Short Story: Mandy's World

Short Story: Mandy's World

The land remained beautiful. The green of the grassy fields, with sheep dotted like popcorn on a jade carpet, still retained its emerald lushness. The blue skies still remained breathtakingly sapphire. Here and there cotton wool clouds dared show their happy selves, asking her to forget the rains that might come down to spoil the summer’s day. And a breeze had flown over the Tay River that always captivated her mind and was now gently pulling at her hair and scarf. “Forget it,” everything seemed to say. “Forget the violence and come play with us. Come stay with us and you can still make it better. You can still keep us. There is time yet.”

The ambulances had gone from the scene of the massacre and the bodies that had spewed the streets with their blood had been taken away. There were no policemen or reporters insight. People were trying to clean the streets of the blood now, working people, paid for their work though too human to keep their faces from showing the horror of the happening. “Why did he do it?” one of the on lookers murmured. “He was such a nice guy. Just drove his taxi around and minded his own business. Never thought he had so much anger in him. How could he have killed all those people?”

“Some demon must have got into him,” said one of the workers, pausing for a moment to answer her. He held the scrubbing brush in his hand and waved it up and down to emphasize his point though his voice did not rise above a whisper. “Anger comes in many forms. Look at the tomb stones vandals have gone and destroyed. ”

“How can one destroy tombstones!” said another voice from the crowd. “Can you go and disturb the dead because of anger within you? What kind of people are there nowadays!! What terrible times!!”

“It is anger alright,” said the worker going back to scrubbing the ground of blood. “Anger comes in many forms. Once you let the demon in, it will strike out from you in many strange and cruel ways. In the end the land too will be affected. Because people make the things around them. You wait and see where all this will end. If we do not mend our ways ……”

That was when Mandy turned away from the scene and started walking back. The air seemed colder somehow. Was it going to rain? She had just come home from Sri Lanka, back to her mother in Scotland. In Sri Lanka she had been working with a voluntary organization that was helping to rehabilitate the many refugees from the terrible war between the lethal LTTE terrorists and the Sri Lankan government. They had been thrown like errant pebbles on the sand when children play – to be left homeless and defenseless….a subject of pity…to be tolerated and exposed…but still left, despite whatever good work rehabilitation procedures did for them, like fish upon the sand…..gasping for breath…feeling the pain of the hook in their mouths….. in shock.

The calm and peace of a beautiful summer’s day lay before her. The Tay River could be glimpsed beyond, glistening and sparkling in the warm, encouraging sunlight. But to Mandy the heavy burden of a thousand images were now keeping the joy of the day away. “Was the Sahara as beautiful and as sparkling once upon a time before the humans in it turned it brown?”

Sri Lanka was her mother’s homeland. Her father was from Scotland. She loved both of these lands because her parents had seen to it that she had experiences of both. She now remembered the Thovile she had attended in Sri Lanka. She had been just a kid then. A young girl had been possessed by a demon and the Thovile, an age old ritual with drums and chanting, was done to chase the demon out. Fascinated by the color, the sound and the chanting, she had asked her father to explain it.

“Demons? Are there demons? Do they possess people?” she had asked of him.

“I really don’t believe in all that,” he had said in his practical, wise way. “I do believe that people are capable of anger though. Sometimes it seems the same thing. Demons and anger you know. You have to control it. Find how it springs from the insides of us and destroys those hidden springs. Otherwise there could be trouble. ”

Mandy remembered then a story that she had heard long ago. Her mind had a way of its own it seemed to her, to surf all the knowledge it had stored in one masterful sweep and bring to surface the most apt images to the thought she was thinking. Thus was the thought enriched and sometimes guided, to conclusions so wonderful and interesting. It had been in Sri Lanka, where she’d first heard this story, from her granny in one of those happy holiday times when her parents had made the journey with her to that island paradise.

Once in India a king went hunting deer with his retinue. Though this was the time of Siddartha and the prince had already left his palaces to seek for enlightenment through meditation and had achieved what he sought and become Buddha, such sport still went on, lives were still bought and sold or killed for sport. The deer hunting king, drunk with his skill and his kingly power, wanting to show his prowess at archery as being above all the other princes, soldiers and vassals, rode his mighty horse in front of all. They had been after a stag. The jungle became impassable and he had to leave his steed and chase his prey on foot. Slowly did he creep, slowly did he steal upon the frightened stag, feeding on the long grass a moment at ease thinking that it had shaken off its pursuer. He aimed his arrow-straight and true. A twig broke under him and the stag fled into the jungle with the falling twilight readily flinging a protective shroud. The king found that he had lost his way and shout as he might, he could not make himself heard to his people who were now searching the jungle for him. Tired depressed, stag-less, sweat taking off his royal scent, and broken down to a mere man who was but only flesh and blood and worthless thought, he sat himself down under a massive tree to spend the night. There were mangoes fallen at his feet, rotting and worm eaten. The tree was silent, dark and immense and banyan. The adjacent mango tree was full of fruit but the kingly nature did not think of climbing it for food. So sword ready by his side, his back to the wide trunk, his soft haunches shouting against the hard rock on which it was made to rest, the only one available, the king waited for the familiar dawn when his reality of trees and jungle would become once more.

