Chapter 19-

Things had not changed much. Father pleaded indisposition when I asked for an audience to lay my head at his feet. Why had he called me back?

When I went to the Victory Hall in the evening, a bandaged effigy masquerading as a human being dragged himself to the throne. His face was sewn up. Some Delhi soldiers had tried to sever his dead arm and the one good leg had been sliced open in the thigh. We all rose and bowed. He looked at us with what a stranger would call a one-eyed sneer but which was in fact one of his more amiable expressions and, to everyone’s consternation, raised his good hand over his head and bowed deeply to all of us. Had one of the enemy blows affected his brain? No Rana will raise his hand above his shoulder in salutation; how could His Majesty possibly bow to his subjects and subordinates? The court stood awkwardly not knowing how to respond. But the surprises were just beginning. He bade us sit down in our accustomed places. And then, like all the other nobles, took his seat on the floor next to the throne.

The courtiers and the vassals couldn’t contain themselves. They whispered about the mental health of His Majesty and his fitness to rule. I stepped out and prostrated myself before Father. That was the only way I could distract the court’s attention. He was brusque: ‘May Lord Eklingji’s blessings be upon you.’ My wife took in the situation and followed me. It was a little unusual for the Princess to pay her respects to His Majesty in open court but it was turning out to be a memorably unorthodox day. Father was chatting with my wife.

‘Never seen a ghost before, have you, Princess?’

‘I’ve seen worse, Your Majesty. From tomorrow I’ll cook for you and heal you within fifteen days.’

‘What would the Little Saint know of cooking?’

‘Even the gods come to eat Merta food from me, Sire.’

‘I might just take you up on that, Princess.’

‘You don’t have a choice, Majesty.’ And added softly, ‘Shall I help you sit on the throne?’

He smiled and shook his head.

When the whispered confabulation was over, Father addressed the court.

‘My lords, raos, rawats, rajas, the highest and the mightiest in the land, friends and people of Mewar,’ his voice was low and rich in emotion, ‘we welcome you. We are honoured that you are with us to share this great and happy victory. This is the second time that we have inflicted a heavy defeat upon the Sultanate of Delhi. Ibrahim Lodi has not only sued for peace but has agreed to all our terms and conditions. We could not have done this without your help, cooperation and loyalty to Mewar. We are truly thankful to you. Before we proceed to the banquet hall and then to the victory celebrations, including a mushaira and fireworks display, I have a small announcement to make.

‘My lords, you are all familiar with our Hindu customs and culture.’ The voice had suddenly changed. You could have heard it all the way to the ancient coronation field two miles away. ‘We do not worship a damaged idol.’ He paused. Like everyone else, I too wondered what the hell he was talking about. ‘A scratch, even a slight chip, and the holy image is holy no more. We no longer offer it prayers. It is no longer garlanded, and we no more fall at its feet. The divinity has withdrawn from it and we install a new image. My noble friends, I stand before you today like a broken and desecrated image. Victory has taken its toll. I am broken and injured from head to toe. It has been a great honour to lead Mewar all these years but it is a wise king who knows when it is time to retire. I beg you to grant me leave to relinquish my crown. Relieve me of my royal duties and appoint a new, whole and unblemished sovereign instead of me. All I ask you is to bestow a not too opulent maintenance upon me, just enough to keep body and soul together and allow me to serve our state of Mewar like any other warrior noble and lord in this assembly for the rest of my life.’

I could have gagged. Bravo. Hooray. Cheers. If that wasn’t superb theatre, I don’t know anything about acting any more. Oh the modesty, the humility and the magnanimity of the man. There were tears in Rajput eyes, young and ancient. You might have the full deck of cards but Father has always got an extra card up his sleeve that’s sure to wipe you out. I could hear a murmur rising. I could tell it was about to turn into a thundering chorus. The credulous fools didn’t even pause to ask themselves why after all these years of victories and bodily injuries, His Majesty had chosen this moment to offer his resignation. What was he up to? What game was he playing? Why not say it in plain language, what did the great big idol of Mewar want? But why was I rushing things? The cat was bound to pop out of the bag in a few minutes. If Father was trying to prove his popularity, he had made his point. They were raising hell, yelling the great big hall down, vying with each other to proclaim their loyalty. It was wonderful to watch my brother Vikramaditya, who not too many years ago had tried to unseat Father, now racing ahead of everyone else and in a frenzy of filial love swearing to slit his own throat if His Majesty stepped down.

I had, needless to say, painted myself into a corner. I had no one to blame but myself. If you are a public personality and wish to remain so, you can’t afford to shy away from showmanship. It’s not enough to be honest and loyal, frankly it doesn’t matter if you are not, so long as you are perceived to be so. Why was I tongue-tied, why couldn’t I compete with the rest of them and tell Father that I wouldn’t permit him to retire from kingship when that was the truth and nothing but? If you like, let’s take a more cynical view. What would happen if he threw it all up and walked away? What if they appointed, at his bidding, Vikramaditya as his successor? Anyway you looked at it, I had little choice but to bray along with the others. It was too late now. I had let my diffidence and dislike for exhibitionism get the better of me. Besides, I was being unfair to the majority of Mewar’s vassals and friends. Whatever their private ambitions, they respected Father and believed in him and his leadership. I caught my uncle Lakshman Simhaji looking at me quizzically. He was my father’s colleague and contemporary. He could afford to hold his tongue. No one would question his intentions.

Two minutes of ‘nays’ would have made the point but His Majesty let them go on for over five minutes. It fell upon Rawat Rattan Simha of Salumbar to refute His Majesty’s transparently rhetorical argument. With what earnestness and enthusiasm he took up his task. There was not a shadow of dissembling or sham in the good man. Like almost all the other grandees, he believed that his liege meant every word he uttered and would renounce both royal title and function. How suavely Father had manoeuvred his vassalage and courtiers exactly where he wanted.

We were kings by divine right, the earthly regents of Lord Eklingji who is none other than the great Shiva himself. By the simple device of a simile, Father had entered highly dangerous and dubious waters and arrogated divinity to himself. And yet here were Rawat Rattan Simha and the other elders falling over each other trying to explain with more and more convoluted ratiocination why he must continue to occupy the throne and perform the duties that devolve upon the Maharana.

‘We submit to Your Majesty that your excessive sense of modesty, your untiring and persistent endeavours to put the interest of the state above all else, and your regard for the court have clouded your mind like the opaque tissue of a cataract and thus engendered the subtlest misapprehensions and misconceptions in it. We beg you to allow us to remove the scales from your eyes. The injuries His Majesty has received are the mark of the legendary heroism and valour that every Rajput thirsts after. They were earned in the line of the highest duty to the state while vanquishing the enemy and ensuring the pride of victory for Mewar and its friends. You are not the lesser from loss of limbs or your wounds. Far from diminishing your reputation and stature, they crown you with the most illustrious laurels and enhance the glory and fame of Mewar. More than ever before you are the paradigm of divinity.’

The bombast was forgivable. The lord of Salumbar had a difficult task and he was trying to impress his liege. How we get carried away by words. Who is to keep track and count of the rights and prerogatives we give away of our own accord in our eagerness to make gods of men? Further vociferous cheering followed. Finally, Rao Viramdev stepped forward and raised his hand. He waited till the last voice had died down.

‘Your Majesty, you have heard the verdict of the people of Mewar, of the raos and rawats, of the princes and the court officials. We’ve gathered here to celebrate our victory over the Delhi Sultanate. I beg you not to turn it into a grievous defeat.’ Thereupon, Rao Viramdev and the other chieftains including Raja Puraji Kika got up and took His Majesty by the hand and placed him on the unoccupied throne.

Father demurred. Father protested. Father acquiesced.

‘What can I say? To refuse now would be tantamount to abusing your trust in me and my office. There is only one thing that sustains any kingship: the faith and goodwill of its people. I’m overwhelmed by your regard for me. I am beholden to you and hope that I shall continue to be worthy of your great trust.’ When the applause had subsided, Father spoke softly. ‘I have but one small request.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ the courtiers and the whole assembly shouted, ‘we’ll lay down our lives for you, Sire.’ His Majesty had something a little less straightforward and obvious than the mere gift of life on his mind. We had come to the point of this whole elaborate exercise. ‘It is our wish that the fort and province of Ranthambhor be bestowed upon Prince Vikramaditya and his brother Prince Uday Simha as jagirs.’

Where had all the hurrahs and bellowing and ‘Anything, absolutely anything, Sire, it is yours to ask and ours to give’ vanished? The court sat stunned. His Majesty was breaking with tradition and the sanctity that attaches to protocol that had been deliberately constructed over hundreds of years. He would get away with it, no doubt about it, but it was evident that in his moment of triumph Father had overplayed his hand. He had misjudged the mood of his court: his lords, nobles and rajas were willing to back him all the way but not the caprice and favouritism of an overbearing and overindulged queen. By giving in to her, Father was willing to risk alienating his closest allies. But there was more to follow. Having gone out on a limb for Queen Karmavati’s two sons, the younger one still a child, and asked for a special and extraordinary dispensation for them, Father felt compelled to safeguard their interests further.

Rani Karmavati may have been a foolish queen but she was no fool. The jagir of Ranthambhor was not only a considerable territory, it was one of our most prestigious provinces. She must have suspected that her beloved Vikramaditya may not be up to the task of defending that fine stronghold.

‘I would like to ask His Highness, Hada Surajmal to be the guardian of the two Princes in Ranthambhor.’

Hada Surajmal sat impassively, only the ticking of the pulse in his tight-set jaw giving away his surprise, anger and discomfiture at Father’s request. Queen Karmavati and the Hada had nothing, absolutely nothing in common but the fact that they were siblings. Hada Surajmal was curt, haughty, painfully upright and exceedingly sensitive to the possibility that his position and privileges may be construed to be a consequence of his sister’s marriage to His Majesty. He loathed his nephew Vikramaditya. If he could, he would never have visited Chittor. He did not stay at the Palace but with friends of his in the capital. He was one of our most important and valued allies. He was also one of the three or four people in Mewar who could stand up to Father.

‘Your Majesty, the interests of Mewar are paramount to me.’ He then looked pointedly at me. ‘As such my loyalty to the throne forbids me from undertaking a commitment that may perchance lead to a conflict of interests.’

I found it droll that the Hada should glower at me. Since I no longer figured in the line of succession, there would certainly be no conflict of interest between his nephews, especially Vikramaditya and me.

‘Your Highness,’ Father answered in an unaccustomedly appeasing tone, ‘I doubt that such an extreme exigency will arise. But let me reassure you that should there ever be a divergence of interests, the well-being of Mewar will take precedence over all else.’

Hada Surajmal had little choice but to accept the assignment.

‘As you wish, Majesty, but,’ he was not about to give in without protest, ‘I hope I have made it amply clear that I would find it intolerable to be put in an untenable position.’

