The Impossible Question

By Anita Kainthla

In the end, the Baital (a celestial spirit/ ghost/ vampire) recounts the 25th story to the legendary King Vikramaditya of Ujjain. The story that ends in the most impossible question; a king and a prince find, both, the enemy queen and princess, alive in the melee of a war. The son marries the queen and the father marries the princess and eventually, the son and the queen become parents to a baby boy, and the father and the princess to a baby girl. The story ends here. Baital seeks to know from Vikramaditya the utterly confounding relationship between the two newborn children. The answer perhaps can be worked through an intricate math of relationships but the math is so long winding and so hopelessly entangled that the bewildered King is unable to answer the question. 

The Baital Pachisi (25 Baitala stories) was written 2500 years ago by a brilliant Sanskrit writer, one Somdev Bhatt. This collection of stories is about the legendary King Vikramarditya of Ujjain, who is gifted a rare diamond by a Tantrik. In return the Tantrik requests the gallant King to capture and bring to him a Baital hiding in a tree. True to his word, the King captures the Baital, slings him across his back and trudges off with him to the Tantrik. The long and arduous walk back would have been insufferable had not the Baital offered to narrate stories to the King along the way. The unsuspecting King readily agrees. The clever Baital draws up a catalog of conditions to be maintained during the narration and again the King once more is all in: 

1. If the King is unable to answer the question at the end of each story that the Baital recounts, the latter would remain in the captivity of the King.

2.  If the King, despite knowing the answer, keeps quiet, his head will burst into a thousand pieces. 

3. On the other hand, if the King speaks, the Baital will escape and return to his tree. 

4. And finally, in the eventuality of the King being forced into silence due to not knowing the answer to a story, the King could take the Baital to the Tanrtik. 

 2500 years after the Baital Pachisi was written, it was televised in the mid nineteen eighties as an Indian television series called Vikram aur Baital, for children. Also in the mid nineteen eighties, I’m spending lot of time with father and mother worries about it. I don’t see what is wrong though. All the same, a question has begun to surface, inspired by the Vikram and Baital television series that I’m into- am I the son that father never had or the daughter he never wanted? Although the answer isn’t an unsolvable mathematical equation as in the case of the 25th Vikram and Baital story, it is unanswerable, being obscured somewhere in father’s psychological labyrinths. 

I only watch the Vikram and Baital stories when father isn’t around. Just one story per week is telecast, but there are re-runs throughout the week and I’m watching all the re-runs as well. Even though these stories were allegedly written for children between 4 and 12, I watch them in my early twenties and wonder why these were ever advertised as kid’s tales only? With every re-run, I’m uncovering such profundity of meaning. With every watch I’m maturing with an unbelievable velocity.

One after the other, the Baital recounts 24 stories to the King and the King animatedly answers the question posed by the Baital at the end of each story causing the Baital to fly off from the King’s captivity 24 times. But at the end of the 25th story, the baffling question pushes him into silence. This means that the King can now take the Baital back to the Tantrik, who in the end would exterminate the Baital in a sacrificial fire. This intent of the Tantrik is, however, upset when the Baital and Vikram team up and kill him in a cunning move. Very much like the legendary Vikramaditya I don’t know the answer to my internal conundrum stimulated by the Tele-series (Am I the son he never had or the daughter he never wanted?), so I can’t speak. But unlike the King I’m not able to carry my spooky Baital to his annihilation, at least just yet.

Father is extremely critical of Indian cinema and television. Story, thrill, music, use of technology- everything he says is distasteful and pretentious in them. Worth neither one’s time nor sympathy. So the Tele series is my most intimate secret from him. It’s almost like a secret sin I’m recklessly committing but one about which I don’t carry any guilt. 

Other than this one omission I’m always attentive to a hundred things father’s telling me all the time, which he says I should know. He recurrently advises me that all I need to watch are Hollywood films and all I need to read are novels by western writers. There are Hollywood films he wants I watch but we have to make do with only those that show in the solitary cinema hall in the town. Every Friday a new film is up and it shows three times a day, all through the week. And every Friday is father’s favorite day. It’s my favorite day too but for different reasons- father’s because of the change of film and mine because of the “lightness of being” that the change of film affects in him.  Mother never watches these films with us because she says that although she understands and speaks fairly good English, she can’t follow American English. She also isn’t part of the reading lists made up primarily of books on wars and spies, suspense thrillers and political dramas, which sometimes father recommends and sometimes reads passages from. He’s like the story telling Baital, except he’s also the valiant King to me. I wonder what I am to him? 

I’m apprehensive about the answer so I’m always avoiding it. I’m just glad that it’s me he talks to, it’s me he takes out, it’s me he teaches everything he knows about the world. My world is being structured with the raw material of his knowledge and understanding of it. His knowledge and understanding, all of which is noumenal. At least all of that which he’s passing on to me. 

I enjoy our trips to the hairdressers where father explains in detail to the stylist, the length and style of hair he wants for me. To the tailor where he pours over old Russian magazines with hundreds of designs for long, heavy winter coats, till he finds exactly what he would have me wear. His affection is reflected in his diligence in designing something as trivial as the cut of my hair or my coat. I look at him with stars in my eyes and a pride at being whatever I am to him explodes my heart into many tiny pounding fragments as I’m munching on paper- cone peanuts. Paper- cone peanuts is “our” thing. Whether, we are watching a Hollywood-er or he’s telling me about King Tut’s tomb, the 2nd World War, British India, Indian freedom struggle, cricket, Hollywood, Bollywood, war stories or we’re simply walking- we are always munching on peanuts from paper cones. 

