The Crimson Throne

by Sudhir Kakar

  The room into which I was finally led to meet the prince was the one where Prince Dara held his evening soirées. It was brightly lit by a huge chandelier of the finest Venetian crystal, delicately etched. Light cotton spreads decorated with floral motifs of scrolling vines and blossoms covered the white marble floor. About a dozen men lounged on these spreads, leaning against round bolsters covered in scarlet velvet embroidered with flowers and stalks in gold and silk threads.

  My knees felt as though they would give way under me as I approached the platform where the Wali Ahad sat, holding court. Sweat poured down my face, and just as I felt it was a huge mistake to have ever left the comforting safety of the Jesuits’ house, the familiar sight of Father Buze’s bearded face smiling encouragingly at me slowed down the beating of my heart. Taking a deep breath, I bowed low to greet the prince, just as the fathers had taught me.

  The prince appeared delighted to see that a youth, a farangi at that, not only spoke Persian but had learnt how to pay proper obeisance to a royal. He asked me a few questions about Venice, to which I gave truthful answers, and a couple on my medical background, to which I did not. When he asked me about my origins, I did not pretend that I was of noble lineage although I did lie in telling him I was a cittadini originarii, among those citizens who have a high status in Venetian society because they belong to the corps of scribes and notaries.

  ‘Ah, like the Brahmins among the Hindus,’ the prince remarked, and wanted to know more about what he called ‘your caste system’.

  ‘Not exactly like Brahmins, Your Highness,’ I said. ‘Cittadini originarii may also be traders. It is just that they must be descendants of two generations of Venetian citizens and neither they nor their fathers should have exercised a mechanical occupation.’

  The prince nodded in understanding, took a long drag from his hukka, the water in the bowl of green glass with lotus flowers etched in gold gurgling loudly like an old man clearing his throat of morning catarrh. He asked me with a smile, ‘Would you like to enter my service, farangi?’

  I had waited for months with a ready answer to this question.

  ‘I can hardly believe that I will have the good fortune to serve under so famous a prince,’ I said, bowing low.

  The prince turned to one of the dozen retainers standing against the walls—four carrying flagons of wine, others awaiting orders—and directed one of them to immediately give me a sum of thirty rupees, a complete set of vestments and a good horse. He also announced that I should be paid eighty rupees a month and that suitable quarters be hired for my accommodation.

  Father Buze later told me that most of the men I had seen that day were Prince Dara’s drinking companions. They were the elite among Delhi’s liberal Muslim poets and scholars. The Sufi poet Sarmad, a fakir with conspicuously bushy eyebrows, wearing nothing more than a white loincloth, was present that evening. As was Halim, a man with the heavy face of a peasant, whom Father Malpica described as a scholar who had burst upon the literary scene with what was considered a majestic history of religions, the Dabistan-i-Mazahib. Also there that evening were the prince’s chief scribe, Chandra Bhan, who allegedly indulged in a drinking binge at least once every month; the youthful Muhandis, who had assisted his father Ustad Isa Khan in the construction of the Taj Mahal; and, in a corner, sitting at some distance from the rest, drinking sherbet rather than wine and dressed in white cotton dhotis with muslin scarves thrown across their shoulders to cover their bare chests, were two scholars of the Hindu religion, both in their mid-thirties, who were initiating the Wali Ahad into the mysteries of their faith. I, Niccolao Manucci, who had grown up on the streets of Venice and had once scrounged for food in its dockyards, could never have imagined in my most audacious fantasies that I was to be a frequent visitor to this august court in the days to come.

  Excitement plays tricks with memory. Although I can recollect the room and the objects in it in precise detail, I have little memory of the prince’s face, stature or attire from that first visit. I remember a hand, its fingers covered with flashing rings, raising a goblet to his mouth. I remember the magnificent vessel encrusted with rubies and emeralds in the shapes of blossoms and leaves. I remember a turban glittering with strings of rubies and sapphires, a head thrown back in a sputtering laugh, and drops of red wine staining a lightly bearded jaw. I remember the impression the Wali Ahad left on me on that first meeting: a comely prince with a hearty laugh, whose generosity and warmth had quickly put me at ease.

