Editor’s note: This work of fiction has been edited and excerpted from the author’s longer form.
After the Stone Songs
They practiced on their bodies and then reached for the cave walls.
They left handprints in red. They drew profiles of bullheads. They painted plums heavy with color, an aching purple and deer leaping over rocks jutting out of the cave wall.
They used their fingers. They plucked their hair and dipped it in color and drew wavy blues. They reduced vegetables, leaves, flowers, fruits, roots, bones, stones to the visual essence of their pigments: the black of the birds on the ceiling is from bird-bones ground and boiled, the ochre from a plant that still grows in the Shivalik peaks.
They would be called the Stonesongs when they were discovered centuries after being wiped out by an earthquake.
******
Kaivalya joined the residential school in sixth grade.
It was set in a military cantonment. The boys were subjected to a regime: morning drill, evening sports, afternoon yoga.
Kaivalya was away from home for the first time. He clung to the memory of song.
Every morning, before the drill, he went to the temple that stood in a pine grove. He closed his eyes and intoned a devotional song. He remembered his evenings at home with his mother on the terrace and her fable about stars breaking into a song, settling back into the rhythm of narrative; her lips moving in the dim light of the lantern she kept by her side.
One day he went on singing, song after another, intoxicated, the seven notes as an aphrodisiac in his throat. He missed attending the drill. When at last he fell silent in the temple, a hand clasped his shoulder. It was the drill coach.
—Your classmates were right. Here you are!
Kaivalya tried apologizing. But the coach cut him short.
—Who taught you to sing like this, boy?
—My mother, sir. She greets the rising sun with a Bhairavi song, sir. To beat the afternoon heat she sings the Kafi. She welcomes the stars with the Bhupali. In the nights, sir, she lulls the gods to sleep with the Kirwani. Sir.
The story acquired in the school the mint of its own fable. They were reluctant schoolboys with their heads in the past, hungry for their mothers and the stories that sung them to sleep. In their homesick eyes, Kaivalya joined the legion of folk heroes: the shepherd who with his flute called his herds back at dusk; the woodcarver who napped in the jungle with a tiger’s head in his lap; a boy who with his song softened a coach’s stern eyes.
The coach approached the head of the cantonment with an unusual request: discharge Kaivalya from the drill and sports routine. Out of respect for the coach, who had served on the first Indo-Pak war, it was sanctioned. Instead, he spent hours assisting with the morning and evening service at the temple. The priest initiated him into the role by tying a thread of basil leaves on his wrist and placing a sugar cube on his tongue. Twice a day, after offering the goddess a candelabrum, Kaivalya sang devotional songs. He garlanded the goddess with jacaranda flowers. With his thumb, he pasted a dot of vermilion on her marble forehead. He distributed freshly prepared sweet rice among the devotees.
Kaivalya had to participate in some physical activity, though. Which military school would relax that requirement? So late one evening, after he concluded service at the temple, Kaivalya was taken to the adjoining workshop owned by a retired soldier, a young man who, after losing a foot in cross-border firing, took to his father’s trade of making sculptures for the army cantonment.
The sculptor sat in front of a tin shed. His brown eyes were intent on a stone trapped between his knees. His hairline was caked with powdered sandstone, as though he slicked his hair in place not with brilliantine, but with wet earth. His hands were raised, a chisel in one fist, a hammer in the other, ready to draw a likeness of skin on stone. Kaivalya opened the gate and walked in. The sculptor turned. He lowered his muscular arms. Kaivalya looked at his bony hands. He lowered his eyes and squeezed his elbows. The sculptor held out a chisel.
—Every stone has the possibility of becoming a sculpture. Your job is to discover form beneath the stone surface.
Kaivalya became his apprentice. One day, Kaivalya continued standing by the tin shed even after his teacher said he could leave. He formed fists with his hand and held them in front of his face.
—I keep my fingers tight against the metal. You say the chisel can’t shift. Hold the hammer steady, you say. But my palms turn sweaty.
The sculptor put his tools down and, leaning forward, looked at Kaivalya, who spread his fingers and pointed to the skin between his thumb and forefingers.
—It pains me here afterwards. When I play the harmonium in the temple.
Then he pointed to his eyes.
—The dust goes inside and stays there. Devotees think I’m blissful and teary-eyed when I sing.