Father smiled and refrained from comment. ‘One last matter and we’ll proceed with the festivities. We have recalled our eldest son from Kumbhalgarh. As of tomorrow he’ll be appointed governor of Chittor and will assist me in the War Council.’

A single audible gasp escaped from the Queen’s enclosure. While my favourite mother’s confidant, the eunuch Bruhannada maintained an impassive expression, she had not been able to contain herself. It was followed by much thumping and clapping from the court. I’m often lectured in glowing terms about the innate wisdom of the common man. It is pointed out that regardless of temporary lapses, it rests on a solid foundation of pragmatism, hardheaded sense and the good of the community. It’s a nice thesis and patently false. The common man is just as fickle, shortsighted, sensible or otherwise as the nobility gathered in this court. We are deluding ourselves when we say man is a rational animal. If we are to understand him, or ourselves rather, we must look to impulse, the mood of the moment, the herd mentality and a cursed unwillingness to weigh the consequences of our actions. There was indeed a simple explanation for the sudden show of affection for me. When indifferent tidings come on the heels of bad news, they are greeted as if there has been a turn in fortunes that one has prayed and yearned for every hour of one’s life.

I would have to be a tetchy prig to be piqued by the newfound enthusiasm of the courtiers for me and their attempts to catch my eye and convey their congratulations. I smiled back at them but my thoughts were elsewhere. That old fox, His Majesty, was in good shape and at his devious best. You had to hand it to him. He had fooled even his favourite queen who had put him up to gifting the kingdom and purse of Ranthambhor to her own children. That susurrus of surprise from her was not for dramatic effect. It was the genuine article. She had got what she wanted but Father had proved once again that he was the master of the stalemate. He had obviously left Queen Karmavati in the dark about the new move he had planned and had thwarted both Vikramaditya and me. Our fortunes had improved but we were no better off than we were. You can’t please everybody, a king certainly can’t, Father had said to me when I was a child. He had forgotten to mention the other half of that proposition. You can displease everybody and get some peace of mind for yourself. The whole court, including the Queen, was at liberty to keep guessing who Father had in mind as his successor while the princes could keep themselves busy scheming and intriguing against each other and with some luck kill each other off.

* * *

So far, two of the administrative officers working for me have taken it upon themselves to tell me that they did things differently. I have quietly and half seriously reminded them that things haven’t changed but have gone back to being the same as they were. My style may not have changed but my hours have. I hope it is only till such time as I finish catching up. Otherwise I will have given the lie to my maxim that whether you work eight or twenty hours, the quantum of work that gets done on a normal day is the same.

Vikramaditya had spent all his time on the second set of administrative services he set up. The parallel economy, the parallel police force, the parallel food and agricultural department, the parallel trade and commerce ministry and so on. That left the original infrastructure in a shambles. My younger brother, Rattan, who was given charge of Chittor when Father was out campaigning against Sultan Ibrahim Lodi, did not wish to rock the boat. His concept of the job was an interim one, a holding operation till Father returned. His chief concern was to keep the machinery of the state working.

I am supposed to be working right under Father’s nose. That should leave me paralyzed but I prefer to think that it gives me a free hand. After all, his subjects are bound to take it for granted that he is keeping an eye on me. For one interminable month I debated whether I should take action against the officers who ran the parallel government and whose dereliction of duty had few precedents in our history. Tej and Shafi had enough documented evidence against them, especially the senior members, to keep them in jail for at least a couple of lives. I knew it was the right thing to do to set a precedent and a deterrent. But wisdom, I felt at this juncture, did not lie in taking punitive action. I would be raking up a lot of old issues and making the whole administration nervous.

It would be seen as vengeful instead of just and fair and I would paralyse the civil services. Perhaps I was taking the easier way out, letting sleeping dogs lie. (As in most cases where higher-ups are involved, the moving force behind the colossal corruption in the state would go scot-free.) I declared amnesty for all and sundry in my mind. But anybody who slipped up henceforth would pay a heavy price for wrongs past and present.

There is no addiction like work and routine. After barely five weeks in Chittor, I find it difficult to recall that I have been out of circulation for close to three years, one in Chittor and nearly two in Kumbhalgarh.

I ask myself how this extended period of enforced marginalization and inactivity has affected me? Do human beings ever change? Do calamities, crises, sudden loss of self-esteem, and the meaning of one’s life, the death of one’s closest friends or relatives transform one in obvious as well as subtle ways? Do our goals alter? Is there a larger vision of life? Do our unhappy experiences make us more understanding of people and their foibles? One could go on with the list of possibilities for a couple of pages. But one question alone will suffice. Do they make us better human beings? I find the thought that great upheavals and traumas may leave us untouched at the very core of our beings, even as we protest to the contrary, devastating, though I suspect that that is where the truth lies. I’m not making any large generalizations nor do I claim to have made a deep study of the subject. I can only speak for myself. I find that I’m still as intent on being Maharaj Kumar as I ever was. There’s one thing and one thing alone that I want above all else: it is the crown after Father’s death. Secondly, I’m still utterly and inseparably attached to worldly ambitions like enlarging our kingdom to the boundaries of the oceans, and that’s the very least I would aim for. Take those two things away and what is left of me? My wife, Kausalya, Leelawati, my good friends Raja Puraji Kika, Tej and Shafi matter to me, but the meaning of my life does not revolve around them.

I am, as even my well-wishers are constrained to admit, a man with not one, but numerous hobby horses. The intervening lost years have brought a new sense of urgency so that I’m now trying to ride astride all of them simultaneously. Everything has a rhythm and a momentum. A little too early or too late and you fall on your face. I am beginning to appreciate more and more the importance of the auspicious moment. Why is timing so important for a project? Because mankind would like a tree to bear fruit before planting the seed. We would all want Victory Towers dedicated to ourselves without laying deep and solid foundations. The propitious moment is rarely the next day or the next minute. It is a week, months or even years away. It forces you to get your wits together, to analyse data, assess the chances of success, check whether you’ve got your facts right and check and double-check who is likely to go along with you, who’ll go against you and who’ll sit on the fence. Plan your strategy to the last detail and then know when to seize the auspicious moment. Ripeness is all. Or phrasing it a little more practically and personally, catch Father and his senior advisers at the right moment. Even in matters of state when sometimes the very survival of the polity may be at stake, never underestimate the effect of the favourable moment. Without it, as with both pointless haste and procrastination, all will come to nought.

At the third cabinet meeting since my return, the town planner, Sahasmal and I pushed through the water and sewage schemes without needing exceptional skills in persuasion. I’ll attempt the tunnel project only when Sahasmal has devised a foolproof system of ventilating the passages.

That brought me to the third and most pressing of my self-imposed tasks: reliable information regarding ordnance and weapons knowhow and the latest military strategies. Instead of making a case for each individual project, I had temporarily circumvented most of the problems by clubbing all of them under the title of Intelligence. All I did was to get Father’s approval for Mangal’s appointment as head of the intelligence services. Father was of the view that as Mewar’s territories grew, there was a need to recruit more agents and of course, increase the budget for the department substantially. What Mangal and I did with the budget was my business and responsibility so long as the security of the state was not compromised.

Mewar’s intelligence services were at an all-time low. Let me rephrase that. The reports from our various agents kept coming in regularly. But in the absence of an active and centralized guiding authority, a clear-cut enunciation of goals and special subjects of interest, our agents stuck to traditional areas of observation, enquiry, infiltration and reporting. There was no system for gauging the value of the reports. Not only was the enemy as busy as we were planting false information, but, as in most fields where immediate means of verification are not available, the only way an agent can raise his importance is to inflate dangers and threats – better still, invent them and inculcate a chronic crisis mentality. Matters got completely out of hand and inextricably complicated when the competitive element was added to the spy scenario.

Agents rarely knew the contents submitted by other members in the service but they did not wish to take any chances. They turned master storytellers. In the majority of the reports, even dry ones like the enemy’s crop situation or the numerical strength of a garrison, they turned themselves into heroes. They took on the might of Delhi, Gujarat, Malwa or any of our other opponents single-handed; the odds would be stacked a thousand to one but they secured the information and came out alive.

But you cannot blame the agents. It was our systems which were at fault. For a while after Mangal took over, things seemed to go from bad to worse. Had I made a mistake in choosing him? It’s one thing to take care of the Maharaj Kumar, pick up whatever gossip and rumour you can and protect His Highness, and quite another to take over the reins of a demoralized intelligence service, enthuse its members while always keeping alive the threat of disciplinary action and most important of all, deliver valuable and trustworthy information. Maybe Mangal was out of his depth. Two months into the post, almost all reports from his agents had ceased. Then every once in a while he started sending me pages written in Turki, some of them in a childish script, some in exquisite calligraphy along with an execrable and indecipherable scrawl which was meant to be a translation of the Turki. I had little desire and even less patience to unravel the meaning from bits and pieces of what was clearly someone else’s diary. They were rarely connected and I did not get a feel for the diarist or the way his mind worked. Besides, I also had the strange feeling that if I continued reading, I would become a voyeur. A diary by definition is a chronicle of past events. Detailed descriptive passages about flowers and fruits; nocturnal raids which were nothing but dacoities in plain language; the one-time bane of my life, poetry, though I must confess that in the last couple of years, constant exposure has worn me down to the point that I am not only receptive to it but even look forward to it occasionally. But poetry in Turki where assonance and wordplay run riot and the translator is not always capable of handling the multiple layers of meaning? No, thank you. Constant troubles with uncles, cousins and half-brothers, as if I don’t have enough of my own. Drinking parties followed by remorse at having imbibed.

What interest would Father have in an indigent man who was a maruader, with literate and cultured tastes, in some distant land? I stopped going through the scraps. I had now at least seven or ten of them, some of them two lines long, others a paragraph while a couple went on for a page. I put them away in a desk and decided to call Mangal and ask him why he was wasting my time with a Turki diary, and how did he expect me to brief His Majesty and the War Council three weeks from now when all other reports from our agents in Delhi, Malwa, Gujarat and elsewhere had dried up.

My irritation with Mangal kept rising but for some reason I was loath to summon him. (The scraps of Turki with their translation have now gone up to twenty-one.) There was only one thing for me to do. When I get mad with a written report, I sit down with a pen, go over the text line by line and then tear apart the writer’s facts and assessment, his lack of interest, his woolly language and ask him to redo the report within a day or two. I sat down with paper and quill and the excerpts and got ready to blast Mangal. If he thought he could take me for granted just because we had grown up together since childhood and because I was dependent on him, he was making a mistake.

If anybody was mistaken, it was not Mangal but I. I wrote furiously and scathingly. By the seventh note a pattern had begun to emerge; by the eleventh excerpt I was hooked. I couldn’t have enough.

‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

‘In the month of Ramzan of the year 1494 and in the twelfth year of my age, I became a ruler in the country of Farghana.

