Manthara gasped and raised her head, staring at her arms, her body, feeling herself all over, unable to believe the power and ease of her master’s sorcery. ‘My injuries, my burns, they’re all gone! Oh, master, you are magnificent and munificent beyond all measure! Your power is—’
The flame blazed one last time, shooting out in all directions, filling every square inch of the secret prayer room, enfolding Manthara in a sorcerous shroud that blazed without burning. She screamed with ecstasy and delight throwing out her repaired limbs to the unholy fire, embracing it with every fibre of her being. It was cold, like a cloak of ice rather than fire. As she knew her lord’s naked body might feel against her own bare skin. She savoured the unholy ashirwaad of her dark deity.
As suddenly as it had blazed out, the fire withdrew, sucking itself back into the chaukat, then extinguishing itself in one last
whump
of flame. The chaukat was cold and empty, the last bones of the dead Brahmin boy gone, the chamber dark and silent.
With a great sigh, Manthara got to her feet and went to fulfil her master’s command. She looked exactly as she had done when she had entered the secret room; not a hair was out of place.
TWENTY-FOUR
They were almost at the royal bhojanshalya when a rather too shapely form emerged, sighing and belching at the same time, rubbing her bare midriff, looking like a cat that had eaten far too much fish and now regretted her gluttony. Lakshman and Shatrugan’s playful banter stopped instantly, Shatrugan cutting himself short before the punchline of a particularly mischievous play on the Sanskrit and commonspeak words for ‘nubile young girl’. Bharat’s face lost its smile and he slowed his pace.
Kaikeyi turned and saw them approaching. She uttered a noise of exasperation.
‘Where have you been?’ Her voice was shrill and grating, flecks of paan visible between her teeth, the blood-red tobacco juice spraying out as she spoke. ‘First you disappear all morning—and what a morning!—and then Manthara vanishes without telling me where she’s going. And your father—let’s not even start on him, I don’t know what’s got into him today. Nobody seems to care a damn about me in this palace any more.’
Lakshman and Shatrugan proffered the expected bows, their outstretched fingers barely brushing the hem of Kaikeyi’s sari. She gestured vaguely, her ashirwaad—if she issued any—obscured by her mouthful of paan. Her lips were bright from the tobacco juice, a gory contrast to her pale northern complexion.
Lakshman observed that her eyes seemed bloodshot and wilder than usual, and the snappishness in her manner a bit more pronounced. If he didn’t know better, he might have thought she was nursing a hangover: but Second Queen Kaikeyi always made it a point to announce proudly in public that she never touched alcohol as it was so
unladylike
. It was an odd boast, since neither his and Shatrugan’s mother Third Queen Sumitra, nor First Queen Kausalya had ever touched alcohol in their lives, and never thought it necessary to remind the world of this fact. But then Kaikeyi did love to sing her own praises, even when nobody else seemed interested in singing along.
Bharat went with his mother, who was haranguing him about how nobody in the palace seemed to care about royal protocol any more, and how short-staffed she was, and how her seamstresses had utterly botched up her choli for the Holi parade, and how tiring such festivities were for a queen but nobody seemed to care, and so on. He glanced back briefly, giving his brothers a look of despair that Lakshman had seen often.
‘Did you see that?’ Shatrugan said. ‘When she gets like that, it makes me so mad, I’d like to grab her fleshy shoulders and shake her until she just shuts up!’
Lakshman looked at his brother. Again he wondered at the cosmic irony that had bonded Shatrugan and Bharat so closely while he had formed an identical bond with Rama.
‘You take one shoulder, I’ll take the other,’ he said aloud. ‘She’s too tough for you alone!’
Shatrugan looked at his brother, surprised. Then he saw the twinkle in Lakshman’s eyes and let his scowl turn into a smile. ‘Yeah, she is, isn’t she? If only she’d use some of that Kshatriya strength to fight rakshasas instead of taking it out on poor Bharat.’
Lakshman shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe Bharat shouldn’t be such a victim too. I mean, he could stand up to her once in a while. He’s not a milk-drooling babe any more.’
