by Sharon Maas
‘She’ll be fine, don’t worry about her. Her uncle will take care of her. Now you go away and don’t come back here.’
‘Not till you’re grown up,’ added the first woman, and laughed again. Kamal stared at her; she was not like any of the palace servants. Her face was small and pockmarked. There were loose black-ringed holes in the sides of her nose and in the lobes of her ears but she wore no jewellery save a cluster of plastic bangles rattling on a bony wrist. Her teeth, those that remained, were yellow. She wore a threadbare faded sari of an indistinguishable colour. She smelt of rancid coconut oil and stale sweat and perfume gone sour.
‘Yes; then you can come back,’ said the other woman. ‘With all your silks and your fine jewellery!’
Both the women roared with laughter at a joke Kamal could not understand. What he did understand was that they were right: he had to go. He did not like this street; he did not like these women; he could not help the girl. Instinct told him he was out of his depth. It was time to go home. The women were still chatting about him.
‘Where do you live, boy?’
‘In Moti Khodayal.’
At that, they all burst out in raucous laughter.
‘In that big palace? With the fake queen? Are you a prince, then? Is that why you are dressed in fine silks?’
‘Ah, little prince! You grace us with your presence! Should we bow before you? How can we serve you?’
‘Ay, little prince, do you have a job for me in the palace?’
‘Will you make me a patola-silk sari, boy?’
‘Only royals wear patola silk, girl – you think you are a royal?’
‘Ay, maybe I will marry a royal and then I too will get to wear patola silk!’
‘Go home to your fine palace, boy, and your patola silk. This is not the place for you.’
‘Yes, go home. Shoo! You need to be saved from the likes of us. We will only lead you astray. We are bad women.’
They all laughed again, and in the space where they stopped talking Kamal found his voice.
‘I don’t know the way home.’
‘Ah. The little prince is lost. No worries, boy. We will make sure you reach home safely. Hey, you! Baldev, come!’
Baldev was a boy of about twelve, sweeping a doorway across the street. He came immediately.
‘Take this boy back to the palace. He is a fine prince; got lost and stepped into a cowpat. He doesn’t know the way home.’
‘But don’t steal from him on the way back, hey! He will give you some baksheesh when you get him home. He is so rich.’
And indeed, the boy called Baldev led him home through the labyrinth of streets, and Kamal gave him the rest of his money. And so, in the early evening, Kamal found himself outside the gates and the sentries called out in relieved astonishment, and, it seemed to him, the entire palace household came running out into the courtyard, calling out to him how much he had been missed and where had he been, and what a naughty boy he was, and how angry Daadi would be.
‘She’s angry with me, too, Kamal,’ his friend Hanoman, Teacher’s son, whispered. ‘She thinks I helped you out. Look!’
He opened his hands and showed Kamal the thick red welts across his palms. ‘She beat me to tell her the truth. But I didn’t know! I didn’t know anything!’
Kamal’s filthy clothes were peeled from him by clucking servants. He was bathed and perfumed and bedded for the night.
‘Rani Abishta says she will see you tomorrow,’ came the message just before he fell asleep.
Chapter 5
Asha. Mumbai, 2000
A few weeks before I turned twelve the terrible thing happened and that was the beginning of the end of my life.
Amma and Appa were on their way home from the market, walking along the side of the street with their baskets slung over their arms, when a strange black car swerved off the road, rammed straight into them and, without even stopping to check the damage, raced off again. Amma died instantly, Appa a few hours later, in hospital. The police wrote it off as a hit-and-run accident – the driver must have been drunk, they said, and there was no chance of tracing him. They had too many serious crimes to solve to bother themselves with this.
Their deaths put an abrupt end to my happy childhood. The death itself was terrible enough and we were all plunged into the blackest grief; if you can imagine a dark mist where you cannot even see your hand in front of you, well, that is how we all felt.
Janiki, my little mother, came back from America where she was now working, her face pale with shock. We cried and comforted each other.
‘What now, Janiki?’ I wept. ‘What will become of us?’