‘Farghana is situated in the fifth climate and at the limit of settled habitation. On the east it has Kashghar; on the west, Samarkand; on the south, the mountains of the Badakhshan border; on the north, though in former times there must have been towns such as Almaligh, Almatu and Yangi which in books they write Taraz, at the present all is desolate, no settled population whatever remaining, because of the Moghuls and the Auzbegs.’

‘Farghana has seven separate townships, five on the south and two on the north of the Saihun river.

‘Of those on the south, one is Andijan. It has a central position and is the capital of the Farghana country. It produces much grain, fruits in abundance, excellent grapes and melons. In the melon season it is not customary to sell them out at the beds. Better than the Andijan nashpati, there is none. After Samarkand and Kesh, the fort of Andijan is the largest in Transoxiana. It has three gates. Its citadel is on its south side. Into it water goes by nine channels; out of it, it is strange that none comes at even a single place. Round the outer edge of the ditch runs a gravelled highway; the width of this highway divides the fort from the suburbs surrounding it.

‘Andijan has good hunting and fowling; its pheasants grow so surprisingly fat that rumour has it four people could not finish one they were eating with its stew.’

‘It passed through my mind that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and houseless, had nothing to recommend it.’

‘I do not write this in order to make complaint; I have written the plain truth. I do not set these matters down in order to make known my own deserts; I have set down exactly what has happened. In this History I have held firmly to it that the truth should be reached in every matter, and that every act should be recorded precisely as it occurred. From this it follows that I have set down of good and bad whatever is known, concerning father and older brother, kinsman and stranger; of them all I have set down carefully the known virtues and defects. Let the reader accept my excuse; let the reader pass on from the place of severity!’

‘Umar Sheikh Mirza, my father, was a short, stout, round-bearded and fleshy-faced person. He used to wear his tunic so very tight that to fasten the strings he had to draw his belly in and, if he let himself out after tying them, they often tore away. He was not choice in dress or food.

‘He was very generous; in truth, his character rose altogether to the height of generosity. He was affable, eloquent and sweet-spoken, daring and bold.’

‘A middling archer, he was strong in the fist; not a man but fell to his blow. Through his ambition, peace was exchanged often for war, friendliness for hostility.’

‘It has been mentioned that the fort of Akhsi is situated above a deep ravine; along this ravine stand the palace buildings, and from it, on Monday, Ramzan four, Umar Sheikh Mirza flew with his pigeons and their house, and became a falcon.’

‘Without a glance at the fewness of our men, we had the nagarets sounded, and putting our trust in God moved with face set for our opponent Muquim.

    For few or many God is full strength,

    No man has might in His court.

‘How often, God willing it, a small force has vanquished a large one! Learning from the nagarets that we were approaching, Muquim forgot his fixed plan and took the road to flight. God brought it right.’

‘As the Bajauris were rebels and at enmity with the people of Islam, and as, by reason of the heathenish and hostile customs prevailing in their midst, the very name of Islam was rooted out from their tribe, they were put to general massacre and their wives and children were made captive. At a guess, more than three thousand men went to their death; as the fight did not reach to the eastern side of the fort, a few got away there.

‘The fort taken, we entered and inspected it. On the walls, in houses, streets and alleys, the dead lay in what numbers! Comers and goers to and fro were passing over the bodies.’

‘After taking Bajaur by storm in two to three gari, and making a general massacre of its people, we went on into Bhira. Bhira we neither overran nor plundered; we imposed a ransom on its people, taking from them in money and goods to the value of four lakhs of shahrukhis and having shared this out to the army and auxiliaries, returned to Kabul.’

There was more, all of it jagged and piecemeal. There were various references to defeats, ignominious flights from whichever place served as a temporary home, repeated mention of the enormous pleasure the diarist took in swimming in any kind of climate. He was constantly on the move, from Samarkand to Kabul to Kandahar to Samarkand and other places. There were times when the band of men following him was less than two hundred.

I suspect that there were two reasons why Mangal wanted me to look at the transcripts. The first was that the diarist never gave up. Defeat rejuvenated him. There was something in his character which drew people to him despite repeated defeats, failures and dethronings. The second feature could have a direct bearing on Mewar itself. The man had crossed the River Indus. Granted that it was more in the nature of a swift desperado raid on Bajaur for what appeared to be religious reasons and the collection of a substantial ransom from the people of Bhira. Having tested the waters of Hindustan and found them inviting, he had made a second incursion from his base in Kabul.

Perhaps Father knew of his visits. He is news to me since I was dead to the world in Kumbhalgarh. Innumerable Muslim chieftains, kings and padshahs have come through the Khyber Pass, pillaged the land around the Indus and sometimes as far down as Delhi, defaced temples and massacred people in the hundreds of thousands but most of them have gone back for the simple reason that they were transient marauders and their only purpose was plunder and booty. Only a few stayed behind. Delhi has been under Afghan rule for generations. Hardly anyone remembers that their ancestors crossed the high passes in the Hindukush without any clear-cut idea of settling down in India. This man (why is Mangal keeping his name in the dark?) will bear watching closely.

There is however one other reason, call it intangible, whimsical or absurd, why I’m drawn to the diarist. I see myself in him. I too take notes and since Kumbhalgarh, have begun to turn them into an autobiography of sorts. You will find the passage where he speaks about writing the truth without regard to how one comes across, on the flyleaf of my own memoirs. Of course the language and specifics may differ but the sentiment is exactly the same. I read about the pleasure the man takes in swimming across rivers and I see myself. He is fond of his father but does not care if the pen portrait is not always complimentary to the subject. There’s something else, something dour and dark and disturbing. He leaves his conscience and sentiments out of the picture and the diary, when he commits mass murder. I feel a closeness to the man that makes me feel that I’m familiar with his mind. As we all know, or at least ought to know, the one simple way a commander can ensure defeat and disaster is for him to go by his intuition alone.

Having said that, let me not underplay the sharp and unbridgeable differences between us. There is a truly scary sentence which occurs again and again in his writing. ‘God brought it right.’ I am a believer in our gods. I may no longer have any serious dialogue or transaction with the Flautist, but I cannot imagine starting a day or ending it without saying a prayer to Lord Eklingji. And yet my relationship with God is distant, formal and more a matter of protocol and habit. The diarist on the other hand has an extraordinary faith, the kind of compelling faith that can almost bend and coerce God to rise to his expectations. Don’t take me literally; the wandering diarist would find this blasphemous in the extreme. But there is something about his tone and his absolute and unshakable trust in God which must surely give pause to even the Almighty.

There is a side effect of this belief which can have the gravest consequences for us. If he ever comes to Hindustan with long-term plans of settling down, he’ll want to be a ghazi, a holy warrior of God who fights against infidels and heathens like us in Mewar. Will he keep off the Muslim kingdoms like Malwa and Gujarat or will his territorial ambitions run them over? This is speculation but there’s more to it than foolish imaginings. Since my return, I have been pondering the Hindu-Muslim divide. If Mewar is to grow and expand, one of our major tasks will have to do with making Muslims feel secure in a Hindu kingdom. They must have as much of a stake in Mewar’s future as the Jains or Hindus. How, I keep wondering, do we ensure a dichotomy whereby God and faith remain at home and the state takes first priority in public life?

That evening Mangal sent his ‘confidential and top secret’ file home to me.

Your Highness,

Now that you’ve been through the notes that I have been sending you over a period of months and studied them carefully (the man has me followed round the clock; I can’t pee without one of his men noting down the time and place and colour of the fluid), I feel free to present my report. I’m aware that I have tested your patience and put you in a predicament by not having yet submitted my very first report for the coming cabinet meeting. It is true that I have also been avoiding you but that was because I did not wish to have converse with you till you had independently made up your mind about those excerpts.

A word before I come to the report. I know you’ve been wondering why I have not submitted most of the reports sent by our agents. Their veracity was, frankly, doubtful and I wished to spend time with each agent and get a feel for the man, his quirks, his level of insecurity and his need to justify his patriotism. I wanted to encourage them in their endeavours and discourage them from what can perhaps be termed as parallel truths. I gained their confidence by putting them at ease over a series of meetings. Then I went over their previous reports. I gave them my assessment of the ratios of truth and fabrication they contained and told them that they were free to contradict my assessment so long as they produced corroboration for their stories.

Ten days from now, I believe, intelligence reports will once again appear on your table. Each will come marked with its priority rating and also a rating for veracity. Over and above these two parameters, every once in a while you’ll come across a comment like ‘Facts and data unreliable but agent’s feel for the situation is insightful and should not be discounted.’ It is in the nature of a spy’s job that nothing can be guaranteed, not even his lies; for every once in a while you’ll discover that his fabrications have been substantiated by the turn of events.

Now to the report.

Name of subject : Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur

Designation : King of Kabul

Sources : Dictation or copying exercises given by Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur to his nine-year-old cousin, Haidar. Also scraps of paper on which Babur’s amanuensis tested his quill, ink and handwriting before making a copy of the diary under Babur’s supervision or sheets thrown into the waste paper basket because of spelling and other errors committed during the course of copying.

Ancestry : On his father’s side Babur is the great-great-grandson of Timur the Lame. On his mother’s, Babur is descended from Chaghatai Khan, second son of the Mongol conqueror, Jenghiz Khan.

Rajputs and even the Lodis of Delhi may regard Timur and Jenghiz Khan as barbarians but that is the outsider’s point of view. For Babur it is a matter of the highest pride that the blood of these two conquerors flows in his veins.

Most of his life Babur has been on the run. In 1497, at the age of fourteen he captured his ancestral home, Samarkand. The expedition proved prohibitively expensive since within a hundred days, he lost both his own kingdom Farghana, and Samarkand as well.

In 1499, Babur recovered Farghana but the year after he had to share it with his brother Jehangir.

In the year 1500, Babur recaptured Samarkand. Within a few months, he had once again lost it. Homeless for three years, in 1504 Babur took possession of Kabul which he made his capital. In 1511 Babur again mounted the throne of Samarkand only to vacate it in May 1512.

In 1519, Babur first crossed the Indus and took Bajaur fort. In 1520, he invaded India for the third time, attacked the Gakkai tribe, quashed a rebellion at Bhira and reached Sialkot.

There is clearly a pattern here. In his diary, Babur keeps referring to Samarkand, the place that Timur used as his home base, and to Delhi which Timur invaded in 1398.

Timur always had Samarkand to return to. Babur captured Samarkand thrice and thrice he has had to relinquish it. Even Kabul he may lose one of these days. India is infinitely bigger, infinitely richer, and has the added attraction of being peopled by infidels. If he decides to take Delhi, he serves both Allah’s purposes and his own.

Conclusion : Adversity does not faze Babur. Wherever he goes, whether it is Samarkand, Kandahar or Kabul, he quickly establishes a court and gathers poets and artisans around him. Since he is a man of his word, he arouses strong loyalty in his men. He is swift both to attack and retreat. Some of his most impressive victories have been won by a mere thousand to twelve hundred men. It is not inconceivable that he will go into battle with just two hundred men and yet come out triumphant. He has a keen interest in weapons technology and is constantly trying to acquire and incorporate it in his military strategy. He has, it is said, acquired a new kind of weapon called cannons and a Turkish artilleryman called Ustad Ali who casts them. We await more information on these firearms.

