The Enchanted Deer

Shamit was astonished. As if cool white snow were falling from the sky. On the ground people’s minds were unwell. Everything seemed to be congealing. The field where Shamit stood was ringed by ancient banyan trees. In the slanting late afternoon, the sweat of those trees slid down into the soil and soaked the grass.
 
A flock of crows was driving a neelkanth—an Indian roller—before them. The colored bird, exhausted in flight, found the crows arrowing in with a hiss. From the left one crow jabbed its beak into the roller’s ribs; another clamped its throat like a pair of tongs. Staggering, the neelkanth began dropping toward the earth—only to snag upon a leafless branch. Four or five crows now circled and penned it in. Trapped in a wheel of assault, it suffered peck after peck until, at last, it fell lifeless onto the world’s wet breast. Such a cruel falling for so beautiful a bird left Shamit stunned. The snows truly were descending upon the earth, tireless.
 
Shamit began to sprint straight through the field. He would hurl stones and split the plastic hides of the crows. At his poised charge the crows raised a riot. Shamit tried to reach the neelkanth. Just then, a philosopher-vulture launched from the high boughs like a missile and stooped upon the dead bird. With a slash it lifted the shredded, many-colored body in its beak and flew away—close to heaven.
 
Shamit was panting. Looking back he saw the girl watching him. Her name was Sangeeta. She saw Shamit every day—with the clear, blue-tinged gaze of a gentle sheep. For as long as the girl remained within sight, Shamit’s own eyes stuck upon her body. It was a kind of chain. Until she went out of sight, his eyes were not set free.
 
For some strange reason Shamit strayed into this field every day. He did not come of his own will. Hypnosis dragged him here by force. The fidgeting, restless life beyond the field had lately become unbearable to him.
 
He felt for this field an odd, fierce attraction— and also a measure of disgust. There were flowers here. There was clean oxygen steeped in love. The green grasses were wet with snow; one might think their true color was white. The great trees held so many crows that their bodies, like the trunks, had turned ashen. Here the sky grew dreamy with many colors, for the reflections of the surrounding flowers fell upon it.
 
The pattern of the girl’s walking laid peace upon Shamit’s mind. So indifferent was that gait that it seemed even a nuclear blast at the center of the field could not break its rhythm. Was Sangeeta truly so indifferent? Yet her eyes held such fire that she could burn the whole world to cinders. She was like a solitary fire-fairy.
 
In a blink she pierced all of Shamit’s intelligence and entered within. His body felt like transparent glass, so easily did Sangeeta’s gaze pass through him.
 
The girl still watched him. From far off, though, one could not be sure what she watched— or was it only Shamit’s illusion? He had run to save the neelkanth. He turned, unprepared. For the past month and a half the girl had watched him in exactly this way; as if, abandoning everything else in the field, her gaze hunted only him. So Shamit came prepared— to stand before that gaze. He came made-up so that, under it, he might appear the world’s most handsome and intelligent man. He hid a ruined economy, a wrecked social policy, a brazen politics— hid even his narrow, thin frame— and came into the field dressed up as a sham prince of fable. For one game only: Sangeeta would look at him. That much.
 
That a girl would merely look at him— could anyone live for that purpose alone? It seemed to Shamit he had been born only so that Sangeeta might look at him: with an arrogant, rascal stare from a mountain peak to the sea’s edge— there he would stand, and she would keep on seeing him.
 
Though the flowers all around the field glowed with light, Shamit wanted to see only Sangeeta. If one goes too close to a searing light, the body feels the heat. And if Shamit could not bear that heat— if he burned like black letters on white paper— then better to keep a safe distance.
 
Yet he had gone mad like a poet; drunk like the light-crazed moths. Some imaginary crank-wheel kept turning in his skull. If heaven existed anywhere, it was in Sangeeta’s eyes.
 
A part of Shamit did not want to rush toward the light. He looked at Sangeeta as he looked at flowers. When he looked at flowers, he never thought of the gardener who raised them; nor the life-history of the seed; nor which bee would someday drink this nectar; who would pluck them for a god’s offering or for some home’s beauty. He had never thought of such things. So it went here too. For him, the present was the marrow and whole. Do past and future truly exist for humans? Can one live anywhere but in this instant? He had loved the battling neelkanth when it flew with fierce velocity through the sky— only the present in its wings.
 
