The Venus of Konpara

by John Masters

  ‘Well, Huttoo Lall, what is it?’ he asked.

  The headman stood erect. His eyes were deep set, and though he observed the rules of behaviour with great care - almost obsequiousness - Mohan thought, not for the first time, that he did not really give an impression of humility. Yet he was a low-caste fellow, of no wealth and no position beyond the hereditary headship of the little village on the next ridge.

  The headman said, ‘For the past week a troupe of entertainers has been giving shows for the coolies working on the dam. Yesterday they performed at Konpara.’

  Mohan remembered that he had seen them rehearsing one afternoon when he rode through the coolie camp on his way back from Deori. And last night he had thought of walking across to Konpara to see the show, in his boredom.

  ‘They are nothing,’ the headman said apologetically. ‘A juggler, a singer, a magician, a drummer, a flutist, and a female dancer... but they wish to give a performance here.’

  ‘Here?’ Mohan said. ‘Who for?’

  The headman threw, him an odd, surprised look. ‘For the Suvala.’

  Mohan tapped his fingers uneasily on his knee. Of course, he was in India now, where performances for a single man were nothing rare; and he was the Suvala. But Mr Kendrick would not approve. That was the kind of irresponsible ‘oriental potentate’ behaviour which he did not like at all.

  The headman said, ‘We of Konpara can recommend the troupe to your lordship.’

  Mohan felt the subtle pressure, and understood completely. The troupe had given the performance to the village free, in return for the headman’s assurance that they should perform before the Suvala. When he paid them tonight he would be paying for both performances. So he should. The villagers of Konpara were poor, they were his subjects, and he was the Suvala - whatever the Viceroy decided.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Ten o’clock.’

  ‘Very good, lord,’ the headman said, bowing deeply. He backed out of the room.

  Mohan looked at the book in his hand. Vilely printed at a cheap press in Allahabad, it was written in the most high-flown type of Hindi, almost unadulterated Sanskrit, and he found it hard to understand. It was a history of the Suvala family and the State of Deori - the two phrases meant the same thing - and had been written ten years ago by the State Archivist. What a jumble of superstition and fairy tale and legend it was! What strange, lurid people his ancestors had been!

  Where had he got to? Twelve hundred and fifty B.C. He read on, and read till his bath was announced. He took the book in to dinner with him, and was still reading when the major-domo announced that all was prepared for the show. Then he walked out on to the front lawn.

  He expected to find that the servants had placed the biggest armchair, from the living-room, near the foot of the verandah steps. They had not. Instead, in that place they had piled five or six of his thickest cushions. He paused, flushing. That was a gaddi, the royal seat

  He should order them to bring out the chair. Or he should change into Rajput clothes. The major-domo was at his elbow. The dancer ordered it so,’ he muttered.

  ‘Ordered?’ Mohan said in astonishment.

  The major-domo looked nonplussed, as though he, too, could not understand why he had used the word. ‘She said it was important for the performance. I am sorry, lord, if...’

  ‘Let it be,’ Mohan said, and sank down on the cushions, his legs crossed beneath him. It was hard to sit like this in a dinner jacket and trousers.

  Lamps from the dining-room stood on the lawn, and the young dishwasher was tying hurricane lanterns to the trees at the edge of the cut grass. The troupe were dim shapes in the far gloom. From there came the tentative thud of the drum, several rapid beats, then a pause, then the drum again, pitched higher. The drummer was tuning his drum. The flutist blew a long quavering note.

  Mohan remembered that Southdown was only a quarter of a mile away across the shallow valley. Mr Kendrick would hear the music, perhaps even see the lights. Perhaps he’d come over, and find him sitting on a makeshift gaddi ... like Prince Hal: trying on his father’s crown before he was dead.

  Too late now. The major-domo had placed a low table at his elbow, with a bottle of brandy and a glass and soda beside it, in ice. He became aware of a larger, unseen audience. The bungalow was behind him, the thatched roof full of mysterious creaks and murmurs, but those were bats, or perhaps the rats that lived above the ceiling cloths. The servants’ quarters and stables were invisible behind the bungalow and to the left as he sat; but the servants were here, grooms and dishwashers and sweepers and water carriers and gardeners, and their women. The cricket pitch was to the right, down the slope of the ridge there. Ahead, the darkness of the pit, and behind, a sinking half moon.

