A Night with a Black Spider: Stories

By Ambai and Aniruddhan Vasudevan

‘Since she was valorous, she said she was a man, and since Mahishan was speaking of love, he was feminine... If she was a combination of feminine and masculine qualities, why could he too not be a combination of the masculine and feminine?’

Setting the stage with the Asura Mahishan’s doomed love for the beautiful

• Language: English
• Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
• Release date: Jul 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9789386582256

Ambai

Dr CS Lakshmi has been an independent researcher in Women’s Studies for more than forty years. She has a Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She writes under the pseudonym Ambai in Tamil about love, relationships, quests and journeys and her short story collections have been published in Tamil and also translated into English. She is currently the Director of SPARROW (Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women).

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Introduction

Ionce met a woman who makes savouries and snacks for weddings. She told me that while leaving at the end of the day after making large quantities of snacks like murukku and thenkuzhal, it is important not to look back. Apparently, looking back at all that you managed to cook in one day might overwhelm you. You might be hit by a sudden exhaustion and the need to lie down as soon as you get home. But writing works differently. Here, it becomes important to constantly look back at what one has written. But no matter how often one looks back, one is never wonderstruck at one’s work. We only feel, ‘Is this all?’ One has to go past all that has been written. Then forge ahead. Targets have to be constantly set and abandoned.

Desire, loss, financial security, penury, friendship, loneliness, exhaustion, enthusiasm, disappointment, happiness, lust, detachment—stories lie at the tensions and pulls between these things. Life, too. It is in the constant struggle to know which is story, which is life, where does story end and life begin, where does life end and story begin, that writing happens. It is definitely a happening. A happening that catches one by surprise. A happening one can’t hold on to. As long as one is ready for surprises, it keeps coming like the touch of a feather, the force of a wave, the caressing of a breeze, a knife cut, a life-sucker.

Nirmal Verma says in one of his novels that for a writer to desire spiritual security is as fatal as an aspiration to material pleasure. For a writer, every place of refuge is a pitfall; you fall once, and the clear sky of creativity is lost forever. When A.K. Ramanujan was asked by a friend how he knew when a poem was complete, he is said to have replied, ‘A poem is never completed. At some point, I leave it.’ Even though his remark is about poems, I think it applies to stories too; I feel that stories too never find completion. The moment a writer finds that refuge called satisfaction, the sight of the sky that is the story, is lost.

Whenever one feels contented with what one has written and gets past the push and pull of life, stories cease to happen. If I were to put myself in the place of that woman who cooks for weddings, I must say that my murukkus come misshapen; some have even crumbled; some have stayed in the oil for a little too long and have reddened; some are not fully cooked; some broken because the batter hadn’t held together well. It is this dissatisfaction that keeps me returning to the act of writing. This dissatisfaction and the fact that a door in my mind is always open to that amazing happening called a story.

Therefore, my stories are not done. There will be another collection that comes out soon holding onto the tail of this one. Then another one holding to the tail of that one.

My other stories brought out in three collections, were translated by Lakshmi Holmstrom who is no more. Over the years a deep friendship had developed between us where arguments, disagreements, laughter and enjoyment of the work of translation were possible. I miss her and her affection. With Aniruddhan Vasudevan, who agreed to take up the task of translating these stories, a different way of working together has begun. It has brought some youthful abandon along with warmth and understanding with an approach that is astute but not rigid, to the original text and the translation. Preeti Gill, my close friend, who was always my reader, has become my agent with this book. I thank her for her commitment to my writing and thank Ravi Singh for making this a Speaking Tiger project. For my English translations I always begin by fighting with my editors and then at the end of it all, we become good friends. I thank Renuka Chatterjee, who sportingly went through this process.

My thanks to the sea that I can see through my window, the blue expanse of which comforts me whenever I am sad, mentally exhausted, or confused; to my foster children Khintu, Golu, and Sonu, who don’t know any Tamil, and who, even though they fill my days with fights, arguments, commotion, tears, and anger, have also brought to my life laughter, gaiety, and joy; and to my fellow traveller Vishnu, who has journeyed with me for forty-one years now, but has never once complained of weariness.

Mumbai Ambai

I June 2017

A Love Story with a Sad Ending

Mahishan could not accept the fact that he, and others like him, had to stay confined to the netherworld. He often wondered who decided that only the Devas, the demi-gods, deserved feasts of rice, ghee and meat.

The strength of ten thousand years of penance permeated his body. He was filled with the weight of that strength, and with the loneliness that comes with it. Loneliness spreads like an ocean on top of Mount Meru. Mahishan had delved into that loneliness and had touched its very depths. He was absolutely alone. He had not known a mother’s love. When his mother leaped onto his father’s funeral pyre, Mahishan emerged from her body. Not once had he experienced the gentle and warm touch of a father’s hand on his head. Nor did his father’s arms ever embrace him. Or bless him.

He knew the past, the present and the future. But the idea of his death was like a wondrous, empty space in his mind. He had asked Brahma for the boon of immortality. He did not like the way the Asuras, demons, died. As far as he knew, all Asuras were killed brutally. Didn’t they even have the right to ask for the perpetuation of their clan? His uncle Karamban, who was his father’s younger brother, and his father Ramban too, observed penances just to beget such a boon, had they not? Karamban stood in the waters at the confluence of five rivers, and Ramban stood in the middle of five fires—one in each of the four directions and the fifth, the sun above—under a banyan tree on the banks of the river, observing incredible austerities. They had done all of that only in the interests of future generations of their clan, hadn’t they? But Indiran, the leader of the Devas, could not bear it. He took the form of a crocodile, appeared in the river where Karamban stood in penance, dragged him into the river and killed him. When Mahishan’s father Ramban saw his brother being killed in that manner, he decided to cut off his head and die. But Agni, the God of Fire, appeared before him, stopped him from killing himself, and asked what he wished for. What did Ramban ask for at that moment? Didn’t he ask for a valorous son who would reign over all three worlds and before whom everyone would bow? Wasn’t that how Mahishan was born? He was born with the ability to understand how people of his clan were decimated.

