barbarin was born in an indigent brAhmaNa household.

They lived just beyond a sp rawling slum in an area where the Mogols had formerly camped during their final struggle with the mahArATTa-s for that city. In his youth he had been struck by a gaja, as though the wrath of the awful vinAyaka had come upon him. He was take n by some onlookers and placed in the local government hospital, where people us ed to say that the destitute normally went there to contribute to the supply cha in of corpses for the aspiring physicians in their student years. Perhaps, vinAy aka-s were not so ill-disposed to him he somehow survived on the care given to h im by a neophyte who had just begun her medical internship. The damage to his sk ull notwithstanding, barbarin exhibited an atavistic manifestation of his brahmi nical past as he grew up became a master of both secular lore and the shruti the star of his otherwise unremarkable family, which at best produced methane dwarf s among a multitude of non-luminous planets. As time went by he used his skills to depart from the shores of bhAratavarSha and reach those of krau~nchadvIpa. La ter he remarked that when he gained entry into the madhyama-mlechCha-varSha he f elt like free man in a free country for the first time. In those alien lands his skills were widely sought after and he was solicited by many a mlechCha profess or seeking to build even larger pyramids than their rivals had ever done. He not ed that one such professor carried the weighty qualifier of being a Nobel laurea te. While the professor was not in his own field of study, barbarin noted that t he artillery of his mathematical and numerical skills could be brought to decisi vely bear on any academic fortress the said laureate might wish to storm. He als o reasoned that with such pedigree his own future success would be assured. Acco rdingly, barbarin apprenticed with that professor and ere long he had landed him self a plush job using his mathematics as a facade for his pecuniary manipulatio ns. Having accumulated some assets, barbarin decided that he needed a woman to compl ete his life. With that objective he returned to the shores of bhArata and displ ayed his wares but no woman was caught in his snares. Disappointed he returned t o his job in the mlechCha-land and rethought his strategy. He realized that barr ing gold-diggers, women of the type he wanted mostly sought something more biolo the signals of an alpha male or at least a facade thereof wh gical and heritable at else is interesting to a woman in a man? Hence, he went again the next year, this time playing a different game he did not emphasize his wealth but his physi cal prowess and verbal celerity. As result he snagged a reasonably endowed woman , phalgu, from a respectable brAhmaNa clan of higher standing than his own, and returned to the mlechCha country with her as his wife. For sometime barbarin fel t his life had reached its pinnacle, but soon he felt a lack. He long wanted to b elong with the mlechCha-s: He had tried everything he acquired the mlechCha accen t, he dressed like them, he watched their films, talked about their bizarre spor ts, and above all he hoped his wealth would make them see him as their equal. So mewhere deep within he realized that none of these were taking him where he wish ed to be. Now that he had a wife he decided to adopt a new strategy he believed that if he called the mlechCha-s home and threw parties they might finally accep t him into their inner fold. He accordingly played out this script and thought t hat it worked. He felt more and more mlechCha and apparently so did phalgu. They spoke admiringly of their dear mlechCha friends and condemned the ineptitude, d isorderliness and lackadaisical ways of their friends and relatives from bhArata . Around this time barbarin acquired a fascination for the productions of white in dology he procured a vast collection of such books and read extensively. He flau nted the knowledge acquired from these to his bhAratIya and mlechCha contacts al ike. One day he would talk of the bhagabhakShakI from Chicago another day of her guru, the ex-spy from Harvard. This was his way of showing his connections to h is roots. Those in bhArata took his knowledge to be profound and believed him to be a genuine arbitrator on the matters of the shAstra. One day some of phalgu s c lansmen felt called upon us to discuss these matters with him for they felt it m ight be of mutual interest. In course of this encounter barbarin went on about:

