River of ink, p.8
River of Ink, page 8
‘Stop that!’ I shouted up at them. ‘I am the prince of Vidarbha! I will have the gate watch lock you in the dungeons!’
They did not believe me, of course. I clambered up the bank, muddied and bruised, with putrid palm fronds sticking to my hair, while the whole congregation laughed. Their leader, a tall boy with a dog-bite scar on his cheek, grabbed me and twisted my ear. He was much stronger than I was, and jeered: ‘Look! Here is a cowardly monkey boy who claims to be Prince Rukmi! Look how he doesn’t even fight back!’
You see, this is where the madness I spoke of took over. As the taunts and blows rained down on me, I lost control of my body. I swam deep in a lake of shadows, a cool black water from which I fought to surface. As though from far away, I heard the screaming of the children, and then the darkness sucked me under. After shrieking and thrashing through the worst nightmares I have ever experienced, I remember finding myself back in the palace, curled up and sweating beside my mother, father and sister, wondering at the strange darkness of my dreams.
The next morning, I shook myself awake, took an early daal and found my way back to that village by memory. I needed to return, to find out what had happened. I navigated the mesh of goat paths that criss-cross the forest, following the bulge of the Wainganga until I found where the spires of my mud city had risen. There was a hush in the trees. I soon found the path by which the children had come, and followed it through the forest.
I could smell smoke before I reached the village, and a sickly stench in the air. When I got there, I found a funeral pyre burning. I remember the shiver, like moths’ wings brushing up my spine. When I asked what had happened, the elders of the village wailed: with eyes pinched from weeping, they told me that wild animals had butchered a child the previous day. Some of the children recognised me from the river, and they ran behind their squalid huts or to their mothers, as though I were leprous. They told their parents that I had killed the child, that I had torn him apart with my bare hands and that as I did so, my face had ‘changed’. They kept whispering a word that was created to be whispered: ‘rakshasa’. A demon.
The adults told them not to lie. Nothing but a tiger or a leopard could have done that to the poor child, they said. That was not the work of a boy.
When my sister Rukmini refused to marry my friend Shishupal, I lost control again. I felt the dark water rising around me, watching from afar as I threw her against the balustrade of her pagoda. I hit her in the stomach, and held her out over the pool as though I would throw her in. Then I saw my reflection. The village children’s voices came back to me through all those years, vague as though from the very end of a dream, whispering that my face had ‘changed’. They were right. It was grotesque. My eyes were wide and bulging, and a grin split my face from ear to ear.
After that, I remember nothing. It is worth noting that even in the throes of my madness, I did not beat my sister’s face: presumably I still wanted her to remain attractive to her future husband. I am only glad that I did not do to my dear, stupid sister what I did to that boy on the bank of the Wainganga.
Now if there has to be a villain of this story, let it be whatever causes these fits in me. Whatever it is that wakes me some mornings with feathers and blood on my pillow. Or the time I awoke covered in lurid cuts and bruises, in a pool of my own blood, my mind heavy with dreams.
If you ever find out what it is that afflicts me, please tell the scribes what you know. Then maybe they can find a cure, or at least change their histories, and give me the peace I deserve. It is common for men to lose control of their demons. I am not evil. I am helpless, I think.
Chapter Five
In the dream, I’m standing in a city with walls snaking to both horizons; the spires are clustered like loom needles, the rooftops peppered with doves. This is Indraprastha, the great city of legend, but it’s also Polonnaruwa, in the way that places in dreams can be two places at once, or one place but not at all. Here’s Magha, but he’s also King Shishupal. He’s grinning with his perfect teeth and arching his black eyebrows as he drags Rukmini away to be married – she turns, her veil slips, and I see that she is Queen Dayani.
I still have this dream all these years later, though now one of the faces is different. Every time, I wake up believing that Krishna has arrived and sliced off Magha’s head in a blaze of light, that only sand poured from the stump of his neck, and that everyone present laughed until tears made riverbeds of their cheeks.
