Bheem Read online

  Bheem had no idea what had caused this devastation but it was apparent immediately that its work was not yet done. As an uprooted tree whirled towards them, the greybeard jerked to his left, his massive shaggy arms grabbing a less alert follower, scooping him out of its path. Instantly, Bheem leapt towards Saragha, mace blurring in a lightning-fast swing. The vaanar heard its murderous swish and lurched aside. Whether he would have been able to evade the blow was uncertain, but he was not the target of Bheem’s strike. Like a javelin, an enormous branch had hurtled through the air, spearing directly towards the distracted vaanar’s back. Bheem had positioned himself squarely in its way, his mace shredding the missile an instant before it buried its ugly, jagged point in his chest. Saragha blinked, then shook himself. A moment later, the storm that was not a storm ended with the same abruptness with which it had begun.

  ‘It has happened.’

  Bheem spun around. If he had expected the vaanar to be grateful for his timely intervention, the notion was quickly dispelled. Saragha completely ignored Bheem. He was gazing southwards. Along his line of sight, extending as far as one could see, trees had been flattened as if a giant plough had run a furrow through the jungle.

  ‘Nature’s order—the rules have been broken,’ the vaanar said, eyeing the fallen trees.

  He’s shaken, thought Bheem.

  It was a first. Until now, the vaanar had looked completely impervious to anxiety. Bheem felt a frisson of fear pass through him. That was unusual too.

  ‘The trees,’ Saragha growled. ‘The shakti that levelled them radiates from the Cave of the Flame.’

  What was this mumbo jumbo? The warrior looked sceptically at the old vaanar. Was his first impression right, after all? Was the greybeard unhinged? Saragha turned towards Bheem. His expression had regained its composure but a crushing burden was visible in his time-worn eyes. Bheem knew at once that he was wrong. This was one of the sanest faces he had ever seen.

  ‘Samay,’ Saragha said quietly. ‘The ones you seek have begun a journey.’

  ~

  The Vortex of Samay

  Kritavarma screamed. And could not stop. The flames licked at his skin, hungry, liquid, unrelenting. The blade that had slashed open his flesh and scraped bone, the arrow embedded in his rib, dug out while he bit down on a saddle strap to save his bloodied tongue, the cauterizing iron that had seared his suppurating wounds—for Kritavarma, pain had a familiar face. He had thought himself prepared when he followed his general into the flame behind the water. He was mistaken. He cried like a child, soiled himself, flung away the laughable, shredded cloak of Kshatriya stoicism and dignity. But the pain went on, unendurable, with no end.

  ‘Ashvatthama!’ he screamed. ‘Ashvatthama!’

  His mind was burnt raw, cleansed of all artifice. Nothing remained of synthetic social norms, of man-made hierarchies, of the respectful address due to his leader. Like a talisman, he shouted his general’s name—but Ashvatthama could not respond. Borne along in the same scalding stream of flame that buffeted his lieutenant, Ashvatthama had surrendered himself.

  Would he remain immortal now that Krishna had wrenched out his protective jewel? The only certain answer to that was death itself. But death is the end of all thought—so there was no way of knowing. All that Ashvatthama knew for sure was that he had lost his lifelong immunity to pain—the excruciating, intolerable pain that wracked him as he turned and burned like meat on a spit. Beyond endurance, beyond pain itself. It was about survival now. Grimly, Ashvatthama gave himself up to the river of Samay, the savage waves blazing their way through the centuries.

  They had to survive, find their way to the journey’s end. Krupacharya had laid down his life for this. Was it an hour ago that they had entered the flame? A day? A thousand years? They had no way of knowing. They were in the grip of Samay, hurtling through time. The roaring agony, the scattering of flesh and bone and soul: this was death. Ashvatthama and Kritavarma continued to live.

  You will die . . . You must choose to be reborn . . . You will be unmade . . . You must choose to live again . . .

  With every dying breath, Krupacharya had ripped loose the key to Samay from the mind of the asura guru. It was not the body that lived, it was the mind. The flames vaporized the flesh, atomized it; thought floated impervious, indestructible, through Samay’s blazing torrent, a magnet for the dismembered body. A century, five centuries later, the dispersed flesh took form again around the living mind, for a moment, a hundred years, only to be blown apart once more. The mind continued to live as long as thought continued without break—a living thought, a belief, a mantra.

