Cuckold

by Kiran Nagarkar

  * * *

  Consider the knee. Without this flexi-joint, we would not be able to sit down, kneel or do a padmasan. There would only be an either/ or, a vertical or horizontal posture. Stand up or lie down. Nothing in between. I have no idea how we would ride horses without knees. Steps, staircases, multistories, frankly even first floors, would be inconceivable without knees. Islam would have to invent some other posture for prayers. Wrestling would be out and so would the prospect of putting one’s knee in the crotch of some bully or brigand who attacked suddenly. One of my favourite childhood pastimes would have been out too. I would go behind a classmate standing erect or with his legs apart and arms akimbo and shove my knee into the fold of his leg. It always worked. The guy lost his balance or semi-sank and I laughed myself silly till someone came and did the same to me.

  And what you may well ask, is the occasion for this ode in praise of knees when there is still no trace of Leelawati? Take my word for it, I’m undone. That accursed woman, the wife and witch of my life, has revealed to me that the knee, at least mine, is an explosive trigger, an aphrodisiac of such phenomenal dimensions that I have driven my companion of infinite patience and indulgence, Kausalya, to despair and exhaustion. I am unquenchably randy and demand satisfaction though I am bedridden, on an hourly, nay, on a half-hourly basis. What infernal perversity led my wife to first break my other leg and then place her moist lips on my exposed knee cap, begging me to forgive her? Perhaps it is an idle mind and my supine posture and two broken legs that are responsible for my unfathomable lubricity. Kausalya who has always maintained and defended the decorum of the home, has finally caved in and smuggled in nocturnal and transient company because I cannot make it to Chandra Mahal. I would be happy or at least painfully wearing myself out if I could plough and till a lonely furrow on rented flesh. But there is no peace even in my own home, my own private chambers. That woman when she is finished with her inordinate outpourings and her devilish swirling of skirts and torrid singing, drops in at the oddest hours. I resolve not to speak. I keep my cool and hold firmly to my stone of silence. It is, needless to say, of no use whatsoever.

  Will someone please tell me what I am to make of my life? Is my wife Greeneyes real? Is she nothing but a great actress, a phony all the way? Is she one person or two or many more? Does she love someone else and hurt for me? Is she lying? Does any of this, all that is past and the present and whatever’s to come, make sense?

  ‘Want to bet your gold belt with all its rubies and diamonds that I’ll beat you?’ She had brought back the chess set, the one with the damaged horse.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Afraid of being beaten?’

  ‘Terribly.’

  ‘What will you bet?’ She persisted.

  ‘My box of needles and thread and buttons.’

  She stared uncomprehending for a second and then collapsed in waves of laughter. A strange pass, my life had come to. My wife finds my third-rate humour funny.

  ‘You wait, just you wait. Til clean you out of hearth and home.’ She looked defiantly at me. ‘But I’m a fair person. Go ahead, ask for anything, anything you want, if not I, but you win the game.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Anything. I don’t go back on my word.’

  There was something I wanted from her, at least I remember I did a long time ago. Something I had craved and yearned and waited for all these years.

  I lost the game. Had I won, would I have asked her? Would she have granted me my wish?

  She was a compulsive gambler. We played hundreds of games of chess while I lay on my back in bed. She bet many things. Sometimes she lost. But she never bet ‘Anything, ask anything. I don’t go back on my word’ again.

  ‘Perhaps it may be a good idea to wait a while before you ask His Majesty’s permission for us to leave for Kumbhalgarh.’

  What was she talking about? We were in the middle of a game. Was I no longer permitted the privacy of my own thoughts? I had not mentioned Kumbhalgarh to anyone. Our games, the only time we had any sort of transactions, were monologues. Hers. How did she know then?

  I had no role to perform in Chittor. I was not even an ordinary member on the Gardens and Parks Committee. The projects I had initiated – sewage management, the escape tunnels and the modernization of military technology – were no longer actively pursued. What hurt most was not that they were shelved but that we were willing to cut off our nose to spite our face. Chittor’s interests were dismissed merely because my name was associated with those projects. How does one deal with this order of shortsightedness?

