The Queen's Play (13 page)

Later, when that spy had burnt half the city to cinders, when our armies suffered one blow upon another, when one brave fighter after the next was felled by the enemy's blows and arrows, when the king in a final attempt to save the situation withdrew behind the city walls to perform the grand ritual sacrifice to propitiate the deity, the
yajña
from whose blazing fire he vowed not to separate himself until he had imbibed its fierce heat to become a being of pure flame that nothing could touch and from which the enemy would run in fear and trembling, when a handful of enemy soldiers breached the city walls to disrupt this very ritual sacrifice and distract the king, jumping from ledge to ledge, swinging from curtains and banisters, even harassing the queen, rending her robes, nearly raping her, obliging the king to break his vow, voices slowly began to murmur, as if from deep down empty wells, posing questions that seem to have no definite answers.

One blamed the kidnapping, another that devious sister of his, yet another attacked, though almost in whispers, the false pride of
the king, his casual dismissal of our every misgiving, of our rising concern since the burning of the city, even the queen's repeated entreaties to set the captive free and avoid a pointless war. Indeed a priest went as far as to predict the king's end, since it was common belief that the queen's chastity was his one true shield, which, alas, had fallen at the hands of those wretched harrying savages, monkeying about with the sole aim to disrupt the sacrificial ritual, the
yajña
. As if this wasn't enough, the oracle drew a connection from some past life in which the captive was none other than the king's own daughter, and a desire to join with your daughter, in this life or another, was a sin for which even Prajāpati had not been spared.

Prajāpati had awakened from his long cosmic slumber in the dead of the night. It was always night. Only he at first, no other. From this loneliness had arisen first fear, then desire. He stared into space, and his desire made a rent in the fabric of darkness, letting in streaks of light. Thus was born his daughter, Uṣa, the dawn. The God rejoiced, for here at last was company. Instantly, without him coming to know, lost that he was in delight and desire, were born his descendants. Yet no sooner born than they wished to rid themselves of the Father's sin. Thus they sacrificed him who had engendered them. How, then, if the divination was correct, reasoned one old courtier, could the king elude a fate before which the Creator himself had yielded?

Tiresome speculation. Meaningless exchange of words carried out by fools and parasites who knew nothing better, forever playing with symbols, the one perennial pastime which was the basis of so much of our philosophy and history that we had long since forgotten their essence, content with believing the flimsiest story in the name of truth.

Because I was away in battle, and because most of the talking took place behind my back, I only heard these rumours belatedly, when there was little left to prove or salvage. Since that time though I have come to feel, whatever be the merit of these assertions, that the reason itself was far simpler. How easily we had forgotten that
the king had received the boon of immortality from none other than Śiva himself, who is beyond time, and hence the one best placed to offer it. Or was it Brahmā? No, it was not a matter of honour, pride, or colour, not a matter of lust or desire, but a call of something smouldering inside, an invitation to endgame, to death. Something had taken root deep within the king's soul the moment it had been set free. For he must have known better than anyone else that what the gods grant they take away, or rather they only grant that which can be taken away. The boon after all comes with its terms, and terms are expressed in speech, and what is speech but a dark slimy tunnel through which every real intention slips past. The terms can never cover all possibilities, and so every immortality is contingent on one or another excluded event not taking place. Hence are the gods so free with boons, because in due course all things come to pass.

Did the king see then, when he heard the avalanche answering his prayers in the desert, what I see now, this image of himself falling in battle, the end of the accursed arrow sticking out from his navel, and the shining bare landscape with small triangular flags of five colours fluttering from a line stretched across it, home of homes, to which he had at last arrived?

A shadow passes over me in sleep. I look up. A crane, its legs tucked in, is catching the sun in its outstretched wings. I dream on. I am alone, the world nothing but a small empty room, a ten-by-ten- foot space, somehow glowing. In a corner, a large copper urn. Near the centre, a deity with a flowing mane, face turned away from me, stomping and swaying in a slow, surprisingly soundless dance.

TWO ANCIENT, venerable bloodlines met in the king. Two elements. Born of light and dark in equal measure, there was something of the inexplicable in him, something which resisted naming, escaping even those who knew him best.

