Cuckold

by Kiran Nagarkar

  On the other hand, there is no gainsaying that even if Babur ventures into India, it may once again be for a quick hit-and-run money-making raid. Or he may leave Delhi alone now and decide to try to regain Samarkand which seems to have become almost an obsessive symbol of legitimacy and nostalgia for him. He could also lose his head, literally.

  Babur has already been to India twice. Mangal’s implicit guess is that Babur will some time or other make further forays into India. I would go along with Mangal’s analysis for the simple reason that Mangal weighs his words carefully before he speaks out. I doubt if Kabul will contain Babur’s ambition. He will find it difficult, if not impossible, to resist the temptation of India. But the question to ask is whether we want to plan our armament strategy contingent upon a single enemy’s plans to invade India. Of course, we have to be prepared for any contingency including an invasion from the north-west. But more to the point we have to be better equipped and better prepared because we ourselves have territorial ambitions.

  It seems hard to believe that I am actually holding pages of matter written God-knows-where, Farghana, Samarkand, Kandahar or Kabul in my hands and that they are the words of a king whose ancestors hailed from the distant kingdom of Turkey. How could they have travelled so far? Is it a big hoax? We don’t have any foolproof method of verifying the authenticity of the documents unless of course I send an emissary to the current king of Kabul and enquire whether the notes I have in front of me are his own. And yet I suspect that the words are true and come from a man of great resolve and vision, a man whose sense of self is neither inflated nor modest, but matter-of-fact.

  For some reason I keep going back to two passages, one about Andijan in Farghana and the other about his father. There is a quiet warmth in the tone of writing which could only come from someone who is deeply attached to his country. And yet it is devoid of the sentimentality that accompanies most writing about one’s homeland, especially if one is an exile. It makes the reader want to go and explore the place for oneself. ‘Into the citadel at Andijan water goes by nine channels; out of it, it is strange that none comes at even a single place.’ What happens to the water? Where does it go? Has it been collected underground year after year? (Like a bump on the head, does the citadel keep rising? Will Andijan burst open like a pod one of these days with the pressure of all that water under it?) Take the puzzling passage about Umar Sheikh Mirza and his pigeons at the Akhsi fort. I went over it at least a dozen times before I realized that Babur’s father had gone to see his pigeons in the dovecote when the side of the mountain ledge seems to have collapsed, and in death Umar Sheikh ‘became a falcon’.

  The less said about my dislike of hunting the better but I must confess that I want to go to Andijan to check out the pheasants there. Why has Babur switched to rumour when it’s obvious that he has done enough hunting and fowling himself to know the facts except to pull our leg with some fabled and fat-bird stew that four people cannot finish? I’ve always had a fondness for humour. But the kind of humour that really gets to me is the straight-faced variety where unless you are on your guard you don’t detect the tongue in the cheek.

  Can you imagine any charan, poet or even historian from Mewar writing so candidly, objectively and affectionately about His Majesty, the Maharana, for instance? Frankly, I can’t see any of my brothers, cousins or uncles managing it either. No whitewashing, no genuflecting, no obsequious toadying, just a quick sketch done with superb self-assurance. It’s obvious that the man is not afraid of being critical because he does not believe that the act of appraisal or judging someone rules out affection or high regard.

  How often does one hear even our seniormost officials prefacing their remarks with the proviso, ‘Please don’t misunderstand me, the last thing I want to be is judgmental.’ Why have they been appointed to senior positions with so many people reporting to them, if they are not expected to analyse and assess situations and human beings with the utmost rigour and ruthlessness? Rigour and ruthlessness do not preclude sympathy with another’s point of view. But it is impossible to take decisions, often critical ones, or to deal with one’s enemies, friends, peers, juniors, seniors or wife and children unless one evaluates their and one’s own strengths, weaknesses and blind spots.

  * * *

  ‘And what if I don’t get your report within the next ten days?’ I knew what Mangal’s answer was going to be but I wanted to make him squirm. ‘What shall I tell the cabinet and our friendly neighbours? Should I tell the former that they should postpone the business of the state of Mewar and the latter that they delay any plans to attack Mewar because Mangal isn’t ready to brief the Security Council yet?’

