Cuckold

by Kiran Nagarkar

  None of us eats less, the standard of cuisine hasn’t slipped nor is there any parsimony in the upkeep of the palace and yet expenses are down by close to thirty per cent.

  How she finds time in such a busy schedule to look after palace affairs, serve Father meals, lay out his clothes and massage that battered body of his which is in perpetual pain, entertain him with stories about her childhood, her grandfather Rao Duda, and her uncle Rao Viramdev, sing to him when he is feeling out of sorts, or play cards with him, and yet not be harried or rushed or short-tempered is not just a mystery but cause for alarm in the likes of me and all those whose use of time can never aspire to even a quarter of her efficiency. It would appear that she has discovered another talent. She can unobtrusively slip in an opinion on political or state matters but unlike Queen Karmavati she always allows Father to think that the idea has originated from him.

  Did I detect Father’s deep and rumbling baritone in the chorus which accompanied my wife’s first bhajan of the evening? He may be king, but at the Brindabani Mandir the devotees have no qualms drowning His Majesty’s voice. Kausalya and I had the whole evening to ourselves. The devotional songs to the Blue God and the arati would go on for another hour at the very least. It would be nine thirty or ten at night before the Princess returned after serving Father dinner and reading out a couple of chapters from the Gita.

  How quickly one reverted to old ways and the wrinkles and creases of habit returned. It was as if there was a break in time and I had slipped into my premarital mode. I told Kausalya about my day. The Security Council meeting was scheduled for eleven in the morning but Father sent for me at ten. We had a visitor from abroad that day, all the way from Portugal. His Majesty was sitting for a portrait when I arrived. Portraiture is an alien art-form to us. Our painting tends towards types and traditional subjects but in the last decade or so some visitors from France and Italy have brought along pictures of their kings and doges and now some of our artists have begun to adapt this style of painting. The result is a quaint hybrid that can be occasionally quite pleasing.

  The miniature artist Chand Rai had posed Father with his face in profile to avoid the absent eye. Father looked intimidating and haughty. He was sitting astride a wooden ledge covered with heavy red brocade and the royal saddle. His right hand was covered in a leather glove and raised to the level of his seventh rib. Saathi, His Majesty’s horse, and his falcon Aakash would be painted in later. Right now the artist was concentrating on getting the flowers on Father’s angarkha right. Father was a painter’s ideal subject. He could sit for hours without moving or what is more trying, talking, for as the artist often explained to our guests, lip movements not only changed the features, expression and composition of the face continually but affected the posture of the body.

  The painting, I must add, has been in the works for the last seven years. If you look closely, you’ll realize that Father’s wearing a duglo that is yellow, not blue and the flowers on it are not mogras but green chaphas. The portrait, as you’ve guessed, is a decoy. Father likes to get the measure of outsiders who visit the court. He is averse to talking at the best of times but is decidedly tongue-tied and maintains an aloofness on such occasions while his courtiers chat up the visitor till the man has furnished us his entire life-story and a detailed account of his sovereign’s nocturnal escapades and plans for travel and war. Chand Rai was the only person in Mewar or anywhere else who could with impunity tell His Majesty to shut up. ‘Your humble servant, Chand Rai, begs your forgiveness for his impertinence of speech but Your Majesty will do posterity a signal service if he holds his tongue and allows me to get on with the painting.’

  Every once in two or three years a wanderer or trader from Italy, Turkey, Spain, Portugal or Britain stopped over in Chittor and spent a week or two, sometimes even a month with us. Conversation is not always easy but there is a universal language that we all share: commerce. The merchants got gold from across the seas and exchanged it for cloth, pepper, cinnamon or whatever was in demand at home. Our guest this time is a little different. Manuel de Paiva Bobela da Costa was here in a semiofficial capacity. At the very end of the last century, I think it was 1498, a Portuguese admiral called Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and discovered the sea route from Europe to India. Since then the Portuguese have been visiting the country regularly and have even set up small bases on the western littoral. This year oddly enough has seen three governors: Duarte de Menses, Vasco da Gama (I must ask da Costa whether this da Gama is the same man who landed in Calicut in 1498) and Henrique de Menses. Today’s visitor has been sent by the Portuguese Governor of Goa, Henrique de Menses, as a roving ambassador to explore the possibility of commercial links with local kingdoms. Or at least that’s his story.