Legend spoke of his birth on the banks of river Hir that flowed through the island of Lanka. Sumali, the king of the southern clans, dubbed by those in the north as the
Asuras
or the dark ones, wished to increase and fortify his already vast dominion, the preferred way for which was alliances formed through marriage. Toward this end, he set his sight on the sage Visravas, not only the most powerful man on earth, but the son of the great Pulastya himself, one of the ten mind-born sons of Prajāpati, now twinkling upon the world from the asterism of Big Dipper, to whom he intended to give away in marriage the hand of his daughter, Kaikesi.

While he was pondering over his plan, news came to him of the sage's visit to a hermitage in a neighbouring forest. Taking this to be a fortuitous sign, he arranged for his daughter to be noticed by Visravas just as the sage was leaving his host's cottage. Nothing more was needed on Sumali's part, he knew that if the two met, things would inevitably take the course he desired. Famed for her charm and intelligence, Kaikesi would not fail him.

Not altogether unexpectedly then, the king found Visravas walking into the royal court the very next day with a wish to seek his daughter's hand in marriage. Only too happy to oblige, the king at once announced a grand ceremony to be held in three days' time.
Filled with a sudden tenderness for this man who had received him with such humility and devotion, the sage blessed the king and promised his eternal protection to the empire and its people.

This being achieved, Sumali rested in peace and, once the wedding was over, left them undisturbed in the hut by the river, calmly watching from a distance, awaiting the birth of his grand- child.

In time the couple was blessed with a son. More children would follow. But that first child was special or was considered special. Considerate and kind, aggressive and arrogant by turn, he would grow up to be an exemplary scholar and warrior, learned in scrip- tures, reader of stars, master of the
vīṇā
. They called him Rāvaṇa, after a thought came to the mother's lips on seeing the infant, he who wins the gods by just actions, he, the lineage-bearer of sun- worshippers. Straddling two very different worlds, with one foot in the forest and the other in the palace, at home both in the pieties and rituals of his father's life and the splendour and ethics of his mother's world, he grew up into a hybrid like no other, an ascetic with the brow of a king, or a king who went around in a sage's garb, a man loved and feared equally, discoursing in two tongues, moving from observances of one realm to those of the other with uncommon ease, channelling and blending the knowledge of two distinct cultures to leap beyond into an understanding greater than either and one that was wholly unique.

Thus, later, when a struggle ensued to take control of his grand- father's empire, he was able to easily gain the support of all concerned and swiftly quell whatever slight resistance there remained in his race to the throne.

Receiving an empire that was already vast and powerful, he brought, over the years, further territories and vassal states under his control through a mix of diplomacy, mediation, and campaign. Because he was neither entirely of the north nor entirely of the south, and of each side in part, many clans identified with him, either out of fear or out of awe, and he was able to bridge the chasm
that had forever divided the two races, earning the respect of even those who ruled on the far edges of the world.

But what on the outside joined him to both sides, divided him internally. The deep axe-wound of exile, of homelessness, a fate no hybrid can escape, for it is not of the world but of the mind, unless you take the two to be one and the same, inseparable. As the world contracted before his eyes to something solid and manageable, a tear opened somewhere inside past which a steady stream of diffusion seeped and spread. With the woman he loved beside him and with no kingdom left within sight to conquer, his gaze turned back to probe its very source. First uncertainty, then boredom, then restlessness grew in him. And so came the day when without a word to anyone except his queen and two or three trusted ministers and even to them offering only a tentative sketch of his desire, he slipped out of the palace late one night.

The queen did not once demur when she heard his wish. Only a few years of marriage and she too longs for the gap that is about to open, less a distancing than an acknowledgment of the void into which the ferocity of their feelings had quietly vanished, the void which is the slow, cruel turning of days and years, the millstone whose heavy measured rotation grinds every ambition, every meaning to dust.

At each step away from the city, the ruler in him dies a little and the wanderer awakes, groaning and blinking, or better still, it is the wandering spirit of his childhood that has lain sleeping in the shade for who knows how long.

He heads north, following an instinct, the paths of the past, in the memory of his father, whom he has not seen in years and of whose whereabouts he has not the slightest idea, but also because he cannot go further south before soon encountering the ocean, overfamiliar, billowing with pointless activity, past which there is nothing but more swells, and then ice, teeming with beings that accept his sover- eignty, live in his protection.

