Cuckold

by Kiran Nagarkar

  ‘Jagte raho. May God keep an eye on us.’ My voice sounded strange in that thick silence. The man on duty was out of the doorway, his sword in hand. Did I make a convincing sentry? I was still far away. Besides, a night watchman couldn’t have been such an unfamiliar sight. Every palace, village and city had at least one who went around on the hour till daybreak. I walked steadily towards him.

  ‘Jagte raho. All is well.’

  He relaxed but the sword was still out. I was alongside him now. ‘May God keep an eye on us.’

  My left hand was on his mouth and my dagger in his heart.

  I lifted him up and dragged him to the stables. He was heavy and it was a relief to set him down. The horses stirred softly as the dim light from the oil lamp in the courtyard threw my shadow on them. I unlatched the gate to the stables and led the horses out one by one.

  Time to start a minor conflagration. I went back and picked up the lamp (not much oil left in it) and let it drop in the hay. It was a terrible way of repaying our host for his hospitality but I had no other means of flushing out our visitors. Within minutes the overhead beams of the stable and some of the rafters in the left wing of the palace were in flames. The horses were terror-stricken and running wildly into the woods at the back. A few of the servants were up and shouting frantically. Three of His Majesty’s security guards joined them now and ran to the well to fetch water.

  I was standing in the recess behind the stairs when the visitors came tearing down. Should I take on all seven of them? Six now to be precise. It was hardly the time for heroics.

  ‘The horses, save the horses,’ they screamed at each other as they rushed out of the building.

  I waited for His Majesty. He did not follow our guests down the stairs. Nor did Rawat Ram Simha, the Security Chief. What had happened to the rest of the elite guard?

  Where are you, Father?

  I climbed the stairs reluctantly. Lord Eklingji, let him be lost in the oblivion of nocturnal sleep and not in the other one that lasts forever. The door to his room was open, the lamps still brightly lit. Even from where I stood his lips looked green. The poison had worked but not painlessly. His right hand was a claw trying to tear open his throat, his eyes seemed to be searching for air but the rictus of pain and horror on his face suggested that all the air in the world would not do him any good. I went over and closed his eyes and mouth. Dear God, how swiftly is a man dead and cold. Forgive me, Father, I’ll grieve for you later.

  The venison and a little bit of pepper powder in a bowl were waiting for me in my room.

  I went to check on the security chief and his band of men merely to confirm my suspicions. The visitors from Chittor had indeed served a feast, a feast of death. It was not difficult to guess why they themselves had not suffered the same fate. The poison, as any primer on statecraft and intrigue will tell you, was not in the venison but in the pepper powder that we Rajputs sprinkle so liberally on our food, especially roast meats. All you had to do was to avoid the pepper and you were fine. The three guards downstairs who were trying to douse the fire had obviously skipped the pepper.

  For sycophants and toadies there’s nothing more important than self-interest and survival. The murderers would come looking for me only after they had located their horses and secured their own safe return.

  I was back in the village. Everybody was asleep. I wasn’t sure if the messenger, Ishwar Simha, would still be waiting for me at the village headman’s house. I needn’t have worried. Mangal did not hire men who are false or faint of heart. Life without Mangal, now that was one possibility that had never occurred to me.

  ‘Your Highness, how is His Majesty?’

  ‘Dead.’

  He was about to commiserate with me but I stopped him short.

  ‘I will give you some sealed papers. Deliver them to Sajani Bai, the court singer at Chittor. Here’s my necklace. It will make it worth your trouble. Now wait outside and keep watch.’

  When he went out, I undid the seal on Mangal’s letter.

  It was an almost illegible scribble.

  Jai Shri Eklingji

  A very brief letter, Your Highness. I suspect the very worst is about to befall Mewar. There is a plot underfoot to murder His Majesty and you. Do please take the most extreme measures to safeguard both your lives.

  There is another matter that I must now share with you since it is likely that I too have been targeted by Prince Vikramaditya’s men. I’m aware that you’ll never forgive me once you’ve learnt the contents of the accompanying letter. But I gave my word to my mother and so must suffer the one thing I cannot bear: your displeasure.

