Chapter 11-

Should he pull her tongue out, he wondered, or stuff a large silk handkerchief into her mouth? Was she perverse? Was she doing it deliberately to annoy him? He had broken the ektara into two. That didn’t seem to make much difference. She sang without it. Despite his resolve to make her stop singing at any cost, he listened intently. Would she go off-key without the ektara, sing a false note? If only he could catch her hesitating for the tiniest fraction of a second as she nose-dived into a glissando. She did not. Her voice was steady as a surgeon’s hand. When it zigzagged, it was because she wanted to take a taan that slithered like a desert snake as it flashed past, progressing sideways across the sand. Where did she get that voice from? She was five feet two with a little bit of imagination. She was slim and slight. That range and fluidity of registers required a voice box made from tensile steel and it had to be attached to bellows the size of the palace.

He sat her down. He controlled the pitch and timbre of his voice. ‘Do not sing. Is that understood? I will not have you sing under my roof.’

‘Why?’ she asked innocently or at least she did a fine imitation of innocence.

‘Because princesses don’t sing for the public, at least not in this house. Tawaifs do.’

‘It was only a bhajan.’

‘Rasikabai ends every mushaira of hers with a bhajan. Like you, she also gets an audience of a hundred or so to stand under the windows and balconies. Soon they’ll be throwing coins at you too.’ I had got carried away by my rhetoric. ‘But they won’t if I have anything to do with it. Today’s was your last concert, is that clear?’

‘If it upsets you so much, I won’t sing.’

‘It doesn’t upset just me, it upsets the whole family. My mother, the other queens, the princes and their wives and it upsets Father.’

‘Forgive me, I didn’t, I didn’t realize it would get to be such an issue that the whole family would be exercised by it.’

‘Rani Karmavati called me over yesterday and told me with her usual straight face that the Rao of Chanderi had asked whether he could borrow the new singer we had acquired from Merta. He said he would pay well.’

‘Do you want me to go and sing for him? I can’t, I’m very shy.’

He was sure she was putting him on, no question about that. Was she crazy? Was she naive and stupid or did she take him for a fool? How was one supposed to talk to this woman? He could feel his temper rise and the blood throbbing in his head. Easy, easy does it, he told himself and found that despite the proffered advice, he was getting madder and madder.

‘Just forget it. I don’t want to talk about it, so long as you understand that from now on, you’ll not, under any circumstances, sing for your pleasure or anybody else’s.’

He should have known better. She sang every day. His wife was the talk of the town and there was nothing he could do about it. Not that he lacked the imagination or the initiative to think of extreme options. But there was a stray remark of hers which kept surfacing in his mind.

‘I didn’t know I was going to sing. I sit down to pray and I lose consciousness of my surroundings. When it’s all over I discover that I have once again disobeyed your injunctions.’

He abhorred people who did not take the responsibility for their actions. He believed that all of us know what we are up to even when we tell ourselves that we drifted into something.

‘I didn’t know what I was doing, I swear I didn’t. I found myself in his bed and the next thing I know is I had slept with him.’ Or, ‘I didn’t know what was happening but one thing led to another and before I knew what was what, I had stabbed him.’ A likely story. And yet he wanted to believe her desperately.

After all, it was not so uncommon to be possessed. Everybody knew that smallpox was nothing but the visitation of a devi. She could kill you, blind you or being a goddess, she could leave you permanently marked with craters on your face and body. If someone else was perchance responsible for his wife’s plight, this other one whom she called by various names, then maybe it was possible to be rid of him. And then maybe, just maybe, he and his wife could settle down to a normal, average married life.

In a cave some forty miles from Chittor, there lived a woman called Bhootani Mata. Nobody knew her antecedents. She lived alone and performed arcane sacrifices and ceremonies. Sometimes if the mood was upon her, she might decide to help a person. But there was no forcing her, nor was there any possibility of getting her over to the palace.

Bhootani Mata was not the kind of person he would have turned to, ever. But ‘ever’ is a flexible and finite word. Whether he knew it or not, he had crossed the shifting line that separates the sane from the unbalanced. Anything, he was willing to do anything, to retrieve his wife from the forces that had robbed her of her will and set her on a path of collision with the whole of Mewar. He set out to visit his Bhil friend, Raja Puraji Kika with Mangal and the usual retinue of ten or twelve others. On the way, they made a detour. Ordering Mangal and the men to wait, he climbed up the steep side of the mountain to Bhootani Mata’s cave. He stood at its mouth and whispered: ‘Mata, my wife will not cohabit with me. She says there is another in her life and she is his. I fear she is possessed for I have never seen her with another man. Please help me.’ It must have been a long and twisting cave for her voice took a while to reach him. Her message was short. She used an obscenity and said that she had no time for him or his faithless wife. He started to plead with her. She threw a stone which hit him on the forehead, and told him to get out because if he didn’t she would throw another one at that thing between his legs and then it would make no difference whether his wife slept with the whole world because he would be of no use to her. He thought of retreating but then decided against it. What did he stand to lose any way?

‘I’m coming in,’ he told her and didn’t wait for her answer. After ten or fifteen minutes he realized he was lost. At each turning there was a fork, sometimes three or four. The passages were black and mouldy, some of them had the overpowering smell of bat droppings. Sometimes he thought his hand brushed a lizard, at other times hairy tarantulas crawled over him. He wondered why his eyes hadn’t become attuned to the darkness. He should have been able to see at least vaguely but the longer he stayed, the less he saw. He found it difficult to breathe. What time was it? How long had he been here? Was it just five or seven minutes or a couple of hours? He had given strict instructions to Mangal not to follow him. How long would it take Mangal to transgress his orders? Would he have the sense to bring a light? He himself certainly hadn’t thought of it. And would a torch really help? Or would its flame also turn black? Was he going to be responsible for the deaths of Mangal and all the others? He felt a sense of panic at the thought. He had to find his way back.

He strove to calm his agitated mind and to think back carefully. He had entered from the west, the first two turnings were to the south, then to the north, he couldn’t remember how he had navigated after that. He was getting disoriented. If you enter from the west and want to retrace your steps, do you go east or do you go west? It was a complex question and though he thought hard about it, he couldn’t come up with a definite answer. Perhaps all directions vanish in the blackness of Bhootani Mata. He remembered something from his geometry lessons. If you went in a circle, you would get back to where you started. He would go left and at every crossroad he would take the extreme left turn. There was one more rule he would follow: he would count the number of steps he took.

He counted up to seventeen thousand and collapsed. Forget it. His fate was in Bhootani Mata’s hands, if there was such a person as her, and he didn’t care a damn what happened to him.

‘Are my companions in danger? Did they enter the cave too? Whatever you do with me is all right but you can’t make them pay for my actions.’

A hand made of cast iron hit him in the face. ‘Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do.’

‘You’ve been following me throughout, haven’t you?’ he asked after he had caught his breath from the blow.

‘You’ve been following me, or trying to.’

Eight hands picked him up. Four supported him, one touched his face as if to learn its features, one groped around his chest and shoulders, the seventh felt his member and the last one pulled his hair. He felt a tongue lick his face, the hands ripped off his clothes and the tongue touched his feet and his neck. How long was it? Was it one tongue or many? The hands sat him up.

‘Scared shitless, are you? What happened to the cocky “I’m coming in”?’

He heard the sound of water falling off the edge of the earth and a distant screaming of voices in perpetual pain. He saw dismembered heads held up by the hair with the blood still dripping from them. He saw black feet stomping on the back of a demon lying on his stomach. He heard the sound of lips slurping blood, he saw the coitus of the earth and the sky, he heard the slow moaning of pleasure. There were severed limbs writhing on the floor, a hand came down, picked up a leg, shoved it into a mouth without a face which started crunching on it. He opened his eyes. In front of him was a hollow cavern with a platform in the middle. A toothless and blind old crone was sitting naked on it.

‘There are others. Why don’t you make it with them? You can marry again. Ignore her till she dies.’ There was a pause. ‘How about me?’

His body tensed with revulsion. ‘Ghastly thought, isn’t it?’ As she spoke she turned into a young woman. She had a lush body, her breasts were full and firm, held tightly by a kanchuki that exposed her shoulders and arms. She wore a clinging sari. It had gold bands spiralling upwards, a gold waistband hung casually below her belly-button. She shook her hair loose. It cut the light. He heard the sound first. It pierced the eardrums with a sharp high-pitched note. She was whirling her head in circles, the hair swished through the flesh of his face like a rake with a million thin needles. Her head rotated faster and faster. His body was being whipped and his skin shredded so fine, each strand by itself was invisible. He stood up in an attempt to run but the long hair kept whooshing past reaching deeper and deeper into his raw red flesh.