Recommended action :

1. Babur, to follow your own precepts, will bear watching.

2. Go all out to obtain samples of the new weaponry.

3. Demonstrate how this new weaponry operates to His Majesty.

4. Get a big budget sanctioned to place large orders for guns and cannons.

5. Build our offensive and defensive strategies around these weapons.

6. Train our army personnel in the use of these firearms.

7. Ensure that our investment in technology is not a one-shot exercise but a continuous one so that at every point it is our enemy who is at a disadvantage against us and not the other way round.

8. Accessing ordnance know-how from foreign sources as an initial measure is fine but in the long run, we’ll have to steep ourselves in the new knowledge and learn to stand on our own feet, the idea being that future advances in the field come from us.

* * *

Is there any room for doubt that Mangal and I fed at the same breast after you’ve read his report? He may be more terse than I but that’s because the format of a briefing demands brevity, clarity, a conclusion and a line of action. I doubt if I will ever have to rework a Mangal-report before presenting it to Father. Will Mangal’s recommendations have the desired effect on Father? After all, I have been saying the same things to His Majesty for the last seven or eight years. There is no denying, however, that Mangal’s action-scenario is now anchored to an actual set of circumstances while what I’ve been talking about was really a matter of policy. I hope the War Council meetings are not going to get stuck in a discussion about how Mangal’s suggestions devolve upon a series of assumptions: one, the ruler of Kabul plans to come into India again; two, at some point in time he’ll give battle to the Sultan of Delhi; and three, our own borders and kingdom will then be threatened by him.

On the other hand, there is no gainsaying that even if Babur ventures into India, it may once again be for a quick hit-and-run money-making raid. Or he may leave Delhi alone now and decide to try to regain Samarkand which seems to have become almost an obsessive symbol of legitimacy and nostalgia for him. He could also lose his head, literally.

Babur has already been to India twice. Mangal’s implicit guess is that Babur will some time or other make further forays into India. I would go along with Mangal’s analysis for the simple reason that Mangal weighs his words carefully before he speaks out. I doubt if Kabul will contain Babur’s ambition. He will find it difficult, if not impossible, to resist the temptation of India. But the question to ask is whether we want to plan our armament strategy contingent upon a single enemy’s plans to invade India. Of course, we have to be prepared for any contingency including an invasion from the north-west. But more to the point we have to be better equipped and better prepared because we ourselves have territorial ambitions.

It seems hard to believe that I am actually holding pages of matter written God-knows-where, Farghana, Samarkand, Kandahar or Kabul in my hands and that they are the words of a king whose ancestors hailed from the distant kingdom of Turkey. How could they have travelled so far? Is it a big hoax? We don’t have any foolproof method of verifying the authenticity of the documents unless of course I send an emissary to the current king of Kabul and enquire whether the notes I have in front of me are his own. And yet I suspect that the words are true and come from a man of great resolve and vision, a man whose sense of self is neither inflated nor modest, but matter-of-fact.

For some reason I keep going back to two passages, one about Andijan in Farghana and the other about his father. There is a quiet warmth in the tone of writing which could only come from someone who is deeply attached to his country. And yet it is devoid of the sentimentality that accompanies most writing about one’s homeland, especially if one is an exile. It makes the reader want to go and explore the place for oneself. ‘Into the citadel at Andijan water goes by nine channels; out of it, it is strange that none comes at even a single place.’ What happens to the water? Where does it go? Has it been collected underground year after year? (Like a bump on the head, does the citadel keep rising? Will Andijan burst open like a pod one of these days with the pressure of all that water under it?) Take the puzzling passage about Umar Sheikh Mirza and his pigeons at the Akhsi fort. I went over it at least a dozen times before I realized that Babur’s father had gone to see his pigeons in the dovecote when the side of the mountain ledge seems to have collapsed, and in death Umar Sheikh ‘became a falcon’.

The less said about my dislike of hunting the better but I must confess that I want to go to Andijan to check out the pheasants there. Why has Babur switched to rumour when it’s obvious that he has done enough hunting and fowling himself to know the facts except to pull our leg with some fabled and fat-bird stew that four people cannot finish? I’ve always had a fondness for humour. But the kind of humour that really gets to me is the straight-faced variety where unless you are on your guard you don’t detect the tongue in the cheek.

Can you imagine any charan, poet or even historian from Mewar writing so candidly, objectively and affectionately about His Majesty, the Maharana, for instance? Frankly, I can’t see any of my brothers, cousins or uncles managing it either. No whitewashing, no genuflecting, no obsequious toadying, just a quick sketch done with superb self-assurance. It’s obvious that the man is not afraid of being critical because he does not believe that the act of appraisal or judging someone rules out affection or high regard.

How often does one hear even our seniormost officials prefacing their remarks with the proviso, ‘Please don’t misunderstand me, the last thing I want to be is judgmental.’ Why have they been appointed to senior positions with so many people reporting to them, if they are not expected to analyse and assess situations and human beings with the utmost rigour and ruthlessness? Rigour and ruthlessness do not preclude sympathy with another’s point of view. But it is impossible to take decisions, often critical ones, or to deal with one’s enemies, friends, peers, juniors, seniors or wife and children unless one evaluates their and one’s own strengths, weaknesses and blind spots.

* * *

‘And what if I don’t get your report within the next ten days?’ I knew what Mangal’s answer was going to be but I wanted to make him squirm. ‘What shall I tell the cabinet and our friendly neighbours? Should I tell the former that they should postpone the business of the state of Mewar and the latter that they delay any plans to attack Mewar because Mangal isn’t ready to brief the Security Council yet?’

‘You’ll have it within the next ten days, Your Highness.’ He didn’t blanch, I should have known that too.

‘I’m much beholden to you.’ That was shabby and utterly uncalled for but it did the trick. There was a crack in the stone-face for a fraction of a second. Perhaps underneath it, the man may actually have winced. ‘That will be all.’

He prepared to leave, not reacting to my childish snubs.

‘Mangal, that was excellent work. How did you get hold of the stuff?’

Mangal smiled. ‘From a sweeper.’

I laughed. ‘Bravo. The laugh’s on me this time. Let’s have the truth now.’

‘It is the truth, Your Highness.’

‘Come off ….’ I realized that he was not joking.

‘One of the local operatives told me laughingly one day over samosas that times had changed. “Sweepers,” he said, “would soon be doing better than jagirdars.” “How’s that?” I asked him. “Have you ever got a parcel from abroad?” he asked me sarcastically. I shook my head. “Shyam Dulare, the sweeper at the Prime Minister, Pooranmalji’s home, gets them.” “From where?” “How would I know? All I can tell you is that some passing mendicant delivers them.” I think Your Highness has guessed the rest.’

‘I may have but I wouldn’t mind it if you spelt out the details. How did Shyam Dulare get access to the Kabul court?’

‘Shyam Dulare, it turns out, has a cousin Pyarelal who worked in Bajaur. When Bajaur was sacked, Pyarelal and his family were spared because Pyarelal said to the commandant of the occupying army, “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, is it not true that the Prophet has forbidden the faithful to kill those gentiles and pagans who have discovered the true Lord, Allah himself?” The commandant smiled and asked, “Have you discovered the Lord and Master of the Universe or is it that you’ve discovered that your life is worth nothing unless you profess to the faith of the Prophet and of His Highness Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur?” “And what if the latter be the truth,” the sweeper’s cousin replied cheekily, “will you question the diverse and manifold ways in which Allah causes the blind to see and the deaf to hear and the mute to speak, and the unenlightened to see the light and the deceived to forsake their deceptions and the hypocrites to abandon their hypocrisy? For if you do, then is it not obvious that you consider yourself wiser than Allah himself and is there any crime greater than placing yourself above the All-knowing and the All-perceiving who hath wrought this earth and all living and dead things in it, the waves in the sea and the colours on the birds and the dome of the sky and the rains that water the earth and quench our thirst and bring forth grain a thousandfold from one seed?” And the commandant stayed the sword in his hand as it was about to slay Pyarelal and took him to his king, Babur himself, and told him of the miracle of the words from the sweeper’s tongue, for verily they were words that the Holy Book itself would recognize and honour. And Babur lifted the sweeper up by the hands and said, “From today this man shall be my brother in the faith and work in my house.” And thus it came to be.’

‘Mangal, will you spare us the archaic language?’

‘It was the language in which Shyam Dulare told me this lofty tale.’

‘Shyam Dulare, it appears however, has not been converted yet.’

‘Pyarelal, now known as Karim Muhammad, is working on it.’

‘And is the two-way traffic a phenomenon that occurred after Pyarelal’s conversion or was Shyam Dulare sharing documents and information from the Pradhan Pooranmalji’s home from earlier times?’

Mangal no longer seemed to enjoy the raconteur’s job. ‘Shyam Dulare’s conduit has been functioning for a long time, Highness. The information has been going to the Delhi, Gujarat and Bajaur courts and to Medini Rai at Malwa.’

‘That’s a relief. At least Shyam Dulare is impartial to money and the colour of its religion. Is our Prime Minister Pooranmalji involved in this affair?’

‘So far I have not found any evidence to suggest that.’

‘Is that “so far” a hedge against future discoveries or are you holding something back?’

‘So long as I am in charge of the intelligence portfolio, forgive the impertinence, Highness, I’ll use the phrase “so far” in your context too if ever you were under investigation.’

‘I believe you would, Mangal, and that is one of the reasons why you and not someone else is holding the job. And what are we doing about Shyam Dulare?’

‘Paying him money, feeding him information and keeping him under surveillance.’

‘How do we know he’ll not raise the price for the next instalment of these scraps of papers?’

‘We know for certain, Sire. He has already raised his price.’

‘Despite the fact that he’s committed treason?’

‘He knows that we need him alive if we wish to continue getting information from him.’

‘How do we know that Babur is not deliberately feeding this information to Pyarelal to misguide us?’

‘It’s a possibility that I have considered but I don’t think we need worry too much about it. We are unlikely to get current intelligence on the man and his plans anyway unless he comes geographically closer to us. Barring you, Highness, nobody would be interested in knowing whether Babur has a hernia, whether he sleeps late and how long his hangovers last. I also know that you are going to ask me to research the military strategies of his ancestors Timur and Jenghiz Khan.’

‘Mangal are you planning to make all speech from the Maharaj Kumar redundant? Let me warn you I won’t have it. Do you have anything on Shyam Dulare?’

Maharaj Kumar. The words had slipped from my mouth. I thought I was going to be facetious. Instead I was aghast to find that somewhere in my mind I still hoped to be next in the line of succession.

‘All we have, Highness,’ Mangal deliberately changed the subject, ‘is a slight deterrent.’

