The Queen's Play (15 page)

His frame has become lean from lack of food, but he walks with an assured stride, his eyes deep and blazing, such that as he wades through the water, the leopard by the bank abandons its kill and fades into the wilderness. Further still, the earth seems to contract in a painter's palette. He lifts the still warm gazelle onto his shoulder and walks in search of nettles. He likes this place. The mounds, the cave, the river sprawling across the green and russet landscape and, at the far end, the mountains, silent, eternal, cloaked in their own ice-mists.

For days, for months, he does nothing but stare at the view before him, until all that is without is also within. His rations are plain and meagre. Sallowthorn, nettles, a lump of salt, cool water to drink. On
some nights, he collects juniper twigs to build a fire and, when the mood is upon him, chants the hymns of the Sāma Veda with a deep emotion. Master of the lute, master now of the subtle winds travelling through his body, he pulls taut an arm such that the veins rise up from his spare flesh, and he presses and plucks them as if they were so many strings over the frets.

In time he is on the move again. Now come the days of rapture, days of delirium. Days of trudging where nothing moved but he. The river angles away to his right, and the bulwark of high peaks seems to slant leftward. They too, it appears, are abandoning him, and he walks into the desert opening wide at his feet. Above him, in the blue of the firmament, a skein of geese, as if replicating the features of the landscape, flies west too. He drinks frugally from his make-do flask, and chews a few green twigs for nourishment. His mind seems to be anchored to the flesh by the flimsiest of bonds, yet he pays no attention to either, he, who watches the watcher, that which watches the I.

For three days he walks without cease, and in the early evening of the fourth he glimpses from the corner of his eye a band of blue as if alight. He walks toward it enchanted. After almost an eternity he sees the first signs of life, of wild asses grazing along its near shore, bold and prepossessing in their serenity. The mind-lake comes into view in an arc of indigo tempered with ice-floes that continually shudder and splinter and cave in from their own weight, creating a terrible symphony of sounds. He is observing the elements in their purest form, in ceaseless activity and collision. The tumult of the celestial crush which not ten, not a hundred battle- fields could match. The lake roars and groans, he can hear cries of human agony and the melancholy moans of a thousand conches and the deep boom of the war drums rising from it. In the depthless silence of the desert, the lake acts as a counterpoint.

He slowly climbs up a promontory of sparkling rocks only to find that these are whole plateaux of congested snow as old and firm as the land itself. He walks on and is presently skirting mudflats
where gulls and sand martins roam with ever-alert eyes. He falls into a pit and instantly the warmth of the earth pervades his every pore and in its bosom he falls to sleep.

In the legend revealed to him in childhood, the lake is his kin, a distant brother or sister, and in spite of the ice which the waves thrust inshore, its water feels warm against the skin. He lifts his hand away and a spoonful of it settles in the hollow of his palm, the surplus dribbling through his curled fingers. He mumbles a few words invoking Brahmā and quickly sucks in the lake's nectar from the base of the palm, feeling it slowly trickle down and settle near his navel, insubstantial like vapour and yet ever present like a cosmic fragment from the god's mind.

Cured of hunger, thirst, and fatigue, he suddenly feels himself immortal, the benisons of heaven circulating in his system. When he walks out of the lake, his tread is lighter than air, and he seems to cover substantial ground at each step without noticing. There is in him a sense of accomplishment, though what he has accomplished he cannot say. Yet he feels he has found his one true home, and wherever he goes it will go with him.

Now the bank rises steeply away from the lake and he chances upon a cave scooped from stone and pink-coloured debris. The lake lies beneath him, foaming under a chiaroscuro of snow-white clouds and deep brown mountains. Is it a swan he sees?, a goose?, calmly sailing over its indigo sheen. Or is it only a rock of ice? Perhaps it is Śiva himself, come down from Kailas to take his leisure in the divine waters.