‘Is she possessed or are you possessed by her? How many days, weeks, months is it since you had any thought barring hers in your mind? I would say that it’s you who needs to be exorcised.’ She paused in her gyrations and let the thought sink in. ‘We are always trying to cure other people when we ourselves need the cure most. What do you say? You are here, it will take a minute and you will cease to think of her. You’ll be a free man.’ She paused again. ‘Would you like to be a free man?’

He wanted to say yes, every bone and pore in his body said yes but he couldn’t bring himself to utter the word.

‘I thought as much. Who wants freedom when you can have perpetual bondage?’ There was a weighty pause with some tortuous breathing. ‘How far are you willing to go?’

He was intrigued by that last question. He wasn’t sure he understood its thrust either.

‘Money is no consideration,’ he blurted out.

‘You can shove your money you know where. What do you think I can do with it, make a chain of it? Eat it? Spin yarn from it and cover my knockers? There’s only one question in life. Once you have the answer, you know everything that you’ll ever need to know. It is this: Just how far are you willing to go to get what you want?’

‘Pretty far, I would think.’

‘Go home, you fool. When you know the answer, I’ll be there. But by then you may not need me.’

‘Who is it? What is the name of her lover?’

‘What difference does it make?’

He had many more questions to ask. The light at the entrance of the cave blinded him.

‘Who was with the Shehzada on the night of the seventh?’ I finally lost my patience and better sense and called the head of the security guard.

‘I don’t quite recall. That’s a week ago, Sir. If you want to know I’ll have to go and look up my records.’

‘Yes,’ I kept my voice under check.

‘Right now?’

‘Yes.

He was back within twenty minutes.

‘Yes?’

‘It was a woman, your Highness.’

‘What was her name?’

‘We don’t have it, Prince, because the Shehzada did not ask us to engage the services of a lady that night.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘There’s just one sentence here under the column Description. “Woman with cowl covering her entire face.” She was shown in at ten past nine.’

‘What time did she leave?’

He fumbled for some time, making a show of going over the log. ‘There’s no entry here,. Sir, for some reason.’

‘For some reason, I don’t exactly know why, sergeant major, I have a feeling you are about to be stripped of your rank and your job. It could be a man, woman or eunuch who may have wanted to give his regards to the Shehzada, steal a few art pieces from the palace or kill the Prince. Your log doesn’t say and you don’t care. He, she, it could have stayed the whole night, abducted the Prince but you and your subordinates don’t know because they and you were playing cards, whoring or sleeping while on duty.’

He tried to protest. I’m sure he had a string of excuses but I was not interested. ‘I’ll review the matter with your superior officers within a fortnight. Till then you and the guard on duty are suspended.’

I cornered Mangal that evening. ‘Aren’t you worried where your mother is? She’s been missing for seven days and nobody knows whether she’s dead or alive.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘She’s an adult. She can take care of herself.’

I would have liked to have shaken Mangal’s brains and his indifference. I didn’t want to see the malicious look of satisfaction on his face. I turned around and left. Kausalya, I had to grant, was capable of looking after herself under normal circumstances. But an invitation to sexual congress was hardly normal and the Shehzada, I was beginning to appreciate, had a side to his nature that was on the far side of wild. That night at the wrestling matches had given me a new insight into the man.

He had mentioned more than a couple of times that he was missing wrestling. One of his companions who had accompanied him to Chittor was supposed to be one of the best wrestlers in Gujarat. A few days ago, I finally arranged a full evening’s programme. Bahadur was in a great humour. Of the ten matches, the first nine were between Mewaris, the last between the Shehzada’s man and one of our local stars. The Prince was in luck. Of the first nine matches, he had bet his money on seven participants who won.

‘What are you going to bet, Your Highness? What are you going to bet against my man?’ There was a mad gleam in his eyes. ‘He’s going to trounce your man.’

‘How would you know?’ I asked him.

‘Because I saw him in action yesterday. My man will dismember him.’

‘Have you fixed the fight, Shehzada?’ I asked light-heartedly. He gave me a look of such contempt, I wished to God I had fixed it so that our man would lose early enough. It was too late to do anything about that now.

‘Gujarat will cow down Mewar any time, Prince. On the battlefield or anywhere else. My man, rest assured, will annihilate your wrestler before the poor man makes his first move.’

There was a crowd of at least five thousand people. The noise was deafening and the excitement a little out of control. It was the rainy season and we had put up a big shamiana around the open-air pit to accommodate everyone. The sand-pit was the only part that was exposed. Everybody was sweating and eating massive quantities of cholle-bature, samosas, kaju chiwda, tawapudi, malpohe, bundi laddus. Bahadur had obviously had a few drinks plus I suspect some drug that was making him highly tense and restless. His pupils were dilated and his hands were shaky.

‘What, what will you bet?’

‘How about a hundred tankas on your man?’ He was looking for a fight and I was not about to oblige him.

‘On my man? Don’t you have any pride and patriotism?’

‘I like to be on the winning side.’

‘Then you’ll have to abandon your camp and country. Hundred tankas. Is that all Mewar can put up?’

‘Your Highness, you seem to have forgotten that when it’s our turn to be kings, we are going to sign a peace treaty.’

‘Peace treaty be blowed. How much? And remember, you can only bet on Mewar.’

If only, I thought, wrestling could replace wars, I wouldn’t mind if Bahadur and Gujarat won every fight for all time to come.

‘Five hundred.’ I gave the money to the bookie.

‘No, no, no.’ There was a thunderclap and it began to rain heavily. The two wrestlers were out. ‘I have put ten thousand. You’ll have to bet at least that much.’

Fortunately it was too late. The two men in the sand-pit had come to grips with each other. I understood why the Shehzada was betting so heavily on his man, Aslam Jaffer. He was tall and built like a mountain. His opponent, Bharat was half his size and more to the point, looked a little intimidated. They were both heavily oiled and the opening of the sluice gates in the sky didn’t exactly help matters. For the first minute and forty-five seconds, Bharat’s only ploy and preoccupation was to slip out of Aslam’s cavernous arms.

‘Rat,’ Bahadur said to me, ‘the Chittor rat doesn’t have the guts to give a fight. Look how he’s avoiding Aslam. But Aslam is like fate. He cannot be postponed or put out. You watch, he’s got a series of holds of such lightning speed, once he locks in, your man will beg to be let off. All he’ll want to do is rest his back on the sand and give up.’

That’s just what was happening, but not to Bharat. He was a wiry man who used his body rather than fought with it. The fighting he left to his mind. And his mind was an uncanny liar. It sent contradictory signals to the opponent. He came through on some and let his adversary down on others. He was compact rather than fast. The time to get him was when he was sizing up your game and frame of mind. After that things got a bit tough as they had for Aslam. Aslam had used a Bakasur hold and pinned Bharat so far back it would take just a couple of seconds for him to land on his back. Those few seconds were critical. Bharat’s toe smashed into Aslam’s kneecap. Aslam struggled for balance; Bharat was up, his foot jerked Aslam’s leg forward, his head hit Aslam on the chest so that he was falling, falling, falling and was flat on his back.

Bahadur Khan was up and screaming dementedly. ‘Foul. Cheating. This is no match. Disqualify Bharat. That referee is a partisan.’ The mass of five thousand Chittorites watched him in surprise, dismay and with a rising sense of indignation. Bharat looked at me wondering whether he had done something unforgivable. I saw no point in eye contact. The crowd had begun to boo. The Shehzada noticed the turn in the tide and sat down. Time to diffuse the crisis, I thought and got up. ‘Good night. Thank you everybody. It’s late and we should all be going home. Tomorrow is a working day. Thank you Aslam, thank you Bharat for a wonderful evening.’

The crowd had already started to disperse when the Prince leapt out of the royal enclosure into the sand-pit. It was still raining and everything looked fuzzy and unfocussed. Aslam Jaffer was sitting up a trifle dazed. As Bharat gave him a hand to help him up, Bahadur Khan’s foot connected with Aslam’s mouth. Seven broken teeth sprayed out and Aslam was once again flat on his back. The Shehzada’s foot kept coming back at regular intervals. The cracking of the ribs was amplified by the sudden silence of the crowd. Five, six, seven times the foot slammed into Aslam’s rib cage. Then it turned him over and hit him in the kidneys. Two firmly aimed kicks in the small of the back. The neck was next. ‘You failed the Sultan, me and Gujarat. The izzat of our kingdom is mud in the infidel’s eyes. The only honour left to you is to die.’ I thought it time to intervene. He swung at me but I ducked and said, ‘Time for the fifth namaaz of the day, Prince.’ He stopped.

