Anjali grimaced as she absently picked up the bowl and started rubbing the coarse paste to her arms. The comforting fragrance of crushed turmeric overwhelmed her, as the shimmering winter sunshine filtered through the filigreed terrace of the Phool Mahal Palace, overlooking its lake—so golden, such a world away from the bleak, watery light that lay over Oxford University, half-buried this time of the year in snow.
This was how Anjali’s ancestresses had lived, looking upon this view century after century. Rajput queens and princesses were famed in history for being valiant, but theirs was not the valour of war. While their men struck terror in the hearts of the enemy on the battlefield—repelling every invader from the Greek to the Muslim to, yes, even the British—Rajput women had held strong to their fortresses, never hesitating to fling themselves into the immolation pyres rather than enduring defilement at the hand of the enemy. The Rajput royal blood that flowed in Anjali’s veins was an untainted stream of glory, its purity to be preserved at any cost.
Not that Anjali was going to present herself to suitors any time soon, a fact that was incomprehensible to her adamant old dai. Her current fate was closer to the immolation pyres of yore—with her two older brothers recently turned up dead; and her senile father, Maharaja Amarendra Singh Rathore of Kishangarh, counting his own last days within his shady bedchamber at the heart of the palace, the last male member of their line. But this was the twentieth century. Anjali was a scholar at the Oxford University, preparing to take the bar exam next year. All of the British Indian Empire was thrumming with nationalistic fervour, and so many other, unseen tensions roiling beneath the surface. In the midst of all that, Anjali had no intention of setting herself on fire.
Turmeric paste applied, she stepped out of her dressing gown onto the cool stone floor of the bathroom. There was no claw-footed bathtub, unlike her flat in Oxford, but the water drawn in buckets from the lake was cool and painstakingly filtered, all by that bent old woman who had once bathed Anjali and her brothers by her own hand. Anjali poured mugfuls of water over herself, willing it to wash away the horror of the past few months.
All it managed to remove was dead skin, something she barely cared about any more.
THE LARGE DINING room at the palace lay unused, for Anjali now took her meals at her father’s bedside. The once valiant Maharaja Rathore—six feet tall and barrel-chested, renowned hunter, the terror of his subjects though his kingdom was nothing but a decorative title under the British Empire—now lay wasting away in his bed, with an illness the doctors called ‘paralysis,’ for the lack of any better explanation. The best doctors in the country, including the Viceroy’s private physician from Delhi, had failed to determine what precisely was wrong with Maharaja Rathore. Not that the family—or what remained of it—didn’t know, but the thing they knew was not the sort that bore any relevance in the twentieth century.
The family did not discuss such things at mealtime. There were appropriate times for every conversation in the royal household of Kishangarh, and for some of them there was never an appropriate time. It was why Anjali was not informed immediately after her two older brothers—Ajay, twenty-five years old, and Abhay, twenty-two—were killed in “hunting accidents” months ago. She never saw their bodies, never attended their cremation nor observed the week of mourning afterwards, although leaving a message for her at St. Hilda’s College in Oxford could surely not have been impossible. “The tragedy had happened; we had lost what we lost,” said her father when she returned, resorting to the formal, royal plural she’d always despised. “They were not going to return to us. We did not find it necessary to disrupt your studies during the term.”
Sabarmati dai served lunch on a tray—the thin khichdi, rich with ghee, that was the only thing the Maharaja could swallow any more. As the old maid receded, glancing uncertainly from father to daughter, Anjali proceeded to spoon the broth patiently into the Maharaja’s mouth. Her father was the only parent Anjali had known. He had been generous and liberal—providing her with a Western education that few women in the country received—but never quite intimate; not in the way he had been with her brothers. A daughter was nevertheless a daughter, not to be taught hunting or drinking or womanizing as becomes of the princes of a Rajput royal estate. Instead, since her mother died when she was but a few months old, Anjali Singh Rathore was brought up under the close supervision of Sabarmati dai, going to school and studying as hard as she could, knowing that would be her only route out of centuries-old Rajput femininity.
