Cleopatra’s bath

A few months back, while browsing through a rather quaint collection of historical essays at a library, I came across this probably incomplete but most definitely amusing piece by a famous Egyptologist. The subject of the essay being of common interest, I thought it would please you to see this essay here. Here goes…

“Cleopatra was born in 69 BC, in Alexandria, Egypt. People say today, that she was glamorous and beautiful, but she was far from it. In her early years she has, as shown on ancient forged coins, an extraordinarily long hooked nose and features that would have been noted by any great poet as close to masculine. She was also overweight, quite short and she never trimmed her finger nails.

(Now you ask me a very pertinent question –“If she was NOT as beautiful as everyone else wants us to believe she was, then, how on earth did she manage to do all that she so ably did?” “She was clearly a very seductive woman”, you tell me, “Caesar and Antony would vouch for that. She had a really pretty nose–what with Bacon’s famous nose quip and...then of course... there’s Shakespeare and Elizabeth Taylor not to discount the lavish praises of a venerable Gaulish druid.”)

Now for some more facts…again this is completely historical. She had a beautiful musical voice. It is also said that she was highly intelligent. She spoke nine different languages, and she was the first Ptolemy pharaoh who could actually speak Egyptian.

(Better? Not quite I see... The fact that despite all this, I was bold enough to state that she was ugly, rankles... Well, history is faulty because no one believes in the role of magic in history. Or of Gods or of anything else that they cant be explained away using cold rational logic and shards of broken pottery and ruins of ancient toiletries. So I beseech you to remain patient and listen to my story. At the end of it, I promise you, all will be well).

She ascended the Egyptian throne after her father, Ptolemy Xll Auletes died in 51 BC. Cleo, who was seventeen at the time and her brother Ptolemy Xlll, who was twelve, were married because of the terms of her father's will. In the third year of their reign Ptolemy’s advisers told him that he should rule Egypt by himself. They felt that their King and Queen, who were both quite heavy as such, were consuming too much of the great Nile’s yearly produce all by themselves. So the little fifteen year old good- for -nothing resolved to drive away his twenty year old wife or whatever it was that he called her. Result- Cleo was exiled and being the resourceful twenty year-old that she was, she escaped to Syria.

So far so good…now come the unbelievable parts i.e. the parts that are unhistorical, unproven, and inexplicable- hence –the truth. It was in Syria that Cleo took the first of her historical baths. The Cleopatra Bath, as it is often called.

During the fourth week of her stint at Syria, an old crone visited Cleo in her dreams. On her bent shoulders she carried a sachet of camel’s leather. For a full five minutes she pillaged within the sachet muttering and cursing all the while in some barbaric language. Kanathos, she kept saying as she continued in her mysterious search. Finally, she found a flask of clay which she kept quietly on the table beside which Cleo slept. “Kanathos of the reborn virgin”, she said, “shall change history again”.

Cleo woke up at once. Like every hero of every great tale she knew at once that her dream was a holy one. She looked around her. Sure enough, there beside her bed on the ivory table was the flask of clay. On the flask were engraved some careful instructions

“Spring of Kanathos TM- User’s instructions
· Use ONE drop (10 ml) of Spring water TM with your bath water
· Soak in above mix for one hour
· For best results repeat procedure next day, every day
· Keep away from children, Romans, Gods, immortals, other women and the Sun
· Store in a cool place”

Twenty servants were immediately summoned and some assorted slaves filled a tub large enough and deep enough for the youthful queen to splash around in her enormous bulk. In she went and 10 ml of Kanathos was added…

Cleo then returned to Egypt with an army. Ptolemy sent an army to meet her. At this point, Julius Caesar of Rome arrived in pursuit of his enemy, who was seeking help from Ptolemy. So Cleo took a small boat, and one only of her confidants, Apollodorus, the Sicilian, along with her, and in the dusk of the evening, rolled up in a Persian rug,

Cleopatra was delivered to Caesar. "Greetings to Caesar from Egypt!" Cleo saluted Caesar. Cleopatra provided Caesar with ample time to observe and admire her scanty, tight, black, shiny dress revealing her full arms, abdomen, hips, back and legs, where the large slits parted...

