Who makes up or invents proverbs? They are so often a crockful of never-mind-what. They pile up platitude upon platitude which the officious and unctuous mouth in and out of season and are taken to be the distillates of wisdom. But proverbs are sagacity after the event. Homilies, truisms, adages, maxims are the work of the glib, the undecided, the ambivalent and of those who would have it both ways. Show me a proverb and I’ll show you its antidote. When I was in the second grade we had two stories cheek by jowl. The title of one said ‘If enough people say it, there must be truth in it.’ The next one immediately proceeded to contradict it. ‘Listen to everybody but do what you think is right.’ When I pointed out to my teacher – may he rot in hell and prosper in heaven – that one negated the other, he took me on his knees, my head and feet dangling, and caned me till he had completely cross-hatched my buttocks. ‘You buffoon,’ he told me, ‘they complement each other.’ Do you wonder that our people have the intelligence, analytical ability and the steadfastness of the weather-vane? They endorse and propagate the views of the last man they’ve seen. ‘Unity in diversity. Diversity in unity.’ We don’t see any contradictions because we love to believe that antitheses, polarities and the one and the many are the same.
What does it matter one way or the other? In the long run we are all going to end up dead.
What was this long tirade in aid of? I am about to mouth a proverb.
Life is stranger than fiction.
I was feeling good. I felt like seeing our kingdom. (I was about to say my kingdom. Is that a sign of love, power, possessiveness or just being wishful?) I ran up the Victory Tower. That’s not quite true; the stairs are too narrow and dark. I took the steps at a brisk pace and did the forty vertical yards in four minutes flat. How can you not love Mewar from here? The view is breathtaking. Sometimes you can see all the way to Kumbhalgarh. It must have rained all night long and then stopped in the early hours. The sky is transparent. You can see the gods behind the clouds. I bow my head and ask my ancestor, the Sun-god to bless me. I thank him for his munificence. The land of the fort is verdant. The birds are out making a racket. Seventy parrots wheel in the sky and come straight for me. At the very last minute, they turn an invisible corner and alight on the parapet of Rani Padmini’s palace.
The pujari at the Kalika Mata temple lightly tolls the bell and then in a voice that is as clear and crystalline as the sky this morning sings the Surya Stotra. (Did you know that the Kalika Mata temple was originally dedicated to the Sun-god?) He sings of the brilliance of Surya Deva. He tells of the god’s chariot, its seven horses and his charioteer, Arun, whose torso ends at his waist. He marvels at the journey the god makes every day across the dome of the sky. His speed is light and his medium is light and his message is light. I stretch my hands out and gather an armful of the sun’s rays.
In the thick forests on the slopes of the hill on which Chittor stands, the lions and the tigers, the deer and the boar are calling it a day. I can see one of their watering holes from here. A male antelope with magnificent antlers drinks unhurriedly and then looks up. Was that a footfall or just a dry branch falling down? The muscles in his neck are taut. He looks around carefully just in case there is an unwelcome visitor. Everything seems to be all right. He calls his mate. She comes out shyly, rubs her flanks against his and drinks from the pool. A tribe of monkeys swings off the branches and lands at the opposite end. They are a noisy, cantankerous lot. Soon they settle down to remove lice from each other’s hair.
I’m doing a three hundred and sixty degree swivel. The township within the fortress walls is slowly coming to life. It’s always the women who wake up first and come out to fill water. If someone were to ask me what is Mewar, my first answer will be Mewar is colour. There will be other answers, some of them more important, like our blind and indiscriminate bravery or valour. But that’s not a spontaneous, instant reaction. When I close my eyes I see colours leaping at me. They skid and lurch and shove and push everything else out. Have you seen the reds and yellows and blues and greens in Mewar? There’s the sun in them and a rawness that’s like an open wound. I know that muted colours are a sign of sophistication. They are pleasing and beautiful, I won’t deny that. But the daring and sheer nerve of the hues and colour combinations of Mewar is like a punch in the solar plexus. In the most ordinary and quotidian moments of life, my people rewrite the dynamics of colour every day. They are profligate and prodigal and yet so controlled, they re-invent colour every time they use it.