I wondered if Mangal had taken to archness. ‘And what may that be?’

‘We have taken one of his children in custody.’

‘This is not a police state, Mangal.’ I was genuinely horrified.

‘You can’t have it both ways, Highness.’ That shut me and my hypocrisy effectively. ‘The boy is getting an education, something inconceivable for a sweeper’s child. Besides, the child is no guarantee. Shyam Dulare may turn around and say “Go ahead, kill him. I’m young enough to have more.’”

‘Who’s doing the translation from the Turki?’

‘Pyarelal or Karim Muhammad as he is known now.’

‘Mangal, what about the original? Is it really Turki or gibberish?’

‘It is Turki, Sire, and as you must have realized, Karim Muhammad is not a bad translator at all.’

* * *

‘How long do you plan to avoid me?’

‘We run into each other four to seven times a day.’

‘You no longer wish to see me, Kausalya?’

‘You have other commitments now, Sire.’

‘I was foolish enough to lose you once. I don’t intend to make the same mistake again.’

Kausalya did not prise open my fingers from around her wrist but there was a distant ache in her eyes, a resolve to suffer the pain of severance now rather than live on false hope and defer the loss of closeness and intimacy. She was too proud to tell me that if I had wanted to, I could have walked into her room months ago. I thought of the hundreds of women in the palace waiting for their lovers or husbands. How many months and years would they keep vigil? Who would scotch their loneliness? Very likely they knew who their men were spending the night with. There is no measure to the bitterness and heartbreak of the zenana. How does it feel to be rejected daily? Was death the only way out?

‘Your Highness, one request. No kindness, please. Nor a visit out of a sense of duty.’

Kausalya had redrawn the boundaries and there was no crossing them. The tension between her and me ebbed away without either of us noticing it.

‘Why don’t you sit down, take my head in your lap, locate, pick and squash the eleven thousand lice from my hair as you did when I was a child and then knock some sense into my head?’

There’s no difference between dogs and men. We’ll circle around ourselves half a million times, check the place where we want to deposit ourselves as we’ve done for the last eleven years and then ease ourselves into it. There’s surely a trough or dip the size of the back of my head on the inside slope of Kausalya’s right breast. I know this place well, I have chatted long hours looking at the underside of Kausalya’s chin, wondering if her skin is inherently blemishless or she has some esoteric unguent that strips away stray, sharp hairs from the roots before they appear. I have fallen asleep in that hollow while Kausalya’s been busy tracing a rao’s or sultan’s family tree for me or unravelling the bitter roots of enmity between two Rajput families who’ll even today kill each other without any idea of the original grievance.

The bells of the Brindabani temple are pealing away.

The gods no longer materialize on earth, at least not in Kali Yuga, this most fallen of ages. Divine intervention, I must confess, seems a matter of hearsay, faith and credulity. The only miracles in life are wrought by time. My wife sings and dances at six every evening now and the prayer meetings are often attended by none other than His Majesty. Plans are afoot to enlarge both the temple complex and compound to hold fifty thousand people. Marble lattices wrought with workmanship that’s comparable to the exquisite silver filigree jewellery that Chittor is so renowned for, now screen the billowing storms that my wife’s skirts generate for the Blue God.

Frankly, Chittor has little reason to complain. The pilgrim and tourist traffic in the citadel has gone up by a hundred and fifty percent since we got back from Kumbhalgarh and shows no sign of abating. Caravans of people from Chanderi, Champaner, Jaipur, Delhi, Agra, Mathura, Ahmedabad, Raisen, Daulatabad, Pune, Vijayanagar, even the valley of Kashmir come by bullock and camel cart, by palanquin and on horseback. Those who can’t afford fancy transport, load their bedding and a couple of utensils on their heads and walk all the way to Chittor. My wife, as the finance ministry was discovering, is not just a rare and living treasure, she is Chittor’s biggest economic asset. All these years, it was Father’s vision and diplomacy that tried to bring disparate geographical and historical Rajput interests together. Today the nexus between the Little Saint, the Flautist and His Majesty has bound Rajput, Bhil, Hindu, Jain and Muslim in a manner that would have been almost inconceivable a few years ago.

While the Little Saint is lost in the adoration of the Flautist or preoccupied with household chores, Chittor or rather, all of Mewar is busy mythologizing her. Already there are enough stories of her purity and piety, of her conversations with the Blue God, and of her miraculous escapes from the attempts on her life to fill up at least a couple of volumes. The latest has to do with Swami Rupa Goswami, the highly renowned ascetic and disciple of the late Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who was arguably the greatest poet-saint and adherent of the Flautist.

When Rupa Goswami was passing through Chittor a few months ago, he stayed, as almost all Vaishnavaite holy men do, at the Brindabani Mandir. My wife, who believes that knowledge and salvation, if not enlightenment, can come only through the offices of a teacher and in the company of sages, went to meet the Goswami the next day. As a severe ascetic and one who had sworn off women, the swami refused to see the Little Saint. He was certain that she was not just a much indulged Princess but, very likely, an impostor whose public displays of devotion and other antics like dancing and singing were nothing but a ploy to gain attention. Rupa Goswami had a formidable reputation but the Princess neither lost her composure nor was she dismayed. She merely expressed surprise that he was a man. For if he was, what right did he have to enter Brindaban? Did the Goswami not know that there was but one male in the universe and that was the Blue One and all others, barring none, were women?

What was the Little Saint talking about? I’m completely out of my depth when my wife switches to this kind of highly esoteric symbolism. But the Goswami seems to have got her drift and instead of bristling at her snub, he realized that here was an enlightened bhakta who had grasped the essence of the Lord. He agreed to see the Princess.

What does Queen Karmavati have to say about my wife’s rising star? She has certainly made Vikramaditya the strongest contender to the Mewar throne, working up a groundswell on his behalf in Ranthambhor and its environs; one can feel her presence and her hand shaping, recasting and interfering with the affairs of Chittor almost daily. And yet, however puissant her long-distance reach may be, it has not been able to prevent my wife from becoming almost indispensable to Father. The keys of the stores, the royal jewels, His Majesty’s cupboards and chests of clothes, shoes, saafas, in short, of the Palace itself hang from the silver clasp which she so casually tucks into the waist of her ghagra. She may look a little bemused, other-worldly and on an altogether higher spiritual plane than any of us mortals but as the entire hierarchy of eunuchs, palace bureaucracy, staff, servants and the seraglio were discovering, not much escapes her. If sweetness of temper does not yield results, she is tough and adamant. If anyone thought that feminine delicacy would prevent her from confronting difficult or personal subjects, they were much mistaken. Whether it’s bodily functions, illness, awkward or exotic sexual proclivities, usury or blackmail, feuding and intrigue, her lack of guile allows her to come straight to the point and tick a person off when necessary without leaving a bad taste in the mouth.

None of us eats less, the standard of cuisine hasn’t slipped nor is there any parsimony in the upkeep of the palace and yet expenses are down by close to thirty per cent.

How she finds time in such a busy schedule to look after palace affairs, serve Father meals, lay out his clothes and massage that battered body of his which is in perpetual pain, entertain him with stories about her childhood, her grandfather Rao Duda, and her uncle Rao Viramdev, sing to him when he is feeling out of sorts, or play cards with him, and yet not be harried or rushed or short-tempered is not just a mystery but cause for alarm in the likes of me and all those whose use of time can never aspire to even a quarter of her efficiency. It would appear that she has discovered another talent. She can unobtrusively slip in an opinion on political or state matters but unlike Queen Karmavati she always allows Father to think that the idea has originated from him.

Did I detect Father’s deep and rumbling baritone in the chorus which accompanied my wife’s first bhajan of the evening? He may be king, but at the Brindabani Mandir the devotees have no qualms drowning His Majesty’s voice. Kausalya and I had the whole evening to ourselves. The devotional songs to the Blue God and the arati would go on for another hour at the very least. It would be nine thirty or ten at night before the Princess returned after serving Father dinner and reading out a couple of chapters from the Gita.

How quickly one reverted to old ways and the wrinkles and creases of habit returned. It was as if there was a break in time and I had slipped into my premarital mode. I told Kausalya about my day. The Security Council meeting was scheduled for eleven in the morning but Father sent for me at ten. We had a visitor from abroad that day, all the way from Portugal. His Majesty was sitting for a portrait when I arrived. Portraiture is an alien art-form to us. Our painting tends towards types and traditional subjects but in the last decade or so some visitors from France and Italy have brought along pictures of their kings and doges and now some of our artists have begun to adapt this style of painting. The result is a quaint hybrid that can be occasionally quite pleasing.

The miniature artist Chand Rai had posed Father with his face in profile to avoid the absent eye. Father looked intimidating and haughty. He was sitting astride a wooden ledge covered with heavy red brocade and the royal saddle. His right hand was covered in a leather glove and raised to the level of his seventh rib. Saathi, His Majesty’s horse, and his falcon Aakash would be painted in later. Right now the artist was concentrating on getting the flowers on Father’s angarkha right. Father was a painter’s ideal subject. He could sit for hours without moving or what is more trying, talking, for as the artist often explained to our guests, lip movements not only changed the features, expression and composition of the face continually but affected the posture of the body.

The painting, I must add, has been in the works for the last seven years. If you look closely, you’ll realize that Father’s wearing a duglo that is yellow, not blue and the flowers on it are not mogras but green chaphas. The portrait, as you’ve guessed, is a decoy. Father likes to get the measure of outsiders who visit the court. He is averse to talking at the best of times but is decidedly tongue-tied and maintains an aloofness on such occasions while his courtiers chat up the visitor till the man has furnished us his entire life-story and a detailed account of his sovereign’s nocturnal escapades and plans for travel and war. Chand Rai was the only person in Mewar or anywhere else who could with impunity tell His Majesty to shut up. ‘Your humble servant, Chand Rai, begs your forgiveness for his impertinence of speech but Your Majesty will do posterity a signal service if he holds his tongue and allows me to get on with the painting.’

Every once in two or three years a wanderer or trader from Italy, Turkey, Spain, Portugal or Britain stopped over in Chittor and spent a week or two, sometimes even a month with us. Conversation is not always easy but there is a universal language that we all share: commerce. The merchants got gold from across the seas and exchanged it for cloth, pepper, cinnamon or whatever was in demand at home. Our guest this time is a little different. Manuel de Paiva Bobela da Costa was here in a semiofficial capacity. At the very end of the last century, I think it was 1498, a Portuguese admiral called Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and discovered the sea route from Europe to India. Since then the Portuguese have been visiting the country regularly and have even set up small bases on the western littoral. This year oddly enough has seen three governors: Duarte de Menses, Vasco da Gama (I must ask da Costa whether this da Gama is the same man who landed in Calicut in 1498) and Henrique de Menses. Today’s visitor has been sent by the Portuguese Governor of Goa, Henrique de Menses, as a roving ambassador to explore the possibility of commercial links with local kingdoms. Or at least that’s his story.

