She was a deep one. He had to hand it to her, it was, frankly, close to a master-stroke in the escalating war of nerves between him and her. You want a name, say it again, you want a name, you really and truly want the name, how many months had he pursued her with that one single question, here it is, she had thrown a name at him casually, like a bone to a dog, go ahead, chew on it for the next seven hundred or a thousand years, for all I care.
What a name. She must have planned and chosen it carefully and with such cruel pleasure. It was one name and a hundred names. It could stand for the one and only one or for anyone. One poem had Giridhar, the other Shyam, the next Gopal and the one after that spoke to a nameless one. It could be a pseudonym, a pet name or a private code name for a beloved. It could be one or all the people she had referred to or none of them. She had kept her part of the deal, now he was left to stew in his own juice.
He threw his head back and laughed. A loud, unambiguous, unforced laugh. The bride of god, how’s that for a conundrum? Try and figure that one out, my friend. You had to admit that she was a wizard at sowing confusion and slipping away. Put yourself in her shoes, you are having one hell of a roaring, ear-splitting, torrid affair, they get you married to some young bloke, the future king of the most prestigious kingdom in the community. Do you keep your secret to yourself, no sir, you are a plain-speaking, honest person. On the night of your wedding you tell your husband the truth, and nothing but. He wants to know who the other man is. He wants an answer to that question so badly, he is shrinking, literally dying from curiosity. You hold your silence till the man is about to go completely berserk. And then when you can’t put him off any longer, what name do you tell him? Would any woman barring her have thought of telling him that she was in love with a god?
Why had she not chosen Shiva, Brahma, Indra, Agni, Varuna, Vishnu or any of the other gods? How did she pick the name of the Gita-god, Shri Krishna, Krishna, Bal Krishna, Flautist, Giridhar, Gopal, Govinda, Atmaram, Shyam, the Peacock-feathered One, Vasudev, Kanhaiyya, Kanha, Murlidhar, Kaliya Mardan, Nagar, Madhusudan and a thousand other names and aliases? Did she know what the Blue God meant to him? He had never told her; what conversations had they ever had that he could have revealed the special corner Krishna had in his heart? Besides he was not demonstrative and never singled Krishna out for any special form of public worship. He did his sandhya in the mornings after he had his bath, put the red tilak on the foreheads of the gods and goddesses, said his prayers, prostrated before them and went off to work. He doubted, no, he was absolutely sure, that neither his mother nor Kausalya was aware of the closeness between him and Krishna. How had she found out? Was she a clairvoyant, could she peer into a man’s mind and see its innermost secrets? Had she chosen Krishna deliberately knowing how vulnerable her husband was and how confused and hurt he would be? He felt exposed. His wife was an unknown and uncharted territory. What little he had seen of her told him that she was devious beyond anyone he had known. She was full of surprises, each greater than the previous one and they were all unpleasant and disturbing. He felt a shimmer of fear under his skin. Who was she? What was she up to? What other fearsome wonders and shocks were in store for him?
Whoever had heard of falling in love with a god, for God’s sake? Gods were for worshipping, praying, interceding, invoking in times of distress and calamity, begging favours. Sure, Krishna was the most loveable of gods and if one were to believe the stories about him, he was more than a little soft on women. The endemic promiscuity of Krishna was one aspect that he did not quite understand and, truth to tell, he wasn’t terribly interested in it either. The Blue God had, quite apart from his wives, a seraglio bigger than those of all the other gods and every shepherdess in Brindaban was infatuated with him.
One of them, Radha, was closer to him than any of his wives, which is why Krishna is worshipped often as Radheshyam. But the gopis and Radha and all of Krishna’s wives spoke to him, heard his beautiful voice, played with him, danced with him, listened to him play his flute, saw his beautiful eyes and his glowing blue complexion, saw him pick up the Govardhan mountain on his little finger to save them from a deluge, witnessed him vanquishing the evil on this earth. To cut a long story short, they saw him in the flesh. That’s the only way you can fall in love. Not by seeing a carving or a statue or a painting.
In love with Krishna, he laughed again, a likely story.
He was a lonely boy. His father was away at war most of the time. Even when he was at home he was taciturn. He was the king and always preoccupied with the affairs of state. The Prince was not sure whether he was a stern man or just looked forbidding. He came down to the Gurukul when there were competitions or sports, not really to watch his sons’ progress but because he was the patron of the academy and that’s what patrons were supposed to do. Sometimes his eldest son won a couple of medals; in one particular year, he walked away with the first prize for archery, military strategy, swimming and riding. If the Rana’s breast swelled with pride, the only way he showed it was by being more awkward than he normally was with him. He should have felt alienated from his father, neglected and ignored. But he didn’t. He knew his father kept an eye on him. Part of the problem, he grasped when he was fairly young, was that he and his father were not demonstrative because they were clumsy when it came to matters of emotion. Both by temperament and by their calling, they kept a close watch on themselves, and very rarely let themselves go. Often just looking at him, he got the drift of what was going on behind his father’s quiet visage. He had the feeling that his father too read him with accuracy and insight. It wasn’t that they were cold fish. Quite the contrary, they were men of intense feelings and sentiment. But they understood that if you were to be a good leader you did not allow your emotions to come to a boil, and even on the occasions when they did, you took care to separate the emotional from the rational and opted for the latter. He knew his father thought a lot about him and that was about as close to paternal love as he would get. Or perhaps thinking about someone was the same as loving.
