Karma by Dr.

Gopal Baratham

Rattlesnakes are full of surprises. At their rear end they have a noisy apparatus which
distracts enemies and causes them to strike at their tails instead of their heads, where their
brains…and their fangs are. As with other snakes they have no noses and smell with their
tongues, so when you see a snake gliding across the grass, his tongue darting ahead of him, he
is not trying to frighten you: he is merely taking the air. The most surprising thing about these
creatures, however, is their capacity for love. When they mate the male inserts his bifid penis,
which resembles two light-bulbs stuck together, into the female and they stay wrapped around
each other for nine whole days. During this period, they seek neither food nor water, nor do
they appear to excrete, for they have a common orifice, called the cloaca, which houses both
their genitals and their organs of excretion. Using the orifice for one function precludes their
using it for the other. Such commitment to love is difficult to find anywhere. When mating is
done the penis is withdrawn into the cloaca and it becomes impossible to distinguish male from
female. This story, however, is not about reptiles. It’s about humans.

It is a story of Ganesh and Gita. Ganesh resembled the elephant God of his name. he
was a stocky fellow, with a low hair-line and an enormous nose that led his face. Gita, on the
other hand, was a song, beautiful and slender as a note played on a single-reed instrument.
They were the most improbable of couples.

At the time when Ganesh and Gita lived, men believed in God and God believed in Man.
That is to say, God deceived Man at every turn, played cruel tricks on him but, nevertheless,
called on Man to serve His unknowable purpose. Like the people around them, Ganesh and Gita
were Hindus: devout Hindus. They believed in the cycle of birth, death and re-birth, the spiral of
karma, which if you lived your life correctly carried you upwards towards everlasting
enlightenment but if you didn’t dragged you down to the level of beasts.

As soon as they set eyes on each other and, much to their dismay, Ganesh and Gita fell
in love. Theirs wasn’t the eye-evading, flower-throwing love that culminated in day-dreams and
poetry. It was a love that demanded sweat and smells, sticky secretions and the exchange of
unfavorable body fluids. Even with God around this would have been alright – except for one
thing. They were married. But not to each other.

As a young lad, Ganesh had married the bride appointed by his parents. And he
couldn’t complain about the girl chosen for him. Vasantha was as light and sprightly as spring
rain. Gita had done likewise and her man, Prem, was a model of propriety and husbandly love.
So they had no reason, no excuse, no case that even a Californian court would countenance to
find each other. But find each other they did.

And, when they did, they couldn’t believe what they had found. It seemed absurd that
flesh could sing so sweetly that time stopped; incredible that the circumscribe pleasures of Eros
could make them cling to each other for days, nights and days again. Dripping, dancing and in
positions that would have made houris sweat they spent time, if one could call what felt like
eternity time, in a pleasure that flowed between them like swing of the sea.

But they were good Hindus. Religious folk. And like all religious folk they questioned
what God intended by causing them to come together. Joyfulness could never be its own
reward.
 “God is telling us that a child wants to be born,” said Ganesh in his simple way. “He is
telling us that out of the unformed elements of the universe a life is crying out for an existence.
We are the vehicles of the purpose.”

“Then why not a child from you and Vasantha or one from me and Prem?” Gita
questioned. “That would be proper and it would not offend the code of dharma?”

They questioned even as they clung to each, questioned even when breathless with
pleasure. But questions unanswered are more damaging than those attended to. They erode
joy, interrupt ecstasy.

Once, even before the ebb of their pleasure was complete, Ganesh, suggested, in the
touching but somewhat stupid way that elephants have, “It could be that the astrologers were
wrong when they matched horoscopes. It could be that we were designed for each other and
would be husband and wife but for a man’s misreading of the stars.”

Gita was not satisfied with this. She was a song and songs, as we all know, work in a
roundabout way. So, even as she rejoiced in her love for Ganesh, she searched for its true
meaning, worried about its significance.

Then, as though God had intended it, she found in a magazine an article on
rattlesnakes.

“It is clear,” she said, as she lowered herself on to her lover, “that in our past existence,
we were rattlesnakes. Some memory of this remains. That is why we are as we are.” She
continued when Ganesh was securely inside her. “You and I have been good Hindus. We have,
except for this one transgression, obeyed all the dictates of dharma. All God can do to punish us
for our present failing is to return us to our former state. When we are born again, we will be
born as rattlesnakes. And is that not what we really want?”

“How can we be sure but we have to trust in God.” Gita felt her lover begin to shrivel
inside her. She put her hand over his mouth, moved a little and made him firm again before she
let him speak.

“And to return as rattlesnakes…?” Fear at what Gita was about to suggest made it
impossible for him to complete his question.

“We must die now and go back to our former lives.”

“Kill ourselves, you mean?” asked Ganesh, now clearly terrified.

“Yes.”

Songs persuade and it didn’t take Gita long to convince her lover that the course she
planned was the right one.

The rains came and the river rose. Rose till its muddy waters invaded the huts of the
poor living on its banks. Gita, dressed in a plain white sari, and Ganesh, in a yellow silk dhori,
hurled themselves into the swollen river. At their birth, the astrologer had warned that water
would be dangerous to them and they should never go near it. Because of this neither had
learned to swim. The astrologer was, of course, right. Water is, indeed, dangerous to non-
swimmers. Ganesh and Gita drowned.

The desert in Arizona is hot and arid. The air is so dry that human skin flakes and
becomes like scales. Gita was glad that she was a snake. Her belly was heavy with eggs and she
was aching for a male who could make them come to life. Nevertheless, she waited till the cool
of dusk before she emerged from under the rock where she had found shade.

She knew she had to be careful. She yearned for a male. But not any male. She yearned
for Ganesh. He was around, somewhere, and she would find him. Of that she was sure. But she
had to be careful to avoid the attention of other males in heat. Whatever the eggs told her
body to do, it would be pointless spending nine days entwined with a stranger. So she avoided
the flats easy paths that randy young rattlesnakes took and stuck to the rocky high-ground,
even though the stones grated against her belly and threatened to tear up her soft underscales.

Dawn was beginning to break and Gita had almost given up hope, when she found him.
He was lying against a rock. She shot out her tongue to get the male smell that would make her
orifice damp and the eggs in her belly churn. Nothing happened. But she knew it was Ganesh.
Her Ganesh. So she slithered across and began wrapping herself across his body.

Ganesh seemed disturbed by her action. Almost ashamed. But Gita was not put off by
this. He had always been a little shy. She pressed her damp orifice against his and began the
gentle gyration that would cause his penis to protrude. She couldn’t wait for the bulb of gristle
to spring out and lock into her opening. Nothing emerged. She flicked out her tongue to smell
him again. There was no sharp male smell about him. Instead the odour she got was exactly the
same as that which came from her own body. As karma promised, they had been reborn as
rattlesnakes. But as female rattlesnakes.

As always, God has the last laugh.