A River Sutra

by Gita Mehta

  Dr. Mitra’s curiosity won over his triumph at proving me wrong. “What do the bandits do when they find it?”

  “Honeybees are said to circle the Immortal’s head, sahib. The bandits believe if they are stung by one of the honeybees, they cannot be killed in a police shootout.”

  Dr. Mitra stretched full length in his chair, grinning with pleasure at having learned yet another tale to add to the tales that seem to multiply around this astonishing river.

  There was the deep rumble of thunder and the sun was suddenly obscured by scudding storm clouds. The guard walked back to his post lifting his face to the raindrops falling intermittently from the darkening sky. Then jagged lightning ripped open the black clouds, deluging the garden in the first storm of the monsoon.

  Mr. Chagla hurried onto the veranda and began lowering the rolled cane screens tied between the pillars. The heavy downpour roused Dr. Mitra from his reverie. “I’d better give you a lift back to town, Chagla. The road will be slush in a few minutes.”

  Mr. Chagla accepted with alacrity. I could tell from the uncharacteristic glumness of his expression that he was already dreading the weeks ahead when he would have to cycle on flooded mud paths through the monsoon storms to get to work.

  OVER THE NEXT month I had no time to think of bandits.

  Even dining a light monsoon the steep hill behind the bungalow traps the rain, sending torrents of muddy water down the hillside to inundate our grounds. Broken branches fall on the single electric line that connects us to the power station at Rudra, and the bungalow generator is so old it cannot cope with our frequent power failures. Poor Mr. Chagla is continually loading spare parts for the generator into a hired three-wheeler at Rudra and navigating his way through the deep puddles left in the mud path by bullock-cart wheels to restore the bungalow’s power supply.

  Fortunately we never have visitors during these months and are able to see to the bungalow’s maintenance without unnecessary distraction.

  This year the monsoon was unexpectedly heavy and the generator had hardly worked at all, although Mr. Chagla had practically rebuilt it in order to run Our lights.

  One morning I was sitting behind my desk in the office, unable to work. With nothing to stir the air, the humidity was already making my clothes stick to my skin. I stared at the black rainclouds darkening the sky outside, resenting this season when the driving rain keeps me imprisoned indoors, and waited impatiently for Mr. Chagla to arrive and work some miracle on the generator.

  At last the three-wheeler backfired at the gates and Mr. Chagla’s oval form crossed the garden. Mud stained his trousers to the knees but his head was obscured by his large black umbrella, so it was only when he turned toward the house that I saw the elderly woman sheltering under his arm.

  “Can we keep a visitor, sir?” Mr. Chagla asked as he entered my office, morosely shaking the leg of his sodden trousers.

  “In the middle of the monsoons? Impossible, Chagla. Nothing is working.”

  “Even only for a night or two?”

  “Chagla, be reasonable. We are not prepared for a guest.”

  “But the road is practically submerged, sir. My three-wheeler stalled. Water flooded the engine. Everything was a complete flop. Then I saw this lady walking on the road. She told me she was on her way to a temple north of here. I asked her to help me push the three-wheeler but, poor thing, she was too frail to do anything. She looked so fatigued, as if she were going to drop any moment. I couldn’t just leave her there, sir.”

  “Where is she now, Chagla?” I asked in exasperation.

  “In the drawing room.”

  “I’d better warn her that she is not going to be very comfortable.”

  The smell of damp upholstery overwhelmed me as I entered the high-ceilinged chamber built to keep cool in the worst heat of summer. Now the small windows threw the room into heavy shadow so that only the colors of the butterflies and flowers that adorned the marble mosaics glowed. The woman was standing in the middle of the room staring at the mosaics. She turned at my approach, and in that shadowy light it took me a moment to see that her mud-spattered sari was white.

  “How long do you want to stay here?” I asked ungraciously.

  “Just tonight, sir.” Her face was so thin the lines that creased her skin were more prominent than her features. “Tomorrow I will come back with my daughter to collect my belongings.”

