Prasanthi Ram, Singapore
The first to notice the tremors in Singapore was a priest named Sheshadri.
At the ripe age of twenty-five, he had made his first big move from a roadside Mahavishnu temple in Coimbatore to the legendary island city of Singapore. One foot off the IndiGo 737 though, and his knees almost buckled. It was the earth, he registered, shifting scrupulously under him. As strange as it was, given that Singapore was famous for not experiencing any natural disasters, he had already been forewarned by his guru about the events to come. Back home, Tamil Nadu's cyclone season had already returned with an unquenchable vengeance. A dam outside his city had broken and numerous villages were flooded, death counts surging beyond human comprehension. The same was happening in the outskirts of neighbouring cities too, leaving the government with no other choice than to announce a state-wide emergency. Even on the airplane, which Sheshadri thought was a shameless copy of Lord Brahma's pushpaka vimana and which was one of the last flights out of Coimbatore before the airport's closure, the weather was atrocious. The flight was particularly turbulent over the Indonesian archipelago that only recently had been shaken up by both a volcano eruption and a related tsunami that wiped out not only coastal dwellers but many inland too. It seemed Earth had made up her mind.
Somehow though, every other passenger disembarking from the same flight seemed unperturbed and were well on their way into the pristine Changi airport. Unlike Sheshadri, they could not sense the tremors. He reckoned it was their good fortune not to know, not to bear the knowledge of incoming catastrophe and yet feel powerless the way he did.
But this was his duty and he was bound to it.
"Why do I have to leave?" he had asked his guru Venkatesh Iyer a month before, when he was first told. "At your age, you need help to take care of this temple. How will you do it alone?"
To that, Venkatesh Iyer smiled, wistful, as he uncapped cartons of milk and poured them into a large pail for Lord Vishnu's pal abhishekam before sunrise. "You are destined to leave, Shesha. Your duty lies beyond this humble establishment. You must return to his side."
"But why would he be there of all places?" Shesha had whined, as he heaved the pail up the short set of steps into the main sanctum. Was God not right there with him in the temple?
"He can be anywhere and everywhere at once, Shesha. You know better than to limit him with your mind. You have been called upon, so you must leave."
Of course he could not say no to the man who raised him like his own. Twenty-five years ago, he had been found as an infant on those very steps. It was Venkatesh, the elderly head priest who found him lying before the statue of Vishnu during his morning rounds. According to the priest's many retellings throughout the years, little Shesha had been dressed in nothing but a blue loin cloth. There had apparently been a garden snake too that fateful morning, lazily circling the infant as if stalking its prey. Curiously though, Shesha was not at all frightened by the hissing, but instead outstretched his tiny palm to play with the creature. Upon that bewildering sight, Venkatesh quickly ushered the child into his safe arms and decided it was only right that he named him Sheshadri, after Sheshanaga, the serpent upon whom Mahavishnu rested.
At the temple, Shesha lived among gods and animals. He would run at pigeons that pecked at the broken coconut shells offered upon the temple doorstep. He would feed the spotted cow that sometimes sauntered in to rest under the tall and cool shelter of the gopuram. He would even play with the family of mice that built a home behind Ganesha's statue. Venkatesh was determined to raise Shesha as a priest despite the child's casteless status. It was thus under his generous tutelage that Shesha learned Vedas in the day alongside young Brahmin boys who openly wondered what an orphan was doing in their midst. At night, Venkatesh would sit Shesha on his lap and tell him stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana. About the great Arjunan, the feared Raavanan, the kind Sita, the conniving Shakuni, the righteous Krishnan. Venkatesh even taught him about Sheshanaga, and how he could, upon the preserver Mahavishnu's orders, coil into himself and destroy the entire universe. Or uncoil for the creation of a new, wondrous one. Each story leapt straight into another one so often that Shesha spent nights dreaming of himself as a snake, holding Rama's hand as they stepped into the formidable Dandaka forest or playing with Krishna's peacock feather and flute in Vrindavan. In many ways, Shesha's life had been built upon Venkatesh's kindness and mercy.
Hence, when the old priest dreamt a powerful dream one night of Mahavishnu himself calling upon Shesha to an island-city down southeast that would soon be struck by an unprecedented disaster, Shesha saw no other choice but to readily agree.
