Cuckold

  CUCKOLD

  KIRAN NAGARKAR

  HarperCollins Publishers India

  One of the premises underlying this novel is that an easy colloquial currency of language will make the concerns, dilemmas and predicaments of the Maharaj Kumar, Rana Sanga, and the others as real as anything we ourselves are caught in: a birth, divorce, death in our families; political intrigue, a national crisis, or a military confrontation in the life of our nation. The idea was to use contemporary idiom so long as the concepts we use today were available in the sixteenth century. For example, the measurement of time, theories of education, war strategies, music, the functioning of bureaucracy, etc. I was striving for immediacy, rather than some academic notion of fidelity, at best simulated.

  CONTENTS

  Major Characters

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for Cuckold

  Copyright

  Major Characters

  RAJPUT KINGDOM OF MEWAR • CAPITAL: CHITTOR

  Maharana or Rana Sanga – King of Mewar

  Maharaj Kumar – The Rana’s eldest son and heir apparent

  Vikramaditya – The Rana’s third son

  Rani Karmavati – The Rana’s favourite queen and Vikramaditya’s mother

  Kausalya – The Maharaj Kumar’s ‘dai’ or the woman who breast-fed him

  The Princess – The Maharaj Kumar’s wife

  Kumkum Kanwar – The Princess’ maid

  Adinathji – Finance Minister

  Leelawati – His granddaughter

  Lakshman Simha – Home Minister

  Rajendra – His eldest son

  Tej – His younger son

  Pooranmalji – Prime Minister

  Mangal Simha – Head of Intelligence; Kausalya’s son

  Sunheria – A washerwoman

  Bruhannada – Rani Karmavati’s chief eunuch

  Rao Viramdev – Ruler of Merta and uncle of the Princess

  Puraji Kika – A Bhil chieftain

  MUSLIM KINGDOM OF GUJARAT • CAPITAL: AHMEDABAD

  Muzaffar Shah II – Sultan of Gujarat

  Bahadur Shah (Shehzada) – His second son

  MUSLIM KINGDOM OF MALWA • CAPITAL: MANDU

  Mahmud Khalji II – Sultan of Malwa

  Medini Rai – His Rajput prime minister and later, his enemy

  Hem Karan – Medini Rai’s son

  Sugandha – Medini Rai’s daughter

  MUSLIM KINGDOM OF DELHI • CAPITAL: DELHI

  Ibrahim Lodi – Sultan of Delhi

  Babur – Invader from Central Asia and founder of the Moghul dynasty

  Humayun – Babur’s eldest son

  Chapter

  1

  The small causes court sits on Thursdays. When Father’s away I preside. There were fourteen plaints to be heard. I dealt with them all, albeit as the sun rose to the meridian and then crossed it, I became impatient. The seventh was the most interesting, perhaps because it was not about being done out of money or land but afforded a change of pace and a bit of humour.

  An old, bent dhobi, I would have sworn it was the same washerman who besmirched Sita’s name and obliged Lord Rama to banish her into the wilderness some two thousand years ago, was now casting aspersions on his wife’s virtue.

  ‘She has a lover, maybe several,’ his voice was thick with chronic bronchitis and he had to clear his throat many times before he could speak.

  ‘Do you?’ I asked his wife. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. How naive, or hypocritical, can one get in court? Did I really expect her to smile demurely and tell the court who she was sleeping with?

  I was sitting in a small semi-hexagonal balcony which jutted out from the sheer rear wall of the palace my great grandfather Maharana Kumbha had built. She and the other litigants stood fifteen feet below. Her head was covered with a green and yellow bandhani chunni which was tucked into the cleavage of her blouse. I was sure I had seen that chunni before. The sun got into her eyes when she raised her head to answer me. She bent forward and drew the silk covering her head down, to shield her eyes. Her ivory bangles, each bigger than the previous one, clattered down into the angle at her elbow. Her breasts, the colour of fine sand at Pushkar, were exposed for a brief second. I could feel Mangal’s eyes at the back of my neck. I still couldn’t figure out why that chunni was so familiar.

  ‘Ask him,’ she ignored my question, ‘if he has performed his husbandly duty by me even once after my father got me married to him two years ago.’ Her forthrightness was as unsettling as it was unexpected. Her eyes held mine. There was no bitterness in her voice; a matter-of-factness, that’s all.

  ‘Is this true?’ I asked her husband.

  ‘What do you think? Would any man, least of all her lawful husband, be able to keep his hands off such succulent fruit?’

  ‘What is your age, old man?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with her infidelity?’

  ‘Don’t be impertinent or I’ll have you thrashed.’

  ‘I was washing clothes before His Majesty, your father, was born but I’m still able. I was the Hatyara’s dhobi. Never was a king so obsessed with cleanliness. But he could never wash the blood off his hands. He was always on the run. Where he went, I went.’

  ‘You have a loose tongue, old man. It’ll tie a noose around your neck one of these days.’

