I am not thinking straight, am I? If he’s half as good at spying as I am making him out to be, then it seems unlikely that he doesn’t know about his mother and me. He has always had an uneasy relationship with his mother. Did he regard me as an intruder? But for me, he would have been the one and only one in her life. They are both naturally reticent but in the last few years, there’s a coldness between them that’s close to bitter hatred on his side. Kausalya does what duty demands of her as a mother. She got him married, but only after I was, to a girl from one of the prominent families of Sirohi. Kausalya bought him a fine house, a stone’s throw away from the palace. The dowry that her daughter-in-law brought, she has invested for her son and bride in real estate in the town. She’s not over-friendly with her son’s wife but neither does she interfere in her affairs.
Thus far and no further. Kausalya has an acute sense of boundaries, not just physical and geographical, but interpersonal ones. More often than not, she is the one to draw them so that you might not always agree with their rationale, but once they are drawn, she sticks to them even if they end up inhibiting her own freedom or hurting her emotionally. When I grew up and my eyes started wandering, she sent me to Chandra Mahal. Sooner or later I would have gone to Chandra Mahal anyway. Many of my brothers and cousins, not to mention Father and my uncles, had suites with separate entrances there. You took a woman with you or asked one of the servants or security guards to get one for you. Kausalya made sure that the girls who visited me were clean and didn’t have some infection. Was she jealous and resentful? Did she feel insecure and hurt? I’ll never know. Perhaps she was sure that I would always go back to her.
I did. Until I got married. She decorated the bridal bed in Chittor and she took my wife under her wing. I had never needed her as much as I needed her then. I wanted to bury my head in the fork of her legs and squeeze, compress and force it all the way back into her womb. I wanted to cling to her and bash my head against her breasts till they burst and my head cracked open and I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I wanted to tell her about the blood and my bride’s earlier espousal; ask her about what I should do and where I should hide my face and why she didn’t tell me beforehand and how I was to find my way out of this insupportable quandary not of my making. But I couldn’t go to her and expose my shame. Was it pride, humiliation, a damaged and traumatized ego? Who knows? If anybody knew my secrets, Kausalya did. She knew my great and lasting anxieties about Father, the succession, the future of the country, my misgivings about the state of our armoury and my ideas about escape strategies during sieges. She alone knew my sexual pleasures and preferences, a great many of which I had no doubt learnt from her. It may not have resolved anything but talking about my bizarre relationship with the Princess to someone who had made my life her mission, would have taken a load off my mind. Perhaps she would have reasoned with the woman who everybody thought was my wife. Maybe she would have made her see the light. If not that, she would have dispelled the darkness of the woman’s past and revealed who the secret and nameless stranger was.
Kausalya stayed in the wings not wanting to intrude upon me. The four months that my bride was away, she got the water for my bath ready and put out the clothes I was to wear to court or for an official function. She served me food and sat quietly while I ate. She slept in her old room and if I paced the room all night long, brought a glass of hot milk with turmeric powder in it. But we didn’t exchange a word. She could have come at night and pressed her nipples into my mouth, pulled out my tongue and let it forage in her dark and mysterious ponds and rejuvenated me. But she kept back and I remained aloof till my need of her became a cold and hard rage that I could not understand nor overcome.
Mangal, doubtless, had sensed the abyss opening up between his mother and me a long time ago. Sometimes I thought that he rejoiced at her defeat and was happy to be even with her and to watch her suffer silently. For suffer she did. She did not know what had earned her my wrath. She did not know where she had gone wrong. Had I told the new woman about the wet fingers? Had I revealed the quasi-incestuous bond between the two of us to my wife on our first night? Had my wife forbidden me to have any truck whatsoever with her? Would she let it be known abroad that Kausalya had seduced me when I was fourteen when I should have been making out with girls of my own age who should have been abundantly available to the Maharaj Kumar? Would she be evicted out of the palace, dispossessed of her belongings and properties and exiled forever? But I am missing the point. For her greatest fear, and there was hooded terror in her eyes, was that she would be made to part company from the one most precious thing in her life: me. Never mind if I did not talk to her, see her even when she was in front of my eyes; it mattered little or not at all that the new woman had turned my head and there was nothing but cold hatred and a disowning of the past in my eyes, just so long as she could get to see me every once in a while.