His mother, the Maharani was certainly a loving person. He was her son, her first-born and he thought she loved him more than she loved his father. She asked him if he had had his milk and had he eaten his breakfast, eggs, cornflour chapatis dripping with ghee, almonds and sheera. Then she told him the menu for lunch. After lunch she enquired whether he had had enough dal, roti, cabbage, green peas and okra shakh and most important of all had he eaten the mutton masala, the chicken tikkas and the three varieties of fish.
‘You must eat the greens but if you want to be king, you must eat mutton and cashew nuts and pistachios and almonds and fish and drink lots and lots of milk but never with fish, mind you.’
It was always at lunch-time that she took it upon herself to tell him what she was planning – perhaps it was conspiring since she spoke in hushed tones – to give him for dinner. Food, he grasped early on, was in his mother’s eyes as perhaps in the eyes of many other mothers, the essence of love.
His mother had little else to do the whole day and that seemed to keep her busy. He was singularly lucky that she did not have the patience to sit in on his meals because as a child he was a finicky eater and whatever little he ate, it was because of his grandmother’s and Kausalya’s stories. They were stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, from the Puranas and the Panchatantra and of course stories about his ancestors and their heroic deeds. They must have told him the same tales over and over again but it was also true that they both had an inexhaustible repertoire of stories. As he grew up, he often said, ‘Oh, you’ve told me that one before.’ Without losing their temper or batting an eyelid they moved to another story. Often the Queen Mother and Kausalya told the same story, sometimes on the same day. What struck him was how differently they told it, not just their intonation, manner of telling, their pauses and the build-up towards climactic scenes, but the content itself varied. His grandmother, paradoxically, was the more matter-of-fact: who did what and how; who was right and who was wrong; she went straight for the jugular. Kausalya, on the other hand, told a story from different points of view. She always seemed to be asking the question, why. And when you asked why, it was not so easy to find one party right and the other wrong.
He had many heroes, some from his family tree and a great many from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Bhim, Rama, Shiva, Lakshman, Bhishma, Hanuman, he dreamt of them and their exploits during the day and at night. But when he grew up, he realized they were all static. They may have grown up physically and in years but they were the same at the end as when they began. What changed was the plot-line; the events and the circumstances altered, they remained steadfast. They went from extreme luxury to acute poverty, from war to peace to war, they renounced their kingdoms, or undertook the severest bachelorhood because of a promise their father had given, their foot touched a stone and brought a woman to life, they prayed to the gods and won so many boons that the gods themselves feared them. Their lives were turbulent but the quality of their experience rarely warped, bent or changed the way they looked at things. Their minds were impervious. Little, if anything, seeped in. They had experienced much but experience did not alter them or reshape their outlook radically.
The one exception was Shri Krishna. The god seemed to grow with him. There was not one Shri Krishna but at the very least, three or four. He was protean and he changed his role according to the circumstances in which he found himself. You could not put your finger on his character and say, yes this is him. He defied definition. You could never predict how he was going to act or react. Did he have principles? Yes, he did. And yet if the occasion called for it, he kept them in abeyance, changed them or forgot them. Was he ruthless and unscrupulously opportunistic? Sometimes. But the Flautist wouldn’t have framed the questions quite that way or would have subtly side-tracked them while answering them. Over-simplification was easier to handle but it was also dangerous. Nobody had a monopoly on truth. And your perception of the truth changed depending on your past experience, your family, clan or professional loyalties, your cultural background and what you wanted out of life. Was Shri Krishna dynamic because he saw the larger picture or did the canvas grow wider and far more complex because he responded differently to each set of circumstances and problems?
Bal Krishna was everything the Maharaj Kumar was not as a child. He was the ultimate brat. Mischievous, obstinate, disarming, cocky, exasperating, loveable and gregarious. The whole of the under-fifteen population of Gokul were his buddies. He was what most boys in villages were: a cowherd. He was their leader. He called to them on the flute and they followed him everywhere. Everything he did was an adventure. He was always in trouble and barely managed to squirm his way out. Because he was always stealing freshly churned butter from the kitchen, his mother hung the butterpot high up. He aimed a stone at the pot and stood under it with his mouth wide open. Or made a pyramid of his friends and climbed on it and stuck his fingers inside the pot and licked all the butter. When he was caught and he almost always was, he denied being anywhere near the kitchen. ‘I? I was busy grazing the cattle.’