Finally he touched the side of his forehead and then his ear.
—The noise, here. Stuck here. Metal on stone. Right here when I try sleeping.
Would the sound that had replaced the content of silence also replace its meaning? Didn’t the teacher say it was the apprentice’s job to find form when he faced a blank block of stone? Kaivalya couldn’t point to his body and explain his fear. He couldn’t lend it his corporeal weight, so he didn’t talk about it.
—Come with me, said the sculptor.
He took Kaivalya to the temple, up the staircase, to the edge of terrace. He pointed to the sculpture they had been working on: a celestial dancer, her sandstone limbs ablaze in the evening light, her face oval and flat, the features yet to be carved. Kaivalya had never seen it from this perspective.
—This is how life is formed, said the sculptor. This is how you were formed in your mother’s womb. Details added to a basic unit of life.
Kaivalya realized that he could not find form in stone. It was an unconscious outcome as he chiseled one reality at a time—toenails, knee, fingers, chin, hair—bearing in mind nothing more of the bigger picture than the principle of proportion.
Kaivalya had established a relationship with stone.
The sandstone dancer was installed outside the army museum.
Over the next few years Kaivalya advanced to making sculptures independently: a pantheon of celestial drummers in granite; stone birds on the verge of flight; marble creatures with human faces and animal bodies; soapstone women talking to swans. They found a home in the forecourts of public buildings and in the drawing halls of army homes.
When he finished schooling he was appointed the chief priest in the temple. He enrolled for a degree in Hindustani Classical. He stopped sculpting that summer.
Stone musicians
Photo by Shastri Akella
******
Nupur went on a pilgrimage to the Himalayas. She saw the face of a forest goddess carved into the bark of a deodar. She kneeled down and said a prayer. As though invoked by her incantation, a speckled green serpent snapped out of the tree hollow and bit her on the throat. Blood darkened her pink blouse to a henna red. Nupur opened her mouth but could not scream. Her co-travelers rushed her to a Tibetan herbalist. He examined the snakebite.
—I can give you back your voice. Can you give me nine months?
Nupur stayed in his house for the duration of the treatment. He prepared a concoction from sixteen hill herbs. He told her to hold the paste in her throat for an hour every day. In the mornings she lay on a charpoy with the paste choking her. She longed to sing the songs she had learned. The distance between head and throat was the length of her palm two times over; the space between memory and expression, her muteness turned into an ocean. During the day, she wandered in the woods. She listened to birdsongs. She collected their fallen feathers with reverence. In the winter when life in the hills hibernated, the thorn of silence pricked her ears.
She cried when she heard her voice again. It cracked over the song she attempted singing. Still, she kissed the herbalist’s fingers in gratitude.
She returned to her father’s home. He was an army major who had just shifted to the cantonment where Kaivalya worked as a chief priest. Her neck was tattooed with two red dots.
******
After he finished singing morning prayer, Kaivalya sat in the empty temple and, with his eyes closed, tuned his lute. Only the occasional devotee came by to gong the bell. The tinkle of anklets entered this silence. He looked up. Her eyes were like a gypsy’s. They seemed hungry for a journey.
—How do I start singing again?
Her face was suspended in animation. The priest lit an incense cone. A smoke smelling of pine-sap sweetened the air. Sunlight inched into the temple. Her brown eyes turned amber. They exchanged names. Kaivalya held out his lute.
—Surrender to an instrument. Ask it to watch over you as you practice your songs.
Nupur extended a hand. Her bangles jingled. She plucked a string uncertainly. It released a minor scale note. She touched her chin and blinked. Kaivalya saw his future hours with Nupur. A little home, not tucked away by the quiet of a river but set above a busy street. With each step he took up the stairs he would leave behind the anonymous noise and step into their personal music. He imagined their house with the things they might use: two cups of tea; an open book, its pages rustling in the breeze; two plates on the countertop; a washed sari left on the washbasin, dripping purple drops. The music of the lute floated through the house and touched their belongings in his daydream.
Nupur began practicing her songs with him. Slowly, her hesitation dissolved in the confident melody of her former voice. When she intoned the minor scale she turned so still that she seemed like a Ragmala painting, still wet, the brush just lifted off the canvas. When she raised her hand at the beginning of a song and pressed her fingers to her palm, Kaivalya felt like a cotton pod secured in her warm clasp.
