Kundalini

© 2007 Joseph D'Lacey
All rights reserved.

There was a time in New Delhi when heroin was cheaper than beer.

I was young then. About my neck, I wore an amulet of Shiva, the destroyer. The skin of my forearms was deep brown and permanently sweat-slicked, the veins corrugating it like the wet bark of a rainforest sapling. The insides of my arms, where the sun made less contact, were paler, sprinkled with cinnamon powder pocks: the spirits of skin-pops past. It was a soporific time. I remember it in a language of long slumbers and waking dreams.

I knew a lot less than I thought I did, but I was alone. I was free. Such conditions were important to me in those days. Like any youth, however, my self-knowing was based on ignorance, on the absence of understanding. Self-realisation must be experienced. It must be embodied. Now, I know true solitude.

True autonomy.

***

In the misty opium dens and sultry smack lounges, rumours of disappearances were the gossip equivalent of a viral epidemic. Believing myself superior to every other helpless devotee of Morpheus, I dismissed the chatter as fantasy. It seemed normal that those with nothing better to do than nod to the poppy would make up such stories or see them in their nightmares and pass them around as fact. The alleged abductions were blamed on an immense snake that came in the night and swallowed addicts as they slept. With misplaced erudition, I assumed that this idea originated in some construct of the shared unconscious, some link between heroin use and dragon imagery. I am amused by that now.

When I did not have the strength or will to walk, I took taxis between clubs, friends' flats, brothels, and my own sloth-encrusted bed-sit. When the thronged streets smelled of curried shit and lemony, garlicky perspiration, there was a tremendous relief in being driven. I was at liberty to do other things: further intoxicate myself, accept languid oral sex, or, if alone, stare out of the windows at a world continuing without me. Naively, I viewed such rides as meditations.

The downside was that I relinquished control of the vehicle and, therefore, one could argue, my life. I never thought about it that way until one pressure-cooker-hot afternoon when I hailed a cab for a drive into the countryside on the outskirts of the city. Usually my trips took me just a few blocks through streets sardine-packed with cars, buses, bicycles, rickshaws, and cows. Rarely did you reach a speed high enough for a collision to be much more than an irritating jolt from your reverie.

In India, driving was a matter of icons, rosaries, talismans, and hasty prayers more than it was a matter of skill. All the taxis were scarred; scratches caused by creating extra lanes in roads where there weren't any, dents caused by a split second of looking in the wrong direction, crumplings that made the steel shell of a taxi look like scrunched wrapping paper.

***

Occasionally, I needed to get away. On the afternoon that I escaped all this mayhem for the first time in months, I asked the cabbie to take me to Chindalee, a small town about ten miles to the north of the city. The driver was sullen and taciturn. A tattoo of entwined serpents, faded with time, emerged from the open collar of his dirty shirt. I sank into the sweat-weary leather seat in the back of his no-longer-white Mercedes and let the world slide past me outside the window.

There were taxis with air conditioning in New Delhi, but they were rare and cost more. In this car the air conditioning was rolled down on all sides and the dirty, engine-cooked fumes roiled around me, polluting me with their microcontents and making no difference to the temperature. Even the missing rear windscreen didn't help. Warm beads gathered on me, pooling in my suprasternal notch. My back added to the mingled vintage of fluids embedded in the leather. A stream ran down my chest and formed a small lake in my navel. Eventually, it bled into the cotton of my white Oxford weave shirt, darkening the already stained fabric. I unbuttoned it.

***

I'd never been to Chindalee and had no idea why I'd picked it as a destination. The streets were empty and the buildings, none of which had windows, looked uninhabited. Coconut palms formed a spiky backdrop to many ruined dwellings where it seemed that simple erosion had been the cause of their collapse. On the main street, once-busy shops and mini markets were shuttered with aluminium mesh. Only that metal remained untainted by the elements, still gleaming under a patina of dust in the early evening pinkness of the sun.

I let the driver drive, content to go wherever he took me until I decided it was time to turn around. Chindalee ended suddenly, like an arm with no hand, and we were on a dirt road with dusk approaching. I wanted it to go on a little longer. It was so good to have escaped the noise of the city. The smell of human filth was gone.

The driver slowed the taxi to a crawl but I said nothing. Then, for no reason I could determine, he drove up close to the edge of the road. To the left the ground disappeared into a deep ditch. I wouldn't have wanted to slide down into it; it was dark and tangled with vines. God knew what kind of creatures might lurk there. Even at our level, the dry, leafless limbs of trees scraped along the side of the car, some snapping off inside and dropping onto the exposed steel foot-well. For a moment, I thought the driver might be falling asleep at the wheel, but I saw his eyes in the rear-view mirror, the whites flashing as his orbs swivelled to see my face. The man looked vicious, but it wasn't him that scared me. It was our proximity to the edge of the road.

