He was returning from work when he first heard the singing. It was faint and very distant and he didn’t know whether it was coming from the heart of the town or from one of the exclusive areas of the citadel a little beyond the Khetan Rani Palace. That was an odd coincidence. He had been thinking that now that the Shehzada was improving, he must arrange a jalsa to celebrate his recovery. He had not heard the voice before. There were just two people apart from his father who were crazy enough about music to import new talent from outside the kingdom: his uncle, Lakshman Simha, the Minister for Home Affairs and Narbad Simha, the commander of the infantry. Since the latter was away with his father, it had to be Lakshman Simha. Who could it be? It was unlike any of the voices of the great singers of Chittor.
He stood still and let the voice wash over him. For some reason that he could not explain, he always found both the sound and the raga itself far more moving if he heard them from outside someone’s window or as he was going up the stairs or climbing the shoulder of a mountain. His great-grandfather had been a fine musician and musicologist. Great singers, even those under the patronage of other kings, thought it a rare privilege to be invited by Rana Kumbha. If one was down and out or there was a rift with one’s patron, there was always room in Rana Kumbha’s court.
Nobody had taught the Maharaj Kumar the intricacies or the finer qualities of raagdari music. When he was a child of four, he sat in padmasan, his backbone a relaxed ninety degrees to the ground, for five or six hours while the singer or instrumentalist expounded a raga. God help him if he got restive or started to bawl, his father’s head would turn slowly and the one good eye would come to rest upon him. It took a couple of seconds for him to turn to ash. All that was left of him was a pool of pee in his seat.
If a prince or princess’ interest in music continued, then a teacher would come over at six in the evening twice a week for an hour. The Maharaj Kumar learnt the basics of classical music for barely three years. His voice, as the teacher politely told his mother, was passable but not special. And yet his grasp of the subject was remarkable. He had an unerring ear and could tell how and why a series of notes was to be sung just so.
If at a jalsa or mehfil, the audience was a little over-appreciative and kept the beat with their hands on their knees and nodded their heads and exchanged complacent glances of wonderment and pleasure as the singer came full circle after a complex progression simultaneously with the pakhawaj player, the Maharaj Kumar left in disgust. Grammar, he felt, was a sign of competence, not of excellence. Do you congratulate your colleague, bob your head, pucker your mouth and smile approvingly when he constructs a sentence of seven or nine clauses without missing an article, misplacing an adverb or bringing the whole superstructure down with a verb in the wrong tense? An audience which is easily pleased is congratulating itself on its own taste as much as the artist. It is a fool’s game where the artist is a willing party to the audience’s chicanery. It is not enough to love great art, the least you can do is to separate it from the mediocre and the competent; the virtuoso performance which is self-centred brilliance from an exposition that transports and transforms both the artist and the listener. He was not stinting of praise; it was merely that the praiseworthy was not a quotidian phenomenon.
Chittor had its crop of greats and even the occasional genius. It was not just a matter of equipment like the lungs, the diaphragm, the vocal chords and how much work and training had gone into it; it was also a question of what the mind, breadth of experience and the imagination of the artist could do with them. Shalivahan Samant, Rajab Ali and Rasoolan Bai had voices as deep and varied as the ocean and a range of emotion and meditation that was like a vision of life itself. He didn’t know anything about the range of the voice he was hearing now. Besides, while first impressions were valuable and had their place in life, he was wary of them. It was only when you heard an artist over a period of time and in different contexts that you could tell whether he did the same thing over and over again or whether he was versatile and his range protean. He would withold judgement for the moment but he had to admit that the intensity of this new voice was unsettling. She flung it as if she would encompass earth and heaven. It was a javelin whose flight path was unaffected by storms and hurricanes because its own element was the flash and turbulence of lightning. It was difficult to imagine how anyone could sustain such raw power. What struck him suddenly was how easy it would be to mock that voice, and burlesque it from one’s own sense of acute embarrassment because what it did was to expose the innermost being of the singer, no half measures, no private spaces, no room for equivocation. It bared all in public. It exposed itself without the common courtesies of concealment and dissembling that are essential for the smooth running of society. It was dangerous because it did not respect your mores and your hypocrisies and had no room for compromises.
