‘You think this is a laughing matter? You are going to tell me who it is. Now. I’m going to kill him and then I’m going to kill you.’ His voice was a strange and violent inhuman screech. ‘Have you no shame carrying on under your husband’s roof? Speak bitch, speak. Who is it, who is it who ravishes you in this very palace while you deny your husband his conjugal rights?’
‘Calm down, please calm down,’ she pleaded with him. ‘You are going to wake up the whole palace.’
‘I don’t give a horse’s soft grassy green shit who wakes up. I don’t mind waking up the good Lord of the universe Himself and telling Him what a great time my wife’s been having right here under His very eyes.’ He had, however, lowered his voice. Here’s this slut carrying on merrily, he thought, a consummate dissembler, if ever he had seen one, never a hair on her head out of place or a line of anxiety on her forehead, leading a double life and she’s worried someone might hear him. Well, she needn’t worry, he had sent off all the servants. She was all his now until he had wrung the truth out of her.
‘Is it my younger brother, Rattan? Or my debonair paternal cousin, Rajendra? Or is it Vikramaditya who’s always hanging around in your vicinity salivating at the sight of your exposed feet with their gold anklets and when he thinks nobody’s watching, peering into his bhabhi’s blouse to see if he can delve a little deeper into the cleavage?’ He was suddenly silent, aghast at how low he could stoop. No one, but no one was beyond suspicion. Could anyone bring himself to believe that the Rajkumari pure-as-virginsnow was such an uncontrollable whore? Anything was possible. ‘Is it Father? Is that why you fainted when you first saw him?’
‘Stop, please stop. You are going to regret your words and hate yourself.’
‘Or is it that uncle of yours, the one you went back with to Merta, Rao Viramdev? Is it him you’ve been betrothed to while he’s supposed to be married to my father’s sister? Did he start you young, such a fine, handsome man, so much dignity and such a noble face. And that handle-bar moustache on which you used to swing as a child, did he tickle your ears with it and then tickle you all over? Did he say, this is our secret, only you and I will share it all our lives?’
She was crying now. Soundlessly. Her chest went through paroxysms, she was trying to speak but her tongue seemed to have retracted. Her breathing was erratic. Her eyes turned upwards and only the whites were visible. Her hands and feet tensed and twisted while her mouth started to lose its alignment.
‘Ah, woman, this is one trick you are not going to pull on me. No hysterical or histrionic fits, if you please.’ He slapped her hard. He slapped her again. Her breathing improved and her eyes focussed but she was still disoriented.
‘No more, please,’ she said suddenly. ‘I will tell you who it is.’
It was his turn to lose his tongue. He looked as if someone was strangling him. For seven or eight months, or was it a year, the one thing he had wanted to know was the name of the man to whom she was betrothed. Now she was about to tell him and he had lost his nerve. He didn’t want to know, shut up you harlot or I’ll pull that tongue out, shut up, I don’t give a damn who it is, just so long as I can carry on being ignorant.
‘It’s him,’ she said and pointed to the small marble statue next to her bed.
‘Who?’ he asked her.
She pointed at the statue again.
‘That’s Shri Krishna. What’s he got to do with this?’
‘It’s him.’
‘Is this your idea of a joke?’
She shook her head.
‘You take me for some kind of fool? Are you going to confess or do I have to strangle you to get the truth out of you?’
‘It is the truth.’
He struck her then. Her chin opened up. His next blow caught her on the left eye. ‘Rajputs don’t ever raise their hands on their women,’ he didn’t stop hitting her. ‘But neither do their women make out with men from the very first year of marriage.’
‘I thought you went through all my writing.’
‘What?’ he was not sure he understood what she was saying. Her words were as indistinct and swollen as her lips.
‘Never mind.’
‘Yes, I read everything barring the bloody verse. Can’t bear the stuff.’
She smiled.
She was lying. Trust her to come up with someone as absurd and incredible as Shri Krishna for her paramour. A simple straightforward man was not good enough for her. Only a god, one of the most powerful, important and beloved of gods would do. You couldn’t fault her for under-reaching, lack of imagination, or low self-image. It was so far-fetched, so utterly beyond the probable and the possible, some credulous fool might just give it credence. Shri Krishna. Ha. Make it a ha, ha.
He took the sheets back to his rooms to start reading the poems but he dozed off. It was one in the afternoon when he awoke. He picked up the top fifty pages.
Get him on the double Tell him it’s an emergency The doctors have given up.
