Cuckold

by Kiran Nagarkar

  Stand on your head Flautist, it’s a topsy-turvy night.

  My arms are a black snake. Come, I’ll wrap them around you.

  I’ll slither and slide inside and over you, twist and cling to your limbs.

  I’ll be your masseuse, the black rain my healing unguent.

  Body on body, breast on breast, tongue coiled with tongue.

  We’ll tie a knot that can never be untied.

  We’ll intertwine into a double helix.

  Weave vein, artery and capillary into an inseparable plait.

  Everything has a place and purpose, you told us.

  A viper must be true to his creed.

  The fang needs sharpening, the lethal venom a victim,

  Come my beloved, lie with me today and always,

  No telling if poison and ambrosia are the same

  Unless you savour them both.

  It’s a black snake, it is, this song of night and longing. When someone departs, you are exiled. Would one be as alone but for the people one loves? Oh God, I am not yet twenty-seven. How did I make such a mess of my life? Does Sunheria think of her life as lonely or a mess? Be my teacher Sunheria, teach me to, what were your words, oh yes, let go. Come my friend, he said to himself, self-pity is an indulgence you cannot afford. He started walking towards the palace. It had begun to rain heavily and the skies had darkened again. The voice became stronger and stronger. The servants ran hither and thither, asking him why he had not ridden home or sent for an umbrella. There were people standing all around and listening just as he had. He brushed them aside. He walked in a daze up the steps of the staircase. His wet feet slipped and he barely managed to keep his balance. He scraped his right knee but he kept walking. Who had had the temerity to hire a singing girl and bring her to his suite of rooms in the palace without his permission? Surely his house had not yet become a kothi.

  His wife sat in the middle of her room in front of the marble Shri Krishna. The fingers of her right hand were strumming an ektara. Her eyes were closed. Her face glowed and she swayed just a little from side to side. He watched her as if she were an apparition. He waited for it to disappear, for disappear it would. It is fortunately the nature of hallucinations not to linger and turn into the substance of reality. He must be a sick, a very sick person to think that a Princess of the House of Mewar, the wife of the Maharaj Kumar, no less, would be singing like a tawaif in the palace itself with an audience of forty or fifty down below and a few just outside his private chambers.

  ‘No telling if poison and ambrosia are the same

  Unless you savour them both.’

  She picked up the last line again and began to embroider on it. He kicked the ektara. It broke in two and slipped out of her grip. Her eyes opened slowly. He knew she wasn’t seeing him.

  Chapter

  13

  It took Adinathji close to a month to recover from a mild case of bronchitis. It must be different with younger people, especially active ones like Bahadur. He was walking around in ten days and playing chess with me late into the nights. He was a better player than I, except that he became impatient or lost his nerve at the last minute. My only strength, if you could call it that, is that I am a steady plodder.

  ‘Have there been any letters for me?’ he asked me in the midst of a game. He tried to make his voice sound casual but I could feel the tension in it.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. At least not lately.’

  ‘Not lately and not before that either. Was I putting too much faith in my friendships with the amirs and nobles of Gujarat or is the timing all wrong?’

  I didn’t know what reply to make. Sometime or the other, he was going to discover that a revolt is easier in theory than in real life.

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far. It takes a long time for mail to reach Chittor especially since the courier must make a long detour to avoid the battlefield. And then there is the matter, Prince, a thousand apologies for mentioning this, of your elder brother Sikander. However capable you are, do you think it might give the nobles pause?’

  ‘No offence taken. I am no reader of the future but this I assure you, I will be King of Gujarat. When is merely a matter of time.’

  I poured both of us drinks. ‘Let’s drink to that. Because quite apart from the fact that we have become close on a personal level, I believe that the peace treaty you mentioned between Gujarat and Mewar will prove a boon to both countries. May you indeed become the king when the time is right. I wish you every success, Shehzada.’

