Sheena Bora's murder and the curse of Inardnia

Do you know about the legend of Inardnia? It is inspired from the tale of Melusina in AS Byatt's Possession. Inardnia was a monster who married a mortal but made him promise that he shall not speak of her past if he was to stay married to her and benefit from her secret powers. If ever - she said - he would get curious about her past, they would lose all the boons from her secret powers. They were married for several years during which they accumulated great wealth and built castles all around the world. But one day Aneesha, a delicate creature from the east, made of snow and feathers, came to their door and claimed to be her long lost daughter. She took refuge in their castle and fell in love with the mortal's son. This upset Inardnia to no end. Inardnia would lock herself up in the secret chamber built inside her castle. There she roared and thrashed her scaly tail. Deep screeching noises came from inside the chamber where she clawed day and night with her long nails. The mortal got fearful and concerned but stayed away owing to the pact they had made. Mortal's fearless son however proposed to marry the daughter and make her the new queen. This made Inardnia furious and she reproached both the mortal and his son reminding them of all the creature comforts her secret powers had helped them obtain. The mortal bore her reproaches but mortal's son remained defiant.

Maddened by his rebelliousness and her own daughter's betrayal, she summoned ogres from her past lives. She ordered them to kill feathery Aneesha else she would destroy their flimsy ogre worlds as well. The ogres submitted to her will and enchained Aneesha in an iron carriage and took her to the woods in a faraway land. There she was burnt under Inardnia's watchful eyes. The ogres were duly rewarded. Alas, a free spirited dragon from another world witnessed this secret burning who broke his silence in due course. Inardnia's world - suspended on the scaffolds of silence and fear - cracked. The earth shook and with all the mighty forces mortals brought down her castles and accumulated riches. Inardnia was captured and contained in a dungeon from which she could never escape.

Inardnia is indeed a creature of mythical proportions. Where does she come from? Who taught her that a slight brush on the arms of a mortal would disarm him? Did she watch his face turn for effect? Did she relish her power over wealthy men, erudite men, and men from all walks of life who would shudder and get confused and submit to her coddling? And this creature must have been driven mad by the knowledge that the power that disarms men so successfully is an utter failure with her own daughter. Those charms, those seductions don't have any effect on this puny little thing. How disappointing or perhaps enraging? When she first made her appearance, we weredismayed by its innocuous exterior. We watched with awe and admiration this creature born of ourselves, so much like us, and yet so far above us. And we gathered around this freak show pointing our fingers, wagging our tongues. Now, we are entertained to no extent with the struggles of the enchained creature, not really afraid of her since we know its powers have been rendered useless. We are desperate to identify her into something we know. We say she is a femme fatale, an adventuress and ascribe to her various quotidian principles and motives. But she is proving to be evasive and so far she had eluded capture even by the hands of most erudite of us.

There is perhaps a good reason she has defied any of these labels. She is in fact a monster: manifestation of evil that walks amongst us. And we cannot categorise evil as female or stereotype murderers based on gender. We cannot brand evil along gender lines. We cannot find explanations based on feminist principles. If we do so we risk their inclusion and we may miss the point of the perversity they embody. This exposition therefore is part of a dialogue, however grotesque, that humanity needs to have with itself on the fault lines of morality. There in that ether space one cannot lay claim to man or woman but only to humanity's struggle in chasing that elusive point where transgressions conquer our inner lives. When we reduce a monster to a gender stereotype, we deprive ourselves of the sensibility that they carry for us.

Monster sare not worthless after all. In "Gothic and Gender", Donna Heiland tells us that the word "monster" comes from the Latin "monstrum" meaning "something marvellous; orig [inally] a divine portent or warning". She proposes that indeed monsters are important for the human world. These monsters "tend to function as warnings or admonitions of one sort of another. They function as uncanny doubles of our societies, reflecting back to us images of everything that we have cast out as undesirable or threatening to the status quo and forcing us to face that which we would prefer to leave hidden." No wonder then that our inner child is fascinated with these grim fairy tales. The creatures that live in them teach us some valuable lessons. They feed our imagination. Above all, these larger than life beings serve as reminders of truths that may well be hidden from our mortal grasps.