Surely, a voice coming from nowhere and without a body or a face attached to it can’t tell you so much, he said to himself. He smiled wryly, why does my imagination always run away with me? There was only one way to verify all the romantic nonsense he had been reading into that voice. Get to know its owner and after a period of a few months judge how far off the mark he had been. Whose voice was it anyway? He stopped every few yards. If there was one major shortcoming in his appreciation of classical music, it was that he rarely paid attention to the words. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he couldn’t bring himself to read poetry. If it was a folk song or a popular street melody, his ears pricked up and he wanted to know what it was all about. He was amazed at the bawdy vitality of some of the courting songs that the Bhils sang and the pungency of the satirical verse that went the rounds of the city as a comment on the current political situation, the sexual peccadillos of some well-known person or on the volatile loyalties of some of the neighbouring kingdoms. In classical music, on the contrary, he tended to think of the words as a peg on which to hang the song. He realized that he was being unfair but in most cases where he had understood the words or had had them explained, he found them banal in the extreme.
It had begun to drizzle. He loved Chittor in the rains. Everything, even the stones, were just a little out of focus. The Tower of Fame and the Digambara temple were lost in low-flying clouds. He always thought of the grass in the monsoons as an actor waiting impatiently in the wings to make his appearance. A knock, a slight drizzle and entire armies of grass showed up overnight. Why does green mean so much and make such a difference to men and women? Why is it that no one sings of the dry brown of summer with the same joy and excitement? Is green the colour of life or is it the colour of madness? The green of grass is a possessive, greedy colour. It doesn’t leave an inch of space for anything else. I want, I want, I want. It takes over and like the salesman at a cloth shop, unrolls yard after yard of grass till all the three square miles of Chittor are a waving field of green blades. Every now and then you come across a puddle of sky. Suddenly there’s a chink in the heavens from which light tumbles out. Somewhere in the distance, I’m sure, there will be a rainbow.
The light and the rain affected the quality of the woman’s voice. It became purer and there was a shard of sorrow in it. He was completely wet now. Lightning tore through the sky soundlessly. Later, much later, thunder grumbled irritably at the eastern corner of the fort. Twilight had a strange effect on him. His senses were sharpened and he felt distanced from everything around him. He could hear the words of the song now.
The rocks have risen to the sky. Heaven has been relocated. It’s gone under.
The points on the compass have skidded and let go of their bearings.
The underworld has levitated and the demons are abroad.
Beware Blue God, someone may mistake you for them and slit your throat.
Stand on your head Flautist, it’s a topsy-turvy night.
My arms are a black snake. Come, I’ll wrap them around you.
I’ll slither and slide inside and over you, twist and cling to your limbs.
I’ll be your masseuse, the black rain my healing unguent.
Body on body, breast on breast, tongue coiled with tongue.
We’ll tie a knot that can never be untied.
We’ll intertwine into a double helix.
Weave vein, artery and capillary into an inseparable plait.
Everything has a place and purpose, you told us.
A viper must be true to his creed.
The fang needs sharpening, the lethal venom a victim, Come my beloved, lie with me today and always, No telling if poison and ambrosia are the same Unless you savour them both.
It’s a black snake, it is, this song of night and longing. When someone departs, you are exiled. Would one be as alone but for the people one loves? Oh God, I am not yet twenty-seven. How did I make such a mess of my life? Does Sunheria think of her life as lonely or a mess? Be my teacher Sunheria, teach me to, what were your words, oh yes, let go. Come my friend, he said to himself, self-pity is an indulgence you cannot afford. He started walking towards the palace. It had begun to rain heavily and the skies had darkened again. The voice became stronger and stronger. The servants ran hither and thither, asking him why he had not ridden home or sent for an umbrella. There were people standing all around and listening just as he had. He brushed them aside. He walked in a daze up the steps of the staircase. His wet feet slipped and he barely managed to keep his balance. He scraped his right knee but he kept walking. Who had had the temerity to hire a singing girl and bring her to his suite of rooms in the palace without his permission? Surely his house had not yet become a kothi.
His wife sat in the middle of her room in front of the marble Shri Krishna. The fingers of her right hand were strumming an ektara. Her eyes were closed. Her face glowed and she swayed just a little from side to side. He watched her as if she were an apparition. He waited for it to disappear, for disappear it would. It is fortunately the nature of hallucinations not to linger and turn into the substance of reality. He must be a sick, a very sick person to think that a Princess of the House of Mewar, the wife of the Maharaj Kumar, no less, would be singing like a tawaif in the palace itself with an audience of forty or fifty down below and a few just outside his private chambers.