Aalavaka, a demon, lived in his supernatural mansion above the banyan tree. He had got his boon from the high monarch of the world of demons, to whoever should stray under the banyan tree or thereabouts. Soaring high over the jungle, invisible to all but to the eye of demons and gods, his mansion spanned a whole mile of sky. He had been at a meeting in the remote mountains of another realm when the king had come under his tree. There were a whole lot of ‘king demons‘ there on that day, Vibhiishana the high king taking the chair. The message that a mortal had strayed under his tree, had come on the wings of an eagle, a demoniacal one brought by Hemawatha the messenger-devil. Hemawatha had seen a mortal under the tree of Aalavaka. With a horrible growl Aalavaka leapt into the air, not even worried about the disturbance he was creating at this horrible meeting of demons, though some were even more powerful than he. A boon was a boon. And this was the sphere of the demons. No mortal order held sway over this land of conflagration. Death at the peak of fury got you here.

And Aalavaka that day had smacked his lips in anticipation of the taste of the kingly morsel that awaited him under his tree. He almost smiled if smile is possible for such an ugly cruel demon. Aalavaka thought of himself as timeless. So long was his life span. And even when he would quit this existence to start another, there would be another deserving one to take his place. As long as anger and hatred dogged the thoughts of mortals, Aalavaka and his demons would exist. Was it possible that he spied the thousand millions of mortals who waited unconsciously to visit his demon world? A thousand million fury ridden mortals? Aalavaka soared skywards. The green jungles of the mortal world was just a blotch of green at this height. He was speeding fast. In a moment, after the blue oceans were passed, he would nose- dive down.

The king had had a nightmare. He was standing in a desert. It was gray black. In his dream. It must have been night- time. There was a black pool at his feet and something seemed to push him into it from behind. He stepped back, with all his strength mustered, looking behind to see what it was. But there was nothing there for him to see but the force he felt. No sound would come from his parched throat. In terror did he open his eyes to the twilight-night of his mortal world. Under the demon tree, there was enchantment. The night was gray-black around him. As if it was only twilight. But there a terror far greater awaited . From the gray, rain clouded twilight sky came Aalavaka. He came with his head down. A poisoned arrow falling straight and true from the feral enemy. In front of the king’s terrified eyes the demon interchanged his head and torso with his feet and groin.

Now he stood. Hell in eyes. Mountain in body. Blood in smell. Rip and gorge his intention.

“Please demon,” The king croaked. “Please let me live. I am a poor traveler, the king of the land ,…actually, lost my way…” Better keep to the truth. The demon might be able to read minds.

No words. Just a jerk by the hair. The king hung perilously forty feet in the air with the black crevasse of the demon’s mouth wide agape at his feet. Stench. Fear.

“I will give you a body everyday if you let me go.” Talk fast.

In goes the kingly feet into the mouth, the black nails with which the demon was holding the kings locks, high above his head are about to let go. Huk! Huk! A mortal morsel. Hard to come by these days. Only under his tree was he permitted to gorge humans. Vibeeshana the high king of the demon worlds had given him leave to eat mortals only thus.[1] Huk! Huk! May Vibeeshana be praised.

“Demon, set me free. I will send you one such as I, every month.”

“I want no more of such as you, dirt!” says Aalavaka. But he pauses before he gulps the king down. This was no ordinary demon. Not one of the ordinary demon of the common sort you get inhabiting trees, stones and arid plains of the mortal world was Aalavaka. This was a ‘thinking demon.’ One with a history. His family of demons had always held sway over others of its kind, working always directly under the demon monarch ‘Vibiishana.’ Thus he could reason out to an extent. And reason out he did and came up with an idea. He loved infant-meat. Such meat was hard to come by.

“Mortals are beasts who guard their cubs in a manner that keeps demons at bay. It would be a fine deal to get a mortal infant for dinner at the end of a month.” Thus speculating, the deal was clinched. The cowardly king promised an infant monthly and got away. Thus every month a mother in his kingdom lost her baby, mysteriously stolen, and the wailing and lamenting of motherhood became the tragic tune of that land.

The story goes that Aalavaka had long given up its old ways and tried now to live a life of virtue with only a morsel here and there of human flesh to remind it of what dark species it belonged to. The Buddha had tamed Aalavaka. But that is another story. The people whispered that it never even ate now with the blood oozing down from its jaws to fall splat, splat all over. He had given strict orders to his servants that a corpse must be cut into civilized slices and washed of blood and served in huge platters more like the way the humans devoured theirs in the land below. And food was to be served at table in his domain and there was to be no chomping at table. No she-demon could go to hunting away from the places where the demons lived in the forests or haunt the ancient streams that were only trod by humans. There she would, in the days past, prey on them when they came to take water. Take them by their ankles, throw them over her shoulder and spring into the skies before you can say a word. And chomp them up, tearing their flesh with those lethal fangs and sharp, knife like teeth. Then, in the days past, she would have got in to a delicious orgy. Ah! This was the twilight sphere.

The story, remembered at the correct time, saved Mandy’s day.

“Even Aalavaka was tamed,” she said. Her normally happy spirit was back with her now and no killings in Cumbria or Sri Lanka or Afhganistan was going to get her down. “We are going to keep you,” she told everyone concerned.

She had come home. Her father was taking the car out. He put his head out and waved to her. She waved back.

“Talking to yourself?” he asked. Her mother stood at the doorway. She smiled at Mandy and raised her hand in greeting. Where on earth had she gone without having her breakfast? Her father was going looking for her.

“I took a walk,” Mandy said.

The peace of it all took her in. It was good to be home. It was good to be back in her world.

[1] The Buddhist story goes thus. Aalavaka the demon had got leave only to be able to gorge humans under his tree. The king was unfortunate to have rested under the tree.