The narrative tradition of India contains true gems of fantastic literature that give rise to the most entertaining ethical and metaphysical speculations. In the collection of stories from the 11th century Katha-Sarit-Sagara (The Ocean that Contains Streams of Stories), which collects traditional stories from India, the loquacious ghost of a corpse taken down from a gallows tells the king who took him off the macabre swing a very interesting tragicomic tale.
Two friends undertook a pilgrimage to a sacred spa of the goddess Kali, and there they saw a beautiful girl. One of them fell ill with passion, stopped eating and sleeping, and was sure that he would die unless he could have that girl as his wife. His friend contacted her father and explained the situation. The father, hurriedly, went to the girl's parents in order to organize the wedding. Shortly after the hasty marriage, the young couple and her friend left for her parents' house. On the way, they came across a Kali temple, immersed in blood. The young husband asked his wife and his friend to wait outside while he went inside to honor the Goddess.
When he saw the image of Kali blood-stained and triumphant, crushing furious demons with eighteen powerful arms and with Her lotus foot planted on a bull-shaped demon, a sudden enlightenment came upon him. He came up with the strange idea of immolating himself before the goddess to be saved and obtain Her grace as a reward for his devotion. He took a sword from the shrine and cut off his head. After an hour of waiting, the friend entered the temple to look for him. Seeing his corpse, he took the same stained sword and cut off his own head, immersed in the greatest sadness and despair. A little later, the young woman entered the temple worried about the delay of both, and when she saw the two decapitated bodies in a pool of blood, she ran away horrified to hang herself with a vine from the nearest tree. However, Kali's voice spoke to the girl and ordered her to bring the boys back to life by placing their heads back on her bodies. Nervous and scared, she hastily placed the heads on the still warm corpses, but she absentmindedly placed the head of her husband on the body of her friend. A funny ethical dilemma was then posed to the girl: Which of the two was her husband? She opted for the head of the husband with the body of the friend, a combination that today raises smiles among married women, but which supposedly conveys the teaching that the head contains more of the soul than any other part of the body, apart from the obvious one that we indoctrinates in the belief that he who worships the Goddess will be resurrected and have eternal life. The story does not tell us more about how the union of the girl with her particular Frankenstein monster turned out to be, nor if the husband suffered severe personality changes in the various facets of married life, although it perfectly shows the headless impetus that guides marital unions, and the blind orgy of bad decisions in which we spend our lives.
Fragile is the structure of our masks, the narrative of our egos... Life blows its wild winds and certainties, precariously sustained on foundational dreams of personality, break up.
