Cuckold

by Kiran Nagarkar

  The soul is never born, it does not ever die;

  Never having come to be, it will never cease to be

  Unborn, immortal, perennial, the pristine soul

  Survives even after the body is slain.

  When a man casts out old clothes,

  He must perforce wear new garments.

  So does the soul discard old bodies

  And enters new ones.

  Swords cannot cleave through it,

  Fire cannot burn it,

  Water cannot wet it,

  Wind cannot dry it.

  Never to be cut, never incinerated,

  Never wet, nor dry ever

  Ever-present, immovable, eternal,

  It is steadfast and perpetual.

  Death comes to all who are born.

  The dead too cannot escape birth.

  If both birth and death are inevitable,

  Wherefore wilt thou mourn?

  Sugandha was asleep leaning against the banister of the landing to the first floor when I came home. I wondered if Greeneyes had locked her out Not another silent cold war, please, I said to myself though I had no reason to complain since Sugandha never tattled against the Little Saint or anybody else in the zenana. I removed my shoes and walked up on my toes but that didn’t prevent her from waking up.

  She smiled as she looked down on me.

  ‘I’m pregnant.’

  Her hand reached out to touch me. I shrank back from her since I had not yet had the mandatory bath after a funeral. I tried to explain my reasons later but they sounded like an apology and the damage was done.

  ‘You think it’s your brother’s?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The baby.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about it.’ I had. This is perhaps a despicable observation but I tend to think the worst about myself or anybody else before I think better about either party.

  ‘You did. It is not. I don’t think so.’ Her face crumbled. I had wrung the joy out of her good news. She turned away from me and walked towards her own rooms.

  ‘Are you telling me that you know what’s in my mind better than I do?’ I wanted to make amends to this daughter of Medini Rai so badly that I got myself in worse straits.

  ‘You are a good actor, Highness, but there are times when the acting shows. I know you’ll never be sure whose child I bear.’

  I changed tactics once again and called out to her. ‘Sugandha, you’ve given me the only good news of a day when almost everything I have heard was not just bad but disastrous. Please don’t ruin this little happiness.’

  She was instantly contrite. ‘I’m sorry. I am. You really believe me?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ Maybe I meant it too. I certainly had no wish to break our friendship with Medini Rai or destroy the peace in the kingdom as no less a god than Shri Rama had done when he doubted the chastity of his own wife because of a dhobi’s suspicion. I did not want to take any more chances with Sugandha and wrapped my impure hands around her.

  * * *

  Will somebody enlighten me about the way the human mind works? From the day I got married to her, Greeneyes has told me to keep off her. Now I’m married the second time, never mind that it was against my wishes, and all she spends her time doing is wooing me. Her tactics are out of the ordinary, to say the least, and she has an unusual arsenal. She was born with a flair for colour and cloth but all these years she has been casual about them. Forgive the banality but it is the only way to describe her intentions, she now dresses to kill. The last seven days she has gone on a rampage of green. She can carry any colour, a garish yellow or a tinselly brown to devastating effect but it is green that looks lethal on her. She is well aware of this and has a hundred, more likely two hundred odhanis, ghagras and cholis in shades of green.

  She makes it a point to be around fully dressed before I go to work. I may ignore her (no, that’s not possible) but I must say that I am not a little amused by her: why attempt to seduce someone who was hers the day he first saw her and has never shown any signs of changing his mind? Poor Sugandha never did stand a chance against the Princess of Merta but frankly there was not a woman from the zenana who was a match for Greeneyes in this avatar.

  What did the Little Saint want? Was it even remotely possible that she missed me? Or was she insecure that she was about to lose her position as prospective Maharani if at some time in the future I became the Rana of Mewar? Why else would she be jealous of Sugandha’s pregnancy and want to break my already shaky marriage?

  Greeneyes put a halt to guerilla combat with my second wife when she discovered that Sugandha was pregnant. It was open war now.

