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.
Chapter
5
I have avoided speaking about the rights of succession as much as the other forbidden subject which tears my guts and paralyses my mind. But Prince Bahadur has touched a particularly raw spot and the least I can do is to gain a degree of relief by talking about it.
I am a self-conscious person. Loners usually are. Often, though not always, I know how my mind works and I have a fairly good idea of the kind of person I am. I am ambitious. Ambitious enough to want to be king today. In matters of policy and state, I have few scruples. If there was gain, solid gain in backing the sons of one of our archrivals, Prince Bahadur Khan for instance, I would gladly do it, however much it hurt me to go against the few principles I have.
But I am the son of Mewar and a Guhilot Sisodia to boot. It’s the only family tree in Rajasthan that can be traced all the way back to the seventh or eighth century and through an unbroken chain of thirty or forty kings. We are a country of bards and minstrels and story-tellers and troubadours. They never tire of telling stories of the heroic exploits of my ancestors. Of Bappa Rawal, Rana Hameer, Choonda and Rana Kumbha. I think we breathe in less air than we inhale these stories. Our anecdotes are all history. The bed-time stories of our children are about these larger-than-life monarchs and warriors from the past. Our arteries and veins are clogged with them. Sometimes I think we have no present, only the past.
They paint a rosy picture, these tellers of tales and very sensibly, don’t dwell too long or too often on the bad guys. That’s not quite true. What they do is far more dangerous. They turn the fratricidal and bloody struggles that always preface the assumption of the throne after a king dies, into a hundred or thousand pretty couplets about heroism and valour. They cannot see death’s head above the crown of each king. And nobody calculates the cost of all this insane and internecine bloodshed to Mewar. We are our enemies’ best friends. For what better chaos and anarchy can they wish upon Mewar than that which we wreak upon ourselves? Only a short-sighted fool will take solace from the fact that the same deadly struggles take place in the kingdoms of our neighbours.
I am the first-born and heir apparent and Maharaj Kumar. It can be said that the reason I’m so interested in primogeniture is because I stand to gain nothing less than the crown, the throne and the kingdom of Mewar. But it’s a little more than that. I am constantly aware of how fraught with uncertainty the future is for Father, me and my siblings. Because I cannot forget how red and sticky our hands are with the blood of our fathers and brothers. We don’t have to go too far back into the past. Take my great-grandfather Maharana Kumbha. Some say he is the greatest king Mewar has seen, greater than even Bappa Rawal and Hameer. This is fruitless speculation. What is of moment is that when Kumbha came to the throne, there was not a single axis from which he did not perceive either present or imminent danger. Our current foes, Delhi, Gujarat and Malwa were forever snapping at the flanks of Mewar, seizing huge chunks of its flesh or going for its throat. But as always amongst us Rajputs, it is not the outsider who is to be feared, it is our own blood and kith and kin who’ll undermine our power far more effectively than any foreign enemy could. The Rajput ruler of Sirohi, the Hadas of Bundi and Jodha of Marwar, not to mention the Rana’s brother, Khem Karan, often joined forces with our enemies and kept Kumbha on a short leash.
Be that as it may, Kumbha was the only Rana in living memory who waged a simultaneous battle with Gujarat and Malwa on two different fronts. It is true that he did not annihilate either of them, but he managed to keep each of his predators at bay, and enlarged the boundaries of Mewar as no other previous king had. He annexed Sarangpur, Gagrone, Narana, Ajmer, Mandaur, Mandalgarh, Khatu, Chatsu, Abu, Ranthambhor and other forts and towns, many of which have, since his death, changed ownership several times. He was forever on the move. And he seems to have had his hands more than full. So it’s difficult to imagine how he found the time to build thirty-two fortresses which are, to this day, bulwarks against the foreign invader. Building must have been his passion. He built temples, palaces and the Tower of Victory. He thought of geography as the timeless architecture of the cosmos. The only way a man could defy time was to leave behind buildings that would not die. He spent a great deal of time with his favourite architects, Jaita and Mandan. He suspected that some enemy would cut his life short but hoped that the work of his town planners would ensure him a place in Chittor’s posterity. His architects did not fail him. When you walk through Chittor today, you are stepping into Rana Kumbha’s vision of it.
He was shrewd, sensible and knew when to leave well enough alone. Forget all his achievements and successes, just the fact that he was around gave the country stability and continuity. They say he was built like Chittor, wide and tall and almost impregnable. He had not been ill since the day he was born. He had been on the throne for thirty-five years and looked good for another thirty or thirty-five. That’s when his son Prince Uda, whose ambition and impatience got out of hand, murdered his own father.
It was a shaky throne the Hatyara acquired and an uneasy crown he wore. Criminal careers prior to royal investiture were not unknown in Rajasthan and yet there was such a wave of revulsion against Uda, he felt threatened by his own people and feudal lords. To curry favour with princes and maharaos and rawals, he began to disband Kumbha’s acquisitions with such celerity and abandon that Mewar soon shrank to the size of a third-rate principality. He gave Abu back to the Deora prince, and bestowed Sambhur, Ajmer and the adjoining districts to the fledgling king of Jodhpur as the price of friendship. They accepted the bribes of entire provinces gladly but didn’t extend either loyalty or support to the self-orphaned king.
