‘I didn’t know what I was doing, I swear I didn’t. I found myself in his bed and the next thing I know is I had slept with him.’ Or, ‘I didn’t know what was happening but one thing led to another and before I knew what was what, I had stabbed him.’ A likely story. And yet he wanted to believe her desperately.
After all, it was not so uncommon to be possessed. Everybody knew that smallpox was nothing but the visitation of a devi. She could kill you, blind you or being a goddess, she could leave you permanently marked with craters on your face and body. If someone else was perchance responsible for his wife’s plight, this other one whom she called by various names, then maybe it was possible to be rid of him. And then maybe, just maybe, he and his wife could settle down to a normal, average married life.
In a cave some forty miles from Chittor, there lived a woman called Bhootani Mata. Nobody knew her antecedents. She lived alone and performed arcane sacrifices and ceremonies. Sometimes if the mood was upon her, she might decide to help a person. But there was no forcing her, nor was there any possibility of getting her over to the palace.
Bhootani Mata was not the kind of person he would have turned to, ever. But ‘ever’ is a flexible and finite word. Whether he knew it or not, he had crossed the shifting line that separates the sane from the unbalanced. Anything, he was willing to do anything, to retrieve his wife from the forces that had robbed her of her will and set her on a path of collision with the whole of Mewar. He set out to visit his Bhil friend, Raja Puraji Kika with Mangal and the usual retinue of ten or twelve others. On the way, they made a detour. Ordering Mangal and the men to wait, he climbed up the steep side of the mountain to Bhootani Mata’s cave. He stood at its mouth and whispered: ‘Mata, my wife will not cohabit with me. She says there is another in her life and she is his. I fear she is possessed for I have never seen her with another man. Please help me.’ It must have been a long and twisting cave for her voice took a while to reach him. Her message was short. She used an obscenity and said that she had no time for him or his faithless wife. He started to plead with her. She threw a stone which hit him on the forehead, and told him to get out because if he didn’t she would throw another one at that thing between his legs and then it would make no difference whether his wife slept with the whole world because he would be of no use to her. He thought of retreating but then decided against it. What did he stand to lose any way?
‘I’m coming in,’ he told her and didn’t wait for her answer. After ten or fifteen minutes he realized he was lost. At each turning there was a fork, sometimes three or four. The passages were black and mouldy, some of them had the overpowering smell of bat droppings. Sometimes he thought his hand brushed a lizard, at other times hairy tarantulas crawled over him. He wondered why his eyes hadn’t become attuned to the darkness. He should have been able to see at least vaguely but the longer he stayed, the less he saw. He found it difficult to breathe. What time was it? How long had he been here? Was it just five or seven minutes or a couple of hours? He had given strict instructions to Mangal not to follow him. How long would it take Mangal to transgress his orders? Would he have the sense to bring a light? He himself certainly hadn’t thought of it. And would a torch really help? Or would its flame also turn black? Was he going to be responsible for the deaths of Mangal and all the others? He felt a sense of panic at the thought. He had to find his way back.
He strove to calm his agitated mind and to think back carefully. He had entered from the west, the first two turnings were to the south, then to the north, he couldn’t remember how he had navigated after that. He was getting disoriented. If you enter from the west and want to retrace your steps, do you go east or do you go west? It was a complex question and though he thought hard about it, he couldn’t come up with a definite answer. Perhaps all directions vanish in the blackness of Bhootani Mata. He remembered something from his geometry lessons. If you went in a circle, you would get back to where you started. He would go left and at every crossroad he would take the extreme left turn. There was one more rule he would follow: he would count the number of steps he took.
He counted up to seventeen thousand and collapsed. Forget it. His fate was in Bhootani Mata’s hands, if there was such a person as her, and he didn’t care a damn what happened to him.
‘Are my companions in danger? Did they enter the cave too? Whatever you do with me is all right but you can’t make them pay for my actions.’
A hand made of cast iron hit him in the face. ‘Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do.’
‘You’ve been following me throughout, haven’t you?’ he asked after he had caught his breath from the blow.
