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  AGNIPUTR

  WHEN AGNI

  FIRST SPOKE

  AGNIPUTR

  WHEN AGNI

  FIRST SPOKE

  VADHAN

  © B. Sai Chandravadhan, 2016

  First published, 2016

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  To Rani Garu,

  the queen.

  I will always miss you,

  Nanama. Always.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Fragment-A: SUTRAM

  Fragment-B: SHEILA

  Fragment-C: SURYA

  Fragment-D: AGNIPUTR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  TO all those wonderful people who made this book happen, thank you.

  Chief among them are the great Vedic masters who hinted at what Agni’s word was.

  To the amazing quantum scientists who made me imagine sub-atomic space and helped me peel away the maya.

  To Suhail Mathur, my literary agent who worked very hard to get this book out there.

  To Paul and his team from Bloomsbury without whom the book would not have ever taken shape.

  To my children who came up with wonderful ideas for the book.

  Saving the best for the last, my wife who is my toughest critic, yet. Thanks for ripping me apart so I could get it right!

  ‘In restless dreams I walked alone

  Narrow streets of cobblestone

  ‘Neath the halo of a street lamp

  I turned my collar to the cold and damp

  When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light

  That split the night

  And touched the sound of silence’

  – ‘Sound of Silence’

  Simon and Garfunkel

  FRAGMENT-A

  SUTRAM

  CHAPTER 1

  1940-Gudem, a village in Andhra Pradesh, India.

  THE lone man gawked at the samadhi, a tomb.

  He was a cadaverous individual wrapped in a dirty dark lungi around his lower torso. His flat lips were parched and as brittle as a sun-baked twig. He tried, with little effect, to wet them with a sandpaper dry tongue. He liked to think of himself as an aghora tantrik. A necromancer. He lived his life around rotting carcasses. He ate them sometimes or had intercourse with them and at other times called for spirits through them.

  The structure trembled briefly. It was more than a shiver, less than a shudder. The motion was not unlike an earthquake except that it was local, just around the samadhi. Like sluggish resistance to a tectonic invasion. The rumbling that followed the quake was muffled. It sounded like rocks rammed into each other deep under the Earth. Like the very planet was gnashing its teeth.

  The base of the samadhi cracked just a little. In a flash the crack zigzagged to the tip of the structure like a streak of lightning.

  The tantrik had a bad feeling about this one. He had not in his life tried anything like what he had just done. He had expected the result of his experiment to manifest itself fast but not instantaneously. Shifting his weight from one foot to another he leaned on his trident. His beady eyes rested on the broken samadhi. The inscription on it read, ‘Rajah Raghuram Surya’.

  The earth shuddered again. The quake was much stronger this time. The entire memorial hall shook. The tantrik almost lost his balance. It shuddered even harder a second later, as though angry that the man had not fallen to the ground.

  All of a sudden, enormous surges concussed the earth. A tidal wave. The ground heaved, shattering the samadhi. The vast memorial hall which housed the tombs of the Surya Kings buckled and surged like an angry stallion.

  Panic.

  The arrival of the God was not supposed to be violent. At least the nallakolainool, the bark scripture of the Nellore-Ongole tribals, did not predict a violent entry. It had merely said that the God would rise from the middle of nowhere that was everywhere.

  Or was it vice versa?

  It was all the Guru’s doing. The Guru had dragged him into this mess. Damn him! The tantrik had not wanted any part of it from the beginning. But, he could not resist the Guru’s soothing voice nor could he resist the pleasures that were promised. The tantrik had no special love for money. But the woman the Guru offered! So clean! So fresh! He wanted to relish her cold flesh.

  First, the Guru made him poison a man. He was made to retrieve the hairy ball from the dead man’s stomach. It was easy enough to get it after the man was cremated. Surprisingly, the ball of hair had not succumbed to the scorching heat of the pyre. The Guru had ordained him to cover the ball in flour and place it on the tombstone of the dead man. Only moments ago he had laid the hairy flour ball on the cold marble stone.

  The last directive was for him to await the arrival of a God.

  Here he was, quivering with fear. The fire torches were dying, one after the other. The hall was getting darker, the air suddenly thicker, like doom spreading its cloak of despair.

  When the Earth heaved again, the trident slipped out of his hands. The tantrik started to back away, eyes riveted on the cracked samadhi as though he expected a ghoul to break its way through and devour him. Abruptly, rocks from the flayed belly of the memorial hall shot to its fifty-foot ceiling with a dull thunk, like arrows from a long bow.

  The tantrik screamed. A cry for help. None came.

  Rocks wedged themselves into the ceiling. Others completed a lazy arc and hurtled downwards. A few stones wedged themselves into the cracked floor while others rolled down widening fissures. One chunk, the size of an apple, crashed into the tantrik’s shoulder, splitting skin and spraying blood.