I changed horses twice and reached Rohala within five hours.

‘You are not going alone, Your Highness.’ Mangal ran after me as I mounted Befikir late at night.

‘I see that you’ve made much progress since we last met. Do I now take orders from you?’

‘Forgive me for presuming to advise you, Highness,’ he knew perfectly well that I was deliberately distorting his statement of concern, ‘but it is dangerous for the Maharaj Kumar to be abroad all alone at night.’

‘Your solicitude for my safety is praiseworthy, but it may have been more apposite had it been exercised on your mother’s behalf. If I need an escort, I will ask for one. For the moment, I would appreciate it if I could have some breathing room as well as a little freedom of movement.’

There was an unfocussed anger in me and even as I was regretting my petty sarcasms, it felt good to hit a man when he was down and could not retaliate. It was a long, long time since I had been to Rohala and while I recalled some of the rooms and the courtyard with the fountain and the tulsi plant, I had no memories of the exterior of the house I was looking for. It shouldn’t be so difficult, I kept telling myself, to find the largest and most affluent house in a place like Rohala,but it was a moonless night and I was loath to run into the night watchman and have him find out that a prince of the realm was paying a secret visit to his village. I had to get out of the maze of lanes and by-lanes and attain a vantage point from where I could get an overview of the topography of the place. The question was how? The land was as flat as my belly. The ever-present guardian Aravalli mountains undulated in the east but they were a good five or six miles away.

I tied my horse and did what any child of seven would have done right at the start. I spat on my palms and climbed up a peepul tree. When you grow up and return to them, you find that your school and classrooms, your home, the long and forbidding administrative block of buildings, your own father and mother, everybody and everything has shrunk. Unless my memory was playing tricks on me, Rohala had gone against the grain. It had prospered and grown into a town. The semicircular Mayura lake by which it was situated was a good mile and a half long. The slate-grey glass of the water looked solid enough to walk on. It was a mystery why the houses stopped exactly at the diameter of the lake but the effect was to turn Rohala into a toy town. Just in case the Mayura ever went dry, the town had its own river, a tributary of the Banas. There were at least forty two-storeyed buildings, a mosque with a minaret and on the left bank of the river, a temple.

Does a town, city or village have a heart and a soul and a mind? Who decided that the lake was for leisure and that the town should grow around the river? I felt I was caught unawares, as if Rohala had hoodwinked me and grown and spread behind my back. How was it I was so uninformed about our kingdom? How many other villages had burgeoned into towns? And how many had atrophied? I knew what I had to do. I must tour every part of Mewar. I wanted to see the faces of my people. I must talk to them, ask about their crops and industries. What were their problems? Were they good tax-payers? Were our revenue officers corrupt? That old fox Adinathji was right. Not war, but agriculture, manufacture and trade are the fuel of progress. What was the secret of Rohala’s prosperity? Could it be replicated? Or was the trick to study the genius of each place and …. Chamundi. The temple on the river bank was a Chamundi temple and the house next to it was the one I was looking for.

I knocked for a long time. Was she there? I could feel the hostility of the house. With every tap of the knocker, it shrank back from me. The two-storeyed mansion was now a tight little ball of malevolent intent which swung back at me.

‘Who is it?’ the retainer asked. It didn’t look as if he had been sleeping the sleep of the dead. He was alert, truculent and itching for a fight.

‘Dai Kausalya. Is she here?’

‘No, Your Highness, she is not.’

He was a professional bouncer, the kind that can deal with any manner of trouble and if need be, put an end to it. But I am a handful, and besides I never forget that I am the future king.

‘Wrong answer. You should have said “Who the hell are you?”’ I pushed him back and entered. The fountain was playing. The geography of the house came back to me. I turned right. Kausalya’s room was on the first floor. I went up the stairs, turned left, ran along the balustraded passage that looked out on the courtyard and knocked on the fourth door. No response. I knocked again. Silence. I pushed the door hard. It didn’t give. I was relieved. She must have locked it from inside.

‘If you don’t open the door, Kausalya, I’m going to break it open.’ The retainer watched me from downstairs. Three other servants, two of them women, had joined him. I turned back to the door. It was latched from the outside. Neat trick, I said to myself, removed the latch and threw the door open. It was dark but I knew there was no one inside. I went in and slipped my hand under the bed. She was not there.

‘Give me that lamp, you dolt,’ I snapped at the watchman. He ran upstairs hurriedly and handed me the lamp. I went through every room. I scoured the bathrooms and the water-closets, I ransacked the servants’ quarters. I took off my shoes and stepped into the prayer room with its stone icons of Shri Ganesh, Vishnu, Chamundi and the Flautist. I went back to the ground floor and combed the rooms once again. Oh God, oh my dearly beloved God, where was she, my one-time mother-sister-woman-lover-confidante and preceptor. The worst of my fears had come true and however violent I felt, I knew I could not touch the Shehzada.

I saw the household watching me as if I was an actor from a play. I asked for a drink of water both for myself and the horse. We had a long journey back. They were closing the front door when I threw it open again. There was a room on the terrace.

She was lying naked on her back in a bed. The flimsiest of muslin cloths covered her. Her eyes were glazed with fever. There were welts and blisters and hives all over her body. I stood in the doorway. My arrival had generated a draft and the flame in the brass lamp trembled like a frightened bird and then died altogether.

I knew then what she had done. She had rubbed the poisonous weed called Maa ka Krodh or Mother’s Wrath which grew in the marshes on the eastern slopes of the Ramkali hills and which all animals instinctively kept away from, on her body before going to see Prince Bahadur on the night of the seventh.

She was red and black like a bruised and broken tomato with fungus growing on it. Edema had disfigured the angles of her face and inflated it till her eyes, nose and lips were misaligned and yet level with each other. I took my clothes off slowly. Kausalya tried to sit up in bed but fell back exhausted. ‘Don’t Maharaj Kumar, I beg of you don’t. You know how infectious the itching is.’ I lifted the muslin sheet from her body lightly and then gently, very gently lay on her.

‘I’ll never leave you again, Kausalya.’

Jai Shri Eklingji

Our blessings be with you.

A worthy king must divide his time between his kingdom and the battlefield. It is time we came home and took the reins of state in our hands once again.

The conduct and direction of a war are good and essential training for a prince. It is our wish that you now take charge of our armies and do battle with the enemy, the forces of the Sultan of Gujarat.

Celebrate the festival of Janmashtami, pay homage to the gods and proceed forthwith to Idar. We await your arrival.

Shri Surya Namah

Your Father, His Majesty Rana Sanga

Ever since the day I could separate my childhood from my youth, the one wish uppermost in my mind was to lead the Mewar armies. I had accompanied Father on five major campaigns, participated in strategy-planning and on the last two occasions led the main attack. But that was all under Father’s watchful eye and under his command. Now I was to be the sole commander of the Gujarat campaign and yet I couldn’t bring myself to rejoice without reservations. Within a matter of hours, the news would spread and every minister, secretary and under-secretary, anybody who was somebody in the government and the civil services and the populace of Chittor would arrive to congratulate me. But I know that it is not in Father’s nature to drop a job, especially such an important campaign, half-way. I have often heard him say that change of leadership midway on any project, particularly when you are fighting a war, confuses and ultimately demoralizes not just the soldiery but the officers and commanders too. There’s a change of style and substance in the thought processes and concepts, in the way a problem is identified and a solution worked out, all of which affect the thrust and cohesion of a team adversely. He has often given credit for our victories against Malwa, Delhi and Gujarat to the sudden switches in command effected by the sovereigns of these states, when the war had not been going well for them.

Why was Father abandoning one of his basic tenets? Did I owe the honour of becoming the commander-in-chief of the Mewar forces to Mother Karmavati’s good offices?

She had been sending an endless stream of missives to Father, two a day in the past month and a half. I had thought about intercepting and eliminating them but once you indulge in surveillance in personal dealings, you enter a bottomless pit of suspicion and persecution. What is important is that I must not confuse Queen Karmavati with Father.

It’s not the person who tells tales who is the culprit, it is the one who listens to them. What I must never lose sight of is that whatever the Queen, her chief eunuch Bruhannada, her long train of sycophants or any minister of state may whisper or insinuate in Father’s ear, the responsibility for listening and acting upon it, instead of going by his past experience of me and assessing the evidence impartially is his, and his alone. For the moment it seemed as though the Queen’s entreaties, warnings and counsel were fighting against Father’s own conscience and sense of fair play. He did not wish to displease either of us. The middle path, the golden mean, is a fine principle but in the business of politics, you can’t keep everybody happy.

But perhaps what he was doing was playing one against the other, making me commander-in-chief and getting me out of the way while he came back, regained his putatively threatened crown and set Vikram free.