  Today, when people ask me about Prince Dara, I am able to provide a well-considered judgement based on years of observation and free of any misleading spontaneity of first impressions. The Wali Ahad, I tell them, was a man of dignified manners, exquisitely polite in conversation and quick at repartee. He was brilliant, straightforward, and endowed with courage and energy, both physical and mental. Whatever he did was performed with so much ease, his actions accompanied by so much grace that even the most disgruntled of men could not help but feel attracted to his person. If he had inherited his father’s love of pomp and magnificence and a weakness for astrology, he had also inherited the emperor’s munificence, his generous appreciation of learning and scholarship and a refined taste in music and painting. To me the greatest of his virtues was his innate kindness.

  Those ill-inclined towards him have called it a soft-heartedness that was susceptible to flattery. That, I have always felt, is unjust. The prince never used his boundless influence with his father to injure any person, though he often misused it to benefit many unworthy people. Nothing pleased him more than the liberal exercise of royal clemency to spare a life, however justly forfeited. He never withheld it, even against rebels like Champat Rai Bundela, who proved to be the worst of ingrates. I have no doubt that in the end he even forgave that scoundrel Malik Jivan whose miserable life he saved twice, the last time when that betrayer was being readied for execution on the Police Prefect’s platform in Delhi. Prince Dara did not carry grudges. If he was susceptible to outbursts of anger then they were seldom more than momentary. In my opinion, the prince’s thunder was not half as menacing as that wretch Aurangzeb’s faint smile.

  My employment in Prince Dara’s service was like the royal seal on the proclamation of my medical competence. My practice began to flourish as patients poured in. My attempt was to channel the stream from the very beginning.

  ‘If you really want to make a reputation as a physician,’ Vaidraj had told me, ‘be a specialist.’

  Maria assiduously helped me in this undertaking by spreading the word that I was a veritable Avicenna in the treatment of diseases that afflicted women. The curing of Wazir Khan’s wife, now raised to the stature of a miracle, was still fresh in people’s minds, with the result that many women in the harems of the nobles began to demand my services when they fell ill.

  My early successes resulted from a mixture of luck and vigilance in selecting only healthy patients for treatment. By ‘healthy’ I mean women whose sickness was not life-threatening, who in time would have recovered on their own. I refused the very serious cases, pleading lack of time to give them the full attention they required. Miracles are miracles precisely because they cannot be predicted or willed. It would have been foolish of me to hope for another one.

  The bread and butter of my practice came from bloodletting, in which I had gained proficiency. Many women routinely had themselves bled every month to expel the poisons in the bloodstream that could lead to such blemishes as pimples or even unsightly warts.

  My first session of bloodletting, which took place in the harem of Rustam Khan, one of the Wali Ahad’s favourite commanders, was unnerving to say the least. As the Aitmad led me into the harem and closed the door behind us, three or four old women rapidly approached me and conducted me to a bathroom. Ignoring my protests, they began to undress me, making lewd comments and cackling with mirth when I tried to cover my manhood with my hands. I had never had any cause to doubt that I was reasonably endowed, but this mockery made me feel l
ike my genitals had reduced to the size of a small boy’s. The women then washed me well, especially my hands, and anointed me with aromatic pomades. This was accompanied by some uncomfortably indiscreet groping and more laughter. After I was dressed in fresh clothes, I was escorted to the sick woman’s bedside, the shawl thrown over my head now trailing down to my waist. From behind a curtain a slender arm was extended in my direction. The arm was fully covered till the wrist. I first felt the pulse, which was strong and steady, and indicated a spot the width of two fingers above the wrist, close to the vein that I wanted to bleed. One of the old women pushed up the silk cloth covering my patient’s arm. Instead of making shallow incisions with a scalpel, which would have left faint scars on my fair patient’s arm, I used the silver needle I had brought with me to prick the vein. Another woman handed me a gold basin to gather the blood and I examined it for colour before pricking another vein in the foot. This was not really necessary but I knew both the patient and the watching women expected that the bloodletting is repeated at least once, if not many more times, during a single session for it to be truly effective. Such sessions soon became routine and I even began to enjoy the ritual that led up to the procedure, laughing along with the old crones, sharing their glee as they undressed me and prepared my body for the bath.