  Mewar was certainly interested in commerce with the Portuguese, if possible the kind where we sold more than what we bought from them. The problem was, we were not quite sure what the Portuguese were interested in. Instead of establishing trading houses or factories as they prefer to call them, they have been using force and building forts, the first one at Cochin and the second at Cannanore. In 1510 they took Goa. Not exactly a mercantile activity, would you agree? If that doesn’t give you pause, there’s far more disconcerting news tucked away in the title of the Portuguese king. Dom Manuel I of Portugal took the title ‘Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and of India’ almost immediately after Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea-passage to India. It would seem that the present Portuguese king, Joao III, wishes to conquer and rule India from a distance of four thousand miles. So far it’s primarily the western seaboard that has been feeling the effects of the Portuguese presence in the Indian Ocean but we haven’t escaped entirely either. As Lord of the Sea in Asia, Joao III or to be precise, his governor Henrique de Menses has been patrolling the seas and levying a customs duty on any ship, Indian or foreign plying the waters. Which means that anybody including us who has cargo in those ships has to pay a surcharge to the shipowners who then have to pass it on to the Portuguese.

  The Portuguese are either extraordinarily tightfisted or have an extremely low opinion of their hosts in India. Manuel de Paiva Bobela da Costa brought for His Majesty a painting of their God as a child in the arms of his mother. The mother is thin, long-faced and unrelievedly morose while her son has an infant’s chubby body and a mop of curly hair but a bizarre and disconcertingly adult face. In his left hand is a globe with a diamond-studded cross on it. In the top left and right corners are winged creatures called angels. In the background, off centre to the right, is an echo of the cross motif but this time it’s a wooden one. Impaled on it with thick nails is an emaciated man with every rib in his chest sticking out painfully. The ambassador informed us that this man was none other than the lady’s son grown up. His face is even sadder than the mother’s. He wears a diadem of thorns and in the middle of his chest is a glowing and ethereal heart. A rather strange concept of God, to say the least. Gods, I have always assumed, are all-powerful. This one, however, needs help and succour desperately. You would need to have a strong stomach to live with this tearful and gloomy mother and child, apart from a God who is in perpetual pain.

  The painting was shown to Father who passed it on to me and I offered it to the Prime Minister, Pooranmalji. I couldn’t bring myself to make any comment about the picture but Pooranmalji is far more sophisticated than I. He held the framed painting in his hands, studied it and nodded his head slowly as if gradually imbibing the symbolism and poetry. He gave it to the court clerk with instructions to send it to His Majesty’s palace. ‘Careful, very careful. Make sure that it’s packaged properly before it leaves these premises. Please thank His Majesty King Joao for his fine gift to His Majesty Rana Sangram Simha, Your Excellency. We have, I’m afraid, a very insignificant offering, nothing that can compare with the exquisite artistry, not to mention the sacredness, of your painting.’

  I knew that tone of voice well. The Pradhan Mantr
i had anticipated the niggardly present from the Portuguese king and his representative in India, a painting churned out from one of the studios in Lisbon like a thousand or ten thousand others and was about to snub the ambassador and his sovereign with an artefact of overwhelming superiority. What he pulled out from a cloth wrapping that was itself a hundred times the cost of the picture was a soft white shatoosh shawl. It must have taken a year and a half to weave.

  ‘Drape it around your shoulder, Your Excellency.’ Pooranmalji handed the shawl to the visitor. The ambassador was perhaps a little disconcerted by the lightness of the shatoosh but acquiesced to Pooranmalji’s request. ‘Will someone there fetch a mirror for His Excellency?’

