Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  He walked swiftly, like a man with a purpose, so as not to draw attention to himself. But his back was against the wall. There really was no place to go anymore. This place, this moment, was where the last two decades had brought him. He could give himself the illusion of being free, the stranger in the city who must be on his way soon, but he was chained by his promise to the dead. He had to kill the king.

  But Upamanyu . . .

  If even that is his real name, Vishnumitra thought, with bitter humor. The king called himself Akbar Khan. Every child in the kingdom knew how he had come to occupy the throne of the Mughals; in towns all over, people still enacted the story. The British forces fighting their way all the way to Dilli from the South, burning and looting, setting the bazaar on fire. The valiant Mughal army, with the king, Mirza Mughal, in the lead. All the king’s sons fall in battle that black day, until there is only Mirza Mughal chasing a knot of enemy soldiers into an alleyway and out in the open by the river. He is known for his swordsmanship; he dispatches three of them quickly, a few of the others flee, but there is one left. Mirza Mughal leaps from his great black horse, fighting hard, blood on his sword, his armour broken across the chest. Last of the Mughals, he is holding back a pale, yellow-haired youth with a bayonet. There’s the Yamuna before him, and in the black water he can see his city burning. At the last minute, when Mirza Mughal is so tired he almost wants to die, there comes a madman leaping into the fray, challenging the British soldier, wielding a sword but in a style Mirza Mughal has never seen. Then a strange thing happens: the bayonet falls from the British soldier’s hand as if of its own accord; the boy seems surprised, horrified, and the madman’s sword makes short work of him. The stranger bows, introduces himself to his king. His name is Akbar Khan. The king and his subject return to the fray, fighting side by side until a stray bullet hits the king. In the last scene of the tragedy, Mirza Mughal is dying in Akbar Khan’s arms while Dilli burns. The river is burning too: boats succumb first to fire, then water. In the presence of what is left of his army, Mirza Mughal tells Akbar Khan: my sons are dead. I give you my kingdom. Drive out the enemy and rule!

  Over the body of the dead king, Akbar Khan rouses the soldiers and the common people of the city with a speech that is still recited today in the dramas. Men leap over courtyard walls, where they have been cowering, and throng the streets; mothers lock the children in their homes and take up kitchen knives and burning brands, and leap into the fray. It is as though a tsunami has suddenly hit the invaders. In the narrow alleyways, the once-gracious city squares, in courtyards and on the riverbank the British are cut to bits. The invading armies flee.

  In the dark and smoke, the smell of blood and burning flesh, the wails of the bereaved, Akbar Khan stands still for a moment, outlined in the archway of a garden that has become a charnel house. Watchers see him limned in the light from the fires behind him, his bloody, smoking sword by his side.

  Then, in a moment immortalized by innumerable dramas, Mirza Mughal’s great black horse comes up to Akbar Khan. He has lost his saddle, and there is a gash on his side, but the great beast simply bows his head, stands and waits. Akbar Khan pauses for a moment, strokes the horse’s head, and with a lithe movement that no theater performer can quite emulate, leaps upon the horse. The horse bears the new king to the fort.

  Vishnumitra had to concede that it was quite a story: how the nobody, Akbar Khan, ascended the throne of Dilli. But holding on to that throne for so many years was an even greater achievement. What Akbar Khan did, the stories went, was to first consolidate that nexus of power, the harem. Mirza Mughal’s harem was fairly modest, with two chief queens, seventy-five lesser wives and about five hundred concubines, along with hundreds of female administrators, a corps of eunuchs and female guards. This was where the king had lived, where the affairs of state were decided, and where he opened reports from his spies. It was said that Akbar Khan won over the queen mother first. The dead princes were given elaborate funerals and the queens shown the utmost respect. So when the intrigues and assassination attempts began, Akbar Khan was not without friends. His pleasing mien and obvious wizardry with the sword were rivaled only by his political acumen. When Mirza Mughal’s relatives challenged him he played one faction against the other until most of his rivals were eliminated. As for the rest, he invited them to challenge him in a duel unto death.

  Those were the early years. The challenges were issued mostly by nobles outraged that a man without a lineage, let alone a proper Persian lineage, could sit upon the throne of Hindustan with such insouciant ease. Such challenges were the talk of the citizenry, because Akbar Khan received and accepted them in the public durbar. Sometimes the challenger wanted a game of chess; sometimes it was a duel by arms, but always it was the throne at stake, and always, failure meant death. The challenge itself was held in a private room off the durbar, with only the king and the challenger present. And always, the challenger would be found dead the next morning, in the trash heap outside the city walls. There was no evidence of poison or other underhand means, only a bruising about the skin, and a neat sword-cut to the throat. The victim didn’t bleed much, it was said. There were rumors of magic and other skullduggery, but the king, while contradicting these, did not work too hard to suppress the imaginations of the credulous. Always, he generously compensated the families of the victims.

  After his first two years in office, Akbar Khan stopped accepting challenges. The occasional madman would still issue a challenge but Akbar Khan showed great compassion in turning such fools away. Enough blood had been shed. His kingdom was established.