  As terrible as it may sound, the bulk of my practice came from the sorry situation of the women in the harem. In their jealousy, the Muslims were even worse than the Portuguese. They were exceedingly distrustful of their women and did not trust their wives, even with their own brothers. So strict, in fact, was the Muslim purdah that the helpless women had no choice but to adopt its values as their own. If a fire broke out in the harem, many women would prefer to perish in the flames than expose their faces to strange men while fleeing. One of the emperor’s queens was said to observe purdah to such an extent that she refused to take a male child on her lap and covered her face even in the presence of a four-year-old boy. Amir Khan, the governor of Kabul, had gone so far as to divorce his wife because her veil got dislodged, exposing her face, when she attempted to save her life by leaping from the back of an elephant which was running amok.

  Confined to the harem like caged birds and closely guarded by trusted eunuchs and female daroghas, the women pined for attention. In the inevitable absence of physical intimacy, they longed to touch and be touched by a man. Each day, they spent hours adorning themselves in clothes and jewellery and perfuming their bodies with unusual scents; not in the hope of a visit from their Lord, which is rare, but to fill the emptiness of their lives. There were diversions, of course, of gossip and intrigues, dance and musical recitals by the slave girls. Some of the talented women memorized stories—such favourites as tales from the popular tales, Hazar Afsane (A Thousand Nights)—as also whole verses from Persian romantic poetry, which they then related to an enthusiastic audience. Except for the royal princesses, the harem women were illiterate. The tales and the verses had been transmitted orally from older women to those in the younger generation who were blessed both by a good memory and a voice that brought out the subtleties of the prose and the music of the verse.

  Yet the minds of most women remained home to salacious thoughts and their bodies to unfulfilled urges. Liaisons with other women, or even with eunuchs, though not uncommon, attracted harsh punishments. All that remained for a woman was the possibility of pleasuring herself, sometimes through unusual means, but this too was sought to be interdicted. The eunuchs were under strict instructions to ensure that any fruit or vegetable that was shaped like the membrum virile—a radish or cucumber and especially the long brinjal with its purple satiny skin—was cut, and jaggedly so, before it was allowed into the harem’s kitchen.

  Under the circumstances, visits from a young doctor resulted in much excitement and anticipation. Quite a few of the women pretended to be invalid, simply to have a chance to converse with me and have their pulse felt by me. Not that it is easy to find the pulse on a wrist covered with bracelets or strings of pearls wrapped around it ten or twelve times. On occasion, when I stretched my hand to reach inside the curtain to feel the pulse of a woman who pretended to be too weak to extend her arm outside, I felt it being kissed by soft lips or the flesh under my thumb nibbled at by small, sharp teeth. The bolder among the women, either in collusion with the darogha on duty or evading her watchful gaze, rubbed their cheeks against my palm or lewdly placed the swell of a naked breast against it. I was young, full of the sap of youth, and had to exercise strong self-control not to respond to the touch. That would have been hazardous to my plans, not to speak of being fatal for my person. I could not help the involuntary reactions of my body, however. Whenever I went to see a patient in a harem, I was careful to wear a qaba that came down to my knees and trousers that flapped loosely around the hips.

  My monthly salary in the prince’s employment was generous but I needed to supplement it as my expenses were high. Even the horse the Wali Ahad had gifted me was a financial burden since I did not know how to ride a horse and was nervous around the animal. That is, till the man I employed to take care of the animal suggested that I hire it out to people who were visiting the city on business and wanted to make an impression by arriving for their appointments on a horse instead of on foot.

