by Aashish Kaul
Now she saw once more the man who had been languishing for so long under the growing burden of his thorny, elevated position. She had watched how bit by bit, almost against his own wish, life of the palace, concerns of the throne, had reclaimed him from the solitary state in which he had returned from his travels years ago. That nobility of being which was not his by birth or breeding alone, but was acquired through fierce hardships and learning had been slowly pervaded and in the end snuffed out by the desires and worries of those around him. Men, it was said, become intoxicated by that in which they live, come to resemble their environment gradually and completely. But for the present his interest had been kindled, and for her this was enough.
The queen spoke freely, as if picking up a conversation from before. They sat facing one another across the round table, behind their respective armies, white for him, black for her. The square of the board inside the ring of the table, containing every conceivable geometric design, visible or as yet hidden, like an arcane, enchanting mandala. She explained the rules, connecting the newly modelled pieces to their counterparts in the old game, their wider sweep over the board, their new positions and heightened ability to thrust and parry, attack and retreat.
Engrossed in the board’s force field from the start, sucked into its symmetry, at once elementary and perfect, the king simply nodded each time as she gently pressed the tip of her forefinger on the top of a piece in the back row pronouncing its name. Elephant. Horse. Ship. King. Queen. Ship. Horse. Elephant. Inwardly noting their names and positions, perhaps already planning the first moves, he did not even look up at the mention of the word queen, the only piece lacking antecedence. He had taken her place and powers on the board for granted, and for the first time she felt herself coming abreast of him on the battlefield, staring at the danger openly at his side, restless to show her mettle, his equal at last, a shade ahead even, felt in that instant all real or imagined past wrongs righted, the perennial wait and frustration of being left behind now ended forever.
They began instantly, the first of the many games to be played in the course of two nights and a day on the royal boat. She was aston- ished at the speed with which he moved, how quickly he picked up the faults, squared the wrong advances, his attention unwavering over the pieces, the joy of lifting their small frames between his fingers, their slight heaviness strangely comforting, adding to the pleasure. For once he was not issuing orders from afar, abstracted from reality, but participating in it, forming it, resisting it, leaving his mark. Not vested in the figure of the king alone, his spirit animated every piece, split sixteen ways, filled horse, pawn, and queen alike, letting them loose over the board. Fault lines emerged and faded away continually, and danger lay concealed in the greatly contrasting movement of pieces, for if some were harmless at a distance, the power of others did not diminish in the least due to their remoteness from the site of action, indeed they smote just when one was not covering one’s back. A few met and clashed and were swept off. Footmen hobnobbed with elephants and cavalry, traversing dark and light ground with relative ease, while ships sailed off locked in their fawn or ochre diagonals, one drifting cautiously in the dark and the other racing boldly across bands of light.
The players projecting their passions, hopes, and fears onto the board between them. Yet even as they spread their nets, meshing and enmeshing each other in their skill and cunning, who is it that acts through them, weighing and demolishing attacks and positions, devising fresh permutations with fiendish virtuosity, choosing from an infinite number of invisible moves occurring around each move, every moment? For what unfolds here takes its cue from numerous other moves that are being played out elsewhere, intuiting effects and consequences that cannot for now be measured or seen.
The queen’s hand, the big emerald sparkling from it, makes the clinching move. Although the king has lost, he shows next to no emotion, not a sign of unease or vexation given his intense involvement a moment ago. If anything, there is in him, if one cares to look closely, a stroke of delight, coupled with a justifiable pride in his so swiftly acquired understanding of play, his first tentative rendition. And what is more, he is already looking ahead.
Barely had the board been emptied, barely had the queen sunk deeper into the armchair, than he began to arrange the pieces afresh. Rematch? She was half-expecting this. What was it about the game that did not let one be? This was never the case earlier, where the players’ interest would begin to flag toward the end, the throws of the dice becoming quicker, more impatient. But now win or loss, the player was forced, almost against the will, to ask for a rematch. To lose here was to disgrace yourself utterly, as much as in battle, if not more, for here it was solely your own doing, your own responsi- bility. Like gambling, with which it had absolutely nothing else in common, victory was always round the bend, just outside the grasp. And the need for victory was unrelenting, the self, fortified in its own fiction, hungering for it. Fate or no fate, the chase was of the same nature. So they played again, and he lost again. Then a third time.
By mid-morning they were playing once more, in the shade fanned out from the sails, the wet breeze on their faces and the sea about them a bed of molten silver. In each of the games of the past night, the king had opened with a different piece, and now he was going still further. How much of an impression the game had made on him, she could see easily, how quickly the new format had replaced the old, the pattern emerging in the very first moves alone making the earlier version look like a child’s ludo. Near evening, however, she was starting to suspect something else. Not excitement or interest or the flourishing desire for victory, but another, darker feeling, deeper too, residing too close to the sinews.