The first time I woke from this dream, I blinked in the bar of morning sunlight that had been crawling up my bed, and realised immediately the true state of things. Three weeks after his arrival, the barbarous Kalinga still sat on the lion throne, and as I lay there and stared up at the flies crawling over the silk canopy of my bed, he was in the palace being readied for marriage. I wanted to scream curses and break things.
I’d heard nothing that whole two weeks, no sign or clue of whether Magha had met the Queen himself or what had passed between them. I knew that if she spat at him and sent him away, my life could become very difficult. Still, I heard nothing, and I wondered as the days went by if the Queen had accepted the chance I left open to her. Even when Magha himself finally announced a grand procession and ceremony for the occasion of his marriage, I couldn’t predict what was going to happen. The realisation made me nauseous. My own invitation to the festival day came through a servant who called at the gate of my villa the next evening.
‘The lord of the three Sinhala lands, the king who conquered the world, invites you to be present at his glorious wedding’, and so on.
In the theories of Sanskrit poetry, the pandits speak of something called ‘rasa’. In Sanskrit this means ‘juice’. It’s the emotion of a poem that swallows up all smaller, more delicate feelings, that stands alone and cannot be broken down. You may not have heard of it. Perhaps if we had had another year together, we might have reached such a point in our lessons. My point is that I felt no such thing. That morning, perhaps the most uncertain of my life, I felt no single dominant feeling, but a great broth: the red juice of shame and fury; the blue juice of disgust; the grey of sorrow; the fresh green juice of love and pity; the black juice of terror. I thought almost every moment of the Queen, and the endless nights behind her sleepless eyes. I didn’t believe that she’d go through with it.
I pulled myself out of bed, and performed all the dull ceremonies that allow us to face other people. I washed my hair in the basin and combed the expensive oil through it with my fingers. The sweet scent didn’t improve my mood, though. I stepped into my newest cloth and knotted it tightly to my stomach, put on jewels, and all the while my throat was parched. I didn’t pay attention to the view that morning, but all the time I bathed, the rooftops outside the window must have been turning from ochre to fawn to gold, scales on a lizard’s back. The early bells began to ring.
Where were the omens? A gecko falling from a ceiling rafter, maybe, or a parrot perching upside down to nibble a thorn pod – something, at least, could have warned me.
I said goodbye to my wife, who sneered at my finery, and then I went down into the city. The procession was beginning in the Sacred Quadrangle, where the Vatadage temple once held the tooth of the Buddha, before the priests took it to be hidden.
When I drew close, I could hear the sounds of instruments and singers, and once I’d climbed the steps, I saw that a litter was waiting for me in front of the great temple. There were dozens of huge elephants, which sent shards of fear into my stomach. Ah, the elephants: huffing and shitting all over the holy ground. I suppose I should have expected them. Huge, hideous and cruel creatures.
I found out afterwards that all the servants had worked through the night to have the food ready for that day, so you didn’t see the morning procession. It was as loud and bright as you can imagine, an expensive clamour with many skilled acts and chained beasts. My litter swayed along the parade route between the breathing hulks of two huge elephants, otherworldly in their jewelled caparisons, and I felt as if I would throw up from fear. I’ve heard many mahouts say that elephants are as clever as men, that in the shade of the forest they speak in their own language, that they remember all the endless winding elephant roads they cut through the trees, and even mourn their dead. The thought fills me with horror. I tried to keep my back to my seat so that no one in the crowd would see my face coated with sweat. I made a list of detestable things.
Pieces of grit and husk in a bowl of rice.
The western wall of a house.
An extremely fat person covered in hair.
Being caught in the rain so that your sarong and travelling coat stick together and steam.
Musicians, dancers, whip-crackers and soldiers followed ahead and behind, the music too joyful to bear, the beating of many demon drums.
Then I saw the Queen. She rode at the front, resplendent in a red-and-gold robe, though my view of her was obscured by the fan of peacock feathers that spread from the back of her throne. I couldn’t see her face, but I felt my stomach plunge at the sight of her.
