It was a hot summer afternoon. Too early for a vacation that couldn’t come too soon for Sākshi. Sākshi was a student at the foremost literature academy in the kingdom of Jaya. The prestigious ‘Shabdamurti Vinodācharya Sahitya Prashikshikā’ ( loosely translated to Literature School named after a famous author Vinodacharya in the common tongue). The name was another thing that subtly grated on Sākshi’s nerves.
Vinodācharya was a legendary writer - known for his rapier wit and a seemingly endless talent to satirise the most pressing issues of his time. He wrote political commentaries that would leave the reader in stitches but were incisive and perfectly on point at the same time. He wrote plays in his spare time, he wrote ballads, too Comedy sketches and poems too.
The irony that a school named after one of the most iconic free thinkers of history that seemed to be dedicated to make turn it’s students into stuffy old academics was not lost on her.
But! It was the best in the land, extremely difficult to get into and the one that boasted guaranteed employment for all its students in either the diplomatic or the administration services. And it had some really brilliant people among its alumni which added to the glamour.
Sākshi was someone who loved literature for it’s own sake. A talented poet herself, she had won a scholarship to join these hallowed halls and for the first few months it had been a whirlwind joy ride for her. She explored all the various aspects of literature, learning a few old and dead languages, reading epics that were largely forgotten by the masses in for many a decade.
This idea that the world could be viewed through so many different lenses fascinated her. However, it all soured very quickly in her second third year at the place school. That year they started teaching Literature Criticism.
This led to unnecessary and endless arguments about interpreted meanings of writings of one author vs another, one era vs another Spirited debates about metaphors and their usage, across different (read rival) kingdoms. All of this was enough to drive someone to boredom. It drove Sākshi to near madness.
Make no mistake, she was a genius and thus her work always earned her praise though was not as exemplary as the Acharya expected it to be, given her prodigious intellect.To a creative and imaginative mind like hers, this had drained all the joy out of literature.
So one hot afternoon on a Thursday, in a slightly bored frame of mind, she had strolled into the library building. Easily one of her favourite places on the campus. The stone building was always cool in the summer and slightly warm in the winter. The smell of old paper that was made from tree bark lingered here and the small alcoves with the wooden chauranga ( a small wooden table with 4 squat legs) and comfy cushions designed the cradle the elbows of readers lost in their own worlds invited even the most casual of observers to sit and peruse a bit.
The building was a sprawling structure with just one floor. The space was massive and the thick teak book cases held volume upon volume of tomes, essays on a diverse variety of topics, philosophical debates, geographical surveys, old news archives, even art!
Each bookcase had a carefully numbered index and each section had a similar one displayed prominently at the entrance.
Some areas of the library were less frequented than others, predominantly those that held sciences and mathematics. Sākshi avoided the last section like the plague. She hated mathematics. (Who cared what the area of a circle with a diameter twice that of the moon was? No one was going to be able to draw it anyway, so why waste precious time on ridiculous maybes?)
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Today, she was just wandering around the building with no particular destination in mind. A few minutes later, she found herself standing in front of a bookshelf that was up against the far wall of the western chamber. She looked at the index card and frowned slightly. ‘Huh! Paranormal fiction is it?, a whole section full of ghost stories’ she muttered to herself.
She had never been the kind to read too much into ghost stories. Paranormal was all very well when it was treated as just scary stories, but it was never a piece of ‘serious literature’. At least she had never heard of anyone who took their studies seriously give this genre any attention. The words ‘lurid’ and ‘sensationalist’ came to mind when anyone mentioned scary stories. (There was good horror but that was ‘literature’ not ghost stories surely!)
Why would there be an entire section devoted to this? Wouldn’t the bookshops that dealt with secondhand out of date books be the better place for this kind of drivel?
She walked along the bookshelf, thinking such disparaging thoughts about ‘paranormal fiction’, fingers trailing along the aged wood. Not a single speck of dust marked the passage of her fingers, a point of pride for every student of the institute. The library was pristine and cleaned with religious intensity.
The books were may be musty and old but never covered with dust. As she reached the very end of the shelf, she found a slim roll of parchment poking out, a little out of place. Something about it made her stop and gaze at it.
Was it the colour? This book actually seemed to be very old, the parchment was flaking in places. A quick examination showed that the script was not the common language used today. Her interest piqued, Sākshi went to the spot and carefully took out the small roll. It was bound by a leather cord that had almost given away. This could be, at the very least, be a means to drive away an afternoon of boredom.
She took the roll to the nearest reading alcove. The somewhat disinterested library staff member took a look at it and said, “Classified as old folk tales, freely accessible to all”.
(Students at the Prashikshika found out very quickly and often with career shattering intensity the cost of assuming that all books were free to be accessed.)
Sākshi settled down into the floor cushions and unrolled the spiral of parchment on to the chauranga in front of her.
“Chārvāka’s Gift”
The title was written in an old language, she could read but it needed a bit of effort to decipher the ancient faded characters. Her lips moved wordlessly, much like a young child reading a book without pictures for the first time. Sākshi read on, oblivious to how endearing this small habit seemed on her.
“ Dear reader, you are no doubt wondering who would have the gall to be so stingy as to call a book a gift. Especially since in all possibility, you have purchased said book and thus are fully expecting to be giving a gift (to me the author) rather than receiving one. By the end of this scroll, I hope to convince you that you otherwise.
I am Chārvāka. I do not presume that you know who I am, (in fact it is better if you don’t considering the current circumstances). I have collected a set of tales for you dear reader - tales to entertain, tales to illuminate. Stories that talk speak of innocence and others that subtly hint at darker truths beneath.
You may chose to believe them - or not, I have nothing to say on that account. In fact m Most of you will dismiss these as being mere children’s tales or grandmother’s stories. But this book is not for such worldly wise folk.
This is for those few who will see the tales for what they really are, a gift. A glimpse of what lies beyond the pale of human experience.
I do not offer profound revelations, I just offer clues of the truth, echoes of something that has been hidden with some great effort by others before us.
So do you dare, Dear Reader partake of my gift to you? Be warned, it brings a touch of venom with it. If you get bit, you will never be the same again.
Read on! If you dare.”
The introduction left Sākshi breathless, a book that was pretentious to be bordering in hilarious and yet hinted at some profound truth? She simple had to go on…
“ Chārvāka’s Gift…
An open mind sees more than the sharpest eyes”
She turned to the next page of the scroll, which said…
“1. The mightiest hunter
Once upon a time…
”
