Tag: Karma

Karmic Backlog

By Devraj Singh Kalsi

Recently I came to know my past. Not the past of this lifetime but the cumulative past of several lives prior to this birth. I have always been curious to know whether I was a human being earlier or whether I was a bird or an animal.

In case I had been a bird, whether I was something cute like a parrot or a peacock. Or a high-flying eagle or vulture? In case I was an animal, whether I was something domestic like a cat or a dog? Did I bite someone to give him rabies and cause his untimely death? Or was I predatory like the ferocious tiger or crocodile in any one of my previous births?

Although I would have loved to hear I was a donkey, a horse or a deer, in this exact order of preference, the clarity that came my way settled all doubts and confirmed I was a human being in all my previous births — a really old soul that did all sorts of wicked things like abusing power and exploiting people for personal aggrandisement. But God had always been kind to send me back as a human being to atone for my sins, which I never did. This is precisely why I have been rendered a victim to pay for all the misdeeds in this lifetime, with no sympathisers to relieve my emotions. Something like a past life regression therapy session sounds quite an exciting idea but once the dirty secrets are exposed and you get to know the huge backlog of cardinal sins blocking your path to divinity, you come to terms with the bitter truth that you are solely responsible for everything that is not right in your present life and nobody else deserves an iota of blame for the current mess.

I was told I should clear the heavy backlog and aim for salvation. Frankly speaking, I have never ventured beyond the stage of salivation and here I was asked to mend my ways and attain salvation. Why should I do that when I find this world so attractive and the Lord so forgiving that He keeps sending me back in one human form after another? I love returning again and again to this world also known as a playground. Despite my overloaded dustbin of sins, I must be doing something really good and impressive that compels God to give me another chance to stage a comeback. Why don’t these card readers focus on that aspect and stop becoming my misfortune tellers?

I am perfectly fine with my emergence as a villain and there is absolutely nothing that I can do to undo the past. I can make the best possible use of the present and set things right. Before that I must know what exactly I did in my last birth at least. I was told I was a commander of an invading army marching in with the sole intent of pillaging. That’s horrible, to say the least. Did I slaughter people with my sword or put them in a gas chamber? The information I could ferret out was limited. But it was still adequate to suggest I was a conqueror of foreign lands and added one territory after territory. It was shameful indeed. I looked up in the mirror to see if I had any facial resemblance to the notorious invaders from the previous centuries. To be honest, I did look like one, but the fact that he did not enter this part of the world made me feel somewhat relieved.

For some weeks, I grew a beard and the resemblance grew further, making some of my friends cast suspicious looks and draw nasty parallels. How do I reveal to them that even if the name they were guessing is not correct, I was indeed an invader on horseback! In the contemporary democratic setup, this sounds horrific but it was a glorious achievement back in those days. The way the empires were built and expanded and controlled. What was right and justified then seems so inhuman a few centuries later. But the brutality of the past just to gain geographical heft cannot be held right. Surely, in the eyes of God I was a sinner even though I did it for growing an empire. I have been dumped in this part of the world where simple, innocent people were tortured. I have been made to suffer endlessly in silence as an act of retribution. To get a taste what I delivered to others. Fair enough.

For a while I was thrilled to hear that I was an invader, a plunderer, a marauder. Imagine the immense power I wielded then, and make a contrast with this moribund life where I do not enjoy any power at all. More powerless than a clerk or a peon, and always at the mercy of corporate bosses whose permissions and approvals have made my life a living hell.

Now I come across people who show me their power – as much as they can, wherever they can. I get threatened, abused and thrashed by powerful people inside their homes, inside the holy places by powerful committees and organisers. I have to take it all lying down and treat this ill-treatment without retaliation as it would lead to further misconduct and multiply my sins.

I need to forget I deserve any form of respect anywhere because I did not respect people in my previous births. I need to forget I have any power or I can gain any kind of power because I am that old, withered soul that will start misbehaving and misusing power if I sniff it again. I have been destined to stay away from all shades of power and authority – and quite rightly so. I have been condemned to spend the entire life facing its misuse. If I crib or complain that the people are not doing things right, I will lose the battle forever. That’s what I have been told and warned. I have to tolerate everything that comes my way and write off the bad debts of the previous lives. Only then I will manage to come back in human form and enjoy this material world once again. The irresistible greed to be granted another chance to enter this beautiful world seems to prevail over me. I find one lifetime of sacrifices is not quite a heavy price to pay for my past misdemeanours.

