The Crimson Throne

by Sudhir Kakar

  My detractors have spread many stories about my hurried departure from Goa, but there is no truth in them. That I was having an affair with Don Braganza’s wife is a despicable lie. Would a lady of such fine sensibilities as Dona Cristina tie a string to her toe each night before going to bed and hang the other end out of the window for me to tug at at midnight to check if the coast was clear for a quick rendezvous in the garden shed? Would she, like an ordinary village wench, be caught in flagrante delicto in the shed one night by her husband who had chosen that night to drink less wine than was his stuporous wont and reached out across his bed to find his wife missing from his side? And what of the preposterous story about me having fled across the garden and into the street with not a thread on my body, being chased by Don Braganza’s Kaffirs firing their blunderbusses in the direction of my rapidly retreating posterior? Lies, lies, fanciful lies! If these stories had even a grain of truth, Dona Cristina’s husband would not have left her alive. Nor would I have been able to leave Goa as easily as I did. I left in a hurry, true, but certainly not in headlong panic.

  The truth is a less tawdry tale, easily told. Dona Cristina’s favourite maid was recovering from a severe bout of malarial fever in the Royal Hospital and the lady often dropped by to enquire after her well-being. One day I bumped into Dona Cristina just when I was carrying the maid’s regulation glass of pissat vache to be poured out into the ground. The glass tilted and drops of the liquid fell on the sleeve of her silk dress. Dona Cristina took a step back, her nostrils flaring enchantingly in disgust at the smell of urine. I stuttered an apology and stepped aside to let her pass. Surprised by the unusual sight of a European among the low-born mestica orderlies, the intended words of chastisement did not reach her lips. Instead, she smiled. I smiled in return. In the next week, we exchanged formal greetings whenever we passed each other. Eventually, one afternoon, she accosted me in the corridor and invited me to sit out with her on a bench in the unkempt hospital garden. This wooden bench, with two broken slats and covered with pigeon droppings, was to become our regular meeting place three times a week over the next four weeks, until her maid was discharged from the hospital. A plump and attractive woman in her early thirties, Cristina Braganza had the kindest eyes, and an even more gentle heart. I found it easy to respond to her gentle questioning. It felt more like an invitation to share the story of my young life than an idle probing animated by curiosity. The experience of unburdening my soul, pouring out my old pains and my newborn hopes into the ears of a sympathetic woman was so novel for a motherless boy that I fell a little in love with her, never of the carnal kind. At the time, Mala was the only woman who could stoke the fire of those particular promptings. If Dona Cristina had any carnal feelings towards me, she either hid them well or signalled them so subtly that I remained oblivious to them.

  I was aware of the danger of conversing with a married woman in her husband’s absence—Don Braganza was then away on a military campaign—yet I could not resist visiting Dona Cristina at home after her maid was cured. My need to be in her presence had turned into an addiction. Don Braganza was uncertain about the extent of my intimacy with his wife when he returned. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been two Kaffirs waiting for me at the gate of the hospital with a signed note from him commanding me to leave Goa within three days. I would have been confronted, instead, by a jealous army captain with a raised sword or a cocked gun ready to drive the blade through me or fire a bullet into my head.

  I never saw Dona Cristina again. On the morning of my departure, her maid brought me a letter. The letter was addressed to her cousin Maria Escobar, a Portuguese woman who had been among those captured by the Mogul forces during their siege of Hoogly. She now held a position of import in the crown prince Dara Shukoh’s harem, and Dona Cristina had often spoken fondly of her to me. At first, I resisted opening the letter. But curiosity about what she had to say about me soon triumphed over my scruples. In the letter, Dona Cristina had recommended me in the highest terms as an accomplished physician, especially in the arts of rejuvenation. She had chosen her words carefully to hide the tenderness she felt towards me. Instead, she had encoded her feelings in a familiar perfume lightly sprayed on the back of the envelope.