You cannot be unnaturally ambitious and soft-hearted at the same time. Uda should have scotched dissent with an iron hand. He had taken a drastic and dastardly step but he didn’t have the gumption to follow it through ruthlessly. Remorse is a powerful hallucinogen. He saw dangers and revolts brewing across his kingdom and was insecure to the extent that he went and prostrated himself before the Emperor of Delhi and even offered him a daughter to obtain the Sultan’s sanction for his acts and authority. It took barely five years of running from pillar to post to prince for Uda’s life to give out.
Which brings me to a brief digression. Being in the right has got nothing to do with courage or exceptional bravery. The forces of evil will fight just as enthusiastically or fiercely as the armies of righteousness. Again, people talk with a sense of wonderment about the incredible bravery of us Rajputs. This is missing the obvious. Whether it’s Father, my brothers, my ancestors, I or my countrymen, we are, it goes without saying, unsurpassedly fearless and valiant. There may be merit in this but little room for wonderment. From childhood, personal courage is taken for granted amongst us. I use the words taken for granted advisedly. No one in Mewar brainwashes children or stresses the importance of courage. It is all in a day’s work. I remember standing at one end of a large circular wooden enclosure when I was fourteen. The gate at the other end was opened and a tiger who had been starved for a week was let in. No, I was not expected to fight him with my bare hands. I was wearing steel armour, my arms were heavily cushioned, and I had a bow and arrow, a sword and shield.
Have you seen a hungry tiger? He is hyperactive, ferocious but unfocussed. I was a week’s lunch, dinner or whatever tigers have and he made straight for me. I aimed, not too carefully, I’m afraid, and shot an arrow. It should have pierced his heart or brains but it lodged in his rump. He turned round to check what had hit him and see if it could be got rid of. My tutor Rawat Jai Simha Balech was about to throw his javelin when Father stopped him with a wave of his hand. I was relieved. I took a second arrow from my quiver; the tiger was incensed with pain, rage and hunger and racing towards me. I rested my weight on one knee and let go of the arrow at an angle of thirty degrees. It went through his right eye and into his brain. He had an epileptic fit, he thrashed his limbs and rose. But the fire had died down and his vision badly impaired. I took the sword and brought it down on his neck. Father jumped over and helped me sever his head.
‘There, you are a real lion now, just like your name says.’
It had not occurred to me till then that the Simha in my name, as well as that in all Rajput names, signified that my people and I were lions.
The options of doubt and fear and retreat are unthinkable because these areas in our minds have been sealed off. In truth, they are no options at all. There is no discrimination or willingness in our valour. It is blind, headlong and unflinching because we don’t know any other way of reacting in a confrontation.
If the story of Uda is a grim comment on unchecked ambition, his brother and successor, Rana Raimul’s three eldest sons did not seem to have learnt any lesson from it. Their abominable impatience to discover who would inherit the throne even while their father was young and in complete control of his senses, is a curse that will blight all future generations of the House of Mewar.
My grandfather Rana Raimul had fourteen sons and two daughters from eleven queens. The eldest, Prithviraj and the third, Sangram Simha or Sanga as he came to be known later on, were the children of the Jhali princess, Ratan Kanwar. The second son by another queen was called Jaimal. To this murky cast of characters, add the young princes’ uncle Surajmal, a man of devious gifts and a talent for inflaming passions and one whose aspirations did not preclude the throne of Mewar. Who would be king was a subject that took precedence over all else and preoccupied the minds of the princes, yet none of them had ever dared to voice their innermost thoughts until one day Surajmal said: ‘Who will win the prize for archery, who will grab the tits of the luscious maid-in-waiting, Satya Kanwar and bed her, whose elephant will dash the hopes of the others in tomorrow’s elephant fights, who in God’s name gives a damn about the outcome of any of these? Don’t look so shocked Sangram, there’s only one question and one question alone that is the companion of your waking and dreaming hours.’
The princes looked away till Prithviraj, the impulsive one who could hold neither his tongue on a leash nor his sword in its scabbard, looked defiantly at his uncle and asked, ‘And what question is that?’
‘A simple question, who will be king when your father is no more?’
There, the sacrilegious, forbidden words had been spoken and the earth hadn’t cracked open, their uncle had not been smitten by lightning and the heads of the three princes were still on their shoulders.
‘You have any answers?’ it was still Prithviraj talking, ‘Because by right it’s mine and nobody else’s.’
‘By law, yes. After all, you are the first-born male in the family. But who knows, the plague could kill you, your father may banish you, or you may meet with a fatal accident. Or there’s always the possibility that one of your dear brothers who loves you so inordinately and indiscriminately could arrange to have you murdered.’