By this time Appa’s younger brother Paruthy Uncle had already moved into our big house, along with his family. He said it was because his own house was too small for all of us, my four elder brothers and one younger one, and his three little daughters.
I had never liked Paruthy Uncle. He was not like Appa at all. He was not kind. And he did not like me. That is why I wept to Janiki, ‘What will become of us?’
‘Don’t worry, Asha,’ Janiki said, wiping away my tears. ‘You have another amma and appa and surely they will come and get you now. Your white amma lives in America – I am sure she will come and get you, and then you’ll be near me. Or else your appa in Dubai. You are a very lucky girl. You must write them and ask them to come and get you. I am going back to California now – I only got one week of compassionate leave – but you will continue to write me and let me know how you are doing. And wherever you are, I will come and visit you one day.’
Those words were a great comfort to me. It is true that I did not remember the people I called Mom and Daddy very well. I had only seen Mom once, when I was five: I remember her pale face and amber eyes and yellow hair, and I remember I was scared of her. But she had written me letters over the years and sent photographs of her and a tall pale man and I knew that Mom means Amma in American. Sometimes I wrote back. Amma told me to. And Amma dictated the letters and then she posted them for me.
I remembered Daddy better. They told me to call him Daddy because I only had one appa and could not call him that. Daddy came once a year to visit me. But I never knew what to say to him and he didn’t know what to say to me. He sent me postcards of mountains and famous places in India. I never wrote him back because I did not know what to say.
But now I had to write to them both, because it was an emergency. So I wrote them both and told them what had happened, two letters. I did not tell them to come and get me because that sounded rude. I just told them that Amma and Appa had died and that we were now living with Paruthy Uncle and that I did not like him.
I did not have their addresses so I gave the letters to Paruthy Uncle and asked him to find the addresses and post the letters. And then I waited for a reply, or for them to come and pick me up and take me to America, or to Dubai. I did not care where, just that they would come for me, one of them at least. Or at least write back to tell me what to do. But they didn’t. I wrote them again but still they didn’t come, and didn’t write. It was plain they did not want to be bothered with me.
I wanted to write Janiki emails every day because it hurt so much, but I couldn’t, because Paruthy Uncle took away my computer and sold it.
‘What is a small girl like you doing with this newfangled stuff? You don’t need it,’ he said.
‘Janiki! I write to Janiki on it!’ I wailed.
‘You can write normal letters like everybody else. I cannot believe how spoilt you are. If you have a letter for Janiki just give it to me and I will post it.’
So I did that. But Janiki never replied.
Chapter 6
Kamal. Moti Khodayal, 1972
Rani Abishta was having a foot massage, reclining on her cloud-cushion of puffed purple velvet, exclusively designed to enclose her enormous bulk, its invisible steel skeleton taking over the work of her atrophied muscles, buried as they were in mounds of flesh.
Her legs were spread o
pen before her, her sari drawn up beyond her knees and bunched up between them. Her feet rested on matching purple pouffes while two crouching sylphine maidens kneaded her puffy soles and massaged her swollen toes.
Her right hand lay languidly on a plate of milk-sweets, occasionally conveying one to her mouth. Her other hand loosely held a fan of peacock feathers that now lay on her extensive bosom. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, half-closed, and a less knowledgeable visitor might think she was asleep. Kamal knew better.
He knew that behind those sluggishly drooping eyelids lurked a mind as sharp as a two-edged sword, and that Daadi’s outward appearance of sloth, the inertia of her fat, indolent body, was his grandmother’s best disguise, one that only a mind of her cunning could have divined. And Kamal had not the slightest doubt that she wore this disguise not of necessity but of design.
Obesity had not crept up on Rani Abishta from behind; she had seen the advantages of wrapping keenness of wit in layers of fleshy languor, and concealing daggers of guile within a mound of innocuous jelly.
It was part of her master plan.
