He was returning from a seven-mile walk along the parapet of the fort at eleven at night when he saw his wife sitting at the Flautist’s temple. He turned towards the palace but something about her made him go back. She sat still, her eyes closed. This was unusual, to say the least. One of the stories about her said that not just her feet but even her skirt and plait would never come to rest. There was a strange expression on her face. He knew he wasn’t making sense but he could only call it joyous, ecstatic tranquillity. She was no longer of this earth or of this world.
He was sure that the light from the solitary lamp was playing tricks with her face. He drew closer to her. There was a light flowing from her, not just from her eyes which were shut anyway, but from her entire body. It had lit her from within and she had become transparent. He realized that it did not make any difference whether he gave credence to what he saw or didn’t. Nothing could touch her. She was a circle and a completeness. All else was without. She was in communion with something that was beyond comprehension. Only someone touched by the divine could be so insensible and self-absorbed. What was she thinking about? That was a silly question. She seemed beyond thought. He would never be able to penetrate the mystery at the centre of her being. But that, he suspected, is the nature of the mystical experience. It is a one-to-one rapport. The rest of the world was, perforce, shut out. To an outsider, the saint’s world was quintessentially solipsistic, but that was missing the point. There was no outside for her.
He felt an odd desire. He wanted to cup his hands and gather the light emanating from her.
Late that night, he took off his clothes and stood in front of the full-length, vertical mirror. He poured five tablespoons of indigo powder into a shallow bowl and carefully mixed it with two tumblers of water. It was time to spread out four large gunnysacks in the centre of the room. Must be careful not to stain the floor or the walls. He dipped the thick brush he had bought into the indigo solution, pressed the bristles against the curving sides of the bowl and let the excess water flow back. He stood in front of the mirror, studied his reflection without much curiosity and applied the first stroke. Was it the water which was cold or the feel of indigo against his skin? He felt like an actor working with make-up. It was a slow process. He was in no hurry. He wanted to do it right. Under the arm pits, behind the ears, between his buttocks and over his crotch, on the ups and dips of the vertebrae of his backbone, he did not want a speck or line of his own skin to escape his eye. He examined himself in the mirror. A sliver of white showed between his littlest toe and the second-last one. One daub and that was done. He turned around. The back, the three ribs behind his right arm had been the most difficult but all that effort and attention to detail had paid off. He stood still for ten minutes. The paint was dry but he wanted to make sure. He picked up the yellow silk pitambar. It felt soft and rich and subdued. He tied it around his waist. Next, the finely meshed gold belt. Now the headband. He tucked in his hair carefully under it and then stuck the peacock feather a little off-centre above his right eye. One last look. He collected his flute, the one that the Bhil soldier from Raja Puraji Kika’s army had gifted him, and left.
He opened the door to her room almost imperceptibly. She was sleeping. He started to play softly. He had no raga or tune in mind. The notes came effortlessly. Heart, soul, mind and flute were one. He played on. The sound of the reed had a deep, full and finegrained texture. Music was the smoke from a joss stick. He could see its lines rising and spiralling mysteriously. She turned on her side, semi-awake, then lapsed back into sleep. The notes seemed to drift in and out of her consciousness. She lay on her back and covered her face with her chunni. A lazy smile as diaphanous as the song he was playing parted her lips. She was awake now. The smile played mischievously around her eyes but she would not open them.
‘I’m not at home. Might as well go back to all your other women. Guess you didn’t have the time to look in on me when I had that slight fever and a touch of diarrhoea and kept throwing up as if I didn’t want any of my mortal remains left behind. Oh, please, please do me a favour. Spare me your cosmic reasons, matters of state and other excuses. It really doesn’t matter. After all, it wasn’t anything. I was on my deathbed and everybody had given up on me, he certainly had, the poor dear man, how he looked after me, night and day and cleaned my mess, he didn’t leave my bedside, not for a minute, nor did he sleep. But that’s nothing to get worked up about, is it? I might have died but as you are about to tell me, I didn’t. Then what’s all the fuss about? Let’s not have a scene, oh please, we are decent, civilized people here. You are quite right. Let’s call it a day. We had good times, some great ones too but that’s all over. You go your way now and I’ll go mine and never the twain shall meet.’
He tucked the flute in his belt, turned around and started to walk away. She was working herself up into a regular tantrum. He could expect flying objects any moment now.