Look at that woman rubbing charcoal powder mixed with a bit of opium into her gums. I can’t see her features but that kind of slow, suffused pleasure in your waking moments can only come from a border-line addiction that’s been inherited over generations. Her red and black ghagra is topped by a banana skin yellow blouse and the phosphorescent green of a new mango leaf in spring. Her two companions at the well are lightning blue, pomegranate seed pink and eggplant purple. Who needs lassi when these colours can slap you awake first thing in the morning? The lord and master of the but on the left is up and Mrs. Eggplant Purple is pouring water out for his bath.
Something moves at the corner of my left eye. Far in the distance I see a group of men riding hard from the southwest. They are blots and blurs just now but I suspect that they are outsiders. It’s odd that they are without a flag.
I came down and told the sentry to notify the guards at the checkpoint to look out for about thirty foreigners and send a message to me at the office as soon as they learnt the visitors’ identity and mission. But something about that flapless group kept gnawing at me. I rode down to the check-point to find out who the visitors were. One of the guards on duty was asleep. I woke him up and told him he no longer had a job. He begged me to pardon him. I turned away. The riders were crossing the bridge over the Gambhiree with a white flag.
It couldn’t be, could it? It was. Prince Bahadur Khan of Gujarat in person. Had Vikramaditya sent two messengers to him anticipating that one of them may be caught? How could the Prince have travelled from Ahmedabad in a matter of eight or nine hours? Was his army in hiding somewhere close by? I hid my surprise. He was little short of alarmed.
‘How did you know I was coming?’
‘I have my sources.’
He racked his brains. ‘We didn’t tell anyone.’ He looked suspiciously at his companions. ‘And for the last couple of weeks we rode nonstop except for resting at night.’
I didn’t respond.
‘Your Highness Maharaj Kumar, in the absence of your father, His Majesty Rana Sanga, I wish to apply to you for asylum and protection at Chittor. I hereby formally surrender my sword, my shield and my person to your care. And so do my companions.’
‘Why don’t you ride in with me to the Atithi Palace, take a bath, change, have breakfast? We’ll have all the time in the world to talk then.’
Even if his army was in hiding, once we had him, they would think twice before attacking. As it turned out, it was nothing but a banal coincidence that Vikramaditya had written to Bahadur Khan to bring his army to usurp the throne and that Bahadur Khan had turned up seeking asylum the very next day.
I installed Bahadur Khan in the Prince’s suite of rooms in the Atithi Palace and replaced the servants with intelligence men who were also trained to be excellent cooks and personal valets. I shut myself up in my office. What was going on? This is daylight, nine seventeen in the morning. I can’t be dreaming this up. What was Prince Bahadur doing at Chittor as a supplicant? He had sworn to raze Chittor and subjugate the whole of Mewar in revenge for our sacking of Ahmednagar.
Obviously he had had to defer his resolve. Later on I would be criticized by a group of nobles, Rani Karmavati and Prince Vikramaditya himself, for being weak-willed and for nursing a snake in our bosom. Did we really have a choice in the matter? Oh yes, we could have shut the gates in his face or better still, bumped him off, with his companions. The former course would have further alienated the Prince and the second would have pushed his father, Muzaffar Shah, over the edge and enraged him to the point where it would have made a material difference to the outcome of the war Father was waging against him. This way he was our guest and hostage. It would humiliate Muzaffar Shah and in case things went badly for us, we would have an ace up our sleeve. Besides, if ever in the future, Bahadur became king of Gujarat and conquered Chittor as he had sworn, he might perhaps think kindly of its people and spare them.
He slept through that day and night and the next day. I got Mangal to wake him up in the evening and asked him to join me for dinner. At seven o’clock Bahadur presented himself at my palace. He had brought a few gifts with him: a set of six gold goblets from Istanbul for me and, for my wife, a wonderfully carved statuette of the Flautist in green jade from Gujarat.