  Paradoxically, it was Kritavarma’s mind that proved adept at holding steady. He was a Kshatriya, a warrior, trained to focus and obey. His belief in his leader was total—his mind distilled all thought, all purpose into one word.

  ‘Ashvatthama!’

  Krita carried the name like a banner through the flames. It was fortunate that he could not know his leader’s mind. As tortured as his body, Ashvatthama’s mind screamed for peace, for the simplicity of an all-encompassing mantra. But simplicity was the last thing for which his mind was trained. Like his great father, Dronacharya, Ashvatthama was a Brahmin who had taken up arms. And contradictorily, belief does not come easy to a mind trained in the Brahmin tradition. Learning is the Brahmin mantra, scepticism and doubt its weapons. Even as the dying Krupacharya’s vision had faded, he had marked the conflict in his fellow Brahmin’s face. The flames of Samay did not permit passage for the conflicted, the unsure. Krupa’s lips had moved, formed two words, his voice frayed and snapped. Ashvatthama saw the dead eyes glaze over, and gently shut the lids. The two words echoed in his mind.

  ‘The Four!’ Ashvatthama shouted, desperately holding off the demons of doubt.

  ‘The Four!’ he screamed again, focused on the end of the journey, as his body dissolved in the horrific flames.

  ‘The Four!’

  ~

  Mumbai

  18 October 2017

  The medical facilities available at the Royce team’s jungle clinic were spartan. The doctor, though, was certain. The test was positive, confirming what Aviva suspected when she had missed consecutive periods: she was pregnant. A jolt of happiness subsided into uncertainty. This was serious, life-changing—there were so many things to consider. In the excitement of the cave discovery, Aviva had turned down the week’s leave due to her. She would have to change that, take three days off. Alex had to know; they had to make this decision together.

  Which was why she found herself sitting with Alexander Nimbalkar in a softly lit restaurant in Mumbai twenty-four hours later, a single rose in a porcelain vase, music, candles, very romantic. He had arranged it this way. Was this a proposal? After all, they had been living together for a year now. Should she say yes?

  Yes, she thought, suddenly very happy. I will!

  Alex pointed an excited finger at his tablet screen. ‘Sikandar. Or Sikkander, Sikunder, Secunder, Sekandar, Iskander.’

  ‘Asian names for Alexander the Great,’ Aviva said, agreeably. ‘So?’

  ‘So it’s the perfect name for my media start-up,’ replied Alex. ‘Think about it. “Sikandar” is a variant of my name, of course. And the word still has an amazing resonance here in India—2342 years after Alexander’s invasion in 325 BC!’

  Aviva smiled dutifully. This was not what she wanted to talk about. Still, they loved each other and she decided to go along, marking time, waiting for the expected proposal.

  ‘325 BCE,’ she suggested. ‘Before Common Era. The politically correct version.’

  ‘Politically correct! That’s exactly right!’ Alex said, animatedly. ‘“Sikandar” is completely PC. I’ve done my research. We have a major city, Secunderabad, the word “Sikandar” is synonymous with “conqueror” in many of our languages, and there was even an Amitabh Bachchan movie: Muqqadar Ka Sikandar—“Fate’s Sikandar”!’

  But Aviva wasn’t thinking of Indian superstar Amitabh Ba
chchan. And abruptly, she had stopped focusing on the fact that she had taken a weekend off and travelled a thousand kilometres from Bastar to Mumbai so that she could talk to Alex about the baby. Her mind had zeroed in on a number, something he had said . . . She pulled out her cell phone and thumbed it.

  ‘Media Sikandar!’ repeated Alex. ‘Just the meme I needed to grab eyeballs! I could even get official attention, land government contracts! Isn’t that a great name, Avi? Avi? Aviva?’

  2342 years since Alexander . . . Aviva thought. What was our number . . . ? Quickly, she scrolled through the data on her phone and stopped at the image of the symbol they had found etched on the wall of the cavern:

  A group of four. Repeated 585 times on the cavern walls. Which made 2340. Just two more arrows and it would have been 2342. Perhaps they had missed them under the centuries-old deposits of calcium. Or they could be on another wall. Two more and—Alexander! Aviva felt her face redden, pulse race.

  ‘Avi! What is it? You’re acting weird!’

  Aviva looked up from her phone. ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘What?’ Alex spluttered.

  ‘Will you marry me, Alex?’