  With a shriek the man flung himself to the ground with both his hands over his head. Lightning crackled through the fissure in the tomb, lighting up the ravaged room for a brief moment.

  The heaving and surging stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

  The tantrik rose to his knees. His hands flashed downwards to pick his fallen lungi, which had unveiled his shrivelled genitals. He shoved his matted hair away as best he could and crawled around clumsily until he found his trident. He grasped the cool metallic implement like it was the only comfort in a world gone mad.

  Fissures and cracks conjoined themselves into a y
awning chasm in the ground where the samadhi stood moments earlier. The tantrik walked stealthily towards the precipice where he leaned on to the trident to peer into the yawning earth.

  Surely, that was no ‘God’!

  A glowing, green-skinned globule, translucent, like a gigantic blob of mucus, was lodged deep within the chasm. The tantrik was no great mathematician but he figured it was about hundred feet into the ground, radiating like a half-shrouded magic ball.

  A cold shiver ran up the tantrik’s spine. How could a flour ball turn into this...this thing! What in the name of Heaven is it?

  The whispers were faint. Like a puppy whimpering helplessly on a cold night.

  ‘Sutram’

  It did not come from the thing in the depths. For some reason, he had an inkling it was the Guru’s voice. The tantrik whirled around.

  A couple of torches were still casting wavering firelight.

  He squinted into the half-light.

  He was alone in the devastated hall.

  ‘Sutram’.

  Was this the Sutram? The God of Agony. Annihilator of civilizations, of worlds. They were doomed. All of them. The whole world. There was no turning back from apocalypse now. The tantrik did not intend for it to happen. Not this way. He was duped into practicing an art so dark even the true tantriks feared it.

  ‘Who is the Guru? What is his agenda?’

  The searing heat slapped against the tantrik. His armpits and palms were wet with sweat while his legs quivered under the strain of leaning over the precipice. Tendrils of hot wind caressed the man.

  He bucked as though shot with a gun.

  He screamed, a hideous caw.

  The hooks were invisible, at least to the naked eye, but they burned like acid on skin when they sank into his flesh. The tantrik was being hauled into the hole.

  Think. Do something. Now!

  He rammed his trident into a cleft on the broken floor and clung on to the implement for dear life.

  Through all his agony, the tantrik could not help stare at what had once been the size of a tennis ball. He could not fathom how a flour ball with the poisoned blood and viscera of a dead man at its core could become the destroyer of a world. He did not understand what the many thousands of tadpole-like creatures twitching under the greenish skin of the globule were.

  He knew for certain that he was its fodder.

  The Guru intended for him to be the Sutram’s first meal, a sacrificial lamb.

  The tantrik cursed himself for being such a fool. He could never control the thing the Guru called ‘God’. When it came down to it, the Guru had found him expendable.

  He tried a few hymns and incantations. Things that he had learned a long time ago. They were strong sounding words, good enough to impress a fool. They had no effect on the globule.

  I am nobody, nothing!

  Its gigantic strands of grey hair weaved hither and thither like the whiskers of a giant lobster. He was unaware that they were not really whiskers but probes, antennae-cum-feeders that first sought and then sucked in nourishment to fuel the power within.

  It was a measure of comfort that the hooks pulling him to the God were weak or he would surely have been wrenched into the hole. It was like the thing did not really know to wield its invisible tentacles.

  It would learn.

  It would become powerful in the days to come.

  But not yet.

  That was the only edge the tantrik knew he had. He heaved again, ignoring the pain until he broke loose from the hooks. They retracted back to the Globule with chunks of his flesh still stuck to them. The man fell back onto the ground. There was blood everywhere. His blood. Life was inexorably ebbing out. His lips were so far stretched that they cracked open spilling blood into his mouth and over his chin. His agony echoed within the memorial hall.

  Until his voice turned hoarse.

  Until his throat gave in.

  He was still whimpering like a wounded animal when he crawled away from the dark hole.

  The tantrik threw open the wooden doors and staggered down a second hall. He crossed the large room like a drunk crossing a road until he stumbled onto open ground.

  He breathed smoke riddled air. Yet, he drew a deep breath, at least as much as he could manage.

  The castle loomed large in the background, like a giant bird about to pounce on its prey. Around the dark structure was the village of huntsmen called Gudem.

  The entire village was in a state of mourning. The young Rajah Raghuram Surya was dead. Rumour had it that he was poisoned by his own brother. The heir apparent had been a favourite, especially amongst younger women. Of late, Rajah Raghuram had become a devoted husband and father. His murder had sent the people of the two thousand villages under his rule into turmoil. And for good reason. His brother was as mad as they come. No one wanted him at the helm of affairs.