  ‘You’ll have it within the next ten days, Your Highness.’ He didn’t blanch, I should have known that too.

  ‘I’m much beholden to you.’ That was shabby and utterly uncalled for but it did the trick. There was a crack in the stone-face for a fraction of a second. Perhaps underneath it, the man may actually have winced. ‘That will be all.’

  He prepared to leave, not reacting to my childish snubs.

  ‘Mangal, that was excellent work. How did you get hold of the stuff?’

  Mangal smiled. ‘From a sweeper.’

  I laughed. ‘Bravo. The laugh’s on me this time. Let’s have the truth now.’

  ‘It is the truth, Your Highness.’

  ‘Come off ….’ I realized that he was not joking.

  ‘One of the local operatives told me laughingly one day over samosas that times had changed. “Sweepers,” he said, “would soon be doing better than jagirdars.” “How’s that?” I asked him. “Have you ever got a parcel from abroad?” he asked me sarcastically. I shook my head. “Shyam Dulare, the sweeper at the Prime Minister, Pooranmalji’s home, gets them.” “From where?” “How would I know? All I can tell you is that some passing mendicant delivers them.” I think Your Highness has guessed the rest.’

  ‘I may have but I wouldn’t mind it if you spelt out the details. How did Shyam Dulare get access to the Kabul court?’

  ‘Shyam Dulare, it turns out, has a cousin Pyarelal who worked in Bajaur. When Bajaur was sacked, Pyarelal and his family were spared because Pyarelal said to the commandant of the occupying army, “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate, is it not true that the Prophet has forbidden the faithful to kill those gentiles and pagans who have discovered the true Lord, Allah himself?” The commandant smiled and asked, “Have you discovered the Lord and Master of the Universe or is it that you’ve discovered that your life is worth nothing unless you profess to the faith of the Prophet and of His Highness Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur?” “And what if the latter be the truth,” the sweeper’s cousin replied cheekily, “will you question the diverse and manifold ways in which Allah causes the blind to see and the deaf to hear and the mute to speak, and the unenlightened to see the light and the deceived to forsake their deceptions and the hypocrites to abandon their hypocrisy? For if you do, then is it not obvious that you consider yourself wiser than Allah himself and is there any crime greater than placing yourself above the All-knowing and the All-perceiving who hath wrought this earth and all living and dead things in it, the waves in the sea and the colours on the birds and the dome of the sky and the rains that water the earth and quench our thirst and bring forth grain a thousandfold from one seed?” And the commandant stayed the sword in his hand as it was about to slay Pyarelal and took him to his king, Babur himself, and told him of the miracle of the words from the sweeper’s tongue, for verily they were words that the Holy Book itself would recognize and honour. And Babur lifted the sweeper up by the hands and said, “From today this man shall be my brother in the faith and work in my house.” And thus it came to be.’

  ‘Mangal, will you spare us the archaic language?’

  ‘It was the language in which Shyam Dulare told me this lofty tale.’

  ‘Shyam Dulare, it appears however, has not been converted yet.’

  ‘Pyarelal, now known as Kar
im Muhammad, is working on it.’

  ‘And is the two-way traffic a phenomenon that occurred after Pyarelal’s conversion or was Shyam Dulare sharing documents and information from the Pradhan Pooranmalji’s home from earlier times?’

  Mangal no longer seemed to enjoy the raconteur’s job. ‘Shyam Dulare’s conduit has been functioning for a long time, Highness. The information has been going to the Delhi, Gujarat and Bajaur courts and to Medini Rai at Malwa.’

  ‘That’s a relief. At least Shyam Dulare is impartial to money and the colour of its religion. Is our Prime Minister Pooranmalji involved in this affair?’

  ‘So far I have not found any evidence to suggest that.’

  ‘Is that “so far” a hedge against future discoveries or are you holding something back?’

  ‘So long as I am in charge of the intelligence portfolio, forgive the impertinence, Highness, I’ll use the phrase “so far” in your context too if ever you were under investigation.’

  ‘I believe you would, Mangal, and that is one of the reasons why you and not someone else is holding the job. And what are we doing about Shyam Dulare?’