What I, however, enjoy most is when he asks me to assist him during his mending binges. Mother calls him ‘Mr. Fixo’.  He has this elaborate set of tools, which he occasionally oils, wipes and rubs with flannel to get the rust off. All the while I am explained the function and working of the various tools. It isn’t a woman’s job he says because it requires a lot of precision and focus. 

On mending days, it is me who is always asked to hold up the torch light, hand him the pliers, screwdrivers, nails etc. and clutch the chair or ladder on which he climbs to mend something higher up. We do not talk while mending because he says that unlike women, men never talk while working. The texture of the hurt it causes me when he says that is very abrasive and it clings to me. I wish mother would make a little less noise with her tongue and not make father say such things.

Mother’s voice calling me sounds very distant as I am just getting out of a dream and it takes me a few minutes to regain my orientation. She is relentless with her tongue while disposing off the domestic remains of the previous day. I wish women did not have to make so much noise.  She’s right though, I need to go to the hairdresser. 

Mother pauses in her harangue and sighs, “I wish you didn’t wear that coat anymore”, she says.

 I feel such a deep sadness for her. For myself, I’m not feeling anything.  Although I don’t know if numb is a feeling.  

I anyway put on the coat and go out for a haircut and on my way back pick up a couple of light bulbs that need replacement. While I climb up the ladder to replace the bulb in the kitchen, mother holds the ladder and talks. I neither listen nor respond. I’m skilled at doing this. 

That night I decide on watching ‘Patton’ on TV. I’ve seen it so many times that I could recite it like a poem. It’s safer to watch it, so I do. Something like the Vikram aur Baital Tele-series, I will never watch for a long time. I’m scared that watching something like those 24 stories will uncover more of the serious life stuff. I’m now in my mid-twenties, engaged to be married and father is no more.

Some of the daunting empirical aspects of existence, so diligently obscured by father’s stories of the world and its happenings, had been revealed to me through Vikram’s answer to the Baital’s questions at the end of each story. Confronted with complex, life linked questions of my own, I had become inundated with helplessness because I knew my valiant King would never rescue me from them. And also making existential enquiries of father would require talking uselessly like a woman and that was something he would never entertain. By the time the Tele- series ended, the door that exposed vast amounts unfamiliar life stuff, had come unbolted, letting loose vital curiosities. I began becoming aware of stories arising from within me, stories that were mine and not of the world, stories that required someone to theorize with. 

My valiant King was slowly reducing to a salt doll. He was becoming more and more inadequate as I was becoming more and more desperate for talking.

To address this necessity I find a boyfriend and bring him home. Instantly father knows that not only had I found another King but I was also done with the Baital. I did not need other people’s stories. I had many more of those than I needed. I needed to talk about my own ones.

In addition the answer to my deep-rooted conundrum also arose within me right about this time- I was both, the son he never had and the daughter he never wanted. This answer becomes the crown of thorns that I carry till several years after father’s passing. 

Despite his stories, in the end it also turned out that father was possibly the Tantrik guised sometimes as the Baital and sometimes as the King. The cancer granted him two years of time which was riddled with disease and experimental cures. There was no space for reflection or talk about life, as life seemed to be in a hurry to recede and wind up its wares. I met his passing with pain and tears fitting a daughter, a daughter that he never allowed himself to cherish.

Its five year now since father’s passing and also since me being married and I’ve been spending a lot of time with my husband, his friends and his family. It takes me two years of courtship and several years of marriage to realize, that the husband too is neither the story churning Baital, nor the valiant King but most importantly, he’s not the Tantrik either. Once more I’m confused though this time around the confusion is different. Who is the King, who is the Baital, who is the Tantrik? Was there ever anyone who’d been one or all three at any given time? The question is impossible to answer.

All three of us live together now; the mother, the husband and me. And as before I’m alone in battling another impossible question. 

 Whenever mother walks into my room, she wants to talk. Women! I think. I know what she’ll say because it’s always the same thing. 

“Your father would be so happy if you had a son. We women don’t have forever, you know, our bodies shrivel up with age .You are already 34”.

I wish she’d keep quiet. 

But this time it’s me who is unable keep quiet, “Yes I know, I know”, I hear myself half screaming, half crying.

I’m scattering and pouring all over mother’s fragile wrinkled neck and she’s collecting me into the reassuring hollow of her embrace.

“Yes I will give him the son he never had”, I repeat several times in an emotional frenzy while burrowing deeper into the consolation of the embrace each time. Meanwhile, each time, without question or answer she quietly just holds me closer. An alien sense of relief begins emptying my mind and body of everything. A relief that I have never lived but have craved all the same begins surrounding me. The knowing of the simple and silent comfort of an embrace isn’t a matter of books or movies; it is the content of experience. It’s the simplest yet the most profound knowledge.

I hold the mother at arm’s length and look at her and for the first time I see not only the woman that she is but also see in her the acceptance of the woman that I always was. And since we are the women that we are, we talk away the night. Talk of nothing and everything. We are the queen and the princess lost in the melee of the war in the 25th Baital story. We are the ones that marry the kings and the princes and we are the ones that spin our own tales and also the ones that carve the answers to all the complex questions about the relationships that we shape. We are our own Vikam and Baital.

“Women talk all the time”, father would have said.

Yes I know. 

By Anita Kainthla