Cuckold

by Kiran Nagarkar

  ‘The Maharana needs our help against Babur, not the other way round. Besides, I’m not about to sacrifice my life either for you or Father. Father got me into this mess but only I can get myself out of it.’

  ‘In that case I have no alternative but to accompany you.’

  I heard a hearty unmistakable laugh then. ‘Chaperone a married woman, not a bad idea at all.’

  Vikramaditya was warming up to the thought. ‘Will you watch while we…’

  Hem Karan left in a huff. He kept his word though and for the sake of the proprieties, whatever they were in this instance, went to the hunt with his sister.

  One night, soon after the hunt, Sugandha packed her bags and left. Greeneyes was waiting for her at the door leading out of our suite of rooms.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Where do you think I’m going?’

  ‘I could hazard a guess but I’d rather you told me.’

  Sugandha could have left in the forenoon or even in the evening when I was at work and the Little Saint was doing arati at the Brindabani temple. But that wouldn’t have served her purpose. She did not wish to do things behind my back, or to put it uncharitably, she wished to make me privy to all the sordid details of her newfound private life.

  ‘I’m moving in with Prince Vikramaditya.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea, my dear.’

  ‘Don’t “my dear” me.’

  ‘What you do with your time is your business but your place is in your husband’s home.’

  ‘What husband? That man who can’t…?’

  ‘I believe we share the same husband. I will not have you speak ill of His Highness, the Maharaj Kumar.’

  ‘You are welcome to him. I’m off. I would rather be honest than a hypocrite.’

  ‘Kingship is an institution. Content is of the essence. But in its absence, form will have to do in the hope that content will follow. Leave your things where they were.’

  ‘And pray, what will you do if I don’t?’

  The Little Saint’s voice was matter-of-fact. ‘I’ll break your leg and lock up your room from outside.’

  ‘That won’t stop me. When I’m recovered I’ll leave.’

  ‘No, you won’t. I’ll break your leg again.’

  My second wife refrained from testing the Little Saint’s resolve.

  * * *

  We had celebrated our victory over Malwa but in the press of events, Father had kept putting off the thanksgiving ceremony that the Rana must perform in Pushkar. Lord Brahma is the most benign and low-key of gods but nobody dare forget that he is no less than the Creator of the universe itself. The visit to Pushkar is, however, a little more than the obligatory obeisance done at the site where Brahma carelessly dropped a lotus blossom as he was wondering where to perform a yagnya. The Pushkar lake is not just one of the holiest places in the country, second only to the Mansarovar waters in the Himalayas for its sanctity and cleansing powers, it is a truly enchanted arbour in the desert and a great favourite with my family.

  Father and I had planned to ride by ourselves when Greeneyes decided to join us.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible, since we plan to ride non-stop and be back within a week to prepare for the War Council meeting.’

  ‘I can ride with the fastest,’ my wife had made up her mind on the subject. ‘Ask the Maharaj Kumar. I beat him in a race to Ranakpur.’ I was about to protest and tell her that was not true but thought the better of it.

  Suddenly Pushkar has become the event of the year. By the next day anybody in the Palace who had a horse with two and a half legs and could sit on it, was coming along with us. Father tried to put his foot down and tell the women that we were not going on a picnic but on holy duty, but by this time things had gone well beyond his control. My mother, the Maharani herself was going and so were Queen Karmavati, her son and his mistress.

  Nobody officially asked her but Greeneyes took charge of this extended outing. A caravan would leave with our luggage before us. Four days of travel, the fifth and sixth day in Pushkar and four days for the return journey. There was a dress code for each day for both the men and women. Dhaka, Paithani, Ikkat and Balucheri in the evenings on the first four days, white on the first day at Pushkar and purple on the second day. Trust the Little Saint to raise the temperature of what was turning out to be a mammoth picnic by these impromptu ploys and rules that had no point to them except to put the palace ladies into a frenzy of preparation.