‘No telling if poison and ambrosia are the same Unless you savour them both.’
She picked up the last line again and began to embroider on it. He kicked the ektara. It broke in two and slipped out of her grip. Her eyes opened slowly. He knew she wasn’t seeing him.
It took Adinathji close to a month to recover from a mild case of bronchitis. It must be different with younger people, especially active ones like Bahadur. He was walking around in ten days and playing chess with me late into the nights. He was a better player than I, except that he became impatient or lost his nerve at the last minute. My only strength, if you could call it that, is that I am a steady plodder.
‘Have there been any letters for me?’ he asked me in the midst of a game. He tried to make his voice sound casual but I could feel the tension in it.
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. At least not lately.’
‘Not lately and not before that either. Was I putting too much faith in my friendships with the amirs and nobles of Gujarat or is the timing all wrong?’
I didn’t know what reply to make. Sometime or the other, he was going to discover that a revolt is easier in theory than in real life.
‘I wouldn’t go that far. It takes a long time for mail to reach Chittor especially since the courier must make a long detour to avoid the battlefield. And then there is the matter, Prince, a thousand apologies for mentioning this, of your elder brother Sikander. However capable you are, do you think it might give the nobles pause?’
‘No offence taken. I am no reader of the future but this I assure you, I will be King of Gujarat. When is merely a matter of time.’
I poured both of us drinks. ‘Let’s drink to that. Because quite apart from the fact that we have become close on a personal level, I believe that the peace treaty you mentioned between Gujarat and Mewar will prove a boon to both countries. May you indeed become the king when the time is right. I wish you every success, Shehzada.’
By the fifteenth day he was riding with me. ‘Come I’ll race you to Rani Padmini’s palace,’ he said. We were on the road near Bappa Ka Raj Tila, the platform where my ancestor Bappa and other earlier kings were crowned.
‘Maybe you ought to wait another week or so, till you are completely recovered.’
‘Nonsense. Don’t make excuses.’
He took off like the wind. I tried to overtake him but didn’t even manage to come abreast of him at any point. Winning put him in a good humour.
‘A delicate matter, Maharaj Kumar,’ he took my hand, ‘and I don’t quite know how to approach it.’
‘In that case you would do well to say it as plainly as possible.’
That didn’t seem to help him much. His eyes wandered all over the place. ‘Can we go inside the Palace?’
‘I suppose we could but some of the queens and their women may be bathing there.’ Just as I said that, the Maharani’s palanquin left the palace.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I hadn’t realized that Rani Padmini’s palace is still being used.’
‘But that’s not what you wanted to ask me, was it?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ He hesitated for a moment, then spilled it out. ‘That woman, the one who looked after me during my illness, I believe she was your dai.’
‘Yes, she was.’
‘She’s stopped coming.’
‘I suppose it must be because you are well and don’t need her any more.’
‘Yes, that must be the reason.’ He was still having difficulty coming to the point. His eyes held mine. ‘May I have her?’
And you think you’ve seen everything and what you haven’t, you’ve had the sense to imagine: every possible scenario for anything and everything in the world. He caught the hesitation in my silence.
‘Not for ever but while I’m here.’
‘That’s between you and her.’
Kausalya breast-fed me. Later, when I was thirteen or fourteen, she introduced me to sex. Everybody learns about sex, one way or the other, early on or later. How you do it is a matter of detail.
I have no idea of Kausalya’s antecedents. Rumour has it that a couple of years before he died, my grandfather Rana Raimul had a brief affair with a maid-in-waiting who caught his fancy. Brief may mean one night, a couple of nights or a few months on the outside. Well, maybe a year. The outcome of the fling was Kausalya. That’s one story. There are five or six others. Perhaps Kausalya may be able to throw some light on the subject, but I am not exactly dying of curiosity. When she was twelve, she was married off to a courtier in the service of Father. Kausalya and the courtier had a son, Mangal, who was born ten days before I was. When I arrived on the scene, Kausalya was entrusted with the task of nursing the heir apparent and hopefully the future King of Mewar. I cannot very well recall whether she was partial to her son or to the Maharaj Kumar in the matter of breast-feeding. Perhaps I got preferential treatment; it was after all a major honour to be chosen as the dai of the King’s first son. Perhaps she was impartial and whoever bawled louder got fed first. Or more likely, there was more than enough for both children and we suckled simultaneously at her abundant breasts.