  Having silenced his critics, Akbar Khan had set his skill and charisma to work on the rest of the country, bringing to it a relatively stable economy and a robust peace. He befriended Sher Shah of the North-West Kingdom and played the Portuguese and the British against each other while making neighborly noises to both. It was rumored that he gave covert support to the revolutionaries in the South so the British had their hands full. This was the king who embraced the modern science of Europe’s industrial revolution, and in doing so revived the metallurgical genius of the ancient Indians by searching for and bringing to his capital all indigenous talent; he brought over some of Europe’s finest engineers to work with them. The manufactories of Dilli rolled out horseless carriages of gleaming steel that moved on the new-paved roads like boats on still water. They were becoming popular in Britain; the manufactories were having a difficult time keeping up with the frenzied demands from abroad.

  At the same time, Akbar Khan had been careful not to create a culture of demand in his own land. Very few Indians owned their own cars; for long-distance travel there were the railways, laid across the land like lines on a palm. Vishnumitra had, during his wanderings, acquired a reluctant fascination for this mode of transport; there was something about the sway and rhythm of these sleek, serpentine monsters that brought to his heart an inexplicable joy. It was also easy to think while traveling like this, and he had spent some of his most contemplative moments in the last two years on a train, watching the countryside flash by.

  It was said that while the South-West reeled under the despotism of the Portuguese king, and the South itself knew mass poverty and economic collapse for the first time under the rule of the British general, Hindustan was free. And prosperous. Glory be to the king, Akbar Khan the First. So what if he used magic and was rumored to be unconventional, even heretical? So what if he defied the kazis and brought back the syncretic, hybrid Hindu-Muslim culture of his namesake, Akbar the Great? So what if he kept his hair in long braids, had private quarters outside the harem atop a small tower, where only he and invited guests could go?

  So what if his eccentricities included banning of the ancient science of healing?

  Vishnumitra had, from afar, supported the rise of Akbar Khan until then. For him Akbar Khan had been a person of legend in distant Dilli, a man of whom absurdly tall tales were told, who had somehow been able to consolidate the kingdom and keep
its enemies at bay. Then the news came, slowly at first, trickling into the outer reaches of the kingdom from wanderers and tradespeople, and finally from local officials: the practice of the ancient arts was banned. Some of the herbal lore was all right to practice, but the rest of it, referred to by the king as quackery, was no longer allowed. Significant parts of the ancient medical system of Ayurveda, particularly those concerned with the prana vidya, as well as the various methods of acupuncture brought by Chinese scholars, were now forbidden. A system of national medical care had been set up by the king, employing a mishmash of traditions, from the European to the Yunnani, and the textbooks had been standardized and rewritten. So while a practitioner of Ayurveda would have studied the works of, say, Charaka, or Patanjali, now only “relevant” extracts were read, the implication being that the rest was not worth learning. The king claimed he wanted to modernize the country. Yet he did nothing to stop other kinds of quackery; charlatan astrologers could wander the land at will, but a traditional healer could find himself thrown in jail. Yoga as exercise was all right, but healing through the control and manipulation of prana was quackery, and its practice punishable by imprisonment. Vishnumitra had been angry and bewildered, but there was nothing to be done. He had to keep his true vocation a secret and lie about his age.

  But now, walking through the city like a man possessed, Vishnumitra thought he knew why the king had banned the ancient sciences of healing, while reserving them for himself under the guise of magic. Still, it made no sense that a man who was sixty-two years old should look twenty-five, even with the practice of the prana vidya. They gave good health, not immortality. Something was very wrong.

  He thought of the girl Shankara, whom he himself had trained in the forbidden sciences. For his first year of wandering she and a handful of others had been his dear companions. She had cut off her hair and disguised herself as a man so as to be able to travel with less trouble. With their help Vishnumitra had established over much of Hindustan a secret network of the practitioners of prana vidya, all of whom had once operated alone, and in fear. The fear was still there, but with it now there was comradeship, the exchange and enhancement of knowledge. No longer did one healer or scholar of such arts fear that the knowledge would die with him or her.

  And the best of them had been Shankara.

  She had gone to Dilli against his advice, to challenge the king.

  Since the months after a friend discovered her body on the refuse pile outside the city, Vishnumitra had wondered how it had happened. Why had the king, who no longer accepted challenges, accepted one from Shankara? And how had someone of Shankara’s skill been outmaneuvered?

  Oh, those months of grief and rage . . .

  Vishnumitra paused by a shop selling sugarcane juice. He had a cupful so he could sit down for a moment, away from the crowd around the stall. There was a cracked marble platform around the roots of a pipal tree; he sat himself down on it. Behind him, under the tree’s great canopy, was the mausoleum of a minor Sufi poet. He could smell incense and flowers.

  Upamanyu . . .

