Her young mistress was quiet. But she was neither snobbish nor supercilious from a sense of inferiority. She was as eager, impressionable and excited as her maid. Since the time she reached her teens, she had always been shy and quiet. Her new status as bride to the Maharaj Kumar of Chittor had added an edge of reserve to her temperament because she did not understand the implications and nuances of entering such a large and alien household. She was at the epicentre when she would rather not even have been on the outermost periphery.
Her husband did not speak to her the first six days of her stay. He looked pale and anaemic and hurt beyond mortal help. She tried to do things for him, get his slippers, fetch his saafa, button his kurta, dry his wet hair after a bath. He turned away. If he needed something he asked Kausalya. Kausalya, she learnt, was his dai, the one who had breast-fed and looked after him. Kausalya was silent and aloof though never insolent or disrespectful to her.
On the seventh day she went back to Merta with her uncle. Her husband came to see her off. He did not speak to her nor did he wave goodbye. How lonely, how desolate he looked despite that deliberately impassive face. She felt his pain but did not know how to reach out to him. She was happy to be going back. She could stay two or three months with her family in Merta. If she set her mind to it, she could charm her uncle Viramdev, and extend her stay by another month. This was the last indulgence she would be permitted. It was meant to soften the severing of all connections with her maika. Whoever designed and wrought the fabric of tradition understood that you cannot be a girl one day and a wife the next; that the distance between your parents’ home and that of your husband is farther than infinity; that if you try to bridge it overnight, the effects may be traumatic.
She knew what she had to do on this visit. She must brand in her memory the images of her village, of her house, of her horse, of her favourite people, of the well, of her father and grandfather and aunts, of the god in the temple, of the sands and the trees and the kumatiya, khajri and kair of the desert. And the sound of the school bell and the sound of a sandstorm and of rain hissing into the sand, her aunt beating the water out of her hair with a thin towel, the bucket at the well hitting the water some hundred feet below. And the smell of the sun burning the sand, of dry kachra frying in oil and spices, the powdery, bleached smell of her father’s armpit when he came back from a long day of surveying their lands, the fierce smell of the kevda leaves in their garden. All these she must etch on her memory. They would have to last her a lifetime. Of course they would permit her to come back and visit. But this was definitely goodbye, her last long stay at the home of her grandfather and father.
She did not have to coax and cajole her uncle into allowing her to stay an extra month. He could not bear the thought of her leaving home. He had never prospect of her as his niece. She was his daughter, not her father’s. Which is why her father and her uncle were at loggerheads when the subject was the daughter one had fathered and the other one was father to. But the month was soon over and neither father nor uncle had the heart to argue.
‘Who is it?’ his voice was low.
She did not answer. She had been back for seven weeks now. Every night he asked the same question. He looked more haunted than before she had left. There was a tightness to his mouth and his eyes were the water at the bottom of the hundred foot well in her home. He no longer tried to sleep at night. He held himself erect, it was something his body could not unlearn after so many years of military training. But it was an empty shell that managed to be at work at six; conducted the affairs of the ministries under him, talked business, assisted his father in formulating strategy, attended official functions, presided at the small causes court on Thursdays, played cards on new year’s night. But there was no person there, only the pain of not knowing and the fear of discovering the truth.
‘Who are you betrothed to? I have a right to know.’
He did, he did, he had every right to know. Would to God she could clutch him to her breast and cool his searing brow and soothe that racked body. But didn’t he know that you cannot take the name of the beloved?
He came home late in the evenings. As soon as he got in, he told the maids and the eunuchs and even Kausalya to leave. They giggled and smirked. They thought the Prince was besotted with his wife. She brought his food in a silver thali. He kicked it away.
‘Why did you get married? I didn’t force you to.’
No, he hadn’t. She had tried to tell her aunt but she had looked puzzled at first and then laughed it off. When she had broached the subject again, her aunt had lost patience. ‘Enough of this childishness. He is a fine young man, a prince. Not just a prince, the Maharaj Kumar. Don’t be an ingrate. It’s not just you who’s getting married. The betrothal will bond the two houses.’