To his genuine surprise, the equatorial island was as unperturbed as her residents: fairy-tale greenery against the backdrop of dangerously towering buildings, with not a drop of water from the skies. It seemed to be an alternate plane of existence, a paradise like Mahavishnu's Vaikunthai, safe from the troubles of the rest of the world. Yet, the tremors still persisted under each of Shesha's steps as he walked past immigration and out of the airport. It was coming, whatever it was, and he had to find him.
But the question remained: how?
As if having heard his thought, a hissing began. From his feet of all places. Shocked, Shesha lifted his right foot to check. There, beneath him, he found a small garden snake. But it did not seem as if it had been crushed at all, or even stepped upon. Rather it had emerged from him, from the centre of his right sole, growing into its full length as he watched. Before he could react, the snake began to slither out and away from him. It was leading him, he realised, so Shesha began to sprint. Past queues of waiting people and cars, onto the busy roads of Airport Boulevard, then much later, into a long stretch of bushes.
Drenched in sweat and covered in broken twigs and leaves, Shesha knelt onto the grass to catch his breath. When he finally looked up, the snake from his foot was now circling someone else's feet, with an uncanny sense of familiarity. Then, it slipped under, out of sight, and the hissing ceased to a deafening silence.
"You are here, Shesha," said a voice that boomed in Shesha's ears.
He tried to raise his head, to see who those feet belonged to. But soul-piercing sunlight shot him down, preventing him from looking above the ground.
"You already know who I am, Shesha. You have long known."
It was indeed true. He did know. But he hungered for a glimpse, for something beyond just stories told and sung or statues made of cast iron and stone.
"Yashoda too once saw me. All of me. But it was too much for her to bear. It will be no different for you."
Shesha bowed his forehead, pressing down on grass and dirt. He was but a mortal. "I can sense the tremors. Why?"
"Why do you think?"
"Disaster is to strike. But you are here now. Will you be able to stop it?"
The voice did not reply. Instead, the tremors ceased and Shesha felt himself beginning to float. But he was not weightless in the air nor was he grounded on land for the grass was no more. No, he was at sea, one that did not sting of salt but was instead fragrant of a sweet nectar that washed over him. This sea was full of milk. Oh, he was afloat the ocean of milk from the mythical land of Krauncha. A mirthful laugh skipped out of Shesha's body in recognition of a time long before. A time he had once experienced.
"Epochs have passed. It is no longer as simple as a sage's foot to my chest to save the world. The earth has been undone far beyond repair. It is mankind's own undoing."
"Then what do we do?" Shesha remembered to ask, as he felt himself unwind from his human form, spine breaking then reconstructing into an endless coil, head bursting into a thousand serpent heads. A bestial, beautiful unbecoming.
"Here lies the last standing fortress, its land protected for centuries from the wrath of nature. But it too must fall now. You see, Shesha. It is the law of nature, to give back tenfold what she has received. She has tolerated for far too long. She must retaliate and she will. We must not fight her. We are only to wait and bear witness."
In one fell swoop, the milk ocean receded into nothingness and Shesha found himself with his head bowed upon grass again, body intact. The island's noises of birdsong, traffic and construction returned to his ears. He looked up. The feet before him had disappeared too. All Shesha had in memory of him were the salty tears stinging his eyes and the seed of knowledge lodged uncomfortably in his throat. The tremors in his feet resumed but at a quicker pace, as if the garden snake was now residing within his very soles, circling at a maddening pace. Indeed, Shesha thought, the end of this world was nearing. Once again, a yuga was coming to a close but this might just be the quickest and most destructive yet. Still, what was sown must be reaped. It was simply the order of the universe. Which too decreed that Shesha would wait and bear witness just as he was instructed. Because that was all mortals could do. Even a mortal who was once coiled under God's reclined form, surrounded by a magnificent ocean of nectarine milk.
Prasanthi Ram is a PhD candidate for Creative Writing at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore. Her interests lie in South Asian literature, feminism(s) and popular culture. She is working on her debut collection of short stories that explores the Tamil Brahmin community in Singapore. Most recently, she co-founded and is the fiction editor of Mahogany Journal, an online literary journal dedicated to South Asian writers born or based in Singapore.