Now the car was crawling, nearly at a standstill, and our wheels were almost over the edge of the dirt slope. When the two snakes dropped in through the open window and onto the seat beside me, I couldn't take it in to start with. The driver had deliberately driven close to the trees; he must have seen the brightly coloured pair hanging coiled on a branch and thought to give me a scare. I wanted to shout at him, but I couldn't speak. Sudden movement seemed unwise.

The snakes, disturbed from torpid bliss on their dead branch, disengaged from each other: the unravelling of a menacing knot, one thing becoming two. Their heads turned this and that way, vibrated up and down. Their dark tongues strobed in and out of view. Before I even saw their eyes I was mesmerised.

And their colours. Too strange. Too lurid.

One was as red as the tail of a dragon, so red it was almost yellow. It reminded me of the hottest curries I'd eaten when first arriving in Delhi. Fire-chilies, ochre-tinged. Hot and deadly. Its scales shimmered like turmeric sprinkled on lava. Its eyes were molten gold with a vertical slit of darkness. It stared at me, black-hearted and blind.

Its companion was blue, a sick, green blue. It was the colour of some coagulated, untreatable venom, an uncoiling vessel of deoxygenated blood. Its scales were feather-dry and I could hear them abrade each other as this vein-snake fixed its unseeing gaze upon me. Its eyes were purple, tainted clots with onyx wounds cut into them. Diseased eyes.

I happened to glance up and notice the eyes of the taxi driver, one ore-yellow, the other dead-blood mauve, both bulging. He smiled at me through cigar-brown teeth. His tongue flickered between them, black and bifurcated. On his neck there was no longer a tattoo; it was disguised reptilian scales. I could not move.

The snakes, enraged by their new surroundings and by the immobile man who seemed to be the cause, had untangled themselves from each other entirely. Their heads reared and splayed. They approached, scales sighing against the grimy leather.

I reached to my right, trying to catch the handle of the door. It was a quick movement but not sudden. There was a chance I could slip away, out into the evening, before they bit me. The bites would come. I knew that. It was only a matter of when. How long after they made contact with my skin could I refrain from panic? How long after that touch before they drove their dripping teeth into my flesh?

The door was locked. I pleaded with my eyes to the driver and saw his glee.

There was still the missing rear window, but it would be an ungainly squeeze and it was bound to agitate the snakes further. Thinking it was worth the risk, I tried anyway, straightening my legs and pushing my back up the dirty seat. The movement disturbed them. They stiffened, their heads splayed so wide they looked like they would split.

They struck then, perfectly synchronised. They hooked their teeth into me, one on each side of my chest, an inch inside each nipple. I imagined that I'd inhaled in shock, but the truth was that from the moment their fangs penetrated my skin, I stopped breathing. The venom was cold, a liquid frost that slowed and ached within me. It seemed to drip down the insides of my ribs as though I were hollow. It was no swift attack. The snakes gripped me with their lower jaws and worked the venom into the wounds. I stared, unmoving, mouth open, into their reflective eyes.

Paralysed, I was unable to lift a hand to them when they began to push their heads into me. Delving with scaly muscularity, they forced their heads deeper and deeper. I felt my frozen skin would fracture, that my ribs would shatter. Instead, my skin, still slick with greasy rivulets, parted like thirsty lips and my willowy ribs swayed wider to allow passage. The two snake heads disappeared.

Slowly, deliberately, they wormed into me. I felt the ripple of scales and the determined, sinuous twists that took them deeper. It was as though they had some destination in mind. I could feel their movements within me; my only guide as to what they were doing. How could they breathe, I wondered? And why wasn't I dead? I was poisoned and hadn't moved my own lungs for many minutes. My stasis was total. Even though I could no longer glance into the mirror and see the driver's face, I knew he was there, grinning, dirty-toothed, delighted.

I felt the snakes descend past my stomach.

Downward.

God knew what damage they were doing to my organs. Were they still chewing or merely forcing my viscera apart to gain passage? They slipped over my kidneys, pushing them down for a few long, leaden moments. Into my bowels where they twisted between the labyrinthine tubes.

Downward and backward now.

I felt them move toward each other like two branches of a stream, and at the base of my spine, at the tip of my tailbone, they turned and headed upward. Meanwhile, at the entry wounds, their tails disappeared simultaneously. My skin sealed, leaving the vipers within.

Up they came in a slow dance, twisting and clenching around my spine, looping and spiralling between my aorta and vena cava. I felt the pressure in my bloodstream increase as they tightened and twirled. My spinal processes clicked and realigned as they passed. They spread my diaphragm as they pushed though behind my stomach, and suddenly I could breathe again. Behind my lungs, they thrust upward. They seemed to pass right though my heart and become part of its beat. Before, it had been arrhythmic and weak. Now it felt regular and powerful.

The snakes, one red as hell itself, the other bluer than arctic steel, forced their way into my neck, wound like thick ribbons around the maypole of bones supporting my cranium, and still they pushed upward. I felt a ricking in the vertebrae, a lifting and straightening.