  The drum picked up a complicated rhythm, the flute told the tune, and the entertainment began. The music ran alone for a minute or two, then the dancer glided out of the shadows on to the centre of the lawn, three rows of bangles chinking heavily on her right ankle. She was not a very good dancer, Mohan thought, or she was not interested. She gyrated there twenty feet from him, performing the simple steps of a nautch. She wore a short red skirt that came half-way down her calves, and a bodice, and carried a scarf in her hands. Her face was pretty enough. She never looked at him as she went through her steps and stylised attitudes. He wondered whether she was, venereally diseased. Anyway, she was low caste. Why had she ‘ordered’ the preparation of a gaddi? And why had his pompous major-domo obeyed her?

  At the end, he clapped politely. The echo came back very loud from the trees and the bungalow. Why did not the others clap, the servants concealed at the edges of the light? Of course, they must pretend they were not here. The show was for him alone.

  A man came out and sang, interminably, with gestures. Something about his - Suvala’s - ancestors; about Indra riding the heavens and hurling thunderbolts upon the black heathen.

  The juggler followed. Mohan’s interest quickened. The fellow was a pale Punjabi, very stocky. He threw up small wooden balls until he had a dozen of them in the air at once. By Jove, Mohan thought, that fellow would make a first-class cricketer, if he was taught. He toyed with the idea of giving him a job in Deori, and teaching him... Now it was plates... Now he was standing on his head and juggling nine-pins on his feet Marvellous! Mohan applauded enthusiastically and with an instinctive gesture reached in his pocket and threw the man a silver rupee.

  The singer walked out again, palms joined. Mohan poured himself a brandy and tried to maintain his look of regal pleasure. When he became Rajah, this would be his lot for the rest of his life. Noblesse oblige, Mr Kendrick said.

  The conjuror, or worker of magic, came. He cut ropes in two and made them whole. He caused objects to disappear. He spouted flames from his mouth - and this time Mohan heard the involuntary gasp and the woman’s stifled shriek from the shadows to the left. He isolated the walls of his stomach, and moved any piece of skin, as Mohan ordered, at will. He swallowed a long sword and pushed a needle through his hand. Mohan leaned forward, absorbed. Where was the trick? There’d got to be a trick somewhere. There was a trick in all this Indian magic.

  A snake charmer now. Ah, it was the singer. The girl had a pretty easy time. Probably just a prostitute whom the men took along to save them paying others in the cities. Then why was it she who spoke to the major-domo? The singer was not very good as a snake charmer either. The cobras rose out of the basket, swayed, and subsided.

  More singing and Mohan glanced surreptitiously at his new wrist-watch. More juggling. More singing. Nearly midnight

  The music stopped. The girl glided towards him across the lawn, stooped low with joined palms, and said in a low, hoarse voice, her Hindi better accented than his own, ‘That is the end of our programme, Mohan Singh Suvala.’

  ‘Very good,’ he said, and began to fumble in his pocket Five rupees? Ten? He handed her ten rupees. She passed them to the juggler, who had appeared at her elbow, very humble.

  She straightened. He
r hands were no longer submissively joined, but held at her sides, the palms a little towards him.

  Her neck was erect, and he saw that her breasts were full and firm, her waist very small.

  She said in a slow, inquiring voice, ‘Art thou the Suvala... Eldest Son of Indra, Beloved of the Gods?’

  It was silent in the garden. The bungalow behind him made no sound and the people in the darkness were silent The last moonlight shone on the farther wall of the pit.

  What was he to say? That he was the Suvala, but his uncle was trying to protest his legitimacy, and the British Government would have to decide?

  ‘I am the Suvala,’ he said.

  She said, ‘You have spoken truly. Your people believe you are the Suvala, but they doubt - for you yourself have not been sure. It is here that we know who we are.’ She touched her bare navel. She stared at him, and spoke with a sternness, an authority, that he realised was amazing: yet it did not amaze him. She said, ‘I have watched you, every day, for seven days, Suvala. You are the Suvala . . . I shall dance for you, A Bharata Natya of love and pride. For you, the king, for you alone. Only the king may see the queen dance as I dance now.’