As I was still battling with the startling disclosures from the distant, murky past, some prophecies inflicted deeper wounds. I was told I was destined to die at the hands of women, not one but two, one old and one young, both related to the same family. This was also linked to my past life since I had massacred a family and the matriarch of that family was an embittered soul planted in my life by the divine. I was informed she had already entered my life quite effortlessly through an alliance of sorts. Although she is very good at the moment, she will spring a nasty surprise that will devastate me in the coming three years.

The burden of the past was not off my chest and now the astrologer’s prediction has made me nervous. A sure sign of madness if I start seeing my killer in every lady in my life, right from the domestic help to the employer who is also a lady. On my further insistence, two alphabets were revealed. I was asked to be careful about women with names starting with these alphabets: K and V. But there were more than two women with names starting those alphabets. It was all so confusing and devastating.

Hey, wait! Could it also be a woman doctor in the hospital who will packs my departure bags on the operating table? Well, there are thousands of ways of dying a shameful, painful death and I can go on listing hundreds of possible ways and end up damaging my frayed nerves. I should forget it all and prepare myself to meet my end, my nemesis. Just like a woman who brought me into this world, another woman is destined to take me away from this world. No big deal!

Through some dark practices and evil spells, the vengeful lady will take me to the hills and something scary will happen all of a sudden there, resulting in my untimely, unplanned death. It means the lady and her accomplice will play a stellar role, but not a direct role like holding a gun at me or bumping me off near a blind curve or pushing me from a cliff after a selfie shot. Since I played a direct role in the devastation of that family in my last avatar, I should be ready to take the worst direct hit. As per the reported forecast, these women will not turn into cold-blooded killers and they will regret the fatal outcome since they themselves carry no sinister plan of that kind – driven by the singular motive to make me sign some will. The story spirals out of control and takes an unexpected turn. They will be held indirectly responsible for my passing away from this world. As a result, they will not bear a heavy karmic baggage for my death either. Which means God is a clever player who takes no blame and leaves the final judgment on our own deeds and misdeeds.

I am filled with negativity now, and I don’t think I will survive with this last burden. Something will blow up inside my brain so I must stop thinking about the past and the future and simply focus on the present. Isn’t that what great sages and thinkers have been saying all along? But why is it that the past and the future are more attractive than the present? Since I have been assured that I have three more years to perform good deeds, I must concentrate on that. At least a thousand good deeds should save me well in the years ahead – and in the afterlife.

I do not have the complete details of the potential women killers so I should stop worrying and forget their gameplan. Before I could firm up my mind with this template, women relatives proposed the idea of a visit to the hillside. I was shocked my doomsday could be coming earlier than scheduled! Or was it that God is finally trying to be kind and help me know my killers in advance? Those alphabets matched perfectly with the forecast and those two women relatives comprised my inner circle. It was shocking to know these well-behaved, sophisticated ladies would me lead to my death. Should I reveal to them that they will kill me some day? Would they believe me? Were they thinking along those lines? Would they be surprised to know how I read their minds? Or would they call me mad? I chose to rest this issue and scaled down my interactions with them. Perhaps in the coming years I would do something to offend them. These scorned women will gang up and bump me off. Well, by rejecting their proposed trip, I had already vexed them. They could sense I was avoiding them and they wanted to know the reason for my refusal.

One lady treated me like a son and I could not visualise her being the mastermind. One fine day, the lady arrived and suggested she wanted me to write a book on her failed marriage. Maybe, I should duck this proposal by citing my incompetence to write a book. Being aware of my dabbling in creative pursuits, she claimed to be a regular reader of my morose prose. I thought switching to gifting on happy occasions and festivals would foster bonhomie. I had no idea of what would transpire in the coming years that would enrage her so much. Therefore, the best option was to snap ties and remain aloof. The fear of her seeking umbrage made me reconsider this move. I said I write short pieces and I do not have the potential to write a book at the moment. In the years ahead, if I felt confident about the project, then I would like to give it a shot.

