The Satapur Moonstone

by Sujata Massey

  It was almost the same shape as the dowager’s snuffbox. Edging closer to get a better look, she realized that it looked more like a cigarette box. And then she remembered Vandana displaying that very box at the circuit house and showing off all the extra cigarette boxes she’d bought at Cartier on the table in her home.

  Perveen had smelled the faint odor of smoke when Aditya arrived at the circuit house.

  The question was not whether he’d met with Vandana, but the purpose of the meeting.

  “What are you looking at?” Aditya asked sharply.

  “Nothing! This place is small, but it looks comfortable.” She did not want him understanding that the cigarette case had shaken her. What she needed was to get the children to walk out of the tower with her. Only after they were away from Aditya could she put together the pieces of the puzzle.

  “Who told you about this tower?” Aditya demanded.

  “The palanquin bearers pointed it out to me,” she said. “But it’s a bit tight for all four of us. Let me take the children out—they need something to eat.”

  He moved more solidly in front of the doorway. Folding his hands across his chest, he said, “No.”

  “Why are you talking so meanly?” Padmabai gave him a petulant look.

  “My princess, what would you like me to say?” The buffoon had a strange glint in his eyes as he looked at the princess. Perveen felt the hairs on her arms standing up.

  Jiva Rao had settled against the tower wall, pulling his arms around his legs. He had made himself into a ball. Perveen wondered what had transpired between Aditya and the maharaja before she’d arrived. As if sensing the prince’s distress, Ganesan trotted over and lay at the boy’s side, but Jiva Rao kept his arms locked around himself.

  “Aditya-yerda, stop being angry,” Padmabai said, still behaving as if she hadn’t sensed the quiet, coiled danger that Perveen and Jiva Rao both seemed to recognize. Climbing into one of the camp chairs, she demanded, “Tell me a story while I wait for my tea.”

  Aditya looked at her with an expression that seemed to hold years of irritation. Then he gave a cynical eye roll to Perveen. “Why shouldn’t they hear a story? My own story is much better than your Wind in the Willows. Maharaja, will you kindly take the chair near your sister?”

  Despite the courteous invitation, Perveen had a dreadful feeling that he was about to put Padmabai and Jiva Rao through something awful. His life story would probably be full of hardship and harsh opinions of the royal family. As Jiva Rao uncurled himself and dropped into the camp chair near Padmabai, Perveen asked, “What about the Panchantantra? Or Jataka tales?”

  “No, no, no! Perveen-memsahib, you can read books,” Padmabai explained in a grown-up voice. “Buffoon’s job is to tell us stories that are not in books.”

  Aditya spread his arms gracefully and made a slight bow. “As you wish, my dear princess.”

  Perveen stood rigidly, watching the courtly behavior with a growing sense of dread.

  “Two autumns ago, after the rains had stopped and the roads became hard enough for the postal cart to travel, the postmen brought a letter for me,” Aditya began. “I could read my name on the envelope, but not much more.”

  “Because you haven’t learned to read yet!” Padmabai said, grinning.

  Perveen flinched, worried that Aditya would react badly to Padmabai’s condescending words. But he winked at the child and answered her in the same falsely pleasant tone. “That is because I am not rich like you. And I was called to work at the palace when I was nine.”

  The buffoon was twenty-four years old, which put his year of birth around 1897. The maharaja Mahendra Rao was born in 1878, so he could have been the royal father who had passed on golden-brown eyes to Aditya. But the dowager’s husband, Maharaja Mohan Rao, was firmly in middle age when Aditya was born. And hadn’t Mr. Basu said that the dancer had disappeared for some months while she was a young teenager? Perveen was willing to bet the time span the dancer was missing lay between 1896 and 1897.

  Aditya’s voice interrupted Perveen’s frantic calculations. “Now, please guess. Who had sent me a letter when everyone knows I cannot read?”

  “Someone who doesn’t know you!” Padmabai guessed. “How did you learn what it said?”