‘You’ve been following me, or trying to.’
Eight hands picked him up. Four supported him, one touched his face as if to learn its features, one groped around his chest and shoulders, the seventh felt his member and the last one pulled his hair. He felt a tongue lick his face, the hands ripped off his clothes and the tongue touched his feet and his neck. How long was it? Was it one tongue or many? The hands sat him up.
‘Scared shitless, are you? What happened to the cocky “I’m coming in”?’
He heard the sound of water falling off the edge of the earth and a distant screaming of voices in perpetual pain. He saw dismembered heads held up by the hair with the blood still dripping from them. He saw black feet stomping on the back of a demon lying on his stomach. He heard the sound of lips slurping blood, he saw the coitus of the earth and the sky, he heard the slow moaning of pleasure. There were severed limbs writhing on the floor, a hand came down, picked up a leg, shoved it into a mouth without a face which started crunching on it. He opened his eyes. In front of him was a hollow cavern with a platform in the middle. A toothless and blind old crone was sitting naked on it.
‘There are others. Why don’t you make it with them? You can marry again. Ignore her till she dies.’ There was a pause. ‘How about me?’
His body tensed with revulsion. ‘Ghastly thought, isn’t it?’ As she spoke she turned into a young woman. She had a lush body, her breasts were full and firm, held tightly by a kanchuki that exposed her shoulders and arms. She wore a clinging sari. It had gold bands spiralling upwards, a gold waistband hung casually below her belly-button. She shook her hair loose. It cut the light. He heard the sound first. It pierced the eardrums with a sharp high-pitched note. She was whirling her head in circles, the hair swished through the flesh of his face like a rake with a million thin needles. Her head rotated faster and faster. His body was being whipped and his skin shredded so fine, each strand by itself was invisible. He stood up in an attempt to run but the long hair kept whooshing past reaching deeper and deeper into his raw red flesh.
‘Is she possessed or are you possessed by her? How many days, weeks, months is it since you had any thought barring hers in your mind? I would say that it’s you who needs to be exorcised.’ She paused in her gyrations and let the thought sink in. ‘We are always trying to cure other people when we ourselves need the cure most. What do you say? You are here, it will take a minute and you will cease to think of her. You’ll be a free man.’ She paused again. ‘Would you like to be a free man?’
He wanted to say yes, every bone and pore in his body said yes but he couldn’t bring himself to utter the word.
‘I thought as much. Who wants freedom when you can have perpetual bondage?’ There was a weighty pause with some tortuous breathing. ‘How far are you willing to go?’
He was intrigued by that last question. He wasn’t sure he understood its thrust either.
‘Money is no consideration,’ he blurted out.
‘You can shove your money you know where. What do you think I can do with it, make a chain of it? Eat it? Spin yarn from it and cover my knockers? There’s only one question in life. Once you have the answer, you know everything that you’ll ever need to know. It is this: Just how far are you willing to go to get what you want?’
‘Pretty far, I would think.’
‘Go home, you fool. When you know the answer, I’ll be there. But by then you may not need me.’
‘Who is it? What is the name of her lover?’
‘What difference does it make?’
He had many more questions to ask. The light at the entrance of the cave blinded him.
Chapter
15
‘Who was with the Shehzada on the night of the seventh?’ I finally lost my patience and better sense and called the head of the security guard.
‘I don’t quite recall. That’s a week ago, Sir. If you want to know I’ll have to go and look up my records.’
‘Yes,’ I kept my voice under check.
‘Right now?’
‘Yes.’
He was back within twenty minutes.
‘Yes?’
‘It was a woman, your Highness.’
‘What was her name?’
‘We don’t have it, Prince, because the Shehzada did not ask us to engage the services of a lady that night.’
‘What did she look like?’
‘There’s just one sentence here under the column Description. “Woman with cowl covering her entire face.” She was shown in at ten past nine.’
‘What time did she leave?’
He fumbled for some time, making a show of going over the log. ‘There’s no entry here,. Sir, for some reason.’