  She let it be known that there was no guaranteeing that even Vikramaditya was the father of the child in Sugandha’s womb. Who, after all, was to know how widely my second wife had spread her infidelity? To cast Sugandha as villain, it was essential for Greeneyes to make a paragon of me. She was, as can be expected of so capable a woman, up to the demands of the task. My deification was well under way, but most of the mud and calumny would not unfortunately adhere to Sugandha. My first wife had set a trap for herself from which she could not escape. The more she talked about the paternity of my second wife’s foetus, the more smug Sugandha became.

  ‘I can’t quite recall who the father of the child is, whether it was an eunuch, the gardener or the milkman,’ Sugandha seemed to puzzle over it when she ran into Greeneyes. ‘Whoever’s responsible for it, I’m going to deliver one of these days. Can you muster up even a false pregnancy, Princess, after all these years?’

  Suddenly there was a desperation and hurt in Greeneyes that she could not conceal and which Sugandha latched on to instinctively. Greeneyes could carp and insinuate as much as she wanted, all Sugandha had to do was to get more pregnant by the day.

  Do you remember the advice that Kautilya (the very same one whose treatise on the art of governance Leelawati had copied with such care for me) gave to a king? It is not wise for a prince or king to trust anyone. It was dinned into my head in the Military Academy and I practised it up to a point when I grew up and started aspiring to the kingship. I realize now that I was faking it. My heart really hadn’t been in it. No longer though. Bruhannada had not died in vain. It is his legacy to me that I suspect everyone now. Who were the seventeen conspirators who were lying low but were even now working towards destabilizing Mewar and getting rid of both His Majesty and me?

  In my more cynical moments, I am convinced that it would have been far better for His Majesty, Mangal and me and the three judges of the tribunal if Bruhannada had not attempted to be heroic and outdo Bhishma. He is dead and gone and none of us is any the wiser. Mangal has offered to resign since Bruhannada died under his nominal care. Urvashi has been sent off to her parents and I doubt if anyone gives a damn whether Bruhannada fathered a son or daughter or a genderless creature. That leaves Vikramaditya. His Majesty seems to have finally, if feebly, woken up to the threat posed by this son of his and has despatched him to Ranthambhor and kept him under house arrest there. I believe Queen Karmavati protested vociferously that Vikramaditya had only done what any prince barring the ball-less (her word) Maharaj Kumar would have when he discovered that Bruhannada had broken the eunuchs’ code of conduct.

  Father, however, did not pursue the little matter of the conspiracy since we had nothing but the eunuch’s word for it and that, as he had mentioned before the treason-hearing began, may well have been nothing more than a vendetta. Did His Majesty really believe that cock-and-bull story even after Bruhannada had been snuffed out before he could reveal any names?

  But Father’s right. We needed proof, dates, plans, names and anything and everything connected with the conspiracy. We could easily have got them and more, if only His Majesty was willing to use a little bit of persuasion and pressure on my brother. It is almost axiomatic that those who get pleasure by inflicting pain upon others are rarely any good when they are at the receiving end. I am not suggesting for a moment that Vikramaditya
is not every bit as brave as any Rajput. But an armed confrontation like a battle is nothing but carefully orchestrated mass frenzy. There is usually enough time to prepare oneself mentally, let the juices flow and be prepared to kill or be killed (we never entertain the thought of being maimed) within a matter of four to six hours.

  Torture, especially torture by your own people, however, is an altogether different proposition. There’s incredulity that your own friends and relatives can turn on you, do all kinds of inhuman things to you and the fact that nothing is time-bound or barred. It may take a day, a week or months and there’s no telling if they’ll stop at anything.

  You need a different kind of temperament, rather than sustained physical endurance to come through unbroken from such an experience. Frankly, I doubt if it would take much to get Vikram talking. The one thing that my brother is almost pathologically allergic to, is being alone. Put him in solitary confinement for a couple of days, three on the outside and he’ll spill his guts without much coaxing. He can’t think long-term and will dump even his mother if he feels hemmed in and hopeless.

