Cuckold

by Kiran Nagarkar

  Mangal rushed into my tent. ‘Hurry, Prince. We are under attack. I have got Befikir outside.’ I raised my hand to silence him. What was it? Damn, why had I turned to stone? What was so important that I could not and would not move? ‘Get up, Your Highness. I’ve woken the other leaders and they will be here in a minute. If you don’t make your escape now, all will be lost.’ Why was Mangal making such a fuss? If he and the rest wanted to leave, that was all right with me. I had more important matters to attend to. He was yelling at me now. ‘What is the matter with you? Did you not din it into our heads seven times a day that in any kind of war it is better to escape and survive and live to fight again, rather than die a foolish, heroic death? What’s holding you?’

  Weight. It was a question of weight. When my music teacher taught me the basics of the pakhawaj, he said that you had to know the weight of each beat if you wanted to come full circle on the percussion instrument exactly at the same time as the singer you were accompanying. Yes, in life too you had to know how much weight to attach to each event. If Zahir-ul-Mulk had his way today, either we would be dead or the war would go on for a few more months or years. Neither Idar nor Gujarat were worth it. There was an incredible amount of work to be done at home. Delhi and Malwa were waiting to be taken. I had got my priorities and sense of proportion back.

  From that moment on I knew exactly what I had to do.

  ‘Is the general leading the attack?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mangal Simha told me.

  Rao Viramdev walked in with the others. ‘Mangal, ride to Rawal Udai Simha’s camp. Take the straight road. The Gujarat men will be waiting for you on the detour and not on the shortest route since they are trying to anticipate our moves and outsmart us. Tell Rawal Udai Simha to gather the men from the five camps in the south and east and attack the Gujarat encampment. No mercy, no quarter. Send four of your men to the other camps with the same message. Get the men from the two camps to the north to join us on the double. They should come in behind us. The men from the two western camps will come in from behind Zahir-ul-Mulk’s men. Tell their commanders that the Gujarat commander-in-chief may have set a trap for us but they should act with such precision and clarity that the enemy is convinced that not they, but we, have drawn them here deliberately to finish them off. Godspeed. And come back alive. There’s work here.’ He left. ‘Tej, gather your men and attack from the east. Rao Viramdev will lead the men in an old-fashioned frontal attack at the centre. Shafi, take your men, whoever’s still left and strike hard from the west. This is not the hour for heroics. Take only calculated risks but none with your lives. If I signal a retreat, fall back immediately as per Shafi Khan’s Retreat Plan Number Seven. We’ll regroup at camp three and chalk out further strategy and our course of action then.’

  When they left, I rubbed my face with earth and slipped out. I was back within five minutes dragging a dead Gujarati soldier. I undressed him and put on his clothes. My scabbard is not the most ornate but neither is it exactly anonymous. I tested the blade of his sword. Zahir-ul-Mulk was a stickler for detail and his men kept their instruments of death in good shape. I tied the soldier’s sword-belt to my waist and replaced Befikir’s saddle with his. The helmet didn’t fit me too well. If it got too uncomfortable, I would fling it off. I bent down to rub some more mud on my face. Raja Puraji Kika was standing over me. ‘Be careful, Maharaj Kumar. I’ll keep an eye on you.’ I touched his forearm. I was off. Unlike Malik Ayaz, Zahir-ul-Mulk believed in leading his men. It took me a while to locate him. Our men were dying all around. It was a replay of the attack we had carried out on that first morning when we had rushed the Gujarat battalions going home. One of the Mewar men spotted me keeping a low profile and avoiding battle. He reined in his horse and came directly at me. Some of the Gujarat soldiers were watching me. His first blow fell upon my helmet. The second was aimed at my neck. You should have got me the first time, my friend. I ran my sword through his stomach. He fell forward but managed to cling on to his saddle. I kicked the horse hard in his butt. He took off in the direction of the rapidly retreating Rajput armies.