There are hot springs nearby and sometimes he slips into them, lying still for hours, eyes locked onto the faintly visible snow cone of Kailas, rising above its own mandala of dark sandy hills, its black granite shining in the form of a step-ladder where the slant is sheer and the snow cannot take hold. Adepts believe it is a stairway to other worlds, and one from which the mountain-god himself comes down. Here, too, sometimes he boils fish that he finds shored against the lake's edge, their lives descended into the water's immensity. A
single boiled morsel can keep hunger at bay for days. Daily he follows the moon's cycle and reads the stars, making complex calculations in his head.

He is slowly drifting westward again, en route to the mountain itself. Late one afternoon he has his first sighting of the other lake, opening in a sweeping crescent away from him, its water the colour of a peacock's tail, a cloud bank forever hanging above, throwing most of it into perpetual shade and the relief of the land rising and breaking in support of its eerie beauty. This is the dark god's altar. Blessed or not, here he must perform severe penance for his gruesome acts, for the blood he has shed in the past, before the mountain will welcome him.

For nine full nights, he sits by its shore, his flesh feverish from the mind's heat. On the tenth, when a sickle-shaped moon settles upon the mountain's left flank, he slits a finger and lets the blood fall into the ink-black water of the lake. The drops fall slowly against the shining sliver of the moon, dissolving in a sharp hiss at the point of contact, as if they did not share the same fluid form but were hard glowing coals extinguishing in brief violent gasps. Just when the last drop falls into the lake, the ritual concluded, a snowstorm breaks over the mountain's southern face, signalling the success of the sacrifice. He knows this for the granite steps rising sharp from the seeming softness of snow shine clearer than before as if embossed over its white immensity for his sake alone.

He is stirred by this phenomenon. Overcome by the darkness that lies dormant in him and which the lake reflects like his own subcon- scious, he raises its water to his cold, cracked lips on a sudden impulse. A tremor, a sting, goes through them, for the water is utterly saline, even bitter. Bile rises in his throat and he steers away, retching.

Between the two lakes, the first the source of life and the second forever lifeless, is the path that heads to Kailas, and it is there he goes. The night seems endless, and he is soon scaling the mountain slope, rising sheer into the sky's depth. Slow and stumbling he
inches upward, fighting for purchase on the slippery rocks, each step of the stone ladder hundreds of feet apart, until just before dawn, halfway from the summit, the crescent moon hangs an arm's length away, Śiva's powerful sickle out there for the taking. A slow howl breaks from his throat, which is tinged blue, perhaps because of the opaline beams that break on the snow, perhaps because he is possessed by the fearsome god himself who is this very moment pouring
his
essence in the concavity of his soul. The howl now is a terrifying roar. And this too is a meaning of his name, Ravana. He, of the thunderous roar.

He does not hear or see the avalanche building behind him, and it finds him unaware, carrying him down to the foot of the mountain and beyond in a raging torrent of ice.

He awakes far off in the wilderness. How he got here he does not know. He picks himself up and begins to walk. He follows no set direction, roving in the desert like a madman.

After months he comes upon a place strangely familiar from some half-forgotten memory. This could have been a settlement, although not permanent. Now nothing remains, only signs of ruin and abandonment, if ruin, that is, can come to that which is itself transient. For a while he moves about the place. A few discarded objects, a charred pole, here and there pegs driven into the ground still clutching half-burnt ropes, scattered, dust-ridden utensils, a necklace of cowrie shells, the half-eaten corpse of a woman. Not a touch of emotion he feels, walks impassively across the site as if the whole world was a charnel ground.

He reaches a hillock and crouches beneath the overhang of a rock. He sits very still. All at once, he is aware of movement. But when he scans the surroundings there is nothing. Then a shuffle of steps. The tread of a child, light, nervous, even fearful. He explores no further, banishes the thought from his mind.

In the evening, he builds a small fire, shielding it with round stones, baking the last ration of tubers he carries on him. The flames throw jagged, dancing shadows on the near wall. He watches them
awhile. Then he sees one shadow separate from the tangled mass and grow still. He turns to look the other way. The child is beside him, smeared in dirt, slight abrasions on her arms and chin, clothes in tatters, observing his profile without curiosity, as if she knows something about him that he will never know himself.