  “Oh, I asked Pratik to read it to me. The letter said that if I came to the racetrack in Poona on a certain date, someone would meet me with a special gift.”

  “What did you do?” Padmabai drummed her feet impatiently on the earthen floor.

  “Traveling to the racetrack was easy enough for me to arrange because, as you know, I am given free reign to travel and bring back gossip for Rajmata.” He gave Perveen a knowing look, and she forced a smile. She could not let him see her fear.

  “What was the gift?” Jiva Rao asked, his expression wary.

  “A beautiful lady handed me a packet of rupees. I asked who she was, and why she was doing this. She confessed she was my mother! What a surprise that was for me. As everyone knows, I was raised by a buffoon family in a village. She asked them to bring me up while she was working.”

  Padmabai beamed. “Where did the beautiful mother work? Was she a beautiful lawyer like Perveen-memsahib?”

  Perveen liked that Padmabai assumed there was a world of women lawyers, but she thought it was silly for Padmabai to call her beautiful. She certainly did not feel that way, with her face and hands smudged with dirt, and with bits of leaves and sticks crumbled into her riding skirt.

  “This was her job.” He rolled his arms, miming an Indian classical dancer. “For a while she had danced in the very palace you know so well, for all the maharajas who came to visit. But then—instead of fetching me out of the village, as would have been kind—she went to France and Switzerland. When my mother called me to the racetrack, she did so to beg my pardon and to say she always thought of me. And that if things had gone right, I would have been a maharaja.”

  “She was a dancer, and you became a maharaja.” Not understanding the significance of his words, Padmabai clapped. “It’s a good story. But too short.”

  Perveen saw Jiva Rao’s eyes flicker toward the doorway. She waited to catch his eye and gave him a slight nod of encouragement. She would throw herself in the buffoon’s path if needed. But as Jiva Rao slowly began rising from the chair, the buffoon looked at him sharply. “Sit down. Your story is not finished.”

  “Yes, he is going to tell us about his royal place!” Padmabai trilled.

  Sitting uncomfortably on the edge of his chair, Prince Jiva Rao looked contemptuously at his sister. “You fool, can’t you see he’s not talking about a different place? He wants to rule Satapur instead of me.”

  “You are more intelligent than people say!” The buffoon’s voice was rich with sarcasm.

  Perveen felt sweat beading on her temples. She had wanted to avoid a confrontation.

  Padmabai shook her head so her braids trembled. “But Wagh is our maharaja.”

  “He would be—unless he has an accident.” The buffoon paused, his eyes sweeping over Jiva Rao, whose jaw was set in an angry line, and Padmabai, whose face showed only confusion.

  “My dear children, have you forgotten your dead older brother?”

  “Let’s not speak of him!” Perveen implored as Padmabai’s eyes clouded over.

  “It happened near here,” Aditya said with an odd smile, and Perveen felt a chill run through her. It was wrong to smile when talking of another’s death. “I searched harder than anyone else for Prince Pratap Rao. I made this whistle.” He paused to bring his fingers to his lips and sent out a high-pitched sound that made Ganesan jump up and go to him. “The prince came to me. What a story he told!”

  “He told you a story?” Jiva Rao asked, as if he couldn’t stop himself.

  “He said that he’d chased a small tiger, but its mother had come and bared her teeth at him before she led
the baby away.”

  “He was very brave!” Padmabai said.

  “No—he was afraid,” Aditya said, patting Ganesan’s back. “So frightened he dropped his pistol.”

  “Our older brother dropped a pistol? It cannot be. He was very strong,” Jiva Rao said.

  “It is a pretend story—don’t worry!” Perveen said. But now she wondered if the weapon at Aditya’s waist was that very hunting pistol. It was a howdah, which had thick barrels and was designed for personal defense against predatory animals.

  The buffoon studied her for a moment and then gave a wide smile. “Believe what you choose.”