  It was hard work getting close to the General. There was furious fighting around him which I wanted no part of. Zahir-ul-Mulk seemed to slip away from me every time he was within hailing distance. I may have worn a Gujarat soldier’s dress but my lateral progress, I was sure, had caught the entire Gujarat contingent’s attention. My only hope was that the excitement of killing an unprepared enemy and the pleasure of exacting revenge would keep the Gujaratis preoccupied. How much longer would this take? I knew that Raja Puraji was taking more risks than I. He didn’t have my disguise and had to fight for his life while following me.

  I was there. I had an inkling of what Abhimanyu must have felt when he pierced the concentric circles of the enemy forces: how will I get out now? But I still had a job ahead of me.

  ‘Get rid of this pest.’

  I thought that Zahir-ul-Mulk was talking about me. Were my costume and make-up that transparent? Or, I was about to laugh aloud, was I so incredibly good-looking and distinctive, no makeup could conceal my face?

  ‘Get rid of this pest, you ass,’ he repeated pointing to a Bhil soldier alongside Puraji Kika, ‘while I take care of the Raja there.’

  I said ‘Yes, Sire’, raised my sword, do it right, pest, this is the only chance you’ll ever get. I had to cleave the head from the torso in one clean stroke or the job would only be half-done. Zahir-ul-Mulk must have realized that something was terribly amiss with the angle of my hand and sword as I stood in the stirrups to get extra leverage but by then the blade was on its way down. I had caught him in mid-action. The chained mail hanging from his helmet had risen upward like the wings of a bird as he flew towards Raja Puraji Kika and was about to thrust his sword into him. For the briefest instant, the general’s neck was exposed. That was enough time for me to strike. It was a strike without finesse but it did its job. The sword sliced his neck and his head bounced on the shoulder of one of the Gujarat soldiers and fell on the ground a couple of yards from Raja Puraji Kika. His body was slightly askew but still upright. A spasm ran through his hand and the sword dropped from it.

  You could see the profile of the cut now. There was far more neck on the right than the left. How is it that two hundred year-old trees don’t spurt all over and make a mess of themselves when they are axed? Red rivulets were racing down his armour. The veins in the stump of his neck distended to accommodate the free flow of blood. Where the column of the neck was higher, the blood shot up four or five inches, took a downward turn and subsided. Every time the body twitched, a transparent red bubble formed at the jugular. When it broke, a fine spray fell all around. Already some of the descending streaks had begun to congeal. I had killed countless people but it was the General’s beheaded neck that would keep me company in the future whenever I had a fever and was delirious. The Gujarat troops stood in a stupor, unable to grasp the murder of their commander-in-chief by one of their own. I came to when one of the men whispered ‘traitor’ and lunged at me. I rammed my sword into the steel armour on the General’s chest and saw him keel over. The man had to pull in his horse to avoid trampling the general. I swung my sword wildly and broke through as Raja Puraji speared the head above our colours, held it aloft, and shouted, ‘Zahir-ul-Mulk is dead. Zahir-ul-Mulk is dead’ and sped away.

  It was uncanny, the effect those words had on the Gujarat troops. They stopped dead, even those in pursuit of me. In the few seconds before they came back to life and resumed the chase, I wiped the earth off my face, tore my tunic and yelled to my soldiers, ‘Get every one of them.’ Raja Puraji Kika galloped back and forth, his voice booming. ‘Zahir-ul-Mulk’s dead. May his soul rest in peace.’ The general’s head stood above us all and swung from side to side till the Raja came to a halt next to me. Tej, Shafi and Rao Viramdev joined us. There was no time to waste. ‘Let’s go,’ my voice must have carried to the ends of heaven and hell. ‘Let’s take the Gujarat camp.’

  Cha
pter

  21

  We left for Idar early the next morning. Rao Viramdev must have wondered why I was in a hurry but he was far too civil and cultured a man to ask me such a personal question. By nightfall, we were at the gates of this small kingdom which had cost Mewar and its allies so many men, and blocked up a full eighteen months of my life. Both the recently dethroned ruler and the would-be king were with us. My sympathies were with the man who had lost, at least temporarily, his kingdom. I didn’t know Bharmal well but what I had seen of him in action I had liked. He was mature and bore his defeat with silent dignity. I was willing to trade my brother-in-law for him and make him our ally. I knew well that while he was alive, Rao Raimul would not be able to sew the seat of his pants to the royal throne. How roundly and warmly I loathed my sister’s husband. And yet, however much I blamed him for undoing almost all of us yesterday, I could not absolve myself for taking the greater risk.