She was also protected from family secrets. Ajay and Abhay had known exactly what came for them, and it wasn’t some poor starved tiger barely managing to stay alive in the dwindling forests of Sariska. Anjali only had the foggiest idea, and her father refused to say more.
“Would you—would you recite to me some more of that—of that poet?” her father managed. “That Irish chap who’s all into Hinduism and Tagore.”
Anjali sighed. “W.B. Yeats?” The Maharaja was an incurable Anglophile, also a master of changing the subject. At another time, she would have shared his enthusiasm. It was what she had studied with the greatest passion all her life, after all.
“Please,” her father said, smiling. “I feel like his words soothe my soul.”
With another sigh, Anjali recited from the leather-bound chapbook she had picked up in London in summer that year.
“Some may have blamed you that you took away
The verses that could move them on the day
When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind
With lightning you went from me, and I could find
Nothing to make a song about but kings,
Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things
That were like memories of you—”
“Stop! Stop, that’s enough,” groaned the Maharaja, stilling her mid-recital. He made a pained expression. “So condemning, dear God! Is there no joy to be found in the world anymore?”
“Not in the poetry of Yeats, I’m afraid,” Anjali sulked. “There is only so far you can run from the truth, Daddy. The world is on fire. Your sons were just—”
“Enough!” her father growled.
Anjali turned to see Sabarmati dai—that elderly, soft-footed maid—come to collect their empty dishes, along with a bowl of warm water and a rag to wipe the Maharaja’s mouth. Her father leaned back on his pillows and allowed her to perform her service.
Why had this old woman stayed, Anjali found herself wondering? The other servants of the estate were only too happy to be relieved. Word of the curse had been spread. No official statement was ever made, but rumours were hard to keep suppressed in as superstitious a country as this. Even the driver who had taken the family Austin to the airport in Delhi to bring Anjali home had been hired for the day, and legged it as soon as he collected his fee. But Sabarmati dai had been there, waiting for her, taking care of her father, as she always had.
Did she not have any family of her own? Anjali clearly remembered her son Mahesh—a thin, dark-skinned child, nearly the same age as her—for he was the one she grew up playing with, while her brothers were away at boarding school in Dehra Dun. Mahesh was always loitering in the palace grounds, since he never went to school, and at that age Anjali did not understand why; merely assumed he wasn’t diligent enough. With the years they had grown apart, as Anjali got busy with her schoolwork and friends, and Mahesh started being sent out for small chores for the estate. This time around, she hadn’t seen Mahesh at all. She couldn’t remember if he was there when she’d visited the year before.
“Daddy, where is Mahesh these days?” she absently asked.
“Eh, who?”
“Mahesh. You know, Sabarmati dai’s son.”
“Honestly, I have no idea. I thought he found a job in Calcutta or someplace.” The Maharaja grimaced. “What a random question to ask.”
A thought flashed through Anjali’s head for the first time. The sheer certainty shocked her—but it made sense. It
made other thoughts clearer, thoughts that had been prickling her for days. Ajay had been the first to go, and Abhay within a couple of weeks of him. Nothing had happened to her yet, but she did not believe she would be let off. Blood curses did not care for gender.
“Daddy, why did Sabarmati dai stay? Everyone else left. Even the vegetable seller and the woman who draws water from the wells don’t cross our threshold anymore,” she said. “Why didn’t she go away to live with Mahesh? Where does her husband live, or her family? What’s left here for her?”
“How would I know?” Her father’s voice grew irritable. “Why are you asking me these questions?”
“Because I need to know, Daddy. My life may depend on it. How long will you hide the truth from me?”
“You will go back to Oxford next week,” he grumbled. “You will be safe, far from all this.”
