Sary and the Maharajah's Emeralds

by Sharon Shipley

  Rami wanted to suffocate him, it appeared. I stayed his hand. “Don’t kill him, Rami!” Rami looked at me, unfocused, as if he did not know me. His brother would destroy us with a wave of his hand. Yet I did not wish the stain of mortal sin coloring our days. And we would not have lasted past his first thug of a sentry. Only Rami’s position, fragile as it was, had gotten us as far as we were.

  The maharajah was wild-eyed over Rami’s fist, turning the shade of a muscatel grape. I watched, appalled, as Rami made to pinch his blob of a nose shut, then pinched his mouth open instead and ruthlessly hooked fingers in to drag out clots of food.

  The maharajah coughed, moaned, and tried to drag away like an enormous rat. Rami yanked him back by the neck of his caftan, nearly strangling him.

  There was no question of my not being there, as we made our bold way. We were beyond fear and reason, a unit without a plan. As we had raced from the prison, we approached the palace openly, leaving our jailer no worse off than a lump on the head and locked in his own cell. I hoped someone found him. In time.

  The maharani then rushed in, staying Rami’s hand and offering her husband water. Blinking tears, he looked grateful, then spitefully grunted, “You took your time!”

  She stared at her husband and spat, “I do not care! I merely want to avoid suttee. You are not worth it!”

  What is suttee? I looked questioningly at Rami and saw him grimace. Whatever it was, it was not pleasant. Before I could ask, she dashed the water in his face, spat, and swept out.

  “Where are my guards?” the maharajah whined. “Where is everyone? I will have you executed immediately. That is what happens when one is lenient with assassins!”

  “I suspect they are out rounding up escaped animals. Oh, we let them out. In addition, they will be attending to several fires within the compound…small, true, but they will be busy for a while. Time, dear brother, for us to have a chat. You know, a brotherly confab. To negotiate better terms, if you will.”

  “It won’t last forever!” His brother waved his hands, apoplectic.

  “Oh, but Brother, I have supporters too, it seems. No one has rushed to your aid. It could be you chained as an animal…”

  Not only did no one hinder us, but I had caught fleeting smiles as we raced through the grounds, rampaging our way, filled with blood lust and settling scores. No one—not sentries, sycophants, eunuchs, or servants—tried to stay us in the face of Rami’s approaching wrath.

  “I only wished to frighten you,” Rami’s brother bleated as he pressed against the headboard, gaze darting about for escape, his outrage weaker, less convincing. He gulped piteously, rubbing his neck. “You have no idea how exhausting it is to be me. I don’t wish to be the maharajah. It was thrust upon me. Don’t hurt me!”

  “Be careful what you wish for, exalted brother.” Rami savagely ripped the silk sheet aside. “Nights are long and dark, and you, dear brother, have many sources from which your food is gathered and prepared. And not all your women or even all your soldiers appreciate your skills—or your favors,” Rami ended silkily, reminding me of a sleek panther cornering a mouse.

  “You still threaten me,” the maharajah whined.

  “Wrong. Most threaten you.”

  The maharajah struggled to the edge of the vast bed, looking over Rami’s shoulder and croaking, “Help me, you fool!”

  I whipped around. I glimpsed a bodyguard, eyes crusty with sleep, who ducked from sight.

  Rami narrowed his eyes at his brother’s pole-axed face. See? That is your future. Tread easy!

  Rami was not quite right.

  Sentries still loyal, for whatever reasons, belatedly boiled up corridors. Rami, still popular, waved them off as, undecided, they surrounded us. “A brotherly spat, you know how it is?” And, winked at his brother, red in the face and opening and closing his mouth. He never could make hard decisions without a month of waffling, only cruel and impulsive ones, Rami confided later.

  Indeed that was the case now. His face took on a constipated look, as his mind waded through options, as murky and insalubrious as a cesspit. Risk rebellion and mortifying expulsion? Rami cut a more princely swath, and was a man anyone would much rather follow. The maharajah appeared weak and exposed, squatting naked in his bed, while my Rami stood strong, handsome, and dangerous in the doorway.

  No, the choice must seem clear to most. We took the gamble and won, for now.