It is north he must go, retrace his steps across a continent he has
patiently sculpted with all his ambition, tact, and fury, although now like a commoner, like a mendicant traveller if it comes to that, covered in dust with calloused palms and ankles, free of his banners and regalia, his elephants and armies, so that no one gives him a moment's attention even as he notices everyone and everything.

By the time night falls again, he has been walking without a single halt for a whole day in the forest, his strength on the ebb and mind grown vacant. He finds himself next to a mud hut of a recluse or an ascetic, its low walls a pale blue in the filigree light of the moon flashing through leaves and branches. He asks for water and a place to rest, settling down on the ground against the wall. He drinks from a gourd and his upturned jaw through which the water trickles is blue in the blue of the air. The ascetic hands him a pipe filled with hemp and he is grateful for it. Never having been one for words, he leisurely drags in silence the lush vapours into his lungs to the point of bursting. He thinks nothing, or rather no thought comes to him, not even the memory of his own steps on the forest floor, not even the dry scratching of thorns and shrubs all over his legs and ankles, not the birdsong he has heard throughout the day, not the wind in the trees.

When he is shown into the hut, he shuffles about briefly in the gloom, trying to ascertain his bearings. A floor of beaten mud cracking in places, a much scoured copper pot, two or three spoons, a wooden ladle, half-rotten and losing shape, a pail, a gourd, walls lined with soot. Low flames hissing in a clay stove built in a corner leave a gloss on the dark which is otherwise complete. The anchorite hands the traveller something to eat, the taste of ash and salt, and turns away to douse the fire for the night.

He stretches himself out where he has been sitting and soon sleep lies heavy on him, while his host sits on his haunches in the dark, silent, motionless, his eyes, yellowed from melancholy, hardship or illness, fixed and sparkling like embers deep in a grate.

He is up at dawn, but his host is already in the open, working a small vegetable patch at the rear of the hut. He watches him awhile
as the other pulls out a few potatoes and green shoots from the ground unaware that he is being observed. When he finally approaches the traveller, he has in his arms a melon, which he breaks open on a stone and of which he offers one half to his guest. If the older one suspects something in his bearing or manner he doesn't say so, and for the first time there occurs a brief exchange, more a careful barter of words, revealing hardly anything significant, yet to ears trained to register subtle inflexions, eyes that catch the hint, nothing more perhaps is necessary.

Soon he is on his way. The spontaneous and natural generosity he has received this past night he should not expect so readily to find in future. But the kindness is also the kindness of nature and of those who are close to it and he moves in its protection, every day walks deeper into its fold. He emerges from the trees and treads in open grasslands, waist deep through shafts that bend in the wind, shine golden like waves on the sea. He startles a hare and swiftly snatches it away from the wild grass, wringing its neck and hanging it from his shoulder. To the west the terrain rises into the rocks, and it is to them that he heads in search of a cave to rest for the night. Now he is walking straight into a swollen and distended sun that trembles and drips into space like molten wax, the colour of blood. Near where the climb snakes into the crags, he halts at a pond where egrets watch him from serrated boulders. Along the gravel path winding upward, he collects sticks to build a fire.

Night finds him sitting on a rock at the mouth of a crevice into which he will crawl and be safe from the wind that is growing ever fierce by the minute. To one side he has built a low fire upon which the soft flesh of the hare he recently flayed lies roasting and crackling. The cold makes his eyes water and the dark passes through this teary sieve to explode at the far edge in a shower of light. They fall, the stars, in wide arcs along the curve of outer space and are instantly born anew back above in the heavens. Later, when he slips into the stony gap like a snake, he hears the wind breaking against the rocks, receding, breaking again, as if the earth itself is
drawing and expelling breath. For a while he follows its rhythm, lying flat on his back, slowing the beat of his heart to the heartbeat of the world. He feels neither fatigue nor the need for sleep, in fact his mind is calm and alert, utterly empty. Now and then as the wind changes its course, in the brief perfect silence that reigns in the air, he hears faintly the wolf-howls from the edge of the jungle, a half- day's march behind him.