Jasoda Page 2

  ‘Are you all right?’

  The old lady did not answer but her eyes were wide with terror. The shrieking outside had got louder.

  ‘Who’s dead?’ the mother-in-law finally asked Jasoda.

  ‘No one’s dead.’

  ‘Then why do I feel the breath of death upon me?’

  Himmat was clinging to his mother. By now Pawan too was up. He was undecided whether it was wise to cry or not draw attention to himself. Sangram Singh, who usually slept the sleep of the dead, was standing at the window. Jasoda and Himmat joined him.

  Someone was running wildly with a lit torch in his hand. The flame tore the night into two uneven halves. The jagged fire flapped from side to side as he took sharp zigzag turns.

  ‘I’ll set the whole village on fire.’ His voice rose to an inhuman screech and then went hoarse. ‘Tell me, who committed this dastardly deed? On pain of death, tell me.’

  ‘Who is that man, Maa?’ Himmat asked his mother.

  ‘I don’t know, beta. I can’t see his face.’

  The man held the torch with both hands and began to whirl it at great speed. The air whistled thinly as the torch tore through it. If it slipped from his hands and flew to the roof of a house or burst through a window it could start a fire.

  ‘What does Siyaram want?’ The old woman was still lying in bed.

  ‘Siyaram?’ her son asked. ‘How do you know it’s the widower?’

  ‘How can I forget the voice of the man who asked for my hand? I was midwife to all his children, yet he never ever spoke to me or entered our house because my father chose not him but your father’s father to marry me.’

  People were watching the man’s unsteady progress from the few houses in the town that were still occupied. He was out of breath and sobbing uncontrollably.

  ‘Who stole my firewood? Whoever it is, may all the evil in the world befall him. How will my sons set me on the pyre if there’s no firewood left?’

  He stopped suddenly and looked up. ‘Did you steal my firewood, Sangram Singh?’

  Sangram Singh cringed and drew inside.

  ‘The man should have died a long time ago when his wife died,’ the old woman shouted from her bed.

  ‘People must be saying the same thing about you, Maa. That you should have gone when my father died.’ Sangram Singh smiled. ‘Or had had the decency to climb his pyre and commit sati.’

  ‘Shame on you both.’ Jasoda plugged her ears with her fingers. ‘Desecrating the early morning hours with your foul words.’

  Siyaram had folded up on the ground and had begun to weep, a wordless keening more frightening and sinister than the howling of the wolves near Jalta and Piloti. The villagers hurriedly shut their windows lest the widower’s anguish cast its evil eye upon their homes.

  ‘Shut up, you old fool.’ The keeper of the Radheshyam temple tried to outshout Siyaram. ‘If you don’t stop I’ll call the police and have you locked up.’

  ‘Did you pilfer my wood, Purohit?’ Siyaram asked as the Brahmin priest was about to close his window. ‘The whole village knows that the drought is your doing. Your corruption is so great, you’ll pollute the all-purifying Ganga Maiyya herself. Thieves, plunderers and murderers have more conscience than you.’

  ‘That’s enough, Siyaram. I’m getting the head constable. By the time they let you out of jail, there won’t be a stick of firewood left in your place.’

  Now the old man was truly broken. He tried to speak but no words would come forth. He sank down and bashed his forehead on the earth till it split and turned the dry dust a black-red. Then he cried out, ‘Don’t, please don’t. I beg your forgiveness. I’ll touch your feet, priest.’

  ‘No mercy for the likes of you, Siyaram.’

  The widower picked up the torch from the ground and raised it high. Then he hit it on the ground hard again and again till it lay smashed and splintered. Then he walked back to his house and locked himself in.

  Sangram Singh completed his puja and came down. Jasoda served him breakfast – three bajra rotis and garlic chutney that was more red chillies than garlic. She poured thick tea into a shiny brass tumbler and placed it next to his plate. He ate without chewing or tasting the food. The chillies put enough saliva in circulation for the dry bajra roti to go down without a hitch. Himmat and Pawan played noisily but were careful not to come near their father. Sangram Singh savoured his tea. The chutney had killed all sensation from his tongue, the masala in the tea set it on fire.