  At that moment the villagers had forgotten their grief in favour of a more primal instinct. Survival. An earthquake had just hit Gudem. The black moonless night was interspersed with high pitched screams. The red glow of burning houses in the horizon was like a careless scarlet streak on a dark portrait. Quivering pillars of smoke rose into the night to disappear forever, like hope.

  The tantrik realised he had little time left. His heart was pumping out blood through the holes in his body. Already, his vision had dulled and he found it increasingly difficult to breathe. Every step he took was an effort. He stumbled through the castle entrance way, unmindful of the two restless leopards that stood guard at the fifty foot gates.

  Scent of blood and burning flesh.

  Aroused and hungry, the beasts pounced on him as he passed through the castle gates. He barely noticed the cats, knowing their chains would not allow them near him. The tantrik launched himself on the sturdy rope tied to the bell of appeals. He used the entire weight of his damaged body to heave the mighty bell.

  The zamindar, a tall, large boned man clad in a dark kurta and white dhoti, appeared at the Ambari, the protruding bay on the first floor of the castle, in response to the bell of appeals.

  He was a worried man. His first born had died barely three days ago. Already an earthquake had devastated the village. These were signs of ill omen. The zamindar flicked his white mane of hair and focussed his wizened but hard eyes on the man below.

  ‘Rajah Garu,’ the man screamed in Telugu, ‘Please Rajah Garu, I need to speak to you. It is of grave urgency.’

  The tantrik’s voice carried to the zamindar over the screams and noise of a gathered crowd of villagers and guards as if he had bellowed through a megaphone. He had used the last remaining vestige of the power of necromancy so he could be heard.

  A crowd gathered around the wounded man in the blink of an eye. People gawked at him even as the tantrik wriggled in his blood like a serpent slipping out of its skin. It was everywhere, glistening on the ground like a river of red. The gathered crowd were horrified for sure and yet there was no sympathy, not even pity, in their eyes. Instead, they were whispering amongst themselves.

  ‘Isn’t that the tantrik who’s always with Prince Bharatram?’ a squat woman with venomous eyes, member of the castle kitchen staff, whispered from behind the folds of her saree’s pallu, which she held close to her mouth.

  ‘Looks like the bastard. What the Hell happened? It’s like someone’s drilled holes into him,’ said her husband, a man only inches taller than her. He was a guard at the castle.

  ‘Whoever did that’s got my respect!’ the woman declared.

  ‘What does he want now?’ the man growled under his breath.

  ‘Don’t know, but I wouldn’t help the bastard, he’s caused enough harm. Do you know he used to steal our chicken? I didn’t say a thing because prince Bharatram might hear of it. I don’t much care to get near the mad prince when he’s angry,’ the woman complained to her husband.

  ‘Chicken? What are you mad, woman? There were little children missing, and some of those senile farts who sat around cremation ground
s to tank up. I think the bastard ate human flesh. Villagers used to find human bones, even little ones, in the fields often times.’

  ‘I hope he rots in Hell,’ the squat woman with venomous eyes spat out. Other servants and guards nodded their agreement. The roaring flames from the huge fire torches on the walls of the castle threw flickering shadows of the guards and the castle staff on the bleeding man in their midst.

  The tantrik did not care much for the whispered gossip. Most of them were true anyway.

  ‘Rajah Garu,’ he screamed hoarsely, ‘I have caused you grave harm...grave harm, you see, I killed your son.’

  A collective gasp ensued from the gathered crowd. The zamindar went very still on the ambari. Seconds later they cleared a path to make way for their ruler as he rushed down.

  ‘What? What did you say lanja kodaka?’

  ‘Yes, I thought I could use his death...to gain...powers!’

  ‘Ni Amma Kadupu Maada!’ The zamindar was livid with rage. His fair face had turned beetroot red when he spat out the vile swear word.

  ‘But it gets worse O king. Your memorial hall is now the haunting ground of the Sutram. You must destroy it my King. Please...’

  The zamindar barely heard the tantrik. He saw red. He needed to see this man burning. Whip lashed. Skinned alive. ‘You killed my son, Oray, Chantiga, patra naa thupaki!’

  Moments later, a servant rushed to his side with a Winchester .20 bore repeater shotgun. The zamindar grabbed the gun and the cartridges. He loaded six cartridges into the tubular magazine with the practiced ease of a hunter and pumped the first cartridge into the barrel. He trained the gun on the tantrik’s legs. The Zamindar did not intend to kill him at once.

  ‘Rajah Garu, kill me if you want to. Please listen to me first.’

  ‘Pinjari Munda kodaka...’ the zamindar swore under his breath, all the while holding the gun to his shoulder. The crowd around the hapless man cleared away.