Mangal and I must have been about a year old when Kausalya’s husband accompanied Father to do battle with the Malwa forces and died with honourable mention. Kausalya could have left service then. She had over a dozen villages to her name which had belonged to her husband, plus some money of her own. But she preferred to stay. She had got used to city life and Mangal wouldn’t get the kind of education he was getting at Chittor. She kept an eye on her property though, and started a poultry business there. Ever since I can remember she has been one of the major suppliers of poultry to the palace. She has diversified considerably since then. I’m sure at least five percent of the mutton and over ten percent of the vegetables we eat are from her farms. I think she must now be a woman of very substantial means, especially since she’s branched out into money-lending to the queens and odalisques in the palace.
Even after she had withdrawn into the shadows, I have often thought of Kausalya. She was very likely born in the palace. She has certainly spent most of her life there in close contact with the queens and their servants and sahelis and all the important women at court, but she is unlike them. I think of the queens in the palace and my heart sinks in despair. Can you imagine the endless, the relentless, ever-stretching boredom of being a queen? After you’ve had a bath – how long, after all, can you prolong washing your hair – and dried yourself and eaten your breakfast and two meals and discount the eight hours of sleep, that still leaves twelve hours a day to do absolutely nothing. If you are in favour, in great favour, the king may turn up fifteen days in a month but he’s out of town at least six months of the year. Father has twenty-seven wives, not to mention over a hundred concubines. What happens to the other twenty-six queens and to the odalisques? Doesn’t the monotony of their vacant time drive them crazy? Sure, there are rumours now and again of a concubine or a queen having an affair. But a queen’s worst enemies are all the other queens. Can you imagine how difficult that makes things? Because while a maid may find privacy for herself, the queens are always keeping a watch on each other. They don’t want anybody falling out of line.
They can’t spend time with the children because there are maids to do that. They can’t even breast-feed their own babies because it’s not done. I have seen queens howling in pain because nobody told them to squeeze the milk out of their breasts and they have become so distended and sensitive that the merest whiff of air is excruciating. Most of them don’t read. They play hopscotch or some such children’s game. Or they play cards and gamble and get into enormous debts with the wealthier queens or a branch of Adinathji’s family. They talk, they gossip, and they intrigue. There are many camps in the seraglio but the most enduring one is the division between the favourite and the rest put together. The favourite changes, the one that has permanency is the opposition camp.
The big prize, obviously, is the throne. Any queen who’s given birth to a son wants the crown to sit on her son’s brow. But the crown is just the beginning of the deadly enmity among the queens. Allowances, the size of the wardrobe, who gets to sit where, whose child is doing better at studies, who has more eunuchs and maids-in-waiting, whose father or family is more powerful, whose hair is longer, whose skin is flawless, any, but any pretext is good enough reason for feeling slighted, deprived and nursing grudges. Sexual allure certainly helps, but it’s a long time since Rani Karmavati was the favourite with Father. And yet she has a strange power and hold over him which is difficult to explain or understand. Father is a cautious man, someone who weighs matters carefully and hardly ever acts on impulse. And yet if Rani Karmavati is around or has had a chance to work on him, this highly pragmatic and sensible man is capable of abandoning all sense. It is fortunate that so far, she has had her way in mostly trifling issues. But it’s a bad precedent and one of these days she may force his hand in matters which affect the future of the state.
A long circuitous digression that nevertheless reflects on Kausalya. She has no time for gossip or politicking. I think when I was fairly young, she decided to make me her life’s work. This is hindsight talking, of course, but Kausalya is clear-headed and she can take a long-term view of matters. It was, admittedly, a narrow canvas she was working on but it gave her a sharp focus and besides, if one day, I do become king, something of her slant and colouring and world-view would affect a whole people. Power, even if it’s behind-the-scenes power, is its own reward and end and it certainly must have played a role in her choice of subject. She is also ambitious, more for me than for herself. I think it will take me a long time and a great degree of maturity to sort out what I inherited from her. Off the cuff, I think she gave me a sense of perspective. There is right and wrong in the world and there is always an ethical choice involved. The art of statesmanship is knowing how far you can side with the right and when to abandon it in the interest of the polity. For her, ruthlessness is a virtue. It has nothing to do with cruelty or torture. Ruthlessness was paring down issues to their essence, so that you did not get caught or influenced by the abracadabra and the side-shows of life. Woolliness was unforgivable.
