A pair of young devdaasis broke through the PF cordon to run after Rama’s elephant, and when one of the young girls threw up a bunch of flowers, it was Sita who bent low enough to catch it in time, before passing it on to Rama. She laughed and waved back at the girl, who was shouting up incoherent endearments to Rama. Sita turned and said something to Rama, who laughed in return and tossed the flowers back into the crowd on the other side of the marg. The whole exchange took place so smoothly that Kausalya couldn’t help but feel the faintest twinge of admiration. Look at how perfectly attuned to one another they were already: she and Dasaratha had never been like that, had they? Not that she could recall. Not even in their young, wanton days.
She put a hand to her sari-clad breast in dismay as she realised that she was actually feeling envy of sorts at their happiness. She resolved at once that she would perform a special havan rite to ward off any ill-luck occasioned by any hostile observers. If she, Rama’s foremost well-wisher, could feel even the faintest touch of envy for him, then imagine the host of uncharitable thoughts that must be winging their way from other, less well-disposed minds.
Such a perfect mating would certainly bring its share of envious onlookers, starting with the many royal and noble houses that had hoped ever since his birth to make Rama their son-in-law. They would still hope, she knew, and would not expect that Rama might refuse to entertain any other matches. Yet, knowing her son and seeing how content he was, she felt instinctively that he would be unlikely to take another wife any time soon, if ever. That would bring a small avalanche of envy and resentment, and the warding ritual would be worth undertaking in advance. She must do all she could to preserve and sustain this nascent love. She knew how precious and fleeting it could be. Hai, Devi, bless us and preserve us in your grace.
She sat contented and occupied with these thoughts in her own palanquin, keeping one watchful eye on Dasaratha beside her while basking in the glory of her son’s newfound popularity and adulation. The procession was approaching the main palace now, the gates already wide open to receive them. A fresh burst of noise, colour and revelry rang out in the square as the citizens and military declared their love for their champions one final time.
In moments they would be home, and she would welcome her daughter-in-law into her house for life. To think that she, Kausalya, had gone from being the neglected wife and anxious mother of two weeks ago to the ceremonially reinstated First Queen and proud mother of this great night. How strange were the ways of the devas. Who could have foreseen such a dramatic chain of events only half a moon ago? And yet she tried not to gloat at her newfound success too much. One never knew what new changes the samay chakra could bring with the next turning of that great wheel of time.
She was still basking in the roars and cheers when Sumitra caught her arm. ‘Kausalya. Look!’
She turned, expecting anything but what Sumitra was pointing to.
Rani Kaikeyi was running after their elephant. At first Kausalya actually mistook the Second Queen for some penitent driven mad by religious ecstasy. Kaikeyi’s appearance was shockingly dishevelled, her waist-length hair flying like a dark cloak behind her, her sari unravelling unheeded, her breast half bared … and was that blood on her forehead? What had she been up to? She was barefoot, and apparently her feet were wounded too, for Kausalya could see splotches of drying blood on them. If Kaikeyi had been carrying a weapon of some sort— a dagger, or perhaps even a lance, she wouldn’t have put that past the woman—then Kausalya would have assumed that this was a continuation of the hostile rage displayed on the eve of Rama’s departure to the Bhayanak-van.
But the Second Queen was empty-handed and clearly in great distress. Now, as she came up alongside their elephant, Kausalya could see the smears of tear-tracks down the woman’s face, the smudged kohl around her eyes, and the dripping wet sari hanging soggily from her buxom body. Something had happened to Kaikeyi.
She was shouting now as she ran, yelling hoarsely. Kausalya could just make out the sounds and catch an occasional word, but it was impossible to understand what she was saying. Kaikeyi stumbled over her own feet and for a moment Kausalya’s heart was in her mouth as it seemed that the Second Queen would surely roll under the elephant and be crushed to death. But ever-vigilant Airavata rolled his lumbering bulk and stepped over the fallen rani, the rear edge of his enormous foot landing on the corner of Kaikeyi’s unravelled sari pallo. Beside Kausalya, Dasaratha groaned at the sudden sideways roll of the palanquin and grumbled aloud about bigfoot and their insufferable ways. He hadn’t noticed Kaikeyi yet, his attention being occupied by a bravely saluting row of disabled PF veterans lined up on the left side of the procession. Kausalya glanced at him but didn’t draw his attention to the little drama unfolding on this side. She was still trying to understand what Kaikeyi was up to, and why.