I can’t bear it I think I’m going to die It’s a slipped disc A shooting pain up the spine A fire in the brain A comet bursting in the kidneys. Is he here? Call him, tell him to rush Tell him, it’s the end I’ve got galloping TB The left lung’s collapsed The right one’s dead And the soul, it’s fled Has he come?
Sound the alarm Knock on the door of heaven Get him out of bed It’s terminal Cancer of the upper intestines. It’s spread Into the esophagus. Spilt into the lower bowels, The liver, the bones, the breast. What? Hasn’t he come yet? Ask him to come fast I’m about to breathe my last Nothing serious really Just a routine heart attack Tell him I died With one eye open. Lying on the pyre Just to check If he came With a smirk On his face.
And a tart on his arm.
If he won’t come soon, Let him come late,
I’ll wait. If it makes him Feel important To be inconstant Why, of course I’ll indulge him. Because Giridhar Lover Move over I’ve got another.
Stop him, stop that arsonist Pin him down, manacle him. Put him in solitary. Give him the third degree. He set fire to me, in broad daylight. Made a raging torch of me. People watched, he laughed. ‘Try and put that one out, it’s spontaneous combustion. It’s self-immolation but she’ll never burn out.’ So, resident incendiary, Shyam, Philanderer, What’s the score? Seventeen thousand ladies incinerated to date. Died of puppy love, infatuation, yearning, Flaming dervishes of desire and illicit passion. Calling and cursing you, your infidelity stoking the fires further The simpering fools, I’ll not say a requiem for them Better dead than pining for a lecher with a diird-rate ditty on his lips and the disrobing leer in the eye. But there’s news for you, my god, I’m closing down spectator sports. About time too. I’m going to turn the heat on you, my friend. A nice change of pace, don’t you think, Your turn to roil now. Light the spit please, Let’s have a nice slow fire. Turn and turn and turn The Blue One a soft golden brown, Nice and juicy like a sheish kabab. This time around, I’m going to rip that heart of yours. A little more than a heartburn, I would say. A heart-attack really. Fatal. Call it love. Shyam, Giridhar, a likely story. Tomorrow she’ll call him Rama, Partha, Sanjay, Kanhaiyya or by any name she can think of, he thought, just to throw me off the scent. It was physically impossible, at least so I thought, but the Shehzada’s body was even hotter than before. They had changed his clothes and someone was applying cold compresses to his forehead. There was a strong smell of rose-water in the room but the sour odour of flesh rotting managed to leak through. ‘Have his wounds been cleaned?’ I asked the vaidya. ‘Superficially. The cloth of his shirt, earth and sweat have formed a hard crust. If we tear if off, he’ll start bleeding again.’ I had walked back into the Prince’s room hoping for a miracle. What I beheld was the slow progress of infection and the deterioration of his physical condition.
I went back to my office, hurriedly wrote a note in my own hand, affixed the seal of the state and sent Mangal to Kathoda, the Bhil kingdom in the mountains to the north of Chittor. Mangal was demoralized and exhausted but this was a mission I could not entrust to anybody else. Mewar and the Bhils of Kathoda had been close for generations. It was an unlikely friendship, tribals and city dwellers, but enlightened and mutually beneficial self-interest prevailed over the omnipresent snobbery and superciliousness of the Rajputs, and the Bhils had got over their natural distrust of urban sophisticates. When war clouds gathered, they sat in on our War Councils and were our closest allies on the battlefield. Their weapons and war tactics are different from ours but they are every bit as brave as us Rajputs. Nobody knows the Aravali mountains better than them. When they fight on their own, their strategy is to draw the enemy into the jungles and hills. However powerful the foe, he doesn’t stand much chance against the Bhils in their home-territory.
We trade in times of peace, attend coronations and send embassies to Kathoda and other Bhil kingdoms. They send their princes for studies at our Gurukuls – that’s where I met my friend Prince Puraji Kika. Whatever I know of the jungle, its sounds, its smells, its silences, its worms and maggots, its weeds and grasses and trees, its birds of prey and birds of carrion and about animals, big and small, I owe to Puraji Kika. He taught me that herbs and seeds can anaesthetize, revive and kill. They can put you to sleep, cut off blood supply, reverse the course of scorpion and snakebites as well as make you delirious, attack your brain and turn you into a vegetable.