But for her, I would have had the same contempt for literacy as the rest of the men in my family have. Intellectuals are never at a premium among my fellow Rajputs. They are not shunned, but they are objects of fun and a little despised. A life of action for them is the one and only goal of life.
Kausalya herself could neither read nor write. When she was a child she used to accompany princesses of her own age and shared their tutors. But she had some learning disability and was not able to master reading and writing. She was sensitive and proud and suffered because of the handicap. It was to compensate for this failure that, I suspect, she has almost total recall. She was not devout or overly religious but she went to temples and kirtans regularly. She said the brahmins and the charans liked to talk and show off their knowledge. Often they thought they could rule better than the king. And to support their arguments, they quoted from all kinds of sources, mythological, historical and secular. One of the persons they quoted most often was Kautilya from his Arthashastra. When I was fourteen, she made me borrow the Arthashastra from Father’s library and read out a couple of pages to her every day. While its significance and meaning escaped me to a great degree at that time, it was one of the most fruitful experiences of her life. Since she always went to the heart of the matter with a parable or a paradigm, she demonstrated Kautilya’s teachings to me with the real-life situations and crises from Mewar’s own political events.
I remember those days clearly. I couldn’t seem to attend to anything. Even when I read to her, my mind kept wandering. She pulled me up sharply because while I saw and reproduced the words, the sense escaped me and that affected my reading.
My friends including Mangal, were heavily into masturbating. They did it with such intensity and earnestness, it was almost like a religious ritual. But it was not a mass activity where everybody got together and thrummed their members. You could, but it was not mandatory. This was fortunate for me not for reasons of snobbishness or superiority, but because I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm to play with myself. I can’t say with any authority whether it was as a consequence of this or not, but I had wet dreams almost every night, sometimes twice in the night. I started wearing a loin cloth even when I went to sleep. It helped but not always and whatever the substance of the ejaculation, one thing was certain, it was not water. The damn thing invariably left a starchlike stiffness in the cloth.
I removed the sheet in a rush, took it to the bathroom and washed it. When I got back I realized that it hadn’t been a very smart move. The mattress was stained anyway and part of the sheet was wet enough to make Kausalya believe that I was peeing in the bed. That first day I pretended to be unwell and pulled up a thin coverlet all the way to my neck.
‘Maharaj Kumar, don’t you know what time it is? Get up and get dressed or you are going to be late for class.’
I opened my eyes and looked mournfully at her. ‘I’m feeling feverish, Kausalya.’ She came over and felt my forehead. ‘Doesn’t feel hot. Don’t tell me you haven’t done your homework or want to miss a test.’
I shook my head. ‘Ask Mangal. No test today.’
‘See how you feel by noon.’
I closed my eyes. She kept pottering around tidying up the place. I didn’t realize when she left because I fell asleep. I woke up around ten thirty. The water had dried but there was an oasis in the sheet. I had had another wet dream. What was I going to do? Would Kausalya tell my mother, who in turn would inform Father?
There was no way Kausalya couldn’t have noticed my hyperactive night life but she did not ever mention it.
Looking back I sometimes wonder whether, as the months passed, I didn’t really want her to notice. This was about the time she caught me in the branches of the peepul tree a good mile and a quarter up river on the banks of the Gambhiree, spying on the women who went there to wash their clothes and themselves. This was my seventh time in the last fifteen days and I was absolutely sure that no one had spotted me. There was not much I could see. The tree was not exactly on the edge of the bank of the river and the women never really took off all their clothes. Even when they changed into dry saris, they did it discreetly and in one seamless action let the new clothes flow into the wet ones which dropped to the ground. I have no idea how Kausalya discovered my whereabouts. She waited till they had left and then got me down.
‘If I catch you here again or anywhere else clandestinely watching women bathe or undress, I will thrash you till there’s no skin on your body and then inform the Rana.’
Kausalya and Mangal had a room across the passage from mine. It must have been a week or ten days after that incident that Kausalya told her son that he was a grown-up young man now and got him a room on the ground floor in an adjoining wing. A couple of nights later I woke up to find my fingers wet. They were deep in Kausalya’s skirt.