  Eight days later, another opportunity to make easy money presented itself. One morning, just after the scavenger who came with his donkey to remove the garbage had made his rounds, a man came to my house and asked if I was interested in making some money without working for it. What exactly did he mean, I enquired. He said all he needed was my permission to distil spirits close to my house and under my protection, and for me to assert that he was my servant. Drinking alcohol is forbidden in both the religions, Hindu and Muslim, though this does not prevent common people from clandestinely drinking a liquor called arak locally distilled from molasses. Its consumption and sale are strictly forbidden, but widespread corruption in the police force ensures its easy availability. Europeans in the service of Prince Dara had the privilege of distilling spirits and selling them without hindrance. The Jesuit fathers, who did not have the financial support of the Church and had to fall back on their own resources, had also adopted this as their chief source of income. Arak is even offered in some taverns in a disguised form once it has been mixed with coloured sherbets. In spite of the religious prohibition, some nobles openly drink Shiraz wine imported from Persia, while others are partial to the Canary wine brought into Surat by the Dutch. Both wines are so dear that, as they say in Venice, the taste is destroyed by the cost.

  The man, a ruffian by his looks, offered me a fee of ten rupees a day for my service. A little haggling enabled me to get the man to raise my share to twelve rupees and I agreed to his proposal. Growing up poor, I had always been careful about money and did not disdain these petty sources of income even after I had established myself as a physician at the court.

  As far as alternative sources of income were concerned, the Mogul court itself was a goldmine; all a man needed to extract the gold was enough enterprise to explore its depths. In this I found Maria to be the perfect partner. She was resourceful, knowledgeable about the nature of Indians and, to my delight, mischievously inventive in her scheming. Soon after I began my practice in earnest, she revealed to me that the only time a resident of a harem was allowed to come face to face with a man was when she was thought to be possessed by a spirit. On such occasions, an exorcist was called upon to observe her physical condition and monitor the progress of the spirit’s expulsion. Such cases in fact, occurred frequently and the guardians of the harem ensured that the exorcist who was summoned was a geriatric. (It had not escaped my notice that possession of women by demons occurred more often in places where women were confined and had little interaction with the opposite gender; nunneries in my country and harems in India were preferred sites for demonic visitations.) It was time, Maria declared, for me to develop another skill, a specialization within a specialization, so to speak. She had a
perfect plan by which I could establish a reputation as an exorcist.

  One evening, I invited a small group from among the Omrah at the prince’s court to my house for dinner. Those who accepted the invitation did not belong to the highest echelons of the court and I must admit I was relieved as the dinner I was serving would have been quite poor by Mogul standards. In a Mogul feast, serving anything less than forty dishes is considered dishonourable of the host and insulting to the guests—though ignorance of etiquette is excusable in a farangi.

  After dinner, we were sitting around companionably smoking hukkas and drinking Shiraz wine when, in the middle of a conversation, I turned to address a corner of the room as though speaking to an invisible entity.

  ‘Quiet!’ I called out. ‘Can’t you see I am busy with my guests? Hold your tongue!’

  I resumed talking to the nobles as if nothing had happened, but occasionally pretended to cast irritated glances at the same empty corner. The nobles exchanged alarmed looks. Then, suddenly, as one of them began to address me, I cut him off with a raised hand and began to shout at the corner.

  ‘Did I not command you to shut up? Quiet, I say!’

  I repeated this performance three times in the next hour, pretending each time to be more provoked than before, yet I continued to smile at my guests and offer them more wine as if nothing untoward was taking place. All conversation had now ceased. Finally, I rose from my seat in great anger and advanced towards the window, uttering the choicest abuses. On the way, I took a bottle from the table (into which Maria had sneakily poured a little arak) and lit it with a candle. As the bottle glowed blue with flames, I opened the window and violently hurled it out, abusing the invisible demon some more and forbidding him to enter my home ever again. The petrified Omrah, now visibly shaken, could not wait to get away but were too scared to walk the small distance between my house and their waiting carriages. I reassured them that the demon was safely in my power and to keep him at bay all they had to do was to repeat ‘Farangi hakim ki duhai! Farangi hakim ki duhai!’ (‘I call upon the protection of the farangi doctor!’).