The royal procession had reached the palace gates—out of which Kaikeyi herself had emerged—and a fresh wave of conches were being sounded triumphantly and deafeningly by a row of purple-and-black-uniformed PFs, bringing the long welcome to a culmination. Just as this new assault of sound exploded, filling the air for miles around with the sheer bullhorn fullness of its volume, Kausalya saw Kaikeyi rise to her feet, her sodden sari now caked with the dust and dung of the avenue, and reach out to the elephant ahead. She said a single word that Kausalya could make out, ‘Rama!’, and then the rest was lost in the bone-vibrating contralto of the conches.
As the maharaja’s elephant trundled through the gates, Kausalya saw Senapati Dheeraj Kumar ride up alongside Second Queen Kaikeyi, dismount, and begin speaking gently to the distraught rani. She looked around wildly, as if only just growing aware of her surroundings, and stared dumbly at the general. The senapati directed Kaikeyi’s attention back towards the marg on some pretext, preventing her from following the procession into the palace gates, and held her attention for another moment. The last Kausalya saw was a trio of agitated daiimaas rushing out through the gates, dodging the oncoming elephants, and going to Kaikeyi’s side, taking hold of her arms. None of them was Manthara, but then Kausalya had never seen Mantharadaiimaa rushing to intervene in one of Kaikeyi’s ‘scenes’.
Kausalya turned back and saw Sumitra looking at her. Sumitra’s delicate face, as light-boned and fragile as a bird’s, was pinched with concern. Her eyebrows rose, asking the same question that Kausalya was asking herself: what is Kaikeyi up to this time?
Kausalya had no answer, but the question worried her a great deal.
On the elephant ahead, Rama touched Sita’s hand gently. She looked up at him, smiling. The smile faded slowly as she saw the expression on his face. A moment ago, his dark-complexioned features had been lit up by that luminous blueish glow that she was already coming to love. Now, he looked suddenly grim.
She followed the direction of his gaze. He seemed to be looking at a tiny knot of women beside the palace gates through which they had just entered. It appeared to be three elderly matrons—daiimaas, she thought instantly—herding a strikingly beautiful if somewhat overweight woman away from the royal procession. The woman was in quite a state, her sari dripping wet and filthy, as if she’d been rolling in a ditch somewhere, her long lustrous hair knotted and billowing wildly, the front ends of her blouse unknotted and open to reveal her ample bosom. Sita took her to be some madwoman, one of the many driven to ludicrous ecstasy by the sight of Rama or one of the other princes. Rama, probably, for even now the woman’s eyes were focused clearly on the foremost elephant, looking directly at them. The daiimaas attempted to lead her away, in the direction of the palace no less, but she twisted and turned, her eyes riveted to Sita’s husband.
Just then, their elephant lurched to a halt, and began performing a peculiar sideways shuffling movement, turning to bring itself in line with the palace steps, where its occupants would dismount. Sita lost sight of the madwoman for a moment. Then, as the elephant finished its half-turn, she was given a last glimpse of the lady—for she was clearly of noble lineage,
judging from the cautious manner in which the daiimaas were handling her—and a tiny dagger of ice entered Sita’s breast, piercing through to her heart, the same sharp pinprick of coldness that she had felt as a girl when she had learned that she had no mother.
The woman was shouting a single word over and over again, her head lolling madly like a jogini in the grip of an ecstatic trance. Even without being able to hear her voice above the deafening sounds of the conches, Sita was certain that the word was ‘Rama’.