  I was sorely tempted to take some extralegal measures and intercept the progress of my brother to Ranthambhor. A small detour wouldn’t inconvenience him too much and we would soon be privy to all the details of the treason plot. I will never know whether I lacked the daring to do something unorthodox or I behaved sensibly. Perhaps this is the fatal flaw in me, that I do not have it in me to do what is necessary, whatever the cost. If I captured Vikram, I could take the information I elicited from him to His Majesty and confront him with the sordid details of the plot that mother and son and the other nobles involved had hatched. But where would that leave me? Father would feel cornered. He would be forced to recognize that I had had the courage to do something he could not face up to and he would have no alternative but to take action against his favourite queen and Vikram. All to the good. He would know who among the vassals and allies, were his friends and who his enemies. But he would never forgive me for taking the initiative and countermanding his orders. And worse still, for putting him in a spot. He would never trust me again. My only realistic option was to interrogate my brother and then kill him ‘accidentally’. I would then know who the enemies within the kingdom and the confederacy were. Mangal’s men would take over from there, put them under surveillance and catch them red-handed.

  Of course, the plan could misfire but perhaps it was worth trying.

  Instead I went to Father again.

  ‘Mewar may soon face its deadliest enemy to date, Your Majesty. The Padshah at Delhi is likely to exploit any weakness within our ranks. The eunuch’s death will have been in vain if despite his warnings, we do not identify the people who have been plotting against the state and expose the conspiracy. We need to take the severest action against them.’

  ‘Let us for a moment assume that Bruhannada was telling the truth, but barring resurrecting him, I have no idea how we could come by the names of the people involved in the conspiracy.’

  ‘We could,’ I paused since I was not sure of Father’s reaction, ‘question Vikramaditya.’

  ‘Summon him back from Ranthambhor?’

  ‘Or we could send a team of interrogators.’

  ‘And how do you plan to elicit this information?’

  ‘Isolation and a few threats might do the trick.’

  ‘But if necessary you would not hesitate to use third degree methods?’

  I thought about it for a moment: Should I tell the truth or not?

  ‘Yes,’ he seemed to be talking to himself, ‘I believe you would not hesitate to eliminate your brother in the so-called interest of the state even if he is innocent.’

  ‘That is untrue and unjust, Your Majesty.’

  ‘Is it? Both my elder brothers tried to sacrifice me in their self-interest.’

  I was appalled by Father’s equivocation, if not outright mendacity. This was the first time that he had ever mentioned his brothers and the internecine struggle for succession. He had the gall to compare my desire to pursue the perpetrators of the plot against him and Mewar with his brothers Prithviraj and Jaimal’s murderous race for the throne. He was obviously identifying with Vikramaditya since both of them happened to be younger brothers and third in the line of succession. For him, however great my brother’s faults or crimes, he would always be the underdog. That may help explain Father’s behaviour with me over the years but it was a disturbing comment on human frailty. Here was a thoughtful, sensible and astute man who had steered his people and state through some explosive and trying times and was preparing to meet his most dangerous adversary. And yet this very paradigm of a king could not think straight and was willing to allow the most shallow and sentimental paternal feelings to endanger the fate of his own country.

  ‘We have banished Vikramaditya, that is warning enough to all those who would indulge in treason against us. Let sleeping dogs lie, son, at least till we have defeated this Moghul upstart.’

  I had nothing more to say to my father.

  ‘You are, I’m told, about to become a father soon. You’ll judge me less harshly when you have children of your own and not all of them are as exemplary as you are and some of them try your patience to the breaking point.’

  Eklingji Shiva, what is my dharma? What is my duty to the state, to the people of Mewar, to the confederacy of Muslim and Hindu allies and to myself? I’m not just a kshatriya, I have aspirations to the crown. If it is my duty to preserve and protect Mewar, then how should I conduct myself? Should I not ignore His Majesty’s tepid response to the plot and take matters into my own hands? Corner my brother and whatever the cost, get the information out of him? What will it gain a man if he loses his kingdom to say that he had the responsibility but not the power and authority to contravene the Rana’s command and act on his own?

