyes, and you tortured them with those thorns. The ants got drunk on my blood. Never had the world sent me such a painful sign. And it was the necessary first step to reaching you. If I hadn’t stared at you from the anthill, you would never have noticed my existence. If you hadn’t wounded me, I wouldn’t have been able to unleash the curse that is the only power I have. If I hadn’t cursed your family, I wouldn’t have had anything to offer in exchange for you. If you did not now belong to me, I couldn’t offer you for…,” Cyavana stopped. Sukanyā didn’t want him to finish the sentence.

As on every other day, Sukanyā went down to bathe in a quiet, delightful bend in the Sarasvatī. While she was in the water, she had the habit of running through variations of her imaginary love affairs, which, by now, were as numerous as they were tangled. It was a private ritual. She celebrated it with the same devotion and diligence she would any other ritual, but with the added pleasure of caprice and mental waywardness. She looked up from the water toward the bank and the familiar screen of trees. That day, for the first time, there was something new. She saw two young men sitting in the same position on two boulders, each the same distance from herself. Both men had one leg slightly raised, one the right leg, the other the left. They formed two points in a perfect triangle. The third point, Sukanyā realized, lay within her own eyes. She immediately noticed that the two strangers were of fearful beauty. But another thought unnerved her: could it be that the visible world had become a double mirror, which she was now looking into? What she saw to her right was the exact inversion of what she saw to her left. Could the world, this place of disorder, be thus — or was the scene before her nothing more than the projection of the story her mind was inventing as she swam? Alarmed, amazed, she didn’t realize that she was climbing out of the water. At which she saw something that left her paralyzed. At the same moment, curling the same corner of two mouths, the young men smiled. And Sukanyā heard these words: “Woman of the lovely thighs, who are you? Who do you belong to? What are you doing in the forest? Speak, we want to know.” Sukanyā blushed, her whole dripping body turned red. She hurried to pick up her clothes, a strip of muslim she never changed. Eyes on the ground, she said in a barely audible voice: “I am the daughter of Śaryāti. I belong to Cyavana.” She felt angry then, because the young men responded with a shrill laugh. “Why on earth did your father give you to a man who’s already a wreck? Even among the gods there’s no one so beautiful as you. You were made to be adorned in the most precious robes, not these rags. Leave Cyavana, he’s not complete, whole, perfect, as you are. There’ll always be something missing in your life, almost everything in fact. Choose one of us. These are your best years. Don’t toss them on a rubbish heap…” Sukanyā no longer felt either amazement or desire, just a cold fury. She didn’t even answer and walked away toward the place she considered her home, a flimsy cane shelter near the anthill.