Prince of Dharma (35 page)

Kaikeyi stared up at Manthara wordlessly. She was speechless because Manthara had said everything there was to be said. These very fears kept Kaikeyi awake at night, these were the demons she sought to drown when she downed her endless goblets of wine and gorged like a feasting Brahmin each morning, noon and sundown. Even so, hearing them spoken aloud brought home the selfish crudeness of her innermost concerns with the bracing impact of a blow to the face. 

Manthara smiled grimly. ‘Have no fear. It shall be as you desire. Your son shall be crowned prince-heir, to become maharaja on his father’s passing. And you shall retain your status as the first queen in all but title for many a year to come. The keys to the kingdom’s coffers shall be in your fleshy fists, and not even Kausalya will dare to question you on any account.’ 

Kaikeyi’s eyes narrowed. ‘You taunt and tease me, Manthara. I already apologised for laying hands on you. Don’t humiliate me now. I’m a grown woman, not a girl any more.’ 

‘Taunt you? Tease you?’ Manthara’s laughter was like the sound of a monkey gibbering. ‘My poor fat Kaikeyi. I am only telling you what is written in
your
kundalee. Don’t you recall? I have told you these very things before, when I read your horoscope on your sixteenth naming day!’ 

Kaikeyi’s mouth fell open. She
did
recall the daiimaa reading her kundalee when she was sixteen, and the hunchback had reeled off a list of wonderful things that would transpire in Kaikeyi’s future. ‘You mean … all the things you said … they will really come to pass?’ 

Manthara’s mouth continued to smile, but her eyes hardened, the wrinkled skin around them tightening. ‘Every word. You do wish them to come to pass, don’t you, my little girl-whelp?’ 

Kaikeyi was so excited, she could only nod her head vigorously, unable to form any words. 

Manthara bent her head forward and crooked her finger. 

‘Then come to me and let me tell you how you can help bring these things about.’ 

*** 

The maharaja’s highway ran alongside the bank of the river Sarayu for a full yojana. Vishwamitra and the two princes walked the distance without speaking, the seer leading at a pace that soon had both boys sweating freely. The only sound was the clicking of their wooden sandals and the steady roar of the Sarayu. 

It was late afternoon, perhaps two hours from sunset, yet the day seemed warmer than usual, a sign of the seasonal change and a good omen. Rama and Lakshman were still in their whites, each wearing a simple dhoti, with an ang-vastra draped loosely around their shoulders. Despite the bracing coolness of the air, their new duty as oathsworn Kshatriyas required them to abjure all comforts. Vishwamitra had politely declined Dasaratha’s offer of a chariot and a platoon of PFs to see them to Mithila Bridge. It was said the brahmarishi had not ridden a chariot or sat on a horse for over seventeen hundred years. Even Vashishta, despite his status as royal guru, walked the distance to and from his ashram every day, a distance of one and a half yojana each way. And Rishi Vamadeva, who perforce lived in the palace to supervise the small army of purohits the sunwood throne employed, slept on a mat of rushes and ate simple fare from an earthen bowl. As the saying went, ‘The Greater the Seer, the Fewer His Needs.’ 

Nor could Rama and Lakshman be permitted to accept any of the comforts of their princely heritage. The moment they had sworn their oaths to the brahmarishi, they had given up all claim to their worldly titles, possessions and comforts. They were bound to follow Vishwamitra and do his bidding implicitly until he released them from their obligation to him. Such was the tradition of the guru-shishya contract. 

As the city fell further behind, the sounds of revelry and games and the parade fading with every step, Rama felt a pinprick of wonder at the twist of fate that had put him upon this path. 

Not doubt or fear, no. Just a tiny little question mark curling inside his belly, its tip pricking his gut. 

We knew what we were getting into when we accepted the sage as guru
, Rama thought.
Or at least I knew
. He stole a quick glance at his brother, matching him pace for pace in perfect step.
But I should have known that Lakshman would want to follow me. I should have done something, pre-empted him somehow, made him stay back. It was my responsibility as his older brother
. A thread of sweat trickled down Lakshman’s face. Rama reached out and dabbed at it with the end of his angvastra. Lakshman nodded. At that exact moment, a drop of sweat rolled down Rama’s own forehead, stealing into his left eye. 