  When he got up, Jasoda placed a pair of faded magenta mojaris in front of his feet, dusted his yellow ochre turban cloth and handed it to him. He wound it expertly around his head, back and forth, back and forth, and tucked the end in one of the folds. Jasoda took the eight-by-six-inch mirror off the wall and held it in front of him. He tilted the turban a little to the left and went over his handlebar moustache with the ball of his right thumb and his index finger a couple of times.

  ‘I’m off, Maa,’ he shouted to his mother and left.

  He set out for the Alakhnanda Palace as he had done daily for even he couldn’t remember how many years. He shaded his eyes with his hands but it was no use. The light slashed his irises. It was not yet nine-thirty in the morning but the heat sluiced through him like molten metal. The unpaved road was hard and uneven with the ruts previously formed by rain that had not fallen for ten or eleven years. It had the same white look of the walls of the huts and houses. There was no one about till he turned the corner and saw a dog and his mate conjoined back to back. He went around the pair. The sun pressed down upon him.

  His spirits rose when the haveli came into view. It was an awesome building. He had seen it since the time he was a child. His father used to take him along sometimes when he went to visit the present Highness’s father. When Sangram Singh grew up, he had taken to going there every day, even on Sundays and holidays. It was the only three-storeyed structure within a radius of forty miles, the kind of mansion that Shiva and Parvati would dwell in on Mount Kailash. The plaster had been peeling off slowly for the last thirty years, a great many bricks on the eastern flank had caved in and many of the windows were boarded up. In a sandstorm seven years ago, a part of the front railing on the terrace had flown off but the wear and disintegration had been so gradual, he was still able to see the building whole and without blemishes.

  Some said that the Palace had seventy-seven rooms, others put the figure in the vicinity of a hundred and seventy. There was no telling really, there could as well have been three hundred. He knew his way around. He had seen at least half a dozen of the guest bedrooms. They were magnificent. One had a four-poster brass bed with a canopy of burgundy velvet and gold brocade, a lace curtain and porcelain plates with strange human figures and dragons and waterfalls on the walls and a water jug on the bedside table. He didn’t mind, or perhaps he didn’t notice, that the velvet of the canopy was shedding and bald in patches, the lace curtain was frayed and had a long, oblique rent in it. The porcelain was chipped at the edges and the jug could never hold water as it had a hairline crack at the bottom.

  The plan of the building was unique. It stood on a raised platform with marble facing, just like the temple at Ranakpur. Every fifteen yards there were five-foot-tall vases linked together by heavy iron chains. Some time in the past, a variety of lush green plants might have grown out of the concrete flowerpots but all you saw now was caked mud and ancient water stains. A series of steps with a gradient of marble fish scales in the middle to allow water to flow down led to a row of fountains at the centre of the Palace grounds. It would have been a wondrous sight, water flowing in the very heart of the desert, except that Sangram Singh had never seen it in all the years he had climbed up the stairs.

  He walked up the steps to the porch above the driveway. A cluster of people sitting on their haunches in the shade stood up and milled about him.

  ‘Sahib,’ they touched his feet, ‘help us. The water tanker hasn’t come for eleven days.’

  Sangram Singh
raised his hand and said, ‘One at a time.’

  Their needs were far too pressing for them to follow an orderly queue.

  ‘No kerosene third week running.’

  ‘The grocer Bhanwarlalji is hoarding grain and selling it at exorbitant prices to the highest bidder.’

  ‘When is the work on the dam the government was planning to build two years ago going to start?’

  Sangram Singh’s eyebrows narrowed and he nodded his head slowly, almost painfully.

  ‘Let me mull over this, perhaps even talk it over with His Highness and get back to you.’

  Sangram Singh made it a point to reiterate words and phrases like ‘The Prince’, ‘His Highness’ and ‘The Palace’, all of them in a tone that made it clear that these words were in capital lettering. They never failed to impress the elders and the illiterate villagers and to raise his own status in their eyes, though he knew well that the institutions of kingship and the privy purse were long dead and many of the royals were bankrupt and lucky if their palaces could be hawked or turned into hotels.

