Rebel Queen (5 page)

Father put his arm around my shoulders. I knew he was looking down at me, but I was too distraught to look into his eyes and risk seeing my own misery mirrored there, so I kept my chin to the ground. The rising flames felt hot on my face, drying my tears even as they fell. Father held out his palm, but I had nothing to write. There were too many images passing through my mind: the man
in the neem-leaf crown, the women in their saris, the temple with its soft piles of red kunkuma, a powder made from dried turmeric for devotees to smear across their foreheads as a sign of devotion. I tried forcing my thoughts back to Mother and two images came; one of her in the garden picking tulsi—called holy basil by some—for our altar, and one of the little tortoiseshell brushes she used to line her eyes with kohl in the mornings. Then the images of the temple came back to me, and I felt an overwhelming sense of dread.

When Father’s hand remained outstretched, I took it quickly and wrote, “Please don’t send me to work in the temple.”

“What temple?”

“Where Dadi-ji took me yesterday. I don’t want to work for soldiers. Please, Pita-ji. I want to stay with you.”

Father looked across the burning pyre at Grandmother, and when her eyes met mine, I knew she realized what I had done.

I
t didn’t matter that our neighbors had gathered in our courtyard or that half of Barwa Sagar was outside. There was never a bigger fight in our house. The walls seemed to shake with Father’s bellowing and Grandmother’s shrieking, both sounds incoherent with rage. I hid in my room, and Aunt came to sit with me.

“Did she really take you to the temple, Sita?” she asked.

“Yes. The priest said he’d pay thirteen thousand rupees. Do you know what that means?”

Aunt nodded, her eyes closed, but she didn’t explain. We listened to the fighting until suddenly, my door swung open, and Father pointed to my diary. I fetched it from its shelf and gave it to him, unsure whether I was supposed to write in it, or if he was.

A moment later Grandmother appeared, and Father took a pen
from my desk. On an empty page in the diary he wrote, “Every person here bears witness to the fact that if something should ever happen to me, neither of my daughters shall ever”—and he underlined the word
ever
—“become devadasis. There is no money for a dowry fortune large enough to find them both suitable husbands. So tomorrow, I begin training with Sita for a position in the Durga Dal.”

Since Grandmother couldn’t read or write, she looked to Aunt for a translation. When she heard what he had written, she sucked in her breath.

“The Durga Dal is the most elite group of women in this kingdom! No woman in Barwa Sagar has ever become a Durgavasi,” she said.

My father’s nostrils flared. He might not have heard her words, but he understood her meaning.

Only ten women are chosen for this role. “You want Sita to become one of the women who not only guard the rani but
entertain
her?” She took the pen from Father’s hand and handed it to Aunt. “Ask him what will happen if she fails. Ask him!”

Aunt wrote the question in her small, neat handwriting.

“She will not fail,” Father wrote back. “She has me and she has our neighbor, Shivaji. We will train her.”

As soon as Aunt relayed this message, the color rose on Grandmother’s cheeks.

“They haven’t held a trial for a new member in three years. You don’t have the time for this!” She instructed Aunt to write. “What about a new wife? A woman who can raise your baby and give this family an heir?”

Father replied, “Until Sita becomes a member of the Durga Dal, I will never consider remarrying. Ever.”

He put down the pen. The decision was final.

From this moment, Grandmother began to pretend that I didn’t exist. And since she could only communicate through crude signs to Father, our house became extremely silent. I’d like to tell you that this was ideal, that it gave me more freedom, but as anyone who’s ever lived inside a house of eggshells knows, nothing is more fragile.

In the mornings when Avani came to help me dress, there was no more laughter. Grandmother had told her I was a shameless child, and whether or not Avani believed this, we no longer shared happy moments together. But I watched her with Anuja, and the tenderness she showed my baby sister made me understand that if I had been younger, more pliable, less shameless, things might have been different. Eventually, I grew so accustomed to the silence in our house that I became like a frozen stream—hard and impenetrable on the outside, but secretly bursting with life within.