The king had recently won his first game, and the pieces were back on the board. They had returned to the cabin, to their armchairs, talking. Outside it was night. But the king was only half- listening, stealing glances at the unopened game before him, restless for engagement one more time. Useless to talk, thought the queen, as long as these tiny men hold him in their close grip. But it was not the pieces themselves that bewitched the king. It was the feeling of control and supremacy spreading out of the board, overflowing into the world, a feeling he had first accepted wholeheartedly and naturally, then resisted and annulled, only to later succumb to it, little by little, almost without his knowledge, in the slow, cruel roll of nights and days through the royal corridors, under the ever growing burden of sovereign pleasures and duties. And now life had come full circle, the fiction of the self complete and perfect. Nothing to do, thought she, but to go on with it, and spoke the simple and obvious but, given the line of thinking the king was silently pursuing, also portentous words. Shall we play?
She had returned to black, and he opened with the queen’s pawn. She responded likewise, and soon the two pawns stood blocking each other in the middle of the board. He then advanced the ship’s pawn on the queen’s flank, to which she replied with her king’s pawn. Then the white horse on the queen’s side jumped forward, backing the ship’s pawn advanced previously. In quick response, the black king’s horse came forth, covering the back of the first moved pawn in the middle of the board. Opening in the middle, but building support from the side, the forces spread along the diagonal axis of the board like a stream, here white with snow and there deep, dark, primordial. He thought a moment, then dropped his other horse, the one on the king’s side, into the game, bring it in line with the first horse, stationed a mere two squares away. The queen replied by sliding the ship to the square in front of the king. Now he planned the first attack, sending his queen’s ship across enemy lines to challenge the dark horseman as if to a duel, both parties ready with their respective seconds, the white ship backed by a horse and the ebony horse in turn seconded by a ship, as if each party was confronting its image in a mirror, strangely distanced and trans- formed in colour. The stream was beginning to tumble and swell over the board. In quick succession, infantry, horses, and elephants stirred into action. Every piece
backed by another, the check-field for a moment looked staid, if entangled. Now it was impossible to move further without first striking, and thus on his next move, the king took a pawn with a pawn, an attack which was duly answered by the queen with one of her own pawns. New lines were estab- lished, and some of the space freed for fresh combat. The king pounced upon the opportunity, pushing his queen into the fray, advancing the piece like a ship along its light diagonal to the leftmost edge of the board, reining it in just before the enemy lines. In response the queen’s ship inched one step forward in the direction of the enemy queen. Emboldened by the thrust of the game, the king pushed his as yet unused ship flanking his own king right up to the adversary’s ranks, blocking off the dark ship’s route to one side. But the queen was not to be deterred at her own gates, and she swept away the enemy ship with her own. Hardly had the surviving ship rested in its new square than the white queen came rushing and took it off the board. She changed course and the unmoved pawn of the recently removed ship sprang into action at the far end. By now the king seemed unstoppable, mounting attack on attack, slaying her horse with his second ship on the other side of the game only to lose it in turn to her other horse, then shifting his attention to the centre once more, using one of his pawns to take an enemy pawn, and then in turn being swept away by its second. Although both sides had been continuously on the offensive, their armies appeared suddenly in retreat, with a wide gap opening in the middle from left to right, and two isolated black pawns hanging in its immensity. But soon there were reinforcements. More men were shoved into the kiln of battle, and when one’s gaze wavered past the other’s ranks, one found the rival king safely withdrawn behind his pawns, as if mirroring one’s own steps in the plaid world of the game. She presently found her horseman straight in the enemy queen’s line of attack, the piece being doubly dangerous, for it was but a step away from infiltrating her own ranks. So she sent the black queen to block its advance and force a retreat. Then the respective elephants moved sideways, confronting each other from the opposite ends of the board, discouraged from attacking by a lone pawn in the middle of their path. On and on it went, the steadily advancing pawns, the hopscotching horsemen, the quick-footed queens. Then another impasse, then a sudden slaughter, then a play of elephants, moving in teams, then an elephant against a horse, then a few casualties, then silence, silence before the storm, then the storm, emptying most of the board in consecutive moves, leaving behind identical pieces, so close had their thoughts come in reading and countering one another. King, queen, and elephant for each, with five pawns of his against four pawns of hers. A piece less, and yet in spite of the slight disadvantage she won. The queen and elephant combination finished it for her, locking the opponent king behind his own sentinels, while his queen and elephant first watched helplessly from their respective cells, and then in a last futile attempt to save the situation were slain in succession. Her penultimate move was a masterpiece of strategy, offering him seven different ways of choosing defeat.
The king knew that she had won long before, only he had failed to see. He had been completely unsuspicious of any danger when he had removed one of her pawns left dangling in the centre, while she had simply offered it to lure him into a trap. But he was not in the least dispirited, for he had learnt certain lessons in offence that he would have occasion to apply not in play alone but in life too.
Suddenly conscious of the time spent over the board these past two days, he expressed his feelings to the queen. But it was I who wanted to play with you, she offered. Her words had a ring of finality, as if she was making her peace not only with herself, but with history. Perhaps she had already intuited that the game was bound to fall into obscurity sooner than later, and just as this time she had conceived it on the thrust of her own special impulses, other creators, as yet unborn, waited in the wings to do so for other times and ages. For this was the one law from which there was no deviation. Making and unmaking forever and ever with subtle varia- tions was how the web of enchantment was woven.