Then he stopped kicking the plate. His body shook with rage. He turned away.
Kausalya came into her room one afternoon as she sat writing by the altar when everybody in the palace was asleep.
‘What are you doing to the Maharaj Kumar, Princess? What wasting disease have you visited upon him? Speak woman.’
She put aside the quill and closed her papers.
‘What spell have you cast upon him? You are going to kill him with love-making. I’ve watched you for weeks now. He comes home from work in the evening, throws everybody out, and locks the door. There’s never any talk between the two of you, is there? What insatiable appetites you must have, woman, that you keep him up all night long, night after night? And what strange witchery do you practise upon him that he shuns all those who love him, even me, who would give my life for him?’
* * *
She was back a couple of months later.
‘How is it that you are always writing when he is not here?’
She raised her head slowly and put her writing materials away. Kausalya looked uneasy. She was silent for a long time. It was as if she had something on her mind but didn’t know how to find the right words to unburden herself.
‘Why do you deny him?’ Kausalya couldn’t hold it back any longer and didn’t care how she phrased it.
The Princess didn’t know how to react. This was a completely different tack from the one Kausalya had taken the previous time. She was thrown off her guard. How did she know? Was it a shot in the dark? Or had he spoken to her? He was so proud, that didn’t seem likely. What was the point of answering her? No amount of explaining was going to make anyone understand.
‘Are you frigid? Do you not like your body? Why do you make him suffer so? What ails you, woman?’
Kausalya stretched out her hand and touched her cheek gently. ‘Are you lonely, child? Do you miss home? Look at you. There’s not a line or blemish on your face. I’ll wager your life is as flawless and untouched as your complexion. You’ve led such a sheltered life, you don’t know what cruelty or hatred is. There is no pride in you but innocence, which maybe is a pride of sorts, I do not know. Has anybody been mean or nasty to you? Have we said something to hurt you?’
She shook her head but did not speak.
‘You are killing him, you realize that, don’t you? Oh, I know he’ll live but more dead than alive.’ Kausalya held her by the shoulders and shook her hard. ‘If something should happen to the Maharaj Kumar, I’ll kill you.’ Kausalya let go of her. There was no resistance in the Princess, just the despair of the cornered animal. ‘Is it me? Do you loathe my presence? Would it help if I went away? Forever. For if it is so and however difficult it may be for me, I will leave. I will never again show my face to him or to you. Tell me, just tell me, woman, put an end to the Prince’s agony.’
Kausalya gave up. She walked out. She was back the next minute.
‘I won’t leave. I don’t know what black magic you have worked upon him. Beware Princess, I’ll keep a watch on you. You are bound to slip up some time. Whatever your devious designs, and however subtle, I’ll get you. Then God help you.’
Kausalya was as good as her word. She was not in the Princess’ hair
all the time nor did she watch her like a comic spy in a high drama of intrigue and discovery from a bhavai. She was around, if anything, even less than she was before.
Kausalya wasn’t quite sure whether it was something about the Princess’ writing or the way she put it away that struck her as odd. She knew that her mind was working overtime these days imagining clues and omens in everything and everywhere. But you had to admit that it was a little unusual for a Princess, even a literate one, to be always writing. The Maharani, for instance, or even the favourite, Queen Karmavati, never wrote, they got some scribe to do it.
It was a mystery where she hid all her writing material. Kausalya had gone through almost everything in her rooms. It had taken a long while. The only time you could search the place was when she was having a bath and when nobody was around. It was a little disconcerting to find that she did not keep anything under lock and key, not even her jewellery. She was a trusting fool, she was. But after you had said that, the question still remained: where had all those months of writing gone?
Kausalya made friends with Kumkum Kanwar. It was not difficult one day to casually broach the subject of her mistress’s constant scribbling.