There were all the incredible feats that he performed as a child. He destroyed the demons Trinavartta, Aghasura and Dhenukasura when he was still lisping. By the age of seven, he had saved all the villagers of Vrindavan from the deluge that the god Indra had visited upon them to teach Bal Krishna a lesson. The boy-god’s response was a little drastic. He lifted the entire Govardhan mountain on a finger and sheltered his people under it.
His foster-mother Yashoda caught him stealing laddus. As usual he looked innocent and aggrieved. She ordered him to open his mouth which he nonchalantly proceeded to do. What she saw inside was a vision that she was never to forget. The whole universe, the cosmos itself was enclosed in his mouth.
How do you do all the things you do and get away with them, he often asked Krishna. When he was growing up and getting to be uncontrollably randy, he wanted to watch all the women in the palace bathe naked and then steal their clothes, just as Krishna had done sitting on the branch of a tree on the banks of the river Jamuna. He had actually gone down to the Gambhiree when the townswomen were bathing in it. They had their clothes on but you could see their breasts and nipples through the wet fabric. He was starting to get a painfully tight hard-on when he was spotted and got the thrashing of his life from Kausalya. He wanted to say to her, you yourself told me the story of Krishna and the maidens in the river, so what’s wrong if I do the same. He didn’t because she would look him in the eyes, grunt and slap him once more.
The Maharaj Kumar didn’t forget Bal Krishna but he left him behind as the years passed. He read the Mahabharata, especially certain sections of it, again and again and was deeply puzzled and intrigued by the mature Krishna. He seemed to have severed almost all connections with his miracle-performing childhood. Unlike the Maharaj Kumar’s ancestors and all the other Rajputs, Krishna was loathe to indulge in heroics. Most of the time he preferred to wait and watch, play the game of diplomacy, negotiate, avoid confrontations as far as possible, hold out for the longest time and give a long rope to people to hang themselves with. Time, he seemed to think, was not only a healer, it also had a way of resolving issues and problems of their own accord. It was curious, frankly it went against the Maharaj Kumar’s grain and everything he was taught to hold sacrosanct, that Krishna did not very often pick up the gauntlet thrown at him. However provoked, he played for time. And here was the crux of it. Bravery and gallantry he seemed to eschew as far as possible. If his statesmanship did not work, he became wily and devious. War was never an alternative, it was always the extreme resort when every other means of persuasion had failed. He was, from one point of view, responsible for the greatest, longest and the most annihilating war ever fought – the Kurukshetra war – but he tried every trick in the book to negotiate peace before he finally gave up.
It took the Maharaj Kumar a long time, years and years, to understand that at the very core of his being, Krishna did not worry about what people thought of him. The god was sure of himself and knew what he wanted. He did not need to prove himself at any point in his life. Unlike Krishna, his own people, despite their great valour, needed to convince themselves almost on a daily basis that they had not lost their spirit. Whence this insecurity, he wasn’t able to say. Why did the Rajput code of honour and chivalry always devolve upon the sacrifice of their own lives? Why were they always afraid of being seen as pusillanimous? It left no room for manoeuvring and for any other options including machinations, a concept which the world owed largely to Krishna.
Krishna had no problems putting his tail between his legs and retreating. One would have thought he would be in one hell of a rush to terminate his uncle, the tyrant Kansa who had killed every one of Krishna’s seven siblings. Instead, Krishna stayed away from him as long as he could. When Jarasandha, perhaps the most fearsome of all despots, the one who aimed at becoming king of all kings, threatened to attack Krishna and his people at Mathura, Krishna didn’t just back off, he packed his bags. He took all his subjects and fled to Dwarka. Finally when it was time to settle scores, he got the mighty warrior Bheem to fight Jarasandha. Jarasandha was very much on top of the situation when Krishna took the twig of a tree in his hand and clove it in two. Bheem understood the unspoken message. He got hold of Jarasandha’s legs and tore him apart straight down the middle.
Perhaps what the Maharaj Kumar owed most to Krishna was a habit of mind: don’t take anything on authority. Received wisdom is a very good thing, it is after all the distillate of centuries of experience. But because someone says so or it has been so since as far back as memory can stretch, that doesn’t make it so. Reexamine. Question. Doubt. And if need be, but only if the advantages more than outweigh the ill-effects, don’t hesitate to swim against the tide. He talked often to Krishna, discussed the pros and cons of a situation or a problem, and set forth his arguments. It was to Krishna’s acts that he referred when planning strategy and in times of crises, drew out their meaning and their implications. That he had learnt his lesson well was evident from the fact that he was willing to question and modify the teachings of Lord Krishna himself.
And now out of the blue, this wife of his was claiming the Blue God for her own.
His new-found friends, his well-wishers, even his old cronies had abandoned Bahadur Khan. That isn’t quite true. It was the stench that had driven them away. He would surface out of his fever and the toxins that had laid siege to his brain from time to time. Sometimes he didn’t know where he was and asked for his father. The only person around to take care of him in the past three days, apart from me, was Kausalya. He asked me several times if I had reached a secret agreement with his father and was keeping him imprisoned. He wasn’t quite sure if Kausalya was his wife, mother, courtesan or spy. He looked at her pitifully and begged her to use her good offices with me to have him released. She nodded her head and told him that she would speak with me the moment I was alone.