HIDDEN AND scattered amidst the plenitude of life, dreams and objects lie in wait for us. It is to them, or rather to a few among them, that we are forever inching unaware, sketching our personal cartographies onto the world as we go along, rounding the bends like a rope curling on the pegs, marking our one true territory on land and water, on matter and mind. But in the never relenting movement of time and fate, it is only natural that these first encounters leave no trace of recognition in us, no impression of their significance or the soon-to-be-exerted totemic power in our locked and struggling lives.

So it was with the king when he first saw the queen's game. They had been drifting out of the bay all evening under the slow push of a south-west wind, and the royal craft now near stationary was rocking gently on the waves. The moon recently risen appeared to head straight for the constellation of Cetus, but down here in the ocean its light was washing over the wet backs of whales that had come up to draw breath and emit short vaporous jets into the air. He had been watching from beneath the billowing sails these magnif- icent beings born under the constellation's sign, and like him shaped and nurtured by two elements. He has always felt a certain closeness with them, a kinship difficult to define, for what could connect him to these fortresses of flesh trailing their vast bulks in the open horizons of the sea? And yet it is for their sake alone that he makes this voyage each year, succumbs again and again to the water's lure.

Still under the dark, diaphanous clutch of the night, it was inevitable that he would fail to register the full weight of the moment
in which he first saw the checked board and the two miniature immobile armies, surprisingly slim and shorn of all but the more symbolic of distinguishing features. Nor did he later think much of this initial encounter, for by then the game and its working had so subtly and completely pervaded his judgment that defeat and death in life was just another endgame in the binary universe of the board.

Ever since the queen had finished improving and perfecting the technical aspects of play, her attention had turned to its outward form. Once every few weeks, a fresh set of pieces was delivered to her, appropriately modified as per her wishes, but she had scarcely begun to take joy in their craftsmanship, when error would jump out of their design and conception, spoiling her momentary delight. Still bulky, needlessly ornate, overwrought, she would repeat time and again to the chief artisan, sketching for his benefit upon the air what was even to her but faintly discernible. What she had been unable to propose at once was the idea of replacing the image with its symbol. Only this she knew, that to maintain the balance of its enhanced possibilities the pieces had to reflect the swiftness and ease of the game's new lines and movements, and the imagistic figures of old were of little help here. As a consequence, the visible side of the game changed gradually into something that at first glance was near unrecognizable from its ancient prototype. Not surprising if one thinks how with each new ruler on the throne, the kingdom and its emblems, its architecture and artefacts, indeed the most common of objects like keys and bells and pottery, underwent such slow and subtle transformations that in a matter of years what the kingdom projected to a returning traveller was something perceptibly different from the picture lodged in memory.

Nearly half a hand in length, tapering out from an identical round base into disparate shapes at their crests, the pieces stood in their beige or ochre squares at the opposite ends of the board, here a pale white in colour and there a shining ebony, horses, elephants, and ships flanking the slightly taller, crowned but otherwise featureless, heads of king and queen at the centre, with a low line of
footmen in front, alert and watchful like sentinels. Two full armies ready for battle.

And yet when the board caught his eye, the profile of the queen motionless above it, the king simply imagined this to be a model of imminent engagement between two sides, at best a symbolic and beautifully crafted showpiece, attractive though lifeless, soon to take its place on the shelf among many of its kind, and growing ever inert each day under the gaze of habit. Think then of his surprise when he realized that the pieces were not fixed but moveable. Instinctively, he grabbed the white horse and advanced it like in the old game, jumping over the pawn in front to lay it in the third square to the right from its original position. And with this oblique leap of the horse dawned on him the enormous thrust the game had been given by dint of the queen's ingenuity alone, and his eyes shone with fresh interest, even admiration. A single reflex, and his intuition had revealed half of the departures to him, already the dice was useless, forgotten, the will supreme, in control and at work everywhere.