Cleopatra's body language and clothing were obviously sexual. With her sleepy, alluring eyes she leaned back and laughed seductively. She sauntered as she walked in front of Caesar, she walked behind his seat and leaned towards him, all the while smiling slyly as if she disclosed some little secret…

(“Hold on a minute!” you shout “Just a few paragraphs back this woman was anything but full arms and abdomen…she was well rounded to say the least and there were bits about her nose being too long etc…You mean to say that silly dream with a Kanathos flask did all this to her?”

All I can say is I am narrating history as it is. Maybe somebody tore out quite a few pages in between in the chapter.

For all you know the time period between the bath and the carpet banging is almost a year or more and a well rounded woman would have after some good aerobic training come around to be exactly the kind of abdomen any man wanted.

But then, there are accounts that Cleo’s stay at Syria lasted for all of two months which would then negate my above hypothesis... So history is as usual confused here and the secret most definitely lies in the myth of the Cleopatra Bath. Anyhow, after this key incident every one seems to drool infinitely about Cleo, while of course, before it, its all about how poets were just so wrong about her infinite variety-infinite maybe yes, variety no way…etc)

Afterwards, in 47 BC , when Ptolemy Xlll drowned in the Nile while trying to escape the armies of Caesar and Caesar restored Cleo to her throne, Cleo and Caesar went on a two-month cruise on the Nile. (She later gave birth to a son. His name was officially Ptolemy XV Caesar, but he was popularly called Caesarian.). Now it is during this cruise that the myth of the Cleopatra Bath spread to the Roman world and gained its legendary status. Accounts by slaves that have survived the ravages of time, much like the legends of Cleo’s beauty, give us a glimpse, though perhaps apocryphal, of the modus operandi of the Cleopatra Bath.

“And soaked in the light of mirrors with that mystic drop from Kanathos
She waddled and splashed, gaily she thrashed
Pearls and oysters, clay mud and sud
Sacred baubles and bubbles as in the bath she gurgles”

(This is just a little bit of what is legible in the books of the ancient Slave rhymes, found later in the most appropriately titled compendium “Favorite bath time ditties of the ancient world” by philanthropist, slave trader, banana baron, dreadful gambler, the Lord Kashnen of Eckleburry woods, Surry, England, 1835-1899.)

So much for the Cleopatra Bath- after this point in history the details are murky and mixed up and the Bath never features again prominently anywhere-except once. The role of the Bath this time is just as pivotal, life affirming, mysterious and ridiculous as the previous times –only now it’s also extremely tragic.

On March 15, 44 BC a crowd of conspirators surrounded Caesar at a Senate meeting and stabbed him to death. Cleo, who had been living in Rome for a year then, knew that she was also in danger. So she quickly left Rome with her protectors. Before or immediately after their return to Egypt, Ptolemy XIV died and she then made Cesarean, her son, co-regent.

Caesar's assassination caused lacking in a ruler and civil war in Rome. Eventually the empire was divided among three men -Caesar's great-nephew Octavian, who later became the emperor Augustus, Marcus Lepidus and Marcus Antonius, or better known as Mark Antony.

In 42 B.C. Mark Antony called for Cleo to Tarsus, to question her about whether she had assisted Caesar’s enemies. The Lady arrived in style on a barge with a gilded stern, purple sails, and silver oars. The boat was sailed by her maids, who were dressed as sea nymphs. Cleo herself was dressed as Venus, the goddess of love. She reclined under a gold canopy, fanned by boys in Cupid costumes. Antony was hooked.

The story that ensued is quite famous-how Antony became a useless wimp who did nothing but lie around with Cleo, how Cleo thought that they were both Divine, how the people of Rome got disgusted with the entire concept of their best general tottering around with some black chick…and of course how the clever Octavian schemed it out to be his best bet to make it to the top of the roman hierarchy.

So, in 31 B.C. Antony's forces fought the Romans in a sea battle off the coast of Actium, Greece. Cleo was there with sixty ships of her own. When she saw that Antony's cumbersome, badly-manned galleys were losing to the Romans' lighter, swifter boats, she left the scene. Antony abandoned his men to follow her. Here, the Cleopatra Bath makes its tragic final appearance- disappearing forever in the mysteries which shrouded it forever.

Antony ran after Cleo, stormed into her palace, into the private chambers, in to her bath…

Through red death, and smoke,

And cries, and then by quieter ways he strode,

Till the still innermost chamber fronted him.

