How much do you earn? And your parents? How many siblings? Fourteen sisters? We can’t manage to get rid of one. Didn’t your mother bury any in the sand? They were incredible. They had no problems asking strangers about their ancestors, their property, their troubles and the most intimate details of their lives.
‘Why haven’t you got your daughter married yet?’ Greeneyes asked the headman.
‘We found a good boy for her last year but we had a bad crop and what with taxes, we couldn’t afford the dowry. The boy’s parents wouldn’t wait and got him married to someone else.’
‘Don’t you put money aside for a lean year?’ I asked.
‘We do but if we give that as taxes what do we eat the whole year? The Maharana, I’m sure has his share of problems but it would help if he could devise a more equitable system of taxes. More in the good years and less in the bad ones.’
‘You think that will clear your debts and you’ll be happy then?’ I asked laughingly.
‘Of course not. Only dumb animals don’t complain. Human beings always have one reason or the other to complain about.’
It was time to go. The Governor’s men would be waiting for us after they had pitched our tents at Zajora. If we weren’t there in a couple of hours, they would be sure to think that we had decamped and would rush back to Kumbhalgarh and inform the Governor.
* * *
I woke everybody at one thirty. The men from Kumbhalgarh dismantled the tents and we took off almost immediately. I had not been to Ranakpur before and I wanted to see it in the first light at dawn. The road rose steadily through hills and mountains and was densely wooded. We were on the outskirts of the village by five. We bathed in a frisky rivulet which would disappear at the first sign of summer. The water was a shock to the system. I could hear my blood rush back and forth, take hair-pin turns, speed up to my brains and plunge to my toes across my body to warm me. We put on fresh clothes and stood at the base of the temple.
Ranakpur is consecrated to the Tirthankar after whom Leelawati’s great-grandfather, Adinathji was named. It was built during the golden age of architecture in Mewar, but not by my great-grandfather Kumbha. When the temple was complete, Rana Kumbha visited it. He thought it extraordinarily beautiful. He regretted that not he, but one of the men in his employ, his Jain Finance Minister, had built it. But all was not lost. He would build a Victory Pillar in marble inside the temple which would put the Treasurer’s work in the shade. The Jain poets are discreet about the Minister’s response to this grotesque suggestion. Whatever his private feelings, there was no way the Treasurer could say ‘no’ to his sovereign. The plan, side and front elevations, the interlocking and intricate carvings, everything was worked out and approved by the Rana and work was begun. But try as he might, and mighty as he was, there was no completing the pillar. As a matter of fact, even today what I see is an enormous square-based eyesore that does not even reach the ceiling of the first floor.
We took off our shoes at the bottom of the wide flight of stairs, almost the width of a middling street in Chittor and climbed to the plinth. Suddenly the sun struck and crept in like the first wave of a flow tide near Surat. It seeped into the marble and retreated as a wisp of cloud swept over the nascent sun way below the horizon. There was no one else there at this hour. Within minutes the sunlight streamed in like a river in flood. At the extreme corner of the building are rounded bulwarks as at any fort except that these are much shorter. Ranged across the entire plinth are enclosure walls that are really a series of miniature temples housing subsidiary luminaries from the Jain pantheon. Four beautifully proportioned central gateways interrupt the shrines on all four sides. It is impossible to gauge how stupendously large and complex the temple is until you get to the very heart of the edifice. And, yet, that too is a limited and partial view for one has not yet climbed to the first and then the second storey.
Jain saviours in the panels stand or sit, stiff and erect, compellingly directing one’s attention to their large, shining, unblinking eyes. The quadruple image of Adinath in the core chamber at the very top is no exception. You may close your eyes but you always know that the first Tirthankar’s eyes are within you, not outside.