‘Can you hear me? Cat got your tongue? Don’t you have anything to say in your own defence, never mind if not a word of it is true? Don’t you have any shame? An iota of human feeling? You think you can concoct all those stories and expect me to believe them? Forget it. I’m through with you once and for all.’
He was out of the door when she ran after him.
‘Hold me, hold me. Don’t talk, don’t say a word.’
By eight the next evening, night, really, since it got kohl-dark by six, he was standing naked again in front of the mirror and applying the indigo solution.
‘Stand in it.
He wasn’t quite sure what she meant.
‘Move, stupid. I can’t wait all night long. And why have you stopped playing?’
As usual she had not lit any lamps and his foot landed on the rim of the large twenty-two carat gold platter. He steadied himself and took up the Bhil air where he had left off. She fetched a gold lota with a long spout.
‘What’s the matter with you today? Have you forgotten how you normally stand when playing the flute?’
He hurriedly crossed his right foot over the left one. To his consternation she began to pour water and wash his feet. The game’s up, he said to himself as his heart fibrillated wildly. He watched mesmerized as the indigo from his left foot began to run.
‘Now the right foot. Careful, don’t keel over. Wouldn’t bother me if you dislocated your hip,’ she looked up at him and laughed, ‘but I don’t want my neck broken.’
Did she really not know who he was? Was she indulging him? Or herself? Was it all make-believe, some arcane tableau that they had both decided to participate in? Surely she knew.
‘Step out,’ she wiped his feet dry with her pallu. ‘I’ll water the Tulsi plant with this holy water in the morning. She’ll be pleased and flower as if it were spring.’ She laid her head on his feet, clutched his ankles and stretched out on her stomach. ‘Bless me, O Lord. Never did I dare to presume that I would be worthy of you. Never did I imagine that you would choose me as your beloved. Is it all a dream?’ She craned her neck, her eyes looking into his with adoration. ‘Let me pinch you and make sure that you are real.’ She raised her right hand, dug her nails into his calf muscle and pulled it back till he cried in agony. ‘Did that hurt?’ She looked genuinely surprised. ‘How strange, then you really are real. That will teach you never to abandon me for that Radha woman or anyone else.’
She plucked the peacock feather from his headband. What now, he wondered. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. It was soft and insubstantial-as-air like the Dhaka mulmul of her chunni. Perhaps it really was drafts and undercurrents of a rarefied ether and not a feather at all. He would have preferred the steel tines of a rake to drag through his flesh. A strange torture it was, a smothering, unbearable caress that seemed to test the limits of his endurance. He was not sure whether the eye of the feather touched him but it generated a charge that slid and prowled under his skin and left him bruised and raw. How was he going to reconcile the contradiction of the rutting of the peacocks in the time of cholera and the rapture of their dance on his body today?
Sometimes after lunch, they played cards or Mamta brought the multi-coloured game of checkers and unrolled it like a carpet. His Highness would have preferred to have played without stakes but his wife insisted that money was what made the games fun and exciting. They hadn’t ever discussed it or cast lots but the pairs got fixed soon after they arrived in Kumbhalgarh. The Princess and Mangal were partners against Mamta and the Maharaj Kumar. As the days passed, one thing became clear: the three of them were completely outclassed and outmanoeuvred by the Princess. She looked what she was, a little saint whose innocence shone through like burnished armour while she masterminded every devious scheme of self-advancement, buccaneering and profiteering known to man or woman and many unknown to both.
It was impossible to grasp the enormity of her mendacity, the subtlety of her finger-work and her sense of aggrieved outrage when she was caught red-handed. Her rapacity was as great as her inexhaustible charm. She may be dealt the worst hand of cards, she may have had a run of one plus one every time she threw the dice for the last four hours but she always managed to be ahead of the others. Her standard ploy was a diversionary tactic: she dropped her odhani, the screw of her earring clattered down, something had got into her eye, would someone please use the end of his or her kerchief to get it out. By the time she had rearranged her odhani, retrieved the gold screw or someone had located the boulder lodged between her eyelid and eye, the complexion of the game had changed beyond recognition: her hand of cards had improved to the point where she collected the prize money or her coins were way ahead of the others. On the rare occasions when no ruse worked and all seemed lost, she would get an attack of hiccups or sneezes and accidentally scatter the coins on the cloth board.
‘Damn that fly,’ she slapped her chest hard, ‘it’s been bothering me since we started playing.’
The Maharaj Kumar leaned over and gripped her hand. The side of his wrist rested on her breasts.
‘And pray, what do you think you are doing, Your Highness?’