‘My father is no ordinary man,’ he informed her, ‘he is the Sultan of Gujarat. He’ll pay whatever ransom the Prince wants. Jagirs, elephants, horses, you mention it, he’ll give anything because, Sikander may be the eldest but I am his favourite.’ He held Kausalya’s hand and kissed it with his lips and his eyes. ‘You will, won’t you?’ he started crying. ‘I have nobody but you and if you let me down, the Maharaj Kumar will leave me to die. Have you seen what he has, done to me? He tried to kill me.’
‘How did he do it?’ Kausalya asked him. He thought about it for a long time, then whispered to her, ‘He knows the lions and lionesses of Chittor and its environs. He paid one to kill me but I fought with it with my bare hands.’
The rest of his semi-conscious time he howled. I wanted to cut his tongue off, ram a thick wooden ruler down his throat. Kausalya sat immobile making me feel like a spoilt child.
Bahadur is fast receding into the sleep of the immortals. He hasn’t been conscious for at least thirty-six hours. The doctors came twice daily because they were afraid of my displeasure. They changed the medicines from time to time but that was more for my sake than the patient’s. In my sister Sumitra’s case, I was sure now that she would have survived if Father had let the surgeon amputate her leg. What was the surgeon going to amputate in Bahadur’s case? His rotting guts or the chest cavity above his heart?
My thoughts went back to Sumitra. I knew what was in Father’s mind when he told the surgeon to leave her be. She would hop and limp about when she recovered and some Rao or Rawal would force his son to marry her because an alliance with Chittor was desirable and her husband would treat her like a cripple, abuse her and humiliate her by mimicking her gait. Even now I catch myself telling Father in the privacy of my mind that I would have gone from any corner of our country and skinned her husband if he had so much as raised his voice at her. Why could she not have stayed with us? I would have looked after her.
I would have too, but that’s nonsense because Sumitra is not here and I am using her constantly as a decoy not to look at what is staring me in the face. Where had that bloody Mangal gone? Was Puraji playing a game of tit for tat, teaching me a lesson in kind for not taking prompt action against the Rajput poachers? Had the tribal doctor Eka died a couple of years ago and I didn’t know about it?
I’ll do almost anything to get Bahadur to live and yet there are times when I imagine the great relief that would accrue from his death. I would be free, free, free from the gruesome rot.
We’ll build a tall and wide pyre and I will go forth like a man to his appointed task, pour the ghee, say the prayers wishing his soul eternal peace and light the pyre at the head, at the feet and the sides till there’s such a mighty conflagration that the very sky will go up in flames. I realize I’m not in my right mind. The Prince is a Mussalman and we’ll have to bury him but no amount of earth can get rid of that bilious perfume. I ask the labourers to dig deeper. How deep, they ask. I think of the well with perennial waters my great-grandfather built at Kumbhalgarh. Two hundred and seventy feet. More but not less. They are making slow progress. The Prince’s corpse has begun to go rancid in the sun under the white sheet that is wrapped tightly around him. I remove my duglo, hang on to the rope and descend. I dig like a mad man, shame the workers into digging and shovelling faster. It’s night. We don’t stop. Someone brings a tape measure. Two hundred and seventy feet. We stop and climb out. The body is lowered. I can hear it plunging, hitting the sides of the pit like a haphazard bucket in a well. There’s a deep low thud. We throw the ropes in and start shovelling the earth into the hole. It takes us three days and three nights. I pat the earth hard and lie down on top of it exhausted. I am about to fall asleep. I sense something in the air. It’s uncoiling like a snake from its subterranean nest. Bahadur’s malodour, how eagerly, affectionately, it rises to embrace me. We start digging again.
Mangal. Followed by a man who I can only hope is none other than Eka. I am about to go off the deep end and ask ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Fortunately Eka ignores me altogether. Mangal draws me aside and tells me that Puraji’s doctor took a full day looking for the shrubs and herbs for treatment. Wherefore the relief, I ask myself. Nothing has changed. If anything, the Prince is twenty-four hours closer to death. I am about to leave when the doctor calls out to me. ‘You’ll wait outside till I’ve finished my examination.’ It’s a long, long time since anyone has spoken to me without my honorific. I am upset at his lack of manners and grateful. If I am ordered around, someone else must be in charge.
Eka took his time, about thirty minutes. Off and on, Bahadur’s shrieks damaged the fort walls. Eka was precise. ‘He has multiple infections. The lioness’ teeth, the dust and the dirt. His wounds should have been cleaned at any cost. But what is not done cannot be undone either. He’s suffered a tremendous trauma and he’s lost a lot of blood. Plus he has had fever for days. I am going to make him unconscious, otherwise he will not withstand the shock to his system. Then I am going to clean his wounds. If he survives and if the poison has not done irreparable harm, then I’ll apply poultices and cover the wounds with bandages.
