Jasoda Read online

  ‘You mean grovel?’

  ‘There are other ways and means, but that too, if necessary. There is a dark cloud hanging over your name. Revive the economy of Kantagiri, prevent the exodus and the people of Kantagiri will insist on crowning you King.’

  It seemed that everything in Kantagiri was defined by one and only one event – the disappearance of Prince Umaid Singh. The biggest sandstorm in the kingdom had taken place thirteen days before the fourth anniversary of that event; the last surviving buffalo had given birth to a calf five months after the fifth anniversary; the Suswagatam marble gateway to the kingdom had finally collapsed and dismantled itself at four a.m. on the sixth anniversary; the population of the capital city had plummeted to three hundred and forty-nine before the seventh anniversary came around. It was impossible to do a headcount in the three hundred and seventy villages of the kingdom but it was doubtful if even a hundred families had survived there.

  His Highness Prince Parbat Singh’s first wife was Princess Sunanda Devi. She was the only daughter of Sumer Singh, the Rana of Shantagiri. People said she was like a delicate bud. She had never left home, as her mother had died young and she had taken over the running of the palace even before she reached puberty. Her father was her universe and she had thought she would take care of him all her life. Once she reached the age of twenty-two, she was already considered past the ideal age for marriage. The royals in the area began to whisper that the Rana was derelict in his duty as a father because he didn’t wish to let go of his caretaker daughter.

  But it was just the contrary. The Rana had done a fair amount of research and discovered that Kantagiri had no Queen Mother and hence Sunanda wouldn’t have to deal with a mother-in-law. It was true that Parbat Singh had a reputation as a bit of a rake but he had sown his wild oats and very likely was about to settle down. Soon, negotiations between the two parties had been completed. Rana Sumer Singh went overboard and gave his daughter a grand wedding and an even grander dowry to reassure His Highness Parbat Singh that this was the ideal match for him.

  Sunanda Devi was unused to the ways of the world and the royal family in Kantagiri, which was all of just one member who happened to be her husband, was more than her limited experience of men could handle. She tried hard to please him. She made it a point to cook the dishes that he liked and she was always more than willing to do his bidding and Parbat Singh seemed happy with her. But the novelty of homely companionship wore off within a couple of years, especially since the Princess was unable to perform her prime duty as a woman, and a Queen at that.

  ‘Sunanda.’ His Highness Parbat Singh had run out of patience. ‘I am beginning to wonder whether you have any idea why men, especially the last members of a royal line, get married?’

  The sarcasm and irony in her husband’s tone were alien to the Princess and she had no idea how to respond to the not-so-subtle threat underlying it. But she understood that whatever he was leading up to boded ill for her.

  ‘I’ve waited for over two years now for you to give me an heir and son but you’ve failed to deliver. You have exactly one more year to make good. Even God won’t be able to help you if you don’t perform your duty.’

  Sunanda Devi would have liked to ask what would happen if she didn’t come through in a year. Could she not be given a grace period of a year or two more? Or even five? She had known princesses and queens who had had their first child when they were thirty-five, even thirty-eight. But she had the feeling that knowing the answer might prove to be more dangerous and frightening than not knowing it. She had always been a devotee of Prathama Devi and now she laid siege to the goddess. She prayed four times a day and she fasted two full days and two half days of each week. Even her husband noticed that she looked pale and emaciated but if that would help beget an heir, his wife was welcome to fast all seven days of the week. Six months passed. Once Sunanda Devi missed her period. But three weeks later she started bleeding and the doctors informed her that if she continued to starve herself she would not only upset her menstrual cycle but would be incapable of conceiving.

  The Princess grasped that there was no option for her but to visit the gods in their sanctum sanctorum. She went on a whirlwind tour of the holiest of holy teerthas in the country. In less than a month she had visited the temples in Guwahati, Gangotri, Rishikesh, Varanasi, Ayodhya, Vrindavan, the Jagannath Temple in Puri, Madurai, Rameswaram, Kanyakumari, Allahabad, the Brahma Temple in Pushkar, the dargah of Sheikh Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri, and Ajmer Sharif.