Can we read the character of a person from his face? Perhaps there’s a science to it and the thickness of the eyebrows, their angle, the width of the forehead, the curve of the nose and the contours of the lips, the colour of the teeth, the placement of the ears and their size are all precise signifiers of the man or woman within. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. At Chittor itself, Makhanlalji can tell a person’s future merely by looking at his face. And there’s a Chhayashastri at Merta who measures your shadow and looks up an old treatise and traces your vocation and your past. I have no such hidden talent or prowess. All I can do is conjecture which is at best a highly unreliable business. And yet from the moment one sees a face, one is almost involuntarily drawing up a profile of the person and locating him on multiple polarized axes: like-dislike; trust-distrust; dull-bright; open-devious. If I am often a good judge of people it is because I go by my instincts while simultaneously distrusting them.
I like Bahadur Khan but I don’t trust him. It’s not so much that he is unreliable as that he is impulsive and impetuous and won’t give himself time for second and third thoughts. And yet I suspect that he is capable of maturing. Which is why, I think, he is going to be dangerous in the long run. He is spoilt and his ambition is the work of an idle and over-reaching mother. He is impatient and like most would-be usurpers has no sense of the quiddity of life: that sons become fathers and must face the same dilemmas that they had visited on their parents.
We sit opposite each other on the thick Persian carpet which is a gift to Father from our common enemy, the Sultan of Malwa. The Shehzada is enjoying the meal. Our intelligence in such matters is fairly good and I have got the cooks to prepare some of his favourite dishes, Afghani tangdi kebabs and ghazab gosht along with a Gujarati sweet dish called shrikhand made from yoghurt that’s been strained in muslin to rid it of water and then slowly stroked with sugar and saffron till they disappear. We make small talk. I know there’s something on his mind that he wants to spill out but his good breeding prevents him from doing so till we are through with the meal.
‘You must be wondering what brings me here on a sudden visit.’ We were having paan when he broached the subject.
‘It’s a rare pleasure to have someone as distinguished as you amongst us.’
‘You are very kind and I hope I can repay your hospitality one of these days. Very soon, as a matter of fact, if I have my way.’
‘Rest, relax, we would like you to stay as long as you want. Consider Chittor your second home.’
‘Maharaj Kumar,’ he’d had enough of this polite sparring, ‘forgive me for dispensing with niceties and coming straight to the point.’
‘Please. There is no formality between friends.’
‘My father’s armies are engaged in battle with Mewar’s near the kingdom of Idar. If you’ll lend me just twenty thousand cavalry, I will seize our capital of Ahmedabad with the support of my sympathizers and followers there and unseat my father, Sultan Muzaffar Shah. I will relinquish Idar. In one swift move, Idar will become part of your father’s domain. Gujarat and Mewar will sign a peace treaty and your country will gain a lifelong friend in me. Needless to say, I will also compensate you for your forces at the rate of fifty thousand tankas for each day of service.’
Great to get Idar on a platter. The fight for Idar goes as far back as my very first memories. Bahadur has set up a nice series of ‘ifs’ but it does not suit his purpose to dwell on the imponderables. Can I raise twenty thousand cavalry? Will that number be enough? Does he have a substantial following in Ahmedabad? Will Ahmedabad fall like a ripe and rotten custard apple into his hands? And what if our forces are vanquished? What did I know of Bahadur as a military strategist? It’s heartening to learn that he’s going to finance the expedition but where was he planning to get that kind of money from and against what collateral? My own dealings with Adinathji have taught me that he needs castles and lands and forts, not in the air, but on solid ground to lend a ear to any proposal for a loan. Whatever monies he had lent to Vikramaditya was on the sound reasoning that at a pinch, the Prince’s mother would come through with the original sum and some highly compounded interest. As to a lifelong peace treaty and friendship, it was a happy thought but for the moment a rather far-fetched one.
Every single one of the objections I raised in my mind was good enough to cool my ardour, if any, to help the Prince. But all those fine points of rational analyses and logic were merely skirting the issue. Even if there was a hundred percent guarantee of Prince Bahadur winning the throne of Gujarat, it would not alter two facts: one, his father, the legitimate king is alive and two, he is number two in the line of succession.
Not a line moved in my impassive face but I could barely restrain myself from picking him by the scruff of his neck and giving him a couple of hard slaps followed by a memorable whipping and then throwing him in the dungeons and letting him rot there till he had lost his teeth and his vision and begged on his knees to see the sunlight and breathe fresh air and swore to follow the laws of primogeniture.