  Rami quietly took my hand and urged me away.

  ****

  After we delicately melted into the labyrinth, I was unsure, after the first exultation, what was to happen. “I went too far. There will be a bloodbath to pay for our sins.” His mouth curled. “His wives and innocent guards. He will call them traitors. I should have taken him prisoner.”

  Rami was not his brother, however. As he had stated before, traditions ran bone and blood deep in India, and most changes were thought to be cataclysmic if not world-ending.

  He prophesied rightly. It seemed no matter how he tamped down on the maharajah, his brother still owned those twisted in the same way.

  Mysterious deaths occurred in the seraglio and among sentries. Even old Madhuri of the kitchens was a victim. However, her demise could have been because of age. We never knew. Rami grieved openly and bravely at her hasty funeral pyre.

  The maharajah showed a public benevolent face. He left the palace in an unheard-of gesture, showering rupees, holding festivals and puppet shows, and doling out grain allowances. His generals, guard captains, even head eunuchs were beneficiaries of precious jewels, early retirements, and country estates.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Vivāha

  Gradually the blood purge ended as the maharajah became bored, complacent, or distracted. In his final madness, he ordered a statue of Preeta placed in a shrine-like garden, giving her goddess-like status, and declaring a festival in her honor.

  “My brother supposes deification may soothe any demons that might plagued him.”

  Or so Rami supposed.

  “It is time.” Rami took my hand. “My little rājpatnī. My wife, my queen. We will make our own reward, and I can keep you safe by my side, forever.”

  “Oh, Rami,” I cried in despair, “you only want to poke the hornet’s nest.” A young man’s folly, I told myself, not admitting his youth and passion.

  Yet his words stunned. They seemed etched in stone, a prison of a differing sort. Was I just a thorn in his brother’s side? Was passion enough? Why could I not throw caution to the winds, as had he? Was I growing brittle and old before time, losing the sweet juices of youth? My breath caught in sudden panic. I wasn’t sure how old I was. Surely in my twenties.

  “I cannot be wed, Rami. We cannot!” I blurted instead.

  “I do whatever I wish, and I wish to wed!” He drew himself up.

  How easily offended men are! I could not sort out the sudden alarm, only—the wrongness of his proposal.

  “You sound like your brother!” I evaded, shrinking from the look he threw me.

  “Come, come, mere dil ka pyaar, do not deny me. We shall be properly wed, as you Brits say, in full pomp and circumstance.” Am I a Brit? Or is that a chance riposte? I did not feel any kinship to being a Brit. My rajah had burst in, announcing our wedding plans as if it were an event discussed and endlessly mulled over.

  My mind raced to my heart’s rapid tattoo as I faltered to what must have seemed a perplexing and insulting degree.

  The rajah had looked upon me kindly, as if I were a child. “Yes, my love, it is a shock, is it not? Yet you must find me agreeable, yes?”

  I did not know why my outburst. I needed Rami, didn’t I, with every pore, with every look, with every touch? I walked an untamed wilderness, with no star chart of the past or the future.

  I was a nothing, neither slave nor wife, worker nor part of the hareem sisterhood. Other than sweet Asha, I had no friends. I fit nowhere, clinging to Rami’s love as a net of safety.

  Those flashing eyes narrowed. �
��There are myriad reasons we should not, only one that we should. And, that is all consuming. Is it not?” He asked with a hint of ice.

  “Cannot we go on—” I gestured. As we are? Yet latent pricks of joy bubbled, as intoxicating as Champagne.

  In the end, I looked through lashes, placing my hands on Rami’s broad shoulders. “Of course, Rami. It is all so—”

  “Overwhelming? Yes, for me also!” His grin lit the room. “You will be a rani!”

  A rani? A princess? Me?

  Lifting me high above his head, he strode about, leaving me breathless as I gazed down, searching his face. Rami’s hawkish features seemed boyish and younger than his twenty-two years. I had to keep reminding myself that I was older than he. I still felt fifteen. I just could not recall it.

  Then I heard the fatal words:

  “The Holi festival…”

  Words that would haunt me to the grave.