Mewar was certainly interested in commerce with the Portuguese, if possible the kind where we sold more than what we bought from them. The problem was, we were not quite sure what the Portuguese were interested in. Instead of establishing trading houses or factories as they prefer to call them, they have been using force and building forts, the first one at Cochin and the second at Cannanore. In 1510 they took Goa. Not exactly a mercantile activity, would you agree? If that doesn’t give you pause, there’s far more disconcerting news tucked away in the title of the Portuguese king. Dom Manuel I of Portugal took the title ‘Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and of India’ almost immediately after Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea-passage to India. It would seem that the present Portuguese king, Joao III, wishes to conquer and rule India from a distance of four thousand miles. So far it’s primarily the western seaboard that has been feeling the effects of the Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean but we haven’t escaped entirely either. As Lord of the Sea in Asia, Joao III or to be precise, his governor Henrique de Menses has been patrolling the seas and levying a customs duty on any ship, Indian or foreign plying the waters. Which means that anybody including us who has cargo in those ships has to pay a surcharge to the shipowners who then have to pass it on to the Portuguese.

The Portuguese are either extraordinarily tightfisted or have an extremely low opinion of their hosts in India. Manuel de Paiva Bobela da Costa brought for His Majesty a painting of their God as a child in the arms of his mother. The mother is thin, long-faced and unrelievedly morose while her son has an infant’s chubby body and a mop of curly hair but a bizarre and disconcertingly adult face. In his left hand is a globe with a diamond-studded cross on it. In the top left and right corners are winged creatures called angels. In the background, off centre to the right, is an echo of the cross motif but this time it’s a wooden one. Impaled on it with thick nails is an emaciated man with every rib in his chest sticking out painfully. The ambassador informed us that this man was none other than the lady’s son grown up. His face is even sadder than the mother’s. He wears a diadem of thorns and in the middle of his chest is a glowing and ethereal heart. A rather strange concept of God, to say the least. Gods, I have always assumed, are all-powerful. This one, however, needs help and succour desperately. You would need to have a strong stomach to live with this tearful and gloomy mother and child, apart from a God who is in perpetual pain.

The painting was shown to Father who passed it on to me and I offered it to the Prime Minister, Pooranmalji. I couldn’t bring myself to make any comment about the picture but Pooranmalji is far more sophisticated than I. He held the framed painting in his hands, studied it and nodded his head slowly as if gradually imbibing the symbolism and poetry. He gave it to the court clerk with instructions to send it to His Majesty’s palace. ‘Careful, very careful. Make sure that it’s packaged properly before it leaves these premises. Please thank His Majesty King Joao for his fine gift to His Majesty Rana Sangram Simha, Your Excellency. We have, I’m afraid, a very insignificant offering, nothing that can compare with the exquisite artistry, not to mention the sacredness, of your painting.’

I knew that tone of voice well. The Pradhan Mantri had anticipated the niggardly present from the Portuguese king and his representative in India, a painting churned out from one of the studios in Lisbon like a thousand or ten thousand others and was about to snub the ambassador and his sovereign with an artefact of overwhelming superiority. What he pulled out from a cloth wrapping that was itself a hundred times the cost of the picture was a soft white shatoosh shawl. It must have taken a year and a half to weave.

‘Drape it around your shoulder, Your Excellency.’ Pooranmalji handed the shawl to the visitor. The ambassador was perhaps a little disconcerted by the lightness of the shatoosh but acquiesced to Pooranmalji’s request. ‘Will someone there fetch a mirror for His Excellency?’

We were in the middle of winter. The shawl was only a little heavier than a Chanderi odhani but by the time they had fetched the mirror, the ambassador was sweating. ‘Even if it’s snowing, that one shawl should keep His Majesty Joao warm.’

As His Excellency removed the shawl from his shoulders and folded it absent-mindedly, Pooranmalji pressed home his advantage.

‘Let me do it for you, Sir,’ the PM eased the shatoosh out of the visitor’s hands. ‘We are under severe pressure, Your Excellency, to impose duties on all imports. We have resisted all such requests so far but I’m afraid ….’

The Pradhan had no intention of completing that sentence. I had wondered why Father had asked me to attend this particular session of the durbar. Perhaps he had wanted to fill in the lacunae in his eldest son’s education. Diplomatic converse, its symbolic and strategic withdrawals, its innuendoes and weightages, and the things left unsaid fascinated and intrigued me. I knew I was inept at it but not averse to learning from a master like Pooranmalji.

Who was the Pradhanji fooling? Who was putting pressure on him? The populace of Mewar, the merchants, the Minister of the Exchequer, His Majesty? Father scarcely ever interfered in trade policy, and Adinathji at the Exchequer and the PM had an equation that rarely required speech or spelling out things. I suspected that Pooranmalji was improvising but I wouldn’t bet on that. After all these years I had not managed to get the hang of the PM’s arithmetic and mind. I guess that is the mark of the true diplomat and statesman.

‘Your Highness,’ the Portuguese ambassador picked up the slack where Pooranmalji had left off, ‘I trust that this is not in retaliation for the customs duties our inspectors have been charging occasionally.’

‘Have they? I have to admit,’ the PM was as silken as the stole on his shoulders, ‘that age is catching up with me. I have been a trifle out of touch with things of late. But His Majesty Rana Sangram Simha certainly does not believe in petty retaliation.’

‘I had no intention of insinuating that at all,’ the ambassador was stammering.

‘I’m sure you didn’t.’

‘I’ll speak to His Honour the Governor and suggest in the strongest terms that customs duties not be charged on Mewar goods.’

‘That is most gracious of you, Your Excellency. Now tell us more about your country. Is it true that when one of you is invited to dinner at a friend’s, you have to carry your own, what’s the eating instrument called, fork?’

The ambassador’s ear lobes were a hot shade of red and I had the feeling that he would have liked to terminate the meeting.

‘Oh, that’s only among the poor where the male of the family takes his fork along with him.’

‘And the wife and children, they do not eat as guests?’

‘Oh, they do, they do, but with their fingers since forks are a luxury for them.’

The foreign visitor was saying his thank you’s and-taking his leave when I interrupted him. ‘Your Excellency, we are, as you are well aware, land-lubbers and know next to nothing about seafaring or ships. We believe you have some of the most advanced ships in the world with tonnages as high as a thousand.’

‘We certainly do, Your Highness,’ de Paiva Bobela da Costa relaxed for the first time that day. ‘We would be happy to supply you with ships.’

‘Where would we ply them, Your Excellency?’

He was not about to let go a business opportunity. ‘You can rent them out to the coastal traders. I’m sure there’s money in it.’

‘It’s an interesting proposal. We need to look into it. Perhaps His Majesty, the Rana may appoint a commission to do a report. I was wondering what kind of guns your ships are equipped with?’

‘Cannons, Sire. Anywhere between eight to twelve between port and starboard. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give any more details because such matters are generally left to sailors in our country.’

‘No offence meant, Your Excellency. But would you use these same cannons for land warfare?’

‘Not the same, Your Highness, much larger ones.’

‘And would their primary function be to defend your forts and citadels?’

‘That would be but one use to which they are put. As I am sure you well know, they are our first line of offence as well as defence. We would take them anywhere we are to give battle.’

‘Yes, of course. And would you be as interested in selling these cannons as you were in selling your ships?’

‘This is the first time anyone’s broached the subject with me. I’m sure His Honour, the Governor of India, I mean of the Indian outposts, would be interested in looking at such a proposition.’

‘Would you consult him and let us know?’

I was sure that this was a decision that the Governor Henrique de Menses could not take without consulting his sovereign. It was a long shot and getting a reply could take anywhere between a year and a year and a half but I didn’t see any harm in starting the ball rolling.

* * *

It was the first time Mangal was briefing His Majesty and his Council as Head of Intelligence. He was not fazed by the gravity of the occasion and was just as precise and to the point as he had been with me. He did a quick survey of our neighbours, friends and foes, sketched what they were up to, the state of stability or otherwise in their kingdom and the threat they posed to Mewar.

Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur, the king of Kabul, Mangal next told us, had invaded Hindustan again after almost four years, secured Lahore and Punjab and returned home. Nearer home, there are signs that Sultan Mahmud Khalji II of Malwa, egged on by Muzaffar Shah of Gujarat, has initiated moves to get his troops together for a war with his erstwhile Prime Minister Medini Rai within the next few months.

‘The King of Kabul,’ Father spoke more to himself than to the other members of the Security Council, ‘we can safely ignore so long as the Sultan Ibrahim Lodi rules Delhi. The foreigner Babur cannot get at us unless he first crashes through the barrier of Delhi. But what do you suggest we do about the Sultan of Malwa, Pradhanji?’

‘Mahmud Khalji would like to wipe out all trace of Medini Rai from the face of the earth. We could sit back and await the outcome philosophically.’

‘Without us, you well know,’ Lakshman Simhaji, as usual, was easy prey to the Prime Minister’s needling bait, ‘Medini Rai does not stand a chance.’

‘In that case the Rai should be willing to pay whatever price we put on our help.’

‘The Sultan bears a grievance against Medini Rai but in this instance, the Rai is only a pretext. Make no mistake, Mahmud Khalji is coming after us. If we ditch the Rai this time, we’ll not only lose an ally but we’ll be the weaker for it. Our friends will never trust us again.’

‘And who paid the bill the last time when our troops rushed to the Rai’s aid?’

‘Whatever the reasons for it, we were of little use to him since we arrived late. They say he lost twenty, maybe even forty thousand men when the combined forces of Muzaffar Shah and Mahmud Khalji took the Mandu fort and ordered a massacre.’

‘Won’t Mahmud Khalji have to foot all the bills if Medini Rai defeats him with our help?’ That was Adinathji. With one rather simple query he had made the sparring between the Prime Minister and Lakshman Simhaji redundant and gone straight to the heart of the matter.

‘Shall we alert our allies and fix a date with them for a War Council?’ Lakshman Simhaji asked Father.

‘A little premature for that yet. Let Medini Rai ask for our help first.’ His Majesty then turned his dead eye on me. ‘But perhaps the Prince has a different view of the matter.’

And I thought I was going to keep a low profile, hold my tongue, fall in line with whatever was decided by the elders and be a good boy whom nobody would notice.

‘No, no views, Your Majesty.’

‘Do you expect us to believe that a young man of your keen intelligence, Highness,’ Pooranmalji had his lip turned a little sardonically without losing his indulgent prime ministerial smile, ‘has no views on such weighty matters as a likely war with our neighbours?’

‘Your Highness, perhaps my phrasing was a little vague. What I meant was that I’m in agreement with the views of the Security Council.’

‘Sire,’ Adinathji did not smile indulgently as he looked me in the eyes, ‘you are as much part of the Security Council as any one of us.’