She thought she knew me. She discovered that she didn’t know the beginnings of me. Things at home went from bad to worse and I seemed to withdraw and curdle in her presence. There was high intrigue abroad in the kingdom. In the past, I would have bounced ideas off her or at least divided my cussed silence between us. Now I neither shared my bed nor my confidences with her. However much I tried to persuade myself that she nursed Bahadur through the worst days and sat through those dreadful nights at his bedside because she wanted to prove what a martyr she was, I knew in my heart that that was not how her mind worked. There were boundaries and there were duties. You did not cross the first and you performed the latter, regardless of the consequences and interpretations put upon them.
* * *
‘The Shehzada Bahadur wants you,’ I had summoned Kausalya to my room. It was an ambiguous statement and she could have played around with it to vex me and to cause me more embarrassment and discomfiture. She got the sense of the statement instantly. Quibbling and hair-splitting were not her way.
‘Do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Do you want me to go?’
‘I told him that was between him and you.’
We might as well have been enemies. My mask of cynical indifference didn’t have much effect on her. She turned her face away to hide her contempt and disappointment and left the room. I went about my work; two meetings with the Prime Minister Pooranmalji about defence systems for Chittor and the other with Lakshman Simhaji about the action to be taken against the two nobles who, our investigations showed, had indeed encroached upon and annexed several villages from Raja Puraji Kika’s territory. Another meeting with the minister of commerce about falling revenues and the short-term and long-term measures that needed to be taken. All these years I had been a proponent of octroi and sales taxes but I wondered if we had overdone it a bit and it was affecting our exports. I was attentive at all the meetings, interrupted proceedings when I thought we were not getting anywhere and tried to get the ministers and myself to look at old problems in a fresh and constructive fashion. We decided on the punishment and penalties for the two raos and constituted a committee to formulate a new taxation policy within thirty days. But something had happened. It took me over twenty-four hours to realize it.
How can another man’s desire rekindle a passion that you thought was dead and even the memories of which had flown away? Something that I had killed deliberately and without any reason was rising phantom-like and haunting me. I gritted my teeth and pursed my lips and put Kausalya away. But Bahadur’s interest in her was like a brushfire. The more I tried to put it out, the more it spread. Memories of Kausalya’s body and our lovemaking seemed to interfere and impinge upon my conversations, the memos that I was writing, the preliminary budget for next year that Adinathji presented. Then the unexpected happened. My tortured and ravaged mind which had been run over, usurped and vandalized by that woman at home, the one they called my wife had now, however fleetingly, room for somebody else. Kausalya. Damn my pride. Why hadn’t I said no to the Prince? He was aware of Kausalya’s anomalo
us position, that she was my dai and had felt compelled to ask my permission. I had merely to mumble something about the mores and traditions of Mewar and its taboos. I could have embarrassed him and even elicited an apology from him for suggesting something so profane. Kausalya herself was waiting for me to say no. She would have thought of something, I don’t know what, to put him off: she was infinitely resourceful. But I was so busy playing a role, ‘I don’t give a damn, do what you please, what’s it to me,’ that I had not bothered to ask myself what she meant to me and why I was so hell-bent on losing her.
There were at least a dozen or two girls available to the Shehzada at the Atithi Palace. Besides I was told he had also tapped other sources. Some of the families from his own community were keen on earning his favour and dreamt, I am sure, of tying up with the royal family of Gujarat.