Chapter Four

1846

F
ather honestly believed I would be accepted into the rani’s Durga Dal and become a member of the elite Royal Guard. True to his word, he enlisted our neighbor Shivaji to help prepare me for the day when one of the rani’s Durgavasi retired. It could happen in a month or in five years—we didn’t know—but whenever it occurred, I had to be ready, for the rani always had ten women protecting her, and as soon as one retired a trial would immediately be held to find her replacement.

Although Shivaji had three sons at home, he came to our house for several hours each day to train me. I was the only child in our village rising before dawn to begin lessons in poetry, Sanskrit, English, Hindi, and all of the martial skills the Durga Dal required: swordsmanship, shooting, fighting, archery. Before we began my mind was filled with the swashbuckling tales I had read with Father:
The Three Musketeers
and ballads about Robin Hood. I wore a new pair of nagra
slippers for my first day of training: they were plain leather with simple red and gold lotus designs, but I thought they were the most exotic things I’d ever seen.

“You see these thick leather soles?” my father wrote, turning the shoes over when he presented them to me. “These will keep you from slipping.”

“Can I wear these every day?” I couldn’t believe my luck.

“Yes. Especially when it’s raining.”

“And what about those?” I pointed to a green
angarkha he’d brought in with the shoes; a cotton, knee-length shirt that was fitted at the waist.

“Yes. And these churidars,” he said, holding up a pair of green pants. I had never worn pants before. They were tight at the ankles and waist, but loose and airy in the legs for quick movement. With a white piece of cloth, or muretha, tied around my head to keep the sweat from dripping into my eyes, I felt powerful.

But the truth of it was far different: nothing is less glamorous than being woken from your bed in the predawn chill to set up a target and shoot arrows at it not once, but a hundred, even two hundred times, until all of your shots hit their mark. In the summers, the heat in my village was suffocating. In the winters, when the wind blew like a river of cold air, I could feel it in my bones, no matter how many layers I would dress myself in. When you’re standing in an open courtyard with a frozen scimitar in your hands, fighting against a man who is more than three times your size, there is very little that feels like something out of
The Three Musketeers
. It is hard, grueling work.

But I learned how to fight using only a stick. And how to sever a man’s head with a single stroke of my sword. And in case I was ever rendered weaponless, I learned how to defend myself with punches, kicks, choke holds, and shoulder grabs. Day after day I practiced these moves until they came as effortlessly to me as walking or running.

And over several years, I metamorphosed from Sita the child
into someone else. At first, the changes were subtle. Muscles appeared in my arms and legs that had never been defined before. My hands, which had once been full and soft, grew strong and callused. Then, the physical changes became more obvious. My waist grew narrower, my cheeks more hollow. The roundness of childhood was gone. In its place was a tall, lean girl who could carry heavy rocks from one end of the courtyard to another, morning after morning, and still not feel fatigued. She was a girl who could swing a metal sword, carry a man’s burden of wheat on her back, and lift multiple buckets of water with both arms. Sita the
child
could do none of these things. She’d been an average girl with average strength. Now, I was probably the strongest woman in Barwa Sagar.

On the first morning I bled, I told Avani, who let Grandmother know I had become a woman. It felt more frightening to me than anything I had learned with Shivaji in the courtyard, and Grandmother’s rage didn’t help. I could hear her in the kitchen, shouting at Avani, “Well, it’s all over now. There’s not a man in Barwa Sagar we could trick into taking her.”

I was in too much pain to see Shivaji that day. Instead, I stood in front of my small basket of playthings and ran my hands over each one in turn. When I was a little girl, my father had given me two cloth dolls, a wooden horse, and a small block carved into the shape of a bear. I took out the doll with long black hair and held her in my lap. I could remember how I used to give the doll a voice and walk her around my room, but doing this now seemed silly. I was twelve years old.