I consulted therapy experts to guide me through this crisis but they seemed clueless in this regard. They had no knowledge to help reduce anxiety and stress in a person who is forewarned of his imminent death. All they could suggest was meditation and it meant connecting with the same divine power that had signed my death note. I chose to spend maximum time doing good deeds – feeding birds and animals featured on the top of my list. Creating a buffer stock of good deeds would make me a deserving candidate for royalty in my next birth. But the downside was I would most probably indulge in exploitation of subordinates and assert my power and resourcefulness – repeating the same cycle once again. Hence it was equally risky to be super good.

Hey come on, commit some mild mischief in this lifetime to become ineligible for rebirth as royalty. Being an ordinary human being wandering in anonymity, despite being a habitual, small-scale sinner, is a far better deal than hogging the limelight as a leading monster without a parallel.

Devraj Singh Kalsi works as a senior copywriter in Kolkata. His short stories and essays have been published in Deccan Herald, Tehelka, Kitaab, Earthen Lamp Journal, Assam Tribune, and The Statesman. Pal Motors is his first novel.

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Tags Assam Tribune, Deccan Herald, Devraj Singh Kalsi, Karma, Kolkata, The Statesman

Review

Of Ghosts and Tantriks

Post author By borderlesssg1
Post date October 14, 2022
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Book review by Basudhara Roy

Title: Taranath Tantrik and Other Tales from the Supernatural

Author: Bibhutibhushan

Translator: Devalina Mookerjee

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

The book decides to arrive on a crisp Friday morning, its sunshine so keen and abundant that any thoughts of the supernatural can only be merrily chuckled over. The cover, however, is strangely disconcerting. It takes me time to mark that the brilliant art on it actually depicts skulls. Not ordinary enough to be dismissed as mere biological specimens, the skulls seem to represent, in their complexity, vibrancy and the silhouette of birds that haunt them on every side, a text that is both hauntingly familiar and eerily not so. Bibhutibhushon’s short stories exploring the supernatural and tantra, a practice associated with dark forces and the Goddess Kali, translated by Devalina Mookerjee from Bengali — could not, perhaps, have been showcased better.

Bibhutibhushan (1894-1950) was an eminent Bengali writer whose best known works are his novels, Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) and Aparajito – both immortalised into films by Satyajit Ray, Chander Pahar (Moon Mountain) Aranyak (Of the Forest). Some of these books can be found in translation.To one even remotely acquainted with Bibhutibhushan’s oeuvre, his stories offer a definite assurance of being in good company. In reading , Taranath Tantrik and Other Tales from the Supernatural, however, what the reader might fail to bargain for is the almost complete obliteration of the physical world by the world of the book, and by the time the journey through the nine translated stories therein has been made, one is no longer sure where one world ends and the other begins.

It takes time to step out of the frame and to express admiration for the conduit that has led to this extraordinary experience in fiction – the translator. To transcend spatiality and temporality and conjure these tales again for an entirely different readership in an entirely different language is likely to have been a project fraught with its own pointed challenges. Mookerjee, however, seems to have successfully met them all, so much so that in the context of the English language, these spooky, unsettling tales offer not the slightest semblance of foreignness, even when they deal thematically with something as acutely local and specialised as tantra. The language is sparklingly contemporary and in its inflections, energy and dreaminess to allow these nine narratives to carve their own particular niches. The pace of the collection stays heady throughout and the atmosphere is completely overpowering.

Of special significance is Mookerjee’s nuanced and insightful twenty-seven paged ‘Introduction’ to the collection that calls upon the reader to visualise concrete connections between social justice and the genre of the supernatural. Mookerjee writes: “Seen against the background of what people are capable of doing to each other, stories of ghost may be seen as corrective mechanisms in the scales of justice. A person who has been wronged returns to tell their story, perhaps to wreak havoc on their tormentors. A disbeliever sits in a séance for which the medium is clearly not prepared, and chaos ensues. We have a word for this already. We call it karma.”

The ‘Introduction’ serves, also, as a brave attempt to place Bibhutibhushan’s writing in current socio-cultural perspective, and to bridge the disparate worlds of rural Bengal that birthed these stories and that of the contemporary English reader of these tales who could belong to almost any geographical space on the global map.