There were, however, other reasons for my not wanting to leave immediately. I had initiated a project which I believed was of crucial importance to the future of Mewar.

The health of my people and consequently, the drainage system were top priority for me. But the water and sewage schemes were also a smokescreen. My primary concern was with the fort. For several years now I had been exercised by the one problem which even the strongest, soundest and most spacious fort poses. Chittor was just such a citadel. It was at a commanding height, the plateau on which the town sprawled was three miles long, it had its own perennial water-springs and it had large granaries. If there was a fort which was indomitable and unassailable, it was Chittor. And yet a long-drawn out siege like the one Alauddin Khilji of Delhi had laid, had brought Chittor to its knees and killed off almost the whole contingent of Rajput warriors in the fort.

For a while I was convinced that the problem was the institution of the fort itself. The safe haven, I was almost persuaded, was really nothing but a trap crying to be snapped shut. That’s just what we did when hostile forces approached. We locked every gate and threw away the keys. Beleaguered, starved and exhausted after months, our only hope and way out of the predicament was the enemy. He alone could release us, either by raising the siege, or by storming the gates. I was, needless to say, throwing out the baby with the bath water.

I thought about it for months and re-invented the wheel. A fort was not the ideal solution but however inadequate, it was still the most viable. Was there no way out then? I realized there was, if I concentrated my energies and imagination on the phrase ‘way out’. One of Chittor’s greatest assets is that its slopes are covered with dense jungle. My plan was this: under the guise of digging sewer systems, engineer a secret but extensive network of broad tunnels with doors that would open out but not inwards, at seven or more deeply concealed and forested points along the base of the hill on which Chittor stood.

When a siege seemed imminent, the first thing to do was to evacuate all children and women. (The women may valiantly jump to their death in the fires of johar when all was lost, but in the meantime concern for their safety weakened the resolve of the men.) Stockpile as much food, wood and arms and ammunition as the fort could hold. But despite the fall in the population, the resources in a fort are finite. When the enemy was convinced that we were low on victuals, water and morale, move half the forces out at night, through the tunnels, if possible on a stormy and thunder-ridden night. In the absence of thunder, create a deliberate and effective diversion for the troops to escape. Once outside, regroup at night and take the enemy by surprise from the rear and cause havoc in his ranks. If the nocturnal assault fails, the remainder of the garrison too would vacate the fort the next night.

The enemy will discover a ghost town and fortress the next day. Sure, he’ll loot whatever he can and set fire to everything in sight. That he would do even if you fought to the death. Now when his troops leave Chittor loaded with every kind of booty while a small contingent holds the fort, attack the over-burdened, lax and weary, home-bound divisions with everything you’ve got. You better make a rout of it because the day after, you besiege your own badly damaged fort which is almost bereft of supplies and take it back as quickly as you can.

I had barely forty-eight hours in which to settle my affairs, do my packing and say my farewells. But I had to find the time to meet my new proselyte, the town-planner Sahasmal, before I left Chittor. When I first outlined my ideas about the tunnel project to him, he sounded sceptical. He was worried about the time it would take to complete such an ambitious project.

‘Rana Kumbha didn’t build the Victory Tower overnight.’

‘Your Highness, building in open space on firm rock is a far easier proposition than excavating rock for miles. In the former you just place stone upon stone. In the latter you chisel for days and make an inch-wide dent.’

I must confess that the elementary example he cited brought home the problem of the labour involved far more graphically than I had envisaged.

‘So it will take longer to build than the Victory Tower, what of it? We hope the tunnels will prove useful to our children’s children over the centuries. Besides if the scheme is going to really save us in times of a siege, then we can double or triple the work force we would employ for overground construction.’

‘The second problem’s more intractable. I’m worried about the air in the tunnels.’

‘While digging or afterwards?’

‘In both cases. But especially afterwards when it’s been closed for years. It could become toxic and prove fatal.’

‘Chittor is high but not so high that we’ll have to dig a mile or two into the bowels of the earth. Perhaps we need to work out a system of vents and lower birds in cages to see if they can survive. I’m improvising, you understand? I’m not discounting or belittling your reservations. Perhaps there will be other more obdurate problems. But I would leave it to you to resolve them. Just think Sahasmal, if we can see this plan through, how many lives we can save. And if we survive, we may yet end up defeating the enemy. It’s not exactly the Victory Tower you wanted to build when we first met. But we could call them Sahasmal’s Victory Tunnels. Imagine how grateful future generations are going to be to you.’

‘When do you want to see the first plans?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Four weeks from now. My son will personally bring them to you.’

‘I don’t want them to fall into anybody else’s hands.’

‘I’ll do them in code. All the tunnels will be shown above ground so that the whole thing looks absurd and is completely indecipherable.’

‘All right, let’s see what you can do for us.’

‘Godspeed, Your Highness.’

One last job remained. I sent for the mullah. ‘Was it your prayers or the prayers of the priests in our temples which worked? Was it our gods or your One Single God who saved the Shehzada?’

The mullah looked perplexed. He didn’t want to displease the Prince but he didn’t want his Lord God to be angry with him either.

‘Never mind, mullah. Here’s the money for the repairs in your mosque.’

Since the Flautist was born at midnight, the official puja for the Janmashtami festival should have been at that auspicious hour. But as Shri Eklingji is our family deity, he is the first among equals and the honour of a night-long wake belonged to him alone. The family puja for the Flautist was a private affair at night and the public ceremony was held the next evening. I had almost entirely severed relations with the Flautist but this was official business. The kings of Mewar always visited the Brindabani Temple, did arati, touched the Blue One’s feet, ate prasad, and distributed largesse amongst the subjects of Chittor on Janmashtami. Whatever my personal quarrel with him, I was not about to break with tradition. A kingship survives on institutions, and there’s no greater institution than tradition.

It was a state occasion. Kausalya helped me put on the full royal regalia: yellow silk dhoti, a sandalwood-white duglo with some fine silver thread embroidery, nothing fussy, almost the subtleness of white on white which only a very few discerning courtiers would notice and appreciate and a green saafa topped with a flourish of white feathers. I bent my head for Kausalya to put on the fourteen-stringed meenakari gold necklace.

‘Shall I fetch the mirror?’ she asked.

I shook my head. I do not care to look at my own reflection. ‘You tell me how I look.’

‘Like a future king. And a king must always know what impression he’s making on his subjects.’

‘All right. Fetch it.’ I saw a young man with an intense, thoughtful look. Deepset eyes, eyebrows that kept their distance from each other, an assertive nose and a wide mouth; the loose shock of hair was well-behaved since it was hidden under the turban. Why have I become such a painfully serious person in the last few years?

My brothers, Prime Minister Pooranmalji, Adinathji, the Minister for Home, my uncle Lakshman Simhaji and other cabinet ministers and dignitaries were waiting outside the palace. Each did obeisance to me, and I mounted the royal elephant, Toofan. I was relaxed, confident and as always, keeping an eye on myself. This was the first time I was standing in for His Majesty at a public function and I was conscious of the pomp and gravity of the occasion. The roads were thronging with townspeople. They were leaning over balconies, standing precariously on ledges and peering down from terraces. They wished Father and me long lives. I was moved by the warmth and openness of their affection and overwhelmed by their trust. If I were to ask them to go with me tomorrow and give battle to the Gujarat armies, they would come without question or hesitation. They threw flowers at me and the women pressed their knuckles against their temples to ward off the evil eye. I wanted to wave out to them and embrace them all. Instead I smiled slightly and raised my hand sedately every now and then as a future king should.

We had turned right into Maharana Kumbha Mahapath when I heard the voice, the same as on that rainy day when I had first heard it. I was daydreaming of course, no question about that. What would she he doing in this part of town? What in God’s name was she up to? Since we led separate and independent lives, I had no idea of her whereabouts or how she occupied herself. That sounded lame. It would be a risible and inadmissible plea even in my own Small Causes Court. If the Maharaj Kumar of the realm was going to be in the dark about his wife’s movements, he had better become a hermit and go into the mountains. Because if he couldn’t take care of his wife, how was he going to look after his subjects and his kingdom? Did I not know it was Janmashtami, the Flautist’s birthday? Did I expect her to have a change of heart, disown the Blue One and come and lie with me? I had no one to blame but myself. If Vikramaditya hadn’t already helped me become a household name and the gossip of the town, I was about to make myself the cuckold, jester and fool in every bhavai, nautanki and farce in Mewar.