  ‘Marry . . . ?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But . . . but that’s exactly what I—yes . . . yes, I will . . .’

  ‘Great! Wonderful!’ Aviva said. ‘Look, Alex—I have to go. Something’s come up . . . can’t wait! Call you later.’

  And she pushed back from the table and hurried away, walking out through the beaded curtain at the exit. She was already in an Uber when her phone beeped with a message: ‘Where’s my engagement ring?’

  She was still laughing when she realized she hadn’t mentioned the baby.

  ~

  ‘We counted 585 groups of four, Arun,’ Aviva said into the satphone. ‘Totalling 2340 arrows, right?’

  ‘. . . we did . . .’ Kamdar’s voice hissed through the faltering connection. Satphone transmission in Bastar was never dependable, and even less so now with Cyclone Fatima expected to break over Chhattisgarh in less than twenty hours . . .

  ‘Had a thought,’ Aviva continued. ‘I think there should be more.’

  ‘You’re right, Aviva,’ Kamdar’s voice came through her headphones, suddenly clear. ‘We have found . . .’ It faded again.

  ‘I knew it!’ Aviva almost shouted. ‘Two more? 2342 arrows in all?’

  ‘. . . another 166 groups of four,’ came the surprising answer. ‘On a layer of wall under the other groups!’

  ‘166 groups?’

  ‘3004 arrows altogether. Look for a needle, find a haystack! Cora-Pamela!’

  Aviva grinned despite her disappointment. So it wasn’t Alexander. What was it then? Aviva had a nagging feeling she was on the right track. 3004 . . . If the number did denote years, what had happened in the India of 987 BCE? The Kurukshetra War? An era of churning, revolution.

  Suddenly, Aviva sat up straight. There were two ways to look at this. Someone in 987 BCE had known that the cavern would be rediscovered and accessed in 2017, exactly 3004 years later. Unlikely. Or—someone had been keeping a record of passing years on the cavern’s walls, and was still at it. What had Arun said? The group of 166 was on a layer of wall under the others. The walls themselves were a vast palimpsest, with calcium deposits covering older marks, wiping the slate clean for more recent indentations. This was an unfinished record—with a living, working record keeper. Of course, her entire theory could be fanciful and the marks could mean something else entirely. But if radiocarbon dating proved that some of the marks had been made recently—!

  ‘Arun,’ Aviva said urgently, ‘can I talk to Dr Royce?’

  ‘He’s in the cavern with the Hanuman statue,’ Kamdar’s voice sputtered through the tenuous link. ‘. . . ing to wrap up as much as he can before the cyclone hits. There’s no connectivity in . . .’

  His words were drowned out by a sharp hiss. Aviva frowned. It didn’t seem like static. The sounds emanating from the phone were clear, like the fluttering of leaves in a strong wind.

  ‘Arun?’ Aviva said. ‘Hello? Arun, can you hear me?’

  ‘. . . thing strange!’ Kamdar’s voice abruptly cut in. ‘The forest, the trees . . . they’re swaying, but there’s no wind!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cave! It’s coming from the cave! The trees, they’re crashing down everywhere! My god! My go—!’

  A loud boom on the satphone—Aviva jerked the headphones off. Her ears were ringing but she quickly adjusted the volume and slid them back on.

  ‘Arun?’ she said. ‘What happened? Are you all right? Hello? Arun?’

  This time it was static—the kind that confirms the line is dead.

  3

  The Cave of the Flame

  3004 Years Earlier

  On a natural platform facing the foaming cataract, two bodies lay next to each other, stone-ringed flames flickering reverentially at their feet.

  ‘Krupacharya,’ hissed Bheem, recognizing the dead acharya.

  ‘And the asuraguru Shukra,’ the greybeard said, eyeing the decaying rishi. He looked across at the bloody sword embedded in the adjacent wall and the slashed corpse that had been Krupacharya. ‘Mrityu Gyaan,’ he rumbled. ‘They have taken possession of the asura guru’s secrets.’

  Bheem wasn’t paying attention. He was gazing at his mace’s hilt, focusing on the jewel. Krupacharya lay dead before him and he could detect a faint, rancid odour in the air—not the stench of a decomposing body but the distinctive reek of Ashvatthama’s putrefying wound. By every reckoning, the jewel should have blazed red, indicating the presence of its erstwhile master. But despite the scarlet glow of the flame behind the water and the shimmering gold of the cavern’s phosphorescent walls, the jewel remained stubbornly ochre.