  I was finally a hero all right. At the end of the day when Rao Bharmal had signed the instrument of surrender and we had disarmed all the Gujarat troops, the Mewar and allied forces took me on their shoulders and bellowed ‘Victory to the Maharaj Kumar’ and ‘Long live the Maharaj Kumar’ half the night. I had sought to train them in a new discipline of warfare; I had tried to win them over with friendliness for over a year. Now with one foolish gesture, I had them eating out of my hand. They were willing to become my slaves, do my bidding, march all the way to Delhi that very night and give battle to the Lodi king there. God knows what else they promised me that night. How long will this last, I asked myself. How much time would it take for Vikramaditya to win them over and turn them against me? How quickly would they go back to their old ways of fighting the enemy face to face? But that was beside the point. All the leaders, even Rao Viramdev, had said that nobody but I could have transformed imminent and total defeat into victory. They insisted that while they had all given up, I, alone, was thinking clearly and had apprehended that we were left with no alternative but to take extraordinary measures. But there was a clear alternative, one which I had formulated and reiterated endlessly. Retreat. Save our arses. Run for our lives. I had, of course, ignored my own precept. If one of my deputies had done what I did, I would have stripped him of his rank and banished him from Mewar. How forgiving we are of ourselves. I had endangered my life in a situation that was beyond hopeless. What, pray, would my colleagues have done with our army if I had been killed? Worse, what would have happened had I been discovered and taken prisoner? The very same fate that befell the Gujarat forces when I killed their commander-in-chief would have been ours. A headless army caves in instantly. And with that one unforgivable adolescent gesture, I would have set back guerilla warfare among the Rajputs by a few decades, if not centuries.

  If I thought I was in a hurry to get home, Rao Raimul’s impatience to assume the throne verged on the ludicrous. He had knocked on the door of my room at five thirty in the morning, asking me to get dressed and come down for his coronation. He had come back initially after intervals of fifteen minutes. By six forty-five he was making his rounds every ten minutes.

  ‘The mahurat, Your Highness, is at nine seventeen in the morning. That’s close to four hours from now.’

  ‘Can’t we bring it forward?’

  ‘The idea of the mahurat, I believe, is to choose an auspicious time, so that the gods will smile upon you and will not unseat you in a hurry. I trust that you’ll find it worth your while to wait a few hours in the hope that your reign over Idar will last many years.’ He did not appear to be persuaded by my line of reasoning and was about to speak up when I interrupted. ‘Go to your room, Rao Raimul. We’ll see you in the coronation hall at eight forty-five sharp.’

  I had to hand it to him, he was a blithe spirit, this brother-in-law of mine. I had considered throttling him, giving him a public whipping or arranging an accident whereby he would break his neck after our final attack on the Gujaratis. ‘Why weren’t you and your men patrolling the camp? What happened?’ I had asked him while we sat in Rao Viramdev’s tent the previous night to celebrate our victory.

  He took a hefty draught of the transparent liquor from Merta that could lay an elephant supine after the third drink. He smiled and asked innocently, ‘What happened? About what?’ Was he serious? Did he really not know what I was talking about? Or was he putting me on?

  ‘Where were you and your men last night?’

  ‘On guard duty.’

  ‘So why didn’t you warn us about Zahir-ul-Mulk’s surprise attack?’

  He laughed. ‘He was not supposed to.’

  ‘The General had talked things over with you, had he?’

  ‘Not him, but we had it from an absolutely reliable source that the Gujarat forces were pulling out and going back because Zahir-ul-Mulk was fed up with your tactics of never waging a straight-forward battle.’

  ‘Why did you not inform us of this invaluable intelligence?’

  ‘I was planning to do so, the next morning. But some of the men from Idar came over and we decided to celebrate our return to Idar and my forthcoming coronation.’

  ‘You were sure of the crown, were you?’