‘Just helping you catch that fly.’ He squeezed her hand. Beads of sweat broke out on her upper lip.
‘Let go of my hand, Highness.’
‘I will. Once you let me have the fly.’ He kneaded the bones of her hand till you could hear them crack a mile away. Her eyes smouldered with pain and anger but her fist remained tightly closed. Mangal and his wife looked at this family squabble in alarm. They had never seen the Maharaj Kumar so adamant. It was obvious he was hurting her.
If the back of my wrist, the Maharaj Kumar thought, can recognize that softly pounding breast of hers, surely she can identify her nocturnal visitor. The appearance of normality, the feigned amnesia of couples who, a couple of moments back had been locked in each other’s arms, had always struck him as the quintessential duplicity of mankind.
The card fell from her hand. Mangal picked it up to reassure himself that it was real paper and not a trick his eyes were playing on him. Husband, wife and the Maharaj Kumar collapsed with laughter. The Princess was not amused.
‘You planted that card in my hand, Highness. You are an abominable cheat.’
She threw her cards down and stomped out of the room. Mamta ran after her and brought her back after much pleading and coaxing. They resumed the game. That little detour seemed to have improved the quality of her cards enormously.
The news from home and the rest of the kingdom has been mixed. The freak monsoons of the previous year, and the unseasonal flooding have ruined the crops. The economy is in bad shape and there’s a major recession on in the country. The farmers need money to buy seed but the exchequer’s almost empty and the Finance Minister Adinathji is unable to advance any loans. Under the circumstances, Father’s done what most monarchs in the world would: encroached on our neighbour’s lands, marauded, plundered and wherever possible, annexed territory. The choice was between the Sultanates of Delhi and Malwa. Father, as is his wont, weighed the pros and cons and took a shrewd decision. He opted for the former. Both Delhi and Malwa have lost their energy and vigour and are on their last legs. Ibrahim Lodi of Delhi and Mahmud Khalji of Malwa, are kings bereft of ideas and unable to control their nobles and vassals. Malwa would have been a walkover but for the fact that Mahmud Khalji has a prime minister whom he distrusts but who happens to be both a Rajput and very capable. His name’s Medini Rai. It is, as I have said repeatedly, Father’s greatness that unlike his predecessors, he does not choose to commit any hostile acts, let alone start a war with Rajputs. As a consequence, the Sultan of Delhi has been receiving news for the last few months about Rana Sanga helping himself to big chunks of Lodi land.
The Sultan is a deeply suspicious man and regards almost all the high-ranking men in his own kingdom as potential enemies. It is a condition that is as trying for him as it is for those upon whom his suspicion falls. His victims lose their lands, families and heads but the victimizer too must pay a terrible price: his support at home dwindles, his ubiquitous doubts become self-fulfilling and the toxins of insecurity must surely eat into his very soul. If the platitude ‘trust breeds trust’ is even halfway credible, then the reverse must also be true. If Ibrahim Lodi has ignored Father’s depredations it’s because he’s been too busy quelling a series of revolts of his deputies in outlying provinces. He finally managed to put down the internal threats to his throne or at least keep them in abeyance, and rode posthaste to confront the Rana.
Queen Karmavati pestered and pursued Father till the day he left, trying to get him to appoint Vikramaditya governor of Chittor while he was away but Father was not to be swayed. He appointed my younger brother Rattan governor, and took Vikramaditya with him to the battlefront. Court gossip has it that Queen Karmavati has fallen out of favour and Rattan is now being groomed as heir apparent. It may well turn out that Rattan will ascend the throne after Father but it would be shortsighted to underestimate the Queen’s power and influence. It is more than likely that Father took Vikramaditya with him to keep him away from mischief at Chittor while also making certain that he got exposure to a real war. (Incidentally, Mangal’s sources say that the Queen gave in only after Father had made some kind of deal with her though nobody knows what the terms of the agreement were. I can only vouchsafe two things. One, that she didn’t plead my case as heir apparent and two, that we are bound to find out the substance of the covenant in due time.)
The Delhi and Mewar forces collided against each other near the village of Khatoli on the borders of Haravati. The battle lasted five hours at the end of which the Delhi army decided that flight was the better part of valour and took to its heels. Father was shrewd enough to take a Lodi prince prisoner. He was released after the Sultan paid a ransom which ensured that while Mewar may not feast the rest of the year, we would at least be able to eat from time to time.