I don’t know to this day whether her son knows that his mother and I were lovers. His relationship with me certainly didn’t change. If anything, he has become more devoted to me and more vigilant about my safety over the years. We have never discussed the latter but he keeps a hawk’s eye on all my brothers and anyone who is their friend. He has his own intelligence network, one which is far more efficient and reliable than the state’s, and has a good idea of my programme for at least the next seven days so that he can post his men at vantage points.
I am not thinking straight, am I? If he’s half as good at spying as I am making him out to be, then it seems unlikely that he doesn’t know about his mother and me. He has always had an uneasy relationship with his mother. Did he regard me as an intruder? But for me, he would have been the one and only one in her life. They are both naturally reticent but in the last few years, there’s a coldness between them that’s close to bitter hatred on his side. Kausalya does what duty demands of her as a mother. She got him married, but only after I was, to a girl from one of the prominent families of Sirohi. Kausalya bought him a fine house, a stone’s throw away from the palace. The dowry that her daughter-in-law brought, she has invested for her son and bride in real estate in the town. She’s not over-friendly with her son’s wife but neither does she interfere in her affairs.
Thus far and no further. Kausalya has an acute sense of boundaries, not just physical and geographical, but interpersonal ones. More often than not, she is the one to draw them so that you might not always agree with their rationale, but once they are drawn, she sticks to them even if they end up inhibiting her own freedom or hurting her emotionally. When I grew up and my eyes started wandering, she sent me to Chandra Mahal. Sooner or later I would have gone to Chandra Mahal anyway. Many of my brothers and cousins, not to mention Father and my uncles, had suites with separate entrances there. You took a woman with you or asked one of the servants or security guards to get one for you. Kausalya made sure that the girls who visited me were clean and didn’t have some infection. Was she jealous and resentful? Did she feel insecure and hurt? I’ll never know. Perhaps she was sure that I would always go back to her.
I did. Until I got married. She decorated the bridal bed in Chittor and she took my wife under her wing. I had never needed her as much as I needed her then. I wanted to bury my head in the fork of her legs and squeeze, compress and force it all the way back into her womb. I wanted to cling to her and bash my head against her breasts till they burst and my head cracked open and I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I wanted to tell her about the blood and my bride’s earlier espousal; ask her about what I should do and where I should hide my face and why she didn’t tell me beforehand and how I was to find my way out of this insupportable quandary not of my making. But I couldn’t go to her and expose my shame. Was it pride, humiliation, a damaged and traumatized ego? Who knows? If anybody knew my secrets, Kausalya did. She knew my great and lasting anxieties about Father, the succession, the future of the country, my misgivings about the state of our armoury and my ideas about escape strategies during sieges. She alone knew my sexual pleasures and preferences, a great many of which I had no doubt learnt from her. It may not have resolved anything but talking about my bizarre relationship with the Princess to someone who had made my life her mission, would have taken a load off my mind. Perhaps she would have reasoned with the woman who everybody thought was my wife. Maybe she would have made her see the light. If not that, she would have dispelled the darkness of the woman’s past and revealed who the secret and nameless stranger was.
Kausalya stayed in the wings not wanting to intrude upon me. The four months that my bride was away, she got the water for my bath ready and put out the clothes I was to wear to court or for an official function. She served me food and sat quietly while I ate. She slept in her old room and if I paced the room all night long, brought a glass of hot milk with turmeric powder in it. But we didn’t exchange a word. She could have come at night and pressed her nipples into my mouth, pulled out my tongue and let it forage in her dark and mysterious ponds and rejuvenated me. But she kept back and I remained aloof till my need of her became a cold and hard rage that I could not understand nor overcome.
Mangal, doubtless, had sensed the abyss opening up between his mother and me a long time ago. Sometimes I thought that he rejoiced at her defeat and was happy to be even with her and to watch her suffer silently. For suffer she did. She did not know what had earned her my wrath. She did not know where she had gone wrong. Had I told the new woman about the wet fingers? Had I revealed the quasi-incestuous bond between the two of us to my wife on our first night? Had my wife forbidden me to have any truck whatsoever with her? Would she let it be known abroad that Kausalya had seduced me when I was fourteen when I should have been making out with girls of my own age who should have been abundantly available to the Maharaj Kumar? Would she be evicted out of the palace, dispossessed of her belongings and properties and exiled forever? But I am missing the point. For her greatest fear, and there was hooded terror in her eyes, was that she would be made to part company from the one most precious thing in her life: me. Never mind if I did not talk to her, see her even when she was in front of my eyes; it mattered little or not at all that the new woman had turned my head and there was nothing but cold hatred and a disowning of the past in my eyes, just so long as she could get to see me every once in a while.