I knew what to expect. I kept a straight face and looked straight ahead. If you look haughty enough, I told myself, no one will dare make fun of you or crack a joke, at least not to your face. But the people of Mewar were in a good humour and willing to ignore the public humiliation of their Maharaj Kumar. We were now on the central avenue, Bappa Rawal Path, the one that divided Chittor into two almost equal halves. Every fifty yards, there was a pot tied at a height of some twenty-five or thirty feet with ropes that had a profusion of vines and flowers entwined around them. This was a piece of decoration I was unfamiliar with. Did the pots contain, I wondered, the Flautist’s favourites, curds and butter-milk? I did not have to wait long for an answer. I heard the sound of a tugging at the neck of the pot above me. My first impulse was to duck my head. I was in no mood to be spattered with dairy products. Fortunately I kept my head and did not make an ass of myself. There was a shower of petals and by the time the seventh pot had emptied, not just Toofan and I but the entire road was a mosaic of pink, yellow, white and red.

Where were all the peacocks? Why weren’t the parabolas of their lonely cries drowning out the song of my wife?

Seen the sun today? It’s gone peacock blue. Looked at my tongue this morning. Same thing. Stark blue. Blue marigolds. Blue ravens. Blue grass. Must be a blue cataract in my eye, I said. Glanced, by chance at the calendar then. Watch it impatiently for 364 days of the year. Except today, of course. Wish you a blue birthday, my love. (Can gods have birthdays, Thought they were without beginning or end.) Blue is the colour of my beloved. Blue is the colour of my universe. They call me tart, harlot, whore Slut, strumpet, fornicator. Tell them, I beg you. I beseech you, tell them. Save my honour, beloved, save my honour. Tell them who I am, A god’s wife, nothing less. (Are you ashamed of me, Why have you kept me your dark secret?) Tell them, I’m yours. Legally married to you before the gods. As the sun, moon and stars are my witness Tell them, to my last breath, I’m a true blue. Save my honour, beloved, save my honour. Seen the sun today? The song and the voice rose to a frantic chant of one of the Flautist’s thousand names as we stopped at the portals of Brindabani Mandir. I alighted slowly from Toofan’s back. ‘Save my honour,’ she cried again and again. ‘Save my honour.’ There is some misunderstanding here, my dear wife, I believe it is my honour and the honour of Mewar which need safeguarding. I took off my shoes. I could feel the Pradhanji and the Chancellor avoiding my eyes. Did they know? Did all the courtiers and the raos and rawats who were accompanying me know the identity of the singer? I was willing to delude myself even now. Of course they knew. An old man bent down and touched my feet. I took his hands and lifted him up. He looked at me sadly, shook his head and said to no one in particular, ‘Princess, part company with the saints. Your own Merta is ashamed of you. And so is Chittor.’

If his commiseration for my plight touched a chord within me, I was not about to show it. I climbed the hundred steps solemnly and walked across the mandapa and the kalyana-mandapa. The guards were having a difficult time keeping the thousands of townspeople in check. My wife had worn a nautch girl’s bands of bells around her anklets and was dancing in full public view. Her skirts were a red blur, she was gyrating like a dervish in a trance. She was wet with sweat though her chunni and blouse had not yet turned translucent. How long had she been dancing? Only a woman possessed could have this order of preternatural energy. I have kept my peace all this while, Flautist, but I have a score to settle with you now.

How far was I willing to go to get what I wanted, Bhootani Mata had asked me. And my inane answer was ‘pretty far’. No wonder she thought me a fool who spoke without due thought.

Now I couldn’t go far enough. All the way Ma, all, all the way. As far as it takes. Whatever it takes to eliminate her but not without all the torture and suffering and pain that this world and every other is capable of. Do it Bhootani Mata, do it and give my soul peace. I have earned it.

I will make a covenant with the gods and the devils. Anyone you say. With Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh, with Indra, Varuna, Agni, with the dread Yama himself. If need be, with the gods of a prior and primal time. I will not stop there. I will embrace evil and the black arts. I will blacken my heart and of a dark night open the gates and invite a black pestilence upon her and her kind. Open your treasure trove of death’s heads and parasites, Bhootani Mata, of the numerous hordes of worms and weevils, maggots and termites and let them cover the earth and eat through the substance of the three worlds till there is neither stone nor clay, neither sky nor water, neither air nor fire, neither god nor rakshasa, merely a ceaseless tumult and simmering proliferation of the creatures of the underworld. Let them eat through flesh and bone and crawl out of eyesockets and other orifices of the mouth and ears and nostrils and the anus till there’s nothing left for them but to devour each other. Let there be nothing, nothing, nothing.

‘Throw her at Toofan’s feet. Let the elephant trample her to death. Tie her up in the public square and whip her till every drop of blood in her veins has dripped to the ground,’ Queen Karmavati was screaming at me. The other queens and maids were in a state of shock. Even Kumkum Kanwar with her inordinate and blind love of her mistress looked distraught and on the verge of tears. ‘Do you see to what depths your spinelessness has brought us? I warned you when she was dancing at home. I told you to get rid of her, banish her, lock her up forever, get rid of her once and for all but you didn’t listen. How will we ever survive this shame? How will His Majesty, the Rana, your Father hold his head up again? I will tear her apart, limb from limb. Get up, you pansy and drag her home.’

‘Not now, Mother,’ my voice was low and dangerously calm. ‘I will have silence. I have come to offer greetings and prayers to the Blue One. I will have peace. Each of us,’ my voice was resonating and echoing now, ‘must pray in his own fashion. This is her way. We’ll all respect that.’

The Rani was speechless at the effrontery of my snub. It was as unexpected as it was unanswerable. She looked at me with ill-concealed hatred. She would get back at me yet for my insolence. But, for the time being, she was silenced.

Bhootani Mata was standing next to me. I felt the opaque white excrescence of the rock of the cave on my back and the wet slime of her palm as she took my hand in hers. ‘Why not take your time before taking a decision, Prince? In life there is no going back. You cannot undo any act, however much you may want to later on.’ I threw her hand off in disgust. Did the old crone really understand who I was up against? ‘Think about it, Maharaj Kumar.’ Her shrivelled flapping breasts slapped against my face. ‘Act in haste and repent at leisure. What do you say, Prince?’ I turned away and entered the Flautist’s sanctum.

Is there anything more painful and lonesome than betrayal? Yes, there is. It is loss. And worse than loss are the tricks that memory plays. I looked at the Flautist. It was like meeting a dear friend after a period of years. My first impulse, it was hardly an impulse but the most natural thing in the world, was to touch him as I had done when I was four or five years old, but the priest came forward to greet me and the spell was broken. We were finally face to face. Two mortal enemies. Correction. One mortal and the other divine and immortal. I was overtaken by such a strong wave of loathing, I wanted to strangle him till the last breath had gone out of him and then snap his neck. What was I doing here? I didn’t want to see his face again, not be anywhere in his vicinity for the rest of my life. It would be rhetorical and asinine to ask him ‘Why?’ Even on the rare occasion when someone proffers a reason, a sound reason, does it ever get to the heart of things or reveal the truth?

The Flautist’s weakness for women was legendary. There were always women hanging around him. But what was astonishing, disconcerting and inexplicable was the curious nature of his attraction. The more women he had, the more women wanted him. When he discarded them, or rather, just plain forgot them, the more desirable and attractive he became. The truth is perhaps simpler than that: women love a philanderer.

But all that was a thousand or two thousand years ago. He had died a tragic earthly death and gone. Why after all these years … forget it, there’s no purchase in that line of thinking. I did what I had to do, the abhishek, the puja, the arati, the prostration and the circumambulation. I ate the prasad. When the senior ministers were done, we left.

The august gathering at my cousin Rajendra Simha’s rose to its feet to greet the Maharaj Kumar and the Shehzada. The invitation was from Rajendra but as the patriarch of the family, his father Uncle Lakshman Simha came forward to welcome us. He embraced me and then turned to Prince Bahadur.

‘Salaam alequm, Prince. Greetings to you on the mischievous Bal Krishna’s birthday. Treat our house as your home. Make merry and may the child Kanhaiyya’s blessings be upon you.’

My heart skipped a beat. Bahadur and I seemed to have put the Kausalya incident behind us. He was no man’s fool and was not deceived, I was certain, by Kausalya’s ploy. I’m not sure whether she said anything to him on the night of the tryst, something about her gonorrhoea flaring up or just stood there mutely in the full and livid flush of her flesh’s diatribe against her. He had been rejected and the Prince was not one who could conceive of anyone saying no to him. The offence had been noted and been kept like a scented flower from one’s beloved in the pages of a much-thumbed book. He would take it out one day, look at the dry and desiccated petals aimlessly and strike. When I reached the Atithi Palace to pick him up, he was his normal affectionate and warm self. No point ruining the pleasure of the present for the distant future. When the latter came to pass, he would exact the price of vengeance.