Shamit came down the field to the road. Near the girl now. She sat on the steps of the library building. It seemed an old song might start up any moment, attar-sweetness spreading everywhere. Suddenly a feeling of greatness rose within him; as though in a world free of lust, anger, greed, sin, injustice he drifted like the neelkanth. The color of this love, like poison, was blue.
 
Around the field, like the many people wandering here and there, Sangeeta too now wandered. Yet she was different from the others. The rest seemed directionless; she alone appeared to have a single aim in life— one not easily reached, filled with unbroken elegance. Floating thus, Shamit suddenly dropped to the ground. Benches of wood and tree-stumps ringed the field. He sat on a bench, and with a sixth sense he fixed Sangeeta’s position behind him. Until now he had believed the whole world could not be seen with two eyes; that what two eyes could see, that alone was the visible world; what lay beyond them was without existence; what lay behind did not exist at all; turn your neck and look, and they gather themselves just in time, joining the invisible half to the visible half of reality. Yet now it felt as if nothing invisible had slipped out of his sight; as though with two exquisite eyes at the back of his head he kept seeing Sangeeta— continuously, completely— unknown to all, in secret.
 
Shamit grew restless within. Somewhere in his body a cyclone coiled. If he could fling out hands and feet and caper a bit, perhaps he would find two moments of peace. Or else if the girl would pass out of his sight; or like those nights when he woke and kept thinking of her— it seemed if he could smash his fist with all his strength into a concrete wall, he might be comforted. Even if someone broke his face with a punch, he would feel no pain— not compared to the pain of thinking and thinking of the girl. Inside him he grew lively like a koi fish, floundering on land. If the door-bolt at night were not sound, he might have answered the call of darkness and rushed into the street— happy at the thought his body would be found by the pond at dawn.
 
Night after night without sleep, Shamit’s looks worsened. Soot gathered at the corners of his eyes. And Sangeeta’s radiance overflowed all the more. Along with it the canopy of her eyes grew even sharper.
 
As days went by, Shamit became ever more desperate to speak to the girl— like an unkown suicide who had writhed to dip his mouth in the cup of poison. How this grotesque situation had arisen he could not fathom. Clearly two Shamit’s had formed within him. One had sense— the ordinary schooling of reality. Again and again he tormented the second. The other was not quite sane— disturbed and purposeless. The normal Shamit kept scolding the mad Shamit: what you think is not right; such events are not natural, not to be understood by common sense. The purposeless Shamit took this critique upon his chest— and his intoxication only grew fourfold.
 
In the stupor of this intoxication, the tender, lovelorn, purposeless Shamit became entirely drunk. With winter’s onset the field’s trees had begun to go bald. On the grass lay a yellowish tinge. And the snowfall had ceased. In place of snow, sunlight like shards of diamond played here and there across the field, wandering without plan. Some rays clung, caught between the cracks of dead, dry twigs. In his drunkenness, Shamit failed to notice how much the romance of the surroundings had been ruined. Even the men and women kissing on the benches along the field had lips gone so dry that it seemed blood might start to flow with each kiss. That threat of bloodshed cast a cruel nature around the field. From above it still looked like an ideal Vrindavan of love; in truth it was a Sahara, a Plassey plain—historically brutal and without pity. And another truth: beneath this library lawn, once upon a time, foreign merchants had stored their arms. One might call it a playground of destruction.
 
In this split-lipped climate of love, Shamit had started following the girl. Sangeeta kept looking back at him with an unnatural stare. That such childish acts could so profoundly stir a person’s inner self was beyond her imagination. Shamit mistook her gaze for encouragement. He quickened his pace and tailed her. Had the “normal” Shamit stood up to block him then— had he stayed beside this shameless drunk— had the drunk’s eyes and ears been even a little open— he would have sensed what the stillness of the environment foretold. A dry, earthen stink was rising from the roots of the flower shrubs; in that stench the blossoms, rotting, hung from the stems. How desperately they strove to lift diamonds of sunlight off the sun’s body. And he would have heard that all the lovers, instead of love-talk, were only firing rockets of lies. Listening to the lie one told, the other showed such interest that you might think the world square, not round—and the sun rose in the west.
 
All at once, running without break, Shamit caught up with the girl. He called from behind, “Excuse me— will you listen a moment?”
 
Sangeeta stopped, theatrically. Upon the divine skin of her face appeared crooked, secret corrugations. For the first time, Shamit discovered the hard awning that lived in her gaze, and grew a little chilled. In a feigned voice the girl said, “Speak.”
 
