Aamer Hussein

Side by side

The Swan’s Wife

1.

Sometimes, when I walk by the water alone and look at the swans, I remember the artificial lake I read about in a book of old swan tales that I was given as a present many years ago. The lake was made by the servants of a king called Karan, who wanted it to be the meeting place of all the birds in the world. At that time the swans had their own kingdom far away in Lake Manasa, in the mountains near Tibet. King Karan had heard of Lake Manasa, and dreamed that his lake should rival it in beauty. In summer the young swans of Manasa would fly overhead and take home reports of this clear lake that rivalled theirs, with fish of every colour in its depths and flowers of every colour on its margins. They’d swoop down to drink, but they would never linger: they fed only on freshwater pearls, and there were no pearls on the bed of the artificial lake. Recently I looked for the book on my shelf, but I probably lost it long ago, or left it behind somewhere when I outgrew fairytales and other childish things.

2.

I remember the day the famine came to the swans of Lake Manasa.
The swans, the story said, had eaten all the pearls in the lake. Then the pair that were the bravest among them flew off in search of fresh pearls. They flew over all the world’s lakes, but were too proud to stop for food and water. One day, they flew over a lake that was surrounded by pearls that gleamed on the petals of the flowers and on the grass like dewdrops. The male swan swooped down to pick up the pearls: tired, he set his feet on the grass, but soon he found his silver left foot was caught in a trap concealed in a net on which the pearls had been woven. King Karan, who had been watching the swans from a terrace, approached and said to the swan in the trap: “Eat, swan, eat the pearls I laid out for you! Eat and I’ll let you go.” And the swan replied: “Never! You have tricked me.” Karan cried: “Why will you not eat? Have I not made a lake for you that rivals Manasa in beauty? And am I not generous? Have I not laid seed pearls around it for you and your army of swans to feed on?” Then the swan’s wife said from her perch in the air: “Kings do not imprison the innocent. Kings do not war against women.”
In one version the swan’s wife flew away to look for help; in another, the king’s men shot her down with a golden arrow. In a third telling, the swan didn’t even have a wife; the one who came to rescue him from King Kiran was his intrepid friend.

3.

One night, in a coach, on my way home in the winter darkness, I was searching on my mobile phone for swan stories, and found a picture of a pair of swans I’d seen in the book I lost. One was skimming the deep blue water, looking at the sky; the other raised her head from what seemed at first glance to be a tangled nest of thorns in the river. But if you looked again, you could see that she was in the embrace of a giant black bird, his grey beak at her throat, one black talon on her wing and the other on her white and bleeding breast, and what seemed to be water wasn’t water at all, it was darkening sky. The body of the swan lay on night-dark soil. Underneath the picture was the legend: Between you and me there is no kinship.
They say that once a wounded crow who had flown too high in the sky fell into the swans’ nest. The swan gave the hungry, tired crow refuge, but it was an ambush. The crow claimed that he had come to reclaim his mate, the swan’s wife. An army of a hundred crows swooped down from above them to peck at the swan’s wings and at his eyes; they chased him away from his nest at the lake’s edge. The swan hovered in the air above his wife, held off by the army of crows, and the wind was his home and a cloud his nest, and he cried for his mate.
- And the cry of a swan is a fearful thing -
Why, in the picture, was the swan looking away from the crow and from his bleeding wife? In the story, I remembered, ‘between you and me there is no kinship’ were the words the swan said to the crow when he offered him refuge.
But the picture left me wondering. Were those cruel words the swan’s farewell to his mate?
- And the cry of a swan torn away from a mate is a fearful thing.

4.

One summer afternoon, in the light rain, I stood by the edge of the lake and watched the swan’s wife. She skimmed the green surface of the water, preened a wing, and searched in the reeds for her reflection.

Last year I was working on a story I\'d been commissioned to write, about a woman who loved a swan, and inevitably I looked to old Buddhist fables for inspirational sources. But as I was searching for stories I came upon a series of tales about swans connected with the Raja Rasalu cycle of stories from old Punjab. Some of these had been retold by the folklorist Flora Annie Steel, in a beautiful book, Tales of the Punjab, which I keep by my desk. Among the many stories I found was the story of the swans and the crows, told partly in verse and illustrated by the images of swans and crows I describe in this story. (I\'ve been looking for the picture, but have never found it again.) When I’d finished several versions of my story, I was left with these tales around me on the cutting room floor. They continued to shadow me. I don’t often write verse, so my idea was to compose something resembling a poem in prose, and include both the swan tales and their (re)teller. My tales are combinations of several versions of the old stories and songs.