‘Who knows? To her father perhaps. Or her uncle and aunt. But how would I know anyway? I can’t write or read.’ There was no prevarication or guile in Kumkum Kanwar’s face.
Neither can I, thought Kausalya.
Kausalya found the material in the last place she would have imagined. In the Princess’ prayer room. Her gods and goddesses sat on a yellow pitambar which covered a raised platform. There was a black stone Shivlinga, an exquisite Saraswati in bell metal, a foot high marble Shri Krishna, a copper Eklingji, the triumvirate of Ram, Laxman and Sita, a gold Surya and a jade Vishnu and a fierce Chamundi made from black marble. The pages were wrapped in muslin and, along with an ink-pot and quills, were stowed away in a drawer under the platform and the holy silk.
There must have been at least four or five hundred pages there of which more than a half were full of written matter. The individual letters were beautifully formed like black studs carved with infinite care and often an entire sentence stood out like a necklace of black pearls. But if you took in all the lines together, the total filigree work on the page looked a confused and convoluted mess. There were long stretches which seemed to have been written in a scrawl that was trying to catch up with her frenzied thoughts. Kausalya could not relate the writing to its mistress. She was so neat, tidy and unruffled. She had to have things just so and no other way. And to make sure that she got what she wanted, she almost always did everything herself. If you looked at the writing, what you saw was a person of extremes, of violent swings of mood, confused and chaotic.
Kausalya laughed. For someone who could not read, and the letters, for all she knew, may have been in some foreign tongue, she wasn’t doing badly at all as a quack character-reader. She might as well set up shop interpreting the lines on the palm of a hand, or the signs of the zodiac in a horoscope. She didn’t want the Princess to find out that some of the pages were missing. She chose a wad of fifty from somewhere in the middle and stuck them inside her choli which came down all the way below the navel. She put the pile of writing papers back in the drawer and covered the platform with the silk pitambar. Then she carefully placed the gods back in their original positions. As far as she knew, it was impossible to tell that someone had tampered either with the idols or what lay under.
Now that she had the papers, she was at a loss to understand why she had gone to such lengths to find and steal them. What was she going to do with them? She could show them to her son Mangal. He knew how to read. He had attended classes with the Maharaj Kumar. But there was a grey and grim distance that had come between the mother and son over the years. Nothing had been said, there was no single cause but Kausalya suspected that her son hated her. They had one thing and only one thing in common: the Maharaj Kumar. There was not much else they lived for. Kausalya didn’t find it improbable that one of these days the two of them might kill each other because of him.
She kept the papers with her for a week. Then she stood outside the entrance to the Prince’s palace. He was late. She had to wait over two and a half hours. He saw her and turned his head away as he had been doing since his marriage. He was about to disappear behind the doors when she called out to him softly, ‘Maharaj Kumar, I have something to show you.’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘How would you know till you see what it is?’
‘Leave me alone.’
She grabbed his hand. He tried to shake it off. She held on to it. ‘Let me go Kausalya, for if you don’t…’ he had raised his hand.
‘If I don’t, you’ll slap me, right?’
He took a deep breath. He would not look at her. ‘No, I would not.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know whether I would mind it so much if you did. It would be some kind of conversation at least, something which you and I seem incapable of having nowadays.’
‘May I go now?’
‘You don’t want to see what she writes?’
It was as if she had stuck a dagger in his heart. He stood motionless. His shoulders drooped. He closed his eyes.
‘Who are you talking about?’
‘You know who.’
‘Is there something exceptional in that? People who know how to write, an illiterate like you might find that a little difficult to understand, may want to communicate with their relatives and friends at home.’
What had happened to him? Why this wanton and superfluous cruelty which was so alien to his nature?
‘Write every afternoon and not send these communications to anybody but hide them from all eyes?’ She took the papers out from under her choli and handed them over to him.
‘I am not interested. I am not.’ He clutched the papers in his hand and walked in.
