A collection of ancient Indian stories given new life

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The Oceans of Cruelty:Twenty-Five Tales of a Corpse Spirit. Retold by Douglas J. Penick. NYRB. 176 pp. $17.95

In the mists of legendary time, an oil merchant dreamed of two gods making love. He admired the “vast coupling” of Siva and Parvati and listened to their cosmic pillow talk, as Siva whispered stories into the divine ear of his consort. When the oil merchant woke, he could not help but turn to his wife and imitate what he had just dreamed, telling her the same stories as they had sex.

But that was a mistake. The tremors of the oil merchant’s words and sighs reached the heavens, and Siva was outraged that “the intimacy of his love, the merging, caressing passions” should find a base echo in the world below. The god swooped down and transformed the oil merchant into a vetala or “corpse spirit,” a being “filled with shifting mists.” Siva hung the corpse spirit upside down on a tree, like a bat, in a desolate charnel ground. Then he cursed the creature to be consumed for eternity by the stories it had dreamed, to think only of those narratives just stolen from the gods.

So begins a cycle of 25 ancient stories known in parts of India as the “Vetala Panchavimshati.” Although it may well be two or three thousand years old, it was first written down about a millennium ago in Sanskrit. The tales journeyed through a series of revisions in a number of languages into modern times, inspired a TV series in the 1980s, and now have their most recent retelling in Douglas J. Penick’s “The Oceans of Cruelty.” A novelist and teacher of Buddhism, Penick has already reworked several Asian classics, including the Tibetan epic of King Gesar (the lord of the legendary kingdom of Ling), and even penned a libretto about the Indian Buddhist monarch Ashoka. His version of the “Vetala Panchavimshati” represents a southern foray in a career that has fixed in large part on Tibet and Central Asia.

By the standards of other famous frame tales – “1001 Arabian Nights,” for instance, in which Scheherazade keeps her head by telling the king a compelling bedtime story every night, or “The Canterbury Tales,” in which pilgrims have a storytelling contest on the road – the conceit here is rather fantastic, and it gets stranger still. Every good curse needs to be undone. For the corpse spirit to be freed from its torment, it must tell its stories to a king and, by the end, leave the king speechless. Luckily for the vetala, a king eventually comes by. On a peculiar mission of his own, King Vikramaditya of Dhar collects the corpse spirit and travels forth with it on his shoulder, a perch from which it whispers the tales of the gods into his ear.

In Penick’s rendering, the vetala is at once without substance and substantial. It is “weightless but strangely dense and felt like a cape of cold mist.” So, too, are the stories the corpse spirit tells the king. These ancient fables skim the surface of characters and places, blurring into one another as they accumulate, a repetition of lustful monarchs, forlorn princesses, handsome Brahmins, ambitious merchants and all-powerful deities who appear when summoned by the ultimate sacrifices. The drama of the stories is still immense, conjuring complex social systems and relations, ritual and spiritual worlds, and the constant possibility of their undoing.

After each tale, the corpse spirit asks the king to find meaning in the story. The king tries not to answer – such is the magic of the curse that speaking with the corpse spirit will return the creature to its tree and force the king to start all over again, making his task a Sisyphean one – but each time a throbbing headache compels him to deliver his interpretation. These moments of the king’s analysis reveal the stakes of these fables.

At the end of one tale about magic, seduction and a princess tricked by sorcerers, the corpse spirit asks Vikramaditya to decide who should be the rightful husband of the princess: the man whom she loves, and by whom she is pregnant, or the deceitful wizard who used sorcery to convince the princess’s father to marry her to him. Vikramaditya tells the corpse spirit that the husband should be the conniving wizard. “The king’s decision must be the last word. How else, O errant spirit, is anything stable in a world of desire, theft, cheating, ambition, madness, greed, envy, lies, and delusion? Is anything really what it seems? Kings know that we live on the edge of utter chaos.”

As with many ancient stories, the chief concern from the get-go seems to be the maintenance of order and hierarchy, the performing of duty and the obligations that come with one’s position in society – the oil merchant’s original sin, after all, is that he forgot his place. But Penick’s version of the tales makes more explicit the ambiguity that can often be found in epics and folklore from premodern times. “That’s outrageous,” the vetala laughs, when Vikramaditya insists on his own interpretive authority. The reader can choose to accept the king’s notion that the world would teeter off its axis were monarchs undermined; or they can laugh along with the vetala at the convoluted logic required to preserve the world as it is.

The corpse spirit’s final tale – a knotted saga of incestuous familial relations – leaves the king stumped, and the curse is broken. Freedom is no relief from the creature’s grievance. “I was cursed by that most powerful of gods. No matter that I did not deserve such a fate,” it laments to the king. The vetala is eerie and otherworldly – its presence “heavy and oppressive like a monsoon fog” – but in this way its lot is probably not much different from that of many of the people who would have heard these tales over the centuries, and even those who read them now, in worlds and times where justice is so often elusive. Vikramaditya watches the corpse spirit finally achieve its release. As it burns on a pyre, the smoke carries the sounds of a universe of human action, of battles, ceremonies, marketplaces, the chatter and shudders of children and adults, all the stuff of stories. The corpse finally collapses into embers and “the echoes of thousands upon thousands of voices” dissolve into the air.

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Kanishk Tharoor is the author of the short-story collection “Swimmer Among the Stars,” the presenter of the BBC radio series “Museum of Lost Objects,” and a senior editor at Foreign Affairs.

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