  By the fifteenth day he was riding with me. ‘Come I’ll race you to Rani Padmini’s palace,’ he said. We were on the road near Bappa Ka Raj Tila, the platform where my ancestor Bappa and other earlier kings were crowned.

  ‘Maybe you ought to wait another week or so, till you are completely recovered.’

  ‘Nonsense. Don’t make excuses.’

  He took off like the wind. I tried to overtake him but didn’t even manage to come abreast of him at any point. Winning put him in a good humour.

  ‘A delicate matter, Maharaj Kumar,’ he took my hand, ‘and I don’t quite know how to approach it.’

  ‘In that case you would do well to say it as plainly as possible.’

  That didn’t seem to help him much. His eyes wandered all over the place. ‘Can we go inside the Palace?’

  ‘I suppose we could but some of the queens and their women may be bathing there.’ Just as I said that, the Maharani’s palanquin left the palace.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I hadn’t realized that Rani Padmini’s palace is still being used.’

  ‘But that’s not what you wanted to ask me, was it?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ He hesitated for a moment, then spilled it out. ‘That woman, the one who looked after me during my illness, I believe she was your dai.’

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  ‘She’s stopped coming.’

  ‘I suppose it must be because you are well and don’t need her any more.’

  ‘Yes, that must be the reason.’ He was still having difficulty coming to the point. His eyes held mine. ‘May I have her?’

  And you think you’ve seen everything and what you haven’t, you’ve had the sense to imagine: every possible scenario for anything and everything in the world. He caught the hesitation in my silence.

  ‘Not for ever but while I’m here.’

  ‘That’s between you and her.’

  * * *

  Kausalya breast-fed me. Later, when I was thirteen or fourteen, she introduced me to sex. Everybody learns about sex, one way or the other, early on or later. How you do it is a matter of detail.

  I have no idea of Kausalya’s antecedents. Rumour has it that a couple of years before he died, my grandfather Rana Raimul had a brief affair with a maid-in-waiting who caught his fancy. Brief may mean one night, a couple of nights or a few months on the outside. Well, maybe a year. The outcome of the fling was Kausalya. That’s one story. There are five or six others. Perhaps Kausalya may be able to throw some light on the subject, but I am not exactly dying of curiosity. When she was twelve, she was married off to a courtier in the service of Father. Kausalya and the courtier had a son, Mangal, who was born ten days before I was. When I arrived on the scene, Kausalya was entrusted with the task of nursing the heir apparent and hopefully the future King of Mewar. I cannot very well recall whether she was partial to her son or to the Maharaj Kumar in the matter of breast-feeding. Perhaps I got preferential treatment; it was after all a major honour to be chosen as the dai of the King’s first son. Perhaps she was impartial and whoever bawled louder got fed first. Or more likely, there was more than enough for both children and we suckled simultaneously at her abundant breasts.

  Mangal and I must have been about a year old when Kausalya’s husband accompanied Father to do battle with the Malwa forces and died with honourable mention. Kausalya could have left service then. She had over a dozen villages to her name which had belonged to her husband, plus some money of her own. But she
preferred to stay. She had got used to city life and Mangal wouldn’t get the kind of education he was getting at Chittor. She kept an eye on her property though, and started a poultry business there. Ever since I can remember she has been one of the major suppliers of poultry to the palace. She has diversified considerably since then. I’m sure at least five percent of the mutton and over ten percent of the vegetables we eat are from her farms. I think she must now be a woman of very substantial means, especially since she’s branched out into money-lending to the queens and odalisques in the palace.