If only that were true, Anjali thought with a bitter smile. Her father’s vision of England was painfully idyllic—the heart of an invincible Empire as it had been in his own college days, at the turn of the century. Her father hadn’t seen the ravaged buildings in the wake of the Great War, slowly rotting under the damp, grey skies; the rumours of unspeakable horrors that haunted the student halls at Oxford. Only weeks before she left for India, a hell-beast of unprecedented nature had attacked Dr. Archimedes De Quincey within the very premises of Queen’s College, barely steps away from her private accommodations on High Street. Anjali wasn’t acquainted with the man per se—and was attending her own classes at St. Hilda’s at the time of the outbreak—but she had gone with her friends to listen to a seminar by him in her first year.
The next day Dr. De Quincey was nowhere to be seen, his classes assigned indefinitely to a junior lecturer. Rumours had spread like wildfire through the cloistered student community of Oxford. No student walked alone after sundown for the rest of the term. The churches saw a sudden influx of those who had formerly taken great relish in proclaiming themselves atheist. Anjali had been only too relieved to leave, find herself again under the bright skies of India, which blazed away all miasma of horror or gloom.
“Daddy,” she insisted. She had to. An ugly distress had clawed its way into the room, amidst the crisp winter afternoon. “Sabarmati dai never had a husband, did she? It was never the three of us—it was four—Ajay, Abhay, Mahesh and me. And now it’s Mahesh’s turn to die. If he isn’t dead already. But you wouldn’t know if he was, I suppose?”
“Certain conversations are indecent,” the Maharaja snarled. “Especially between father and daughter.”
“Nobody told me the curse spared daughters!” Anjali snarled back, finally at the end of her tether. Funny how similar they looked in their rage. “It said each of your offspring—didn’t it? Everyone of your blood! Nothing about your wife’s blood, not just your sons—but I suppose women have never been a consideration in the glorious Rajput lineage! I suppose you don’t care if I die next, just as you don’t care for Mahesh! Neither of us will carry forth the royal lineage of the Rathores of Kishangarh. As far as you are concerned, the line is dead.”
“The curse is poppycock, and you, Rajkumari Anjali, will address us with greater respect the next time,” said the Maharaja through gritted teeth, turning his gaze to the far wall.
Anjali stormed out of the room, without making an apology, a part of her wondering how she got to be so brave.
SHE MADE A phone call. Her school friend Sujata had got married to a wealthy clothing merchant in Calcutta. It was not common for young women of families like theirs to travel alone, but everyone knew that Anjali’s father was bedridden and her brothers recently deceased; and how could she do her necessary research for Oxford otherwise?
Once she had replaced the phone back on its hook, she found Sabarmati dai waiting in the room.
“You will go looking for Mahesh,” said the old woman, plainly, fixing Anjali in her gaze.
“Yes,” she had to admit.
“Calcutta is a big city, I hear. Almost as big as Delhi. How will you find one boy among it all?”
“I was hoping you would help me, dai,” Anjali implored. If Sabarmati dai refused to talk, she had nothing to start with.
“Very well,” Sabarmati dai said. “Mahesh has been working as a waiter at one Auckland Hotel. It is an establishment patronized only by sahibs, and aristocratic Indians like yourself. The pay is good. The work doesn’t break his back. It is the best a boy like him can hope for in life.”
“It is not!” Anjali flared up, blood rushing to her face. Mahesh should’ve had the same opportunities as her brothers in life.
“You do not understand, beti. What your father did those many years ago—other royal men have done worse. It is the way of the world. At least your father gave us shelter in his estate. There is no place for a soiled woman with no husband in our villages; I could never have returned to my family. Mahesh would’ve starved in the desert. Instead he grew up here, well-fed and safe, learning to read from the books your brothers and you outgrew every year. That is how he managed to get a job at the sahibs’ hotel. As for me, I lived well too, better than any woman from my village. I got to love and raise three more children that I never gave birth to—especially you, who have been the joy of my wretched existence.”