  You would imagine that the royal women were not exactly impoverished as far as clothes were concerned. But suddenly there were no purple blouses, Dhakas, whites or Balucheris in the harem and it was impossible to have a conversation or a few hours of sleep at night. The place was a madhouse. The whole of the cloth market at Chittor had taken up residence in the Palace and cloth merchants visited the seraglio round-the-clock. Tailors, maids, eunuchs, along with Queen Karmavati and the rest of the ladies were cutting and sewing, opening up cholis and letting down hems of ghagras. My only consolation was that by the day of our departure, most of the ladies and their menfolk were bound to drop out. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

  We take it for granted that crises bring people together. A Rajput state is in a perpetual state of crisis and by that logic, we should be the most closely-knit people in the world. But the bonding of war and calamity has its source in fear. And fear is the most destructive of human emotions. It corrodes the soul and the camaraderie it breeds is a false and forced one. I do not know whether the bliss of those first four days will stay with us and make us more tolerant of each other but one thing I’ll vouch for. Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves. Not always, but at least occasionally, it can break our obsession with the self.

  The trip to Pushkar was idyllic. There were a hundred and seventeen of us. The women sang in the evenings, the children played and gambolled, the sunrises and sunsets were a little beyond sensational and my wife Sugandha carried on with Vikramaditya.

  I wrote that last paragraph and paused. It has just the right degree of urbane aloofness, quick brush strokes and images laced with a slight world-weariness. The romantic setting and resonance are nicely undermined by a lighthearted realistic detail in the last clause of the last sentence. But it’s a pose. And if there’s one thing Pushkar brought home to me and perhaps to all of us, it was the devastating barrenness of the roles we play.

  However much we may deny it, we deal in the currency of stereotypes. We do not see people, leave alone our wives, children, secretaries, mistresses, ministers, we only have converse with our preconceptions of them. On the way to Pushkar, I accidentally discovered my family, my extended family.

  We were sitting around the campfire on the first evening when I heard a startlingly authentic imitation of my voice.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t take any credit for our victory over Malwa. His Highness, Medini Rai was the Commander-in-Chief and it was his leadership that made all the difference. Part of the credit must also go to Prince Hem Karan. He is young, committed and a brilliant fighter. I would be doing a disservice to Mewar and its allies if I didn’t mention the gallantry, the tactical ingenuity and ferocity of my friends, Shafi and Tej. It would be unforgivable on my part if I didn’t bow my head before the valour, speed and single-mindedness of our soldiers. Last but not least, how could we possibly have won the great battle without the help of His Majesty, the Sultan of Malwa? If he hadn’t lost, what victory would we be celebrating today? Under the circumstances, I’m constrained, nay, I’ve no option but to return the greatest honour Mewar can bestow on a warrior, the triumph we call Veer Vijay.

  ‘I
beg of you not to misunderstand me. I’m not ungrateful nor do I wish to insult the great people of Mewar or His Majesty, the Maharana.’ My sister-in-law, Rattan Simha’s wife, paused then. When the audience finally stopped laughing, she said, ‘Long live the Maharana and may he prosper for ever. As an earnest of my gratitude to you all, I would, however, like you to know that under duress I will accept the Crown anytime.’

  Could this be the shy and stammering Deepmala, my first brother’s fifth wife, to whom I’ve never said more than ‘hello’ perhaps seven times in the last four years? Surely she must be one of the sharpest observers of the political scene in Mewar. No, not just of the political scene; she next did a devastating portrait of Queen Karmavati lending money to a concubine after taking over her property, which was worth at least a thousand times the amount borrowed, as security and then charging some unheard-of interest. She followed that with a dialogue between a maid and Vikramaditya. The maid pleads measles, menstruation, her husband, her duties as maid-in-waiting to Greeneyes, brain fever, a visit from a mother-in-law and several other reasons for her inability to meet the Prince in the rose garden and is delighted when Vikramaditya overcomes every obstacle and seduces her.