  Fly, Your Highness, fly.

  Your servant, Mangal

  I moved to the other letter.

  To His Highness, the Maharaj Kumar,

  May Lord Eklingji shower his blessings upon you and preserve you from all harm.

  I’ve asked Mangal to write this note for me. He’s the only person to whom I can trust the contents of this letter.

  You were Mewar’s and my great hope. The future of Mewar belonged to you. You were mine but my ambitions for you were my ambitions for our country. I am a very possessive woman. But I knew that if I were to keep you, I would have to let go of you.

  I had prepared myself for your marriage from the day I first breast-fed you. But nothing could have prepared me for the Princess. She was a devoted wife but not to you. It took me a long time to realize this but I finally understood that she would destroy Mewar. The saddest part in all this was the influence she had over you. You seemed to lose your mind when you were with her. She would not give you a son and she made you the laughingstock of Mewar. It was a matter of time before both the Mewaris and our allies lost all respect for you.

  I warned the Princess and asked her to mend her ways. She paid me no heed. I decided to take action. Your enemies had had the same thought but they messed up the job. Instead of the Princess, they killed her maid, the innocent Kumkum Kanwar.

  I planned the Princess’ death far more meticulously. I also took good care not to be caught. I poisoned her food as well as mine except that the dose I gave her was at least ten times stronger than the one I had. Since I was also a victim, nobody suspected me. Unfortunately I too did not succeed in ridding Mewar of the Princess.

  Is it an evil force or the gods who protect her? Sometimes I wonder if they are not the same thing. I have no regrets about my actions. The Princess and you have come closer over the years. But no good will come of it because your relationship is based on a lie. I am powerless to save you. Needless to say you do not wish to be saved. You can’t even see that it is you and not she who stands to lose everything.

  The legend of the Little Saint will become greater with every passing year. The whole world loves a lover. Love and overheated poetry will make her immortal. As for you, Highness, if Queen Karmavati and Vikramaditya don’t get you, the Princess and her lover will. Either way, they’ll wipe out your memory.

  You were meant for greater things, Highness. You have it in you to be the greatest Rajput ruler the country has seen. You have the vision and wiliness to beat all our enemies and become Maharana of the whole of India. Can you break with your wife? Only then will you be able to get the better of your brother and his mother and concentrate on Babur and our other enemies.

  Will you do it? I know in my heart that you will not. There is only one woman for you. It is the Princess. It would have helped if she had loved you too. But no matter. You seem to do it for both of you.

  I’m leaving, Prince. There is no place in Mewar for a murderess, not even a failed one. But neither can I stand by and watch your fall.

  I pray that you’ll prove me wrong.

  Your servant,

  Kausalya.

  I have almost finished my last entry. In a minute now I’ll seal these bits of my memoirs and hand them over to the messenger and ask him to head for Chittor. It’s merely a matter of time before His Majesty’s assassins come for me. But I still have one
job to do, something I have been postponing for years, but which can no longer wait. I have to settle scores with someone at the temple.

  Besides, if I can help it I won’t be an easy target for Queen Karmavati, Vikramaditya or their six lackeys yet. Don’t forget I still have Befikir, and the mountains and Raja Puraji Kika are not far from here. And I am longing to be in Leelawati’s arms.

  Why do I keep deceiving myself?

  There’s no question in my mind that both Kausalya and Leelawati are dead right. Their counsel is irrefutable. If I am to make something of myself, I must turn my back on that woman. Banish her from my life.

  Yes. I must.

  But there is only one woman for me. It is not Leelawati and it is not Kausalya. It is my wife. I will follow her to Brindaban, to Mathura, to the gates of hell, even to heaven if the gods will have me.

  Epilogue

  I am the missing page that is not missed, the hiatus that may be skipped.