EIGHT
From the edge of his aerie atop Lanka, the king of vultures brooded angrily
The aerie of the bird asuras was set upon the highest tower of the black fortress, a thousand feet above the ocean battering the rocky shores of the island. On the north side it overlooked one of the many volcanoes on the island-kingdom of Lanka. One of the more active ones, constantly spewing forth great geysers of blazing lava. The heat reached all the way to the aerie, warming the very stone of the tower. It kept the younglings warm and the other ground-bound asuras at bay, and these were good enough reasons to suffer the stench of sulphur and gouts of black smoke that drifted up night and day, obscuring the rest of the island of Lanka.
On the south side, the aerie overlooked the ocean itself, brackish and perpetually angry, like the asura king who made his home upon its waters. Turned blood-red by the angry light of sunset, the ocean stretched to infinity in every direction. Running parallel to the shore, spanning the length of the curved sticklike shape of the island, the black fortress rose like a living thing, a dark grimy pile of greatstone, like the carapaced shell of some titanic ocean creature.
Nestled upon the open ramparts, the aerie was laden with enormous stacks of hay, saplings and bushels of leaves, hauled up by the bird-beasts and tamped down with their beaks and talons until the tower top resembled some lofty Himalayan nest rather than the roof of a fortress.
At present the aerie was occupied by only a few dozen younglings and a half-dozen decrepit and crippled old bird-beasts, the pathetic remnants of what had once been the greatest flying warrior host on earth. The air was filled with the cranky calls of the younglings as they fought and scrabbled around for scraps. A pair of slightly more mature vulture-gryphons were daring one another to take the first leap off the rampart wall, egged on by the rest of their younger cousins. The resulting cacophony was almost loud enough to drown out the gnashing and booming of the primordial juggernaut below Jatayu’s talons.
Almost, but not quite. From time to time, Jatayu could feel the solid rock beneath its claws tremble with the vibrations from the volcano below, and the tips of its wings, hanging a good thirty feet down, shivered with the searing heat. A fresh geyser erupted, throwing up great gouts of red molten magma shot through with black slag, and the fledglings squawked nervously and leaped back into the aerie. They cackled to each other about Jatayu’s fearlessness in staying poised there despite the ferocity of the eruptions.
Jatayu barely heard their awed squawking and cackling. The bird-beast was angry, and it had been angry for the whole of the day. On its arrival at the island-kingdom three days earlier, it had found only the old ones of its flock in the aerie, those pathetic youngling-minders that had been too badly crippled, old or feeble-minded to undertake the long flight north for the Lord of Lanka’s invasion.
The olduns had nevertheless received their vulture-king with a mixture of superstitious awe and fear. Once they were reassured that it was indeed Jatayu itself and not their lord’s aatma returning to haunt its last roost, they had welcomed it back as best as they were able. Jatayu had been consoled and fed and had its wounds tended to, and even rested these past two nights and days. It had stayed in the large tower-roost long enough to grow weary of the fledglings’ constant squawking and squabbling. When it slept, the little ones crawled and flapped and leaped over its large body with an utter disregard for Jatayu’s lordly stature or its currently injured condition. Normally, Jatayu would have occupied the far side of the aerie, surrounded by the pick of the plumpest females of its flock, all its needs tended to with lavish care. But there were no females now, nor any males, and the younglings had the run of the entire aerie.
Physically, Jatayu felt almost normal, and it was certain that a few moon-spans of rest and feeding would restore its robust health in full. What it was unable to accept was the loss of its entire flock. It had been bitterly disappointed to find that not a single one of the winged warriors that had set out with it on the flight to Mithila had returned. Every last one had been wiped out by the Brahm-astra. Even though it had witnessed the awesome ferocity of the celestial weapon, it had still harboured a faint trace of hope that somehow, somewhere, a survivor had managed to escape the dragon breath of the mantra and would find its way home.
But three entire days had passed, and just today, Jatayu had made a few brief flights to chase down and interrogate many of the southward-flying birds who had fled the environs of Mithila in sheer terror. All those it questioned roughly were unanimous on one count: there had been no survivors. When Jatayu had told one of the birds, a particularly pompous white swan leading its harem, that it, Jatayu, had managed to survive the Brahmastra, the puffed-up fool had cocked its head in mock dismay and issued a cackling call that was echoed all down the curving line of its harem flock. Jatayu had wanted to tear off the stupid bird’s head with one snap of its mighty beak, but its strength was still depleted and it had already flown far from the island in its chase after the swan flock. It chose instead to turn back, its heart leaden enough to weigh it down until its wings brushed the tips of the foam-flecked waves all the way back to the black fortress.