  Poor Vikram, he’ll make fun of the whole world but becomes apoplectic when he himself is targeted for some ribaldry. He went through all the colours of the spectrum and snarled ‘never, never’ when his sister-in-law touched his feet and asked for his forgiveness. His mother was far more diplomatic and blessed her step daughter-in-law.

  ‘Ah Highness, you laughed the loudest,’ Deepmala whispered when she came around to me, ‘forgive the impertinence but do you really like being made an ass of or are you the biggest hypocrite in this gathering?’

  ‘Both, Princess, both,’ I told her as I handed her my ruby ring.

  ‘Stick with the second, Highness. It will take you far.’

  I doubt if there’s a better impresario in Mewar than the Little Saint. Deepmala was just the first of her surprises. On the second day, she lined up Tej as a magician (he cut up Greeneyes with a saw, threw up her bleeding limbs in the air and at the audience and put them back together) and believe it or not, my second wife.

  What was Sugandha going to perform? After she sat down on the stage along with a concubine, two servants brought a veena and a pakhawaj. The veena is an unwieldy instrument with its large and small hollowed-out resonating gourds and I had a malicious vision of my second wife sitting astride the central beam and playing horsie, horsie.

  Let me come clean and confess that I love the veena more than most musical instruments and I did not wish her to ruin my pleasure by playing indifferently.

  Sugandha, however, was no longer diffident or defiant. Her opening meditation was short but she made up for it by a subtle and sinuous vilambit. It took me a while to get the hang of what she was doing. She was not a purist the way zealots tend to be. Since her teacher was from the south, her training and discipline were evident in her conception and her phrasing but the natural bent of her mind resisted the ironclad Karnataka format. The tension between the two impulses was a liberating one. She did not always succeed in what she was trying to do but that was because she was young and inexperienced. What was important was that she could create an air of mystery and excitement, so that you were curious to see whether she could make it worth your while to stay.

  She did not disappoint me or the rest of the audience.

  There were two shows in the evenings, the one presented by Greeneyes and the one in the sky. If you are Brahma, the Creator of the universe, you can spit on all the laws of aesthetics, tell the theoreticians to stuff their mouths with all their talk of the balance of colour and the painterly palette. In the evenings, Brahma dipped his palms, palms wide enough to hold the entire universe in them, into a cauldron of raging colours and flung them helter-skelter at the horizon.

  I’m a classicist by nature. My own life, writing and other excesses may give the lie to that claim but that does not alter the bent of my mind. Austerity, clean lines, wide vistas and, above all, clarity and going to the essence of things is what I respond to. The god of Pushkar is an exhibitionist, he’s garish, profligate and prodigal, he can’t stop showing off, he’s tasteless, he’s self-indulgent, he exaggerates beyond the farthest limits of hyperbole, but none of it matters, not at all. Because, however disparate and contrary his palette, the only thing that matters is, does it work? The answer is yes, yes and yes again. It shouldn’t but it does. Don’t take my word for it, come to Pushkar and see it for yourself.

  He does black sunsets, this god, the poisonous black that dripped from the serpent Vasuki when the gods and the demons churned the oceans in search of ambrosia. In a span of twenty minutes, he starts multiple interplanetary fires and douses them with the most gentle and soothing of unguents; whips up sandstorms that turn into rain and flash floods. It is a seamless transformation, the texture of Chanderi cotton becomes the heavy silk of Kanchipuram, ochre pales to azure. Now you know where all the Rajput contradictions, extremes and cliches come from: fire and ice, rock and fluid, arrogance and extreme politeness. Yes, at Pushkar you can get sunsets in black and white too.

  Did my wife know something about the desert light that I didn’t? Was that the reason why she made everyone wear white the first day at Pushkar? Perhaps it was the interplay between the sun and sand that made all things translucent: men, women and temples. Mirages had more substance than any of us. The slightest breeze, I was sure, would make us disintegrate and waft us into the holy lake.