  ‘They are gone,’ Saragha growled.

  Bheem jerked around, questioning. The eyes that looked back at him bore the burden of centuries.

  ‘I am doomed to live till the end of time,’ the vaanar said, ‘but there are those who die and live again.’ The ancient eyes moved to the blaze behind the water. ‘The door to Samay is always open. Those you seek . . . their trail leads through it. But to enter Samay without the asura guru’s gyaan . . .’ Saragha turned to Bheem, ‘that calls for uncommon courage.’

  That expression on the simian face—surely it was disdain? Contempt? Was the creature implying . . . ?

  Anger flared.

  Control yourself, thought Bheem. Lord Krishna had warned him about this—his propensity to let rage cloud his thinking. But the vaanar’s jibe was intolerable. Had the supercilious greybeard forgotten that he was Bheem, the warrior whose name was a byword for bravery? Did the creature think that Bheem would let it go now, when the slaughterers of his sons, his clan, were within his avenging grasp? He looked at the entrance of the passage, its red glare twinning the fury in his mind. But softly . . . softly . . . Lord Krishna was right. Bheem had often erred when he had allowed his temper to override his judgement. If vengeance were to be his, he needed to survive this journey. Bheem glanced at his mace, his arm throbbing reassuringly with the power that hummed through it.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ sneered Saragha. ‘That club would be but a dry twig in Samay’s flames.’

  ‘You know nothing, vaanar.’ Bheem eyed the greybeard scornfully. ‘The club you mock is—’ This was going nowhere. ‘We are wasting time. As long as I hold this mace, I am safe.’ Which was more than he could say for Ashvatthama when he got hold of him.

  Bheem raised the mace to his forehead in an ironic salute to the condescending vaanar and leapt up the stairway of crags that led to the mouth of the cauldron. A blast of heat staggered him. He stood at the entrance, staring into the fiery red eye and was almost unnerved by sudden apprehension. Was this a mistake? His fist tightened its grip on the mace’s hilt.

  I fear nothing, he said to himself. I am Bheem, the undefeated! I am Bh . . .

  The cavern thundered. Bheem vanish
ed, sucked in an instant into the inferno as the grotto belched a great tongue of flame.

  Saragha grimaced, holding up a paw, shielding his eyes from the blast’s searing brilliance. He had led Bheem to Samay’s doorway, subtly discouraged him from initiating a journey, hinted at the dangers involved. The warrior’s ego had taken it from there; he had reacted exactly as expected, plunging defiantly into Samay’s molten stream, and was dead by now. Or not. Saragha had no way of knowing. Samay protected its secrets savagely. In any event, Saragha had done what was required of him. But . . . he couldn’t rid himself of a twinge of regret . . .

  And then, suddenly, all his misgivings melted away. The vaanar felt elated, rapturous.

  He was here.

  Saragha whirled around. Twenty feet above, a figure hung in the air, its impossibly long tail coiled around a stalactite, its sleek pelt gold and silver, gleaming in the dancing glow of the flame behind the water. Saragha’s head bowed in reverence.

  ‘Vayuputra,’ he said.

  The golden one sprang down, landing lightly in front of Saragha, superb youthful athleticism contrasting sharply with the timeworn form of the greybeard. Powerful paws gripped Saragha and drew him close, the two snouts touching softly.

  ‘You have done well!’

  The voice was light, easy, with none of the greybeard’s bass rumble.

  ‘You are kind, lord,’ Saragha said.

  The golden one grinned. ‘That’s what I’m called by those who want something! Anjaneya to you, my friend. Always. Or any other name you prefer—Hanuman, Maruti, there are dozens!’

  ‘As you say, lord.’

  Hanuman shook his head, helplessly. ‘Come, Saragha,’ he said. ‘We must talk.’

  Holding Saragha’s arm, Hanuman leapt, effortlessly lifting the hulking greybeard to a ledge hidden behind the stalactites, thirty feet above the ground. Before the startled Saragha could regain his breath, he was eased through a crevice in the rock face. Emerging on the other side, Saragha sensed he was in a sizeable chamber but his straining eyes could see nothing. No flame-light glanced off the walls, no phosphorescent glow uncovered more hidden pathways. Then, soft radiance suffused the chamber giving form to the invisible. Hanuman had entered.