Cuckold

by Kiran Nagarkar

  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.

  * * *

&n
bsp; 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.’

  Chapter

  12

  It was an unequal fight. No Armageddon this, just the sport of a god.

  He was returning from work when he first heard the singing. It was faint and very distant and he didn’t know whether it was coming from the heart of the town or from one of the exclusive areas of the citadel a little beyond the Khetan Rani Palace. That was an odd coincidence. He had been thinking that now that the Shehzada was improving, he must arrange a jalsa to celebrate his recovery. He had not heard the voice before. There were just two people apart from his father who were crazy enough about music to import new talent from outside the kingdom: his uncle, Lakshman Simha, the Minister for Home Affairs and Narbad Simha, the commander of the infantry. Since the latter was away with his father, it had to be Lakshman Simha. Who could it be? It was unlike any of the voices of the great singers of Chittor.

  He stood still and let the voice wash over him. For some reason that he could not explain, he always found both the sound and the raga itself far more moving if he heard them from outside someone’s window or as he was going up the stairs or climbing the shoulder of a mountain. His great-grandfather had been a fine musician and musicologist. Great singers, even those under the patronage of other kings, thought it a rare privilege to be invited by Rana Kumbha. If one was down and out or there was a rift with one’s patron, there was always room in Rana Kumbha’s court.

  Nobody had taught the Maharaj Kumar the intricacies or the finer qualities of raagdari music. When he was a child of four, he sat in padmasan, his backbone a relaxed ninety degrees to the ground, for five or six hours while the singer or instrumentalist expounded a raga. God help him if he got restive or started to bawl, his father’s head would turn slowly and the one good eye would come to rest upon him. It took a couple of seconds for him to turn to ash. All that was left of him was a pool of pee in his seat.

  If a prince or princess’ interest in music continued, then a teacher would come over at six in the evening twice a week for an hour. The Maharaj Kumar learnt the basics of classical music for barely three years. His voice, as the teacher politely told his mother, was passable but not special. And yet his grasp of the subject was remarkable. He had an unerring ear and could tell how and why a series of notes was to be sung just so.

  If at a jalsa or mehfil, the audience was a little over-appreciative and kept the beat with their hands on their knees and nodded their heads and exchanged complacent glances of wonderment and pleasure as the singer came full circle after a complex progression simultaneously with the pakhawaj player, the Maharaj Kumar left in disgust. Grammar, he felt, was a sign of competence, not of excellence. Do you congratulate your colleague, bob your head, pucker your mouth and smile approvingly when he constructs a sentence of seven or nine clauses without missing an article, misplacing an adverb or bringing the whole superstructure down with a verb in the wrong tense? An audience which is easily pleased is congratulating itself on its own taste as much as the artist. It is a fool’s game where the artist is a willing party to the audience’s chicanery. It is not enough to love great art, the least you can do is to separate it from the mediocre and the competent; the virtuoso performance which is self-centred brilliance from an exposition that transports and transforms both the artist and the listener. He was not stinting of praise; it was merely that the praiseworthy was not a quotidian phenomenon.

  Chittor had its crop of greats and even the occasional genius. It was not just a matter of equipment like the lungs, the diaphragm, the vocal chords and how much work and training had gone into it; it was also a question of what the mind, breadth of experience and the imagination of the artist could do with them. Shalivahan Samant, Rajab Ali and Rasoolan Bai had voices as deep and varied as the ocean and a range of emotion and meditation that was like a vision of life itself. He didn’t know anything about the range of the voice he was hearing now. Besides, while first impressions were valuable and had their place in life, he was wary of them. It was only when you heard an artist over a period of time and in different contexts that you could tell whether he did the same thing over and over again or whether he was versatile and his range protean. He would withold judgement for the moment but he had to admit that the intensity of this new voice was unsettling. She flung it as if she would encompass earth and heaven. It was a javelin whose flight path was unaffected by storms and hurricanes because its own element was the flash and turbulence of lightning. It was difficult to imagine how anyone could sustain such raw power. What struck him suddenly was how easy it would be to mock that voice, and burlesque it from one’s own sense of acute embarrassment because what it did was to expose the innermost being of the singer, no half measures, no private spaces, no room for equivocation. It bared all in public. It exposed itself without the common courtesies of concealment and dissembling that are essential for the smooth running of society. It was dangerous because it did not respect your mores and your hypocrisies and had no room for compromises.

  Surely, a voice coming from nowhere and without a body or a face attached to it can’t tell you so much, he said to himself. He smiled wryly, why does my imagination always run away with me? There was only one way to verify all the romantic nonsense he had been reading into that voice. Get to know its owner and after a period of a few months judge how far off the mark he had been. Whose voice was it anyway? He stopped every few yards. If there was one major shortcoming in his appreciation of classical music, it was that he rarely paid attention to the words. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he couldn’t bring himself to read poetry. If it was a folk song or a popular street melody, his ears pricked up and he wanted to know what it was all about. He was amazed at the bawdy vitality of some of the courting songs that the Bhils sang and the pungency of the satirical verse that went the rounds of the city as a comment on the current political situation, the sexual peccadillos of some well-known person or on the volatile loyalties of some of the neighbouring kingdoms. In classical music, on the contrary, he tended to think of the words as a peg on which to hang the song. He realized t
hat he was being unfair but in most cases where he had understood the words or had had them explained, he found them banal in the extreme.

  It had begun to drizzle. He loved Chittor in the rains. Everything, even the stones, were just a little out of focus. The Tower of Fame and the Digambara temple were lost in low-flying clouds. He always thought of the grass in the monsoons as an actor waiting impatiently in the wings to make his appearance. A knock, a slight drizzle and entire armies of grass showed up overnight. Why does green mean so much and make such a difference to men and women? Why is it that no one sings of the dry brown of summer with the same joy and excitement? Is green the colour of life or is it the colour of madness? The green of grass is a possessive, greedy colour. It doesn’t leave an inch of space for anything else. I want, I want, I want. It takes over and like the salesman at a cloth shop, unrolls yard after yard of grass till all the three square miles of Chittor are a waving field of green blades. Every now and then you come across a puddle of sky. Suddenly there’s a chink in the heavens from which light tumbles out. Somewhere in the distance, I’m sure, there will be a rainbow.

  The light and the rain affected the quality of the woman’s voice. It became purer and there was a shard of sorrow in it. He was completely wet now. Lightning tore through the sky soundlessly. Later, much later, thunder grumbled irritably at the eastern corner of the fort. Twilight had a strange effect on him. His senses were sharpened and he felt distanced from everything around him. He could hear the words of the song now.

  The rocks have risen to the sky. Heaven has been relocated. It’s gone under.

  The points on the compass have skidded and let go of their bearings.

  The underworld has levitated and the demons are abroad.

  Beware Blue God, someone may mistake you for them and slit your throat.