  “Holi is almost upon us. Bharatpur’s great bonfires and colors will celebrate our vivāha, also!” I was yet dazed. He had called me his little rājpatnī, little wife-queen, often enough. A lovely endearment, but what was vivāha?

  “Our wedding, of course. Our vivāha!”

  Perhaps this was my destiny, yet I could not pluck that niggling feeling, like a splinter one cannot find, that all was not right but was in fact very, very wrong.

  ****

  I recognized the Holi festival, through Asha. A messy, exuberant celebration, welcoming spring by drenching friends, most of whom welcomed the gouts of eye-hurting colors—cobalt, magenta, ocher, reds, oranges, and purples. All Bharatpur lit massive bonfires and set off fireworks that colored the sky, too.

  “Let us leave here. Why cannot we—just go?”

  His face darkened.

  “Out there.” My arm swept, taking in the whole world and nearly knocking him aside. “Not come back.”

  “We’ve had this discussion.”

  I stopped short of saying, You love India more than me! in womanly fashion, realizing in time that it was beneath me.

  In the end, it was not we two lovers who did the leaving.

  ****

  The maharajah died.

  The physician announced to the world that the maharajah had expired from tainted fish, a heart attack, or an apoplexy of the brain. The theories were accepted. Readily.

  After a period of mourning, with all the ceremony of state due a supreme ruler with a bushel basket of titles, the maharani announced she would enter an ashram, a sanctuary for widows to last out their days among other women in the same state, ostensibly so as not to be a burden on their families.

  It sounded hideous and dull. Thankfully, I was ignorant of a much worse fate that could have befallen her.

  In this case, the maharani seemed safe enough, taking a large endowment, including her enormous stockpiling of jewels—a paltry amount compared with her deceased husband’s hoard, buried inside the mound—servants, rich clothing, and musicians, one of whom was extremely handsome and only a few years younger than she, to an ashram high in the mountains of the Aravalli Range to the south of Bharatpur.

  An affable place, even luxurious, for women of higher class, Asha confided.

  “You need not leave. You are my sister too!” Rami protested, to my green-eyed suspicions. “You have friends—your apartments. Who will help me run the government?”

  I gave Rami a stare of shock, furiously thinking. Maharajah!

  I gawped at this lovely creature leaving us with oodles more grace, dignity, and majestic beauty than I could ever aspire to. Of course, it was unseemly. Preposterous, huffed my imp.

  A maharani! Me? What an absurd thought! I suddenly felt I had hay in my hair and mud between my toes.

  My mind stumbled over facts I had ignored. The maharajah had named no successor, and there was no other claimant besides his sweet son, whom the maharani insisted on taking with her, and an elderly uncle of the maharajah’s father. I supposed now Rami would choose someone more suitable as his consort, never mind his “you’re my rājpatnī” vow.

  I sighed, picking up the maharani’s next comments.

  “The world is a big place.” She slanted her knowing sloe eyes at us and grinned with unexpected wickedness. “Perhaps I might stray far from what is expected of me.” Her serene highness’s eyes twinkled then, and she actually winked.

  Perhaps it was the chilled wine on an exceptionally torrid day that allowed her veils to slip. Perhaps she wished to reveal her own guile and skills, after years of subjugation. I never knew.

  “I must say this thing to you.” She watched Rami but spoke in English for my benefit also. “Did I ever tell you…?”

  Her eyes took on a look deep within their black depths, as if a pond reflected stars.

  “My village was renowned. Oh, yes. Travelers came from all parts of India, for all sorts of”—she smiled—“remedies. My mother was a most adept practitioner. She taught me arcane resolutions—secret herbal infusions and tonics for all manner of suffering, tribulations, and”—she hesitated—“complications.”

  She sighed contentedly and arching her long neck drained her flute, running a pink tongue across her upper lip and narrowing startling green-blue eyes, reminding me of a Persian cat.

  “I never forgot them.” With that, she withdrew. The next day she was gone.

  ****

  “Cannot we leave too? Please, Rami.” I envied her chance to see the world, once again feeling the walls enclosing me.

  An old squall brewed between us.

  “No one would know who we—”

  “I cannot leave Bharatpur!” His face turned into a thundercloud and lightning flashed from his eyes.