The first two stories of the collection are centred around the protagonist after who the book has been named, a dabbler in the dark arts, Taranath Tantrik. The remaining seven stories are each unique in their own ways as they chart their individual journeys into the terrain of the invisible and the occult with remarkable skill and clarity. “Human beings have historically shown very little need of support from the otherworld to behave in perfectly horrible ways with other people. This is the point at which the darkness of the uncanny and the darkness of people converge,” avers Mookerjee, pointing out how the surreal is often only another dimension of the real revealed in a disjointed spatial-temporality.

Not all of the nine stories strike with equal power. If ‘The Ghosts of Spices’ appears quite facile and juvenile in its description of a march-past of spice sacks on the deserted nocturnal streets, ‘A Small Statue’ appears rather simplistically cinematic in its dream presentation of the tableau of the monk, Dipankar’s life. In the most evocative stories of the collection like ‘Maya’, ‘The House of His Foremothers’, ‘Arrack’ and ‘The Curse’, however, the quiet, intricate weaving of setting, psychology and idea dazzles in its brilliance, leaving behind a sense of both fracture and healing.

Bibhutibhushan’s poignancy is at its unsurpassable best in his delineation of place and in his exploration of links between physical place and human placed-ness. His most unforgettable stories are those in which people and places interact with each other organically and without inhibitions, creating a documented identity of both being-in-place and place-in-being. In ‘Maya’ for instance, the house acquires an identity of its own as its past inhabitants gently draw its present dweller/s into the folds of its mystery and inexplicable self-sufficiency. In ‘The House of His Foremothers’ similarly, the ghost-girl Lokkhi mourns for the bereft house more than her lost family and consistently haunts its silences in the hope of resurrection for the house which, unlike her, still lives across the family’s generational lifetimes.

To allow one’s imagination to be overpowered by these stories is to experience a strange welding of the probable and the improbable into the arc of the possible — to be awakened to a new dimension of being in which while vision remains at par, the other senses experience a heightened participation with what is positively undefinable but utterly undeniable.

Taranath Tantrik and Other Tales from the Supernatural, by thus placing the reality in the larger context of a world that still evades the cartography of reason, becomes a portal to a widened, heightened and more enlightened worldview. It helps remind of the intersections between our own human finitude and the infinite world with its geo-historical consciousness incapable of forgetting and thoroughly unable to forgive.

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College affiliated to Kolhan University, Chaibasa. Drawn to gender and ecological studies, her four published books include a monograph and three poetry collections. Her recent works are available at Outlook India, The Dhaka Tribune, EPW, Madras Courier and Live Wire among others.

Click here to read the book excerpt from Taranath Tantrik

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Tags Basudhara Roy, Bibhutibhushan, Devalina Mookerjee, Kali, Karma, Speaking Tiger Books, Tantra, Taranath Tantrik and Other Tales from the Supernatural, The Dhaka Tribune

Poetry

Horrific Humour!

Poetry by Rhys Hughes

KARMA IS A BOOMERANG

Karma is a boomerang,
Kismet is a net.
The vampire jumped out of the dark
and bit me in the neck.
I picked him up and shook him down
and flung him far away
and that was that, or so I thought,
the end of a dismal day.
But I was wrong, just like this song
he wasn’t finished yet.
Into a bat he turned and flapped
and to my dismay in every way
raced back and slapped my face.
How rude it is to stab with fangs
a person you have just met.
Karma is a boomerang,
Kismet is a net.


    A CEILING FAN

         I am
       what I am.
    I am a ceiling fan.

   Round and round I go
      but why I never
           know.

I have a feeling that I can
be either fast or slow
but the sounds
that I make
are sure to break
the patience of any man
who is no
fan of fans, for I am never
motionless.

And
while I twirl
to cool boys and girls
on torrid summer evenings,
the drunken fools
see the room revolve
and assume I’m still at rest.

Is this the best
       I can expect?
 

IN THE FACE

I laugh in the face of danger
but not at the legs, arms or body of danger.
Only an insane stranger would do that.
Occasionally I suppose
I might nervously chuckle or even chortle
at the buckle on the belt
that holds up the trousers of peril
because it is shaped
like an awful portal to the immortal world.

Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

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Tags Karma, Kismet, Rhys Hughes, Vampire