  The Pushkar waters. Now there is a mystery. If they can purify us and cleanse all our sins, then reincarnation is a lie or at least redundant. We could all snap the cycle of rebirth and achieve moksha with just one dip in the Pushkar. The trip to Mecca achieves something similar for Muslims, and the Christians, I’m told, can draw a veil over their sins by the mere act of confession and repentance. I sometimes think that Buddhism is the toughest religion in the world. It not only eschews all talk of god but does not allow any instant remedies. Responsibility for one’s own acts is its only metaphysics.

  So did I forgo the immersion in the Pushkar? Would you? I may be a doubter, a frequent one at that, but I am hypocrite enough to play it safe and take my chances with the sacred waters. No, that is too facile an answer. Washing one’s sins is wishing them away. Yet I’ve never doubted the healing and cleansing power of the lake. I held my breath and stayed underwater till my mind had gone dead.

  When the Sun-god touched the red spire of the Brahma temple, Father and I entered the gate where the swan of Brahma keeps an eye on all his devotees. We lay prostrate in front of the Creator. I was grateful to Brahma for the life he had breathed into me, for Hem Karan’s escape from Gagrone and the victory he bestowed on us against the Sultan of Malwa and yet, even as I thanked him, my thoughts kept wandering to the Padshah in Delhi. Would that I had Babur’s total faith and confidence in his God. When he lost, did he say ‘God made it come wrong’ or did he consider defeats the price he had to pay for his sins? Would my hesitation to ask my Creator to intervene in the war that we must surely fight with the Moghul one of these days and make it come right, affect the outcome of the war itself?

  His Majesty and I stood at the head of the stairs of the temple for a moment. The lake had the sheen and stillness of milk on which the cream was congealing. The family was out now and along with the summer pavilions, was dressed in radiant white. The light and air seemed to be filtered through gauze and Dhaka muslin. Barring a lecture in the morning, Greeneyes had set the day aside for a long and lazy picnic by the lakeside.

  I was in two minds about going for the talk. There are two topics that I scrupulously avoid, not always successfully, but I try. One is the weather. Mewar is either singeing dry and hot or corrosively dry and cold. There’s nothing more to say about it.

  The other subject is the eunuchs in the Palace. I’m physically uneasy in the presence of eunuchs. This is not their fault. They are certainly more sinned aga
inst than sinning but they are a dangerous lot. They bring a steamy, hothouse air wherever they are. They scheme, intrigue and machinate not with a purpose but as the end-all and be-all of their lives. Where they are, there is trouble, often grievous trouble. Today’s talk is by Bruhannada, the most powerful, arrogant and devious of the breed at Chittor. It may perhaps tell you something about the man or whatever gender you wish to assign to him, that as Rani Karmavati’s chief eunuch and closest confidant, cabinet ministers as well as visiting rajas and rawats seek an audience with him. I have resolutely eschewed his company all these years and am inclined to do so today but the subject intrigues me: Self-denial in the Mahabharata.

  The shamiana was full by the time I got there. I forgot to mention that while Bruhannada’s looks may not appeal to me, he is singularly goodlooking and can be delightful company when he wants. Bruhannada knew his Mahabharata better than most of us and he had a thesis to propound. He chose Bhishma, the greatest celibate in the epic as the symbol of an abstemiousness that is not of one’s own choosing. This is of course a bit of a grey area. As you are well aware, Bhishma’s ageing father Shantanu fell in love with the beauteous Satyavati but she would not agree to the marriage unless her son and not Bhishma inherited the throne. Shantanu would not ask his son for this terrible sacrifice, yet Bhishma not only renounced the throne but took a vow of eternal celibacy.

  Without saying it in as many words, Bruhannada seemed to suggest parallels between Bhishma and the eunuchs. No, he went even further. He hinted that they shared a common lineage. Both must suffer a neutered fate. He did not of course stop there. It is what you make of this imposed condition that brings the question of choice into play. You would be entirely justified if you spent your entire life railing against your misfortune. But there is another option. Rise above your fate. Internalize your calamity and give it a heroic dimension as Bhishma did. It was a thoughtful disquisition and its central insight applied to all of us since there is no man born who is not handicapped in one way or another. So it is up to us to make the best of a botched job.