My note was to Puraji who was now King. Our relations were a little strained because some of our nobles in the vicinity of the Kathoda border had, according to Raja Puraji, appropriated Bhil lands and were killing game indiscriminately. Since game is what Bhils live on, the decimation of the deer, boar and neel gaya population was affecting their very survival. Raja Puraji Kika is not just a neighbour and a king and all other kinds of formal things, he is first and last, my friend. I had been a little too preoccupied with the Vikramaditya imbroglio and then with Bahadur’s arrival and had not looked into and redressed the wrongs perpetrated by the local jagirdars.
There was no point mincing words. I told the Raja that I had no excuse for the delay in attending to his complaint. I would do so in the next few weeks. Right now I was in trouble, deep trouble, to put it mildly. A royal guest, a Prince of Gujarat, had been mauled by a lioness. The Chittor doctors did not seem too hopeful, read, had given up on him. Would he please send his personal physician, Eka by the fastest steed at the king’s disposal? The Prince’s life and my honour and reputation were at stake.
On the fourth day I knew the end was near. The odd thing was that in many ways the Vaidya’s and Hakim’s medicines had been remarkably effective. The fever had come down, Bahadur’s pallor had improved, he was not as restless and he seemed to be in less pain. But even as I entered the compound walls of the Atithi Palace, the overpowering miasma of rotting flesh and putrefaction too far gone hit me. I knew that cloying, giddy smell which clung to your nostrils for days and weeks and infiltrated the lining of your brain and lingered in your memory forever, so well.
My little sister Sumitra, of whom the finance minister Adinathji’s great-granddaughter Leelawati reminded me so much, fell off a swing when I was fourteen. I guess she was my favourite though I never admitted it. She drove me mad wanting to be with me everywhere I went, including the bathroom and the toilet. She wanted to do everything I did. She came to the Gurukul, she came to wrestling matches, crashed into stag parties, wanted to hang out with us boys when we went over to the whores’ lane. She was a pest and I was the object of her hero-worship.
We were worried because she always swung too high and had fallen on her head. She was unconscious for close to forty-eight hours but she came to and was back to her old self. We had forgotten about her fall when I noticed that she had begun to walk on her toes. Another fad, I said to myself, it will pass. There was a time a few months ago when her only mode of locomotion was cartwheels.
On the third day I realized how unobservant I was. Her right foot was swollen, she had been in pain for days and hadn’t mentioned it because she didn’t want to bother us. I looked at her heel and found a soft, squelchy swelling at the core of which was a sharp point. Even if you brushed against it with a finger, she would weep from the pain. We called the Raj Vaidya. He thought it was an abcess of some sort and applied poultices to the foot and gave her potions.
Her whole leg was swollen now and she would lapse into a semiconscious stupor from time to time. She woke up one afternoon and said to me, ‘I know why I fell down. There was a thorn in my heel and it hurt so much when I put pressure on my foot, I let go of the swing.’
‘Why didn’t you remember it all these days?’
She looked puzzled for a while and then she smiled. ‘I didn’t think about it till you asked me just now but when I woke up from the fall, I lost a couple of tables from my memory. I tried hard to figure what 3 times 7 was and I couldn’t. I remembered my tables up to 5, and from 8 to 12, but 6 and 7 had just gone out of my mind. That’s why I got such bad marks in my last test.’
‘Do you remember them now?’ I asked her just in case she was hallucinating. She was not. She reproduced them perfectly. ‘You lie down quietly and I’ll run and tell the vaidya that it’s nothing but a thorn in your foot.’
‘Will you hurry because otherwise I’ll be asleep by the time you return?’
I had every intention of slouching through the whole of Chittor before getting back to her but for some reason I ran back all the way from the doctor’s. She was already unconscious and the smell had begun to ooze. She was fighting armies of demons which swirled through her mind and there was no way I could cross over into her nightmares and fight alongside her and bring her back.
Her leg had become black and purple and shiny. The vaidya called the surgeon. He was ready with his instruments and about to make an incision when she tensed up and her limbs and her neck twisted at inconceivable angles and stayed that way for a long, long time. The poison had reached the brain, the Raj Vaidya told us. He tried to force her mouth open to pore a calmative down her throat, but it was no use.
The next day it was impossible to stand even a quarter of a mile away from Sumitra and not slump down to the ground with the heavy scent of her festering foot. The bloody girl was unconscious but if I was not holding her hand she didn’t stop calling my name till I arrived and took her scrawny palm in mine. She opened her eyes as the falling sun flooded the room with light.