  I had never had an excess of friends even as a child. After my marriage, I had stopped entertaining almost entirely. Barring Raja Puraji Kika and Rao Viramdev, no one came to visit me. (I’m not counting the Queen Mother and Mother.) Now that both of them had gone to their own kingdoms, my only guest – always uninvited – was my wife. Why stay where one was unwanted? I was an outsider at home. Perhaps I could be at home outside Chittor.

  ‘You feel you’ll no longer be seen as a threat if you remove yourself from Chittor. But that’s just what the people who have been conspiring against you, want. You wish to leave, they’ll say, because you want to foment trouble. Who knows, they’ll hint, all those hotheaded people who bowed to you when the victory awards were announced may join you in Kumbhalgarh and you may decide to march against Chittor.’

  I held my silence. Whose side was the Flautist’s mistress on? Having made me the jester of Mewar, must I now take lessons from her? I had to confess though that I had overlooked the first rule of statecraft. In any matter that concerns your relationship with others, put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Get under his skin. View the world and the issues from his point of view. You’ll know exactly where the shoe pinches. Now decide whether you want to cut the blood supply off altogether, ease the pain or watch how the situation develops.

  ‘It’s not my place to give advice,’ that did not seem to deter her though, ‘but His Majesty is a good man. He was under great pressure to relieve you of your command. But he did not give in. He let you put your unusual ideas to the test. When you tricked Malik Ayaz and trapped the Gujarat armies in the quagmires, there were public demonstrations for your immediate recall. Both of us know who was behind these, but the dismay and disappointment in the populace were genuine. What was His Majesty to do? How was he to educate his people and his allies about the profound changes you were making in warfare when he himself was in the dark about them? Then you disguised yourself as a Gujarati soldier and killed Zahir-ul-Mulk. After that there was no longer a demand for your recall. They wanted you stripped of rank and office.’

  ‘I am stripped.’

  She did not indulge my self-pity.

  ‘I’m not suggesting that your enemies have not won the day. But it may be wise to wait and watch what happens. Sometimes, only sometimes, not always, time will take matters in hand and resolve them.’

  That night Kausalya arranged for a rather unusual treat.

  ‘I want you. Not hired help. I want you to crush my head between your breasts or thighs till my putrid brain is flushed out. That way perhaps I’ll be finally rid of this obsessive disease.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Are you tired of me?’

  She smiled a little ruefully as if I had said something ludicrous and unworthy. ‘I’m with you, never more than two rooms away. The disease, Your Highness, is time. This is the first time you have had all the time in the world. If it is a healer, time is also a killer. What you need is a change, a change of faces and companions. I’m a reminder of all your troubles. The two girls will make you forget yourself for a few hours.’

  ‘Two of them?’

  ‘They are twins. They don’t operate singly. Double the fun, that’s what we do, they told me.’

  They couldn’t have been very old. Leelawati’s age or a couple of years older at the most. Nothing special about that. Most of the people in Mewar are married when they ar
e children. The first period and a girl is allowed to sleep with her husband. The royal family and the highly privileged may not always follow these customs and often wait for the princes and princesses to get into their late teens before conjoining them. But Father has odalisques, not to mention a wife who is maybe twelve or thirteen.

  These two, however, were rare birds. They looked young and eager and uncertain and yet every now and then I had the feeling that they had seen more of life than the great sages for whom the past and the future are interchangeable. Their names were Raat and Din. They were identical twins. Their parents, pimp or whoever had named them must have had a juvenile turn of irony or a twisted sense of humour. After a while I began to suspect that they were playing some kind of game with me. If I called Raat and held her hand, she smiled shyly and said ‘She’s Raat, I’m Din.’

  One of them started to unbutton my shirt while the other got down to undoing my trousers.

  ‘Shall I play with myself while Raat takes you? Or if you like you can play with Raat while I let my tongue discover parts of you, you didn’t know existed?’