  She turned, raised her hands, and spread them wider. Addressing the unseen audience, she said, ‘Go to your own places. Let none stay. I dance for the Suvala.’

  Now she’s a queen, Mohan thought No wonder the major-domo obeyed her, and the servants. He heard the sounds of movement in the darkness and knew that the people were going away.

  She had gone, too, and the drummer was beating a different rhythm. Damned cheek, she had. He poured out-another brandy and soda. Bad for training, but he felt unsettled and nervous. The jungle seemed to stand closer to the edge of the lawn than it did by day, and the pit was bigger, and the moon had set.

  The girl came out of the opposite trees, her legs gliding forward to the slow chink chink of silver bangles. She wore only two now, on her right ankle, and much lighter than the heavy ones she had worn for the first dance. A small ruby gleamed on the outside of her left nostril. Instead of the scarf she carried a snake. Apart from the bangles, the ruby, and the snake, she was naked.

  Mr Kendrick, Mohan thought wildly. Suppose Mr Kendrick ...

  She advanced steadily, not writhing as before, but with a stately motion, her head high, the snake curving gently across her body as she held it, her hands moving.

  The old way, this is the old way, he thought - I remember the statues, I remember someone telling me, this was the way it used to be, the women, even the queens, naked and unashamed, sometimes carrying a snake in the dance . . .. He began to feel bigger. It was a sexual arousing, and sexually sited; but the expansion spread all over the body. The dancer could achieve no more than the audience, the man for whom she danced, would give. He must become as great a man, as strong, as tenderly proud, as she was a woman. She was precisely formed in the ancient manner, a little over five feet high, narrow-waisted, her breasts high and full and mathematically round, the hips springing out to strong slender thighs, a wide space between, where the smooth-shaved delta curved down broad and fat and firmly cleft Her neck was long and her head small, her mouth wide and firm, and her eyes enormous, the lids very heavy.

  The brandy stood untouched on the low table. The glass and the bottle and the gaddi itself became immaterial and soon ceased to exist. The woman - she was not a girl, though she was about his own age - could not be held in place or time. She belonged to a place where there was no knowledge of time, and so no knowledge of the customs and beliefs which time brings and time changes. Naked, the breasts firm when she moved, the muscles holding her stomach firm though her leg trembled in the dance - it was possible to see her as clothed. As her thighs spread and stretched the sign they disclosed was not of sexuality, but of creation.

  Now her eyes never left his and he tried with all his might to read the message she gave him. She could not speak, that he knew. It had to come from the soul, through the body. Physical ecstasy, she was saying, and love... but there was more behind and as yet he could not understand it He heard himself groan and shook his head angrily. If she heard she would think it was a groan of lust, but it was not It was a cry of failure, of striving.

  She had, danced ten, fifteen minutes and sweat gleamed on her body. She opened her hands and poured the snake to the ground. It was a young cobra and, as she released it, it rose again, spread its hood, and swayed beside her, the small eyes fixed on her.

  Her hands swept out and touched Mohan. He rose, and she sank, bowing her head to the ground between his feet. Without looking at her he walked up the steps and into the bungalow, full of an enormous strength and certainty. He knew she followed at his heels. The cobra swayed alone in the centre of the lawn, and one by one the lamps went out,

  Chapter 3

  ‘But how do you know so much, Rukmini? Where did you learn it all?’ Mohan cried, laughing, and embarrassed that a stranger, and a woman, should know more of history, and of Deori, than he himself did. She had been talking about the Suvala-Gita, a collection of rhymed couplets, which told the history of his family from two thousand years back.

  She did not smile, or turn to him. They were sitting on the bare summit of Indra’s Rock, looking down the pit towards the dam and the ant-like figures that crawled and scurried over it. She wore a pale blue sari of the finest South Indian cotton, and thin sandals, and her toenails were painted light blue. She said, ‘About the past, and the world - my mother had me taught’

  ‘So much, in so short a time? You’re only twenty-one now.’

  ‘I was learning the Bhagavad-Gita at five,’ she said.

