The Night Queen

Artwork by Mustafa Zaman

But I will never allow a nishaagandhi to be planted in my own garden. There is a special reason for this and an old tale behind it.

I will narrate it to you. I was a seventeen-year-old college student at the time. It is a dangerous time. Although the English call this age 'sweet seventeen', I have christened it 'calamitous seventeen'. Many ideas that seem intoxicatingly novel occur to a seventeen-year-old. A dreamer who does no one any harm, he intervenes in unnecessary love affairs and complicates them; runs behind every new ideal he hears about only to stumble and fall face down; imagines all the reasonably good-looking girls he sees to be goddesses, nurtures secret desires about them and encounters disappointment. Editors find these seventeen-year-olds great problems. This is because it is a period of life when even a youth with an idiot's mentality wants to write poetry. Disliking to be materialistic, he will favour the love in Nalini or in Leela rather than in Vilasatilakam. His ideal lover will be an Italian dandy.

After I had conducted research on the beauty and character of many young girls without their knowledge or permission, it was Malathi who had the good fortune to finally become my ideal girl. She was a high school student, fair-skinned, with a short, stocky body and rounded breasts. A face as beautiful as the full moon. The first thing that attracted me were her intoxicating eyes.

Somehow, beauty flowed through every part of her. She was a serious little person who never smiled. I liked her seriousness very much. At that time, I hated girls who walked around laughing all the time. I would stand on the verandah of the topmost floor of my house every evening to eagerly watch the wonderful spectacle of her walking like a female swan at the edge of the road with her eyes downcast, wearing a coarse green skirt of khadi and a white khadi blouse with red dots, a huge bundle of books pressed tightly to her chest and a small umbrella with a handle shaped like a cashew fruit hanging from her left hand. She did not know I worshipped her. Pushing my homework sums filled with logarithms, co-tangents and such rubbish to one side, I began to compose poems about Malathikutty, her gait and her bundle of books:
Seeing her breast grow like mushrooms,
My heart burns....

Bravo! I appreciated those lines myself. But although I wrote poems like this, I was determined not to think about her in sexual terms. A divine love, faultless and ideal. And it had to hold within it a sorrow, a feeling of disappointmenta love like Madanan. I visualized the scene where Malu would fall on to my shoulder 'like a flag flapping down on a flagpole'.

Malathi lived in a two-storeyed house set in a huge compound about two furlongs to the west of our place. There was nothing more than a casual acquaintance between her father and me, confined to the formal exchanges of 'How are you?', 'Fine, thank you.' It was doubtful whether Malathi had ever seen my face.

I used to go for a walk after dinner at night. The path that cut across the fields started from the road and ended at the huge gate on the west of Malathi's house. In the corner of the compound, four yards from the gate, someone had planted a thick bush of nishaagandhi that had grown dense and high. I once discovered that if I sat right inside that bush, I could see Malathi seated in her room, reading, through the shutters.

The glow of the table lamp revealed the expressions on her face clearly. She wore a blouse that lay partially open, exposing her breasts. Since her unbound hair hung down over her shoulders on to her breast, covering the blouse, only part of a fair breast was visible, bursting out like a waterfall. Her English reader open in front of her, she would lean downwards slightly over the table and begin to read--no, to recite. 'And Sita wanted to go with Rama,' she would murmur carelessly. The poor girl would sometimes read so much that she would feel sleepy; as the weight of sleep grew heavier, her face would droop lower and lower like the pan of weighing scale and when it finally swung gently against the table, she would put a stop to that journey to Vaikuntam, open her eyes, raise her head and examine her surroundings. After that, she would sit for a long time gazing out of the window into the darkness. As I watched all this from the bush, an impulse of love would make me feel like calling out: 'Enough darling, now go and sleep.' But after rubbing her eyes for a while, she would begin to read again. Holding my breath, I would stare steadily at this sleep-dazed goddess of my heart. and the intense, exciting fragrance of the nishaagandhi would fill my nostrils and flow into my heart. every second I spent in that cave conferred the bliss of nirvana upon me...I felt as if the perfume of the nishaagandhi permeated all my thoughts and dreams.

Sometimes she read Malayalam poems. She recited verse in the manjari metre beautifully:
...not only a mother but anyone at all
would feel like picking her up and kissing her...
Ah! you had to listen to her sing those lines...I would want to kiss her lips then.