Why did the Shehzada want Kausalya when he had all these girls at his disposal? What had he seen in her anyway? I was aware that it was a hypocritical question even as I asked it. She didn’t just look young, she was young. If you saw her just once and that too fleetingly and didn’t have time to notice her eyes, the facets of her face or her bearing, she would still make a lasting impression. Because above everything else, Kausalya had presence, a charisma that stayed in your mind. If the men in my own family had kept off her, it was not only because she was withdrawn and was the Maharaj Kumar’s dai, it had something to do with fear. If you knew what was good for you, you did not cross Kausalya. She had the most direct eyes I had seen. They saw through you and your intentions and told you to stay off.
What was Kausalya going to say to Bahadur? How was he going to broach the subject? How does one break the barrier with a woman one does not know and has never spoken to? Sure, he had seen her but he was barely conscious then. Would he ask her pointblank? Take off her chunni and choli? Grab her breasts, stroke her nipples till there were shallow craters at their centres, suck them and suddenly bite into them, rip off her ghagra and while she was trying to get out of it throw her back on the bed, tie her hands to the bedpost, and … and lunge into her? This was odd, very odd because I did not normally spend time thinking of the sexual proclivities of others. And then it hit me. I was not making any of it up. I was merely reproducing a secret report given by one of our people about the Prince’s nightlife. In the middle of foreplay or sometimes at the very end, Bahadur would become violent and try out various experiments in a cruel kind of lovemaking. One of the cautionary suggestions made by the reporter was that the Prince seemed to want to test the limits of pain in human beings and sometimes ended up going beyond the limits of endurance. As such he needed to be watched. What the paid voyeur meant by ‘he needed to be watched’ is anybody’s guess. Were we to wait outside Bahadur’s door and when the lady in distress had abruptly stopped screaming and was losing consciousness, break it open, doff our caps to the Prince and say ‘by your leave, your Highness’ or ‘excuse the interruption but we think the lady needs a bit of resuscitation?’ His other recommendation was that we should select such partners for His Highness who were not only old masters, or rather mistresses of the art of receiving such treatment but were also adept at meting it out. A nice touch, that. I was sure that our internal intelligence service had a list of the twenty or thirty such experienced and desirable performers in Chittor.
The Shehzada had fallen ill soon after the report and in all the tension, it had gone out of my mind until now. Damn my asinine show of indifference. I told my amanuensis to cancel my appointments for the afternoon and rode home. That woman was singing. I closed the door of her room and locked it from outside. I searched high and low. No sign of Kausalya. I asked a maid to look for her in the queens’ palaces and in the servants’ quarters just in case she had gone to give some poor sick soul homemade medicines. Almost an hour passed but she didn’t get back. I sent another maid after her and told her if she wasn’t back within ten minutes, I would dispatch her to Kumbhalgarh jail. I went down with her and turned left before the zenana. I took off my shoes, and touched the feet of Annapurna Devi who rested in a niche outside the underground storehouses of grain. I made my way through the passages between the tall columns of gunny bags which contained enough lentils, dry beans and corn and jaggery to last the palace occupants for at least six months in case of a siege. I knew I was taking a chance just in case she was supervising some deliveries from the farms. She was not there and when the second maid returned with the first (she had got engrossed in a game of chowpat Rani Karmavati was playing with my mother, the Maharani, for some preposterously high stakes) she said that Kausalya was not on the premises.
I sent for Mangal. Was his mother visiting his family by any chance? No, she was not. I went past the Atithi Palace. I found it humiliating to ask the security guards which woman had visited the Shehzada last night. Was the Prince there? Yes, Your Highness but he has left strict instructions not to be disturbed.
Was she with him? Had she gone to him last night and not come out since then? Had they found so much in common? Had she discovered that she too had a taste for leather, whips, tongs, and cinders? Was she getting even with me for all the weeks and months of sullen silences and cold-shouldering? Was he pouring honey into her navel and licking it as I had done? Was he caressing her back with a peacock feather? Had she run her fingers slowly through his hair and massaged his scalp till he lay in a semi-comatose state only to be woken up suddenly by her tongue playing over his nipples?
