The Queen's Play (9 page)

The shining tree, the bell and the moth, the dry, lingering karking of the bird, to connect them and hold them in the depth of my heart, to squeeze out from them every last drop of happiness, was this, then, my sole reason for living?

SEE THE hand that moves the piece? There is no hesitation in it. Not even premeditation. Only the faint beginnings of pleasure or something resembling it, even if the player is yet to feel it, or cannot locate its source or reason. It is that something unexplained we experience from directing another's pursuits or at least when we believe we are doing so, conveniently forgetting, while our gaze is trained elsewhere, that this pleasure is not for us alone.

Yet because they are simple wood or ivory pieces, dependent on the players' mercy for their movement, and because the players are closeted high up in their terrace gardens away from the press of human wills or history, the fiction, for the time being at least, is sustained. In fact, what neither of the players in this instance has noticed, so profound have been the changes wrought in this respect, so recent their altered positions that we may easily condone the ignorance on their part, is that the pleasure welling up in them is in truth a pleasure which stems not from the freedom to move but from the freedom to exercise control.

Why was the dice abandoned? For one reason alone. That fate ruled the board as it ruled us. That in every throw of the dice was unleashed on us afresh the remembrance of how properly and utterly we were tied in to its designs. Removing the dice from the game's functioning created the twin fiction of our freedom from forces we little understood, and our sole dominion over these tiny actors in the square field of our scrutiny. Go forth and vanquish the foe however you desire, spoke the new voice. This transference of will, or the
illusion of its transference, is the game's special lure, this its ultimate evil. So it is that loss and win are felt more profoundly than in any other game, for seldom can the illusion of will seem so smoothly manifest. Ask yourself why you so gladly measure your days and nights in the squares that reflect them? For the pleasure of lifting the tiny weight away from the smooth floor of the board to place it where you and only you wish it to be.

When Misa, stirring from her inertia, heeded the queen's words and, hovering her fingers over her army, still undecided, suddenly pushed the pawn one square forward from the horse on the king's flank, she did so unthinkingly, as if the dice still dictated movement. Reason and will had not yet begun to operate in her, had not had time enough to evict fate from the board, for time certainly is needed before thought may engender total illusion. What this move achieved though was to open the diagonal for the ship's advance. A better move at least than shifting the ship's or the elephant's pawn, which would have freed no channel for either of the larger pieces, given that the horse could have performed its oblique jump anyway.

But no matter how unthinking the first move, choices had begun to grow. On her part, the queen did not take long to respond. Neither was she distracted. She took the one step which was crucial even in the old game. To take hold of one or more of the centre squares on the board. And so she pushed the king's pawn a square forward. Misa could hardly wait to think now, the pieces had started to cast their pull on her, one controls but is controlled in the process. Paying no attention to her adversary's actions, she quickly picked up the second of the horse's pawns, this time on the queen's flank, and repeated her previous move.

For a while they continued in this manner, the queen fortifying her attack in the middle, and Misa building the pressure from the sides, until it looked as if the black forces were being swallowed up by the yellow battalion. Although it did not occur to her at first, somewhere in the back of her mind, the queen had the idea to advance herself, that is to say, the piece newly rendered in her
image, as soon as possible. But because the piece was tied to the king, could only slide a single square diagonally around him, and because the king could not move or be brought into the action just yet, to risk so much simply to further one's ambition would be sheer folly, she was beginning to feel annoyed as she moved her ships and horses, her pawns and elephants, without any real strategy though with foresight enough to avoid any unnecessary sacrifices, to challenge Misa's fast spreading army.

Eyes on the board, rarely meeting their rival's, hands, one just slightly longer than the other, lifting dark or pale pieces by turn and depositing them here and there, changing the relation of every piece to every other at every step, attacking and retreating and then attacking anew, creating countless geometric shapes and angles, one upon another, one in another, one beside another, triangles, rectangles, squares, polygons, parallel lines, intersecting lines, every design conceivable in our imagined geometry of spaces except the most imaginary and elusive of all, the circle, hollowing out from one edge only to crowd in a second, black and yellow pieces sliding past each other, occluding each other, capturing each other, free, able, ferocious.

The first exchange took place after some ten or twelve seemingly harmless moves. Misa took a pawn with a horse, and it made her almost weak with joy. But the queen hardly noticed. All her energies were concentrated on advancing into the fray, and soon she was dragging the king along all over the board, flouting with impunity the most basic of rules. The second exchange, if exchange it was and not carnage, removed seven pieces one after another from the board, and not even then did the players stop to think.

By now the game had taken away any remaining sense of judgment. Empty pools, voids really, formed and dissolved, like notes in a fervent composition, in the four corners of the board, but the players rushed on, wholly consumed by the momentum of the game, the fire of its possibilities, consolidating their respective forces, eager to launch a second offensive, waging their swift silent
battle on a narrow strip of wood.

Thrice it happened that Misa confused the correct square to which a piece could be moved. The squares all blank, the rules so new, the hunger so urgent, the thrill so palpable, she misplaced the diagonal along which the ship could be shifted more than once. Another time the horse landed a square short in its angular leap. Once, too, the queen moved herself away from the king by more than a square, and promptly catching her mistake, Misa, excited, intervened. That is wrong. You cannot venture that far from the king. And the queen, feeling the sudden pull of chains on her flesh, retreated, dismayed by her impotence, the net of rules cut through only to be now caught back in its sweeping tails.

Some more of this ludic display, some more pieces scattered along the perimeter of the board, some more reconfiguration of forces, and for the first time the players start to think ahead, to loosely strategize. The endgame had begun.

The enemy king had come out from behind the ranks of his warriors, and the queen's sole wish was to slay him with her beloved piece alone, and to this end she began to plot moves, push her king and pawns here and there to clear the way for her own dawdling advance, patiently sliding behind or along with them but getting nowhere, destined, alas, to lamely orbit the king forever, tied to the greater piece, but why?, like a planet to a star.