‘She’s his mother, Lakshman. And never mind him, do you think either of us could raise our voice to her?’
Lakshman shook his head, acknowledging Shatrugan’s point. The very thought of addressing an elder aggressively was anathema to any decent Arya. And though some parents could and did relax behaviour norms—Maharaja Janak of Mithila gave his daughters more freedom than most kings gave their sons, for instance—Ayodhya walked a line closer to rigid traditional formality than liberal individualism.
‘Anyway, at least he’s learned to deal with it. He doesn’t let her feed him like a stuffed boar like when he was a kid.’
Shatrugan conceded that point. Before they had left for Guru Vashishta’s forest academy, Bharat used to be the first one in the bhojanshalya and the last to leave, supervised closely by either Kaikeyi-maa or Manthara-daiimaa. Now, he was more watchful about his diet, more aware of his physical appearance. ‘And thank God our maa isn’t like that,’ Lakshman added.
‘Speaking of her,’ Shatrugan said, ‘shouldn’t we see her first before having naashta?’
Lakshman caught a whiff of some fried savoury: samosas, he guessed. He adored samosas and jalebis. ‘I guess we should,’ he agreed reluctantly.
They turned away from the bhojanshalya with an effort and made their way to the third queen’s palace through a connecting corridor. A chorus of cries went up as their mother’s serving girls saw them coming and conveyed the news with the speed of sparrows chittering at the arrival of sunrise. Their mother was waiting for them, the aarti thali beside her, ready for the Holi morning ritual.
‘There you are,’ she said, beaming up at them. Both her sons had at least a head of height on her. Confronted with them, her small, roundish face still youthful and childishly winsome, she looked like a younger sister rather than their mother. ‘You boys must be hungry. Let’s finish your aarti and you can have your naashta.’
She sighed briefly as she hefted the thali on her little hands. ‘I had to spend half the morning keeping Kaikeyi-maa company while she ate her breakfast. My stomach’s grumbling too.’
‘You mean Kaikeyi-maa’s already eaten?’ Lakshman frowned. ‘But isn’t she supposed to wait and do Bharat’s aarti first?’
Sumitra gave her son a look that spoke volumes. ‘Yes, she is. But you know Kaikeyi-maa.’ She shook her head in bafflement. ‘I don’t understand that woman. Does she drink a cup of bile every night before sleeping? She’s always so full of bitterness for everything and everybody. You won’t believe the scene she made in Kausalya-maa’s chambers this morning. I thought the rakshasas had invaded the palace! Anyway, let’s not talk about such ashubh things before pooja. We all have a long day ahead.’
Lakshman and Shatrugan exchanged a last glance before bowing to touch their mother’s feet. It was a glance of mutual relief that they weren’t Kaikeyi-maa’s sons.
TWENTY-FIVE
The moment Rama’s face came into view, framed between two bougainvillea-twined marble arches, Kausalya was struck by a great urge to run and sweep her son into her arms, hugging him madly, the way she had done a year ago when he returned from Guru Vashishta’s ashram.
That day she had been standing ready from dawn on the steps of the palace, anxiously awaiting his return after a gap of seven unbearably long years. When she saw the slender young man walking up the avenue, she was startled at first:
this can’t be my Rama
. Then she had recognised his delicately carved features, chiselled more finely than ever in adolescent masculinity. As he came closer, still absorbed in banter with his three brothers, she began to delineate the unmistakable silhouette of her father’s aquiline profile in his face as well as reflections of her own nose, jawline and chin, mingled to form a strikingly handsome face and personality that was entirely his own—unlike Bharat walking beside him, a smaller and much less bulky but otherwise identical clay-cast model of Dasaratha— and Kausalya was struck with a shock of delicious realisation that her son had left as a boy and come back a man. Then he had glanced up while smiling at some comment by Shatrugan or Lakshman and met her astonished gaze, and she had seen the startled look of recognition in his own eyes. She had let all protocol fall by the wayside as she ran down the steps, past the surprised night-watch, and swept him up in her embrace, her tears leaving streaky trails down his dust-limned shoulder.