The Ranakpur temple was a revelation. It opened my eyes to possibilities that had not occurred to me. Hindu temples come in many shapes and sizes. The spire may be small, large or sometimes totally dispensed with but the garbha griha, the sanctum sanctorum where the image of the deity resides, is almost always the heart of darkness. It symbolizes the impenetrable mystery of divinity. It is the primal womb, a tight and closed blackness, a claustrophobic and intimidating place which only the intermediaries between the deity and the layman, the brahmins, may negotiate. The Jain temple at Ranakpur turned the Hindu concept on its head. It brought things out in the open. Instead of the subterranean and the secretive, light and air were the elements of the divine here. The white marble was part of that openness. It had the swirl and speed of milk being poured.
The Ranakpur temple may be dedicated to Adinath, the first Tirthankar. And yet if you ask me, it is a celebration of the Sun-god. Its thrust and impulse are light and its goal is enlightenment. It is unlike any temple I know. It is not its incredible sprawl, the marble mass or the exquisite carving which are central to the conception of the temple. As the temple rises tier upon tier, there are no walls but pillars that let the light and the air mingle and merge with the structure and stone. By themselves, the latter would have made the temple heavy and obdurate and earthbound. What I saw instead was the transubstantiation of marble into light. By making light a structural and integral part of the architecture, the Adinath temple had beams, shafts, columns and walls of light, and floated in the air.
The Adinath temple, as I was to discover, was not one, but a hundred, a thousand and a hundred thousand temples. By dawn, noon, by twilight, by the hour, by the minute, by full moon and the other phases of the moon, there’s a different Adinath temple. The speed, weight and shape of a cloud can alter it. Rain, shadow, lightning and thunder reshuffle and reinvent it. It does not celebrate conquest or victory. I do not know whether Rana Kumbha’s treasurer was singing a paean to the power of money or hoping to etch his name on the continuum of time. It doesn’t matter. It is an aspiration and striving towards openness and freedom. It is a flight and an ascension. It dares you to assay the unknown, to reach out beyond yourself.
I sat down in the lotus position. I doubt if I was conscious of what I was doing. The light of my ancestor, the Sun-god suffused me. ‘So’ hum’. I am that. I breathed in ‘so’ ’ and breathed out ‘hum’. And I too was transubstantiated. I was the marble and the light and the air. And then the temple lost its walls and all that was left was consciousness, an indivisibility and oneness with all things living and unliving.
What am I doing in a Jain temple? Why did Mahavir, who founded Jainism, and Buddha find Hinduism inadequate and look to other ways for moksha or nirvana as Buddha would call it? Why did they reject violence so totally? Did it not amount to denying one of our deepest human impulses? Was that one of the reasons why Hinduism has reasserted itself in our land and squeezed Buddhism till there’s only one drop of it left in Sri Lanka? Jainism, it is true, survives but only in a marginal way.
Violence is first and last about power. When two pairs of antlers are locked into each other, it is to decide who controls power. Jainism is even more extreme than Buddhism in its stance on violence. Its monks and nuns often wear white masks over their noses and mouths to avoid killing the infinitesimal forms of life floating around in the air. But it sometimes seems to me that they have only replaced violence with finance. It is still very much the pursuit of power. And yet even I, one of the bloodiest mass murderers in history, must confess to the temptation of peace, the peace of mind that must come from renouncing violence.
There is no gainsaying both the Buddhist and the Blue God’s analysis of the human condition. It is desire, the life of the senses, attachment and ignorance which suck
us deeper and deeper into the quagmire of unhappiness, misery and more desire, and keep turning the wheel of reincarnation ceaselessly. But Buddha’s compassion, vision and understanding are all the more remarkable because even after enlightenment, he refrained from saying that his is the one and only way; follow it. Quite the contrary, he tells anyone who is interested that the golden mean and discipline are what worked for him but each of us must discover on our own whether they are valid for us. If not, we must seek our own way out of the maze of life, death and rebirth. The detachment that Buddha preached is, like all teachings, open to different interpretations. It is true that your chances of meeting with an accident go down perceptibly if you do not stir out of the house and cross the street or join the army and go to war. Needless to say, your chances of not meeting with that accident will not just improve dramatically but become fool-proof and fail-safe if you commit suicide. But if detachment is really fear of failure and hence never putting oneself to the test, or if it’s fear of being hurt, humiliated or rejected, then one is closing all doors to life, to the possibilities of happiness, pain, dejection, achievement and experience. Reincarnation may be on the cards for most of us but we live this particular life, whether it is maya or whatever else, only once. This is our only chance to engage it.