I was giving the finishing touches to my two hundred and seven page introduction to Shafi’s book when there was a knock on the door. Whichever servant was knocking was in for the bawling of his or her lifetime.
‘Come in.’ The door opened. ‘What the…’
It was my wife looking brand-new after a bath. Her eyes were alight. What awful mischief was she up to?
‘Shall I complete the sentence for you?’
‘You know very well that I’m not to be disturbed between seven thirty and twelve thirty in the mornings.’
‘Not even in an emergency?’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Got you, didn’t I? You are such a spoilsport. Surely I’m allowed to ruin your routine once every eighteen months.’
‘No.’
‘Come on, I’ll race you to Ranakpur.’
‘I bet on all fours.’
‘Very funny. Get up. Mangal and Mamta are waiting in the courtyard.’
‘Have you …’ I stopped short again. I had become a one-response man. Every time my wife suggested one of her impromptu projects, she didn’t have any others, my reaction was to ask her whether she had gone mad. Didn’t I know by now that she was born that way? She was certifiably insane. It was an infectious kind of craziness. Mangal, Mamta and I were also suffering from advanced symptoms.
‘How are we going?’
‘We’ll ride, how else?’
‘You’ll ride?’
‘And beat you to it.’
‘And what do I get if you lose?’
‘My bangles.’
‘I have them. Remember, you lost them at cards.’
‘You cheated.’
‘You should talk.’
As usual she turned the question right back at me.
‘What are you betting?’
I looked out of the window. ‘The flowers from the parijat tree.’
She stared at me quizzically for a long time and then at the tree which covered the ground with hundreds of red-stemmed white flowers every morning.
‘You are the most generous human being I have known. Don’t move. I’m going to take out your nazar. I said sit still. I don’t want anyone casting the evil eye on you.’
I had long since stopped trying to make sense of my wife. She brought two plates, one with burning coals and the other with salt, red chillies and all the other paraphernalia and made me close my eyes. I could feel the air swish and lap in my face as she moved her closed fists back and forth around my head and muttered something. She opened the fists and let the contents fall into the plate on the floor. They crackled and sputtered and spattered angrily.
‘May I open my eyes?’
‘May all your enemies die a terrible death,’ she was in a temper. The firecrackers were still bursting, if anything even more virulently. ‘See, see how much ill they’ve been wishing you. I’m to blame. I should have taken drastic action a long time ago. You watch me, Highness, nobody will come between you and His Majesty again. I’ll take care of you, I’ll vanquish all your enemies.’
Dear God, did she not know who she would have to destroy first?
We were travelling incognito. Greeneyes had got picnic lunches packed for us. I had informed the Governor of our last minute plans and he looked a bit uncertain. Would Father approve? Was our trip as innocent as we were making it out to be? What if something should happen to us? Why the incognito? He was ambivalent about the Princess and Mamta riding with us. It seemed to reassure him that we couldn’t be up to much mischief since we were with our wives, but he would have preferred it if they had ridden in palanquins instead of roughing it out. What put his mind at rest was my request that four of his men go ahead and set up tents for us. My reasoning was elementary. He would have to send somebody or the other to keep a watch on us anyway. Might as well get them to do a little work.
The road between Kumbhalgarh and Ranakpur is hilly and heavily wooded. The sun was out in his full glory but it was still several months to May when the rock of the Aravali ranges would heat up like fat in a griddle. We must have ridden for over two hours when the Princess who was ahead of us – why should I exhaust Befikir today, I figured I would conserve his energies for the final spurt – raised her right hand and brought us to a halt. To everybody’s surprise she took a bow and arrow from Mangal. She patted her horse on the neck and quieted him down. Had she sighted a tiger or a lion? Unlikely at this hour but not impossible. This was, after all, game country. Mangal had got his spear while I readied my bow and arrow. Greeneyes sat straight and still, then quietly fixed the arrow to the bow and pulled the string taut. We could see the herd of barasinghas grazing on an open grass patch to the left of the road ahead now. Did she know what a barasingha weighs? If the buck was wounded and not killed, it could rush her and lift her and her horse all the way to heaven.
What was she waiting for?