Was the mention of a Hindu deity going to stick in his craw? Was he going to come up in a rash and make an issue of it? He smiled a disarming, winning smile. ‘Wale-e-qum salaam,’ he triple-embraced my uncle in the custom of his faith. Lakshman Simhaji wasn’t doing too badly either. The funny anecdote Bahadur had narrated on his previous visit had been shelved and though the Shehzada couldn’t quite encompass his girth, Uncle dutifully put forth his left cheek, then his right and left once again.

I am rather fond of my uncle as I suspect he is of me. Don’t be put off by the enormity of his corpulence, his jiggling breasts, or the ripples of flesh that swim across to the distant shoreline of his body when he exposes himself to the masseur in the evenings. He is a man of great taste, puckish humour and a highly sensual softness that some women find irresistible. He is the only true hedonist in Chittor. He loves his food and wine and his bodily pleasures including farting in various keys. He is also a fine musician and has a deep, resonating timbre to his voice, which in the days when he was slim and active, made him one of the most sought-after amateur singers at parties. He didn’t ever make a fuss about singing. He likes himself and he’s sure that others like him too. He is Father’s cousin and since Father was away often and his son Rajendra and I were the same age, he took it upon himself to be my guardian.

Rajendra is his father’s son. He loves the good things of life. When I was young, I would go to him when I needed cheering. When we grew up, we drifted apart. No fights or falling out, just the normal going our own ways which didn’t seem to bring us together too often. We are going to be constantly in each other’s company from tomorrow since Father has appointed him head of a division of cavalry. I’m looking forward to getting close to Rajendra again and not only because I need friends and allies. I like Rajendra. As with many gregarious and loquacious creatures, you never know what goes on in his mind or why he hurts. A good man and a loyal one. At first I was a little wary of his hot-house friendship with Bahadur but part of it, I suspect, was nothing more than possessiveness. I felt left out but was not willing to join them on their nights out on the town. We are always laying claim to those whom we have not bothered to stay close to and nurture. Bahadur and he are still close as you can see by the way they greet and hug each other. Bahadur’s going to be a little lost from tomorrow.

The Pradhan Mantri Pooranmalji, Adinathji, the other cabinet ministers, my cousins, nephews and brothers came and greeted me. This is an informal function but I’ll mingle with them later on. As my Father’s representative in Chittor, etiquette demands I stand on my dignity till the performance starts. I know what they are thinking about but barring Vikramaditya, who, fortunately, is still in jail in Kumbhalgarh, no one, I’m certain, will refer to my wife’s song and dance at the Brindabani Temple this afternoon. I chat with everyone, ask after their wives and children and pointedly talk of inconsequential things.

The house is lit as if today is Diwali. My uncle is a collector of lamps and this is the ideal place to show them off. Sky-blue chanderi curtains are kept on a short leash in the huge windows but cross ventilation makes them strain and protest till they slip free and billow and reach for the ceiling. We may have more expensive carpets at home but the Persian and Afghan carpets at Lakshman Simha’s always seem more springy and inviting. You can sit on them, loll on them or snore away and no one’s going to come running and tell you to be careful because this one’s a gift from the Raja of Kashmir and the other one on which you are resting your mud-caked shoe is a collector’s item worth a king’s ransom and is from the Sultan of Turkey. There are hundreds of cushions strewn across the carpets. Some are round, some square, some are fat cylinders. I would prefer a more inconspicuous place to sit so that I can slip out if I get bored. But you can’t be cock-of-the-walk and expect to be ignored.

There is no formal dinner tonight. Whenever you feel hungry you go to the shamiana that has been set up in the courtyard. You may have a full meal, one of the best in this part of the country or make a meal of the endless varieties of snacks and savouries.

The pakhawaj player and the sarangiya enter and do namaskar to me and Bahadur Khan, to my uncle and Rajendra and to all the dignitaries, then settle down to tuning their instruments. Everybody has to wait on the Rana (or in his absence on the Maharaj Kumar) but there is one exception to the rule. An artist like a singer or dancer, or even the nautanki player, will not appear till the king is seated. This is the signal for the women to take their seats in the side wing. A red flash jumps over the extra sets of percussion and stringed instruments and is in my lap, its arms wound around my neck. Adinathji starts to protest but I raise my hand. Leelawati, as always, does wonders for my ego, spirits, heart, soul, and whatever bits and tatters of mind that are still around.

‘You are going tomorrow without even saying goodbye.’

‘That is not true. You are the guest of honour tomorrow at dawn. It is you who will present the pennant of Mewar to me.’

‘You could have come home.’

A year or two and Leelawati will not fly into my arms. They’ll marry her to some financier and we’ll hardly ever run into each other.

‘You haven’t done adaab to His Highness, Prince Bahadur of Gujarat,’ I changed the subject since I was not about to go into a long explanation about how little notice Father had given me to leave Chittor.

‘You haven’t introduced us.’

‘Shehzada, this is Leelawati, Adinathji’s great-granddaughter. Leelawati, His Highness Prince Bahadur.’

Leelawati got up and curtsied to the Prince.

‘I was wondering whether the Maharaj Kumar would get around to introducing me to the lovely young lady. Are you his favourite?’

‘Yes. And he is mine.’

What a fine head Leelawati had. The Prince must have read my thoughts. ‘She is going to be one of the most beautiful women in Mewar.’

‘She is already one of the brightest.’

It was a tradition at Lakshman Simha’s Janmashtami celebrations that the name of the artist was never revealed before the performance. Part of the fun of the evening lay in trying to guess whether it was a man or a woman, a singer, instrumentalist or dancer and his or her name. People laid bets, a cask of wine, a thousand tankas, a horse, a camel and sometimes a couple of villages. Almost everybody had his private grapevine and wanted to check out if his information was right. Rajendra nodded his head and went along with every speculation. Uncle declared solemnly that there was a major shift in the policy of the house and a half-man and a half-woman named after the bisexual deity, Ardhanareshwar, was going to recite hermaphroditic verse and sing simultaneously in male and female voices followed by a dance duet given by the same person.

‘I’ll bet you my diamond and emerald necklace,’ the Shehzada told Leelawati, ‘that it’s going to be a dancer, obviously a female one.’

‘Wrong. Partially wrong. It’s going to be a woman singer.’ Leelawati told him.

‘Empty words won’t do, Leelawati. You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. What are you betting?’

‘I have nothing to bet with.’

‘How about that gold chain around your waist?’

Leelawati hesitated. ‘Your anklet will do just as well. I’ll wear it around my wrist.’ Bahadur was tying Leelawati up in knots and for once she was not sure how to respond. ‘What about weaving a pennant for me?’ I hadn’t realized how deftly the Shehzada had tied a noose around Leelawati.

‘Yes, I would love to. Will you join the Maharaj Kumar or ride with Uncle Rajendra?’

The entire mehfil was babbling away but Bahadur’s tense silence rang like an alarm in my head. I took off my belt and gave it to Leelawati.

‘We’ll bet His Highness, the Maharaj Kumar’s ruby and pearl belt. Does that sound fair to you?” Leelawati did not wish to dwell on what a close call it was.

The Shehzada put the necklace around Leelawati’s neck. ‘You’ve won this round anyway, Leelawati.’

As luck would have it, I wouldn’t have lost my belt.

‘The name’s Sajani Bai,’ the woman said after she had made herself comfortable in front of the pakhawaj player and the sarangiya. ‘Are names deceptive or do they reveal something vital about a person? Some people think I am every man’s Sajani, and beloved. Others think I am theirs and theirs alone. You are welcome to your opinions, my lords. For as you know, a woman is like a throne. However large she may be,’ she smiled and with a gesture of her hand pointed to her wide girth, ‘she may enjoy one man and one man only at any one point in time. So while I enjoin each one of you to take his pleasure from me, my pleasure is for the one who gave me the gift of life. Adaab, Maharaj Kumar, adaab Prince Bahadur, adaab Lakshman Simhaji and adaab, all you lovers of the arts. Since you would not come to see me in Awadh, I have had to come to see you.’

She placed the string drone in her lap and closed her eyes. Her fat fingers strummed the strings softly. The moment of truth. The alaap is the part of our classical music that I like best. It is an inward voyage, an odyssey into the unknown. You are alone, truly alone, in the cosmos, no pakhawaj and no sarangi, just your voice feeling its way. It is a wordless meditation, a rumination on matters that human thought cannot encompass. Anchored in the schema enunciated at the very start, you are free to explore the full range of the human condition. It is the quality of the probing and the freewheeling that exposes you and decides your worth as an artist.