  He had to knock hard and long before one of the retainers in the haveli opened the door.

  ‘What do you want? His Highness is still sleeping.’

  ‘He’ll get up some time or the other.’

  Sangram Singh went in. It was cool inside, almost chilly. He stood still till his eyes got used to the cavernous dark around. The crystal drops of the giant chandelier hanging from the ceiling tinkled with the draft of air that the movement of the door had let in.

  ‘Send some tea up for me,’ he told the servant who had let him in, ‘while I wait for the Prince.’

  He climbed up the long flight of stairs to the first floor and turned to the right. He leaned with all his weight against the thick teakwood door to His Highness’s suite of rooms, just in case it was open, but it was locked from inside. He stood against the adjoining wall and slid down to squat on the floor. It could be five minutes or six hours before Prince Parbat Singh ventured out. He waited a while for the tea. It did not come. Sangram Singh took out the tiny silver box with dual compartments from a pocket inside his vest, tapped some tobacco flakes on the palm of his left hand and added some lime to it. He kneaded the two till the tobacco had turned to powder and poured it into the pocket between his lower lip and incisors. Slowly his mouth began to salivate and the juices reached the extremities of his toes and brain. He felt at peace. Now he could wait for as long as it took for His Highness to appear.

  His mouth had fallen a little open and there was a vacant smile in his eyes when there were rumblings in the bedroom. He got up unsteadily and stood in front of the door as it opened. The Prince slapped his shock of grey hair back and pushed Sangram Singh away.

  ‘Is anybody there? Deaf-mutes and freeloaders all, where the hell are you? A man may die here but they wouldn’t come to know of it for a couple of years.’

  ‘Seva, Highness.’ Sangram Singh bowed. There was a tentative smile on his face. ‘I’ve been waiting to do your bidding since morning. Shall I ask for breakfast for you?’

  The Prince’s eyes focused on him for the first time.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, as if an important thought had just struck him. ‘Yes. There’s a great service you can do me. As a matter of fact, the whole of mankind will be beholden to you.’

  The smile that had been playing on Sangram Singh’s face became wider.

  ‘Just command, Your Lordship, and it will be done.’

  ‘You give me your word? A real man’s word?’

  ‘Yes, Highness, yes.’

  ‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind?’

  Sangram Singh put his hand on his heart and nodded solemnly. ‘Never.’

  ‘Take that bloody obsequious face of yours and don’t show it here or in any part of this world. Ever.’ He was silent for a minute. ‘Can’t you pick up some ghastly disease, syphilis or smallpox or leprosy, something that will make you die a long death so that I don’t have to see your ugly face till my dying day?’

  ‘You are making fun of me. I like that. It shows that I too have my uses.’

  ‘There is no use for you, Sangram, no earthly use for you. What grievous sins did my ancestors commit that I have to see your inauspicious face every morning?’

  Something or someone inside Prince Parbat Singh’s wing had caught Sangram Singh’s attention.

  ‘Stop peering inside my room. Haven’t you seen naked flesh before? Or do you copulate with Jasoda with all her clothes on?’

  Sangram Singh craned his neck further.

  ‘Get out. Or I’ll kick you down the stairs.’

  It was hard to believe that seven years had passed since Prince Parbat Singh’s twin, Umaid Singh, had disappeared from Kantagiri. Kantagiri was the capital of the state of Paar. Paar was one of those rare names which pinpointed the exact location of a place. ‘Beyond’ – that what’s the word ‘paar’ meant. Beyond what? The answer is still ‘Beyond’. Beyond the farthest limits of your imagination. Beyond civilization. Maybe beyond the universe itself. Prince Umaid Singh’s bride-to-be, Princess Antaradevi, and her family had waited in the palace in Kajuria till midnight for the wedding party to arrive and gone to bed without dinner.