The queen won the first game. But she felt no happiness as she moved the elephant from the end of the board where it had lain from the very beginning of play to eject the enemy king off its square. Yet another oversight of Misa's had presented her with an opportunity too good to be passed over, and in the end feasibility won over wishfulness. The elephant's path though long was clear, and the queen was so close yet so far. Such was her preoccupation with her thoughts, such her disheartenment with the rules she had herself not long ago prescribed that she did not see the shame of loss in Misa's eyes, something she had not seen before in that most loving and gentle girl. Thus it happened that both players came away more
unhappy than before from their first engagement.

But the wind went about unheeded, so did the peacocks in the lawns, so the water in the fountains, so the sun in the sky, unusually mild on this day for the tropics. So much has transpired in so short a time, but to the ladies-in-waiting it means nothing. They have not seen anything out of the ordinary except two bored members of royalty amusing themselves at yet another game, dice or no dice, four or two teams, it is all the same to them. They have not seen anything, for they have not been shown. They have not been made to see.

NIGHT AND day the coitus continues. The bodies coil and uncoil, merge and detach in such a variety of forms that you wonder if they are one, two, or many, forever delaying the moment of climax like in a long, digressive novel. But if the climax is not delayed then the pleasure is not prolonged, desire perishes in a fleeting if charming release. Pleasure needs time just as time needs pleasure to fuse and explode into emptiness, thus freed from each other's bondage, they leave no residue, active or dead matter.

But let us return to the conjugal scene, where there is no desire, or rather into which desire has not yet made its appearance or where it exists but is not felt. Strange as it may seem, the concupiscence which is commonly the supreme driver of bodily pleasure is totally absent from this carnal rite, if carnal at all it is and not ethereal, for as we well know appearances are often deceptive.

King and queen, husband and wife, the yogin and his consort, the goddess Tara, Śiva as Bhairava, the Fearful Lord, and Śakti as Bhairavi, the Fearful Goddess, each form collapsing into the next as impressions passing and breaking over the lake of flesh. The many- limbed, many-gestured, interminable tantric dance.

The man firm like a rock or a mountain or a tree, unwavering, unexcitable, a mind empty of all desire, the woman serene, pliant, munificent, committed to give and receive without distrust, the two enacting, in the very image of a vine clasping a tree, the
Śiva Lata Mudra
.

Here the wish for pleasure does not lead to forgetfulness, to lose
oneself in the aspect of the other, but instead to fierce control and concentration, an intense self-identification with the life-force surging within. For three, five, eight hours, the couple sit face to face in the royal bed, without a shred of clothing, without the least excitation, until each has achieved complete one-pointedness of mind, at which time there is felt at the base of the spine, as if just born, a granule of heat. They have no consciousness of time, no vision of day or night, neither hunger nor thirst.

Next, the king moves the queen onto his left thigh, eyes locked into each other, sexes close but not touching, they sit in perfect equanimity for several hours.

Still on his lap, the queen is now facing forward, their figures erect, his left arm curving behind her back to gently cup the left breast, while her right arm drapes into his lap, hand lightly entwining the erection. Already it is night, the flames dim, moonshine filling the room, stars few but hard and glittering like diamonds. By the time they finally join, dusk is again falling, but the very act of coitus is far from begun. It is yet another pose, yet another level of descent, and the seed the king has held within him for all those years and months of roving through the harsh, cold, rim of the earth will spurt not yet.

They are both familiar with the ancient, venerable technique of sucking up water through their sexual orifices by a certain way of breathing or to be precise by stopping the breath altogether at specific places in the body. But water, in what the king is now proposing, is merely the first of a further row of steps, a cleansing agent to prepare the vessel of the body for receiving the terrible inhuman love, if love it be, by which the universe is made.

When water has cleansed and been expelled, it is the turn of milk to be taken in and held up for a few hours, to cool the glands and pave the way for what will come hence. Like water, so with milk. Likewise clarified butter. Each element denser than the one before, each held for longer, building patience and reserve in the bearers, testing stamina, for the act to which they are progressing will brook
no weakness, yield to no emotion.

The couple have perfected their systems, are utterly indifferent to the heaviness in their perineums. Now comes the last step, the supreme test of the bodies to be able to withstand what is to follow, a rite of the adepts. It is then that the king brings out a small container from which he pours two or three spoonfuls of purified quicksilver into a shallow dish. Mercury, that strangest of metals, element of the gods, catalyst of transmutation. Heavy in its fluidity, protean in its sturdiness. Like how the mind is, or ought to be. For the first time, as the metal is breathed in, globes of sweat appear on their skins, one pale, the other coppery. The granule of heat born at the bottom of the spine has set the solar plexus alight. Soon the blazing fire is sent slithering by this fierce agent to every extremity of the body, heat is spreading in widening circles, temperatures are on the rise, feet and the mind baking alike in the kiln of flesh. Desire possesses them completely without their in the least possessing it. The edge of the world as also its navel as also the seed from which it sprouted into being, the square brick altar as also the sacred fire kindling within as also the sacrificial or symbolic offerings poured into it, so many signs winding into each other to make up the touching, desiring bodies.

A thousand sighs, a hundred peakings with just the king's fingers on the frets of the queen's flesh that glint here and there in her skin as light from the moon shifts across her body. On and on he plays her like a
vīnā
, her music streaming in a delicate symphony of sounds,
ragas
that know no crescendo, no culmination.

At last the vulva surrounds the phallus, engulfs it. Like dark space engulfing matter, like a lake possessing a mountain's image, like night covering the gloss of the world. Like a wedge his torso locks into her wet angular thighs.