  It was like my mother reeling out the names of all the savouries and sweets she could remember as she tried to coax me to eat when I was ill.

  ‘Lie between us and we’ll give you a nipple massage. You’ve never experienced anything like it in your life.’

  I must have looked a trifle unconvinced.

  ‘I know what you are thinking,’ Din smiled knowingly. ‘That you can feel a nipple only between your fingers or lips and tongue. But you are wrong. Raat and I have invented this special treat. Your skin will become astringent as an alum-rub and your gooseflesh will be the tremor in the grass when the papiha sings and the monsoon showers scurry through it.’

  She let her clothes slither down. How many months had she practised this seemingly triggerless undraping of herself in front of the mirror? Raat thrust herself forward.

  ‘Would you care to undress me, Highness?’

  Her hand brushed accidentally against her sister’s breast. It was sheer art, this act of casual premeditation and voluptuous provocation. As I undid her blouse, I watched Din’s fingers between Raat’s legs. Her nipples woke sleepily.

  ‘Hold my breasts, Maharaj Kumar,’ Raat told me, ‘no, no, don’t clasp them. Just place them on the palms of your hands.’

  Her voice was a flickering whisper, an erotic invitation as potently compelling as her palm on her sister’s breasts. ‘They are the apples from the Persian Emperor’s orchards, the mangoes from Konkan in Maharashtra. And the red-black grapes, Your Highness, how will you know where they are from unless you bite them?’

  Din throbbed like a slow spasm that contracted and released her as her sister put her tongue in her mouth. My hands fell to my sides. The grapes would neither rouse my tongue nor my member. I was disconcerted and disoriented by the mirror images. There was no room for an outsider between these undulating reflections in which it was impossible to tell where simulation began and spontaneity ended.

  ‘Shall we do this a little later?’ I asked a shade guiltily.

  They looked discouraged but stopped instantly. Their smiles were a little hesitant now, waiting for further instructions.

  ‘Do you divide all tasks, I mean all your work equally?’

  ‘Yes. We never plan but if I take the left, she handles the right. If she starts at the top, I’m already busy working my way up from the toes.’

  They smiled constantly but were bereft of humour or playfulness. They were tirelessly painstaking, ever-willing to do your bidding, persevering even after they had worn themselves to inert fatigue, compulsively good-humoured, extending themselves to any lengths to please the customer. I could not bear thinking about what would happen to them and their self-esteem if they failed to please. Would they kill the customer or commit suicide? They were creatures of such exquisite delicacy and yet so ersatz, an evening with them could go either way: degenerate into excruciating boredom and emptiness or become a bejewelled, if precious experience in a mirror universe. Is it possible, I asked myself, is it possible for an image in a mirror not to have an original? Was there a world where only reflections had life, that there was only antimatter, that we are a shadow world and the universe and creation are not maya or a figment of the imagination but a possibility or an option that cannot be because God lost interest or is lying dead on the edge of some galaxy?

  They are singing now. No, Raat sings and Din dances or the other way round. ‘There is only one taboo, it is sorrow,’ the song tells me. ‘There is only one medicine for both the invalid and the healthy. It is love. Because love is the disease. It is the key and the lock, the incarceration that liberates.’

  The paradoxes and the antitheses pile up. The banalities never cease to fascinate our poets and their audiences. And yet every now and then, in that synthetic emotion, a live image or irony grabs you and disturbs the tranquil certitudes of one’s cynicism. The singing and the dancing may not be extraordinary but they are accomplished to say the least. I’m reminded of the night at Rajendra’s and my uncle Lakshman Simhaji’s place. Surely I don’t expect these pixies or expensively made-up waifs to share the magnificent rolling introspection of Sajani Bai. They have fine antennae, these sisters, they catch the ever-so-fleeting lapse in my attention.

  ‘Our recital does not give you satisfaction, Sire?’

  ‘Much satisfaction, ladies.’

  They did not believe me.

  ‘Shall we play the games Prince Bahadur played with us?’

