Ch. 1: The Fruit, the Jewel, and the Asoka Tree

In the city of Pratishthana, on the banks of the Godavari, there once ruled a king named Trivikramasena. He was the son of Vikramasena, and men said of him that he was as steady as a mountain and as generous as the monsoon. He sat in his hall of audience each morning, heard the petitions of his people, and sent no one away empty-handed.

Among those who came before him there was a mendicant, a wandering holy man named Kshantisila. His name meant “he whose nature is patience,” and patient he was. Every day for ten years he came into the hall, bowed, and placed a single fruit in the king's hand. He asked for nothing. He spoke little. When the king had taken the fruit, the mendicant went away again, and the king, without thinking much about it, passed each fruit to his treasurer, who put it away in the treasury.

One day a young monkey that had slipped its keeper came scampering into the hall. The king, amused, tossed it that day's fruit. The monkey bit into it, and the fruit burst open, and out of it rolled a jewel so bright that the whole hall seemed to hold its breath.

The king looked at the jewel. Then he looked at his treasurer. “Where,” he asked quietly, “are all the other fruits this man has given me?”

The treasurer hurried away to the treasury, and came back pale. The fruits, he said, had long since rotted to nothing. But where each one had lain, there lay a jewel, glowing in the dark among the dust. Ten years of fruits. Ten years of jewels. The treasury was full of them.

The next morning, when Kshantisila came and bowed as always, the king did not take the fruit at once. “Holy man,” he said, “you have given me a treasure past counting, and you have never once asked for anything in return. I will not take another gift from you until you tell me why you give them.”

The mendicant was silent for a moment. Then he said, “King, I am trying to perform a certain rite, a work of spells that needs the help of a brave man. I have watched you for ten years, and I know of no one braver. I ask you this: on the fourteenth night of the dark fortnight, come alone to the great cremation ground outside the city. I will wait for you there, beneath the banyan tree.”

The king had given his word long before, in his heart, the first time a fruit had turned into a jewel. “I will come,” he said.

The fourteenth night of the dark half of the month came, and there was no moon at all. Trivikramasena wrapped himself in a dark cloak, took up his sword, and went out of the city by a small gate, alone.

The cremation ground lay beyond the last fields, where the land sloped down toward the river. It was a place every family in Pratishthana knew, for every family had carried someone there. By day it was a sad place but an honest one: the place where the body, the borrowed house of the soul, was given back to fire, so that the soul might go on its way unburdened. By night it was something else.

The pyres of that evening were still burning low, red eyes in the black. Smoke drifted across the ground in slow bands and smelled of ghee and sandalwood and ash. Jackals moved at the edges of the firelight and did not run when the king passed. Somewhere an owl called, and something that was not an owl answered it. Here and there lay the scattered remnants of old offerings: clay lamps gone cold, faded marigolds, little heaps of rice the birds had not yet taken. The air was thick and close, and the darkness seemed to lean in to listen.

The king walked through it without hurrying and without looking back.

Beneath the great banyan, whose hanging roots made a hall of pillars in the dark, he found Kshantisila. The mendicant had drawn a circle on the ground and was sitting inside it, marking out signs in ash.

“You came,” said the mendicant, and for the first time in ten years there was something like gladness in his voice. “Now listen. Go south from here, a good way, until you come to an asoka tree standing alone. From its branches hangs the body of a dead man. Cut it down, carry it here to me, and the rite can begin.”

“It will be done,” said the king, and turned south.

The asoka tree stood by itself at the far edge of the burning ground, where even the smoke did not seem to want to go. It was a handsome tree in daylight, perhaps, with its long glossy leaves. In the dark its leaves hung down like tongues.

From one of its branches hung a body, bound by a rope, turning very slowly though there was no wind.

The king climbed the tree, drew his sword, and cut the rope. The body fell to the ground with a dull sound. And as it fell, it cried out, a long thin wail, as though it were in pain.

A man of softer stuff would have fled. Trivikramasena thought, perhaps this poor creature still lives, and he climbed down and knelt and began to rub its limbs, as one would for a man half-drowned or half-frozen.

The corpse burst out laughing.

It was a terrible laugh, dry as old leaves, and with it the king understood. This was no living man. A vetala, one of those restless spirits that make their homes in the dead, had taken this body for its dwelling. Before the king could seize it, the corpse rose, slipped from under his hands, and went back up into the asoka tree, where it hung from the branch again as if it had never been cut down.

The king said nothing. He climbed the tree a second time, cut the body down a second time, and this time, before it could move, he lifted it onto his shoulder, holding it fast, and set off in silence toward the banyan.

They had gone only a little way when the corpse on his shoulder spoke. Its voice came from very close to the king's ear, and it was not unfriendly. It was, if anything, amused.

“King,” said the vetala, “the road is long and the night is dull. Let me shorten it for you with a story.”

The king walked on.

“But hear my rule,” said the vetala. “At the end of each story I will ask you a question. If you know the answer and keep silent out of stubbornness, then this head of yours shall certainly split in a hundred pieces. And if you speak,” it added, and the king could hear the smile in its voice, “well. Then we shall see.”

The king did not answer. He shifted the cold weight on his shoulder and kept walking north toward the banyan, through the smoke and the low red light of the dying pyres. Behind him, the asoka tree waited.

It was not the first time that night he had made this journey. Once already the vetala had told him a tale, once already the king had known the answer and spoken it, and the moment he spoke, the corpse had slipped from his shoulder and flown back to its branch. So he had gone back, and climbed, and cut, and lifted, and now he walked the same road again with the same burden, and the night was no shorter for it.

“Good,” said the vetala softly. “You are learning. Listen, then. This is my second tale, and it is about a girl who died, and three young men who would not let her go.”