After they finished practice one morning, they walked on the winding path that led away from the temple and out of the pine grove to a tarmac. The army museum was in front of them. And in its garden, Kaivalya’s first sculpture. He tapped Nupur’s shoulder.
—Look. My dancer.
Nupur walked up to it. She leaned over its shoulder. Her choker fell off, but she didn’t notice, not until she saw Kaivalya thumbing his neck. She touched her two red scars.
—How will these look on stone?
Kaivalya picked up her choker as Nupur told him about the snakebite.
—You stopped sculpting?
He nodded.
—But I’ll show you someday how those marks look on stone.
A carpet of light rolled down the hill. The Kutch weavers working nearby squinted. Their sequins, copper threads, and fabric mirrors caught sunlight. Flashes of gold flickered on Nupur’s face as though she was sitting by a pond full of coins. Kaivalya slid the choker round her neck. His fingers lingered on her nape, the clasps inches apart. Then, he slipped the choker into his pocket. They were married in the winter of 1991.
They rented a one-room apartment in an old part of the city. He returned from the temple every afternoon to share a meal with his wife, leaving the noise of the bazaar behind. He entered a home filled with his wife’s song and cooking sounds: a lentil stews stirred with a ladle, the hiss of eggplants darkening in olive oil. With fingers smeared with temple vermilion or sacred ash he added a pinch of basil or a dash of pepper to the cooking pot. He picked up the threads of the song she was humming. Their eyes met. He held her gaze.
On clear nights they spread quilts on the terrace. He told her about his mother.
—Before I left for the army school she’d wake me up every morning. Her hair smelled of myrrh.
Nupur reared herself up on her elbow. She had washed her hair with pinecone shampoo and clipped to it a string of jasmine. This is what a domesticated forest would smell like, thought Kaivalya. Jasmine and pinecone. He told her a story.
—Centuries ago there lived two lovers who weren’t allowed to marry because they were of different castes. So they hanged themselves from a banyan.
Nupur’s dark eyes turned liquid.
—The Creator was touched by their love. He had them reborn as trees. Tobacco and cannabis. Lovers bound in the wedlock of intoxication.
Kaivalya held Nupur’s chin and drew her face close to his. Her nose-ring winked at him. Her breath singed his upper lip.
Lithograph courtesy of Shastri Akella
******
The Stonesongs had been gone for centuries in 1992 when riots broke out across the land where they had lived. Gangly fanatics in saffron robes and red headbands destroyed the Mogul Mosque with pickaxes and hammers, claiming that it was built on the birthplace of a Hindu god. Communal riots created a history of absence throughout the country. A village in one state, elsewhere a colony of Hindu priests. A man in a bus, a train full of Hajj pilgrims. A woman walking her cat, a man and the children in the orphanage he ran. Bread and water in a town, shelter in the neighboring city. Mass migrations: a family moving to a Hindu area in their town, leaving a home where five generations had lived; a couple fleeing their apartment, the trunks full of their wedding gifts looted within the hour.
To prevent the ruined mosque from fuelling the violence, its debris was sent away to a prison to be made into stone blocks by convicts; afterward, they sat in a garage.
******
The violence reached their town a few weeks shy of their first anniversary. When Kaivalya was cycling home for lunch the gates of the government school were thrown open and children in gray uniforms ran out. He got off his cycle. They ran his way, swarmed him, making plans for the unexpected week off from school.
On his street people huddled around a water pump and talked.
—Mathur was mistaken for a Muslim. He was carrying bread packed in an Urdu daily.
—A woman was in the operation theater when the hospital was attacked. The red powder in her hair parting gave her away. She was in labor.
Those were the two stories Kaivalya remembered.
A twenty-four hour curfew was announced the next day. It was lifted for two hours in the afternoon for the dead to be taken to crematoriums and burial grounds. Nupur and Kaivalya looked down from their balcony. Funeral processions passed, each led by a musician in black robes who clanged cymbals. Pundits who chanted verses from the Gita accompanied Hindu corpses enshrouded in white. Mullahs who recited lines from the Quran flanked Muslim bodies wrapped in green. All of them tossed rose-petals in the air. By dusk the stone road was carpeted with red sunlit petals, each scarred with a prayer in Sanskrit or Urdu.