  ‘I know the Hatyara’s name is taboo, but his father had no intention of dying or relinquishing his throne. Thirty-five years is a long time to wait. Do you blame him if he lost his patience and got rid of Rana Kumbha? Would you do any the less if Rana Sanga, your father, may he live forever, hangs on to his crown thirty, forty or fifty years from now?’

  ‘Were it not for your age, old man, you would die for treason. Even so, you’ll receive ten lashes after the court rises.’

  ‘That will not dampen my virility, Your Highness.’

  I was beginning to tire of his garrulousness.

  ‘That remains to be seen. Go to the brothel at the end of Tamarind Lane on Monday night and prove your prowess in Rasikabai’s bed. I’ll defer my judgement till she gives me her report.’

  ‘And were I to fail, and I say this merely as a point in rhetoric, does that justify my wife’s infidelity?’

  ‘Even if you prove your virility with Rasikabai, you’ll still need to produce proof of your wife’s unfaithfulness.’

/>   * * *

  I like to be at work by six thirty in the morning. That gives me an hour and a half to scrutinize the papers, appraise individual issues, take decisions, jot down my remarks in the margins and move on to more pressing matters. Around nine, while I was conferring with Sahasmal from the Department of City Planning about digging a couple of wells, since the population of the town had risen by over a thousand in the last year, a courier from Father arrived. The confrontation with the Sultan of Gujarat was proving to be more difficult than Father had anticipated and he now needed money to pay the troops, buy victuals and enlist the support of two score and ten rawals and rawats and their garrisons.

  There was of course no money in the exchequer. We fought endless wars so that our enemies would sue for peace and fill our coffers, and immediately emptied them to pay back the interest — settling the original sum was out of the question — to our gracious financiers, the Mehtas. And borrowed from them on the instant to finance further wars which, in turn, would fill our treasuries to bursting and ease the pressure of interest payments, and so on and so forth, till the vicious circle had become the web at the centre of which we were stuck like flies being slowly sucked of all juice.

  I sent a message to the treasury, Kuber Bhavan, asking the grand old man, Adinath Mehta, to do me the favour of conferring with me in my private chambers. Adinathji had refined the game of protocol, wherein he had the upper hand but placed himself in the position of a supplicant, to a minor art form. Would I do him the honour of going over in the evening for a game of chess followed by dinner? His wife, happy coincidence, had prepared my favourite sweet, rabadi. It would be a change of atmosphere from the affairs of state and his great-granddaughter, Leelawati, would be delighted to show me how much progress she had made in embroidering the royal insignia for the flag which would accompany me when I led our troops in battle.

  The rabadi was a nice touch since Adinathji was only too aware that I had taken a dislike to all sweets made from milk in recent years. But who was I to refuse an invitation from the great Adinathji? Besides, the nine-year-old Leelawati, if she was allowed to be around by the patriarch, would more than compensate for any discomfort suffered in the financier’s company. She was a superb mimic, quick-witted, precocious in the extreme, obstinate and a surprisingly shrewd judge of character.

  ‘You don’t have to dine early, Your Highness. There’s some dispute about whether Mahavirji really enjoined us Jains to eat before sundown but as you know, I like to play it safe. I try to rationalize and tell myself it’s good for the digestion, especially at my age. You, of course, have no such problems.’

  What would happen if I said, ‘Yes indeed, I will eat later’ and added as an afterthought, ‘After I’ve had a few drinks’?

  Needless to say, nothing would happen. The absolutely unlined face of Adinathji would not furrow or show the slightest sign of discomfiture. Were I to ask for a woman from the sweet and sour Tamarind Lane, he would respond with a ‘How thoughtless of me not to have made arrangements,’ and proceed to instruct one of the security personnel to send for Kajribai or someone as expensive. After a decent interval of say, forty-five minutes, he would let me know that he was extremely sorry but the carriage had met with an accident and the poor lady had broken her seventh vertebra or cracked open her skull or lost all her teeth.

  The food, as usual, was good without being fussy. I marvel at a cuisine which is so circumscribed; no garlic, no onion, no root-vegetables and of course, no game or mutton, fish or fowl, and yet seems to suggest that what it lacks is but superfluous. Daal bati, rotis of cornflour, khatti daal chawal, gatte ki sabji, kanji wadas, and maal pohe. I knew that the meal was not complete and did a good imitation of surprise and delight when Adinathji’s wife brought out my favourite sangri beans boiled and then fried in oil and spices. Ghee, I’m aware, is the mark of hospitality but I wish Shrimati Mehta was a little less prodigal with it. I felt bloated as a dead ox which has been water-logged for a week or two but there was no gainsaying the lady of the house when she sent for the dessert, bundi sheera.

  We moved to the drawing room and sat down to play. I had the curious feeling that life itself was a game of chess for Adinathji. Every move was planned in advance: the invitation, the bait of Leelawati (I had asked for her twice and was told she was coming but there was no sign of her), the food, the chess. If the whole ritual was familiar, it was because I had played the game often in the past. Skip a step and the game would never end. Adinathji, more than most people, knew that ends are what games are played for.