  The frantic days turned to weeks and the weeks to months and it was the beginning of December, the twelfth month since the Prince had given his dire warning. A strange peace descended upon Princess Sunanda Devi. As was his wont, H.H. Parbat Singh had gone to Mumbai for the races for a full month. Each morning, the Princess woke up early, had a bath, did puja and then went to the terrace to distribute her ancestral jewellery amongst the children of Kantagiri. At first nobody believed that the jewels were real but the poor would have lined up even if they had been tinsel trinkets. When news of the largesse spread, the parents of Kantagiri started to camp outside the Palace with their children in the bitter winter night, hoping for a windfall in the morning.

  Since the Prince didn’t care to see other people’s children in his Palace, Sangram Singh’s father, Dheeraj Singh, brought his son over only when the Prince was out of town. It was with the intention of teaching the boy the chores that he himself performed and which he hoped his son would take over one day. It was Sangram Singh’s lucky day. He was the first child the Princess saw in the morning and she gave him an emerald necklace with a dainty five-cornered star made of rubies at its centre.

  His Highness returned on the third of January in an upbeat mood. He laughed and guffawed and told Sunanda Devi how he had played poker with the other princes on New Year’s night and had won a lakh and twenty-seven thousand rupees. The Princess had made a magnificent meal for her husband and he ate heartily and told her that if they were ever short of money, he would open a Michelin three-star restaurant with her as head chef.

  That night he made love to her and went to bed sated. The next morning, when he woke up, the Princess was sleeping with a face so serene that it took his breath away. Surprisingly, she was not covered with a single down quilt and was a little cold to the touch but the sun was shining and the Prince was in good spirits, for he planned to go hunting in the mountains after breakfast. He undid her sari gently, pulled her petticoat up and eased himself upon her. It was a little hard going, as Sunanda was still asleep. It took a while to strike him that she was never going get up again.

  He began howling like a wolf cub whose mother had abandoned him at childbirth. ‘Imagine sleeping with a dead woman and that too my wife. Will the gods ever forgive me? I didn’t mean to. Truly I didn’t know, I swear to you.’

  Sangram Singh’s father knocked on the door for minutes on end and ultimately pushed it open and entered. Once he had gauged the situation, he thought it best that as a loyal retainer of the royal house it was incumbent upon him to inform the Prince about Sunanda Deviji’s extravagant generosity in the last month of her life.

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ The Prince could barely contain his rage. ‘You doddering old fool. To make up such absurd stories about Her Highness? I should have sacked you a long time ago! As a matter of fact, you are hereby dismissed from service.’ But just to be on the safe side, His Highness went into the bedroom and opened the jewellery box lying on the dressing table in which the Princess had kept her gold bangles, earrings and the other light accessories she used daily. It was empty. He then went over to the safe in which Sunanda Devi had deposited not only her wedding jewellery but all the ancestral heirlooms from Shantagiri that she had inherited. Nothing. All eleven shelves inside the safe yielded absolutely nothing.

  Within the hour, the Prince himself went from house to house along with Dheeraj Singh and retrieved his late wife’s jewellery. It was fortunate that he had a fairly good idea of what
Sunanda Devi had brought over with her when she married him but he insisted that the few items of jewellery that his subjects had also belonged to her and pocketed them.

  The exquisite kanthahaar that the late Princess had gifted Sangram Singh would have remained in his possession except that Dheeraj Singh was an honest man or, more likely, afraid that if His Highness discovered that the retainer’s family had stowed away one of the Princess’s most valuable necklaces, he would find himself in jail and the family hounded out of Kantagiri. He asked his son to hand over the kanthahaar but the boy refused to oblige. Dheeraj Singh caned him and when he still did not reveal where he had hidden the heirloom, locked him up for three days without food. It was to no effect. The boy was his son, the only one he had, but Dheeraj Singh was willing to go to any lengths to elicit information about the exquisite emerald-and-ruby necklace. Eventually, his wife put her foot down. She knew that in a one-to-one contest the son would prove to be more obdurate than his father.