  We were in the middle of winter. The shawl was only a little heavier than a Chanderi odhani but by the time they had fetched the mirror, the ambassador was sweating. ‘Even if it’s snowing, that one shawl should keep His Majesty Joao warm.’

  As His Excellency removed the shawl from his shoulders and folded it absent-mindedly, Pooranmalji pressed home his advantage.

  ‘Let me do it for you, Sir,’ the PM eased the shatoosh out of the visitor’s hands. ‘We are under severe pressure, Your Excellency, to impose duties on all imports. We have resisted all such requests so far but I’m afraid ….’

  The Pradhan had no intention of completing that sentence. I had wondered why Father had asked me to attend this particular session of the durbar. Perhaps he had wanted to fill in the lacunae in his eldest son’s education. Diplomatic converse, its symbolic and strategic withdrawals, its innuendoes and weightages, and the things left unsaid fascinated and intrigued me. I knew I was inept at it but not averse to learning from a master like Pooranmalji.

  Who was the Pradhanji fooling? Who was putting pressure on him? The populace of Mewar, the merchants, the Minister of the Exchequer, His Majesty? Father scarcely ever interfered in trade policy, and Adinathji at the Exchequer and the PM had an equation that rarely required speech or spelling out things. I suspected that Pooranmalji was improvising but I wouldn’t bet on that. After all these years I had not managed to get the hang of the PM’s arithmetic and mind. I guess that is the mark of the true diplomat and statesman.

  ‘Your Highness,’ the Portuguese ambassador picked up the slack where Pooranmalji had left off, ‘I trust that this is not in retaliation for the customs duties our inspectors have been charging occasionally.’

  ‘Have they? I have to admit,’ the PM was as silken as the stole on his shoulders, ‘that age is catching up with me. I have been a trifle out of touch with things of late. But His Majesty Rana Sangram Simha certainly does not believe in petty retaliation.’

  ‘I had no intention of insinuating that at all,’ the ambassador was stammering.

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t.’

  ‘I’ll speak to His Honour the Governor and suggest in the strongest terms that customs duties not be charged on Mewar goods.’

  ‘That is most gracious of you, Your Excellency. Now tell us more about your country. Is it true that when one of you is invited to dinner at a friend’s, you have to carry your own, what’s the eating instrument called, fork?’

  The ambassador’s ear lobes were a hot shade of red and I had the feeling that he would have liked to terminate the meeting.

  ‘Oh, that’s only among the poor where the male of the family takes his fork along with him.’

  ‘And the wife and children, they do not eat as guests?’

  ‘Oh, they do, they do, but with their fingers since forks are a luxury for them.’

  The foreign visitor was saying his thank you’s and-taking his leave when I interrupted him. ‘Your Excellency, we are, as you are well aware, land-lubbers and know next to nothing about seafaring or ships. We believe you have some of the most advanced ships in the world with tonnages as high as a thousand.’

  ‘We certainly do, Your Highness,’ de Paiva Bobela da Costa relaxed for the first time that day. ‘We would be happy to supply you with ships.’

  ‘Where would we ply them, Your Excellency?’

  He was not about to let go a business opportunity. ‘You can rent them out to the coastal traders. I’m sure there’s money in it.’

  ‘It’s an interesting proposal. We need to look into it. Perhaps His Majesty, the Rana may appoint a commission to do a report. I was wondering what kind of guns your ships are equipped with?’

  ‘Cannons, Sire. Anywhere between eight to twelve between port and starboard. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give any more details because such matters are generally left to sailors in our country.’

  ‘No offence meant, Your Excellency. But would you use these same cannons for land warfare?’

  ‘Not the same, Your Highness, much larger ones.’

  ‘And would their primary function be to defend your forts and citadels?’

  ‘That would be but one use to which they are put. As I am sure you well know, they are our first line of offence as well as defence. We would take them anywhere we are to give battle.’

  ‘Yes, of course. And would you be as interested in selling these cannons as you were in selling your ships?’