  It is a long, long time since I’ve thought of the Shehzada. Where is he? Still self-exiled in Delhi or back with his father or taking shelter with the Sultan of Malwa? Time has a strange way of playing with the lighting in memories. Clear and sharp lines and features recede at times, the darker recesses come to the fore or gain definition. Perhaps time is a kaleidoscope and never repeats itself. I think of Bahadur now as one of the few friends I have had. We were bound both by life and death. But there was more than that.

  ‘Would you like us to take you in turn? We’ll bring you to the brink. It will be unbearable and exquisite and yet we’ll make sure that you don’t come.’

  Sometimes I think of him as a kindred spirit. During the campaign, I often caught myself talking to him. He was not just the enemy. He had, unlike most people, a point of view that he had arrived at after thinking things through. He had a vision for the kingship and the state and the present was but an improvisation towards realization of that objective. He could be narrow, bigoted and chauvinistic but he had the potential to grow and be flexible.

  ‘You could tie us up. We’ve got a whip. No?’

  I had little doubt that despite his being out of favour with Sultan Muzaffar Shah, he would one day assume the throne of Gujarat. Would there be peace between us if I was Maharana of Mewar by then? I doubted it. Malwa was across our borders to the south-east and its king Mahmud Khalji II was erratic and weak. Bahadur was sure to annex it. We were in between. Gujarat was a young kingdom compared to ours. He would go to war with us. At least he was an enemy worth fighting. Guerilla tactics would very likely misfire against him. He was like me. He studied his friends and enemies. He was curious and he didn’t forget past defeats and offences.

  ‘He applied a burning cinder to my thigh and twisted Din’s arm till she fainted.’ The girls had been narrating many a rare pleasure through my reveries. ‘Would that please you?’

  I had lost them. I seemed to recall that they had at some point switched to Vikramaditya. Did they like pain or did it come with the job? If only they could have broken my brother’s or Bahadur’s arm or torched their privates. I knew then what was wrong with them. It had never occurred to either of them that someone could and should take the trouble, infinite trouble, to give them pleasure. There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Forgive me, Your Highness.’

  ‘Come in.’

  Kausalya opened the doors very slightly. I knew she had her back to me.


  ‘Will you please excuse the young ladies?’

  I did not ask what, why, wherefore. Kausalya is not in the habit of intruding on a private party.

  ‘How much time do they have?’

  ‘A minute and a half at the most.’

  They did not wait for me to ask, request or order them to leave. The customer’s pleasure was the only thing that mattered. Raat, maybe it was Din, tossed her breasts into her blouse and locked them up for the night while the sister tied the strings of her ghagra. They tried to put the musical instruments back in the corner of the room.

  ‘Leave them be. I apologize to both of you. Perhaps some other time. You’ll be paid in full, of course.’

  They bowed out, their backs to the door till Kausalya pulled them aside and took them to her room. Just in time too.

  A heavily cowled person walked in with four guards. Father.

  For His Majesty to attempt to disguise himself was like an elephant trying to move about incognito. Who could mistake the limp and the drag and authority of the man?

  ‘Leave us.’

  The guards left. Father dragged a seat to my bedside and sat down. I turned on my side to touch his feet. He picked up his bad leg to allow my hand to make contact with it and then put it down.

  ‘May Shri Eklingji’s blessings be upon you.’ He looked around, then sniffed the air. ‘I see that you’ve had company. I’m relieved that you are not that disabled that you cannot indulge yourself.’ Nothing escapes Father. No wonder he outlasted his brothers. ‘How is the leg?’

  ‘Improving, thank you.’

  ‘Do the hands and arms come next? Or are you planning to break your neck first?’ He smiled. He knew I did not associate wit or laughter with him.

  ‘Your Majesty did not come here to humour me at one in the morning.’

  ‘I came to enquire after your health. You are my son, the eldest as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I never for a moment forget that fact.’

  His face clouded and he looked uncomfortable. Perhaps he had hoped to come to the subject of his visit after a few preliminary indirections. But I seemed to have scotched all possibility of light banter.