  This was good training for me. When in a hurry, take it easy, breathe deeply, go slow. I knew I was playing well but I also knew that he was playing with me. Perhaps it had something to do with the non-violent creed of his religion. The only battles that he and his kin fought, the only blood they spilt was on the chessboard. Massacres and carnage were not to his taste. He preferred the long, slow, tortuous death. I knew that he had designs on my vazir, which is why he left him alone.

  It was ironic how all the kings in India, at least all those I knew, were financed by Adinathji’s kinsmen, the Jains. His son-in-law, Sahadevnath, stood surety for the Sultan of Gujarat whom my father was fighting. Ibrahim Lodi in Delhi leaned on Shrimati Adinath Mehta’s brother. Adinathji’s youngest son had relocated in Malwa and was lending money to the chief money-lender to the throne there. The ironies resonated a little more deviously than that. The Jain mind is an abacus. It sees everything in terms of numbers. Like interest, you earn merit.

  You give alms, you earn merit. You feed the poor or the Digambaras, you collect some more merit. Pacifism is a capital investment of the highest order. It’s a kind of super-compound interest scheme with an eye on both heaven and earth. Extend the metaphor and it has a foot in the here and now, and the ever-after. Let’s look at the latter first. The more merit you earn, the more you are likely to abridge the number of reincarnations you have to go through to reach the kind of enlightened state which gets you to moksha. In the meanwhile, just see how profitable the fruits of non-violence are in this life. You stay pure while someone else, someone like me and my Rajput clan, does the sinning and the killing. While you religiously refrain from bloodying your hands, you lend vast sums of money to finance the mightiest armies at minuscule decimal point percentages which add up to monstrous sums as interest. Whatever the outcome in the killing fields, we warriors protect you. We often die; you live unscathed to finance another war. And here’s the best part: thanks to in-laws, nephews, cousins and the whole unbelievable complex of the extended family, your interests are safeguarded in every way, and you emerge substantially richer whoever wins, be it friend or foe.

  I seem to have got my knife into Adinathji and his tribe today. Why do I become so unreasonable in his presence? He’s never self-righteous and he would just as willingly — perhaps far more happily and with a clearer conscience — put his money into building forts or dams or business ventures as he would into bank-rolling wars. Perhaps it’s because I see myself crawling or maybe it’s the fact that we need him more than he needs us.

  There, he has made his penultimate move. By various feints and manoeuvres and the sacrifice of pawns and horses, he has got my vazir to expose the king. Now for the swift kill. But, of course, the elegant fell stroke is never administered. Having established his Grand Master status once again, he’ll now let me win through a transparently bogus mistake. But Leelawati has rushed in, scattered my embattled and besieged king and Adinathji’s hordes and jumped straight into my lap. Her knee squashes my left testicle while she beats a tattoo on my chest.

  ‘You didn’t even tell me you were coming.’ I try to breathe. The universe is out of focus. I cannot tell whether it is my groin that hurts or my chest or throat. ‘You must have come to borrow money from great-grandfather. That’s why you came furtively and will leave shame-faced.’

  Adinathji’s waxen face with its butter-soft complexion colours slightly. I am pleased to find traces of blood an
d humanity there. His great-granddaughter has truly embarrassed him.

  ‘Leave us, you hussy. I never thought I would live to see the day when my own blood would insult the heir-apparent. I will never be able to raise my head in front of you, Your Highness.’ Adinathji was not feigning chagrin. He may reserve his opinion of me but his loyalty to the House of Mewar was unqualified.

  ‘Let her be.’ I had finally found my voice. ‘I asked for you. Twice. They said you were coming but you were playing hard to get like the Id ka chand.’

  ‘Nobody told me. I bet Dada wanted to talk business with you, tell you how short money is these days and raise the interest one seventh of one percent and that’s why I was kept in the dark.’

  Was it possible for the great Adinathji, the financier of last resort to the prime financiers of this country and others, to squirm after he had already been subjected to the indignity of blushing? Leelawati, you may pound the other testicle to a nice round coin and I’ll still owe you one.

  ‘What have you got for me?’ Her arms were around my neck.

  ‘What have you got for me?’ I was fully recovered.

  ‘Ha, I have something for you even though I didn’t know you were coming.’ She was up and away and back in a trice with a piece of cloth. It was a red pennant with my ancestor, the Sun-god, embroidered in gold brocade. The eyes, the moustache, the haughty lips, the thirty-six rays, she had got them all to perfection. ‘Damn,’ she snatched the flag from my hands. ‘I wanted to first see what you’d got for me.’

  ‘Whatever it is, it couldn’t possibly compare with your gift.’

  ‘Let me be the judge,’ Leelawati cut me short. ‘Show me.’

  I gave her the present I had brought. She undid the silk scarf wrapping and stared in disbelief. ‘It’s a sundial. Did you make it with your own hands?’

  ‘I wrapped it with my own hands.’ I tried to make a joke of it but was conscious of how cold and dull my present was, compared to the effort and affection she had expended on hers.

  ‘Great minds think alike. See, both of us had the same motif in mind. Are those real rubies that mark the hours?’