  “I want to know more stories about our brave brother. Nobody speaks of him. They want to forget.” Padmabai’s honest words made Perveen feel faint. She had a sense that the buffoon wanted to tell every detail of Pratap’s death—or make it sound even worse than it was. The goal was to hurt the children in a way that couldn’t be undone.

  The buffoon gave her a contemptuous glance and then, for Padmabai, made an exaggerated display of shivering. “Look how cold Perveen-memsahib is! Shall we drink tea?”

  Padmabai clapped. “Yes! Nobody has given me food, and I’m so hungry! Tea and rotis!”

  “The roti man is nearby. He can make them for the children. They can go out together to request them,” Perveen said quickly. If the royal children said they wanted something, he’d have to concur. She also wondered whether Rama might be nearby and could somehow intervene.

  “Roti later. First we must take tea.” Something about Aditya’s insistence sparked a warning in Perveen’s heart. The dowager had been the only poisoner at the palace—hadn’t she? But she could not walk. She needed someone to provide her with the poison, and it could have been the buffoon.

  Aditya took a box of matches from next to Vandana’s cigarette box and struck a match against the half-burned branches in the brazier at the room’s center. The flame took, and a small fire started. He poured water from an urn into a kettle and hung it on the half circle of metal set over the fire. As he went about the ritual, Perveen thought of quickly grabbing Padmabai and making a run for the door—but then she’d have to leave Jiva Rao, and because of his status, he was the most vulnerable of all of them.

  Padmabai bounced in the camp chair. “Aditya-yerda, tell us more of the story. You said that our brother saw a tiger and dropped his pistol.”

  “Yes. He was most worried about where he had left the gun. I said it would be too dangerous to go back to look for it. He was frightened Prince Swaroop would be angry because it belonged to him. So do you know what I did?” The buffoon opened his arms so wide they spanned half the tower’s width. “I said, ‘Come here. Cry in my arms, and I will make it better.’”

  “You always do that with him,” Padmabai said, smiling at Prince Jiva Rao, who was looking as if he’d seen a ghost.

  Perveen had an awful feeling about what might come next. She shook her head at Aditya. “Let’s not talk of a real beloved person who is gone. It hurts them.”

  The buffoon scowled at her. “And I have not been hurt, a thousand times?” Turning back to Padmabai and Jiva Rao, Aditya raised his hands and began to mime for them. “I held my hand like a cup behind his head. That made it easy to push his head down into the earth. I held him there for many minutes, until he stopped moving.”

  “Stop it!” Perveen cried out in vain. This was far too cruel to the children. What would he pantomime next—the prince struggling for his life?

  Jiva Rao would not see it, because he had buried his face in his own hands.

  But Padmabai was still oblivious. In a curious voice, she asked, “Did you put his head there to see Mole?”

  Aditya had confessed a murder, and while Padmabai was still puzzling it out, Jiva Rao’s shoulders were shaking with sobs.

  Perveen imagined that Jiva Rao understood that the reason the buffoon was being forthcoming was to bring terror right before the prince’s own death. Yet she could not succumb to this feeling. She remembered the time her father had asked her to run the interviewing of a client he was fairly certain had committed first-degree murder. He had counseled her to sound relaxed and unafraid. But how could she derail this man?

  He was a performer. And what came at a performance’s end?

  Perveen put one hand against the other and began clapping. “We must all clap for Buffoon and cheer him, too. What a story!”

  Padmabai began slapping her hands together, but not Jiva Rao. He buried his face deeper into his hands, and Perveen had the dreadful thought that he probably believed she delighted in his brother’s death.

  Aditya gave her a condescending smile. “It will not work. Nobody can hear the sounds of two people clapping so far from the lodge.”

  What did she have left? The element of surprise. “Did I tell you I spoke with your mother?”

  He looked startled for a moment and then shook his head. “You are not from this area. You can’t know her.”

  “I certainly do know Vandana Mehta. We had a long conversation that I already put on record.”

  “She didn’t tell me about you. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Actually, she matters quite a bit. She is well respected in government circles.”