Later, in bed, lying on his back, she astride him, her legs unusually firm round his waist, digging deep into his flesh, the chin rising away from him, sashing her neck and face in blue shadows, their outlines somewhat diffused and magnified, he felt her to be not herself but a being from beyond come to join with him, work him inside her till the pillar of flesh he was began to heat and burn scarlet, smouldering and disintegrating to ash in the cavernous dark.
XVIII
WEARIED AND ravaged by endless fighting, the two armies girded themselves one more time for the day’s ghastly work. Tin-helmeted, smeared in wood smoke and sandalwood lotions, the soldiers rolled on the balls of their feet, gripping their weapons testily, restless for the impending command to action. We knew the fight was now to the very end, easily forgetting that wars were never truly concluded but only abandoned. Be that as it may, the engagement had entered its final phase, the abandonment near, for lately the demon king, too, had joined the conflict, and was slowly making his way to its epicentre, where the two princes fought with a murderous fervour each day.
Because he moved deep inside this horrid crush unable to observe it from above, the war’s unusual pattern, its devilish design, was not easy to discern from the start. For days he did not stop to think whether his movement across the field was as random as it appeared. On nights in the camp, before the dwindling fire, in the period of rest and silence pinched from the violent din of battle, faint beginnings of a pattern sometimes would rise above the impressions wrestling in the arc of his skull, but he could not dwell on it for long, unable as he was to connect it with anything he had known or seen.
Seen though he had, if not grasped clearly, and it would take him years to form the conviction that his fate had for a while come to resemble one of those ivory men he had glimpsed being pushed about on the square board between that man and woman on the night of his mission in the demon king’s palace so long ago. Was it the king himself who had been directing from above his movements and those of countless others beside him? Was it ever possible to project the schemes of a board game onto a real war, onto reality itself? And who took his place when he took his place amidst the troops at last? Why had he not seen in the intervening centuries that peculiar game again?
Then, too, the war was sui generis, for its cause was not expansion or tribute, not safeguarding the lives of your people or quelling a rebellion that threatened your sovereignty, but something infinitely more complex and obscure. Defending honour, we believed. Perhaps. At least, the answer was easy for us. But what was the king defending, what did he fight for?
Pride, infamy, sinful corruption. These words had been scooped hollow by time’s insistent digging, questions that kept mounting in its wake, befuddlement that knew no end. He and he alone could have answered. Ravana, the sage-king. Ravana, the possessed. And maybe not even he. And where was he now, ages away from the day when Rama’s arrow had at last made its target, piercing his navel in the softening glow of the declining sun by the beach? He had fallen like any other in battle, immortal until the arrow struck home, dying like everyone else in the end from and of his beliefs.
Been here too long, seen too much, hope ebbing away into emptiness and unease. Now it was melancholy, and now melancholy diffusing into space, and now nothing. The snow peaks had sunk behind the clouds, and here mist was rising from the roots of the trees. Forever and ever, there had always been war, and the promise of peace, of untold everlasting happiness, of rivers that flowed with milk, had that golden age ever been? Or was it just a fancy, a nostalgia, the mind’s instinctive bid to escape from its cruel unending predicament, the world in which one found oneself, the world where one always arrived late, with little recourse but to go down fighting against all the odds that continued to rise from day to day? Real or not, the high noon of humanity lay most certainly in the deepest past, now irrecoverable, and the path ahead went steeply down, right to the abyss, and then beyond.
Suddenly the child tho
ught of something, and the dark, brooding feeling was gone. His fingers began to itch. To touch, to grasp, to move. Without a warning he slipped off the tree’s crown and came swishing down to the ground, the low branches breaking his fall and landing him straight on his feet. Back in his old form, the god turned to look up the tree and found the puma, already halfway down, following in his wake.
XIX
THE LAST OF the logs had long since crumbled to ash in the braziers, and outside the sky lay awash in a coral-pink luminescence. A faint sweet scent still circled the half-cold cinders, and I felt something akin to happiness rush through me. Or was it relief? Relief at what? At returning alive from the very brink of death?
This crumbling pavilion, together with its three old caretakers who unobtrusively saw to my every need, who were hardly there otherwise, seemed my one true attainment, and to be here and alive, fixed in body and spirit, was reward enough. This when I had least expected or worked for it, even if I had worked for and desired other things.
After a certain point in a man’s life, he settles so comfortably into the shell of his aims or, for it is the same thing, the aims work themselves so finely into his skin, that he grows equally remote from both loss and gain, and it is only the distance he has travelled, only how far he has come in his pursuits, that holds any interest, that makes him turn time and again to reckon his vanished steps, but this too without any strong emotion, so that it is sometimes revealed to him that it is in fact the journey which leads to things and not a desire for things that begets the journey.
But maybe it was this and this alone I had wanted from the beginning, and life or fate or time or the jumble of infinite deeds, whatever it was, had seen to my wish while squaring its ledger. You could only end alone when you began so in the first place. This was but fair, just as it was fair that those who arrived together one day returned together. Misa had followed the king into my world, or what I imagined to be my world, and so too she chose her exit, if by a different door, slipping away while I was in the throes of battle, fighting desperately for the king and for my own life.