  Here I must confess to the biggest shame of my life, one which has haunted me for more than twenty years now. In the self-centered preoccupation of youth, as I was leaving Goa I did not think twice about snapping ties with people who had cherished and helped me: Mala, Luigi, Vaidraj. Love and gratitude, sadness at the parting of ways, the pain of loss, were parts of me that I had excised with my eye upon a distant star. They have begun to emerge and demand a hearing now when I am older, and perhaps wiser, and have discovered how cold the star of ambition actually is. At the time, I was dry-eyed and drier-hearted when I bid goodbye to Luigi and Vaidraj, my two benefactors. Mala I did not visit to bid farewell. How monstrous is the youth of men!

  Armed only with the letter of introduction to Maria Escobar, but with full faith in my ability to both charm and cure (the two indispensable ingredients of a doctor’s success), I arrived in the new imperial capital of Delhi on 15 June 1654, two months and eleven days after leaving Goa.

  Ah, Delhi! Anyone who has been in Delhi in the heat of June shall be well prepared to face the fires of hell. Hell may be hotter, but it certainly does not experience the mistral the Indians call the loo. This hot wind, heavy with gritty sand that can make sandpaper out of eyelids, can arise at any time of the day or night during the months of May and June, causing the city to barricade itself behind closed shutters for most parts of the day and awaken to life once the sun has set. Early mornings and evenings thus became the hours for my explorations of the imperial capital.

  On the second morning after my arrival, I sought out the house of the four Jesuit fathers whom Luigi had once mentioned while enlightening me on missionary undertakings in India. Like his father, the irredeemably irreligious Emperor Jahangir who encouragedjesuit priests only for the amusement of watching them squabble with the mullahs, the Great Mogul, too, had no use for Jesuits. There were none left in the city except for Father Buze, a Flemish priest, the German Father Roth, my fellow Italian, the Neapolitan, Father Malpica, and the Portuguese Father Juzarte, whom I never met since he had gone on a long visit to Goa. The Jesuits enjoyed the protection of the eldest of Emperor Shah Jahan’s sons, Dara Shukoh, known to be a keen student of religions and an enthusiastic practitioner of the mystical Sufi strain of Islam, and were his informants on all matters of Christian faith. My plan was to ask for Father Malpica’s help in reaching Maria Escobar in Prince Dara’s harem.

  Father Malpica turned out to be friendly middle-aged man who did not resemble any Jesuit I had known. For one, he was not dressed as a man of cloth but in a white cotton churidar and a calf-length fine muslin qaba of the same colour. The qaba was fashionably tight at the torso but loose from the waist down. It was tied in the front on the left, as Hindus tie their garments, rather than on the right in the manner of the Muslims. His fleshy chest and the bulge of an ample belly straining against the diaphanous material of the tunic did not exactly bespeak of the austere lifestyle for which the Jesuits are known and respected. Having listened gravely to my request for his assistance, the Father said, ‘I will help you myself. I, too, have a certain influence with the prince. But to do that I need to know more about your professional expertise. You look very young to me.’

  I recounted an edited version of my story, one which exaggerated my medical skills and embellished the nature and length of my medical experience as a physician. I even added to my account a couple of histories of successful cures of difficult cases which I had heard from Luigi.

  ‘Good! I needed to make sure, although the recommendation speaks for itself. Such is the faith of Indians in European medicine that many shameless quacks have begun to hover around the native courts,’ Father Malpica said after I finished, his small, dark eyes kind but shrewd. ‘Come and see me after a week and I may have some
news for you.’

  For the next three days, I explored the city in the early mornings and its people late in the evenings. Both are delightful as long as they are encountered on their own terms and not judged by European standards. Delhi’s public buildings and spaces are magnificent. One of the most pleasing vistas is of the avenue that begins from the Agra gate and ends at the emperor’s citadel. This is a long and spacious street, divided in the middle by a canal of running water. Both sides of the street are lined with raised pathways, five to six feet high and four feet broad. Petty officials of the state sit here and go about their functions without being inconvenienced by the traffic of people, horses, carriages and oxen carts that pass below.

  The dwellings of common people may seem like wretched huts but their mud floors and walls and thatched roofs are well suited for Delhi’s hot climate. They are airy and are swept clean more than once during the day. They are free of the filth and foul smell of the poorer quarters of Venice where people blithely dump dirty water out on the cobblestones. The Indians, even the poor, bathe regularly and the smell of sweat, inevitable in a people living in a hot climate, is of fresh and not stale perspiration. It is true the common people are poverty-stricken and sorely oppressed. But they have neither lost their zest for life nor an essential kindness.