  ‘At five?’ he exclaimed. ‘But why? Surety it must have cost a lot of money.’

  To fit me to be a queen,’ Rukmini said quietly. When I was a baby my mother saw that I would be beautiful enough to become anything I was fitted for. When I was old enough to understand, she told me I would be what many of our ancestors had been - a queen. The money... she became a prostitute in order that I might not have to. Besides, a prostitute is the only sort of woman in your Brahmins’ India who has freedom to govern her own life. As for the Suvada-Gita , I came to Deori the day after you returned from England. Ever since, I have been studying this land, these people. And you.’

  ‘Me?’ he said softly, pressing her hand. Every time she looked at him, every time she spoke to him, every time their skins touched, he felt a helpless pang of love. You mean you loved me even then?’

  She said, ‘No. I came to Deori search of myself, and of love. When I saw you, I thought you were my love, but before I danced I had to be sure that you were worthy and that you were the king of my dreams.’

  Mohan stretched playfully and pressed his head against her slender neck and, when she leaned back against him, bit softly at her skin.

  The troupe of entertainers had vanished during that first night .This was the seventh day afterward. He remembered that night’s feeling of vast power, and of forward motion from a high place, as though he were sliding down the front of a huge wave,- and the wave racing fast towards an unseen shore. The feeling had not been a fantasy of the moment, but a continuing reality. The sexual experience, his first, came in a series of such waves, each bigger than the last, each timeless; but the hands of the clock had moved when the wave passed on; and between the waves, the swelling calm of such moments as this on the rock, or at the Tiger Pool below the Rainbow Fall, or walking through the jungle hand in hand, or studying the books by lamplight. All the while the rest of humanity had been no more than shadow forms which placed food before him and hovered, smiling, about house and garden and forest.

  ‘Who are you’ He asked suddenly, sitting up.

  ‘That is for me to find out, my lord,’ she said. ‘And for you to decide.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said humbly.

  She pointed along the edge of the pit, where two dark shapes stood at the rim of the cliff staring across at them. They were small, very black men, carrying bows and
arrows and wearing nothing but loin-cloths. As soon as Rukmini raised her hand they disappeared. ‘Who are those?’ she said.

  ‘Gonds,’ Mohan said. ‘They are black savages, and eat snakes and lizards and ants, and use poisoned arrows. We have quite a lot of them in Deori. But you know what the Gonds are!’

  ‘Black savages,’ she repeated. ’True. And also the oldest inhabitants of your country, and a part of it, like the trees. Perhaps they always were hunters. Perhaps the next who came drove them into the jungles. In any case, they are your landlords, Suvala, like the tigers and the deer. You should pay them an annual quit-rent -- a handful of understanding. And who are those?’

  She jerked her head backwards in a graceful gesture. Mohan knew, without turning, that she was indicating the area where a dozen men from Konpara worked at the shaft which allowed inspection of the conduit that would carry the waters of Tiger Pool through to the pit.

  ‘Villagers,’ he said. ‘Peasants from Konpara.’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Also, priests and kings.’

  ‘Priests !’ he exclaimed. ‘There isn’t a Brahmin or Kashatriya among them, nor even a Vaisya. They are all Sudras - those. that are not outcasts.’

  She said energetically, ‘You see, Suvala, it is not so easy to know who anyone is. But you cannot be king unless you do know, and are a part of each one of them, just as each is part of you. Listen.’

  She faced him, sitting up like a teacher in the school. ‘First were the small dark people - the Gonds. Then thousands of years ago - six or seven thousand years - new invaders drove the small dark people into the deepest jungles.’ Her sweeping hand embraced the ridge, the pit, the valley, and the Upper plateau. Those first invaders were the Dravidians. They flourished all over India until 1500 B.C. Those were my mother’s people. In 1500 B.C. the second invaders came, out of the Central Asian steppe. They were the Aryans - your people. They fought the Dravidians, took their land from them, and drove them south, or into the jungles to join the. Gonds. Gradually the Aryans spread over the whole of India. In the far south they lived with the Dravidians, as rulers, rather than destroying them. And they established the caste system, for their own selfish convenience.’