It is men and women who consciously and fortuitously take an art-form in one direction or another. If I had been born in an earlier age when our classical music was taking shape, or if I could devote myself to it even today, I would enlarge the scope and emphasis of the alaap, and make it mandatory as the true test of the artist. For like all meditation, an alaap has the solitude and form of a prayer. It is a cathartic and purifying act. You are blessed, touched by the divine and made to partake of the sacred.

There is good reason why the seminal artists of earlier times kept the alaap short and switched to the easier pacing of the vilambit where the beat of the pakhawaj is your guide. They knew the limitations and fears of the majority of singers and instrumentalists. To plumb the depths, you must leave the safety of the shallows, the easy sentiment and the company of others. One’s own frailties, mediocrity, shortcomings and the fear of the abyss, one must dare them all.

There’s only one test for Sajani Bai today. Not so much a test for her as the hope of a lifeline for me. Will she cast a spell on me and draw me down into the wells of oblivion? Will she release me from the torment of this afternoon? Will she heal me? Will I be made whole again? She struck a deep, low, majestic note and held it for a long endless moment till it seemed to slip out of time, then almost imperceptibly shaded into another. She states the scheme of the raga in crystalline phraseology. Then she sets out on her own.

To speak of music is to speak of intangibles. To attempt to catch its essence in words is foolhardy and doomed. The images music conjures in my mind and on the screen between my eyeballs and eyelids are not of a coherent extended metaphor. They are dissonant and diverse but coalesce with a natural dynamic that has its own internal logic.

She lays out her palette, the range of colours she’ll be using. With measured strokes, both subtle and broad, she sketches in her themes and concerns though there is nothing sketchy about this. Her voice is still a rumble, brief glimpses of well-springs and fledgling currents that may or may not meet up. There’s a sylvan stretch, broad beams of slanting sunlight broken by a million leaves and bushes, which turn into a moody, brooding bottle-green forest. Mythical beasts prowl sinisterly in the jungle. Deep down, the waters are linking up. There’s a blinding vista of sky and V-formations of migratory birds in silent flight. A couple disengages and sinks down in a giddy glissando. Suddenly the voice is a full-fledged river, strong, wide but still unhurried. The water trips over dips and stones playfully, soon it’s accelerating and the rapids froth like hot wild horses. I open my eyes. Sajani Bai’s left hand is pressed against her left ear in search of an even purer note. The boneless fingers of her right hand undulate like fluid branches under water. Her eyes pass over my face unseeingly and withdraw into darkness. The piercing cry of a bird who’s lost its mate scars the air. My eyes close. A red’s on fire. I press my eyelids tight. The incandescent red trickles down my face. Her voice is leaping, speeding, rising high, ever so high, it arches upon itself like a curving wave and breaks in a trillion points. I release the pressure on my eyelids. Midnight blue is crisscrossed by jets of iridescent stardust. The lines sizzle and shift and race at breakneck velocities. They loop and link and skate and swing. Darting greens turn to raging sun flares to whistling purples to ruptured yellows. A white mist is coming in from the left corner of my eye. It rises swiftly. The underground river surfaces through it. It is in flood. I’m tossed and twisted, broken and bruised and reconfigured. My arms are as wide as the Gambhiree which I swallow entire.

Is it possible to make love to a disembodied voice?

I am washed ashore and am strangely at peace.

It is midnight when Sajani Bai winds up her concert. Leelawati is fast asleep with her head on my lap. I was not destined to keep the belt after all. Rajendra handed the purse of money to Sajani Bai. Adinathji picked up Leelawati and I walked over to Sajani Bai. I took off my belt and presented it to her. She touched my feet and said something. I had to bend to hear the words. ‘I sang for you today, Prince, just for you. If it will help you to forget, perhaps even cure you, I will sing again for you some other time. Don’t be alarmed, Maharaj Kumar, your face is not transparent, my mind is. You have the gift of genuine enjoyment. Don’t lose it.’

‘Two announcements. There are snacks and dinner downstairs in the shamiana, ladies and gentlemen. If you haven’t already had them, please do not insult our house, especially my mother, and refuse our hospitality. The other announcement will please you no end. There will be a surprise recital after an hour.’

I had not realized how hungry I was. Rajendra was right. The food was so good it fuelled my appetite further. Everybody was jovial and friendly and I was in great spirits. Rajendra had decided that Sajani Bai and I had a little delicate something going between us. Soon Bahadur had joined him and they did magnificent imitations of her voice, her ample bosom and at least fifty alternative versions of the indecent proposals Sajani Bai was supposed to have made to me. Each proposal was more outrageous and lewd than the previous one and almost everybody was doubled up. Without meaning to, we had formed a semicircle around the Shehzada and Rajendra. The only thing that worried me was that Bahadur was drinking steadily. He was looking for a refill when I tried to draw his attention to something else.

‘Aren’t you going to tell us what I said to Sajani Bai?’

Did I really believe they had been lubricious before? They were improvising wildly now but with such perfect timing, it was as if they had rehearsed their act for months. Where could the clandestine lovers meet? ‘The Victory Tower. On the very top floor. There will be no one there. The whole of Chittor will be at our feet and if we raise our hands, they’ll touch the sky. Well, mine will. Yours, I guess will come to my waist.’ There’s some problem about Sajani Bai squeezing into the entrance of the Tower. They resolve the quandary by making the lady edge in sideways. Not a very wise move. Madam is evenly distributed and is now lodged immovably at the entrance. A gang of prisoners is deployed to break down the wall to let the dear lady out. A child thinks that if the new central prop is removed the Tower will come down. His father smacks him. But the child is right. When Sajani Bai is finally able to make her exit, the great Tower begins to totter and wobble and comes crashing down. Fortunately the lovers escape unhurt.

‘Why didn’t I think of it?’ the Prince asks himself and his inamorata. ‘There is a solution to our problem. We’ll send the Minister for Home Affairs, none other than the stupendously voluminous Lakshman Simhaji, to war against our Rajput cousins and appropriate his bed. It alone will hold us both.’ ‘But Sire,’ Sajani Bai protests, ‘you and your cousins are the best of friends, you have recently even signed an eternal amity pact with them.’ ‘Little matter, I’m willing to sacrifice friend, foe and family for your sake, my Sajani.’ And so Lakshman Simhaji is dispatched instantly and unceremoniously. Finally, the two are alone and in bed. They are locked in a long, torrid embrace. Then something terrible happens. The bed breaks? You’ve got to be joking. It’s strong enough to hold two Sajanis. It’s just that Sajani Bai can hear the Prince but cannot locate him. Oh God, where could he have disappeared? She picks up her right arm and checks under it, then the left one: is he, the poor little darling, lost in her armpit? No sign of him. She picks up her petticoat.

It was at that delicate moment that the Queen Mother, my grandmother herself walked into the magic circle. She had a frown on her forehead and her lips were clenched tight. ‘Disgusting. Disgraceful. Is this how the younger generation entertains itself?’ Everybody freezes. No one dares look up. ‘Leaving the women out of the fun? What happens then, beta?’ She asks the Shehzada. ‘Does she find my Maharaj Kumar or not?’

It was time to go back to Deep Mahal.

We were all highly keyed up by now. There’s usually just one performer at Lakshman Simha’s Janmashtami party. What’s up today? Who, what, when, why, how? As bookie for the latter half of the evening, Rajendra, the shrewd so-and-so was raking it in. Jugglers, acrobats, performing hijras, bards, dancers, lion-tamers, wrestlers, you name it, the more unlikely the suggestion, the more people were willing to bet on it. And lo and behold, guess who turned up? In the right-hand corner here, ladies and gentlemen, what we have is none other than the seven hundred and odd pounder, the one and only Sajani Bai. There’s horror-stricken silence. Then everybody was crowding Rajendra Simha and yelling for his blood. I can’t wipe the smile off my face. The swine, the shameless rogue, what a ride he’s taken us all for. After all, he had merely said ‘surprise’. That didn’t rule out Sajani Bai.

But Sajani Bai had already begun her song. And suddenly there was absolute silence. It was about Dhola and Maru, our legendary star-crossed lovers. Maru has just seen Dhola for the first time and her friends are teasing her. We all know the folk song, we’ve heard it a million times but what Sajani Bai does with it is to give it her own twist, almost create it anew. We are just about to bask in her magnificent voice when there’s the sound of anklets and seven apsaras make their way through the sprawled and stunned menfolk. They start dancing. Catcalls, whistles, clapping, applause. Most of the girls are barely seventeen or eighteen, some are exquisite, others are shy and self-conscious, but every one of them is an apparition. Those of us who leave tomorrow morning, hell no, this very morning know that they are the stuff of wet dreams. We will ache and pine for them, both in our waking and sleeping hours. Oh God, to be young and lovely. I feel old. When the song comes to the refrain, all of us, the women’s section too, join in spontaneously and sing the chorus. It is impossible to sit still when a folk song from Rajasthan is being sung. We are all seasoned clappers and along with the pakhawaj, we give the beat. Song follows song and there’s a masti and khumar in the air. We are drunk and high with the songs, the women and the sheer joy of being alive.