  The next morning, Prince Parbat Singh’s emissary drove into the palace compound and presented himself. ‘It is my unfortunate duty to inform you that His Highness Prince Umaid Singh has been missing for three days. We have no idea whether he has met with an accident, been bitten by a cobra or has fallen prey to some hungry beast. Search parties were sent to the neighbouring towns. The Bholapur sanctuary and the Aravali hills and mountains were combed but the Prince is nowhere to be found.’

  ‘Tell your master, His Highness Parbat Singh, that Kajuria and its people consider this breach of promise as the gravest affront to our kingdom. The only reason we accepted this proposal of marriage was because your royal house was so persistent and both Prince Umaid and Princess Antaradevi had developed a fondness for each other. You are an insignificant principality of no consequence and would have benefitted from a union with Kajuria. Now within a fortnight you will discover that the waters of the Panna Canal will be diverted. We will build a dam at Ramani and Kantagiri will forfeit half its water supply. When the rains play truant, as they do so very often, your people will suffer from a drought that will never end.’

  The search for Umaid Singh continued for a couple of weeks more and was then abandoned. The police version maintained that Umaid Singh had gone ‘missing’ and hence could not be declared dead. Some people in Kantagiri said that Prince Umaid must have been ‘mental’ or suffered from sexual inadequacy and had got cold feet at the last minute. He alone was to blame for the calamitous severance of the waters of the Panna Canal. But there were also the usual conspiracy theories floating around that the Prince was full-blooded and far more popular than his identical twin, Parbat, who hated him. Umaid was born three minutes before Parbat and as such was the heir apparent. Nobody dared say it but some elders believed that Parbat Singh had got rid of his brother and buried him on the night before the marriage party was to leave for Kajuria.

  From childhood Sangram had watched H.H. Parbat Singh’s every move. It was as if he had decided to devote his whole life to the study of the Prince.

  ‘It’s a year, Pradhanji, since my brother Umaid Singh died,’ Prince Parbat Singh spoke at the annual durbar that morning when Sangram Singh’s father had taken him to the Palace. ‘How long do you want Kantagiri to be headless?’

  If Prince Parbat Singh was looking for a spat with the elderly Prime Minister, Umashankar Shukla, he should have known he would fail. The Prince may have been next in line to the throne but he could not assume it till the wily and wise eighty-year-old Prime Minister gave his consent.

  ‘As far as my limited information goes, Highness, your elder brother is missing. But your sources, it would appear, are better informed. Are we to understand that you have proof of Prince Umaid Singh’s demise?’

  ‘I h
ave no such proof. I was merely surmising his death from his year-long absence.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not conjecture the police are looking for but hard evidence.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my second query.’

  ‘I intend to. Indeed, a kingdom without a crown is like a fatherless child. Which is the reason your honoured father, His Majesty the late Raghuvir Singh, appointed me regent when he fell terminally sick and you were still children. I performed my duties as laid down by him and, as you are well aware, I was about to hand over the keys of the kingdom on the occasion of the marriage and crowning ceremony of the heir apparent, His Highness Umaid Singh.’

  ‘How long, according to your calculations, do we have to keep our subjects waiting?’

  ‘Hopefully, not for long, Highness. Royal titles and the privy purses may have been abolished decades ago but you are right, the people of Kantagiri are waiting for deliverance from the lack of direction and hard times that have befallen them in the last year. Our people are desperate and needy. There was never much surplus farming in this corner of the country but we managed to be self-sufficient till recently when the water supply from Kajuria ceased. But along with the waters, our handicrafts, small industries, tourism and power supply too seem to have run dry. The desert has been growing at a rapid pace and hence the sea too has receded. Which means the saltpans too are defunct.’

  ‘Why are you boring me with these banal stories, Pradhanji? My brother broke his promise to Princess Antaradevi of Kajuria and, if I’ve understood you correctly, I am supposed to be responsible for the consequences of that action?’

  ‘The people of Kantagiri and the neighbouring villages are leaving in droves for lack of a livelihood. This is your chance to turn the tide and show your leadership qualities. Highness, now is the time to prove that you will not abandon your people. I entreat you, treat this moment as an opportunity and a challenge. Make diplomatic overtures to Kajuria…’