‘Your Highness,’ Lakshman Simhaji patted me on the back and broke into a guffaw, ‘we all know that you think we are all, no offence meant, Your Majesty, a bunch of old fools. And perhaps with good reason too, at times.’ Even Father smiled then. Only my uncle could get away with such impertinence. ‘But you owe it to the Security Council and Mewar to give us the benefit of your views.’

Was I to continue with my protestations or speak my mind?

‘I believe that the Security Council has decided on a wise course of action for any other response would be so unorthodox as to be unthinkable.’

‘Highness, if you don’t think the unthinkable at your age, you certainly won’t at mine. Why else would His Majesty have appointed you to the Council but to be confronted with a point of view that is, occasionally, radically different from his and ours?’

Did Father really want to hear my half-baked and wild opinions? He had put me in a spot and Lakshman Simhaji had attributed an openness to him which he may not want to live up to. He had no choice now. He would have to sit patiently and listen to his son’s bizarre ideas.

‘Mangal told us that Muzaffar Shah of Gujarat is cajoling Mahmud Khalji to go to war with us. It is my guess that this time around, come what may, the Sultan of Gujarat will not contribute anything to the Malwa war efforts beyond encouraging words. Is it possible then to expend our energies on a more gainful enterprise?’

‘And what would that be?’ the Pradhanji did not bother to conceal his disdain.

‘Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur has so far made four sorties into Punjab, each one deeper than the previous one. It would stand to reason that his next stop is Delhi. It could be argued that like his Turki ancestor, Timur and other invaders from the northwest, he may come on a flying raid, sack the city and return. The question is what if he has other ideas on the subject? Kabul is his kingdom but whatever the attractions of that cold mountain principality, it is neither the hub of power nor does it have the wealth of Hindustan. Do we let him take a shot at Delhi or do we ride into Delhi, gain possession of the tottering Lodi empire and take control?’

I would rather not use that hackneyed phrase ‘stunned silence’ but nothing else will do. It was Father who finally broke the quiet.

‘And in the meanwhile we let Mahmud Khalji walk into Chittor?’

‘No, Your Majesty. While you assume the crown of Delhi, Medini Rai and I will harass and destroy the Malwa forces with quicksilver attacks.’

‘Aren’t you forgetting one of the first principles of war: never open two fronts simultaneously?’

‘I have no intention of doing that, Highness,’ I told Lakshman Simhaji. ‘There will be only one front, one of our choosing against the Delhi Sultan. Our objectives in Malwa will be limited: take a highly trained, mobile force and keep the Malwa armies preoccupied and off-balance. After you’ve taken Delhi, the initiative will have passed on to us and we could enlarge the scope of our tactics in Malwa.’

‘Do you believe that taking over Delhi will be such an easy task?’

‘No, Your Majesty. Nobody clings to life as persistently as a dying patient. But if we don’t annex Delhi, someone else will. Besides, I do not think our troops will have difficulty defeating Ibrahim Lodi under your leadership.’

‘If that last sentiment had come from someone else, I would have told him, “Sycophancy won’t get you anywhere” but I believe you mean business. Let’s think over the Prince’s proposals, shall we?’

Would Father really think over my proposals?

* * *

Kausalya was giving me her variation of a head massage. I think she was happy that my visit was not a token gesture. She sank her hand into my hair, pulled it gently but long and then let go of it. It brought back memories of my childhood when she would put me to sleep by playing with my hair. It was amazing what a relaxing and soporific effect this innocuous scrabbling in the scalp had on me.

‘Your Highness, I don’t need to tell you how much I enjoy it when you tell me stories of the affairs at court and especially your comments about people but surely you didn’t come over to tell me about the Portuguese visitor.’

‘Why Kausalya,’ I was horrified, ‘are you trying to suggest that I’m a calculating mercenary who never does anything without an ulterior motive? I’m truly offended.’

‘I’m not suggesting anything of the kind, Sire,’ How rare it was to see Kausalya in a light and bantering mood. ‘I believe it would offend you no end if you ever caught yourself in a selfless act or discovered that you were doing something for the sheer pleasure of it.’

Just as I was leaving I asked her, ‘Tell me about Mahmud Khalji II and Medini Rai.’

There is no greater living hero among the Rajputs than Medini Rai (I doubt if anyone remembers what his real name is since Medini, the title the Sultan of Malwa gave him, has stuck for good.) Father may be more respected, his word certainly carries far more weight; even raos and rajas will think ten times before they cross him but Medini Rai, despite his precipitous fall from power, is a legend. I remember Kausalya coming back from Mandu where she had gone to visit some cousin telling me when I was fourteen and grieving about three pimples on my left cheek, ‘May you have more of those pustules, Maharaj Kumar. Imagine being perpetually conscious of and handicapped by the kind of good looks that Medini Rai has.’

After all those years I needed to brush up on Medini Rai. Who was this Rajput who had appeared almost from nowhere, hitched his star to that of Mahmud Khalji when he had been abandoned by everyone else, reversed the fortunes of his king, risen to the pinnacle of power as prime minister of Malwa and then been hounded out of the kingdom by the very man whom he had restored to the throne? What was the cause of the falling out between the king and Medini Rai? And why did Mahmud Khalji see the Rai as a threat despite his downfall? Would Medini Rai seek our help even though the last time he had asked for it we had failed to come to his aid in time?

‘Do you want the long-winded version or a quick sketch with highlights?’ Kausalya asked me.

‘The shorter one for the time being with some detailing and colour after Medini Rai comes on the scene.’

This is what Kausalya told me. It’s not verbatim, and it’s got asides from me, but it’s close.

Mahmud Khalji II’s grandfather was called Ghiyath-ud-din. (I can’t resist telling you that he’s reputed to have had fifteen thousand women in his seraglio, one thousand of whom were his personal guards. I wrote the figures in words because I was sure that you would think that I had slipped up and added a couple of zeroes for effect.)

Unlike his grandfather, Mahmud Khalji II was a weak and childish man who was incapable of keeping his own counsel or acting decisively. He believed every story, rumour or whiff of gossip floating in the air and was overeager to lend an ear to any amir or nobleman inclined to low or high intrigue.

Soon Mahmud Khalji was a king without a kingdom. His younger brother captured Mandu and usurped the throne. The Sultan’s followers abandoned him and it seemed he would never regain his crown.

Enter Rai Chand Purabia, a Rajput from the east whose past is a mystery. Why would any man want to join his fortunes to those of a king whose situation seemed hopeless and beyond repair? Was it faith in his destiny or was it hubris and unbridled arrogance that made the Rai think he could reverse Mahmud Khalji’s run of bad luck and reinstate the king on his throne at Mandu? How many troops did he have? Kausalya didn’t have the answers to those questions. I certainly didn’t and I doubt whether too many people in Mewar or Malwa for that matter had any inkling either. Be that as it may, the cloud over Mahmud lifted almost overnight.

Rai Chand Purabia was no practitioner of black magic, he did not have the reputation of being the greatest general this side of the Narbada, but he had certainly managed to get the planets of the zodiac in the most auspicious conjunction possible. When the armies of the two rival Sultans of Malwa finally met, Rai Chand routed the usurper.

Mahmud Khalji was grateful to the man who had rescued him when his fortunes were at their nadir. He appointed him vazir and gave him the title by which he is known all over the country: Medini Rai. Perhaps the Sultan was incapable of having any but hothouse friendships. The vazir could do no wrong. Mahmud Khalji’s admiration and his reliance upon the Rai waxed without let.

The Rai too, it would appear, had not learnt any lessons from his predecessors. Perhaps that’s what power does, it makes you blind to the obvious. He could not perceive the portents of his own decline and fall. Did the Rai really believe that Mahmud Khalji would not realize that he had become a mere plaything, especially when there was no dearth of malcontents and disaffected nobles to steer their vacillating sovereign into troubled waters? Events came full circle when some of the Sultan’s favourites under instructions from him made an attempt on the vazir’s life. Medini Rai was badly wounded but survived. The infuriated Rajputs under the Rai’s son attacked the royal palace. The king and his guard stoutly defended his home and put the Rajputs to flight. In the ensuing melee, the Rai’s son was killed. Despite his terrible personal loss, not to mention the injury to his person, Medini Rai wrote to the Sultan: ‘As during my whole life I have never done anything but wish for your welfare, and act faithfully to my salt, I have carried my life in safety from the wounds. If in reality, the affairs of the kingdom can be better regulated by my being put to death, I have no objection to even that.’ It was the kind of petition that most nobles who had offended their liege wrote to gain forgiveness. Did Medini Rai mean what he wrote? (Kausalya said she wouldn’t put it past him.)

There was a rapprochement between the king and his vazir but it did not take a clairvoyant to see that it was not to last. Medini Rai had saved the king when he was on the run. Now the king was on the run from the same man. He left Mandu one night and sought refuge with Muzaffar Shah of Gujarat.

When Medini Rai heard that the combined armies of Mahmud Khalji and Muzaffar Shah were marching towards Mandu, he left his capital in the care of his deputy and set out for the Mewar court to seek Father’s help. But before Father and Medini Rai could reach the Malwa capital they got news that the Mandu fort had been reduced and that Muzaffar Shah had ordered a massacre in which twenty thousand soldiers, forty according to some estimates, were killed.

That was some time ago. Mahmud Khalji no longer had the Gujarat Sultan, Muzaffar Shah, by his side but he reckoned rightly that if he didn’t destroy the Rai, who had gone to Gagrone, soon, it would be too late.

One of the first things the Maharaj Kumar did when Mangal, Mamta, the Princess and he got back to Chittor was to plant the parijat sapling in the large courtyard in his wing of the palace. He would have liked to have dug a hole in the dead centre of the plot but that was not possible because that spot belonged to the Tulsi plant which every housewife worships since there is no woman as adamantine in her fidelity to her husband as Tulsi. He chose a corner not too close to the wall so that the parijat would have plenty of room to spread its wings. Every morning, as soon as he had had his bath and said his prayers, he took a watering can (he could hear the eunuchs and the maids giggling and calling him royal mali) and poured water slowly around the branch that he hoped would take root and flower.

Close to a month passed but instead of the first green shoots showing up, the plant seemed to die on the Prince. He dug it out and turned the soil over. Seven days later he knew there was no hope. Some people, he told himself, have green thumbs, others have the gift of death. He had meant that statement to be facetious but he felt as if someone had struck that dead runt of a branch into his heart.

The gardener had been watching him for days but had refrained from proffering advice. The Prince was glad to be left alone but resentful that the man had not had the decency to resuscitate the dry stick that meant so much to him.

‘Is there any fertilizer,’ the Maharaj Kumar did not want to admit defeat, yet he had no choice but to approach the expert and ask his opinion, ‘that could give this plant a second life? A kind of ambrosia?’

‘I’m afraid no ambrosia works on the dead. It can only bestow immortality on the living. But that plant doesn’t need fertilizer. You’ve burnt it with too much watching and attention. Talking to trees is fine but you can’t water a little baby plant three or four times a night, cuddle and pet it and then threaten it with dire consequences if it doesn’t start showing results instantly.’