‘For some reason, I don’t exactly know why, sergeant major, I have a feeling you are about to be stripped of your rank and your job. It could be a man, woman or eunuch who may have wanted to give his regards to the Shehzada, steal a few art pieces from the palace or kill the Prince. Your log doesn’t say and you don’t care. He, she, it could have stayed the whole night, abducted the Prince but you and your subordinates don’t know because they and you were playing cards, whoring or sleeping while on duty.’
He tried to protest. I’m sure he had a string of excuses but I was not interested. ‘I’ll review the matter with your superior officers within a fortnight. Till then you and the guard on duty are suspended.’
I cornered Mangal that evening. ‘Aren’t you worried where your mother is? She’s been missing for seven days and nobody knows whether she’s dead or alive.’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘She’s an adult. She can take care of herself.’
I would have liked to have shaken Mangal’s brains and his indifference. I didn’t want to see the malicious look of satisfaction on his face. I turned around and left. Kausalya, I had to grant, was capable of looking after herself under normal circumstances. But an invitation to sexual congress was hardly normal and the Shehzada, I was beginning to appreciate, had a side to his nature that was on the far side of wild. That night at the wrestling matches had given me a new insight into the man.
He had mentioned more than a couple of times that he was missing wrestling. One of his companions who had accompanied him to Chittor was supposed to be one of the best wrestlers in Gujarat. A few days ago, I finally arranged a full evening’s programme. Bahadur was in a great humour. Of the ten matches, the first nine were between Mewaris, the last between the Shehzada’s man and one of our local stars. The Prince was in luck. Of the first nine matches, he had bet his money on seven participants who won.
‘What are you going to bet, Your Highness? What are you going to bet against my man?’ There was a mad gleam in his eyes. ‘He’s going to trounce your man.’
‘How would you know?’ I asked him.
‘Because I saw him in action yesterday. My man will dismember him.’
‘Have you fixed the fight, Shehzada?’ I asked light-heartedly. He gave me a look of such contempt, I wished to God I had fixed it so that our man would lose early enough. It was too late to do anything about that now.
‘Gujarat will cow down Mewar any time, Prince. On the battlefield or anywhere else. My man, rest assured, will annihilate your wrestler before the poor man makes his first move.’
There was a crowd of at least five thousand people. The noise was deafening and the excitement a little out of control. It was the rainy season and we had put up a big shamiana around the open-air pit to accommodate everyone. The sand-pit was the only part that was exposed. Everybody was sweating and eating massive quantities of cholle-bature, samosas, kaju chiwda, tawapudi, malpohe, bundi laddus. Bahadur had obviously had a few drinks plus I suspect some drug that was making him highly tense and restless. His pupils were dilated and his hands were shaky.
‘What, what will you bet?’
‘How about a hundred tankas on your man?’ He was looking for a fight and I was not about to oblige him.
‘On my man? Don’t you have any pride and patriotism?’
‘I like to be on the winning side.’
‘Then you’ll have to abandon your camp and country. Hundred tankas. Is that all Mewar can put up?’
‘Your Highness, you seem to have forgotten that when it’s our turn to be kings, we are going to sign a peace treaty.’
‘Peace treaty be blowed. How much? And remember, you can only bet on Mewar.’
If only, I thought, wrestling could replace wars, I wouldn’t mind if Bahadur and Gujarat won every fight for all time to come.
‘Five hundred.’ I gave the money to the bookie.
‘No, no, no.’ There was a thunderclap and it began to rain heavily. The two wrestlers were out. ‘I have put ten thousand. You’ll have to bet at least that much.’
Fortunately it was too late. The two men in the sand-pit had come to grips with each other. I understood why the Shehzada was betting so heavily on his man, Aslam Jaffer. He was tall and built like a mountain. His opponent, Bharat was half his size and more to the point, looked a little intimidated. They were both heavily oiled and the opening of the sluice gates in the sky didn’t exactly help matters. For the first minute and forty-five seconds, Bharat’s only ploy and preoccupation was to slip out of Aslam’s cavernous arms.