‘What are his chances? I would rate them very low. Twenty to twenty-five percent on the outside. The only thing in his favour is his youth. Anybody who can bray like that after what he’s been through, must have the health of an ass.
‘Should I proceed? Or would you rather that I concentrated on reducing the pain?’
He had thrown the question and the responsibility of taking a decision back at me. Is this what kingship meant? I guess it did. ‘Will reducing the pain make him come through?’
‘No. But as I have explained, the first option does not guarantee that either.’
‘Whatever slim chance there is, does it lie in the first option?’
‘I see that you are looking to me to make your decision…’
‘I am not.’ I put him down firmly. ‘I need to have the facts before I decide either way.’
‘There is a good chance that I may hasten his death by all my probing and cleaning but there’s not much else going for him.’
‘All right. We’ll take our chances. Clean him up.’
‘Are you saying prayers for the recovery of His Highness, Shehzada Bahadur?’ I asked the mullah who was waiting for me about five hundred yards down the road from the palace.
‘Yes, Your Highness, five times a day.’
‘Not very effective, are they? Maybe you should say them oftener and a little more fervently.’
‘They come straight from the heart, Master.’
‘And do you ever pray for our health, mullah?’
‘Everyday, Maharaj Kumar.’
Maybe he did. Unlike me who didn’t pray for my soul’s redemption or his.
‘I came to ask a favour, Master.’
I should have known. You don’t get a favour for free. What did he want? A job for his son in the army? Or out of the army into the civil services? I waited for him to speak.
‘Our mosque, Sire, is in a state of disrepair. Would His Highness consider giving a donation for rebuilding it from the state treasury?’
‘No.’ I was sharper than I had meant to be.
‘But just last year, His Majesty, the Rana gave a big sum for the construction of a Shiva temple and a Jain one.’
‘Mullah, tell me something. Will a Muslim king consider giving a little donation towards the upkeep of a Hindu shrine?’
He looked crestfallen and turned to go. ‘But let me give the matter some thought.’ That seemed to touch him after my rebuff.
‘May Allah look after you.’
I stared at his receding back and called him again. ‘Mullah, it is not conditional but I would appreciate it if your prayers helped repair my friend, the Shehzada’s health.’
It’s the seventh time in seven days I have been to the Eklingji temple. The guards beat the crowds back as I entered. I paid the head priest for the abhishekh and asked him if I could have some privacy for a few moments. After he had left I prostrated myself. My mind was numb. Shiva is the Destroyer but they say he destroys to create anew. I find it impossible to barter with God, you give me this and I’ll give you that and I hate to treat him as a petition box. I lay on my stomach and took his name seventeen times, then I said, ‘I wish you well, O God. I hope you’ll keep us well too. Bahadur is as much your guest as mine. We’ve always treated our guests with honour and generosity. I trust we won’t fail them now either. May your blessed hand rest over my head and Bahadur’s.’
I circumambulated ten times around Eklingji and went home.
Leelawati was sitting on a swing in the palace. Without meaning to, I ran towards her. She flung herself from the swing straight into my arms and hugged me. She wouldn’t let go of me and I wasn’t about to let go of her. To be trusted so, without any reservations, I too must have been up to some good in my past lives.
‘Where have you been all these days?’
‘You should ask. You never come home. Never send for me.’
‘Look who’s fishing for compliments?’
When in the wrong, take the offensive. ‘You could have come over too.’
‘I asked Father and Dadaji every day. They said you were busy and not to be disturbed.’
‘If I am as busy as they say, how is it you are here today?’
‘I was invited if you please.’
I caught a fleeting glimpse of her behind the curtain. What was she up to? She had already driven a wedge between the Flautist and me. Did she now plan to deprive me of this child too? Leelawati is my only living link to my sister Sumitra. I had no intention of losing her. I must have felt truly threatened. I was about to ask Leelawati the same asinine question that a child is asked at least once a day. Who do you love more, her or me? Fortunately Leelawati interrupted me.
‘What have you got for me?’
I gave her the prasad from Eklingji to gain time to think. She hadn’t come for so long I had stopped stocking up on chikki, halwa and other sweets.
‘You wait here. Close your eyes. Don’t move. Not an inch. Not a millimetre.’
‘What if I do?’
‘You’ll turn to stone.’
She opened half an eye to check if I was watching her.
‘No cheating, madam.’
She quickly closed her eyes. I ran out into the garden, picked a dozen roses, then doubled back, went to the attic where my toys were stored and got ten marbles from the bottle in which I had hoarded them many, many years ago. She was standing still with her eyes closed.
‘May I open my eyes?’
I kissed her left eye and then her right. ‘Now you may.’ I gave her the bouquet. It was such an unexpected present, she stood there a little hesitant and thoughtful.
‘Does this mean you love me?’
‘But I always did and always will, stupid.’
‘Forever?’