  No one saw or heard from the Maharaj Kumar again. There were many stories floating around about the manner of his disappearance. One said that the six butchers, the henchmen of Queen Karmavati and Prince Vikramaditya, killed him. Another maintained that the Maharaj Kumar escaped to Mandu and eloped with Leelawati into the mountains where Raja Puraji Kika held sway. Yet another said that he had been spotted in Mathura. He had become a mendicant and was one of the group of people who followed the Little Saint wherever she went. The fourth version seemed to suggest something more complicated.

  Pursued by the six, the Maharaj Kumar ran to the temple of the Flautist at Baswa. He had on his kesariya bana, the turban of the final confrontation. ‘Even the gods,’ he muttered, ‘must get their just deserts.’

  The marble image of the Flautist at Baswa was not half as big as the one at the Brindabani Temple in Chittor but it had a rare beauty and though the Maharaj Kumar found it difficult to admit, the god was possessed of a sense of peace that was, of all things, ironically, reassuring. The folds of the pitambar were as delicately carved as the waves in the sand the Maharaj Kumar had destroyed when he was missing for seven days during the Idar campaign. The carved peacock feather was stuck jauntily in the headband and was so delicate, it was nearly transparent. But it was the expression on the face and the way he held his head that struck a chord in the Maharaj Kumar. He could have almost mistaken the Flautist for himself. He was playing the flute and the song he was seeking had closed his eyes. There is no truer meditation than music and no journey of discovery greater than that of looking within.

  A fine time to dwell on the aesthetics of sculpture and its resonances. No more procrastination. No more. They say god dwells in all things, the Prince told himself. He must surely be present in his own image.

  Take the sword out of the scabbard. Raise the right hand above your left shoulder. Now look him in the face, don’t worry, he won’t open his eyes and he won’t stop playing the flute. Then suddenly, with lightning speed bring the right hand down, left to right, one clean stroke and his head should be rolling on the floor.

  ‘How long will you nurse this enmity? How long will you fight this personal war? And to what purpose? Do you not know that you and I are one? My flute and song are on your lips. We love the same woman. Why, you fool, no power on earth can separate or divide us.’

  Was the Blue One equivocating, the Maharaj Kumar asked himself. He was after all a god of infinite mendacity. He would prevaricate, dissemble, stoop to almost anything to get out of a tight spot or to gain a point. Wasn’t that one of the reasons why the Maharaj Kumar had thought him one of the greatest statesmen of all time and hoped that the people of Mewar would learn the art of diplomacy and war from him?

  The Prince was in two minds. Should he raise his hand and strike him dead? Or ...

  He brought his double-edged sword down, swift and hard just as he had imagined he would. Was his hand stayed in mid-air? Did it at least make a slight nick in the beatifically smiling face or torso of the marble Flautist? Sajani Bai is silent on the subject.

  The six were already closing in on him, swords ready for the kill. It was then that the Flautist embraced the Maharaj Kumar. Terror and astonishment struck the six men. One minute the Maharaj Kumar was there, the next he had become invisible. Had they been dreaming? There was just the end of the Maharaj Kumar’s turban, the kesariya bana, showing outside the lower left edge of the Flautist’s chest.

  Every time anybody walks into the temple, the cloth caught in the seamless marble stirs slightly with the draft in the air.

  Afterword

  The last thing I wanted to do was to write a book of historical veracity. I was writing a novel, not a history. I was willing to invent geography and climate, rework the pedigrees and origins of gods and goddesses, start revolts and epidemics, improvise anecdotes and economic conditions and fiddle with dates. As luck would have it, I didn’t get a chance to play around too much except in the case of the chief protagonist, since he is a person about whom we know nothing but the fact that he was born, married and died. His only claim to fame was that he was betrothed to a princess who is perhaps the most remembered and quoted woman in Indian history, right down to our own times.

  If, despite my intentions, a substantial quantum of history has inveigled itself into the novel, it is because both the princess and her husband lived in momentous times. He was heir apparent of Mewar, the most powerful Rajput state in the early sixteenth century. His father, Rana Sanga, had for the first time in generations managed to unite the perpetually feuding and warring Rajput kingdoms and principalities. He was surrounded on three sides by hostile forces. To the north-east was the Lodi dynasty whose Afghan rulers called themselves, rather ambitiously, Sultans of Hindustan. On Sanga’s left in the south-west was the kingdom of Gujarat headed by Muzaffar Shah II. To the south-east was Sultan Mahmud Khalji II of Malwa.