Clearly, the swan-king had been wrong in its assumption: after all, Jatayu itself had survived, but as its interrogations continued and the same message was repeated by a variety of other south-flying species, Jatayu was forced to admit that it was probably the only survivor of the devastation wrought by the Brahm-astra.
Apart from one other.
Jatayu’s mannish features darkened to an ugly grimace as it recalled the block of glassy red stone that had accompanied it on the return voyage home to Lanka. The block had been suspended beneath the Pushpak, and from its perch atop the celestial vehicle Jatayu had been able to look down directly at the form murkily embedded in the heart of the veined stone. It had taken every ounce of its willpower to retain its grip on the Pushpak instead of letting go as it dearly longed to do. Had it possessed the strength to fly on its own to some other safe clime where it would be rid for ever of the king of rakshasas, it would have done so. But its oozing wounds and loss of feathers and wing muscle had compelled it to cling on to the speeding air-chariot and endure the ten faces of Ravana staring up at it all the way to Lanka. At least the asura lord’s eyes had been closed, all twenty of them.
Besides, it had had no other place to go, Jatayu mused now as it raised its bald head to peer around the dark roost filled with squabbling, crying younguns. The last of its breed were all here in Lanka. Apart from this pathetic clutch, there were no more of the giant bird-beasts that had once dominated the skies. This was all that remained of a proud ruling clan, a few tottering old fogies that could barely spread a wing, and a score and ten younguns too small to know a jatayu from a garuda if they ever saw one.
The thought of Garuda brought to mind the recollection that the lord of winged beings still lived, and ruled over a flourishing and prosperous clan, or even a number of clans by now, up in Swarga-lok, the heavenly realm. But that celestial plane was long since barred to Jatayu. No, here on Prithvi-lok, this was all the family it had left. And the only hope it now clung to was that some of these spitting, quarrelling young brats would grow up to breed a new dynasty of bird-beasts as magnificent as the ones Jatayu had grown with.
The image of its youth brought back a flood of memories of times when Jatayu had basked in an eminence second only to Garuda itself, father of all birdkind. Ah, those had been the days. Before these wretched warmongering asuras had appeared on the
scene, when the name Ravana hadn’t been in the vocabulary of any language yet known.
Jatayu was torn out of its memories by a blood-chilling sound. At first it assumed that one of the younglings fooling about on the rampart had fallen over and its wings were too badly frozen with fear for it to lift itself in time to avoid the leaping geysers of lava below. It turned and scanned the aerie. No, the younguns were still safely in the nest, all looking as startled as Jatayu itself, peering around to identify the source of the scream. The olduns shuffled and hopped around agitatedly, calling out to each other and to Jatayu. The bird-king felt sick of their constant mewling and complaints. Was this its future? To live amongst feebles and younguns too nervous to take their first leap? Bah. It should never have flown towards the Pushpak in the first place. It would have been better off battling the crab-rats, or even rksas if it came to it. Anything would have been better than this wretched existence.
Then it raised its head to peer in the direction of the setting sun and saw something that made it change its mind all at once. A pair of kumbha-rakshasas had emerged on to the ramparts a few hundred metres west of the aerie. Had they been closer, Jatayu might have suspected them of coming up here in search of younguns - rakshasas would eat anything if they were hungry enough. And those damn nagas and uragas salivated —if snakeasuras could be said to salivate— at the very scent of young jatayus.
Jatayu scraped its talons along the rim of the rampart, issuing a screeling cry that lacked much of its former vigour but was nonetheless piercing enough to make the younguns cower nervously and a distant flock of swallows, some two yojanas out to sea, veer away and take a major detour from their flight path. For good measure, it raked its claws along the edge of the rampart at an angle designed to cause the most nerve-grating sound. It scored deep long scars in the ancient volcanic rock, cracking one corner and sending it hurtling into the red-orange maw of the belching monster below.
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