“You didn’t deserve a wretched existence!” Anjali railed. “He should’ve married you, especially after—especially after our mother passed!”
“Oh, my sweet, innocent child, if only that were possible,” Sabarmati dai gave a weak, bitter laugh. “The Maharaja of Kishangarh marry a lowly Bhil woman? This country couldn’t bear the weight of the scandal! Why, that is exactly what that witch demanded. And you know what happened with her.”
“I… don’t, actually,” Anjali bit her lip. “He refuses to tell me anything. Even—even after… all this.”
“And so would I have, but I believe you have the right to know.” The old woman sighed. “Beti, I have loved your father all my life, though he has never loved me back the same way. It does not please me to discuss his misdeeds, but he committed his share of them, especially in his youth. It is the prerogative of the royalty to take what they want, as it is the burden of the lowly like us to suffer their whim. Such is the will of the gods. I do not question it. But there was once a woman who did. It was perhaps thirty years ago, before any of you were born.
“She was not a maidservant like me. She was a priestess—a priestess of a tiger goddess, who came from the forests of the east, walking barefoot all the way to our land. But she was a low-caste anyway, a forest girl with skin as black as rocks, matted hair bleached auburn by the sun, thick calluses on her feet. A girl who could barely speak the language of civilized society, leave alone any English.
“It was a blighted time for Kishangarh. There had been a drought that summer, which drove the tigers from the forest of Sariska to hunt towards our villages. The forest was much larger then, with many more tigers than today. Every night there would be a child carried away by a tiger, or at least a goat or a cow. The people appealed to your father, who was a young Maharaja then, but already renowned as a hunter. The British government wasn’t interested in the fates of us lowly villagers, so your father alone brought together hunting parties and went raiding the forests. He killed two or three tigers, but more kept coming.
“That was when this priestess appeared. She wasn’t local to our land, but she claimed she could make the tigers retreat by appeasing her goddess, and overnight there was a shrine for her under the banyan tree in our village, with people from far in the desert bringing her offerings.
“This kind of thing very quickly tilts to insubordination, so the Maharaja had to investigate. When he arrived with his men, he found the young priestess surrounded by hundreds of devotees under her tree. There would be a rebellion if he ordered her to be driven from his land, especially since he had failed to cull the tigers himself. But there was something else. There was a strange aura to that young woman—rough, dishevelled, unlettered, but emanating powe
r and wisdom far beyond her age or station in life. She was nothing like any other woman he knew, either high-caste or low, and even at that young age, your father had known many women already.”
Sabarmati dai let out a distraught sigh.
“And, you must understand, touched by a goddess though she might have been, this priestess was a very young girl. Much younger than you are now.” Anjali’s skin crawled—she had turned eighteen barely a month ago. “A young girl newly arrived from the forest, where life is very different from the way it is in civilization. In the forest, among the lowest castes, they do not know shame. There any woman can choose any man and start a family; it is accepted. They make love on the forest floor and do not care for the dirt. He came to her in supplication and wonder—this young, charming king, so worldly in his ways—and the priestess of the tiger goddess fell violently in love.
“A few months later, she arrived at his palace demanding acknowledgement for the child in her belly. Obviously, the Maharaja laughed. He was at that time actively seeking a bride from another royal family—someone of equal stature to join him in lineage and estate. A scandal like this would ruin his prospects, so he ordered the forest priestess to be shown out of his premises as swiftly and ruthlessly as possible. Unfortunately, in those months the priestess had become wiser to the ways of the world, so she threatened to take up the matter with the British governor in Jaipur. This, then, endangered much more than your father’s marital prospects. Our British overlords, as you know, have no understanding of our ancient caste system and consider it unequivocally evil. If it was proved that the woman’s unborn child was his—and there would have been witnesses in plenty, for she had many followers still—the Maharaja would be compelled to marry her, and that would destroy the nobility of his lineage forever. If he refused, he might lose his estates altogether and go to jail.
The True History of the Strange Brigade Page 16