He approached from the garden. The white floor-to-ceiling louvred door-flaps were folded back, opening onto the terrace and the cupid-fountain (imported from France), so that the Surya Hall, where Rani Abishta spent the greater part of her life, extended in one unbroken expanse of grey marbled flagstones to the emerald-green lawn. Rani Abishta sat in a shadowed recess at the back of the hall, for she could not bear the sunshine, yet liked to look out on her domain, occasionally dozing off, usually just sitting, watching, waiting, motionless except for the one hand moving from plate to mouth and the other hand now and then rising, fanning and sinking again.
Beyond the reach of sunlight lay a scattering of plush carpets. Kamal felt Rani Abishta’s concentrated perusal as he drew nearer; he saw the instant’s pause as her hand drew near to her lips; he knew that the eyes had narrowed to slits barely visible between folds of fat, and that the very air surrounding her vibrated with venom.
With a barely perceptible motion of her fingers Rani Abishta dismissed the two maidens. They stood up, namasted and bowed with a graceful bend of the knee, stepped backwards and vanished on silently tripping feet. They left in their stead a vague perfume of jasmine and rose, which Rani Abishta briskly eliminated with a sonorous passing of wind, slightly raising one side of her body to allow the pungent wind to escape, falling back into position with a thud and a wobble of flesh. Kamal held his breath, namasted, smiled and lowered himself to the carpet before her, sitting back on his heels.
Her lips moved. ‘Come nearer!’ she commanded, and Kamal edged his knees forward a fraction.
Rani Abishta grunted and shifted position again, and Kamal feared another blast of exhaust fumes, but all she did was lean forward to bring her face slightly nearer to his.
‘Yesterday you left the palace,’ she said.
Kamal shrugged.
It was done, it was over, he was back, and there was no way Rani Abishta could erase what had happened. No punishment would make the day undone; it was there, impressed upon his consciousness, senses stirred awake and fed but not nourished, doors and windows opened that would never again be closed. Yesterday could never be unmade, and he regretted nothing, no matter what the punishment.
‘I have forbidden you to leave the palace, and yet you left,’ Rani Abishta continued. She spoke slowly, her voice low and without emotion: simply stating a fact. It was the voice she used when the anger was boiling within her, boiling with such violence that all her strength was involved in holding it back. Those who were in daily contact with Rani Abishta knew that voice well, for a thousand little things drove her to anger: a carpet with an untidy fringe, a stray dove relieving itself on the terrace, a sesame seed lodged in a back tooth. Summoned into Rani Abishta’s presence, the evil-doer (the maid who had not brushed the carpet fringe, the gardener who had not chased away the dove, the cook who had made the sesame sweet) would stand quaking before her while first she stated the bare facts in this voice, crouching low like a leopard before a deadly lunge.
Kamal, ever since he was a small child, had marvelled at Rani Abishta’s ability to inspire fear. He had seen countless hand-wringing servants stand or kneel before her, sweating with terror, their eyes pleading for pity, sometimes clasping their hands, kneeling and begging for mercy. What was it about Rani Abishta that evoked such naked terror? Even when Rani Abishta’s inner dam burst and she shouted at someone, it might not be pleasant, but she didn’t actually hurt anyone with her noise. Why didn’t they just shout back? Kamal used to think. Or simply turn their backs and walk away, the way he did when she yelled too long or too loud?
Kamal himself had never known fear. Neither fear of Rani Abishta, nor fear of any living thing within the walls of the palace. He had heard the word fear, of course, and had feared vicariously with many of the heroes in the adventure books he loved to read, so that he did have second-hand knowledge of what it was to sense danger, but here there was nothing to fear. Here he was safe. Here there was nothing to hurt him.
Rani Abishta had made it so. Rani Abishta had created this safe soft perfect world, this world of golden platters overflowing with ambrosial eatables, of silk garments and emerald lawns and bowls filled with jewels you could plunge your hands into, hold them in the cup of your palms and raise up, letting them ripple through your fingers like water. A world where peacocks strutted across brilliant lawns, their tails fanned out in glory. Rani Abishta had created this world and kept it perfect for him, which was why he did not, could not, fear her. Rani Abishta, who reigned with absolute jurisdiction within the high walls of her empire.