Excess is the language of adolescence. We do not have to posit life as extremes or polarities, as either close to nothing or surfeit. The thought of the afterlife or lives or even nirvana does not mean that we have to miss out on this life.
* * *
I woke up with a song the next morning. It was not on my lips but on my wife’s. I looked around for her but she wasn’t in the room.
It was dark outside and a low wind scuttled through the scrub. I ran up the stairs of the temple in one breath and sat down against a pillar. A chill light flowed from inside. It came to me then that marble is nothing but frozen moonlight. My bodily processes slowed down, my temperature dropped, my breathing became subdued and I found myself retreating or rather, distancing myself from the ups and downs in my life that had exercised me so inordinately; from my family, Father, wife, Queen Karmavati, Vikramaditya.
I do not know how to describe my wife’s homage, song, offering or whatever one wishes to call it. I think it was an invitation and an invocation to the Sun-god. It was not entirely bereft of words but almost so. This was unusual since my wife’s preferred mode of expressing religious fervour is poetry. Her singing and dancing were but variations and extensions of her lyrics. If the purest form of music, its very essence and distillate are the singing human voice, why do we debase it with words? Since I’m not a singer and am not likely to found my own school of classical music, I doubt whether alaapi will ever become the centrepiece of a recital. I had never discussed my concept of the alaap with my wife and yet here she was, not expounding but singing it. Was it the Ranakpur temple? Or did she and I think alike at least on this one single subject?
It was strange weather for this season. When I looked through the open interstices in the tiers of the temple, I saw black clouds grinding their teeth and itching for a fight. There was vicious thunder from time to time. It looked like rain but the banks of clouds stacked up like unsteady boulders would not let the sun, lightning or rain through. My wife started out thoughtfully with a quiet, unhurried exploration of her mind. It was a diverse landscape, asymmetrical but not chaotic. Cold, empty oceans stretched forever and yet sprouted gentle fires where you could warm your hands. Macabre winds blew over dead cities bringing messages of longing and unfulfilled desires. But even here there were transparent blue pools of water where you could rest for an hour or a couple of nights. If you climbed the hills, the horizon slipped under your feet and moved behind you so that the future was something that had occurred in a long-forgotten past. A fog floated in now and you couldn’t see the present but there was no panic for if there was one polestar in this universe, it was faith and hope.
My wife called out to the sun, her song was impatient and imperious. But it could also implore and plead, use any kind of guile to push aside the rock-clouds. I closed my eyes.
She changed her tactics. Her voice grew soft and sinuous and hinted at secret trysts. It ingratiated itself into the chinks and fissures, became frisky and intimate and slipped in and out of the rock precipice in the sky. It withdrew into the cellars and underworlds of the earth, lingered like mist and then started back. It gained momentum rapidly, wave rolled into urgent wave, fought its way out into the open, built into a roaring wall of water that would brook no obstacle and hurled itself at the black impregnable dome. Nothing happened. Then there was a fearsome creaking sound and the sky tottered and crashed down. The sun broke through the temple, not a nascent, tentative one but a full-blown, unstoppable golden orb. The carvings, the pillars, the mandapas, the staggered levels of the temple, the full marble structure and the two of us inside turned into light. My wife’s song was pure joy. The temple tilted, and we were airborne. We flew at the speed of light and were at the heart of the stillness that is the universe.