  “Me or your country?” I said as lightly as a falling concrete block.

  The stormy look abated. “A maharani by my side, the most enchanting, beautiful, charitable…”

  “Maharani! Me? But I—” My laughter was false even to my ears, as if I only just envisaged it. “I cannot possibly be. Even if—”

  He kissed me. It sounded as if he then said, “App merijidagi, meridhadkane aur season main hain…aap hi mere sab kuch hain ji!” Way too long for me to translate, and with such passion. I understood the meaning, however deciphering “princess,” “heart,” and “queen.” I was the queen of his heart.

  I played for time. “I need to learn Hindi, my prince, or should I say king, or maharajah-darling.” My heart thumped, and my thoughts were like chasing cats.

  I wanted the rajah, Rami, with all my soul…but the role of maharani?

  I was in no way suited, by either temperament or background as far as I knew. I could be the long-lost, wrong-side-of-the-sheets daughter of some hanged scoundrel. Or wanted by the law. Why else would I be here, if not in hiding? Why not Queen of the May?

  This was his world steeped in this stultifying atmosphere, ritual, and culture since childhood. I was the possibly embarrassing unknown.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Purdah Most Foul

  Rami eschewed ceremony, taking over the reins of governing without fanfare.

  My mind strayed, in the long hours apart, to dark thoughts of wondering why I could not escape, now the maharajah’s heavy sword no longer hung over my head. What kept me here? Besides the man himself? my impious imp suggested.

  The seraglio’s curiosity grew as eunuchs carrying a palanquin passed them by. It stopped by me. Priests had decided I was to return to the seraglio before the vivāha—and thence to the rajah’s compound after a suitable time. I was on a runaway train hurtling down a hill.

  With his new status, my Rami became maddeningly traditional, at least by day. Nights were a different story.

  Asha gave me a tiny wave. “I will send for you,” I whispered.

  I brushed by the head eunuch waiting by the lowered seat, suggesting he was about to lift me bodily onto it.

  “I can walk!”

  “No, no, mem-sahib! Doli—doli!” He pointed at the shaky contraption on two poles. “I
t is custom. The gods in their wisdom decreed purdah for those”—the head eunuch coughed, regarding me as if he emptied a rattrap—“of elevated degree.”

  “Oh, all right, but this is silly.”

  He indicated I should kneel on the platform and cover with a ghoon ghat as thick as felt, head to toe, coarse and stifling.

  Clumsily, I climbed onto the low, shifting platform, gripping the sides. Perched on my knees on the elaborate doli, swaying like a boat on high seas, I made my procession.

  Purdah!

  I kenned what purdah was but had assumed the custom was ancient history.

  Yet you’ve been in purdah in the hareem, where females hide from men lest you enflame them beyond all reason, my imp scorned.

  I fumed beneath the stifling tent, peering balefully through the coarse weave until jolting to a halt at the rajah’s lush courtyard, surrounded by a suite of lofty rooms. I glimpsed Rami’s own new opulent quarters, befitting his rank, glimpsed through a broad archway.

  Bowing, the eunuchs lowered the doli and backed.

  I whirled. Rami made the mistake of striding to me with a cheese-eating grin, hands out in welcome.

  “Sarabande, beloved! At last! Come, my—”

  I lost no time hurling a copper pan of fresh petals at him. It had been lying about sweetening the air; blossoms fluttered about us. I admit to nerves. I did not care.

  “Purdah! I will not be in purdah! It—it is old-fashioned! And suffocating! It is a prison of another sort. I am my own woman and will not—”

  “Sarabande.” He spoke soothingly—as if to a horse. “You are always throwing things. It is meant as special protection, an honor for a woman of highest value.”

  “Honor? A canary in a cage! A slave has more freedom. You will not keep me here, isolated, on a stupid pedestal. I prefer the seraglio! At least there…”

  Why was I so hysterical? I had no intention of following the custom.

  Visibly I calmed.

  “Sary. I have no wish to imprison you. That would be against all my desires.”

  “Then why this, this—?” I gestured at the ghoon ghat as if it were a dead rat.