He was fourteen, almost fifteen, then. A whole year had passed since that emotional reunion. A year in which they had grown closer than ever despite the long separation, or perhaps because of it, and now not a day passed without Kausalya spending an hour or several in her son’s company, making up for those lost years. But now, as she watched him enter the courtyard of her palace and walk through the arched entranceway, she felt a tearing at her heart and eyes that was as wrenching as the anticipation she had felt that day.
Then, it had been the realisation that her little boy had returned a man. Today, it was the knowledge that he was about to become crown prince of Ayodhya. Crown prince! Even the sadness that lay in her breast like a hard, cold lump, the awful certainty that his ascension would be as a result of his father’s untimely demise, even that sad fact couldn’t lessen the joy of this moment. Earlier this morning, in the akasa-chamber, Dasaratha had reproached her for thinking like a wife rather than a mother.
And so she had. But now that she had had a little time to absorb the unexpected news, to accept the inevitability of Dasaratha’s mortality, she had begun to think like a mother again. And now, flushed with the pride and exhilaration of her thrilling secret, it took every ounce of her self-control to remain standing as she was in the proper dignified posture, and not to shout out Rama’s name, run laughing to him, trumpet her message to the skies. She must behave immaculately. There would be eyes everywhere from now on, watching him as well as her. For if he was to become king, she would be queen mother, and there was a protocol to be followed.
And jealous eyes would be watching constantly.
All this passed through her mind in the space of the moment it took Rama to step through the marble archway. His face softened in a shy smile as he caught sight of her across the twenty-metre length of the square aangan.
He raised his arm in greeting and was about to sprint to her when he saw the entourage of serving girls surrounding her and the pooja thali in her hands. He slowed his pace and strode in measured steps across the aangan, past the sacred tulsi that he had helped Kausalya plant when he was seven, past the greedily admiring doe eyes of the first queen’s entirely female palace staff, each one admiring every nuance of his lithe, muscled frame with the avariciousness of a johari testing the purity of gold— although even a jeweller would not dwell as shamelessly on the intimate anatomical details of a piece of jewellery as did the palace nubiles admiring Rama’s body. And after the announcement today, not just nubiles but every woman of the court would give her life for a single night in his embrace. Kausalya had no fear that Rama would give in to their temptations—she had brought him up too well for that, she knew—but she took some small pleasure from his popularity. It was a fine thing to be desired, as long as one never succumbed to desire.
To his credit, without even throwing a flirtatious glance in anyone’s direction—he was his mother’s darling after all, she told herself with a brief flash of pride—he climbed the seven steps to the threshold where Kausalya stood. As he had passed the tulsi plant, a trio of little butterflies twirling playfully in the air attached themselves to him, roiling and fluttering around his head. As he reached the seventh step, they hovered before his face, attracting his attention for an instant—he laughed delightedly, turning cross-eyed as he tried to look at the bold admirers—then danced away in the wind.
Prajapati
, she thought. Butterflies were an embodiment of the One God that had created all living creatures large and small. The other six million gods—including the holy trinity that were in fact varying aspects of the One God—were all avatars of Prajapati, and the butterflies gracing Rama at such a moment were nothing less than a supreme blessing. She sent up a silent prayer and vowed to offer a special yagna to Prajapati before the season was over.
‘Maa, pranaam,’ he said, bowing low to touch her feet.
Greetings, mother
.
‘Ayushmaanbhav, Aryaputra,’ she responded formally.
Live long, son of Arya
.
Touching his forehead with the tips of his mother-blessed fingers, he accepted her ashirwaad and straightened up. The maids beside Kausalya stepped up with the phool-mala and other tokens of the aarti, and she performed the simple ritual that every Arya mother and wife dutifully executed every day, praying for the long life, health, wealth and happiness of her husband and children. Traditionally, a wife performed the daily aarti for her husband before he left for his day’s duties, be they farming or kingship. This morning, she had already performed it for Dasaratha, but through these many years of marital estrangement, she had satisfied herself by blessing her son every day. And so it was this little ritual that made her feel as though her day was now truly begun.