‘I asked you if you had any answers, not this prattle about accidents and disease.’
‘It’s a damned shame, isn’t it? Time alone knows and he will not reveal his secret till he thinks the moment is ripe.’
The young princes looked at their uncle in disgust. He was a Naradmuni and nothing more. He named the unnamable, mentioned the unmentionable, and after he had roused your curiosity, left you on tenterhooks.
‘What precious words, the very essence of sagacity. Uncle, spare us your philosophical homilies,’ Jaimal spoke witheringly.
All three of them turned away and were about to leave.
‘There is,’ their uncle’s voice was soft and laggardly, ‘there is one other way.’
‘Good for you. Keep it to yourself.’ Prithviraj said. ‘I’m not interested in your childish games.’
‘Very well then. I’ll go to the priestess of Charani Devi at Nahar Magra with Jaimal and Sangram.’
The audacity of the thought was breathtaking. No, it was a little more than that. It was an awesome idea, one that froze the blood in your veins, gave you cramps in the pit of your stomach and made your tongue so heavy, it was impossible to utter a word. There was terror in the hearts of the princes for you did not take Charani Devi’s name lightly and you did not take it in vain. They were off to Nahar Magra, the tiger’s mount but even the bold Prithviraj would rather be riding back home. What kept them going was the fear that the others would penetrate, at whatever risk to their persons, the mystery at the heart of the future.
There were many legends about the Devi. One of them Kausalya told me when I was a child. Time was suffering from advanced symptoms of megalomania. He was the framework or the boundaries within which everything that happened, happened. The demons, the gods, space and the cosmos were time-bound. Nothing – not even nothingness – existed beyond the limits of time. Little wonder then that Time began to perceive himself as cause and consequence, the begetter and begotten, as the beginning and the end. It was not just that he had delusions of grandeur, it appeared that he was what he claimed to be: omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent.
The gods including Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva had seen many crises, they had often been on the verge of defeat or extinction and yet always at the last minute, through imagination, guile, trickery, or the clever use of power, they had pulled back from the edge of chaos and won the day. But Time had been on their side then. Things were a little different now. They sent embassies of goodwill and reconciliation to Time, they held war-councils, they intrigued and thought of double, triple and even quadruple crosses. They had a vast repertory of feints and sleights-of-hand, bribes, betrayals and treachery. Time might take the bait but he could also outlive it. They had to seduce him. They rendered his dreams pornographic and when his passion was aroused, they sent him apsaras and Vishnu in the form of Mohini.
To no avail. The moment of truth for the gods who had survived all manner of travails and calamities, was at hand. Time was about to ingest the three worlds when Charani Devi hurried past. She was gathering together the million and one strands of Time, here, there, up, below, before, yonder, next; she didn’t look to the left or the right, her hands stretched, foreshortened, her fingers picked up the loose ends and the unbroken threads, endless stretches of prehistory, history-to-be and the simultaneous present that is the same second multiplied by all the points in space, she must have put glue on the tips of her fingers for not a straggly piece of raveled warp or woof escaped her, she bundled it up helter skelter, no beginning, no middle, no end, no order, just one monstrously big ball the size of the cosmos. Then the Devi opened her mouth and swallowed all of it in one gulp.
But just as the gods were about to rejoice and celebrate this greatest of victories, they realized that they had circumvented one calamity to fall prey to another that was even more devastating. Time had stopped dead. And so had everything else. Because life, as we all know, can only occur on the axis of time with its three sharp and fluid divisions: the past, the present and the future. With Time sitting confused and muddle-headed in the belly of Charani Devi, life would cease to be.
So the gods went into a huddle once again. They could tear open Charani Devi’s stomach – with her consent of course – and let Time out. But that would get them back to square one. Or worse, since Time would know that the gods couldn’t do wit
hout him. There was one other solution, an unthinkable one since nobody, not even Brahma had the courage to approach Charani Devi. She had just done the impossible, performed a service that had saved the universe. And now they wanted her to do something even more impossible, something that would deprive her of sleep forever; something that would never, never end; something that would be the loneliest job in the world. When no one else comes forward, Shiva takes up the challenge. He went over to the Devi’s mansion in the heavens. She was larger than any pregnant woman ever would be for she had Time in her belly.
‘You know what I’ve come for, don’t you?’ Shiva asked her.
She looked at him with her large, limpid eyes. She had always been one of the liveliest and most restless goddesses in the heavens. But the knowledge of her fate did something strange to her face. It gave her a composure and stillness that wrenched at Shiva’s heart. Shiva gently took her hand in his. She held it tightly as if she would never let go of it.
‘You want me to unravel the tapeworm of Time. You want the present back.’ She spoke after a long time.
‘Will you do it?’ he asked her. It seemed as if she would never answer.
‘It is going to be a long, lonely and loveless vigil,’ she said.
‘Long and lonely, yes.’ Shiva told her, ‘but not loveless. No one will ever part us. You have but to think of me and wherever I am, I shall return to you.’
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