‘Yes. Seven lives and more.’
‘Now look who’s silly. Not you, but it is I who must ask for you as my husband in my next seven lives when I tie the string around the banyan tree at the festival of Vat Savitri.’
The curtain moved almost imperceptibly. Greeneyes was listening to Leelawati’s and my conversation. Leelawati did not miss the tightening of the muscles in my face.
‘These flowers are a token of our betrothal, aren’t they?’
Is that what flowers are for? If I give some to my wife, will we be married too? Leelawati was distraught by my silence.
‘Yes.’
She smiled and gave me back a flower. ‘There, now the marriage is sealed.’
‘Are you going to keep jabbering or do I get a chance to give you your second present?’ I gave her the marbles. Her eyes lit up with incandescent pleasure.
‘Veerdev, Raghudev, Ashok Simha, Pratap can all go to hell. I don’t need their marbles any more and it’s okay if they don’t play with me. I can set up my own game now. You haven’t asked what I have got for you.’
‘I’m sure you’ll part with the information, anyway.’
‘That does it. I will not tell you what it is and I won’t give it to someone as snooty as you.’
I apologized. I begged for mercy.
She was not about to forgive me. ‘I made them with my own hands.’ She added just in case I had lost interest.
‘What?’ I asked innocently.
‘Hopscotch shells.’
‘There, you told me.’ That brought on a shower of blows.
‘You made me. You tricked me.’
‘More fool you.’
‘I’ll get you for this. I will too.’
‘Are we going to play or just blabber?’
‘Are you really going to play hopscotch with me?’ She couldn’t contain her delight. She brought out the shells. She had painted them with phosphorescent sindoor. ‘See, you can play with them even at midnight and you’ll see them.’
She watched us play through the evening from the window. Once when I stumbled and sprawled on the ground, I thought I heard her laugh.
It was the first night after the Prince’s illness that I had slept. I was woken up around one thirty. There was a message from the tribal doctor. He couldn’t get a reading of the Prince’s pulse. If I wanted to say goodbye to him, now was the time.
‘Is he awake?’
‘No, Highness.’ Was the honorific back as consolation for his inability to change my guest’s fortunes? If he was not awake what was the point of calling me? Was I supposed to keep vigil? Say a prayer for his soul? He must have read my thoughts.
‘Sometimes they wake up and are absolutely lucid before they venture to other worlds.’
Don’t I know it? But once was enough. What shall I say to him?
The Shehzada didn’t wake up that night. Or the next.
I didn’t see the point of going back to bed. A dip in the Gambhiree, phew, the water was cold or perhaps I’m not in such great shape, and I went over to Lakshman Simhaji’s office.
I had discussed Raja Puraji Kika’s complaint with him about a month ago but had not followed it up. He felt we should call our nobles from the border areas to Chittor and ask them to clarify what was going on.
‘Are they likely to confess to poaching if, and I grant you that it’s a big if, they really have been?’
‘I would like to think they are honest men. And even if they are lying they are bound to slip up.’
‘If they were honest men they would not be grabbing Bhil lands. Raja Puraji is not likely to have made this complaint without checking the facts first. But there’s another matter of some urgency here. Apart from the fact that we have both been lax, I want to send a signal to all our neighbours that we value their friendship, if it is proffered, and will do everything in our power to cement it.’
‘Fair enough, but why the urgency? Merely because the Bhil king is your Gurukul friend?’
‘No. I listen to the heroic tales that the Charans and the other bards sing of and I am aghast. Do you know just how many of our wars in the last fifty years alone were due to some petty frontier dispute provoked by a small-time jagirdar whose greed got out of hand? Every friend that we make and keep is at least one war less.’
He was silent for a minute.
‘I will send for Hada Parbat.’
‘Won’t that give the game away?’
‘Give me some credit, Maharaj Kumar. He’ll meet the erring landlords and be sympathetic to land-grabbing and poaching and worm out all the information we need. When instructed precisely, he’s a capable man. He’ll leave tomorrow.’
He was right. I sent a courier to Raja Puraji Kika telling him that I was instituting an enquiry as of immediate effect and would keep him posted of developments.
At ten o’clock I had a meeting with Rao Jai Simha Balech. He owed me one and I wanted to strike when the iron was hot. I enquired after his family, especially his sons and then moved straight on to business.
‘I have been through your report. I agree with your analysis that given the state of technology in the weaponry and equipment in our neighbouring kingdoms, we are, at the very least, at par with them. In many instances, our elephants have proved to be a major factor in our favour. But do you remember what you taught us at the Academy? The difference between bronze and iron was a phenomenal leap in war technology, not a matter of degree but almost of a different species. Both the opponents fought with swords but against iron, the bronze swords were soft as clay. From the reports that have filtered down from the north-west, from Turkey and beyond, the technology of war materials seems to be undergoing revolutionary changes. I am not talking about matchlocks. I have heard that they now have some very, very big guns, I’m not sure what they are called but just ten or twelve of these massive guns can play a devastating role before two opposing armies can join hand-to-hand battle.