It was clear soon enough. She wanted the odds to be even. She would take a shot at him only if he had as much of a chance to maul or kill her as she had with him. Of all varieties of deer, the barasingha is, by far, my favourite. One look at him and it was obvious why the Princess had chosen him. The twelve-antlered one stood out, literally, head and shoulders above the rest of his tribe. His complexion was a russet gold. Even in the dark it would shine like a nimbus around him. He was at least five feet tall, that’s not counting his horns. He was lean and tight and without a gram of fat. The sinews on his legs were made of steel cables. They had three specific tasks: to charge; to round up his kinsfolk and retreat if his tribe was in danger; and to hold firmly to the earth when a contender to his throne locked horns with him. He had a neck like the double-barrelled thighs of a Gujarat wrestler. Every now and then he twitched his epidermis to get rid of a fly. But it was his eyes that set him apart from everyone else. They were keenly intelligent and kept a casual but vigilant watch over his wards. They were aloof and full of hauteur. Thus far, they said, and no more. The message was clear. Don’t trifle with me.
He stared at the Princess for a long time and then turned his head dismissively. What you do is your business just so long as you leave my people alone. He grazed for a minute and looked up again. This time he sensed that the woman across was waiting for him. He pawed the ground furiously in a show of strength hoping that wiser counsel would prevail and she would leave him alone. It also gave him a couple of seconds to decide on his course of action. She was still watching his every move. It was clear to him now that he was the target. The least he could do was make it a moving one. He bolted. It was a magnificent sight as he took off, his front legs folded, his body including his rear legs straight as the arrow he hoped to elude. It was a smart move. He had alerted his people against present and imminent danger. There was a left to right stampede now. My wife looked motionless even though she swivelled a full 180 degrees, keeping the speeding beast in the dead centre of her vision. There was no slack in her backbone, neck or the muscles of her arms. The thunder was deafening and the duststorm obscured the view. He was out of sight now. She waited. He must have taken a three-quarter turn for he was back. He had accelerated his speed. There was a barely audible zing of the bow string and the arrow was out of sight. We waited till the entire herd of two hundred or so deer had disappeared and the dust had settled. He was lying on his side, the beast; the arrow had pierced his heart. He had died instantly
‘Where did you learn to shoot like that, Highness?’ Mangal asked the Princess as she pulled out the arrow.
‘It was a fluke,’ the Princess said self-deprecatingly.
‘No fluke this.’
‘My uncle taught me.’ She was embarrassed by the attention she was attracting. ‘Let’s keep a leg and give the rest away to the villagers nearby.’
I was not overeager to meet anybody. Not that the villagers would recognize me but one couldn’t discount the possibility that someone might have touched the Little Saint’s feet or danced with her in Kumbhalgarh or Chittor. It would put unnecessary stress on the Governor and we would soon have welcome committees waiting for us at every village and hundreds, if not thousands of villagers would accompany us all the way to Ranakpur. But the barasingha had been downed and there was enough meat there to feed seventy to eighty people. There was nothing to be done but locate the closest village. I was reluctant to leave the women by themselves but my wife, as usual, had the last word.
‘I can take care of myself and Mamta.’
We discovered a hamlet three quarters of a mile away and spoke to the village headman and his friends. Barasingha meat is a rare treat reserved for feast days. The villagers were delighted with our gift and only too happy to help us carry their dinner home. They hitched two of their biggest bullocks and we were about to ride out with six young men when the headman asked whether we would stay for an impromptu lunch of paunk. It was an offer I was unlikely to refuse even on my deathbed.
Paunk is no ordinary food. It is ambrosia and an enigma. Which mortal would have thought of using crisp vermicelli savouries made from chickpea flour as a foil to the lightly roasted green and succulent corn of jowar picked fresh from the farm? Eaten soft and crunchy, it is deadly and unpredictable but spike it with lemon and what you get is a collision and collusion of sweet, sour, and salty that’s likely to go down as one of the high points of one’s life.
When was I going to get to know my people? The men were tall and erect and handsome and the women were shy and beautiful. (This is, I realize, the paunk speaking but it also happens to be the truth.) They were hospitable and loved company. We sat on a dhurrie under the open sky. They wanted to know where we came from.
‘Chittor,’ we told them.
‘We knew it,’ they said. ‘You look like people from the centre of power, though you may for all we know, be powerless. But that busy, purposeful look is Chittor, no question about it. And the accent is a dead giveaway. And what is your name?’
‘Sisodia.’
‘Not related, we trust, to the royal family. If you were what would you be doing with the likes of us? But you never know, some princes like to travel incognito and keep a watch on their people. Hope you are not some of them.’
‘Sure we are. Can’t you tell from our haughty demeanour? Better watch what you say.’ My wife pointed to me, ‘That man’s making mental notes of everything you say because he is the Maharaj Kumar and I’m the Princess.’