Nupur went in and turned on the light. She opened the daily that carried extra pages with photos of missing people.
—Not far from here is the Sabarmati, said Nupur. Gandhi lived by its banks. He pressed handspun kurtas and saris into the hands of followers. He spoke of giving our country a freedom without bloodshed.
She was reminded, she said, of a flute rendition of Gandhi’s favorite song: Rahupati Raghav.
Later that night, Kaivalya opened his eyes to her voice. He stumbled out of the bedroom and found Nupur sitting in the hall, cross-legged with the lute’s pear-shaped base in her lap, its stringed neck leaning against her shoulder. She was drenched in moonlight. Her tears flowed into her mouth. He tasted on his tongue the salt of her sorrow.
A desire to sculpt that form of Nupur overcame him. At twenty-six, he picked up the chisel again. He began working with stone he had picked up in the temple’s pine-grove. He was returning to an old skill. The finesse of his craftsmanship was intact. But his work did not satisfy his artistic vision. The statue bore no resemblance to the vibrant person that had captured his soul. He returned the stone to the grove. He couldn’t find another stone of the size he sought. He went to a garage that had stones, those from the mosque. He impatiently scratched his name and contact details in a register. He lumbered back home, hugging the stone.
Nupur started singing when he set to work again. When sculpting with the first stone, he had dwelled on a still image of Nupur. Her song turned his imagination fluid this second time: as he worked his chisel and hammer he remembered Nupur tilting her head, closing her eyes, her fingers twanging a lute, her wet lips parting in the moonlight. Kaivalya sang together with his wife the next morning. At sunrise, when a flock of mynahs landed in the tamarind tree close by, Kaivalya asked Nupur to sing a solo. He watched them: human and stone likeness, melody and silence rising from their lips.
One night, a police jeep escorted Kaivalya and Nupur to visit the army’s temple where Kaivalya could chant for the martyred soldiers. Nupur watched the widows draped in white saris, their hair shorn, their hands laid bare, every bangle, every ring removed. One of the widows raised her head. She caught Nupur staring at her. She looked at Nupur’s wedding bangles. She met Nupur’s eye. A smile spread on her crumpled face. Nupur felt her pulse quicken. She drew a dot of kohl from the corner of her eye and daubed her husband’s neck with it.
—For protection. If Death visits our house let it take me first.
As a police jeep dropped them outside their apartment, Nupur heard something like the crunching of plastic. On the other side of the road, in the shadows beyond the streetlight, she saw a pair of gleaming eyes. She tugged at Kaivalya’s sleeve and pointed at the feline eyes. But they were gone before he saw them. She felt naked as a newborn, her wedding bangles the birthmark of her religion.
The patrolman urged them to go inside. He started his jeep and waited. They shuffled up the stairs, went in and locked the door. They heard his jeep rumble away. Nupur insisted that they not switch on any light. From the window she pointed at houses that were reduced to their skeletal state of iron rods and bricks. She touched the snakebite scar on her statue’s neck. She ran a hand on its distended belly.
—Not just a singer. A singer who’ll soon be a mother.
She set her chin on the shoulder of her stone likeness. Kaivalya embraced the two. Her lips moved between his ear and the sculpture’s.
—In my dreams, our son is never small. He’s born years from now. A sixteen-year-old.
******
Fire is our oldest companion. Older than language. Almost as old as stone.
Someone pelted a rock at the glass window in the drawing hall. Nupur was the first to step out of the bedroom. Kaivalya heard the sound of bone and glass meeting; the hiss and crackle of fire. He heard her scream and rushed out. She was engulfed in flames.
He wrapped a rug around her, rolling her on the floor until the flames died away. He leaned over her face and placed a hand on her belly.
He was close to the window when they flung another stone. Bits of glass entered his eyes. He passed out. He was woken up later by rescue workers to a different world. He couldn’t see that he was in the hospital. But he heard when they said it had been a flaming kerosene bottle.
******
What was the religion of the Stonesongs?
We walk by rivers and pick up stones that look like turtles. We lie down on cool grass and seek familiar forms in clouds. They painted on cave walls. We create sculptures or build around a space, turning that space sacred with statues and incense. Perhaps the Stonesongs shared nothing more with us than a desire to find the animate in the inanimate.