  Dheeraj Singh took the matter to His Highness. The Prince listened patiently and said he understood the father’s quandary. ‘I know how you feel. Children can be so difficult at times. But you needn’t worry. You go about your work in the Palace and I’ll take care of the matter.’

  He was true to his word. He got Dheeraj Singh’s home demolished in two-and-a-half hours. The necklace was hidden in the most obvious place – in Sangram’s schoolbag, along with his books.

  Prince Parbat Singh had waited for Umashankar Shuklaji to do the decent thing – bid goodbye to his earthly existence and thus facilitate his ascension to the throne. Not that His Highness had any objection to the Prime Minister living forever just so long as the old man pronounced him Rana. Two thousand five hundred and fifty-five days or seven years had gone by and the Prince had counted each one of them. But his patience had run out and he decided the wait was over.

  Whether the Prime Minister approved of Parbat Singh assuming kingship or not, the event was about to take place. His Highness had taken charge and was supervising every aspect of the celebrations and the arrangements to welcome the royal guests on his birthday in the month of November. The Shiv Shambho temple was being repainted after more than a hundred years. The Palace was in dire need of repairs but since the bottom of the treasury had already been scraped a long time ago, the refurbishing was limited to the coronation room. The moment the widower Prince was crowned King, his prestige and price would shoot up and many a royal family was bound to send marriage proposals for their daughters along with a hefty dowry.

  There was just one hitch. Parbat Singh’s brother Umaid may have gone missing many years ago but amongst the incestuous network of royal families in the country, the younger brother’s name was still linked to the older twin’s disappearance. H.H. Parbat Singh had pondered over the matter for a long time and over the years had made certain that every single landmark or memory bearing his brother’s name or picture had been erased. Yet he had noticed that every now and then, Umaid’s name would pop up in some context or other when the older denizens spoke. H.H. had to admit that the drought had its uses since it had culled many of those elders. Luckily, now he had hit upon an idea that would induce permanent amnesia.

  What he needed, the Prince had decided, was a PR campaign. If done effectively, it would permanently supplant Umaid’s name and absentee-presence. On one of his trips to Mumbai, he had met a loudmouth and overconfident young man called Ranjan Dasgupta. He was in a hurry to make a name for himself and he was hungry for high-visibility jobs. The title H.H. Prince Parbat Singh had the desired effect on him and he was convinced that he could make H.H. of Paar a household name across the country.

  It has to be noted that that was before he visited Paar. Dasgupta felt he had entered a time-warp when he arrived in the capital. He was in a place that could only be described as a wasteland. Indeed, time had ceased here centuries ago. If this was the hinterland, he figured, any slum in Mumbai could be construed as New York or Paris. For the first time, he understood the significance of his own profession. PR was like playing God. You created a place and people from scratch. To his credit, what he invented was a new Kantagiri. It was a city in the making at least for one day in some mainline newspapers and Parbat Singh was its one and only saviour.

  The weather was ideal, there was a nip in the air and the royal guests were dressed as if for a Hollywood movie shoot. The invitees, though not too many, far outnumbered the local aristocracy but sadly there was an acute shortage of the hoi polloi who would have cheered the vintage cars that drove into Kantagiri. Sangram Singh watched the cavalcade enter the Palace gates from the window of the second floor where he was posted to lead each guest to his room. By four-thirty p.m. he was handing over the printed programme to the royals who entered the coronation room. The shehnai played auspicious music that was followed by the chanting of Sanskrit shlokas.

  ‘Your Majesties and your Highnesses, it is an honour to welcome you all to Kantagiri,’ Prince Parbat Singh addressed the royal gathering. ‘I am delighted to announce a slight change in the programme. There is nobody in the state of Paar, and I suspect anywhere else in the country, who is as universally respected, nay revered, as our Prime Minister, Umashankar Shuklaji. This may come as a surprise to him but I can’t think of anyone more suited to address such a royal gathering.’