She thought she knew me. She discovered that she didn’t know the beginnings of me. Things at home went from bad to worse and I seemed to withdraw and curdle in her presence. There was high intrigue abroad in the kingdom. In the past, I would have bounced ideas off her or at least divided my cussed silence between us. Now I neither shared my bed nor my confidences with her. However much I tried to persuade myself that she nursed Bahadur through the worst days and sat through those dreadful nights at his bedside because she wanted to prove what a martyr she was, I knew in my heart that that was not how her mind worked. There were boundaries and there were duties. You did not cross the first and you performed the latter, regardless of the consequences and interpretations put upon them.
‘The Shehzada Bahadur wants you,’ I had summoned Kausalya to my room. It was an ambiguous statement and she could have played around with it to vex me and to cause me more embarrassment and discomfiture. She got the sense of the statement instantly. Quibbling and hair-splitting were not her way.
‘Do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Do you want me to go?’
‘I told him that was between him and you.’
We might as well have been enemies. My mask of cynical indifference didn’t have much effect on her. She turned her face away to hide her contempt and disappointment and left the room. I went about my work; two meetings with the Prime Minister Pooranmalji about defence systems for Chittor and the other with Lakshman Simhaji about the action to be taken against the two nobles who, our investigations showed, had indeed encroached upon and annexed several villages from Raja Puraji Kika’s territory. Another meeting with the minister of commerce about falling revenues and the short-term and long-term measures that needed to be taken. All these years I had been a proponent of octroi and sales taxes but I wondered if we had overdone it a bit and it was affecting our exports. I was attentive at all the meetings, interrupted proceedings when I thought we were not getting anywhere and tried to get the ministers and myself to look at old problems in a fresh and constructive fashion. We decided on the punishment and penalties for the two raos and constituted a committee to formulate a new taxation policy within thirty days. But something had happened. It took me over twenty-four hours to realize it.
How can another man’s desire rekindle a passion that you thought was dead and even the memories of which had flown away? Something that I had killed deliberately and without any reason was rising phantom-like and haunting me. I gritted my teeth and pursed my lips and put Kausalya away. But Bahadur’s interest in her was like a brushfire. The more I tried to put it out, the more it spread. Memories of Kausalya’s body and our lovemaking seemed to interfere and impinge upon my conversations, the memos that I was writing, the preliminary budget for next year that Adinathji presented. Then the unexpected happened. My tortured and ravaged mind which had been run over, usurped and vandalized by that woman at home, the one they called my wife had now, however fleetingly, room for somebody else. Kausalya. Damn my pride. Why hadn’t I said no to the Prince? He was aware of Kausalya’s anomalous position, that she was my dai and had felt compelled to ask my permission. I had merely to mumble something about the mores and traditions of Mewar and its taboos. I could have embarrassed him and even elicited an apology from him for suggesting something so profane. Kausalya herself was waiting for me to say no. She would have thought of something, I don’t know what, to put him off: she was infinitely resourceful. But I was so busy playing a role, ‘I don’t give a damn, do what you please, what’s it to me,’ that I had not bothered to ask myself what she meant to me and why I was so hell-bent on losing her.
There were at least a dozen or two girls available to the Shehzada at the Atithi Palace. Besides I was told he had also tapped other sources. Some of the families from his own community were keen on earning his favour and dreamt, I am sure, of tying up with the royal family of Gujarat.
Why did the Shehzada want Kausalya when he had all these girls at his disposal? What had he seen in her anyway? I was aware that it was a hypocritical question even as I asked it. She didn’t just look young, she was young. If you saw her just once and that too fleetingly and didn’t have time to notice her eyes, the facets of her face or her bearing, she would still make a lasting impression. Because above everything else, Kausalya had presence, a charisma that stayed in your mind. If the men in my own family had kept off her, it was not only because she was withdrawn and was the Maharaj Kumar’s dai, it had something to do with fear. If you knew what was good for you, you did not cross Kausalya. She had the most direct eyes I had seen. They saw through you and your intentions and told you to stay off.