1) how nobody could say if the bhArata or the rAmAyaNa came first, adding that t he itihasa-purANa were full of baloney that should not be mistaken for reality; 2) How the ritual of chaula-karman was of primitive, tribal, Dravidian origin a substitute for offering the head itself as a sacrifice; 3) How murukan was a Dra vidian deity who had been Aryanized and that the Dravidian word kanda was the pr ecursor of skanda. We attacked these terrible misapprehensions of Hindu historic al tradition but he waved us aside stating that we were yet to read solid litera ture on these matters. With the passage of time barbarin lost both his interest in the shruti and these indological fancies. He gave up his daily veda recitations, which is the duty o f a brAhmaNa, claiming that he had a lot of important work to do that left him w ith no time for these. Yet, his partying with the mlechCha-s continued with much elan. By now his kids were grown up and themselves carousing with the dizzying ferments of white occidental liberalism they were imbibing at high school and co llege. They enjoyed talking about diversity, anti-racism, egalitarianism, democr acy, and above all saving the world. By now their whole clan felt no different f rom the mlechCha-s they had finally attained that coveted padavI, much as the ea rly vedAntins of the yajurveda held that after a series of ascents the supremely endowed young man attains the highest state known as brahmAnanda. Now they spok e of the great land of the free and endearingly referred to the mlechCha-rAjan ( i.e., the president) of the country as the dynamic and farsighted leader of the free-world. When they got the chance of having a photo snapped with them beside the mlechCha-rAjan s patnI they felt like mANikkavachakar and his band felt in the company of rudra and his shakti. They told their relatives in bhArata how all w as free and fair in the glorious land of the mlechCha-s and expressed sympatheti c condolences regarding their putrid lives. There is nothing which is impossible here if you have the ability to do it. Merit is what counts were the words of adv ice barbarin doled out to them, not bothering for a moment to tell them how they could cross the immense samudra-s to reach the shores of the mlechCha paradise. In midst of all of this vicissitudes of existence served up a surprise that barb arin had never seen coming. While barbarin thought he was displaying virtuoso fi nancial agility for his firm, he found that his mlechCha colleagues suddenly gan ged up on him much like the crow, the jackal and the tiger on the camel in the t eachings of bhIShma-pitAmaha and viShNusharman. As result he was out of his job and back home. A similar fate struck phalgu shortly thereafter. Suddenly, they w ere left without a means of sustaining their lifestyle. Not long after that they had to call off their parties with the mlechCha-s hoping the shore up some mone y for seeing through this harsh period. The mlechCha-s no longer came home and h is kids went their own ways. Then barbarin was struck by a painful affliction th at came upon him like an arrow of rudra. But he could not get anything beyond th e most meager temporary medical assistance rendered by a third-rate physician he could no longer afford any thing, leave alone even obtain a basic diagnosis of his condition. Bound by the disease, barbarin had to grit his way through it hop ing that his body s repair mechanisms would some how take him across this vaitaraN I of existence. He had visions of the time when he was struck by the gaja. Sudde nly faces of his indigent former countrymen, who lay beside him in the hospital, and had gone the way of vivasvAn s dreadful son crowded his vision. barbarin had yet another vision where he found himself shivering before chitragupta who was t aking his own sweet time to sum up the account-book as barbarin stood before him . He wondered if a blow from the mace of the buffalo-rider might fall on him soo n. He had a vision of the intern who had saved him them and though she was indrA NI and hoped someone may come to save him thus. The only saving grace was that p halgu being a woman of the former times took care of him in these dire straits. He realized things could have been worse: he had long been envious of his friend tailakesha who had snagged a hiraNyakeshinI mlechChikA as a wife. Like him, tai lakesha too was out of employment. But the news had just reached him that to add salt to the wounds his friend s mlechChikA had decamped with all his earnings to enjoy maithuna with a pratikAmin. Even worse tailakesha learned his children wer

e jAragarbha-s and not his own. Thus, getting comfort from the fate of tailakesh a, barbarin and phalgu spent their now long days talking about why fate had been so adverse to them. Suddenly, it dawned on phalgu that despite all their sense of belonging they never belonged here. With some trepidation she tried to explai n her gnosis to the ailing barbarin: She told him the tale of the blue jackal ch aNDarava and his grim end. It hit barbarin that perhaps he was chaNDarava. He re alized that the life of a jackal might be rough but that of the blue jackal was tragic. However, like the once great rAjarShi of the ikShvaku-s all he could do was to remain suspended in the incomplete universe of the son of gAthin.