The Birth of Maya or Illusion

I Am Become Death the Destroyer of All Worlds.
Richard Openheimer, from the Bhagvad Gita

Cawnpore, 1857.

Screams puncture her dreams. She wakes up, tiptoes to the balcony, leans over the banisters. Her golden-brown ringlets fall over her elfin face, she impatiently tosses them aside. She watches the flames run riot below, twisting and uncurling, snapping along the length of the mansion. She notices the grey shapes that swirl in the darkness, and squints to see them better. They step into the ring of fire, and she sees their faces, lighted by the spiraling flames, faces contorted by anger, malice and passion. She shudders. She hears screams below, and listens intently, hears the voices of her mother, father, sisters as they scream, plead for mercy, and finally - on the doorstep of death - curse their attackers.

She shudders again. It is too much for one little girl to bear, to witness. She returns to her bed, crawls into the pile of silken, white sheets, burrows a hiding place for herself. She falls asleep...and dreams...dreams of something other than fire, pain, revolution and death. She deludes herself with nice dreams, pleasant dreams. She shuts out the noise of pain with these fantastic illusions.

The fires spreads and ravages the house, incinterating everything in its path. The white silk sheets sprout red flames, blacken and shrivel into ash. The legs of the teak bed buckle under, collapse and break...the pieces burnt and scorched.

The fires blossoms and dies, spent.

Hours later, the attackers creep in, sweep the mansion for its valuables and treasures. An old, bearded soldier pauses in the midst of his looting in the little girl's bedroom. He picks up a white rabbit on the floor, fur singed in places, ash dotting the undersides of pink ears, the little pink bunny mouth. He looks across the room, at the little bed, at the collapsed book shelves, with blackened picture books spewing out, at the dolls littering the floor.

He looks at the toy in his hands, and thinks of his own grandchildren, far away from fire and violence, sequestered in a tiny hillside village. He buries his face in the rabbit, and the white, singed fur muffles his loud, heavy sobs, absorbs his swollen, salty tears.

He cries for the violence. He cries for the injustices he has faced, he cries for the buried resentment and anger that has been unleashed in an orgy of violence and revenge. He weeps for the madness and mania that swept over his own soul, that possessed him, transformed him into a grinning, malevolent sprite for an evening; and that has departed now - leaving him alone to face the guilt and the horror.

But he is only human.

The girl murmurs in her sleep, the reality of the old, gnarled soldier and his bitter tears in her room seeps into her dreams, disturbs her carefully constructed illusions. She sleeps still, miraculously unharmed by the fire, undiscovered by the looters, cocooned in a mass of blackened, charred sheets. And when the soldier leaves, his boots stamping across the creaking floor, her dreams flower again.

She sleeps on. The years have come and gone, the mansion has disappeared, the books and shelves have crumbled to ash, but the little girl, wrapped in a nest of greying, rotting sheets, sleeps on, buried in the womb of the earth. She has become a Goddess, and the people of the town have built a small temple around her. Bats flit in and out of the rough, stone structure, and a Brahmin Priest, garbed in a white dhoti, cycles to the entrance of the temple every day, and performs a silent puja. She doesn't even look human anymore - her flesh has withered away, only her white bones, peak out of the mess of flowers of fruits piled by pilgrims and devotees atop her remains everyday.

But her breath still remains, echoing through the small, dark stone chamber, the sound of a child sleeping.

She still dreams.