The Man Who Lost India by Meghna Pant

Author:Meghna Pant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S India
Published: 2024-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Knowledge is conquest, power is conquest, and money is conquest. Everything else that lies in between these things— the unbridled and intangible—bakes the mind, produces nothing but abomination. Seth is learning that.

There is his son to tell.

Seth walks up to Vakil’s room, taking the stairs slowly, deciding how best to break the news. Vakil is a different kind of person to deal with. And his father Seth best knows that. Growing up, he was a quiet child, unremarkable but affable, raised mostly in Urmila’s presence. One dusky evening, all of eighteen, Vakil was returning home from college when he lost control and crashed his car into a banyan tree. His brains went into his nasal cavity. The hospital said he would not survive. Kamala broke her black pearl chain in agony. Seth squeezed his Chokia phone so hard that a crack appeared. Ida fainted in Manu’s arms. Ram wept in a corner.

At the hospital, Urmila came up to Seth, her eyes blazing red, and asked him: what tree did Vakil’s car crash into?

Banyan, Seth heard himself saying.

There. Then. Time. She said and walked away.

She was seen praying at the Mount Akaho Temple for three days after. She did not move, not for food, or water, or rest. Not even to go to the bathroom. What superpowers did she possess?

On the fourth day Vakil opened his eyes in the ICU. Within a few days his organs were functioning. After eleven days, at the exact time of the accident, Vakil was back at The White Taj.

The car, now abandoned next to the tree, was gifted to the doctor.

No one dared to ask Urmila where she had been or how she had brought Vakil back to life. When Seth finally did question her, Urmila fixed a stare on him so long, so hard, that he got up and left his own living room.

There were many inferences, many theories drawn from the three words Urmila had signaled that day, the most common being: Then there’s time. After all, people conjectured, a banyan tree grows from host trees and, therefore, feeds off other souls. The banyan tree must have trapped Vakil’s soul within its hundred aerial roots, and Urmila knew there was time to release it and put it back into his young curable body.

This excited the imagination of the townspeople. So they whispered that they’d seen Urmila and Swamiji together, walking the Mount Akaho steps, building a fire that reached the stars (in the exact location where the first flaming pillar of Mount Akaho would stand after the bomb attack) and jumping into it, only to emerge three days later with Vakil between them. Others said that they’d seen Urmila drop cobra skin into the same fire and from that had emerged a form, large, broad and slightly hunched (shaped exactly like Vakil). Swamiji had carried this form by the scruff of its neck, dipped it into a nearby pool of water (some said it was the same source of water as the Jyotirlinga) and from that Vakil had emerged, back to life.

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