They found this very funny. They slapped each other on the back and the women giggled and nudged my wife on the shoulder. They bowed to us and fanned us and got into the spirit of things.
‘Your Highness, my daughter needs a husband. We’ll give you three cows and a dozen hens. What do you say, will you take her off our hands and make her the Queen of Mewar when, long live His Majesty, you become the king? The first one we believe is a saint but no queen.’
‘Saint?’ That was my wife again. ‘They call her a strumpet and a nautch girl.’
‘Really? The Maharaj Kumar need never worry about our darling daughter singing or dancing. She has no ear for music and has paddles for feet. But she’s docile as a cow, cooks a fine meal, washes clothes and gives a back massage that crushes your bones but makes you fit within minutes. There she is, the one who’s got her head covered by her mother’s chunni.’ The girl withdrew further behind her mother and chewed on the cloth of her chunni. ‘No, seriously, what do your parents do? Perhaps you have a younger brother who might fancy her.’
How much do you earn? And your parents? How many siblings? Fourteen sisters? We can’t manage to get rid of one. Didn’t your mother bury any in the sand? They were incredible. They had no problems asking strangers about their ancestors, their property, their troubles and the most intimate details of their lives.
‘Why haven’t you got your daughter married yet?’ Greeneyes asked the headman.
‘We found a good boy for her last year but we had a bad crop and what with taxes, we couldn’t afford the dowry. The boy’s parents wouldn’t wait and got him married to someone else.’
‘Don’t you put money aside for a lean year?’ I asked.
‘We do but if we give that as taxes what do we eat the whole year? The Maharana, I’m sure has his share of problems but it would help if he could devise a more equitable system of taxes. More in the good years and less in the bad ones.’
‘You think that will clear your debts and you’ll be happy then?’ I asked laughingly.
‘Of course not. Only dumb animals don’t complain. Human beings always have one reason or the other to complain about.’
It was time to go. The Governor’s men would be waiting for us after they had pitched our tents at Zajora. If we weren’t there in a couple of hours, they would be sure to think that we had decamped and would rush back to Kumbhalgarh and inform the Governor.
I woke everybody at one thirty. The men from Kumbhalgarh dismantled the tents and we took off almost immediately. I had not been to Ranakpur before and I wanted to see it in the first light at dawn. The road rose steadily through hills and mountains and was densely wooded. We were on the outskirts of the village by five. We bathed in a frisky rivulet which would disappear at the first sign of summer. The water was a shock to the system. I could hear my blood rush back and forth, take hair-pin turns, speed up to my brains and plunge to my toes across my body to warm me. We put on fresh clothes and stood at the base of the temple.
Ranakpur is consecrated to the Tirthankar after whom Leelawati’s great-grandfather, Adinathji was named. It was built during the golden age of architecture in Mewar, but not by my great-grandfather Kumbha. When the temple was complete, Rana Kumbha visited it. He thought it extraordinarily beautiful. He regretted that not he, but one of the men in his employ, his Jain Finance Minister, had built it. But all was not lost. He would build a Victory Pillar in marble inside the temple which would put the Treasurer’s work in the shade. The Jain poets are discreet about the Minister’s response to this grotesque suggestion. Whatever his private feelings, there was no way the Treasurer could say ‘no’ to his sovereign. The plan, side and front elevations, the interlocking and intricate carvings, everything was worked out and approved by the Rana and work was begun. But try as he might, and mighty as he was, there was no completing the pillar. As a matter of fact, even today what I see is an enormous square-based eyesore that does not even reach the ceiling of the first floor.
We took off our shoes at the bottom of the wide flight of stairs, almost the width of a middling street in Chittor and climbed to the plinth. Suddenly the sun struck and crept in like the first wave of a flow tide near Surat. It seeped into the marble and retreated as a wisp of cloud swept over the nascent sun way below the horizon. There was no one else there at this hour. Within minutes the sunlight streamed in like a river in flood. At the extreme corner of the building are rounded bulwarks as at any fort except that these are much shorter. Ranged across the entire plinth are enclosure walls that are really a series of miniature temples housing subsidiary luminaries from the Jain pantheon. Four beautifully proportioned central gateways interrupt the shrines on all four sides. It is impossible to gauge how stupendously large and complex the temple is until you get to the very heart of the edifice. And, yet, that too is a limited and partial view for one has not yet climbed to the first and then the second storey.