There were other highly charged and utterly unmentionable things that Kausalya and I had invented and perfected between ourselves. Was she sharing all this with Bahadur, giving him a condensed course in what we had taken over ten years to explore and chart?
What was the matter with me? If I had missed Kausalya so much, why hadn’t I known about it? And when I discovered the truth, why had my randiness gone completely berserk? It was as if I was trying to whip myself into some kind of sexual frenzy by deliberately regurgitating the intimacies I had shared with her. And what if she lay unconscious somewhere? What if he had hurt her beyond the point of no return, not just physically but far more importantly, in her soul?
Oh God, wherever you are, keep her well. And if it’s possible, let her be mine and not the Shehzada’s.
Where was she?
Chapter
14
We were that rarest of couples. Even after years of marriage we were madly in love. I with her and she with somebody else.
Should he pull her tongue out, he wondered, or stuff a large silk handkerchief into her mouth? Was she perverse? Was she doing it deliberately to annoy him? He had broken the ektara into two. That didn’t seem to make much difference. She sang without it. Despite his resolve to make her stop singing at any cost, he listened intently. Would she go off-key without the ektara, sing a false note? If only he could catch her hesitating for the tiniest fraction of a second as she nose-dived into a glissando. She did not. Her voice was steady as a surgeon’s hand. When it zigzagged, it was because she wanted to take a taan that slithered like a desert snake as it flashed past, progressing sideways across the sand. Where did she get that voice from? She was five feet two with a little bit of imagination. She was slim and slight. That range and fluidity of registers required a voice box made from tensile steel and it had to be attached to bellows the size of the palace.
He sat her down. He controlled the pitch and timbre of his voice. ‘Do not sing. Is that understood? I will not have you sing under my roof.’
‘Why?’ she asked innocently or at least she did a fine imitation of innocence.
‘Because princesses don’t sing for the public, at least not in this house. Tawaifs do.’
‘It was only a bhajan.’
‘Rasikabai ends every mushaira of hers with a bhajan. Like you, she also gets an audience of a hundred or so to stand under the windows and balconies. Soon they’ll be throwing coins at you too.’ I had got carried away by my rhetoric. ‘But they won’t if I have anything to do with it. Today’s was yo
ur last concert, is that clear?’
‘If it upsets you so much, I won’t sing.’
‘It doesn’t upset just me, it upsets the whole family. My mother, the other queens, the princes and their wives and it upsets Father.’
‘Forgive me, I didn’t, I didn’t realize it would get to be such an issue that the whole family would be exercised by it.’
‘Rani Karmavati called me over yesterday and told me with her usual straight face that the Rao of Chanderi had asked whether he could borrow the new singer we had acquired from Merta. He said he would pay well.’
‘Do you want me to go and sing for him? I can’t, I’m very shy.’
He was sure she was putting him on, no question about that. Was she crazy? Was she naive and stupid or did she take him for a fool? How was one supposed to talk to this woman? He could feel his temper rise and the blood throbbing in his head. Easy, easy does it, he told himself and found that despite the proffered advice, he was getting madder and madder.
‘Just forget it. I don’t want to talk about it, so long as you understand that from now on, you’ll not, under any circumstances, sing for your pleasure or anybody else’s.’
He should have known better. She sang every day. His wife was the talk of the town and there was nothing he could do about it. Not that he lacked the imagination or the initiative to think of extreme options. But there was a stray remark of hers which kept surfacing in his mind.
‘I didn’t know I was going to sing. I sit down to pray and I lose consciousness of my surroundings. When it’s all over I discover that I have once again disobeyed your injunctions.’
He abhorred people who did not take the responsibility for their actions. He believed that all of us know what we are up to even when we tell ourselves that we drifted into something.
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