  The state of research about Mewar is not exemplary but available history books suggest that Muzaffar Shah’s second son, Shehzada Bahadur took asylum in Mewar. He was treated generously but things went sour when, at a party, the Shehzada killed a prince related to the royal family. The Queen Mother had grown fond of Prince Bahadur. It was she who intervened and saved his life. Mewar fought with Gujarat mainly over a principality called Idar. In a battle with Malwa, Mewar defeated Sultan Mahmud Khalji and took him prisoner.

  It was around the early 1520s that Babur began to make his presence felt in India. He made, in all, five forays into Hindustan, the first expedition having taken place in 1516. Both Babur and the contemporary Mewar chronicles agree that there was some correspondence between Sanga and Babur about attacking Ibrahim Lodi simultaneously, one from the Panipat end, the other from the Agra side.

  Most British and Indian historians usually underplay Babur’s battle with the Rajputs at Khanua and dismiss it in a sentence or paragraph. They tend to see Delhi as the focus of power in India. This was primarily because the Moghul dynasty that Babur founded ruled mostly from Delhi. But Babur’s perception of Maharana Sanga and the Rajputs was vastly different.

  After Babur defeated Sultan Ibrahim Lodi at the famous second battle of Panipat, the Padshah annexed Delhi and Agra, and gradually subdued the rest of the Lodi empire. It is worth remembering that Ibrahim Lodi was a much-hated man even amongst his own relatives, vassals and amirs and the Lodi Sultanate was already in the process of disintegrating. Babur knew that his most crucial trial of strength lay ahead. The real power in that region lay with Rana Sanga and the alliance of Hindu and Muslim rajas and chiefs. Babur’s soldiers wanted to go back home to Kabul and as he himself writes, they were intimidated by the combined forces of Rana Sanga and his allies and extremely reluctant to engage them. Babur had to resort to extraordinary measures to persuade his soldiers to fight a battle to the death.

  The importance of the battle of Khanua where the two armies met is generally underrated. The fate, not just of Padshah Babur, Rana Sanga and his friends, but of India was at stake. It is no exaggeration to say that the history
of India may have been very different but for that battle. At the same time any conjectures about its future course if Babur had lost are idle and futile.

  After his defeat at Khanua, Rana Sanga vowed not to return to Chittor till he had defeated Babur. It is during this interregnum, many historians believe, that he was poisoned, though it is not clear who was behind this crime.

  Colonel Todd, in his Annals of Rajasthan, and other historians share the view that Sanga was a uxorious husband and that Queen Karmavati had an excessive and unhealthy influence over him. If Prince Vikramaditya, along with his brother, was awarded the kingdom of Ranthambhor while the Rana was at the peak of his career, the credit for this highly irregular gift must go to his mother. Vikramaditya was degenerate and power-hungry, with hardly any redeeming features and proved to be a rotten king. Both the Queen and her son did not do Mewar proud.

  So much for the facts.

  As for the rest, storytellers are liars. We all know that.

  Historical Note

  All that work and effort Queen Karmavati had put in was not in vain. Vikramaditya became the Rana of Chittor. Not for very long but that is beside the point. Chittor was only a shadow of its former puissant self and the Maharaj Kumar’s one-time guest, Sultan Bahadur Shah, laid siege to the fort. Ironically, Queen Karmavati sent frantic messages to Babur’s son, Humayun who was now the Moghul Padshah, to come to Chittor’s rescue. For a while it appeared that he might arrive with his forces and relieve Chittor. He never did. When there was no hope, Queen Karmavati and thirteen thousand of the Chittor women, saved their honour by jumping into the fires of johar.

  * * *

  The Turkish chief, Babur, who had not started out from Transoxiana with the intention of becoming the Padshah of Hindustan, founded one of the most memorable dynasties in the world, the house of the great Moghuls.