Jain saviours in the panels stand or sit, stiff and erect, compellingly directing one’s attention to their large, shining, unblinking eyes. The quadruple image of Adinath in the core chamber at the very top is no exception. You may close your eyes but you always know that the first Tirthankar’s eyes are within you, not outside.
The Ranakpur temple was a revelation. It opened my eyes to possibilities that had not occurred to me. Hindu temples come in many shapes and sizes. The spire may be small, large or sometimes totally dispensed with but the garbha griha, the sanctum sanctorum where the image of the deity resides, is almost always the heart of darkness. It symbolizes the impenetrable mystery of divinity. It is the primal womb, a tight and closed blackness, a claustrophobic and intimidating place which only the intermediaries between the deity and the layman, the brahmins, may negotiate. The Jain temple at Ranakpur turned the Hindu concept on its head. It brought things out in the open. Instead of the subterranean and the secretive, light and air were the elements of the divine here. The white marble was part of that openness. It had the swirl and speed of milk being poured.
The Ranakpur temple may be dedicated to Adinath, the first Tirthankar. And yet if you ask me, it is a celebration of the Sun-god. Its thrust and impulse are light and its goal is enlightenment. It is unlike any temple I know. It is not its incredible sprawl, the marble mass or the exquisite carving which are central to the conception of the temple. As the temple rises tier upon tier, there are no walls but pillars that let the light and the air mingle and merge with the structure and stone. By themselves, the latter would have made the temple heavy and obdurate and earthbound. What I saw instead was the transubstantiation of marble into light. By making light a structural and integral part of the architecture, the Adinath temple had beams, shafts, columns and walls of light, and floated in the air.
The Adinath temple, as I was to discover, was not one, but a hundred, a thousand and a hundred thousand temples. By dawn, noon, by twilight, by the hour, by the minute, by full moon and the other phases of the moon, there’s a different Adinath temple. The speed, weight and shape of a cloud can alter it. Rain, shadow, lightning and thunder reshuffle and reinvent it. It does not celebrate conquest or victory. I do not know whether Rana Kumbha’s treasurer was singing a paean to the power of money or hoping to etch his name on the continuum of time. It doesn’t matter. It is an aspiration and striving towards openness and freedom. It is a flight and an ascension. It dares you to assay the unknown, to reach out beyond yourself.
I sat down in the lotus position. I doubt if I was conscious of what I was doing. The light of my ancestor, the Sun-god suffused me. ‘So’ hum’. I am that. I breathed in ‘so’ ’ and breathed out ‘hum’. And I too was transubstantiated. I was the marble and the light and the air. And then the temple lost its walls and all that was left was consciousness, an indivisibility and oneness with all things living and unliving.
What am I doing in a Jain temple? Why did Mahavir, who founded Jainism, and Buddha find Hinduism inadequate and look to other ways for moksha or nirvana as Buddha would call it? Why did they reject violence so totally? Did it not amount to denying one of our deepest human impulses? Was that one of the reasons why Hinduism has reasserted itself in our land and squeezed Buddhism till there’s only one drop of it left in Sri Lanka? Jainism, it is true, survives but only in a marginal way.
Violence is first and last about power. When two pairs of antlers are locked into each other, it is to decide who controls power. Jainism is even more extreme than Buddhism in its stance on violence. Its monks and nuns often wear white masks over their noses and mouths to avoid killing the infinitesimal forms of life floating around in the air. But it sometimes seems to me that they have only replaced violence with finance. It is still very much the pursuit of power. And yet even I, one of the bloodiest mass murderers in history, must confess to the temptation of peace, the peace of mind that must come from renouncing violence.
There is no gainsaying both the Buddhist and the Blue God’s analysis of the human condition. It is desire, the life of the senses, attachment and ignorance which suck us deeper and deeper into the quagmire of unhappiness, misery and more desire, and keep turning the wheel of reincarnation ceaselessly. But Buddha’s compassion, vision and understanding are all the more remarkable because even after enlightenment, he refrained from saying that his is the one and only way; follow it. Quite the contrary, he tells anyone who is interested that the golden mean and discipline are what worked for him but each of us must discover on our own whether they are valid for us. If not, we must seek our own way out of the maze of life, death and rebirth. The detachment that Buddha preached is, like all teachings, open to different interpretations. It is true that your chances of meeting with an accident go down perceptibly if you do not stir out of the house and cross the street or join the army and go to war. Needless to say, your chances of not meeting with that accident will not just improve dramatically but become fool-proof and fail-safe if you commit suicide. But if detachment is really fear of failure and hence never putting oneself to the test, or if it’s fear of being hurt, humiliated or rejected, then one is closing all doors to life, to the possibilities of happiness, pain, dejection, achievement and experience. Reincarnation may be on the cards for most of us but we live this particular life, whether it is maya or whatever else, only once. This is our only chance to engage it.