  A radiant smile suddenly brightened her expression and I realized she must have once been beautiful. “Then, sir, I will take my daughter home at last.”

  “Has your daughter run away?” I am always reluctant to allow the bungalow to become the battleground for a family dispute.

  “Oh, sir, if only God had been so kind.” She began weeping and I hastily changed the subject.

  “Where is your daughter at the moment?”

  “Near a temple called Supaneshwara. I looked on the map. It must be quite close.”

  I did not remember where I had heard of the temple or I might have been able to prevent a tragedy. But I was only concerned to stop the woman’s weeping. Her next words aroused my suspicions again. “I pray my daughter will not be scarred forever by her experience.”

  “Experience, madam?”

  “Oh, sir, my daughter was kidnapped two years ago.”

  “Good God. We must inform the police immediately.”

  I turned to leave the room. The woman clutched my arm. “No. You will put her life in jeopardy. The police gave up the search months ago. They are afraid of my daughter’s captors. I was there when she was kidnapped. I saw the men who stole my daughter. If you had seen their faces, you would know there is no cruelty of which they are incapable.”

  She sagged, her weight dragging me down. I put my hand under her elbow and led her to a chair.

  At that moment Mr. Chagla entered the room with a tea tray. He solicitously poured a cup of tea for our distressed visitor, and she wiped her tears with the edge of her sari before sipping from her cup.

  I thought the tea had calmed her, but when she spoke again it was clear she still feared I would inform the police.

  “I have lost my child once, sir. I beg you, do not endanger her life again. Let me tell you how my daughter was stolen from me. Then you will understand why the police have abandoned her.”

  10

  The Courtesan’s Story

  Fifty years ago, in the days when there were still kingdoms in India, our small state of Shahbag was famed throughout India for its culture.

  Too small to be of interest to the British Empire, perhaps Shahbag was saved by its size. Our ruler, the Nawab of Shahbag, was awarded no British gun salutes and the viceroy never visited. But if we were denied imperial splendor, in our isolation we were able to maintain the truer splendor of civilized behavior.

  It was easy to cultivate civility in the beauty of our setting. You see, ‘Shahbag’ means ‘garden of the emperor.’ Our capital gained its name from the Emperor Jehangir’s pleasure when he saw the fields of flowers growing on our riverbank and, beyond, the Narmada stretching twelve miles across, as wide as an ocean.

  Once a year, as schoolchildren, we joined our ruler in showering blossoms on its waters. The Nawab was a Muslim but he honored the river’s holiness. I can still hear his voice echoing through the microphones: “Bathing in the waters of the Jamuna purifies a man in seven days, in the waters of the Saraswati in three, in the waters of the Ganges in one, but the Narmada purifies with a single sight of her waters. Salutations to thee, O Narmada.”

  Then we all shouted “Salutations to thee, O Narmada!” and flung our garlands into the water, competing to throw them farthest.

  In those days if you went for a boat ride you could see people promenading in the gardens that stretched the entire length of the city or lying by the flower beds that led to the water’s edge, and in the evenings there were always musicians playing in the wind pavilions. Then, as night fell, above the gardens you could watch the skyline of the city being etche
d into the darkness as lamps were lit in the mosques, the arched balconies of the Nawab’s palace, the windows of the grand houses of the aristocrats. Our haveli was one of the grand houses. The less wealthy lived on streets leading to some central point, a bazaar or a place of worship, so that the whole city had a symmetry that pleased the eye.

  Wide boulevards bordered the river gardens. Now the globed gas lamps imported from Paris by the Nawab have all been removed, but when I was a child their light cast a romantic glow over the horse-drawn carriages in which the gentlemen from the great Shahbag families took the river air. Sometimes a famous beauty like my grandmother was seated at their sides. Although her face was veiled, her rich garments and most especially her ostrich-feather fan with its jeweled handle revealed to every eye that she was from our haveli.