‘Unless we are familiar with the new equipment we’ll find ourselves in the position of the soldiers with bronze swords confronted by iron ones.’
He was respectfully attentive, I was after all the Maharaj Kumar, but I didn’t want him to humour me.
‘All this will take time. How soon do you think you can get all the information on the subject? Names, diagrams, effective range, the chemistry of the gun powder, and the metallurgy for the guns. Who has the expertise and who is selling it? Let’s have competitive figures and last but not the least, where can we hire experts and teachers to train our men?’
He looked dumbfounded. I had overdone it. Perhaps I should have gone about it in stages.
‘Will your father approve of all this?’
‘Whether Father approves or not, the new know-how will overtake us all. That is the nature of technology. The least we can do is to keep abreast of it. Otherwise someone else will and that will be the end of us.’ I decided to deadline the project to conclude the discussion and underline its seriousness. ‘I have set aside thirty thousand tankas from the defence budget for the project. I would like to have a preliminary report within two months and a detailed one in five months’ time. I suggest you treat this as top priority.’
I opened the mail after he left. Two letters about tithe payments. One from Sirohi saying that they regretted the delay but the dues would be paid in the next fortnight. The other one was from Mandasaur, excessively courteous, so one knew that they were stalling. They said the usual thing, the monsoons had failed and there was no harvest plus recent wars had left the treasury empty. Would we please reschedule their debt and waive the interest? No way. I would write to them tomorrow. The monsoon had failed at the beginning but picked up very well later, so the rabi crop would be just fine and the wars they mentioned had taken place a year and a half ago. As a mark of the special regard in which we held them, we would give them a grace period of sixty days.
There was a letter from Father. He had heard that Mahmud Shah Khalji of Malwa was once again getting restless and wondered whether we could have some of his mail intercepted, read, re-sealed and sent to its proper destination. Could we also send along reports of the reconnoitring activity in the north-east? What was in his mind? Ibrahim Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, was certainly losing his grip but was Father finally planning to move against him?
You had to hand it to Father. Unlike his predecessors, his relationship with the other Rajput principalities and kings was exemplary. However gravely provoked, he avoided military confrontation with them. Look at the records and correspondence of my grandfather Raimul, even of my uncle Prithviraj; they are constantly at war with their own kindred. If Father gets a chance to rule another forty years, he’ll not only set a precedent for peace among Rajputs, he’ll prove something far more fundamental, that given the will, we don’t have to fight with each other to the death to confirm that we are alive and that the dividends of peace can be invested in the progress of the state. Isn’t it ironic, I would never dare to voice these thoughts to anybody, least of all to Father? They would sound patently false. The greatest living apprehension of Father or any other ruler for that matter must surely be the eldest son.
I find it tragic that Father and I can never be close. He must suspect my every move. It must have taken unusual courage to appoint me acting Head of State in his absence. Does he worry every night that I will raise the flag of rebellion and usurp his throne? Or that my men are even now poisoning his cup of wine? Am I plotting the murder of my siblings? After all, the memory of the Hatyara Uda will be fresher in his mind than mine, and the race to the throne between him and his brothers Prithviraj and Jaimal must be a nightmare that he must live through every day. Besides, patricides and fratricides are not a Rajput monopoly. Look at our guest Bahadur and his ambitions to the crown though he is son number two.
If Father had several enemies abroad and seven at home, I was at risk from six of them: my brothers Rattan, Vikramaditya, Karan, Parvat, Krishnadas, and Uday. Vikramaditya had been caught in the act. The others were innocent only because they had the good sense and good fortune not to be caught, at least not yet. And what would happen when I had children? Nothing much. The risk factor would rise in proportion to the number of sons I fathered. The only remedy was to kill them all at birth or lock them up in some distant prison and throw away the key.
No, sincerely, how do I persuade Father to think sanely and sensibly about a subject that, I’m sure, he never ceases thinking about? How and when will this sword hanging over all our heads be removed?
I waited for Sunheria at the Chandra Mahal. Sometimes she came, sometimes she didn’t. I was terrified when she did and distraught when she didn’t. She did not expect anything, she did not wait for anybody, she was never disappointed. Is that what you call a strong woman? If her husband found out, if I slipped out of her hands tomorrow, if my wife laid claim to me, so be it, she would move on. Move on where, go in which direction, she did not know and did not care. Because knowing and caring didn’t help much either. She wore all those expensive clothes in a casual careless fashion and that made her – without her realizing it – even more desirable and provocative. She loved eating pickles at the oddest hours. She dropped mango pickle on an expensive silk chunni the last time she was here. ‘I’m going to be hauled over the coals anyway,’ she said. ‘Might as well wipe my hands with it.’ She did. Was she doing it for effect? She looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll wash the stains off. And I won’t touch you with my sharp, pungent fingers.’ That last bit relieved me. I can’t stand the smell of food on my fingers or anybody else’s.
