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my creative faculties as the sign of a voyeuristic bore. And I did listen and did feel dismayed when my mother wailed: ‘Oh, Ganesh. You cannot always be telling people their own stories!’
    But bards are supposed to tell the truth. Did Ugrasravas, son of Lomaharsana, singer of the ancient Lore, compromise on this count? No. Did Homer skip the bad bits? I assure you he did not. Back then, stuck in an eternity of timelessness, a vacuum of art and words, I had no way of convincing my parents of this. I was nothing better than a lonely penman lost to his ignorant family.
    But while the repression I suffered would have cowed a less resilient will than mine, I am made of determined matter, and neither my father’s scowl nor my brother’s prickly arrow points could dent my verbal shield for long. Like Valmikiya (author of that very minor epic, the Ramayana) I turned ‘ shoka ’ to ‘ shloka ’ (sorrow to resounding verse) and realised how far too lavishly I was endowed to be sitting around on that barbaric goddery-colony and waiting for my kishti to come in. I had almost reached the stage of final disillusion with the other gods. My mind was filled up with serial somethings – they would surface, irrepressible, to taunt me – and thus was I forced to spend more and more time on the other side of the mountain, writing it all down, lost in a world of my own invention. And then something happened that helped it very much. Vyasa turned up.
    Yes, up he came, huffing and puffing through the mist, tramping through the snow, hyperventilating to the crest of Kailash Hill – where he threw himself at my feet, laid himself open to my mercy, and begged me to lend him my famed transcriptional faculties. For by then, even the good god Brahma had heard tell of my wordy affliction. Vyasa had complained to him: ‘O Brahma, a Poem which is greatly respected, has been composed by me. It contains the mystery of the Vedas, the hymns of the Upanishads and the history of time Past, Present and Future. It explains the nature of existence and non-existence, the rules for the four castes, and the dimensions of the earth, sun and moon. It reveals the art of war, the key to different races and the languages of all men. Everything has been put in this Poem. But I cannot find anyone to write my Mahabharata down.’
    Brahma, being an infinite and beneficent god of creation, thought that, despite the poem’s unmarketable length, it might be worth a try (it could always be sold as Religion). So he put his finger against his nose, looked up at the sky, down at Vyasa, and then he said: ‘You have revealed divine words in the language of truth even from their inception. That’s all very well. But now ask Ganesh to write it out for you.’
    So off Vyasa went to find me. ‘Ganesh,’ he said, when he had got his breath back from the trek up the mountain, ‘become the scribe of my Mahabharata, which I have composed in my mind and shall now repeat.’ He explained how he had heard from Brahma that I couldn’t say no to a saga. And he was right. Being an instinctive elephant, I had already seen the potential of Vyasa’s tale in ways its author couldn’t begin to gauge. So I said: ‘Ganesh will be the writer of the work, provided his pen is not made to stop even for a moment.’ Vyasa said: ‘Stop writing only when you do not understand a passage.’ I said: ‘Om.’ And so we set to work – going back to the beginning, for like all good stories we had started in the middle and were ending near the start.
    Now, in the Mahabharata, Vyasa portrays himself as a holy sage, with matted hair and an otherworldly air, an expert teacher, the counseller of kings, the wise old grandfather of his characters. He builds up a fabulous portrait: comforting yet aloof, clever yet alluring. I have only one problem with this benign vision: it is totally untrue. In these pages of mine, I will correct the misapprehension under which mortals have languished for so long. I