They had breached my skull. How they could get through it I had no idea — the aperture where the nerves entered had to be far too small. They pushed their heads deep into each hemisphere of my brain — I felt the swelling — and there they stopped. My spine, from cranium to coccyx, was serpent.

Suddenly, I could move again. I looked at the driver, but he was no longer in the taxi. Instead, I caught sight of my own eyes in the cracked rear-view mirror. One was golden scarlet and the other cyanide blue. Each had a vertical slit that led to wet-velvet blackness. I blinked, hoping the illusion would pass, but I opened my eyes to the same uncoiled stare.

I staggered from the taxi onto the dust of the road, expecting to die at any moment. Rather than collapse, I stood taller and healthier, more alert than I had been in months. I put my hands to my chest where the snakes had struck me, but there was no trace of their attack or entry. I ran my fingers over my sweat-glazed torso, trying to discern internal damage. I put my hands to my neck, where even now the bodies of two snakes, one red and one blue, paralleled my existing blood vessels like potent internal cables. My neck was not distended, though. I felt alive. I felt vital.

The driver's seat was abandoned, the keys gone. I spent a couple of minutes searching for some clue about who he was or where he might have gone, but there was nothing. No taxi ID card, no driver number, no wallet. No business cards or receipt book. The man had vanished. I looked up and down the road, but there was no one with me. He was long gone.

How much time had it taken, I wondered, for the snakes to complete their task? Seconds? Minutes? Longer? It seemed that it had all happened very quickly — one moment the driver was there, the next he wasn't — but there was no way to be sure. The taxi's clock had been torn out and my own watch had been without a battery for months. Only the sky told me the time: it was the dawn of night.

I began the long walk back into the city, unafraid of the overhanging branches at the edge of the road. The temptation to lie down on my belly and slither was ever present. I was curious to see if I could do it.

The darker it got, the more often I brushed the trees with my shoulder and the more often one foot began to slide into the endless roadside ditch. I put my tongue out, trying to taste my way, and found I no longer faltered or stumbled. I knew it would be well into the night or early morning before I reached somewhere safe. Long before that, I began to have difficulty walking. My legs wouldn't take steps as wide as I wanted them to and my arms no longer swung easily beside me. I stopped to check why this was and discovered that the skin between my legs was fusing together. Already my genitals were disappearing inside of me and my pubic hair had moulted away. My armpits were nearing my elbows as the skin there sealed up seamlessly.

I had to take my clothes off to prevent them from getting pulled under my skin. This left me naked but for my Shiva necklace. I carried my wallet in my hand as I shuffled along. By the time my legs were meeting at the knees, I was walking like a fish on its tail. It hurt. That was the worst moment, trapped between two states, neither human nor animal. Helpless and vulnerable, I crouched awkwardly and fell onto my side. The stones and grit from the road pressed painfully into my skin.

As slowly as clouds passing, my body continued to change.

My calves and feet melted together. My hands and arms became my flanks. I cried at my paralysis. But soon, my eyes barely able to perceive the darkness in front of them, my tongue began to see and taste and smell for me. I saw the tracks of a thousand night creatures, felt the vibrations of their passing and the beating of their hearts. I smelled the rubber laid down on the road from passing cars, buses, bicycles, and carts. I tasted the living and the dead, the latter outnumbering the former like whole beaches to a single grain of sand. Still, the dead were here with us; still they walked, but in unseen bodies. With my tongue I heard the cries of hunted mammals in the night and knew that I was to be feared.

Long before the morning came and showed me to the world, my face changed position. It stretched forward from my body, directly away from my tail. I felt myself elongate by several feet and then, magically, I was moving again. The road and its tiny wounding shards of gravel no longer hurt my skin. I slid over it on hard, silky scales. I left my necklace behind me. I shimmered along the roadside on my body-length belly, a smooth, swaying muscle of sheer power.

Night was ending and I sensed it was time for me to hide myself. I slid down the incline into the roadside ditch away from the growing light, away from the paths of men and their haunted dreams. It was cooler down there, damper. I slid through fertile slime and between exposed roots. I knew what it was to be close to the earth.

When the shadows became too cold for me, I encircled a tree trunk and climbed upwards. Lying out over a strong extended bough, I tasted the closeness of the city, saw the smoke that lay over it, smelled the men I would hunt, felt the trembling of the ground that I would glide silently over when night came again.

In the afternoon of that day, I felt pain deep inside myself, and for the first time since my release, I was afraid. Was it a sickness? Was all this to end so swiftly? The pain gathered within me and concentrated itself at the lower end of my body. It burnt and froze me at the same time. I clenched and grated around that bough for hours.

At nightfall something escaped my body.

Curling downward to taste what had slipped from me, I smelled two tiny human children, one fire-crimson, the other as blue as a drowned woman's lips. I felt no more fear. They climbed down from the branch and into the night. Minutes later I heard the gravelly putter of a taxi's diesel engine and the slamming of a car door. I tasted the driver's smile as he drove his taxi back into the city without me.

That night, in the opium bars of New Delhi, I ate as a reptile for the first time.