  You see, the courtesans of our haveli were rumored to be even wealthier than the wives of the Nawab. Presents were showered on them by other rulers. Renowned not just for their beauty but for their learning, they were in great demand to educate the heirs to India’s mightiest kingdoms.

  Are you familiar with Vatsayana’s classic, the Kama Sutra? No? Read the requirements of a courtesan as Vatsayana describes them. Sixty-four arts she must be mistress of, from architecture to zoology. Painting, flower arrangements, music, languages, philosophy, jewellery, literature, even mathematics. Perhaps we were not as educated as the ladies of the Kama Sutra, but we were certainly more accomplished than any other woman in India.

  And really the essence of all our arts was a single art only: to teach noblemen good manners. For instance, such things as how to pay a compliment.

  What is so difficult about paying a compliment? you might ask. It seems an easy thing to tell a woman she has a pretty face.

  You are wrong, gentlemen. Those compliments are accepted by fools from gangs of boys who roam the marketplace. We required a lighter touch, a phrase that could delight and yet contain a barb to remind us that beauty was a passing thing, and love beyond attainment.

  To give such compliments is one of the things we taught these princes. But to turn a pretty speech on beauty, a man must be able to perceive beauty. After all, the primary colors are seen by every lout, the ordinary scales heard by every washerwoman who repeats them in her songs while she is beating her clothes on the rocks in the river.

  But to teach a prince the subtle grading of color or the microtones of melody, to educate a young man’s palate so he becomes an epicure, to introduce him to the alchemy of scents—this was the most demanding part of our education.

  You see, we were forbidden to give voice to our instructions. We could only educate by hint, by hide-and-seek, by nuance, always struggling to make of our knowledge something as light and transparent as a soap bubble, keeping it suspended in the air as its colors were admired until our students grasped its fragility.

  And when they had understood such refinements, but only then, we sometimes allowed them to touch us.

  After all, touch is the most dangerous of the senses, wouldn’t you say, sir?

  Our establishment was so famous for the rigor of its training that our most brilliant courtesans were sometimes invited by an important king to sing and dance when he was entertaining the Viceroy of India himself. My grandmother was in great demand for such occasions. I can still feel the touch of my grandmother’s soft, scented hand stroking my forehead as I lay with my head in her lap, while she described how she had trembled as she waited for the court minister to give her the cue to enter those huge audience chambers with the king on one throne, the viceroy on another grander one, his mighty retinue flanking him down the length of the chamber.

  And when she had ended her performance she told me a shadowy figure would sometimes stop her in the corridor and offer her a velvet box in which might rest a lotus blossom fashioned of pearls or a rosebud carved from a diamond solitaire. If she accepted the gift the courtier would beckon her to follow him.

  My grandmother wove such magic around those nights. She spoke of being rowed to lake palaces under a star-filled sky. Of gossamer nets hanging over beds strewn with jasmine blossoms. Pearls scattered on the sheets. Arched doorways opening onto balconies below which the water lapped softly against the stone foundations.

  Oh, friends, how Shahbag has changed in my lifetime. Where there used to be gardens now we have factories. Our gracious old buildings have been torn down to be replaced by concrete boxes named after politicians. The woods that once ringed the city have been cut down for the shantytowns of labor colonies. Even the boulevards around our haveli have been overrun so that our view is now only of a bazaar, and we must keep the windows to the west closed because of the smell from the open gutter.

  The city is owned by men who believe every human being has a price, and a full purse is power. Trained as scholars, artists, musicians, dancers, we are only women to them, our true function to heave on a mattress and be recompensed by some tawdry necklace flashing its vulgarity on a crushed pillow. When they come to our haveli they throw cigarette cases, watches, dirty bank notes at our feet as we dance, oblivious to the frigidness of our salaams.

  How often I used to weep in my mother’s arms at the coarseness of our audience, but she would hush my sobs and tell me I would never be soiled by their touch.

  What can I say, sir, except to tell you that my mother died and I lost my protection from such men.