Lakshman tried to use his own ang-vastra to wipe it away but was too late. It stung mildly. Rama blinked it away, grinning. Lakshman grinned back. They walked. 

The sun passed behind a stray cloud shaped like a wineskin filled to bursting with buttermilk—a mental association that was probably the result of his unfed stomach—and when it reappeared, it seemed to have grown fiercer. Rama felt as if he was holding a blazing mashaal at arm’s length. Sweat ran freely down their faces and bodies; their ang-vastras were soon soaked through.
Winter certainly is through with us,
he thought. 

He glanced at the cool, welcoming white waters of the Sarayu.
A dip in the river would be heaven right now
. He caught Lakshman sneaking a glance leftwards too and knew he was wishing the same thing. 

Sarayu’s cool breath carried a fine mist redolent of the iron tang of glacial ice-melt. It was a scent of mountains and flower-vales; the scent of their ancestral homesteads. A drove of dragonflies as large as pigeons whirred over the water, travelling upstream. Deep within the shaded glade where Rama had sat only a few hours earlier, a pair of koyals called insistently. 

I would love to sit with you awhile, my friends, but duty calls.
Squirrels leaped along branches overhanging the river, racing deftly from tree to tree, leaving a row of swinging limbs behind them as they dashed downriver. The silver flanks of enormous mahseer and rawas gleamed in the river, silver and lean from the long hard winter. Soon they would grow fat and slow, fit for the cookfire. 

I should have eaten some of Susama-daiimaa’s naashta after all
. A stag slurping water near the same rock where Rama had found the wounded doe cornered by the poachers looked up and stared at them fearlessly. He was a young black buck, also lean from the winter, but his fur was sleek and glossy. Soon it would be mating season and he would dash his proud horns against a brother buck to decide their mate; only one of them would survive the ritual. Fruitlessly Rama scanned the bank for a sign of the doe, hoping she had survived the arrow wound, although it didn’t seem likely. 

The sun fell steadily in the western sky as they walked on, and soon even the faraway sounds of conches blowing and elephants trumpeting faded behind them. The river’s sound dimmed as the raj-marg rose steadily above its banks. They passed mango groves, orange orchards, apple groves, grape vineyards, and sugarcane patches rife with scorpion-birds that hovered above the high stalks, their carapaced bellies swollen with the sweet treacly juice. The welcome shadow of jackfruit trees shielded them from the slanting sun. Rama and Lakshman had sat beneath the shade of these very trees, eating their stomachs’ fill of the chewy gum-like fruit, carrying the rest back to Susama-daiimaa, who cooked a delicious sweet-sour phanas curry in the Marathi style. 

Now they only looked wistfully up at the swollen ripe fruit, and walked on. 

As the raj-marg rose steadily higher, the day seemed to grow even hotter despite the shade of the wayside trees: too hot for winter, too hot even for spring.
Hot on Holi day means monsoon’s not far away,
the daiimaas always said. Rama licked his dry lips, missing the moist air of the Sarayu riverbank, the refreshing cool spray on his face, the delicate scents of the lotus and jasmine blooms that drifted downriver. Wiping the side of his face with the tip of his ang-vastra, he remembered suddenly that he hadn’t even anointed himself with rang. He couldn’t recall a Holi when he and Lakshman had failed to colour each other. Yet here they were, without even a dab of powder on their faces, clothes unmarked. Then he remembered the kumkum that his mother had pressed on his forehead after her aarti; he did have colour on his face after all. Maa had seen to that. 

A small pebble caught between his toes and he paused to remove it. Lakshman paused as well but Rama motioned him forward. As Lakshman walked on behind the sage, Rama saw that his brother’s rig was arranged in such a way that the tip of his curved bow pointed east, the quiverful of arrows west; his head and feet already marked north and south.
He lit up the cardinal directions as he rode into battle on his flaming chariot.
Now, where was that from? Some old poem about one of Rama’s ancestors, Surya probably, who gave the Suryavansha dynasty his name when he took the only daughter of tribal chieftain Ikshvaku the Settler. Rama stood and followed the others, catching up quickly, unaware that his own rig mirrored Lakshman’s perfectly, their hair as black as crows’ wings, their posture identical. 