‘Rat,’ Bahadur said to me, ‘the Chittor rat doesn’t have the guts to give a fight. Look how he’s avoiding Aslam. But Aslam is like fate. He cannot be postponed or put out. You watch, he’s got a series of holds of such lightning speed, once he locks in, your man will beg to be let off. All he’ll want to do is rest his back on the sand and give up.’
That’s just what was happening, but not to Bharat. He was a wiry man who used his body rather than fought with it. The fighting he left to his mind. And his mind was an uncanny liar. It sent contradictory signals to the opponent. He came through on some and let his adversary down on others. He was compact rather than fast. The time to get him was when he was sizing up your game and frame of mind. After that things got a bit tough as they had for Aslam. Aslam had used a Bakasur hold and pinned Bharat so far back it would take just a couple of seconds for him to land on his back. Those few seconds were critical. Bharat’s toe smashed into Aslam’s kneecap. Aslam struggled for balance; Bharat was up, his foot jerked Aslam’s leg forward, his head hit Aslam on the chest so that he was falling, falling, falling and was flat on his back.
Bahadur Khan was up and screaming dementedly. ‘Foul. Cheating. This is no match. Disqualify Bharat. That referee is a partisan.’ The mass of five thousand Chittorites watched him in surprise, dismay and with a rising sense of indignation. Bharat looked at me wondering whether he had done something unforgivable. I saw no point in eye contact. The crowd had begun to boo. The Shehzada noticed the turn in the tide and sat down. Time to diffuse the crisis, I thought and got up. ‘Good night. Thank you everybody. It’s late and we should all be going home. Tomorrow is a working day. Thank you Aslam, thank you Bharat for a wonderful evening.’
The crowd had already started to disperse when the Prince leapt out of the royal enclosure into the sand-pit. It was still raining and everything looked fuzzy and unfocussed. Aslam Jaffer was sitting up a trifle dazed. As Bharat gave him a hand to help him up, Bahadur Khan’s foot connected with Aslam’s mouth. Seven broken teeth sprayed out and Aslam was once again flat on his back. The Shehzada’s foot
kept coming back at regular intervals. The cracking of the ribs was amplified by the sudden silence of the crowd. Five, six, seven times the foot slammed into Aslam’s rib cage. Then it turned him over and hit him in the kidneys. Two firmly aimed kicks in the small of the back. The neck was next. ‘You failed the Sultan, me and Gujarat. The izzat of our kingdom is mud in the infidel’s eyes. The only honour left to you is to die.’ I thought it time to intervene. He swung at me but I ducked and said, ‘Time for the fifth namaaz of the day, Prince.’ He stopped.
I changed horses twice and reached Rohala within five hours.
‘You are not going alone, Your Highness.’ Mangal ran after me as I mounted Befikir late at night.
‘I see that you’ve made much progress since we last met. Do I now take orders from you?’
‘Forgive me for presuming to advise you, Highness,’ he knew perfectly well that I was deliberately distorting his statement of concern, ‘but it is dangerous for the Maharaj Kumar to be abroad all alone at night.’
‘Your solicitude for my safety is praiseworthy, but it may have been more apposite had it been exercised on your mother’s behalf. If I need an escort, I will ask for one. For the moment, I would appreciate it if I could have some breathing room as well as a little freedom of movement.’
There was an unfocussed anger in me and even as I was regretting my petty sarcasms, it felt good to hit a man when he was down and could not retaliate. It was a long, long time since I had been to Rohala and while I recalled some of the rooms and the courtyard with the fountain and the tulsi plant, I had no memories of the exterior of the house I was looking for. It shouldn’t be so difficult, I kept telling myself, to find the largest and most affluent house in a place like Rohala,but it was a moonless night and I was loath to run into the night watchman and have him find out that a prince of the realm was paying a secret visit to his village. I had to get out of the maze of lanes and by-lanes and attain a vantage point from where I could get an overview of the topography of the place. The question was how? The land was as flat as my belly. The ever-present guardian Aravalli mountains undulated in the east but they were a good five or six miles away.
Cuckold Page 17