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.
Chapter
10
He was my best friend. My confidant and preceptor. This Blue God with the flute and the peacock feather stuck in the band around his head.
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.
Chapter
11
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.
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