  ‘Paying him money, feeding him information and keeping him under surveillance.’

  ‘How do we know he’ll not raise the price for the next instalment of these scraps of papers?’

  ‘We know for certain, Sire. He has already raised his price.’

  ‘Despite the fact that he’s committed treason?’

  ‘He knows that we need him alive if we wish to continue getting information from him.’

  ‘How do we know that Babur is not deliberately feeding this information to Pyarelal to misguide us?’

  ‘It’s a possibility that I have considered but I don’t think we need worry too much about it. We are unlikely to get current intelligence on the man and his plans anyway unless he comes geographically closer to us. Barring you, Highness, nobody would be interested in knowing whether Babur has a hernia, whether he sleeps late and how long his hangovers last. I also know that you are going to ask me to research the military strategies of his ancestors Timur and Jenghiz Khan.’

  ‘Mangal are you planning to make all speech from the Maharaj Kumar redundant? Let me warn you I won’t have it. Do you have anything on Shyam Dulare?’

  Maharaj Kumar. The words had slipped from my mouth. I thought I was going to be facetious. Instead I was aghast to find that somewhere in my mind I still hoped to be next in the line of succession.

  ‘All we have, Highness,’ Mangal deliberately changed the subject, ‘is a slight deterrent.’

  I wondered if Mangal had taken to archness. ‘And what may that be?’

  ‘We have taken one of his children in custody.’

  ‘This is not a police state, Mangal.’ I was genuinely horrified.

  ‘You can’t have it both ways, Highness.’ That shut me and my hypocrisy effectively. ‘The boy is getting an education, something inconceivable for a sweeper’s child. Besides, the child is no guarantee. Shyam Dulare may turn around and say “Go ahead, kill him. I’m young enough to have more.’”

  ‘Who’s doing the translation from the Turki?’

  ‘Pyarelal or Karim Muhammad as he is known now.’

  ‘Mangal, what about the original? Is it really Turki or gibberish?’

  ‘It is Turki, Sire, and as you must have realized, Karim Muhammad is not a bad translator at all.’

  * * *

  ‘How long do you plan to avoid me?’

  ‘We run into each other four to seven times a day.’

  ‘You no longer wish to see me, Kausalya?’

  ‘You have other commitments now, Sire.’

  ‘I was foolish enough to lose you once. I don’t intend to make the same mistake again.’

  Kausalya did not prise open my fingers from around her wrist but there was a distant ache in her eyes, a resolve to suffer the pain of severance now rather than live on false hope and defer the loss of closeness and intimacy. She was too proud to tell me that if I had wanted to, I could have walked into her room months ago. I thought of the hundreds of women in the palace waiting for their lovers or husbands. How many months and years would they keep vigil? Who would scotch their loneliness? Very likely they knew who their men were spending the night with. There is no measure to the bitterness and heartbreak of the zenana. How does it feel to be rejected daily? Was death the only way out?

  ‘Your Highness, one request. No kindness, please. Nor a visit out of a sense of duty.’

  Kausalya had redrawn the boundaries and there was no crossing them. The tension between her and me ebbed away without either of us noticing it.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down, take my head in your lap, locate, pick and squash the eleven thousand lice from my hair as you did when I was a child and then knock some sense into my head?’

  There’s no difference between dogs and men. We’ll circle around ourselves half a million times, check the place where we want to deposit ourselves as we’ve done for the last eleven years and then ease ourselves into it. There’s surely a trough or dip the size of the back of my head on the inside slope of Kausalya’s right breast. I know this place well, I have chatted long hours looking at the underside of Kausalya’s chin, wondering if her skin is inherently blemishless or she has some esoteric unguent that strips away stray, sharp hairs from the roots before they appear. I have fallen asleep in that hollow while Kausalya’s been busy tracing a rao’s or sultan’s family tree for me or unravelling the bitter roots of enmity between two Rajput families who’ll even today kill each other without any idea of the original grievance.

  The bells of the Brindabani temple are pealing away.

