(urth) Short Story 4: The Dead Man

[Marc Aramini]

The Dead Man

This was first published in 1965 in Sir!, and while thematically it is similar to the 1951 work of Wolfe, especially “The Grave Secret”, the prose is far more precise and articulate.  Gene’s progress, of all the truly great writers, seems more “made” that born.  

SUMMARY:  Taking place in a Hindi river setting, for the first time in generations the river seems unsafe.  The main character’s sister-in-law has been taken by a Magar (crocodile, but Urdu/Hindi for “water monster”) 9 days previously.  His wife has been bitten on the foot by a jackal and it has reacted badly when she tried to distract it away from her young son, so her husband, called the peasant, must perform the womanly task of getting water from the river since his own mother is too old.

He rises early, but there is an old Brahman already on the step sitting outside his door, who has cast Marigold wreaths into the river to placate the Magar and other river spirits.  The man retrieves the first jug and returns to his hut where his wife moans and stirs before he goes back with his second, chipped jug for more water.  He grows careless, and his foot slips.  As a result, the Magar snatches him by the leg and he passively accepts his fate.  He awakens in the lair of the crocodile, next to a blackbuck and a woman whose body seems familiar.  He escapes through the “chimney” of the lair and makes his way back to his family (the limp is implied from the injury to his leg during the croc attack).  He stands before his house and looks first and last at his wife.  

The Brahman is seated inside his house and says, “Do not address it.  It is seldom good to hear what they will say” before casting saffron powder from a brass bowl into the air to bring the dead peasant release.

COMMENTARY:  Once again we have a dead man unaware of his condition.  However, we must address the moment when he returns to awareness after the attack.  “When next he came to know our world – maya, that which is not God – it was a small circle of pale blue far above his eyes.”  In hinduism, Maya is like an illusion.  Along with matter and activity it creates a trifecta through which man “exists”, but he experiences matter and activity through Maya.  Thus dualism is taken to an extreme degree – the real world as an illusion, that which is separate from the reality of the divine.  Maya is also somehow linked to the act or actors involved in the creation of the physical world.

The Brahmin is someone who has come to experience knowledge of the self, BUT it is a bit suspicious that he is sitting there waiting outside the man’s door when he leaves, then is not present the first time the man returns … but the wife moans and stirs in her bed.  Since the description is of a very old man I will not posit that the Brahmin had a vested interest in the wife.  

However, the peasant’s half-brother’s wife, which is probably the corpse rotting in the den of the crocodile, also evokes the feeling “A drugged and whirling concourse of surmises rushed through his mind, until simultaneously an without consciousness of contradiction he felt that he lay in the palace of a scaled river-spirit and asleep beside his wife.”
The crocodile has teeth that are ill suited to eating the man, so it has to wait for food to get appropriately soft and rotten to consume it, in its little cooking den with a chimney to prevent the noxious rotting gasses to poison the den.  The man escapes through this.

POSSIBLE AMBIGUITIES: Is the Magar there for judgment?  Why has the river been safe for so long?  Was the man having an affair with his half-brother’s wife – is that why they both shared the river-spirit’s attention?  Was the Brahmin innocent or complicit, being there before the man left and then present at his final return to dissolve his consciousness, but not there upon his first return, when he heard the moan of his wife?  Also, is the woman that he recognizes his sister in law?  It would seem to be, but has she rotted enough for 9 days? It does not seem to be another fresh victim that he “knows”. 

ALLUSIONS:  Besides Weird Tales, we have Kipling and The Jungle Book here!  The crocodile is called by Magar just as Baloo is a bear.  Hindi religious systems seem to be treated seriously, especially that separation of real world as illusion from the actual reality of the divine – the Dead Man has unknowingly fallen between those two.

RELIGIOUS CONNOTATION:  We should look at The Brahman as someone who is aware of his own spiritual state and maya as that which is separate from God; interesting concepts, because the main character, like many of Wolfe’s, is able to accept his fate but not understand it (so he is not very "Brahman").

Also, there is a subtle difference between Brahmin and Brahman, and Wolfe usually employs the "a" spelling.

FUTURE ECHOES:  As Gerry said of “The Grave Secret”, it seems clear that “The Other Dead Man” will be related to this, and I would also liken it to the stories where indigenous myths are given power and treated seriously (even the Latro books would fall into this category – Egyptian gods in Egypt, Greek gods in Greece, etc).  The idea of Maya as an illusory real world seems to permeate Gene’s work, though I would normally ascribe it to “Gnosticism”.

Also, we have ANOTHER leg injury, and besides a possibly broken vertibral column, the most obvious source of discomfort to the peasant when he "awakens".  This wound was given at the time of translation between life and death, or between maya and that which is beyond illusion.

The next one will be "Mountains like Mice" - I need a day or two to get that one prepared.