Meeting my civilisational hero Roberto Calasso again in Delhi made a curious bond (bandhu) suddenly clear. Years ago, while backpacking around Western Europe, I was frequently accosted by people who wanted to know bizarre things about us. Alas, I often made them incredulous happy by saying the most outrageous things I could invent. My favourite was the lady in the Italian train, going past Lago di Como. She asked, “Is it true you eat roast serpents in India?” “No, but we have a great big eagle whose favourite food is snake-bake,” I said solemnly. Her ecstatic gasp was my storyteller’s reward and I winked in my head at Vishnu Sharman, Vyasa, Homer, Aesop, the Brothers Grimm and the magicman who wrote Alf Layla wa’ Layla. It always feels like “teller-listener” is the most uniquely human bond: without the stories, which lead us in and out of emotions and memories, we wouldn’t be us, would we, since other species too give birth, rear young and die. So imagine how peculiar it felt to read Ka, the best ever book on Hindu mythology, written by Calasso, an Italian. It was a private joke with the Universe, as if Rta, the Eternal Law, chuckled, “Well, miss, you flung your myths around fooling innocent Italians, now salute this Italian who’s gathered them all again and given you the best read of your life on your pet subject.” Calasso asked me how I was progressing on my Brahma book. “Very slowly!” I grumbled. “I can’t find much on him in English, so I’m limping through the Brahma Puran (mota type) and its ilk, leaning heavily on Monier-Williams’ Sanskrit-English dictionary. I have no social life left. Those terrible rishis lure me back in the evening like sorcerers.” “But that is better for you,” said Calasso gently. “There is nothing like reading the original.” He should know. His book Ka opens with Garuda, who is made entirely of Vedic metres (tristubh, jagaati, gayatri). Perched on Rauhina, the tree of learning, he learns the Vedas. Explain that. Calasso takes a whole book to do so, selecting Hinduism’s greatest hits and making them greater, as Indologist Wendy Doniger says, applauding how post-modern the Vedas really are. Ka ends with Garuda clutching hymn number 121 of the tenth book of the Rg Veda: “His eye settled on the very syllable from which everything had issued forth. Ka.” Ka means ‘Who’ in Sanskrit (Brahma, Prajapati). Who indeed can explain the allure of the old words? What bonds impel us to find new words in every age? But to traverse Hindu myth from Amar Chitra Katha to Ka is to go from a Tobu cycle to a Hayabusa, the world’s fastest superbike. Bang comes the thought that Hayabusa means ‘falcon’, bandhu to Garuda. There’s sorcery everywhere.