When she came back, her hair was loose and dripping with water. She took off my clothes and eased me down on the bed. She closed my eyes and swept the hair softly over my legs, my stomach and my chest and then over my face. I was not aware of the healing powers of water and the gentle crawl of hair over the body till then. She let the hair drip for some time over my eyes. It seemed to suck the heat and the fatigue and the tension out of them. She went out again, wet her hair and came back. She turned me on my back. This time she started at my buttocks and let her hair take sharp drunken turns over my back. My body tensed up wondering whether she was going to turn a corner or just float on my skin. The water seeped in and the muscles relaxed. Slowly I went limp in every particle of my flesh and bones. ‘Sleep,’ she said, ‘we’ll make love when you wake up.’ Because she did not think of the next minute and the next meal and the next day, there was never any rush. Whatever she had to do, she could do today, tomorrow, maybe never.
Would she come today? What was the rationale behind her visits? Was it a whim, a sudden impulse or something as simple as her husband falling asleep early on a particular night?
‘Never the last. That’s putting too much pressure on chance. When I want him to sleep, I give him milk and sugar and mix a little something in it. He sleeps like a baby.’
‘You should give it to me too.’
‘There is no child in you. My husband is more fortunate than you. Even at his age, he can fall asleep and sleep for hours. You will wear sleep down. You care too much, Maharaj Kumar.’ My head was in her lap and she was stroking my forehead.
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘To each his own. Let go Prince, let go of so much unhappiness.’
Her bangles were an object lesson in discipline. However impatient I was, they put the brakes on me. The more ragged and frazzled I got taking them off, the more intractable they became. There would be no one around, that’s not true, there’s always someone around in Chandra Mahal or any other palace, but I hated the clatter they made. It made me terribly self-conscious. The only way to do this, I would tell myself was to relax, calm my nerves. She would offer to remove them herself the way she had done it the first time. But I wouldn’t let her. There was something mysteriously erotic about pressing her wrist ever so gently from side to side and when it had turned to putty and gone lax and limp, to let the bangle tinkle down to the tiled floor. And then gradually like the moon slipping out of a cloudbank, see her arm unveiled. Is the mystery of the body in the clothes? Is it in the knots that tie the strings that tie the clothes? Is it in watching your fingers slip the blouse off and drop the skirt and slip them on again? Is it in moulding your hands to the dips and swells and hollows as you pass over them on the other’s body? Is sex watching Sunheria put on her anklets? Is it seeing her shake her hair loose, gather it together and twist it into a bun? Is it taking vermillion powder on her right index finger and zeroing in effortlessly to the dead centre of her forehead and spreading a perfect tika on it? Is it her hands cupping together to hold water from the bucket, closing her eyes and splashing the water on her face? Is it these unconscious and almost involuntary gestures that she goes through every day?
Untense me, Sunheria. Press your hands upon the tight sinews in my back. Pull your thumbs down in deep furrows on the sides of my spinal chord. Rub your fingers into my temples till they spring a leak and the coils of my brain come out unsnarling from within. Dig into the depressions in the soles of my feet, uncork my pressure points and let me flow.
She did not come that night.
I knew it a good half mile before I reached the Atithi Palace. The smell had lifted. Khuda hafiz, Shehzada, I said and walked on briskly. I was suddenly bereft of fear and the cares of declaring Bahadur dead. It had happened and I knew exactly how to proceed. The letter to his father was ready in my mind. There would have to be a royal funeral. Perhaps this might stop the war between Sultan Muzaffar Shah and Father. Bahadur might have his uses after all.
Instead he was sitting up leaning feebly against a couple of pillows. There was a pre-morning light in his room. I took him in my arms, hugged him and kissed his forehead. ‘Oh Bahadur, I thought we had lost you.’
‘Forgive me, Maharaj Kumar for what I have put you through. No brother of mine would have done what you did for me. I owe you one, a very big one.’ He passed out.
‘Let him rest now and recover,’ Eka told me quietly.
‘The House of Mewar is beholden to you, Ekaji. You have saved our guest and our honour, I believe I’ve got my priorities right this time. You will be Honorary Royal Physician to Mewar from today. In appreciation of what you have done for us, the state bequeaths you Mujadi and ten other villages on the banks of the Gambhiree where it touches your Bhil territory.’ I let go of his hands. ‘Please don’t go yet. Stay till he is completely out of danger.’
‘I intend to, Maharaj Kumar.’
I went down to the Eklingji Temple and said my prayers and thanks. Shiva had nearly destroyed the Shehzada and now he had recreated him almost from his ashes. It is not pride, I told him, that prevents me from asking you for anything. It is the fact that you are all-knowing. Thank you again.
The next seven days the shehnais played in the Naupatkhana and every morning I offered my prayers to the founder of our dynasty, the Sun-god himself from the suraj gokhadas which projected like balconies from the palace walls and faced the rising sun. ‘May your light be upon us always and may you always rescue Mewar from its darkest hours.’