  Even after she had withdrawn into the shadows, I have often thought of Kausalya. She was very likely born in the palace. She has certainly spent most of her life there in close contact with the queens and their servants and sahelis and all the important women at court, but she is unlike them. I think of the queens in the palace and my heart sinks in despair. Can you imagine the endless, the relentless, ever-stretching boredom of being a queen? After you’ve had a bath – how long, after all, can you prolong washing your hair – and dried yourself and eaten your breakfast and two meals and discount the eight hours of sleep, that still leaves twelve hours a day to do absolutely nothing. If you are in favour, in great favour, the king may turn up fifteen days in a month but he’s out of town at least six months of the year. Father has twenty-seven wives, not to mention over a hundred concubines. What happens to the other twenty-six queens and to the odalisques? Doesn’t the monotony of their vacant time drive them crazy? Sure, there are rumours now and again of a concubine or a queen having an affair. But a queen’s worst enemies are all the other queens. Can you imagine how difficult that makes things? Because while a maid may find privacy for herself, the queens are always keeping a watch on each other. They don’t want anybody falling out of line.

  They can’t spend time with the children because there are maids to do that. They can’t even breast-feed their own babies because it’s not done. I have seen queens howling in pain because nobody told them to squeeze the milk out of their breasts and they have become so distended and sensitive that the merest whiff of air is excruciating. Most of them don’t read. They play hopscotch or some such children’s game. Or they play cards and gamble and get into enormous debts with the wealthier queens or a branch of Adinathji’s family. They talk, they gossip, and they intrigue. There are many camps in the seraglio but the most enduring one is the division between the favourite and the rest put together. The favourite changes, the one that has permanency is the opposition camp.

  The big prize, obviously, is the throne. Any queen who’s given birth to a son wants the crown to sit on her son’s brow. But the crown is just the beginning of the deadly enmity among the queens. Allowances, the size of the wardrobe, who gets to sit where, whose child is doing better at studies, who has more eunuchs and maids-in-waiting, whose father or family is more powerful, whose hair is longer, whose skin is flawless, any, but any pretext is good enough reason for feeling slighted, deprived and nursing grudges. Sexual allure certainly helps, but it’s a long time since Rani Karmavati was the favourite with Father. And yet she has a strange power and hold over him which is difficult to explain or understand. Father is a cautious man, someone who weighs matters carefully and hardly ever acts on impulse. And yet if Rani Karmavati is around or has had a chance to work on him, this highly pragmatic and sensible man is capable of abandoning all sense. It is fortunate that so far, she has had her way in mostly trifling issues. But it’s a bad precedent and one of these days she may force his hand in matters which affect the future of the state.

  A long circuitous digression that nevertheless reflects on Kausalya. She has no time for gossip or politicking. I think when I was fairly young, she decided to make me her life’s work. This is hindsight talking, of course, but Kausalya is clear-headed and she can take a long-term view of matters. It was, admittedly, a narrow canvas she was working on but it gave her a sharp focus and besides, if one day, I do become king, something of her slant and colouring and world-view would affect a whole people. Power, even if it’s behind-the-scenes power, is its own reward and end and it certainly must have played a role in her choice of subject. She is also ambitious, more for me than for herself. I think it will take me a long time and a great degree of maturity to sort out what I inherited from her. Off the cuff, I think she gave me a sense of perspective. There is right and wrong in the world and there is always an ethical choice involved. The art of statesmanship is knowing how far you can side with the right and when to abandon it in the interest of the polity. For her, ruthlessness is a virtue. It has nothing to do with cruelty or torture. Ruthlessness was paring down issues to their essence, so that you did not get caught or influenced by the abracadabra and the side-shows of life. Woolliness was unforgivable.

  But for her, I would have had the same contempt for literacy as the rest of the men in my family have. Intellectuals are never at a premium among my fellow Rajputs. They are not shunned, but they are objects of fun and a little despised. A life of action for them is the one and only goal of life.