The city houses had been topped with thick thatches of new cadjan and hung with flags, the stones that lined the road were painted white. The soldiers chanted as they marched: ‘Long live the king who conquered the world! Long live, long live!’
The whole lively mess of the procession moved south down the King’s Highway, passing over the bridges of the southern districts, the canals named after the great rivers of India. You must have crossed them every day: the Yamuna, the Betwa, Kaveri, Godavari, Jayaganga. Soon my litter passed through the King’s Gate and out into the countryside, under the succession of archways that frame the road south.
Thorny wood-apple trees cast starved shadows over the procession, and as we moved further from the city and the shore, we saw workers toiling in the verges on either side, clearing the ruined sesame fruit from the fields. I was told later that the rain had fallen in a sudden late deluge, and darkened the skins of the fruit – they had rotted, and that accounted for the fallow smell in the air. The workers didn’t stop their work to watch our procession pass by.
It took an age to reach the wide grove of talipot palms where the poruwa platform stood, flanked by dragons. The grove was at the top of a slight elevation, and the countryside spread out in either direction through the trees, broken only by Gangadoni Hill across the river, and the white smudge of the city behind. Magha stood with one of his holy men beside a large fire, patient and smiling. He wore many jewels, with Vishnu’s yellow clay markings surrounding a ruby tilaka on his forehead.
Throughout this final stretch of the march, I watched the feathers behind the Queen nod like courtiers with each movement of her mount; my litter moved close behind the animal as it followed the tug of its mahout’s hooks around the crowd, and drew alongside the poruwa with steady, crunching steps. Soldiers surrounded the crowd in their wide-brimmed helmets, their histories of violence scrawled into their skins, their horses trembling as they smelt the water on the breeze. Servants scattered white sand and rice on the ground.
I expected the Queen to jump down from her mount at any moment, to make a run for the trees, or call on those still loyal to her husband to take up arms and cast out the invaders. I expected men to burst from the forest with bamboo spears and rescue her, to cut off the head of the Kalinga usurper and hold it up to the cheering crowd. I don’t know what I expected, but I expected something.
I didn’t watch as the Queen slowly dismounted. The whole time, I was staring into the black eye of her elephant, trying to see cunning in its depths. My litter lurched to a stop.
‘What a happy matching,’ muttered a Sinhala man behind me as I got down, pressed a massa into one of my bearers’ palms and joined the crowd.
It seemed the ceremony would never end. It was long and exhausting and conducted in Sanskrit, which few but myself could understand. By the time the sun had reached its highest point, Magha and Queen Dayani were walking around the fire, containing it in a helix of their steps and throwing offerings of puffed mountain rice to the god in the flames.
‘May this couple be blessed with an abundance of resources and comforts,’ the priest droned. ‘May this couple be eternally happy . . .’
Had I saved the Queen, or betrayed her? I changed my mind countless times as the ceremony dragged on. I watched her eyes, and they never once left the fire. Beside her, Magha’s expression was complex, like a boy who has nearly won a game. Once the circling had stopped, the attending holy man asked them both to hold out their fingers, so they could be tied together with the golden thread. As Magha’s finger hovered there, the Queen just stared, with an expression that said she would rather be tied to a tiger than to him. I felt my breath catch as time seemed to slow and the muscles around Magha’s mouth twitched. But then she raised her finger, and the priest’s shoulders sagged with relief. He tied the fingers together with hurried movements, as though the Queen might pull hers away at any point. The priest chanted a joyous hymn as he did it, but it hung in the air over our heads and turned mournful there like the sesame fruit rotting in the fields.
Once the ceremony ended, a feast was served: fried gram egg, I remember, giant prawns and peppered mangoes served on almond leaves. The platters and piles of food packets were brought from the city by a line of a hundred servants, and I saw with a rush that you were among their foremost, hair a little less patchy, but face no less hard than when I’d last seen you. The attendants ate little, and I certainly didn’t eat. The Queen and Magha sat together at the apex of the crescent, but I couldn’t see her eyes through her veil. I spent the time watching you and tracing the shell pattern stamped into my platter. When the chief of Naga Dipa pointed enquiringly at my empty plate, I said that I felt sick, which was true. He made the sign that wards off the upasagga plague, and returned to his gorging. I saw my face in the brass dish, and I did look sick.