  In the evenings my habit was to wander through the bazaars of Delhi and visit its eateries or taverns. It struck me, as it had in Goa, that Indians, whether Hindu or Muslim, are unfailingly courteous and often generous beyond their means. Guests are like gods, the Hindus believe, and Muslims share the sentiment although they would recoil from its expression in words that reek of idolatry. Save for a trifling amount spent on buying a couple of flatbreads and yoghurt for my daily morning meals, I did not spend a pice on food and drink during those days. And not a night passed when I was not hosted in one of the illegal taverns that dotted the city, drinking spirits being forbidden by Islamic law but tolerated under the benign influence of the Wali Ahad.

  Outside the taverns, free entertainment was available in the public squares. Child acrobats, some aged six or seven, turned somersaults to the accompaniment of drums beaten by their fathers or elder brothers. Bears with strings drawn through their noses were made to perform ponderous dance steps by their handlers. Monkeys on long leashes and dressed in men’s trousers or women’s skirts played out domestic quarrels. Just as on the streets of Venice, charlatans shouted out the virtues of the medicines they peddled. But whereas in the city of my birth cures for pox or ague, boils or plague, were the most touted, in Delhi the peddlers who drew the largest crowds promised potency to men, fertility to women and a reversal of the ravages of age to both.

  Maria was now standing next to me. She recited the history of the woman’s sickness in halting Persian spoken with a familiar Portuguese lilt, punctuating almost every sentence with a respectful nod and the address of ‘Doctor’. Gently, she guided my examination of the patient.

  ‘Yes, of course, Doctor, you need to examine the pulse first,’ she said, directing my hand behind the curtain to place it on the woman’s wrist. The pulse was irregular and very weak. ‘She was restless during the week but has been almost comatose since yesterday,’ Maria continued. ‘There have been three sessions of bloodletting but they have only weakened her further.’

  My apprehension mounted as she recited the woman’s symptoms, a rather long fist of woes that I racked my brain to fit to a familiar disease. Then, as though a lifeline had been thrown to me, I heard the word ‘stool’ and quickly enquired about the patient’s bowel movements.

  ‘No, doctor,’ Maria replied, ‘she has not relieved herself for days together.’

  This was sufficient information. Just as a poet sometimes feels his poetry has come from the music of the stars and is not of his own making, a doctor too has moments of inspiration when a disease and its treatment are laid out clearly before him.

  ‘She immediately needs to be administered a clyster,’ I pronounced with supreme confidence.

  Muslims have strong objections to this particular method of treatment but there was no alternative if the woman’s life had to be saved. Murmurs of consternation arose behind the curtain. Maria was called inside and a message was sent to Wazir Khan. His reply that the decision lay with the women resulted in further rounds of consultation and debate. Maria finally overrode them by quoting from the Quran, ‘Agar zarurat bayad, rawa bakshhad which she later told me roughly translates as ‘necessity knows no law’. I was impressed as much by her knowledge of the Quran as by the authority in her voice. Silence descended behind the curtain as Maria emerged and gave me a triumphant smile. I smiled in answer, as much from relief as to salute her status in the harem.

  ‘Come to Father Malpica’s house in the afternoon. I will then give you all that is needed for the application,’ I said.

  Among the many lessons from the Hindu doctor that had been engraved in my memory was a statement he repeated often, ‘The stomach is the seat of many diseases, especially ones that seem puzzling at first.’ Hindus are fascinated with the journey of food through the body, by what is taken in through the mouth, what happens to it as it travels through the stomach and the intestines, and what is ejected through the rectum. For Hindus, defecation is a serious matter, requiring undivided attention and deep thought. I know of no other people who pay so much attention to the subject of gas in the intestines, or to the form, colour and consistency of stools. The inability to defecate even for a day is considered as bad as a minor illness and people habitually observe their stools to see whether they are as they should be, soft and even a little runny. My difficulty in this case was that though I remembered the ingredients of at least six enemas in Hindu medicine—I had administered a few myself at the Royal Hospital in Goa—I was not quite sure of the proportions to be prescribed. I thus took a risk (allowed Providence to guide my hand, as Father Malpica later said) and prepared a concoction out of mallows, wild endives, bran, jaggery, rock salt, olive oil and canna fistula. Father Malpica was immensely helpful in sending his servants running off to various bazaars to procure the ingredients. Then came the difficulty of finding an instrument with which to administer the injection. In the end, I fashioned one myself from a cow’s udder fastened to one end of a hollow bamboo water pipe through which the Muslims smoke their hukkas. I corked the other end of the tube and filled the udder with the concoction.

