Section 1: Days of peril
Highway to death
Defiant Lonkha
My ordeal was over with the closing of March ’89; but, my wife had no succor, and her miseries continued. Maddening passions hit her every evening and will not let her sleep whole night if I kept away. Joining her to consume her passions landed me where I was in the month of February – weakened and spiritless.
“Our visit to Kamakhya temple at Guwahati may help us,” I told my wife, adding “She represents wholeness of female organ and her powers could intervene to help you. If the phallus deity Shiva pulled me out of the trouble, the vulva goddess could do the same to you.”
Visit of Khamakhya temple by train meant absence for a week from the office and facing half a dozen routine questions for my absence. We decided to go and come back from Guwahati on a single closed day in the office for avoiding unnecessary curiosity among colleagues for visiting the shrine of Tantra. Those days, Indian Airlines flight reached Guwahati from Delhi around 8.30 in the morning. It allowed nine hours for visiting Kamakhya temple before taking the flight to Delhi in evening.
We were climbing Kamakhya hills of Guwahati around 10 in morning on Saturday, April 8. Nothing abnormal happened on the way and by noon we were in the campus of the temple. My wife fell badly on the level sandstone floor near the temple, and a nearby priest laughed at the scene. It was an ominous sign, indicating unhindered activity of my adversary even in the campus of Kamakhya temple. Malun has been felling my wife often on the level compound of our residence at Dehradun. Now she had demonstrated her ability to carry out the same even in the compound of our deity, unchecked. Malun’s deity Lonkha was not under the control of Kamakhya and the Khasi goddess of matrimony could defy her, it meant.
We were back to the airport by evening after the worship of Kamakhya, and checked in for return flight to Delhi in time. There was a strong feeling in the waiting hall that Malun wanted to communicate me some thing important. I asked my wife to go away for a while leaving me alone on my seat.
Malun’s communication was emotion charged. Her wish was before me in straight and equally simple thoughts “Now you’re mine and you must come to me.”
“Malun! I will surely do that after I die,” I consoled the spirit of Khasi queen operating the powers of goddess Lonkha.
“You are already dead and just a spirit like me. That is why you know who am I and what have you done to me in past. Reconcile with your death and join me now in my world. You must kill yourself to be with me at the earliest,” Malun requested me with force of love.
I was a bit confused about my own status of living versus dead when Malun commanded me to join her in love. There was truth in her statement; I was convinced. I must have really separated as an active spirit from the physical body when she stabbed me in Isamati, I visualized. She is joined to me in sex as a spirit is also irrefutable. Who could run conjugal act and feel satiation without touching the teenager in the plane without being a spirit? What’s wrong in her demand to join her as her husband as a spirit, leaving my physical self to die?
Yet a physical death was not acceptable to me. I did not want to die.
I got up from the seat, move to my wife and joined her. Atmosphere of the moment was strange – turgid, depressing and gloomy.
We attained nothing during our prayer and worship of goddess Kamakhya in her temple. Additionally, Malun had demonstrated that chances of our success in the country ruled by her in past were slim. Khasi deities will not help us.
My wife developed severe earache when the plane took off – a gift from Malun – lasting for a week. The spirit had demonstrated her power to defy Kamakhya because Malun represented Lonkha, a Khasi goddess like Kamakhya. One Khasi goddess will not overrule the other and help us against her, I inferred about the convention among the worshipped deities of the past land of Kamrup ruled by Malun once upon a time. Both the goddesses – Kamakhya and Lonkha – are equal in status.