Her voice seemed to drift from the sky. The language was unearthly and abrupt; the whole world seemed to halt behind her. After long ages, perhaps the earth stopped its spin and stood still in space. Shamit’s throat sank down into his stomach. Every rehearsal he had practiced vanished. It was as if the very power of speech were falling from his mouth into an abyss. His eyes were still dream-blurred. He saw a tinted, hazy cloud. On the far side of that cloud stood a celestial, wing-footed horse— waiting for him— to carry him to heaven’s staircase. With great difficulty— as if he would be saved only by sinking into the earth this very moment— he said, “Everything in me seems to be turning to confusion. Could you be a little normal? I’ve… I’ve lost the thread of what to say.”
 
The girl’s eyes flared with a sudden blaze. Then she was no longer merely a girl. She became, truly, a heavenly fairy. “Have you ever seen your monkey-face in a mirror?” she said.
 
A mass of darkness slammed into Shamit. His head spun. His eyes flickered like nebulae. The girl went on, “Is this your daily work— trailing some woman, blocking her path to say… something? How long have you been at this?”
 
Never before had such a gale blown full in Shamit’s face. His ragged heart, under a hammer’s blow, straightened into a smooth line. On Sangeeta’s face there were now no eyes, ears, nose, tongue— only a crystal of white. Shamit’s vision blurred. So much grandeur lived in her face that he remembered Cleopatra’s stone statue. He felt the “normal” Shamit rise within him, wanting to awaken with a great cry.
 
“You men— what do you think women are? Play-dolls? You should have shame. You stupid, asinine idiot.” The last word she delivered as if declaring an unerring philosophical truth. Then she strode away, in swift, storming steps.
 
Shamit stood like a tree struck by lightning. As if she had raised the nails from his hands and feet, tugged out his tongue, and gone. Like a wounded lion rising, like a slaughter-goat giving its final shudder, like a netted fish leaping skyward to escape— so he stared, blood-hot, after the path where Sangeeta went. Then he remembered the exact sentence he had lost. In the same instant, his entire feeling, excitement, love, the perfume of happiness— everything tangled into a dreadful nausea. The way it is when a long-nursed truth suddenly shatters into pieces. As though every proved law of motion snarled at once; as when, leaping, the mind vaults a palm tree; as when one’s delusion breaks trying to fly from the ground into the sky— so he broke.
 
The primal people of this city live wholly in imagination. Their realities begin when they go to sleep. There arise a socialist society, Platonic love, a heroic life, and mortal, heavenly bliss. In that very mist humans dwell. Many live their whole lives in that dream. They believe not a bit of the dusty lie of daylight. They loathe that lie; name it the greatest enemy of their imagination. And again, the abnormal ones like Shamit fling themselves into that very lie to find life.
 
It felt to Shamit as if the sleeping world of truth were yanked from his brain in a single instant. And that is when the day of his downfall began. Like a mad dog he leapt up and chased the lie of daylight.
 
The girl had gone far ahead. She crossed the main road, proceeding with her signature indifference. It was as if the cells of Shamit’s head had been swapped out. Lightning ran vein to vein. This was the return from abnormal reality to normalcy. What, a moment earlier, he had thought the grandest way to live— the next moment seemed a cunning jackal. Blind with rage, he forgot that nature’s indifference was exactly as before. It had not changed at all. For him, no special importance would be given anywhere.
 
The girl had crossed the street. A bus approached from the opposite side; she waved it to a halt. This was not a leaf-strewn lovers’ grove but the belly of a city filled with blue smoke. He felt the ache of that womb. In a daze he stepped into the road, meaning to board the bus. Just then— like a four-footed beast at full speed— a taxi, chased by police, sprang onto his body. When it had crushed the flesh to its liking, the taxi bounced twice: once under the front wheels, once under the rear. Then with a moment’s stall, the terrified driver lunged back into the city at reckless speed.
 
Traffic froze for an instant. From the bus window Sangeeta saw Shamit’s twisted corpse. In keeping with material law, the lines of her face clenched in dread. The other passengers hurled themselves upon the windows to witness the kill— curious cries pouring from their mouths: part homage to the wretch, part the wild urge to curse the system. Though in this overcrowded, unruly city, such happenings are no rarity. This is merely normalcy— of another order.
 