  There is another unanswered question underlying all these. Why did I approach Father except to ward off all possibility of my having to deal with Vikram and if need be, eliminate him?

  Chapter

  44

  Had I really been that preoccupied formulating the new tax proposals to finance the war that I hadn’t noticed the night descend? How could that be, surely it wasn’t more than two and a half hours since I had come to office? There was something wrong, terribly wrong. How could the bird-sounds have died so suddenly? And where had all the people of Chittor disappeared: the children playing marbles and spinning tops on the streets; the steady, hypnotic swing, bash and splash of clothes at the dhobi ghat on the river; the vegetable, fruit, pearl and precious-stone vendors calling out and hectoring passers-by and of course the continuous quarrying of stone for Sahasmal’s water and sewage system?

  I felt uneasy and decided to find out what was going on. There was not a cat or dog, bird, child or grown-up on the streets. A knot of terror was tightening at the pit of my stomach. Even during the cholera or my grandfather, Rana Raimul’s funeral, there wasn’t such an eerie silence. Had Babur stolen into Chittor and like Allauddin Khilji, run his sword through all living things in the city and massacred them? Was Father all right? I started to run dementedly calling out for Mangal I know not why.

  And then I looked up at the sky.

  In the dead centre of the starless night was a perfect black full moon with a fuzzy halo around it. What was it, this evil bindi in the forehead of the sky?

  My good friend and protector Mangal, papers in hand, ran in the dark to save me from whatever demons were pursuing me.

  ‘Highness, please,’ Mangal was yelling at me, ‘don’t look at the solar eclipse.’ He threw his hands around my eyes and buried my head in his chest. ‘Are you all right, Maharaj Kumar?’

  A total solar eclipse. Couldn’t the Sun-god have chosen another time and place for his own annihilation? What was my ancestor trying to tell me? Was it the most unambiguous message the god of light was sending us about how inauspicious a time we had chosen to meet the Moghul menace? But the eclipse must have been on simultane
ously in Agra and the Padshah too must have seen it. Whose side was the Sun-god on? Did the conjunction of the sun and the moon signify doom for Mewar or the Moghul Padshah? I didn’t know and I didn’t care. This was one time when I was going to use the full weight and thrust of superstition to try and postpone the forthcoming engagement with Babur.

  ‘What were you doing staring at the eclipse, Sire? We must get the Raj Vaidya to treat your eyes immediately.’

  ‘Later, later. I must meet His Majesty first.’ There were flaming circles at the centre of my eyes and I stumbled as I ran but there was no stopping me.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ I was a little breathless, ‘I urge you to heed the signs and omens. I beg you, let wiser counsel prevail. Our ancestor, the Sun-god himself is warning us that this is not an opportune moment to take on the Moghul Padshah.’

  ‘Quite the contrary, my son,’ His Majesty laughed and patted me on the back. ‘Our ancestor has sent us a messenger who has just told us that Babur is dying.’

  Everything’s come to a halt. There’s a moratorium on war preparations. You would think we were celebrating Diwali in December. The clerks stopped writing in mid-sentence, the stable-master who had shod three of a horse’s hooves abandoned the fourth, the sword-makers have doused the smithy, tied up the forges and gone to the nautanki. Believe it or not, they are distributing sweetmeats in some localities. Even the government offices and cabinet ministers who’ve been working overtime for three months running have taken the last two days off. The bells in the temples ring all day long and everybody including all our Muslim brothers are giving thanks.

  Sultan Ibrahim Lodi’s mother whom the Moghul usurper had kept, out of kindness to an old woman, under his own roof at Agra, had got one of her retainers to poison the Padshah. Babur has been vomiting copiously for over twenty-four hours.