They are all wearing chanderi ghagras and cholis of deep earth colours. Sheer chunnis cover their hair and are tucked in at the necks of the blouses. All are wearing silver jhumroos around their ankles. There’s one girl-woman here, the one in the dark snuff- coloured choli-ghagra who’s perhaps the shyest of them all. Is she the youngest? There’s no way of telling. What I or anybody else can tell for sure is that despite her bashfulness, she’s smitten with the Shehzada. She keeps looking down into the middle distance while stealing as many furtive glances at him as she can. The snuff of her clothes clashes provocatively with the peach of her complexion. No ordinary nautch girl, this. None of the other girls either.

The Shehzada has been imbibing steadily and has a beatific look on his face. He has, needless to say, noticed the girl’s inhibited – and hence all the more enticing – fascination with him. No explicit overture could be more persuasive or compelling.

‘What’s her name?’ Bahadur lurched a little unsteadily even as he sat in the namaaz position.

‘You are asking the wrong man, Prince. I’m just as ignorant as you are.’

‘Isn’t she something else?’

‘Who?’ I asked innocently.

‘Is there anybody else here but her?’

‘Seven of them, not to mention the love of my life, Sajani Bai.’

‘Yes sir, Sajani Bai’s the one for you,’ he laughed unsteadily. ‘That match, Your Highness, take my word for it, was made in heaven. But I say, would you happen to know who the girl in that, I don’t quite know how to describe the colour, in that lustrous brown, is?’

‘You mean the third girl from the left?’ I deliberately pointed to the wrong girl.

‘No, you fool, I said lustrous brown,’ he half-rose, stumbled, then stood up and directed his index finger waveringly. The girl was by now blushing furiously and looking at her big toe as if she had just discovered it. The blushing did her looks and face a world of good.

‘That’s not brown, lustrous or otherwise. It’s snuff.’

‘Do you think I give a damn whether it’s brown or snuff or violet for all I care. What is her name?’

‘Shhhh, softly Shehzada,’ I appealed to him, ‘come and sit down.’

‘Only if you will tell me her name.’

‘Please, Your Highness. Do come and sit with us.’ Everybody was enjoying his boisterousness. He had had that extra peg which makes people happy and repetitive. I thought it wise to get the Prince to bed now and signalled to Mangal to get a drink for him. He knew what I meant, but adding the shot of opium was going to be a little tricky with so many people wandering in and out. As luck would have it, Rajendra got one of his servants to fill the Prince’s glass.

‘Now you know who I’m talking about. What’s her name?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know, Shehzada.’

‘Don’t know the name of someone from your own house?’ He was not pleased with my answer.

‘Not mine, Prince, this is Lakshman Simhaji and Rajendra’s place.’

‘Oh, of course. Then I better ask Rajendra.’ He turned to Rajendra.

‘Sorry to disturb you, when you are having such a good time friend, that too in your own home, but would you be so kind as to tell me the name of the girl in the snuff-coloured dress?’

‘I don’t quite remember, Highness. It’s either Salma or Nikhat,’ Rajendra smiled and went back to the business of watching the girls dance.

‘Salma? Nikhat? Not a Hindu girl?’ Bahadur looked puzzled.

‘Why are you pursuing her so single-mindedly? Do you recognize her?’

‘Should I? Have I had my pleasure with her?

‘No, Sire, all the girls are virgins.’

‘Then why would I recognize her?’

For some reason my cousin found the question hilarious. ‘I don’t know, I thought you might have played with her when you were a child.’

‘Played with a Mewar girl, how’s that possible?’ The Shehzada was beginning to sound vexed. I was, I must confess, just as foxed as he was. ‘I’m afraid you are speaking in riddles, Rajendra Simha.’

‘She’s the daughter of the qazi of Ahmednagar. I imagined that you must have met her when you visited Ahmednagar as a child with your Father.’

‘Then what is she doing here?’

The singing had stopped. The girls were standing still, hugging each other. They looked frightened. There were drops of sweat on Salma or Nikhat’s upper lip. Her armpits were sweating with the exertion of dancing so long but she was shivering. Her doe-eyes darted all over the place. Though her hands held her companion’s arm tightly, she would have run all the way back to Ahmednagar if she could have got away from Deep Mahal. What was Rajendra up to? Did he know what he was saying? Why bring up Ahmednagar now? Then it dawned on me. I recalled his face when the Shehzada had told the story of the massacre of the Mewar forces and of Lakshman Simha’s debacle. Rajendra had planned today’s party with a single purpose in mind. He was going to have his vengeance by reminding Bahadur of the time we turned the tables on Gujarat, sacked Ahmednagar, destroyed their mosques, marauded their gold and silver and massacred thousands of their townspeople.

‘Rajendra, I urge you to come to your senses and stop talking nonsense.’

He ignored me.

‘Do you remember the time when the Mewar forces routed your Father’s armies and sacked Ahmednagar, Prince? It was a slaughter and the qazi fell too. But we are a chivalrous people. We brought the ladies and their daughters back with us and are now training them in a new profession. We hope they’ll give us pleasure, as they’ve done today and we’ll give them hefty recompense. We…’

He did not get around to finishing the sentence. Would that I had pulled out his tongue or kicked him in his face. That way at least my dear cousin Rajendra who took his father’s humiliation so much to heart would have fought by my side against Gujarat.

Bahadur leaned forward as if he was in pain. It was such a common old trick but I fell for it.

‘Are you all right, Shehzada?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, I am. It’s your cousin who is not.’ Seven swift blows with his dagger and Rajendra was no more. There was the stillness of death amongst us. Salma or Nikhat, the poor girl crumpled to the ground. I picked up Rajendra. My clothes and hands were bloody. I wanted to bring down the gods in my impotent pain, I looked at the ceiling, at the lamps, at Sajani Bai whose voice had seen everything there was to see, feel and experience in this world and yet had missed out on Rajendra’s death, I looked at my uncle, I looked at my dead cousin. My body shook and shivered but would not release the scream in me. Oh Rajendra, why did I not get closer to you earlier instead of waiting for our Gujarat campaign to start?

I heard the sound of metal leaving its scabbard once, twice, thrice. Rao Surajmal, Narbad Hada, Rawat Jodha Simha. They had encircled the Shehzada. The others were unsheathing their weapons. I eased Rajendra to the floor, got out my sword and stood in front of Bahadur.

‘I don’t need any protection, Maharaj Kumar. If they have the guts and the honour, I’ll take them all on, one after another.’ ‘In my father, Rana Sanga’s kingdom, you’ll hold your tongue, Prince, and give me your weapons.’

‘Do you expect me to die without defending myself, Prince?’

‘There will be no more killing, Shehzada. Hand your weapons to Mangal.’ I knew that if I looked at him, he would start a who-stares-whom-down contest. Instead I held the three potential leaders of retribution in our camp with my gaze. I could feel the heat of the Shehzada’s internal conflict. Could he trust me? He himself had attacked an unwary man. Would turning defenceless be his best defence? Perhaps the enormity of what he had done was beginning to dawn on him. I doubted if he was given to introspection or regret. He would rather fight but he knew I was his only hope.

The Shehzada handed his dagger and sword to Mangal.

‘He’ll not leave Deep Mahal, alive, Your Highness,’ Hada Narbad advanced on both me and the Shehzada.

‘He is our guest. Anybody who dares so much as touch the Shehzada’s hair, I will kill him first.’ Was it tall talk? Was I going to take on the hundred-odd people in the hall. ‘I am the Maharaj Kumar.’ I spoke each word separately. ‘Put your weapons down and go home.’

They stood undecided. Would they have listened? Or would they have revolted? Either way, I would never forget the look of loathing, contempt and animosity in the Hada’s eyes. The Queen Mother walked towards us along with my aunt.

‘Did you not hear the Maharaj Kumar? Sheathe your weapons and go now. Give us time and room to grieve for our grandchild.’ Grandmother turned to Prince Bahadur. ‘You have the Maharaj Kumar’s and my word that no one will harm you. I loved you, beta, but you’ve dishonoured both Mewar’s and my hospitality and affection. Go in peace.’

Perhaps Mewar and its people will never forgive me for not avenging Rajendra’s death. Had I too just sealed my fate?