  When Maria arrived at the Jesuit house some four hours later, I handed the contraption to her, together with instructions on how to inject the enema. On Father Malpica’s advice I also asked her to.

  ‘The most excellent and learned man of Asia’

  FRANCOIS BERNIER

  ‘IT IS THE UNCERTAINTIES that energize life,’ my mentor M. Gassendi had once remarked. ‘Look at them as a joy rather than as a curse and you will penetrate to the heart of life’s mystery … and grace.’

  I have not experienced the truth of this statement more acutely than in the time I spent in the service of that most excellent and learned man of Asia, Danishmand Khan. Entrusted with the task of administering the empire’s foreign affairs by the monarch, who reposed full trust in him, Danishmand Khan, M. Briffault had said, was one of the few nobles who was more committed to the welfare of the empire than to increasing his wealth or promoting his self-interest. After eleven years of close association, I can unhesitatingly vouch for the truth of M. Briffault’s observation and can only marvel at my good fortune that I found service with a man whose character was also devoid of vanity and moral blindness, the two other forces that drive men in public life, in any society.

  I noticed soon after I joined his services that Danishmand Khan, whom I was instructed upon arrival to address as Agha, master, was the only grandee “who was exempt from appearing every day at the imperial court, a freedom granted in consequence of his being a man of letters who needed time to devote to his studies and to foreign affairs. He could no more dispense with his philosophical studies in the afternoon than a
void allocating the mornings to his weighty duties. But on Wednesdays he attended court in the same manner as any other Amir. This was the only time the Agha wore churidar breeches of coloured silk rather than starched white cotton. His qaba, the tunic worn by all Indians of a certain social standing, in which he wrapped his lean frame with the slightly rounded shoulders of the scholar, was also of silk with a floral pattern rather than of white Dacca muslin embroidered in the arabesque pattern he usually favoured. His beard, clipped to the breadth of four fingers, was always neatly combed. Unlike older Omrah, who seeks to appear youthful no matter how advanced their age, he never dyed his beard nor plucked out its sprinkling of white hair. I was quite flattered when the chief eunuch of his court once said to me, ‘Bernier, you do not have a beard, nor the, Agha’s colouring, but you look remarkably similar to the Agha, not in features but in form.’

  Like his other employees, I would go to his house every morning to mark my attendance, my brief appearance consisting of nothing more than making the ritual salaam, bowing deeply from the waist while raising my right hand to my forehead. A man of the most polished manners, Danishmand Khan was so civil and courteous that he addressed everybody, even his employees as ‘janaab’, sir. He disapproved of coarse language as he did of any display of anger. In Surat, after I had received the summons to reach Delhi, M. Briffault had recounted some incidents he had heard of to prepare me for my future post. It was said that Danishmand Khan’s sensibilities were so refined that once when his horse stopped to answer the call of nature, he immediately dismounted and took a seat in the palanquin that was always a part of his entourage, cloaking the distaste caused by the sight, smell and sound of the horse’s evacuation by claiming that his back was hurting and needed support. Again, when the architect appointed to build his mansion had shown him the plans for approval, he had studied them with much interest, making specific enquiries about the various sections. Not quite able to fathom a particular set of markings, he asked the architect about their purpose and upon being informed that they indicated the place where the lavatories would be situated, Danishmand Khan held his nostrils with his right hand and puckering up his face in disgust signalled with his left for the architect to take the plan away, as if the paper gave off an offensive odour merely because of the drawing. At the time, I had found the stories amusing, but now, after meeting him, I no longer saw them as eccentricities but as manifestations of an exquisitely refined temperament