‘This is the only world you need to know,’ she had told Kamal when he was a little boy. He had come to live with Rani Abishta before memory, at a time before he could think; all he knew was that his mother had died in childbirth and his father, Rani Abishta’s only son, had brought him here and then left again, to rebel against Indira Gandhi and her Emergency. Thrown into prison, where death had met him. Nobody was allowed to mention his name in Moti Khodayal. ‘I am your mother and your father,’ said Rani Abishta. ‘Moti Khodayal is your world.’
And he knew there was a world outside those walls, a bigger world, but he had no idea of what big meant; how big was big, and how much bigger could it be than the palace of Moti Khodayal?
Moti Khodayal was enormous.
‘I have created this world for you,’ Rani Abishta had told him again and again. ‘It contains all that you will ever need. It is enough for you. I have provided for you; here there is everything you want; and if you want more, you only have to ask.’
‘But what is outside the wall?’ Kamal had asked, for he had walked all around the perimeter of Moti Khodayal and looked up along the high stone wall, topped by bits of spiky broken glass set in concrete.
‘Bad things. There is poverty and dirt and bad people who will hurt you and who will want to take away the things you have. Do not even think about the world out there; you do not need it. It is bad and ugly.’
She had smiled then, and held out her arms, and Kamal, not knowing better, for Rani Abishta was mother and father and all people for him, ran into her arms and she lifted him onto her knee. She pointed out beyond the terrace.
‘Look! Look at that beautiful lawn! See how it gently slopes away to the garden! Look at that peacock, strutting across! Soon he will lift his tail and open his wheel, and then he will dance for the peahens, and for me! The peacock dances because he is aware of his beauty; only beauty must exist in the world. I want you to know only beauty, Kamal. I am sorry I have lost the use of my legs, else I would take you by the hand and walk with you through those beautiful flower groves and tell you the names of all the roses. When I was a young girl, Kamal, I loved the roses and tended them myself. Now it is all done by gardeners. But they are the best gardeners in all of India. I have instructed them to make of Moti Khodayal a paradise; and this paradise is for you. For you, Kamal, are a prince and y
ou must have the best. Never forget that you are a prince.’
And she told him for the billionth time the story of the family, a line of kings dating back further than it was possible to think.
‘Moti Khodayal was bigger then. Bigger than what you know now; a real kingdom. There were no walls around it, for its lands reached out among the rolling hills. It contained villages, towns even, and all the people worshipped us and paid us tribute. I was just a girl, but I remember well my grandfather, not yet a maharaja but a prince. I remember when we went to the royal palace at Jaipur, for the wedding of Princess Gayatri Devi, the Jaipur Princess, to Maharaj Jai. I am second cousin thrice removed to her. I remember Prince Jai raising me up, Princess Gayatri placing me on her lap feeding me with gulab jamun. I remember playing with the Princess’s jewels. She was wearing a patola-silk sari; we had given it to her as a present. What a fabulous present! But, Kamal – and this was the fate of all the great kingdoms of Bharat, not just Moti Khodayal – there came conquerors from abroad, white men with weapons, white men who wanted it all for themselves, and those white men reduced us to what we are now. So we built the wall to keep what we had, and this is what you see today. It is smaller than it was, true, but it is still big enough to call a kingdom, and one day it will all be yours.’
‘And we owe it all to the worms!’ Kamal declared.
‘The worms?’
‘Yes. The silkworms. The silkworms that work for us.’
‘Who told you about the silkworms?’
‘Hanoman did. He says we have an army of silkworms in the hill district working for us. And that is how patola silk is made, which is the best silk in India and only royals wear it. And it takes a whole year to make a single patola-silk sari. And he told me that if it weren’t for the silkworms you and me would be poor like the rats in the bazaar.’
‘Hanoman told you that? Hanoman knows nothing. Worms! Pah.’