  “But she is most likely dead by now. Datura takes less than twelve hours.”

  He was talking about the poison that the dowager had taken. So he must have procured it for her and kept some for his own use. She reminded herself that Dr. Andrews had made it to Heaven’s Rest. Vandana might survive.

  Trying not to show her agitation, Perveen asked, “Why would you do such a thing to your mother?”

  “She always wanted to give me money and fine things from Europe. I had only one request—we had talked about it since before the last rainy season. Still, she would not change her mind.”

  “What was your request?”

  “A simple thing. I only needed my mother to come forward and write a letter saying who my father was. She has important British friends who would believe her.” Shaking his head, he said, “She was foolish, saying that she would rather stay with her husband than join me when I became ruler.”

  “Your mother left you before—and this was another abandonment,” Perveen said, imagining his rage.

  “My mother leaves. But she always comes back,” Padmabai said, as if trying to cheer him up.

  Perveen took a deep breath. “I know you have been very badly hurt. But that does not mean it is necessary to hurt others. That cannot ever bring happiness.”

  Aditya threw his hands in the air as if her talk was inconsequential. “And do you think I was happy before? When you saw me smiling and bowing, you thought I was enjoying life?”

  “The rajmata created the situation that made your mother give you up,” Perveen said steadily. “Now she is dead. Please let me walk out of this tower with the children. They have done nothing to you.”

  “Impossible!” His hand went to his weapon. “If the stupid boy sniveling in that chair lives, I will lose my claim to the throne.”

  Perveen shook her head. Aditya’s desire was so off course it could never be granted—not even if every member of the royal family, Swaroop included, died. If she told him this, would it scuttle his manic plan? Swallowing hard, she began. “As a lawyer, I feel it is my duty to give you the correct advice.”

  His expression shifted, became more interested. “Yes, yes. I will need lawyers to help me.”

  Hoping he wouldn’t explode, she said, “The trouble is, the claim you wish to make would very likely be rejected.”

  “Of course it won’t!” He advanced toward her, speaking urgently. “I look very much like my father and my brothers. My mother is gone, but I will find others who can verify the truth about my mother and the maharaja.”

  “And which maharaja was your father?” Perveen kept her tone businesslike.
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br />   He paused, then said the name with reverence. “Maharaja Mohan Rao.”

  “So you are a half brother to Prince Swaroop.”

  “His older brother,” he corrected with a raised eyebrow. “Once that information is widely known, everyone in Satapur will want me to rule.”

  “But my brother is maharaja!” Padmabai bleated. Jiva Rao’s face was set in a despondent mask. He’d been taught enough about the history of the brutal Maratha wars to understand what Aditya had in mind for him.

  Perveen had to change the conversation. “There is a bar to the plan you have in mind. The trouble is that the succession for the Satapur throne does not pass between the sons of Maharaja Mohan Rao. It passes through the descendants of the succeeding ruler, the late Maharaja Mahendra Rao.”

  Frustration tightened Aditya’s jaw. “That’s not correct! In our palace, succession passed between brothers just recently. British approved!”

  “The reason that occurred was because Prince Pratap Rao had no offspring.” Perveen continued to speak carefully and slowly, lest she confuse him. “The British and royals set up strict laws about the path of succession.” Remembering what Colin had said about the maharaja of Baroda, she added, “They could even appoint an ordinary boy of royal caste from the area. But it would be important that both his parents were of royal caste.”

  Aditya’s expression froze. After a moment, he said, “You are lying.”

  “I am not lying. The reason your mother wouldn’t help you was because she knows this.” Trying to calm him, she continued, “Your mother loves you and wants to help you—but she knows that such a plan would not ever be legally accepted.”

  His expression had re-animated into threatening. “You shall suggest to the Britishers that I be named the ruler.”

  Perveen shook her head. “I would not suggest someone who didn’t let these children go free. A maharaja loves the people of his state. He doesn’t kill.”