  ‘This is the first time anyone’s broached the subject with me. I’m sure His Honour, the Governor of India, I mean of the Indian outposts, would be interested in looking at such a proposition.’

  ‘Would you consult him and let us know?’

  I was sure that this was a decision that the Governor Henrique de Menses could not take without consulting his sovereign. It was a long shot and getting a reply could take anywhere between a year and a year and a half but I didn’t see any harm in starting the ball rolling.

  * * *

  It was the first time Mangal was briefing His Majesty and his Council as Head of Intelligence. He was not fazed by the gravity of the occasion and was just as precise and to the point as he had been with me. He did a quick survey of our neighbours, friends and foes, sketched what they were up to, the state of stability or otherwise in their kingdom and the threat they posed to Mewar.

  Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur, the king of Kabul, Mangal next told us, had invaded Hindustan again after almost four years, secured Lahore and Punjab and returned home. Nearer home, there are signs that Sultan Mahmud Khalji II of Malwa, egged on by Muzaffar Shah of Gujarat, has initiated moves to get his troops together for a war with his erstwhile Prime Minister Medini Rai within the next few months.

  ‘The King of Kabul,’ Father spoke more to himself than to the other members of the Security Council, ‘we can safely ignore so long as the Sultan Ibrahim Lodi rules Delhi. The foreigner Babur cannot get at us unless he first crashes through the barrier of Delhi. But what do you suggest we do about the Sultan of Malwa, Pradhanji?’

  ‘Mahmud Khalji would like to wipe out all trace of Medini Rai from the face of the earth. We could sit back and await the outcome philosophically.’

  ‘Without us, you well know,’ Lakshman Simhaji, as usual, was easy prey to the Prime Minister’s needling bait, ‘Medini Rai does not stand a chance.’

  ‘In that case the Rai should be willing to pay whatever price we put on our help.’

  ‘The Sultan bears a grievance against Medini Rai but in this instance, the Rai is only a pretext. Make no mistake, Mahmud Khalji is coming after us. If we ditch the Rai this time, we’ll not only lose an ally but we’ll be the weaker for it. Our friends will never trust us again.’

  ‘And who paid the bill the last time when our troops rushed to the Rai’s aid?’

  ‘Whatever the reasons for it, we were of little use to him since we arrived late. They say he lost twenty, maybe even forty thousand men when the combined forces of Muzaffar Shah and Mahmud Khalji took the Mandu fort and ordered a massacre.’

  ‘Won’t Mahmud Khalji have to foot all the bills if Medini Rai defeats him with our help?’ That was Adinathji. With one rather simple query he had made the sparring between the Prime Minister and Lakshman Simhaji redundant and gone straight to the heart of the matter.
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br />   ‘Shall we alert our allies and fix a date with them for a War Council?’ Lakshman Simhaji asked Father.

  ‘A little premature for that yet. Let Medini Rai ask for our help first.’ His Majesty then turned his dead eye on me. ‘But perhaps the Prince has a different view of the matter.’

  And I thought I was going to keep a low profile, hold my tongue, fall in line with whatever was decided by the elders and be a good boy whom nobody would notice.

  ‘No, no views, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Do you expect us to believe that a young man of your keen intelligence, Highness,’ Pooranmalji had his lip turned a little sardonically without losing his indulgent prime ministerial smile, ‘has no views on such weighty matters as a likely war with our neighbours?’

  ‘Your Highness, perhaps my phrasing was a little vague. What I meant was that I’m in agreement with the views of the Security Council.’

  ‘Sire,’ Adinathji did not smile indulgently as he looked me in the eyes, ‘you are as much part of the Security Council as any one of us.’

  ‘Your Highness,’ Lakshman Simhaji patted me on the back and broke into a guffaw, ‘we all know that you think we are all, no offence meant, Your Majesty, a bunch of old fools. And perhaps with good reason too, at times.’ Even Father smiled then. Only my uncle could get away with such impertinence. ‘But you owe it to the Security Council and Mewar to give us the benefit of your views.’