  Using his walking stick, Umashankarji got up with an effort and approached the mike. ‘Namaskar, adaab, greetings. What an august assembly this is and how keenly it reminds me of my youth when your parents would congregate to celebrate the marriage, coronation and birthdays of his Majesty, the late Maharaja of Paar. Those were the days.

  ‘But let me not hark back to the past when the present beckons us so urgently with multiple surprises. For instance, I had no idea that I was to give the inaugural speech on this happy occasion. But, of course, how could I forget that today is the birthday of His Highness Prince Parbat Singh? I won’t wish him my remaining years, if there are any left. Instead, I hope the gods will grant him eternal youth and may he never have to face that calamity called old age. I was informed this very morning that he plans to be crowned today. I wish his reign the very best.

  ‘I cannot but remember his older brother, His Highness Umaid Singh, the missing heir apparent whose fate is still unknown and thus will cast a shadow on this coronation. But there are other concerns. All these years, His Highness Parbat Singh has spoken with great feeling of the tragedy of a kingdom without a King. Unfortunately, he has not been able to stem the flight of his people from this land. I fear that the Prince will now be a King without a kingdom. And so, like it or not, there will be a question mark on the crown that he wishes to wear. I’ve seen him since the day he was born. And so for me he’ll always be His Highness Prince Parbat Singh.’

  His Highness Parbat Singh was crowned that day but he had failed to graduate to kingship. He would always be referred to as the Prince. He had attempted to bamboozle the Prime Minister into supporting his coronation but Umashankarji had had the last word.

  In the early years after the rift between Kajuria and Kantagiri, the diversion of the waters of the Panna Canal had hardly made any difference, for the rains were mostly regular. In any case, as the name so vividly expressed, the waters of the Athang Talab in the Aravali mountains eleven miles away were bottomless. But some years ago, it became clear that the name of the lake would have to be changed, for the Athang had done the impossible. It had hit rock bottom. Geologists from all over India and some from abroad had come to investigate this bizarre phenomenon. The Athang had been mentioned in the Puranas and was at least a few million years old.

  Scientists had explored various theories to explain the disappearance of the perennial springs which had fed the Athang but had eventually rejected each one of them. They had enquired whether its waters had been diverted as in the case of the Aral Sea. They also thought that they saw similarities between the fate of Kantagiri and Mohenjo-Daro. There had obviously been a cosmic event that had wiped
out the astonishingly advanced ancient civilization east of the Karakoram ranges but so far all they had had to go by were far-fetched extraterrestrial hypotheses. The mystery would remain unresolved unless you were into occult explanations and admitted that the gods were angry with either Umaid, his twin Parbat or both, or that the Raja of Kajuria had cast an evil eye on the Athang.

  Jasoda could hear the children as she dragged herself awkwardly on her haunches, trying to sweep behind the only cupboard in their home.

  ‘I want to play with the horse on wheels,’ Pawan told his brother.

  Himmat ignored him.

  ‘Maa, Himmat won’t give me the horse.’

  ‘Why should I? You’ve got your parrot.’

  ‘I don’t want the parrot.’ Pawan flung the plastic green bird at Himmat.

  Jasoda knew if she didn’t stop them now, they would be at each other’s throats soon. It was usually the older boy who got the worst of it, as he was conscious of his strength and did not wish to hurt his brother. She gripped the handle of the cupboard door and heaved herself up and sat down immediately with a thud. She could hear one of the children climbing up the stairs. As he came into view, she saw a nick a little above Himmat’s right eye. The boy put the palm of his hand on his eye and discovered that his fingers were bloody.

  ‘That’s a nasty cut, beta. We need to put turmeric powder on it to make it stop bleeding. You go down, I’ll follow you.’

  Jasoda drew in a sharp breath of pain. Himmat saw the panic in his mother’s eyes and watched her with clinical curiosity.

  ‘Help me get up, Himmat.’

  ‘Shall I get Daadi?’ Himmat asked his mother.