The Oceans of Cruelty: Twenty-Five Tales of a Corpse-Spirit - A Retelling by Douglas J. Penick

Brahman dreams; in his dreams, he overhears the twenty-five stories the god Śiva tells his consort Pārvāti. Waking, Brahman speaks to his wife of this dream, and Śiva, enraged, strikes him dead, dooming him to become a vetāla, or corpse-spirit. The vetāla must hang from a tree for eternity, unless a king comes to break the curse. Some time later, a demon ensnares the wise king Vikramāditya, who is sent to bring the vetāla back. But this is no simple task. If Vikramāditya speaks to the vetāla, the vetāla vanishes, returning to the tree, and the task begins again. But speak Vikramāditya must, because each time he lifts the vetāla up, its clammy incorporeality on his back, it whispers a story in his ear, and asks him to judge the people in it. He cannot refuse. Only when Vikramāditya is well and truly stumped will the task be complete and the vetala freed.

This book is a beautiful retelling of the Vetala Panchavimshati. Most of the stories involve love and lust, honor and dishonor, cruelty and death, and maintenance of the social order (everyone must do what they are ordained to do). Themes and plots seem to repeat, stories blur and end abruptly. And because I am in the state of mind that I am in, it felt impossible not to see some parallels in Vikramāditya’s plight with where the U.S. is right now, doomed to carry forward a malignant spirit again and again and again until we learn.

"There was no end to all this going and going, and no meaning, just a cascade of fragments, all incomplete."