The forms their enemies took to kill them—as a turtle, as a boar, even as half-lion and half-human—were manifold. That was why Mahishan asked Brahma to make him immortal. And what Brahma said in response to his wish still resounded in his ears: ‘Animate or inanimate, all things in the word are encompassed by time. I, too, am subject to the scale of time.’

That was when he modified his wish and asked that his death should only be at the hands of a woman. He did not really know women. The only woman he knew was his mother, who, out of her extraordinary love for her husband, dared to leap into his funeral pyre. Women were soft. The softness of flowers. Their bodies were warm like the rippling waters of a river. A woman was one who kindled the flames of desire and allowed herself and her man to enjoy the pleasure of that fire. Valour and courage were for men; softness and warmth were for women. Anger and strength were for men; patience and humility were for women. This was how women and men had been differentiated for ages. This was all he knew. From what he knew, the goddesses who were the consorts of Brahma, Vishnu and Shivan were created only when the three gods wished for wives who would aid them in their tasks. It was men who engaged themselves in all kinds of labour, didn’t they? Women assisted them. They shadowed the men. They stood by them. For these reasons, Mahishan had thought that a woman would not dare to kill. That was why he asked Brahma that his end should only be at the hands of a woman.

Mahishan reflected on all of this when his messengers told him about a woman who was filled with an incredible rage and ferocity. It was only seconds before that that he had heard her unbearable roar. The sound of that roar shook the vast earth, its expansive oceans, mountains like Meru, and even the eight directions.

The messengers who had returned to him after finding out about the woman who was the cause of all this stood dazed in shock.

When they tried to describe her to Mahishan, they grew tongue-tied. Apparently, her body glowed with a light more powerful than the light of twelve suns. She had eighteen arms carrying eighteen different weapons, they told him. They told him that, looking at her, they could not imagine that she was ever born as a child, that she ever crawled on all fours, or wobbled on a little child’s legs. Apparently, she carried a pitcher in her hand which she would fill with the blood of the Asuras and distribute like wine.

They told him more: ‘We are unable to describe her incredible beauty. Ammamma! Wonder of wonders! How powerful her husband must be, the man who rules over her. How must he look? What must be his colour? What kind of a god is he? But then, if she did have a husband, how could we tell if he ruled over her or she ruled over him? Who knows? She does not look like a woman who has ever been in anyone’s control. She sits astride a lion. They say that is her vehicle. With valour mixed with grace, she looks like a feminine form that is masculine. If you lay eyes on her, you will lose your will to fight with her. You will only see her beauty.’

Mahishan too was skilled at taking various forms. After taking several different forms, he became a lion and completely vanquished the Devas and even Vishnu. Didn’t Vishnu fly away on a wounded and bleeding Garuda? As his messengers went on describing the woman to him, love grew in Mahishan’s heart.

It was a woman who had come to battle with him. He could win her over with his deep love. Was there anything that could not be attained by love? But the woman would not know of Mahishan’s love. After all, he was from a clan that was insulted as being demons. He knew that the children of his clan came into the world smeared with the ignominy of being born in a most reviled and despised clan. His love was full of longings, desires, tears and thirsts. It had the depth of oceans. It had the lustful swell of cascades. It had a bottomless well of infatuation.

Since he had the ability to transform himself into anything, he could perhaps take the form of a guileless dove and play with her. He could turn his fingers into soft feathers and gently caress her body. He could make his lips become like a child’s mouth and seek and taste her nipples. He could become a lotus and ignite her desire by brushing softly against her stomach and her pubic hair. He could then enter her like a snake and harden like a rock inside her. He could offer her his body for her to play with, to caress, smell, crumple, squeeze, knead.

She was a woman. He could pleasure her. He could offer himself for her pleasure.

His ministers told him many things about her. One of them told Mahishan that she spoke a secret language of love. Another minister said that she was not an ordinary woman, that she was comparable to the God of Time, of death. When she spoke to his ministers, she had described Mahishan as a wild buffalo. She had told them that Mahishan belonged to the netherworld where serpents lived; that he should return to that world. But none of these insults bothered Mahishan. He still believed that he could subdue all her anger with the power of his love. He asked his ministers to convey that to her.

She sent back her reply to his profession of love. Since she was valorous, she said she was a man, and since Mahishan was speaking of love, he was feminine.

In speaking thus, she spoke within the existing parameters of feminine and masculine. If she was a combination of feminine and masculine qualities, why could he too not be a combination of the masculine and feminine? Just because he spoke of his passion, of his love, and did not come forward to battle with her, why should she call him feminine, as if it were an insult? Did she herself think that a woman was less than a man? She sent word through one of his ministers: ‘Mahishan is no man, and you are calling him a man. It is the same as calling a eunuch a woman.’ She did not stop with that. She continued to refer to him as a beast. She said he had the mind of a buffalo. ‘Are you an equal? How can your ugliness ever be a match to my beauty? Can they both ever go together?’ she asked.

More than all of this, what pierced his heart like a sharp sword was what she told minister Thambaran about Mahishan’s mother:‘Your mother was like a buffalo who was never aware of how