What was Kausalya going to say to Bahadur? How was he going to broach the subject? How does one break the barrier with a woman one does not know and has never spoken to? Sure, he had seen her but he was barely conscious then. Would he ask her pointblank? Take off her chunni and choli? Grab her breasts, stroke her nipples till there were shallow craters at their centres, suck them and suddenly bite into them, rip off her ghagra and while she was trying to get out of it throw her back on the bed, tie her hands to the bedpost, and … and lunge into her? This was odd, very odd because I did not normally spend time thinking of the sexual proclivities of others. And then it hit me. I was not making any of it up. I was merely reproducing a secret report given by one of our people about the Prince’s nightlife. In the middle of foreplay or sometimes at the very end, Bahadur would become violent and try out various experiments in a cruel kind of lovemaking. One of the cautionary suggestions made by the reporter was that the Prince seemed to want to test the limits of pain in human beings and sometimes ended up going beyond the limits of endurance. As such he needed to be watched. What the paid voyeur meant by ‘he needed to be watched’ is anybody’s guess. Were we to wait outside Bahadur’s door and when the lady in distress had abruptly stopped screaming and was losing consciousness, break it open, doff our caps to the Prince and say ‘by your leave, your Highness’ or ‘excuse the interruption but we think the lady needs a bit of resuscitation?’ His other recommendation was that we should select such partners for His Highness who were not only old masters, or rather mistresses of the art of receiving such treatment but were also adept at meting it out. A nice touch, that. I was sure that our internal intelligence service had a list of the twenty or thirty such experienced and desirable performers in Chittor.
The Shehzada had fallen ill soon after the report and in all the tension, it had gone out of my mind until now. Damn my asinine show of indifference. I told my amanuensis to cancel my appointments for the afternoon and rode home. That woman was singing. I closed the door of her room and locked it from outside. I searched high and low. No sign of Kausalya. I asked a maid to look for her in the queens’ palaces and in the servants’ quarters just in case she had gone to give some poor sick soul homemade medicines. Almost an hour passed but she didn’t get back. I sent another maid after her and told her if she wasn’t back within ten minutes, I would dispatch her to Kumbhalgarh jail. I went down with her and turned left before the zenana. I took off my shoes, and touched the feet of Annapurna Devi who rested in a niche outside the underground storehouses of grain. I made my way through the passages between the tall columns of gunny bags which contained enough lentils, dry beans and corn and jaggery to last the palace occupants for at least six months in case of a siege. I knew I was taking a chance just in case she was supervising some deliveries from the farms. She was not there and when the second maid returned with the first (she had got engrossed in a game of chowpat Rani Karmavati was playing with my mother, the Maharani, for some preposterously high stakes) she said that Kausalya was not on the premises.
I sent for Mangal. Was his mother visiting his family by any chance? No, she was not. I went past the Atithi Palace. I found it humiliating to ask the security guards which woman had visited the Shehzada last night. Was the Prince there? Yes, Your Highness but he has left strict instructions not to be disturbed.
Was she with him? Had she gone to him last night and not come out since then? Had they found so much in common? Had she discovered that she too had a taste for leather, whips, tongs, and cinders? Was she getting even with me for all the weeks and months of sullen silences and cold-shouldering? Was he pouring honey into her navel and licking it as I had done? Was he caressing her back with a peacock feather? Had she run her fingers slowly through his hair and massaged his scalp till he lay in a semi-comatose state only to be woken up suddenly by her tongue playing over his nipples?
There were other highly charged and utterly unmentionable things that Kausalya and I had invented and perfected between ourselves. Was she sharing all this with Bahadur, giving him a condensed course in what we had taken over ten years to explore and chart?
What was the matter with me? If I had missed Kausalya so much, why hadn’t I known about it? And when I discovered the truth, why had my randiness gone completely berserk? It was as if I was trying to whip myself into some kind of sexual frenzy by deliberately regurgitating the intimacies I had shared with her. And what if she lay unconscious somewhere? What if he had hurt her beyond the point of no return, not just physically but far more importantly, in her soul?
Oh God, wherever you are, keep her well. And if it’s possible, let her be mine and not the Shehzada’s.
Where was she?