  But my daughter knew nothing of these matters. Inside the walls of our haveli she still learned the arts that had once kept our reputations burnished throughout the Indian kingdoms.

  Teaching my daughter was no task at all. She seemed to contain in her slender form all the aspirations of our haveli. I had only to make a suggestion and she would bring the hint into the full flower of an art. From the bells on her anklets she could teach the impermanence of the world. Through a song she could inspire her listeners; to imagine the possibility of perfection.

  Knowing from bitter experience that the era of our haveli had passed, I wanted nothing to compromise my daughter’s name, and I permitted her to appear only at weddings, or the birth of a son, or before families celebrating the head of their household. So jealously did I guard my daughter’s reputation that I succeeded in creating an aura of awe around her until she became famous not just for her beauty but for her modesty.

  She was called an angel. You may think it is only the opinion of a mother, but truly, sirs, my daughter was an angel, giving love to all who met her as a child gives love to those who have cosseted and spoiled it because it does not know there is harshness in the world, or ugliness.

  When she was only seventeen our member of Parliament requested my daughter to perform at his election meeting in the capital. He told me important people from Delhi would be addressing the meeting, and thinking my daughter might one day need the protection of such powerful patrons, I myself took her to perform that afternoon.

  Strangely, I felt a premonition of fear when I saw those thousands of people in the park, shifting in boredom as political speeches echoed from the microphones wired on every tree, but I dismissed it as nerves for my child.

  I need not have worried. From the moment a party worker led her to the microphone and she began to sing, my child soothed the crowd into silence.

  I don’t think even my grandmother could have controlled that vast audience as my daughter did that afternoon, exciting them, consoling them, giving voice to their longings and their despairs, as if our haveli were expressing itself through her slender form.

  She was so innocent in the face of her own power, so overwhelmed by the response to her art when the seething mass of people exploded into applause, that her body shivered in my embrace as I led her from the platform.

  Hoping to calm her, I suggested we walk home through the bazaar. As always happens during an election campaign, the bazaar was covered with party posters and campaign flags. Political jingles echoed from loudspeakers lashed onto auto-rickshaws, competing to be heard above the film music blaring out of the t
ea stalls. While my daughter wandered from shop to shop, I stopped at the side of a street to watch a troupe of folk actors enacting the politician’s promises for those who could not read.

  And then, sir, my life somersaulted.

  The sound of machine-gun fire burst through the noise of the bazaar. I screamed for my child but the street was filled with panic-stricken crowds. People were trampling over each other to get into the shops, shrieking with fear as rounds of bullets tore into the air. Seeing my daughter at the far end of the bazaar, I pushed against the crowd with all my might to reach her, but I was crushed, unable to move. I could only watch as a blanket was thrown over her head.

  My daughter’s limbs flailed against her captor as he flung her over his shoulder. He turned his face to avoid her clawing nails and, oh, sir, I saw Satan walk this earth at that moment. Then his men were helping him into a jeep, and they were gone, firing their guns in the air.

  Rahul Singh took my daughter, sir.

  My child has been abducted by the most wanted bandit in the Vindhyas, a man the police fear, a murderer whose name is used even in Shahbag to frighten children into obedience.

  Please, sir, do nothing until I hold my daughter safely in my arms again.

  11

  Mr. Chagla looked at me. I averted my eyes, ashamed at my reluctance to assist the old woman.

  “The police will not hear of your daughter’s escape from us,” I assured her. “You are welcome to stay as long as you wish.”

  “Thank you, sir. You are doing a great kindness to my daughter as well as myself.”

  Mr. Chagla nodded his round head in approval. “I’ll tell the staff to prepare rooms.”

  The woman covered her face with her hands and her shoulders shook as she began weeping again. “I fear my daughter will have much need of kindness. How could this terrible thing have happened? I did everything to protect my child. With her beauty and her unblemished reputation, she could have married a respectable man. Who will believe in my child’s virtue now? Who will accept her as a wife, a girl captured and kept by criminals for two long years?”