******
Kaivalya’s mother visited him. They sat on the cane-sofa and sipped on coffee. She brought home the scent of his childhood home. Boiled milk, masala chai, cumin seeds, quilts, trunks, sundried cotton saris, the backyard of apple trees, acacia shampoo, floor disinfectant, starch, the sea his childhood room faced, the fish trucks he watched from there. Each home has a unique scent, a complex chemical layered with the life of every family member.
Recognizing this smell was for Kaivalya an acknowledgement that they had once shared a domestic landscape, still shared the corporeal river of blood. But the scent wasn’t physically part of him anymore. It wasn’t flesh-knowledge. For years he been scentless, waking up in dorm rooms, slipping out of sheets that others had slept in, living in the army hostel. His skin had hungrily absorbed the scent of his marital home: a simple synthesis of lemon detergent and the jasmine she wore in her hair. When he opened his cupboard the rush of air lifted the scent off Nupur’s clothes and brought it to him. They had not shared a home for long enough for the perfumes of all their personalities—cook, singer, lover, priest, sculptor, storyteller, walker, bath taker—to become part of that home scent. The pine of her shampoo, his sacred ash and temple vermilion, the amber of her silks, the rubber of his slippers and the steamed bell-peppers of their food: these smells were not married to the lemon-jasmine. Bachelor scents, Kaivalya called them. He didn’t tell his mother about them.
This, too, he didn’t tell his mother: after he quelled the fire on Nupur’s body and before the glass splinters claimed his sight, he had looked into Nupur’s eyes with a hand on her swollen belly, the skin there textured like land left crackled by heat. He was ashamed: his gesture had not been a search for signs of suffering in mother and child. He was groping for a twin silence, a confirmation that the two died together. He didn’t want Nupur to think of her body as a grave or his son to feel he was being killed by the body that breathed into his blood the possibility of life.
******
—Come live with us, son, you’re alone here. It’s been three months now.
Kaivalya caressed the womb of the sculpture of his wife; it had survived, unchanged. He looked at Nupur’s brown sandals by the shoe rack; her purse on the sill; her comb on the sink, a long hair strand entangled in its teeth. His mother put her coffee away and wrapped her hands around him, her palms warm on his shoulder.
Even a blind man closes his eyes when he remembers fondly.
******
In the centuries that separated the destruction of the cave and the construction of the mosque, was there, in the debris, a painted star facing the night stars, all night, every night? The Stonesongs, the British archaeologist discovered, slept with their faces close to cave walls. They released their breath on stone. Pilgrims who stepped into the Mogul Mosque prayed with their foreheads to the walls. Did they feel an ancient’s breath, trapped in the stone’s pores for centuries, released now by the heat of their own bodies, the liquid of their sweat?
There are traces of the Stonesongs and the Mogul mosque on Kaivalya’s cross-legged sculpture with faint Persian words on its distended belly. No stone is born only once. Earthquakes and landslides reshape them. They evolve into new forms under chisels & hammers: angels in graveyards, spreading their wings where all mortal life shrivels; fort bastions where emperors once rode their steeds; dancers carved onto temple walls, their postures alluding to the nature of celestial entertainment.
Shastri Akella worked at a street theater troupe and at Google for five years before taking a break to pursue an MFA at UMass (Amherst). He reads for the Massachusetts Review and is an arts council member. His works appeared in &Now (Paris edition), Danse Macabre, Belletrist Coterie, The Common, the longlist of the Oxford E-Author competition, the honorable mention list of the L. Ron Hubbard Contest, The Harvey Swados fiction prize, The Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Fiction, and The Hindu Theater Reviews. He is working on his novel under the guidance of Sabina Murray.
There’s a certain type of guilt in secretly using a friend’s toothpaste. There I stood at her sink, aimlessly rinsing the white bristles of my toothbrush in cold water before lining them with a slab of paste following a quick squeeze of the tube. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the difference in weight or measure how far away the tube was from the edge of the sink or confront me about my germ-infested toothbrush bristles coming in contact with the mouth of her tube of toothpaste. I tried to put it back where I found it, back where she wouldn’t notice that it was I who would share the same minty breath after it was her turn to scrub her enamel.