‘They are going to cut off my leg, aren’t they?’
‘No way, child.’ Father spoke to her though the question was addressed to me. ‘Nobody’s going to cut off your leg while I’m alive.’
Should Father have died and let the surgeon cut off her leg? How I hated Sumitra for forcing me to swim through the dead pools of her malevolently sweet and sickening odour. I cursed her and swore I would never return. I was under no compulsion, nobody else went, not her mother, none of my other brothers or sisters, not even the servants. The vaidya got bulletins of her health every four hours and he dished out the same medicine without venturing near her. I never did ask him what he was giving her but I am almost positive it was some derivative of opium. I knew I ought to be grateful to him for keeping her unconscious of her agony but I hated him for not doing anything more. He was a doctor, wasn’t he and aren’t doctors gods who can save your loved and dear ones? I had not learnt then that even gods who pretend to be all-powerful cannot save anybody.
On the eighth day of the large, looming, imponderable millennium of the deadly scent, I swooned while going to see her. I had stayed away the previous night and the whole day while the little slut had relentlessly kept up the litany of my name. Oh sweet sweet forgetfulness, if this is death let me drown in it just as long as I don’t have to go back to that little girl with the black edema that is a flower that keeps blooming and will one of these days drive out all the inhabitants of the earth and still keep growing till it has blotted out the sun.
For seven days and nights all those who loved her and did themselves the great and sensible favour of not visiting her, paid the brahmins to knock at the doors of the gods and wake them up and ask them to relieve the agony of my sister Sumitra who I was willing to kill with my bare hands but her throat was so tiny, her voice such a whisper and her body so dark and bursting with pus, I didn’t dare touch her.
Was it because the priests in the temples smelled death that they had accelerated the tolling of the bells? They rang at the Kalika Mata temple, at the Eklingji temple, at the Jain temple and the Kumbha Shyam temple. Was it for her or for me? No, I was not going to die if she too was going to accompany me in death. It’s either her or me, make up your mind. When I came to, I pretended for an eternity that I was either dead or still in a dead faint. They held onions and the soles of shoes and the essence of the most dark and priceless attars from Shyamaprasad Ramlal’s collection of perfumes which he exported to the far corners of the earth, to my nose. And all the while I heard her calling my name.
What was the point, the bitch would never die and let go of me. They said you don’t have to go. You are unwell. You haven’t slept for days. Not go? You think that witch is going to let go of me that easily?
Inside Sumitra’s room, there was just one person. Kausalya. She had been there all week long swabbing Sumitra’s brow and applying cold compresses, covering her when she threw off the soft cotton coverlet, changing the bed linen into which the suppuration leaked continually. She fed her water with a spoon and occasionally tried to coax some suji or kanji into her mouth. She mixed the powders the doctor sent with milk and if she threw up, she cleaned up the mess. Nobody asked Kausalya to take on this job. She was far too well respected and important a person in the palace hierarchy to be doing such a thankless and repugnant task. But Kausalya did not seem to be aware that she was doing anything special. She loved Sumitra and was doing what she thought had to be done.
Did Kausalya expect me to come earlier? Or not leave at all? For it was she who had to keep answering Sumitra’s calls and tell her that I was on my way and would soon be with her; she couldn’t imagine what could keep me away from my beloved sister. But Kausalya never said a word to me about my comings and goings and my duties. She never put a name to any of her expectations of me.
I drew the curtains and let the light in. Then I came and sat by Sumitra. You could barely hear her now but I could see her lips moving with my name. Kausalya had done her hair the way Sumitra liked it, in one plait. She had sponged her and dressed her in the aquamarine chanderi choli and ghagra that was one of her favourites, though if she had had her way she would have worn my clothes. There was a tiny red tika on her forehead and Kausalya had matched it with delicate ruby earrings. She must have known I had come. She had stopped her dry whisper and her palm had opened. I placed the index finger of my right hand in it and she clenched her fist around it. Her breathing seemed to settle down into a more regular pattern. The most unlikely thought crossed my mind. There are some people you can afford to lose only by your own death. I let it pass.
Kausalya came over and changed the soiled cloth under Sumitra’s leg. She groaned in pain. I soothed her with my free palm and kissed the red dot. She opened her eyes, took in the room and looked steadily into my eyes. I smiled slowly. Her face lit up and she smiled back, her left cheek dipping in the middle to form a dimple.
‘I am going,’ she said and was gone.