Excess is the language of adolescence. We do not have to posit life as extremes or polarities, as either close to nothing or surfeit. The thought of the afterlife or lives or even nirvana does not mean that we have to miss out on this life.
I woke up with a song the next morning. It was not on my lips but on my wife’s. I looked around for her but she wasn’t in the room.
It was dark outside and a low wind scuttled through the scrub. I ran up the stairs of the temple in one breath and sat down against a pillar. A chill light flowed from inside. It came to me then that marble is nothing but frozen moonlight. My bodily processes slowed down, my temperature dropped, my breathing became subdued and I found myself retreating or rather, distancing myself from the ups and downs in my life that had exercised me so inordinately; from my family, Father, wife, Queen Karmavati, Vikramaditya.
I do not know how to describe my wife’s homage, song, offering or whatever one wishes to call it. I think it was an invitation and an invocation to the Sun-god. It was not entirely bereft of words but almost so. This was unusual since my wife’s preferred mode of expressing religious fervour is poetry. Her singing and dancing were but variations and extensions of her lyrics. If the purest form of music, its very essence and distillate are the singing human voice, why do we debase it with words? Since I’m not a singer and am not likely to found my own school of classical music, I doubt whether alaapi will ever become the centrepiece of a recital. I had never discussed my concept of the alaap with my wife and yet here she was, not expounding but singing it. Was it the Ranakpur temple? Or did she and I think alike at least on this one single subject?
It was strange weather for this season. When I looked through the open interstices in the tiers of the temple, I saw black clouds grinding their teeth and itching for a fight. There was vicious thunder from time to time. It looked like rain but the banks of clouds stacked up like unsteady boulders would not let the sun, lightning or rain through. My wife started out thoughtfully with a quiet, unhurried exploration of her mind. It was a diverse landscape, asymmetrical but not chaotic. Cold, empty oceans stretched forever and yet sprouted gentle fires where you could warm your hands. Macabre winds blew over dead cities bringing messages of longing and unfulfilled desires. But even here there were transparent blue pools of water where you could rest for an hour or a couple of nights. If you climbed the hills, the horizon slipped under your feet and moved behind you so that the future was something that had occurred in a long-forgotten past. A fog floated in now and you couldn’t see the present but there was no panic for if there was one polestar in this universe, it was faith and hope.
My wife called out to the sun, her song was impatient and imperious. But it could also implore and plead, use any kind of guile to push aside the rock-clouds. I closed my eyes.
She changed her tactics. Her voice grew soft and sinuous and hinted at secret trysts. It ingratiated itself into the chinks and fissures, became frisky and intimate and slipped in and out of the rock precipice in the sky. It withdrew into the cellars and underworlds of the earth, lingered like mist and then started back. It gained momentum rapidly, wave rolled into urgent wave, fought its way out into the open, built into a roaring wall of water that would brook no obstacle and hurled itself at the black impregnable dome. Nothing happened. Then there was a fearsome creaking sound and the sky tottered and crashed down. The sun broke through the temple, not a nascent, tentative one but a full-blown, unstoppable golden orb. The carvings, the pillars, the mandapas, the staggered levels of the temple, the full marble structure and the two of us inside turned into light. My wife’s song was pure joy. The temple tilted, and we were airborne. We flew at the speed of light and were at the heart of the stillness that is the universe.
Messengers from Chittor were waiting for us at the bottom of the steps to the temple. The Sultan of Delhi had engaged the Mewar forces a second time and had been routed once again. We were to return to the capital immediately. We rode hard and spent the next night at Kumbhalgarh. In the early morning I went down to the gardens and collected the showers of parijat flowers, five hundred of them, in the cloth of my saafa and poured them over Greeneyes. She woke up and looked in wonderment at the profusion of flowers on her person and all over the floor She gathered them in the palms of her hands time and again, flung her head back and let them fall over her face, her long, diaphanous neck, her breasts and the rest of her body.
‘I wish we didn’t have to leave. You’ll never bring me parijats again.’
‘Yes, I will. I’ve taken a branch of the tree from here.’