The Prince would have liked to throttle the man. The gardener however had not finished with his homily. ‘Learn to leave nature well enough alone with just the occasional nurturing. Perhaps it might take heart and rise from its ashes yet.’

The Maharaj Kumar expected that the gardener would at least now suggest that he would take over the task of rejuvenating the parijat. No such offer was forthcoming.

‘Would you be so kind as to undertake the care of this plant for me?’

‘Certainly, Sire, I believe that’s what I’m paid for.’

If only the parijat would die the next week, the Prince thought, and I could with a clean conscience sack the swine or maybe have him beheaded in public. But within a couple of days the stick had regained colour; within a week it was sporting seven incipient leaves and within seven months the courtyard was littered with parijat flowers. He collected the flowers every morning at dawn and showered the half-asleep Princess with them. Sometimes he wove them into her plait or threaded them into a garland and put it around her neck.

* * *

The room was an impenetrable cube of darkness, but he knew that she was not there. He was seized by a raging and unfathomable fear. He fell on his knees, groped with his hands till he had made contact with the bed. She was not lying on it. He slipped under it, lay immobile on his belly and closed his eyes tight. He had an overwhelming urge to throw a tantrum, go out of control and never be reasonable again. He lifted the bed on his back as he rose up. Had Bhootani Mata finally succeeded? Had she done his wife in? He was crawling on all fours, the bed a battering ram that crashed into the walls of the room. Then an even more grisly idea struck him. She had run away with someone else. He dropped the bed and lay still. He would not get up. Now or ever. They would find him in the morning, an unevenly painted blue corpse with ghastly natural flesh-coloured lips. And what about her? Was he going to let her get away with it?

He saw red phosphorescent footprints; he had been in such a panic that he hadn’t noticed them. He recognized the imprint of those small, delicate feet: the large dot that was the big toe and the four descending ones that were the other toes; the sharply etched ball of the foot extending into a solid land mass that receded into the curving shoreline of the instep and rounded off into the heel.

As he walked into the courtyard there was a loud bang. He stepped aside swiftly to dodge a likely blow. She had burst a paper bag bulging with air and was doubled over with laughter. Was this the woman they called the Little Saint? She was a child, that’s what she was. The smallest and sometimes the silliest acts gave her pleasure. What was unsettling was that she had this strange gift of transmitting joy, turning others into little children, swinging god-crazed dancers or overearnest, adult devotees.

She took his hand in hers and placed it inside her choli. ‘Is it possible, is it possible,’ she spoke rapidly as if time and air were running out, ‘to fall in love all over again every day with the same person? Am I not blessed as no other woman is? Play, play, play the flute, O Lord and still my pulse and enlarge my heart for I need room to accommodate my love for you. Make my heart as wide as the cosmos, no, make it a dozen cosmoses. Play, my beloved one.’

Cosmos? A dozen cosmoses? Beloved? How could she get away with these quaint archaisms, worse, mean every one of them and make one believe in them? He played the Basant Bahar, an urgent call to spring.

‘Here,’ she had two dandiyas in her hand.

‘What should I do with them?’

‘You should ask. You know it better than anyone else.’

He was about to say, ‘No, please. I don’t know how to dance. And frankly I don’t think a prince of the House of Mewar should indulge in —’ but fortunately realized the absurdity of saying anything of the sort. The eldest prince and would-be Maharaj Kumar had indulged himself enough and more. He had done things that most princes would disown instantly. And besides, his wife was not one to take a ‘no’ once she had decided upon a course of action. He took the two sticks in his hands. They were overlaid with a patina of black lacquer through which gold vines and leaves with red flowers shone in the dark. She slipped her right hand into the patch-pocket on her skirt and brought out another pair of dandiyas. The pattern here was the exact reverse of his: a gold bed on which the black vines interwove and flowered.

She started singing a traditional song as she raised her hands and struck her dandiyas on the beat. He followed her cue but a little clumsily. She waited for his sticks to make contact with hers but his timing was off and so was his placement.

‘Will you stop playing the fool?’ she pulled him up sharply. ‘When I come in from the right, you don’t do the same. You have to move in from the left.’ She saw the bewilderment on his face and her tone softened. ‘How could you have forgotten the dandiya raas? It’s your dance. You invented it.’

He looked down shamefacedly.

‘Let me show you. One two three, raise your dandiyas to the right, knock knock knock. One two three, dandiyas to the left, knock knock knock. One two three, our dandiyas meet, knock knock knock. Now lower the sticks and repeat the same pattern. Let’s try it once. There, you’re getting it. You just pretended you didn’t know. How beautifully you play the dandiya raas. No wonder that vixen Radha and the gopis from Mathura can’t keep their hands off you. But you try anything funny behind my back, my friend, and I’ll break your legs with these very same dandiyas.’

He tried not to listen to the song. The gopis were, as usual, filling their pots with water on the banks of the Jamuna when the god with a thousand names took out a catapult and one by one broke the pots on their heads and ogled at the drenched ladies. How were they to go home with wet, transparent clothes that revealed all? Madhusudana alias the Flautist, everyone knew was shameless but they were honourable, decent women, some of them with husbands and children, and all of them had spotless reputations. How were they to face their families and pray, what explanation were they to give?

How he loathed these songs. Didn’t the bards of India have anything else to write about? There were thousands of songs about the divine eve-teaser and every day someone or the other was adding to the genre. In plaintive, vexed or patently false angry voices, the women complained about him. They pleaded with him to stop stealing their clothes, implored him not to flirt with them in full public view and spray colours on them during the Holi festival; would he please leave them alone once and for all? No more, no more, no more, they said when they meant more, more, more and please don’t stop. If he turned his back on them, instead of rejoicing they went berserk with grief. They pined, they fretted, they had nervous breakdowns. Frankly, if they were painful when their modesty was compromised, they were unbearable when they were wailing with lovesickness.

Who, he wondered, wrote these songs of soft pornography, and suggestiveness, these songs which were keyholes through which peeping toms – that came to almost the entire male population – lead a fantasy double-life? The voice and persona of the lyrics was that of women but the majority of writers were men. And yet, given half a chance, any housewife who could manage a rhyme, would dash off a song about ‘Look Ma, see how the Flautist is undoing my plait and pulling my pallu.’ Sure, it was a convention and the poets were working within a framework and the words and images had deep metaphysical significance (a likely story if he had ever heard one), but the curious thing was that the overwhelming majority of the singers were women. Were they too as repressed as the men? What was the lure of this god? It was not just the women who fantasized about him, the entire population of the country carried on one continuous love affair with him. Nobody sang steamy overwrought songs to Rama, Vishnu or Shiva. What was the source of the irresistible attraction of the peacock-feathered god? How was he able to get away with the very things that would land any other man in jail for life? Did the women, in their heart of hearts, want to walk the streets with see-through, wet blouses and wait for some dashing young man with a peacock feather in his phenta to tug at their odhanis?

Whatever the ironies and paradoxes, he was convinced the Flautist was wish-fulfillment for both men and women.

But even as he excoriated the banality of the besotted love songs to the Flautist, he was drawn to the beat and lilt of the music. His wife, as was her wont, was pouring her soul and incredible voice into the hori. She kept you off-balance because you never knew what to expect from even the most familiar song when she was rendering it. There was fire and ferocity in her voice which dropped suddenly to whispered intimacies and passionate pleading. He remembered the pichwai paintings he had seen from childhood. Their subject was almost always the dance of the Flautist; never alone of course, but with a hundred or thousand shepherdesses. The women did not have to wait in a queue or share their beloved. He was sufficient unto all of them without having to divide his time amongst them. There were always as many Flautists as there were gopis in the picture. He was sure he had walked into a pichwai painting except that the Princess had taken care to eliminate the competition altogether.

The raas was a sensuous, circular dance which after the first half hour invariably got on your nerves. You went slow or you went fast but either way it got to be the most monotonous and repetitive dance you could think of. He was damned if he would go round in circles by rote. He had no option but to improvise. What he did was to follow the same principle that’s used in playing the pakhawaj drum. The taal had twelve or sixteen beats. On the face of it once you chose the taal, there was no escaping its constricting scheme till eternity. And yet a taal allowed an almost unimaginable degree of freedom. You could do almost anything you wanted so long as you touched base every twelve or sixteen beats dead on time.

The Princess was carrying on sedately and routinely when he switched tracks and changed the coordinates of the dance. He thought his wife looked disoriented and was bound to miss a beat but she was on to him.

‘You want a fight, my friend,’ she whispered, ‘you are going to regret it.’ She smiled, her body language changed. She was lightning alert, watchful and ready to spring into action. Her limbs were loose, she rocked almost imperceptibly while she calculated her partner-opponent’s next move. There was glee in her green eyes and she looked like a cat about to play with her quarry before polishing it off. She beat a tattoo with her sticks and signalled that she was entering the fray.

What if somebody saw him? He would be a fine sight for the gossip mills. His eyes darted and took in the windows and dark corners of the palace. The retainers, the gardeners, not to mention Queen Karmavati’s flunkies and spies were bound to be watching. He thought he saw a shadow slither away. Why was he lying to himself? There was no one around, not for all these weeks and months since he had got back from Kumbhalgarh because Kausalya made sure every night that all the maids, eunuchs and numerous other busybodies were flushed out and put to work in some other wing of the palace.

‘I worry about you, Maharaj Kumar. Look at the dark circles around your eyes,’ Bhootani Mata was suspended like a bat from the ceiling of a balcony in the palace. There was no purchase for her fingers but she seemed to hang in there without any difficulty. ‘How you burn the midnight oil. You do bring out the worst clichés in one. Pray, where is everybody? Has there been a plague in the palace? There’s not a soul around except of course that old faithful retainer of yours, I forget her name. Was she your nurse or the one who first slipped your member between her legs? What’s her name? It’s at the tip of my tongue.’

‘You remember her name just as clearly as you remember every damn thing you ought to forget. I suggest you stay clear of her.’

‘My, my, we are sensitive about Kausalya to this day. But why is she keeping guard? What’s going on here?’

‘Why don’t you mind your own business?’

‘But you are my business. My one and only business for the time being.’ She looked at the Princess and then him. ‘Isn’t this romantic? Never seen anybody so besotted with his enemy. What would I not give to exchange places with the lady?’ Bhootani Mata opened her crotch. ‘Peer into the void and see the cosmos at a glance, Maharaj Kumar. All the pleasures and treasures of this and every other universe await you. Do you like that internal rhyme? Of course you don’t. You have no ear for poetry, not even bad poetry.’

He spat into the black hole. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Casting the proverbial evil eye.’ She laughed. It was an evil sound, something that came straight from the heart. ‘Let me invoke a benediction upon you. May everything you touch, turn to ashes. May all those who are dear to you, rue the day they came within your ambit.’