And so I silently worshipped that beauty, hidden inside the cave of that nishaagandhi for an hour every night for three whole months without missing a single day. The scent of the nishaagandhi and Malathi's lotus-like face imprinted themselves on my heart. I savoured that beauty every day.

The rainy season began. The Thiruvathira season, when the rains were at their heaviest, began. Storms were no hindrance to my expeditions. But sometimes, when the rains were very heavy, she would close the window. Ayyo! Disappointed, drenched in the rain, I would return home, my heart dark and heavy.

One day, as I sat in my cave, I happened to overhear her father tell her brother, 'Tomorrow we must cut down the plants in the garden. Parts of the compound are overgrown--we must clear all that.'

A fire ignited in my heart. In their attempt to cut down all the branches and twigs and clear their garden, it was certain they would cut down the nishaagandhi bush. It had grown very dense and high and spread over a large area. If my love-refuge was going to be destroyed what would my condition be? How would I be able to sit gazing at that face all by myself again?

There was no other alternative: I decided I would send Malathi a letter appealing to her to spare the bush.

I sat up till three that night, composing this letter:

Queen of my heart,
It has been three months since I began to crouch inside the nishaagandhi bush near your room every night and worship you. It was my desire to spend years like that as a silent devotee, not letting anyone, even you, know. But can 'anyone break fate's decree?' Ah, I cannot even think of it--tomorrow morning that cave is going to be destroyed by your father! Respected lady, I appeal to you: save that bush and, through it, this person, me. Only your mercy can help me. Om Shanti.

Rest later.
Your slave in love, (Signature)

I set out early morning for Malathi's house with the intention of getting the letter to her as quickly as possible. I entered the compound on the pretext of asking for the branch of a white Prince of Wales plant. A commotion of some sort seemed to be taking place there. A handful of people who lived in the neighbourhood were gathered in the yard. I pushed my way in through them to peer in.

An enormous serpent had been beaten to death and flung on the ground. It must have been about three feet long.

A poisonous snake of the most vicious kind!

'Look at that--the fellow was inside that bush that "gives off a scent at night". When we cut down the bush, we saw a huge hole. We dug into it and the fellow jumped out! The incredible thing is that this serpent was so close to us all this time and none of us knew!' said Velu Ashri, who had beaten the creature to death, looking at me, his finger laid on his nose in a gesture of astonishment.

Seeing its tail twitch slightly like a telegraph wire, the carpenter said eagerly, 'What? The rascal isn't dead yet?' he started to hit its head again with the big palm branch he had in his hand. Blood sprayed out from the snake's crushed head.

I did not stay there any longer. I have no idea how I got home. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that someone was pouring fire over my heart. I thought I was growing insane with fear when I realized that while I had sat in the darkness of that bush savouring Malathi's divine beauty, a fearful serpent had been next to me, its mouth wide open to breathe in the fragrance of the nishaagandhi.

That very night, I began to run a temperature. It grew steadily higher. I had terrible nightmares and became delirious. I felt there were serpents everywhere I looked. A snake on the canopy of my bed; innumerable snakes crawling in through the bars of the window; a poisonous snake poised on a box with its hood raised; a snake hanging upside down next to me. 'Ayyo! A snake, a snake!' I screamed.

In these nightmares, I saw Malathi as a nagakanyaka with a serpent's body and a woman's face. While looking at her face gave me pleasure, her body frightened me.

I lay in bed a month with fever. Then I grew better. When I went out for a walk, I saw a board saying 'For rent' hanging outside Malathi's house. I made enquiries and found out that her father had been transferred to Kannur and that all of them had moved there a week earlier.

I never saw Malathi again. I heard recently that she is married and the mother of two. A week ago I took out the letter I wrote her from among copies of my old letters and destroyed it.

Whenever the fragrance of the nishaagandhi wafts out to me from anywhere the old, pleasant memories of my mad seventeen-year-old passion arise in my mind. Through that fragrance, I see simultaneously the images of a schoolgirl sleepily learning her lessons and of a poisonous snake poised with its hood unfurled...It is because of this unreasonable fear that I never allow the nishaagandhi to enter my garden.

S.K. Pottekkat has won awards for his short stories and novels in Tamil. V. Abdulla was a translator of note from Malayalam to English.