Moonfull

I am puffy-eyed this morning. I usually get like that if I’ve tried to squeeze my eyes shut for half the night. You see, sometime during my second REM cycle the moon woke me up. It was the full moon, and of the particular potency of Guru Purnima. Beyond the blue barring of the summer screens outside the window, the moon was a diffused ball of incandescence. Moonlight streamed in on fairy feet. It was pretty. The correct thing to have done would have been to have admired all this prettiness for about five minutes, drawn the blinds and curled back to sleep. A lifetime’s experience has taught me that I cannot get a wink of sleep with light on my face. But of course I did not do that. There is something incredibly romantic about being swathed in moonlight. Of course, in the ideal scenario the subject is sweetly oblivious, instead of in a desperate determination to be oblivious. It was, I realised, a case of that Schrödinger man’s cat. But it wasn’t the time to think about semi-dead cats.

I turned my thoughts instead to Vikram aur Betaal. At least, I mean, to one of the princesses in the ‘sabse komal kyon?’ episode. She was one of the three princesses in a competition for their unsurpassed fragility. This one gets a moon burn from talking a turn in the balcony on a full-moon night. This feat has been indelibly etched in my mind as the height of cool. Of the other two, one develops a blinding headache from construction activity in the next town and the other (the ultimate winner) can smell a goat from someone’s childhood.

Of course, I have always thought, if Vikram had been doing his rightful duty, my moon-shy princess should have been pronounced the victor. But I suspect both he and Betaal knew that ‘komal’ was just a euphemism for ‘darned useful’. The whole point was to provide the pernickety prince with the most useful spouse.

This is how I have worked it out. Being burned by moonlight is not a particularly useful quality, that is to say, can you imagine what would happen if the said princess was to attend some royal coronation or public rally or somesuch? A broiled aubergine is not a pretty sight, even for a princess. Then consider, what’s the use of a wife with a perennial headache?

But a consort, who can smell better than your average Golden retriever, must be an asset to any ambitious young prince. A royal repast need only be scanned by her royal nose for untoward handling and oriental substances. Spies could be sniffed out in a jiffy by way of some regional dietary peculiarity or suchlike. Vishkanyas are no threat to a man with such a wife. There could be no end to her usefulness in smelling a rat, scenting and intrigue, whiffing a deception, or nosing out a mystery.

Therefore I have long since concluded that it is usefulness that decided Vikram and the Betaal in her favour and it had nothing whatsoever to do with her ‘komalness’. I also think it is a shocking thing to spin children such yarns and let them work out their disillusionment at leisure in later years.

Iterating to myself this theory was the work of about a couple of hours. By which time, my father who has the habits of an owl was bustling about the house with about half the household lights on. The romanticism of the moon had waned with all these quotidian lights and sounds splintering in from under the door. I got up and drew the curtains resolutely.

On waking up, I inspected my face as the first thing. Apart from the aforementioned puffy eyes there was nothing distinctive about my face. No moon marks, no nothing.