Sangeeta turned to stone at the shock. In this winter afternoon a few sweet drops of sweat rolled from the left side of her brow along a glassy chin. She took a kerchief from her bag and covered her face. Then, forcing upon herself a look that said she had nothing to do with the event, she sat like stone. The bus barked, surged, and sped into the unknown womb of the city. Across that area rose the prospect of a vast commotion. To give the tumult a push, Shamit’s corpse lay grandly on the road, while human-shaped vultures ringed him for the final rites.
 
When the uproar had begun to coil across the world, the horizon-wide, love-soaked field and its trees, flowers, leaves, and sky showed no concern. That someone would never again come there— this was none of their business. As if none of them grasped the strangeness of the event. Those still in the field, busy singing the glories of love, suffered not the least tear in their concentration. Everything remained as simple and smooth as before. Only the few drops of Shamit’s blood that had seeped through the soil into the earth’s pores dried, mingled with the dust of the road, and drifted on the wind back into the field— eager to join the blood-line of split-lipped kisses. Perhaps all unions in this world end in this manner. In the full indifference of nature, silently.
 
A few days later, Sangeeta returned to the field’s edge with more purity and beauty than before. As if everything had been waiting for her. Till now she had been an ordinary girl. Now, to the field, she seemed a human-goddess. At her sight the trees, flowers, grasses remembered Shamit. What wonder! The newly blossomed hybrid flowers shook themselves and stood upright. The leaves of the trees trembled and fluttered in surprise. The yellowing trunks seemed suddenly alive. Witnessing nature’s restlessness, Sangeeta fell pensive. She wished to throw off this burden and flee— but could not.
 
A neelkanth had again lost its way and come to the field. It had no choice. As if its life had begun solely to fall into this very labyrinth. The hungry crows shook themselves at the sight. The day felt lucky to them. For long they had found nothing close at hand to chase and kill. Their beaks gleamed with joy.
 
To turn this normalcy of the scene abnormal, a completely new man entered the field. Like a dislodged meteor he came plunging in. The neelkanth seemed to guide him there. With envy, passion, narrowness, sin in his heart he stepped into the field. Like one who, playing with a meaningless life, wanders into an act of the grand drama. Then he faced the war-loving, hungry crows. Facing them, all the old spiritual virtues and sensibilities of human life rose to his head. As through a secret gate troops rush toward the battlefield in nameless dread, so foolishly he tried to save the neelkanth— or thought to save it. Failing, he turned back to himself. And there, upon his own face, he saw the shadow of love’s material thread. Thus humans come and humans go. Unchanging nature remains, still as a stone.
 
Sangeeta could hardly believe it. She stood at the field’s rim. Amid all normalcy, abnormally, she fixed her gaze upon the new arrival. It was as if, with a single glance, life was installed in this young man’s body. A whole life long a person is dying; only sometimes, when he truly begins to live, does he find the occasion for that life. From birth to death, the intoxication of struggling to stay alive.
 
Yet a human’s fate is determined by the faults and merits of the way of seeing. The visible object has no role in it. Material systems do not govern it. This inexorable message the flock of crows broadcast with tremendous clamour. Nodding their heads, the branches gave assent. Fallen leaves danced in tiny whirlwinds. The sun of the sky grew exhilarated. The flowers’ joy could scarcely be contained. The old vulture, to prove the grandeur of his philosophical existence, sat on the high bough and waited for the next prey. And yet this inexorable message did not enter the ear-holes of the lovers sitting on the benches. Perhaps this is why humans are not parts of nature, but something else— either supremely wise, or wise-in-sin.
 
Like a raw novice the new youth ran toward Sangeeta. In her eyes he again found that precious thing. The blood-vessels of his heart and soul stuck fast there. In this youth Sangeeta saw the shadow of Shamit, and looked with the gaze of love. The flap of time fell, and in that instant the cherished household took the blind road of illusion.
 
After that, much time has passed. Now, even after so long, I do not feel like asking what became of Sangeeta, how she is. Only for Shamit I feel a great ache. Should I ever meet some wretch as unfortunate, intemperate, sinful as he, let our knowing minds and souls not lament even a little for him. And may humans never again declare rebellion against nature’s normalcy. May one not dash in at arrow-speed and pursue the girl. Let not a single harsh word in the city’s blue empire come flying to strike her. Let the bus not halt in the middle of the road. Let no timid taxi-driver, fleeing the police, surge forward at unstoppable speed. Let the girl’s unearthly expression not be made ready somewhere in space for the next moment. And let not darkness descend upon the world a moment later.