  ‘Yes, of course. How were we to know that our hundred per cent reliable source was planting stories and deliberately misleading us?’

  Rao Viramdev who had been silent all the while was looking at my glass or rather, the hand holding it. He saw me now, my hand tightening around the glass as if it were Rao Raimul’s neck.

  ‘Another drink for you, Maharaj Kumar?’ Did the Rao know that I was about to strike my brother-in-law? ‘Oh, I see that while all of us have been guzzling the brew, you have not touched yours yet. Perhaps you find the quality of the distillate a trifle unsatisfactory?’ My hand lost its tension slowly.

  ‘Forgive me, Your Highness. I’m afraid I got a little carried away with the talk. The liquor from Merta, I’m sure, is a very special one. I know that you’ve been preserving it for a special occasion.’

  ‘Ah, Maharaj Kumar, I hope you have not been keeping us under surveillance too,’ Rao Viramdev laughed his wonderful, gruff and gravelly laugh and we all joined him.

  ‘You should laugh more, Rajkumar,’ my brother-in-law advised me.

  ‘Maharaj Kumar,’ Rao Viramdev interrupted him. Rao Raimul was forgiven much; his shortcomings were ignored time and again but there was one kind of familiarity Rao Viramdev was not likely to permit him ever.

  ‘Yes, of course. He’s my brother, isn’t he?”

  ‘That he may be, but he is, first and last, Maharaj Kumar and heir apparent to one and all.’

  Rao Raimul was not put out by the snub. ‘You have to learn to relax, Maharaj Kumar. Take it easy. Not get so wound up and tense. You’ll have to agree that we were right to celebrate last night. After all, am I not about to become King of Idar?’

  What was the point of getting angry with this man? He would persevere in being a thorn in our side. And truth to tell, I had begun to suspect that he was not really vicious or diabolical. He was far more dangerous than that. A fool who had been led to believe that the world owed him a crown.

  * * *

  Either Mangal or the orderly helps me put on my armour when I am about to lead a raiding party or go into full-scale battle. Today for the first time in a year and a half, I am about to deck myself in civilian regalia and I can’t do without Kausalya. The thought of Kausalya is a peg of rice liquor with a touch of cinnamon. It sits in my belly and spreads a warm glow. Take care of Sunheria, Leelawati and even that woman they mistakenly call my wife, till I return, Kausalya. And take care of yourself. Tell Sunheria not to give in to despair. We’ll be in Chittor soon once we are through with the Rao’s coronation.

  What has come over me, I am unable to tie my turban today. Stop indulging yourself, Maharaj Kumar, or you are going to be late. There’s a knock on the door. Oh God, not Rao Raimul again. The orderly’s on his way but I rush past him sword in hand and fling the door open. ‘If you bother me once more, Ra
o…’ It’s Tej. He’s laughing. ‘Has he been bothering you too? He woke me up at four.’

  ‘You are looking good enough to be crowned yourself, Tej. Let’s get back home and we’ll get you married first thing. The virtue of our women is in grievous danger while you are a bachelor.’

  Another knock. I open the door swiftly sword still in hand. Rao Viramdev. ‘Can’t you do something about your brother-in-law, Your Highness? He’s been in and out of my room since four thirty wondering if we can bring forward the crowning.’

  In an hour and a half the ceremony is over. The priests go through an elaborate ritual, invoke the gods, pacify those who may bear a grudge against Rao Raimul and his ancestors and make hefty offerings to them. Rao Raimul fidgets and grows more and more restless. At last the head priest gets around to holding the royal crown over the Rao’s head. But it’s not to be yet. There’s a series of slokas to be recited. Rao Raimul grabs the priest’s forearms and brings the bejewelled turban down. The crown sits askew but the expression on his face is beatific. Oddly enough, I don’t grudge him his impatience now. He’s waited long enough for this day. The crown is a slippery thing. Most princes go through life waiting futilely for one to land on their heads. Even the lucky ones who manage to become kings are perpetually wary that someone will knock it off. Hang on to your crown, brother-in-law. Nail it to your head. I wish you well. May it bring maturity and wisdom in its wake.