He swung his sword, and crashed into the dim

Luxurious bower, flaming like a god.

So the slave accounts read. And what do you think he saw there?

In the bath sat dark Cleo, lonely and serene.

He had not remembered that she was so square,

And that her neck stumped down in such a way;

And he felt tired.
He flung the sword away,And kissed her limbs, and knelt before her there,

The round Knight before the rounded Queen

Well there you go…Cleo’s bath in fantastic verse and a description of Cleo to spare. Oh yes, as usual the written words are quite unkind to the beautiful lady’s physical appearance…

Anyways by 30 BC, everyone involved in the story was dead, Octavian swore never to talk about this mess and Cleopatra and everything associated with her faded from reality to the realm of legends, myths and fanciful poetry. There hence lies no means of finding out anything ‘real’ about the queen or her bath-time after the era of Antony.”

This is where the essay ends (rather abruptly, I felt).

Good night!

Exile on main street -a trip to memory motel

As I type this, the Rolling Stones are playing in my room- their latest- A Bigger Bang ...Jagger launches into a blues song…”I can read it like the back of my haaand…” Patent Stones blues…and sometimes one listens to the Stones for the sheer joy of hearing them play.

And I started wondering…if there ever was one band -just one band that is me....it is the Stones

I discovered them quite late…but they have stayed on

Surprisingly, The Stones, I guess, were never a big thing in India.

I never met a Rolling Stones fan while in college or even later (and my college was brimming with rock fans who knowingly discussed why RUSH just did not sound like a three piece band and how Deep Purple Mach 1 was the father of prog rock... these were highly knowledgeable people who awed little college uncools with their rock and roll snobbery).

Rock and roll was during my times at engineering college the ultimate expression of intellectual rebelliousness (I Am sure it still is somewhere or the other).

Still...no one was a Stones fan... The Stones were considered wierd rebellious good for nothings who roamed around in leather jackets, had sex all the time and were the corrupting influence on ‘good music’.

I was one of them for a long time. I avoided the Stones for most of my early rock years trying so hard to belong to this and that-my tastes and opinions swaying with every album I heard and every review I read

Then one day after some three years of this rock and roll apprenticeship- I picked up this cassette with an odd cover- scrawling on an yellow dirt wall -scrawling I really couldn’t read cause the picture was too small on the cassette cover- Beggar's Banquet said the graffiti on the wall.

Let’s give this band that no one listens to a chance...So enter cassette into my music system. The room door closes for a ‘listening session’. Volume turned high enough to get the “nuances”.

“Pleaaaased to meet you hope you get myyyyyyy name” threatens this quaint voice with a really weird accent as the band goes ‘woooowooooo” endlessly in the background and a guitar that sounds as weird as the singer churns out some ominous sounding sounds…

Haunting harmonica at the end of one dirty number asking a parachute woman to land on the weird voiced gent…bursting into a mix of sitar, twanging guitars and vague percussion aimed at a street fighting man…and people don’t like this band???

I start hunting for Stones albums. An 'American 'cousin gets me Exile on Main Street. An 18-song album with a collage of strange black and white photographs on its cover -The album sounds like some one very drunk had recorded it. You couldn’t hear anything right. The whole thing's a confused mess of the weird sounding voice and guitars and trumpets and saxophones. Everyone around me hated it. I LOVED it.

“Stop breaking down, mama, please, stop breaking down!!!” ... those guitars and the 'feel' of two very drunk guys screaming old blues lyrics …

Well after that it was a journey...my musical tastes expanded and changed and changed back ...The Stones remained while many bands fell off as adolescent indulgences.

The Stones just stayed on.

They can be world-weary and lecherous, misogynist and drunk, wise and raucous, incoherent and brilliant-all at the same time and could rock you like nobody else could or can...this was a band that played MY music-that appealed to ME . And what with so many people around me still remaining Stones-averse they soon became My Band.

That tired voice that sings the blues and filth with equal ease, that guitar that shimmers and moans , that golden age when Taylor was around, that trumpets and the saxophones that blare every time a brown girl gets whipped,that Jazz obsessed drummer, that dead band member whose genius no one refutes and whose departure no one mourns, that one band that makes you believe in them- that they don't play to make a hit but because they are what they are...and you listen to them for the sheer joy of hearing them play...

The CD has come to an end-time to press repeat...