The sun was a little more than an hour from sunset when they reached Mithila Bridge. 

One of only three such bridges spanning the Sarayu, Mithila Bridge was built at the highest point on both banks, an awe-inspiring seven hundred yards above the river. Far below its carved span, the Sarayu ran rough and fast over a half-mile of enormous grey boulders that had fallen in some avalanche a few thousand years ago. The river boiled and seethed as it roared over the boulders. 

Precisely one and a half yojana or fourteen Western miles from the outermost gate of Ayodhya, Mithila Bridge also marked the end of the royal protectorate. As they approached the bridge, Rama made out the forms of several men mounted on elephants, guarding both the north and south ends of the structure. Even the elephants were dwarfed by the enormous proportions of the bridge. 

Hewn from the sturdy timber of a single massive shagun tree, which the Greeks called ‘teak’ after the Greek word
tekton
, for ‘carpenter’, the bridge was broad enough to allow not two but three royal wheelhouses to pass at a time, or seven elephants ambling abreast. Even at this considerable height, much of its span was obscured by a cloud of spray-mist from the river. 

Vishwamitra stopped at the point where the raj-marg curved slowly to present good access to the bridge for wheelhouses and other large vehicles. 

He turned to Rama and Lakshman. ‘Do not reveal yourselves, rajkumars. There are enemy eyes everywhere, and it would be best if our mission goes unreported. Act the part of my acolytes and leave the talking to me.’ 

Without waiting for an answer, he gestured and spoke a brief mantra. Rama and Lakshman found themselves transformed into the spitting likeness of two shaven-pate chotti-sprouting Brahmin acolytes, while Vishwamitra had become a paunchy, jolly-looking red-faced pundit dressed in ritual saffron. 

The seer nodded approvingly and turned back to face the two outriders who had ridden to meet them. 

TWO 

Dismounting, they approached quickly but cautiously, their bodies glistening with the wet mist of river spray. They were all but naked in the style of all rakshaks, the Kshatriya clan designated as the guardians of life and property, clad only in white cotton langots that covered their maleness. Slabs of muscle rippled on their oiled torsos and thighs, gleaming in the afternoon sun. Their faces were broad and fleshy, their skin as dark as Rama’s hair, heads glistening darkly, unprotected from the harsh sun. They were so similar in appearance, Rama could hardly tell them apart at first. 

‘Punditji,’ the first one said curtly to the seer. ‘Are you lost? The way to Ayodhya lies behind you.’ 

‘Well met, rakshaks,’ Vishwamitra replied cheerfully in his new role as pundit. ‘And greetings to you on this feast day. Regretfully, my holy business takes me in the opposite direction of the Holi mela at our great capital city. My young apprentices were quite sullen about not being permitted to partake of Maharaja Dasaratha’s munificent hospitality. I admit I too would not have been averse to enjoying the exotic sights and sounds of the celebration. However, I am bound to Ananga-ashrama on a holy errand and must reach there before nightfall.’ 

The two rakshaks exchanged a troubled glance. ‘Anangaashrama? This very day? Can’t your business wait a day or three, pundit? Our advice is to return to the capital and take advantage of the maharaja’s hospitality for the duration of the seven-day celebration. Nightfall is not long coming. You will be safer within the walls of Ayodhya. Come this way again next Somvar, and we will wish you good journey and let you pass without question.’ 

Rama saw a frown crinkle the brow of the brahmarishi. He tried hard to keep a straight face: the sight of Vishwamitra posing as a plump pundit was incongruous to the point of hilarity. Yet it was an impressively effective disguise. He touched his own face and felt a weaker jaw and fleshier cheeks, a bulbous nose. The inclination to smile faded at once as he realised how foolish he too must look.
But what exactly does the brahmarishi fear? The bridge-guard can’t be spies too, can they?