* * *
He did not pretend to lie down that night. He told the eunuch on duty not to let anyone enter his room, not even the Princess, and sat down at his low desk. He went through the pages, ten, fifteen, a hundred times. There were places where he couldn’t link the zigzag of her writing. It rose from the middle of the page, went to the next one, came back to the margin of the previous page, gave up the sentence, started another, abandoned that, and tried to revive the earlier one. But disconnected and disjointed though the writing was, it was all addressed to one person. It was a delirious raving, a mad outpouring of passion and plaint, the most abject grovelling and fits of temper and tantrums. Haughty rejections, passages of fierce and naked eroticism, begging and pleading with him to come and visit her, take her away once and for all from the rest of mankind, hold her in his arms tightly, giddily, till every bone in her body was broken. Why did he not come, wherefore this arrogance, this playing hard to get, she could do without him, she had no need of him whatsoever, she was sufficient unto herself, she would commit suicide, plunge the Maharaj Kumar’s sword into her heart, free the Maharaj Kumar once and for all, the poor dear man, how she had made him suffer. Enough is enough. She was going on a fast unto death, today was her fifth day, she was so thirsty, she had a little water to drink, then the maid brought some cold fresh lime juice with honey, it was like amrut, oh forget it, why should she starve herself for someone who didn’t have the courtesy to reply to her letters, answer her urgent calls, admittedly there were at least a dozen of them every day but was this any way to treat your beloved? Sometimes she thought love was just a blind alley. She gave her all and he didn’t say yes or no, he didn’t accept it, neither did he reject it. What was she to make of him and of her unrequited love? What was the point of being betrothed if your beloved never thought of you, never called out your name, never remembered your birthday, didn’t remember the first song she had sung to him? And then suddenly, out of the blue, the skies darkened, and the thunder was a python crushing and grinding mountains, and the lightning was a scorpion that flashed and flared and stung her and the rain pierced
and raked her flesh and there he was, the love of her life, the undertow of the sea, the spirit of the drifting sands, the tongue of the wind in her ears, the caress of the peacock feather and the hardness of the flute was against her.
There were quatrains and broken verses and entire poems. There were padas that she had started and scratched out. The lyrics were the only text that he didn’t read. Poetry left him cold. His curiosity was intense but try as he might, he couldn’t overcome his resistance to verse. And anyway there was so much prose, he decided to look at the poems later. There were invocations and laments and requiems and hymns and soliloquies and excruciatingly detailed descriptions of her life at Chittor, her aloneness, her conversations with Kumkum, brilliant pen portraits of the Rana, an insightful assessment of Queen Karmavati, aching and unflinching introspections about the magnitude of the pain and suffering she was causing the Maharaj Kumar and her inability to reach out to him or bring him peace; sharp memories of her uncle, her grandfather and her father’s guilt that her mother had died and the child deprived of her love and also his own guilt because he didn’t know how to talk to her. She told her lover everything, about the tiny, almost invisible tentacle that a seed was tentatively sending out as a feeler into the universe and why did the woodpecker’s beak not wear out or lose its sharpness although it had been boring a hole for its nest for the past seventeen days and did the phases of the moon have anything to do with the state of her moods and whether her love for him was flooding the plains and making the rivers change their courses. She couldn’t stop talking about the greenery and woods and forests of Chittor. She wondered if there were two earths, one for Merta and one for Chittor. She had never seen so much green. She tried to take it all in with her five senses. Her greed was insatiable. She described trees and branches and leaves and flowers as if they were creatures with whom she could talk. Each branch was an arm and a tree was a thousand-armed goddess and the leaves were her brood of children. She could look at a leaf for hours, dilate upon its network of arteries and veins, draw it and distinguish hundreds of kinds of greens. The wind was a flute at times and a shameless intruder at others. Its lambent touch gave a tree goose pimples and it talked dirty and roused the tree and became frisky and felt it up and down till the tree told the wind to leave it alone, but that only made it bolder and it was all over the tree and then there was no stopping it and the tree didn’t want it to stop either.
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