* * *
Messengers from Chittor were waiting for us at the bottom of the steps to the temple. The Sultan of Delhi had engaged the Mewar forces a second time and had been routed once again. We were to return to the capital immediately. We rode hard and spent the next night at Kumbhalgarh. In the early morning I went down to the gardens and collected the showers of parijat flowers, five hundred of them, in the cloth of my saafa and poured them over Greeneyes. She woke up and looked in wonderment at the profusion of flowers on her person and all over the floor She gathered them in the palms of her hands time and again, flung her head back and let them fall over her face, her long, diaphanous neck, her breasts and the rest of her body.
‘I wish we didn’t have to leave. You’ll never bring me parijats again.’
‘Yes, I will. I’ve taken a branch of the tree from here.’
Chapter
30
Things had not changed much. Father pleaded indisposition when I asked for an audience to lay my head at his feet. Why had he called me back?
When I went to the Victory Hall in the evening, a bandaged effigy masquerading as a human being dragged himself to the throne. His face was sewn up. Some Delhi soldiers had tried to sever his dead arm and the one good leg had been sliced open in the thigh. We all rose and bowed. He looked at us with what a stranger would call a one-eyed sneer but which was in fact one of his more amiable expressions and, to everyone’s consternation, raised his good hand over his head and bowed deeply to all of us. Had one of the enemy blows affected his brain? No Rana will raise his hand above his shoulder in salutation; how could His Majesty possibly bow to his subjects and subordinates? The court stood awkwardly not knowing how to respond. But the surprises were just beginning. He bade us sit down in our accustomed places. And then, like all the other nobles, took his seat on the floor next to the throne.
The courtiers and the vassals couldn’t contain themselves. They whispered about the mental health of His Majesty and his fitness to rule. I stepped out and prostrated myself before Father. That was the only way I could distract the court’s attention. He was brusque: ‘May Lord Eklingji’s blessings be upon you.’ My wife took in the situation and followed me. It was a little unusual for the Princess to pay her respects to His Majesty in open court but it was turning out to be a memorably unorthodox day. Father was chatting with my wife.
‘Never seen a ghost before, have you, Princess?’
‘I’ve seen worse, Your Majesty. From tomorrow I’ll cook for you and heal you within fifteen days.’
‘What would the Little Saint know of cooking?’
‘Even the gods come to eat Merta food from me, Sire.’
‘I might just take you up on that, Princess.’
‘You don’t have a choice, Majesty.’ And added softly, ‘Shall I help you sit on the throne?’
He smiled and shook his head.
When the whispered confabulation was over, Father addressed
the court.
‘My lords, raos, rawats, rajas, the highest and the mightiest in the land, friends and people of Mewar,’ his voice was low and rich in emotion, ‘we welcome you. We are honoured that you are with us to share this great and happy victory. This is the second time that we have inflicted a heavy defeat upon the Sultanate of Delhi. Ibrahim Lodi has not only sued for peace but has agreed to all our terms and conditions. We could not have done this without your help, cooperation and loyalty to Mewar. We are truly thankful to you. Before we proceed to the banquet hall and then to the victory celebrations, including a mushaira and fireworks display, I have a small announcement to make.
‘My lords, you are all familiar with our Hindu customs and culture.’ The voice had suddenly changed. You could have heard it all the way to the ancient coronation field two miles away. ‘We do not worship a damaged idol.’ He paused. Like everyone else, I too wondered what the hell he was talking about. ‘A scratch, even a slight chip, and the holy image is holy no more. We no longer offer it prayers. It is no longer garlanded, and we no more fall at its feet. The divinity has withdrawn from it and we install a new image. My noble friends, I stand before you today like a broken and desecrated image. Victory has taken its toll. I am broken and injured from head to toe. It has been a great honour to lead Mewar all these years but it is a wise king who knows when it is time to retire. I beg you to grant me leave to relinquish my crown. Relieve me of my royal duties and appoint a new, whole and unblemished sovereign instead of me. All I ask you is to bestow a not too opulent maintenance upon me, just enough to keep body and soul together and allow me to serve our state of Mewar like any other warrior noble and lord in this assembly for the rest of my life.’
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