  The gods no longer materialize on earth, at least not in Kali Yuga, this most fallen of ages. Divine intervention, I must confess, seems a matter of hearsay, faith and credulity. The only miracles in life are wrought by time. My wife sings and dances at six every evening now and the prayer meetings are often attended by none other than His Majesty. Plans are afoot to enlarge both the temple complex and compound to hold fifty thousand people. Marble lattices wrought with workmanship that’s comparable to the exquisite silver filigree jewellery that Chittor is so renowned for, now screen the billowing storms that my wife’s skirts generate for the Blue God.

  Frankly, Chittor has little reason to complain. The pilgrim and tourist traffic in the citadel has gone up by a hundred and fifty percent since we got back from Kumbhalgarh and shows no sign of abating. Caravans of people from Chanderi, Champaner, Jaipur, Delhi, Agra, Mathura, Ahmedabad, Raisen, Daulatabad, Pune, Vijayanagar, even the valley of Kashmir come by bullock and camel cart, by palanquin and on horseback. Those who can’t afford fancy transport, load their bedding and a couple of utensils on their heads and walk all the way to Chittor. My wife, as the finance ministry was discovering, is not just a rare and living treasure, she is Chittor’s biggest economic asset. All these years, it was Father’s vision and diplomacy that tried to bring disparate geographical and historical Rajput interests together. Today the nexus between the Little Saint, the Flautist and His Majesty has bound Rajput, Bhil, Hindu, Jain and Muslim in a manner that would have been almost inconceivable a few years ago.

  While the Little Saint is lost in the adoration of the Flautist or preoccupied with household chores, Chittor or rather, all of Mewar is busy mythologizing her. Already there are enough stories of her purity and piety, of her conversations with the Blue God, and of her miraculous escapes from the attempts on her life to fill up at least a couple of volumes. The latest has to do with Swami Rupa Goswami, the highly renowned ascetic and disciple of the late Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who was arguably the greatest poet-saint and adherent of the Flautist.

  When Rupa Goswami was passing through Chittor a few months ago, he stayed, as almost all Vaishnavaite holy men do, at the Brindabani Mandir. My wife, who believes that knowledge and salvation, if not enlightenment, can come only through the offices of a teacher and in the company of sages, went to meet the Gos
wami the next day. As a severe ascetic and one who had sworn off women, the swami refused to see the Little Saint. He was certain that she was not just a much indulged Princess but, very likely, an impostor whose public displays of devotion and other antics like dancing and singing were nothing but a ploy to gain attention. Rupa Goswami had a formidable reputation but the Princess neither lost her composure nor was she dismayed. She merely expressed surprise that he was a man. For if he was, what right did he have to enter Brindaban? Did the Goswami not know that there was but one male in the universe and that was the Blue One and all others, barring none, were women?

  What was the Little Saint talking about? I’m completely out of my depth when my wife switches to this kind of highly esoteric symbolism. But the Goswami seems to have got her drift and instead of bristling at her snub, he realized that here was an enlightened bhakta who had grasped the essence of the Lord. He agreed to see the Princess.

  What does Queen Karmavati have to say about my wife’s rising star? She has certainly made Vikramaditya the strongest contender to the Mewar throne, working up a groundswell on his behalf in Ranthambhor and its environs; one can feel her presence and her hand shaping, recasting and interfering with the affairs of Chittor almost daily. And yet, however puissant her long-distance reach may be, it has not been able to prevent my wife from becoming almost indispensable to Father. The keys of the stores, the royal jewels, His Majesty’s cupboards and chests of clothes, shoes, saafas, in short, of the Palace itself hang from the silver clasp which she so casually tucks into the waist of her ghagra. She may look a little bemused, other-worldly and on an altogether higher spiritual plane than any of us mortals but as the entire hierarchy of eunuchs, palace bureaucracy, staff, servants and the seraglio were discovering, not much escapes her. If sweetness of temper does not yield results, she is tough and adamant. If anyone thought that feminine delicacy would prevent her from confronting difficult or personal subjects, they were much mistaken. Whether it’s bodily functions, illness, awkward or exotic sexual proclivities, usury or blackmail, feuding and intrigue, her lack of guile allows her to come straight to the point and tick a person off when necessary without leaving a bad taste in the mouth.