  Kausalya herself could neither read nor write. When she was a child she used to accompany princesses of her own age and shared their tutors. But she had some learning disability and was not able to master reading and writing. She was sensitive and proud and suffered because of the handicap. It was to compensate for this failure that, I suspect, she has almost total recall. She was not devout or overly religious but she went to temples and kirtans regularly. She said the brahmins and the charans liked to talk and show off their knowledge. Often they thought they could rule better than the king. And to support their arguments, they quoted from all kinds of sources, mythological, historical and secular. One of the persons they quoted most often was Kautilya from his Arthashastra. When I was fourteen, she made me borrow the Arthashastra from Father’s library and read out a couple of pages to her every day. While its significance and meaning escaped me to a great degree at that time, it was one of the most fruitful experiences of her life. Since she always went to the heart of the matter with a parable or a paradigm, she demonstrated Kautilya’s teachings to me with the real-life situations and crises from Mewar’s own political events.

  I remember those days clearly. I couldn’t seem to attend to anything. Even when I read to her, my mind kept wandering. She pulled me up sharply because while I saw and reproduced the words, the sense escaped me and that affected my reading.

  My friends including Mangal, were heavily into masturbating. They did it with such intensity and earnestness, it was almost like a religious ritual. But it was not a mass activity where everybody got together and thrummed their members. You could, but it was not mandatory. This was fortunate for me not for reasons of snobbishness or superiority, but because I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm to play with myself. I can’t say with any authority whether it was as a consequence of this or not, but I had wet dreams almost every night, sometimes twice in the night. I started wearing a loin cloth even when I went to sleep. It helped but not always and whatever the substance of the ejaculation, one thing was certain, it was not water. The damn thing invariably left a starchlike stiffness in the cloth.

  I removed the sheet in a rush, took it to the bathroom and washed it. When I got back I realized that it hadn’t been a very smart move. The mattress was stained anyway and part of the sheet was wet enough to make Kausalya believe that I was peeing in the bed. That first day I pretended to be unwell and pulled up a thin coverlet all the way to my neck.

  ‘Maharaj Kumar, don’t you know what time it is? Get up and get dressed or you are going to be late for class.’

  I opened my eyes and looked mournfully at her. ‘I’m feeling feverish, Kausalya.’ She came over and felt my forehead. ‘Doesn’t feel hot. Don’t tell me you haven’t done your homework or want to miss a test.’

  I shook my head. ‘Ask Mangal. No test today.’

  ‘See how you feel by noon.’

  I closed my eyes. She kept pottering around tidying up the place. I did
n’t realize when she left because I fell asleep. I woke up around ten thirty. The water had dried but there was an oasis in the sheet. I had had another wet dream. What was I going to do? Would Kausalya tell my mother, who in turn would inform Father?

  There was no way Kausalya couldn’t have noticed my hyperactive night life but she did not ever mention it.

  Looking back I sometimes wonder whether, as the months passed, I didn’t really want her to notice. This was about the time she caught me in the branches of the peepul tree a good mile and a quarter up river on the banks of the Gambhiree, spying on the women who went there to wash their clothes and themselves. This was my seventh time in the last fifteen days and I was absolutely sure that no one had spotted me. There was not much I could see. The tree was not exactly on the edge of the bank of the river and the women never really took off all their clothes. Even when they changed into dry saris, they did it discreetly and in one seamless action let the new clothes flow into the wet ones which dropped to the ground. I have no idea how Kausalya discovered my whereabouts. She waited till they had left and then got me down.

  ‘If I catch you here again or anywhere else clandestinely watching women bathe or undress, I will thrash you till there’s no skin on your body and then inform the Rana.’

  Kausalya and Mangal had a room across the passage from mine. It must have been a week or ten days after that incident that Kausalya told her son that he was a grown-up young man now and got him a room on the ground floor in an adjoining wing. A couple of nights later I woke up to find my fingers wet. They were deep in Kausalya’s skirt.

  I don’t know to this day whether her son knows that his mother and I were lovers. His relationship with me certainly didn’t change. If anything, he has become more devoted to me and more vigilant about my safety over the years. We have never discussed the latter but he keeps a hawk’s eye on all my brothers and anyone who is their friend. He has his own intelligence network, one which is far more efficient and reliable than the state’s, and has a good idea of my programme for at least the next seven days so that he can post his men at vantage points.