  He could not let himself feel what he had once felt, but even now, thinking of the name was enough to quicken his pulse. Once dearest friend, dearer than a brother! How lonely the years had been without him. He could never have imagined that he, Vishnumitra, who would once have defended Upamanyu with his life, would one day be plotting his death. He took a deep, shaky breath. A great wave of resistance to the notion rose in him, and along with it a desire to see Upamanyu again, and to leave this matter of revenge and murder to someone else. After all, there was all of Hindustan at stake. What would happen to its freedom and prosperity when Upamanyu was gone? He had thought through it all before, before he knew who the king was, and settled on the idea that what is right is right, and if a right act leads to great evil, then that evil must be thought of as independent of the act that preceded it, and fought on its own terms. But here, in the great city, with its show of might, power and glory, and the terrible news streaming in from the South as though to say: this is what will happen to Hindustan if you kill the king, it was difficult enough to justify this reasoning. And now that he knew who the king was, could he lift a hand against him?

  And yet, and yet . . .

  Shankara.

  And the rest of the practitioners, who now worked in fear and secrecy, and the ones who had been found and killed. He had to do what he had set out to do.

  He thought: after this I will go back home to my village, to what is left of my father’s ashram by the Ganga. He did not tell himself that the very air, there, would remind him of Upamanyu. That after this Upamanyu’s name might well be written on the paths they had once walked in the forests, together, or on the mud walls of the now-abandoned ashram.

  The ashram was the place of his earliest memory. The walls were nearly a foot thick, made from a mixture of mud and straw; in the sun they glowed as though they were made of gold. Some of the walls were carved with images such as a god on a chariot or a hero atop an elephant. To the small boy he had been, the walls of the ashram told stories without saying a word. Inside, under the thatch roof, it was always cool in summer and warm in winter; even now he remembered leaning his head against the textured surface, feeling safe, feeling he was home.

  The first time he saw Upamanyu . . . Nearly forty years ago. That face, in its youthful, unchanged beauty, had burned in his memory for all these years.

  He remembered. How could he not? It was the first time that the world had come to his doorstep, after all, in the form of a young man, wanderer and eternal traveler. On his clothes was the dust of Baluchistan, Mysore, and Assam. He had stories to tell about the fall of Travancore in the South, the winds of the Western Desert, the arid cliffs of the North-West where Sher Shah had his citadel.

  That morning Vishnumitra had been reading a copy of the Charaka Samhita on the verandah, practicing his Sanskrit while trying to learn something about healing. He was fifteen, a tall, quiet boy grown golden in the sun like the walls, and had acquired some of their contemplative silence. He wanted to be a healer, to use the knowledge of the ancients to heal the sick. His world had been whole, complete, until Upamanyu walked into it.

  The children had been singing multiplication tables out in the courtyard, swaying with the music of it, making Vishnumitra feel pleasantly sleepy, so that he couldn’t go beyond stanza one of the first verse of the Charaka Samhita (that great medical treatise being written in poetry, as was once the norm). The other children were bringing in mustard leaves from the garden they had been tending, the leaves scenting the air with their delicate pungency. And there was the stranger at the gate, as though the air had conjured him up: a tall, long-limbed fellow in the outlandish loose pants and long shirt of the North-West, with a mane of unruly black hair. He stood there unhurried and smiling, hefting his cloth bag on his shoulder, rubbing the stubble on his chin with his other hand.

  Vishnumitra rose to greet the stranger but his father had already waved the children to silence. His father loved wanderers and outcasts, having been one himself for so long. In a few minutes the stranger was seated on a low wooden seat under the pipal tree. Water was brought for his hands and feet, and to drink. That was what he had stopped for: water, and five minutes of rest before wandering on to the town twelve miles away. Later Upamanyu would tell Vishnumitra: I stopped for five minutes and stayed five years—I, who have never stayed in a place longer than a month!

  All these years later Vishnumitra wondered why Upamanyu had stayed so long. He had always thought it was because of the love that had arisen between them, the love of brother for brother and friend for friend; but now he was not so sure. Perhaps all that had been an illusion. His mentor and dear friend, who had taught him sword-fighting and filled his ears with the knowledge of a world far greater than the little ashram, may have had other reasons to linger. Who knew if even Upamanyu were his real name?

  Every morning Vishnumitra would recite verses from the Charaka Samhita
for his father. Upamanyu would be leaning against the wall, his mane of hair tied casually into a knot, his eyes bright with curiosity. Maitreya would explain each concept.

  “Prana is the life force. Some people call it breath but it is that which comes before breath. In every healthy living being prana flows unimpeded through its designated channels. Sickness is when there is a blockage or abnormality in the prana flow, and then the healer must restore its pathways in order to restore health . . .”

  “But is prana not the same as blood?” This from Upamanyu.

  “No, indeed. Prana cannot be seen, heard, or felt, except by the one trained in the ancient art of healing. Such a practitioner can tell the state of the prana flow when he feels the patient’s pulse, for the quality of the flow is reflected in the characteristics of the pulse. But the true sage can induce in himself a state of direct prana perception, in which the flow of prana appears manifest to the inner eye as the flow of the Ganga is manifest to the outer.”