After the feast, it was customary for all the lords to gather and congratulate Magha. They flocked around him and sang his praises, bowed to him, offered their wedding gifts. At one point, he sidled over to me, glowing with puffed-up pride.
‘I’m so glad you could be here, Asanka,’ he said. ‘So glad. I assume the translation is progressing nicely?’
‘Wonderfully, my lord. With only a brief pause to attend this day of joy.’
‘A day of such joy,’ he echoed, and beamed in gratitude as a lord from the gem fields of Ratnapura presented him with a polished coconut shell full of rubies.
‘Permit me, my lord,’ I said, looking around. ‘Did your father and your brothers not come to see your wedding?’
Magha seemed not to hear me. He kept smiling as he took the rubies and touched the head of the lord from the south coast, but something cracked behind his face. He didn’t speak to me after that, or look at me, although he laughed and talked with the other lords for a long time.
As the guests filed away from the wedding, I waited at the edge of the clearing. When you passed by in the line of servants, I began to walk subtly beside you.
‘Sarasi,’ I whispered. ‘Please speak to me. Don’t be so cruel.’
You didn’t even look my way.
‘Sarasi, where do you go those nights? Why don’t you sleep in your room? If there’s someone else . . .’
You hissed:‘Leave me alone!’ and hurried away to the front of the line. I thought I heard you murmur the Tamil word for ‘traitor’, too, but perhaps this was only because I expected to hear it.
The Shishupala Vadha was waiting for me when I returned to my room. I sat down and tried to begin the second parva, but as the sun beat on and my room grew hotter, carving out the vast architectures of Tamil words became an unbearable task. The very design of the language, the aroma of the sounds, the way the emotion of the verse falls flat if the tempo and the tune of each word doesn’t properly resonate – it all seemed a conspiracy to vex me. Soon my wife began deliberately performing noisy tasks in nearby rooms, and I suddenly reached a verse in which the poet mentions Shishupal’s name. I found myself, almost before I knew what I was doing, making changes to the poem. Eyebrows. Smile. That laugh.
The late afternoon heat was intense – all the peacocks were taking shelter in the trees, querulous, calling me down to the lake. Dogs were sleeping in the shade. I was desperate to escape the close air of my villa, the chattering of cooking knives and bashing of pots and tuneless singing, to escape Polonnaruwa and the shadow of the two maghas who now ruled my life. And I had to escape the poem, too – this poem that kept warping and changing like potter’s clay in my hands. I didn’t know what shape it might take if I stayed.
For all these reasons, I set out for the lake. It shocked me to find two spearmen posted at the gate to my villa, and they began to follow me as I walked down the King’s Highway, shouldering their weapons, swinging their feet. One of them had a crescent scar on his cheek, and the other periodically spat great, wet blotches of red betel on to the floor, his teeth orange with chewing. I could feel their gazes drilling into my back as I walked, and I imagined what they might be ordered to do to me.
They followed me past craft shops and chanting halls, past one of those fashionable new manuscript workshops full of young apprentices bustling about the business of destroying poetry for ever, through market streets and the labyrinth of caravansaries loud with horses, along the high wall of the elephant stables, past the low archways of the servant quarter, and over the green waters of the Grand Canal, thick with a traffic of barges. All the while, I considered darting down any one of the alleyways we passed, into the palm-lined rookeries, but I didn’t doubt that they would kill me if I tried.
Instead, I stopped at the stall of the old mango seller at the north edge of the servant quarter and joined the crowd waiting to buy one. The warriors sidled nearer as I waited for the seller to stop arguing with a man who wanted a discount. From atop an overturned wicker basket, a royal singer in plum-pink robes was chanting that old song to the crowd: ‘The King takes taxes for the good of all, just as the sun takes spilt water.’