I sat at my desk and thought about other girls my age. The ones who had become women, like me, were preparing to leave their homes, overseeing the packing of their bridal chests and saying farewell to their families. In this way, I was much luckier than they were. I would never have to bid Father good-bye, knowing
that the next time I would see him would likely be on his funeral pyre. I could stay in his home, watch Anuja grow, sleep in my own bed, and eat Avani’s mushy lentils until I undertook the rani’s trial, which might not be called for many years yet. But then, if I succeeded in becoming a member of the Durga Dal, I would also never marry. And I would certainly never have children. I would belong to the rani from that moment on.

“What are you doing?” Anuja asked, joining me in my room. She was three and always filled with questions, like a lidded pot holding back too much steam.

“Thinking.”

Anuja climbed onto my lap. “Can I think with you?”

She not only had Mother’s delicate face, but her tenderness, too. She always wanted to know why Grandmother yelled at her or why the baby bird outside our window had died. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow, Hamlet says. But there was no explaining that to her. “Yes.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then curiosity got the better of her. “Why aren’t you practicing with Shivaji?”

“Because he gave me the day off,” I improvised. “He said, ‘Go and find Anuja and tell her that today Sita is going to teach her how to hold a sword.’ ”

“No swords.” My sister shook her curly head. “I want to play with Mooli.” This was her toy cat, since real cats weren’t allowed in our house.

“But we played with Mooli yesterday.”

She snuggled her head against my chest. “Then will you read me a story?”

I closed my eyes and imagined having a conversation with someone who understood how hard it was to train so relentlessly and wait for a day you weren’t even sure you wanted to arrive. Cer
tainly there were hundreds of women preparing for the next trial in Jhansi, the city where Maharaja Gangadhar Rao and his rani resided. But in my village, I was unique.

So when Anuja laid her soft head against my chest, I wished, more than anything else in the world, that she was old enough to understand what my training was like. I rubbed my calf, which was sore from the previous day’s training. “A story . . .” I tried to think of one. “How about the tale of
The
Peacock and the Turtle
?”

She nodded and I began.

I
t might have been true that nearly every family in Barwa Sagar had heard Father and Grandmother’s fight after Mother’s funeral, and it was certainly true that everyone in my house knew Father’s feelings about either of his daughters ever becoming devadasis, but so long as Grandmother was alive, there was a very good chance that if something happened to my father, we would end up in a temple anyway. You might wonder how this could be, but if my father died, who would actually step forward to welcome two extra girls into their home? Aunt had children of her own; her husband wasn’t going to work harder to feed and clothe my sister and I for as long as we lived, since that was what would be required. I was too old to be marriageable, and since no trial had been announced I was not even earning money for Anuja’s dowry fortune as a member of the Durga Dal. Who in Barwa Sagar would take on a heavy burden like us?

You will understand why, then, when Father became sick that winter, Shivaji insisted I stop studying subjects like Hindi and Sanskrit—both of which I was proficient in anyway—and study horseback riding instead.

“Every member of the Durga Dal knows how to ride,” Shivaji
wrote in father’s small red book. “I know you’re afraid to see her on a horse, but we’ll find a gelding before we give her a stallion. It’s her only weakness.”

My father was wrapped in three layers of heavy clothing, resting beside our charcoal brazier. The doctor had said it was a sickness of the lungs and not to expect any improvements for several weeks. But he had instructed Father to take in hot vapor with eucalyptus oil three times a day—Ayurvedic medicine.

If you don’t know about Ayurveda, it is the oldest medicine in the world. It is based on several
Vedas
—what we call certain texts composed in ancient Sanskrit—written more than two thousand years ago, and it details everything a doctor should know, from eye and nose surgeries to the delivery of a child who isn’t positioned right in the womb. A hundred years ago, British physicians came all the way from England to watch our doctors perform surgeries on patients. They took what they learned with them across the seas and spread their new knowledge throughout Europe. Some people find it unbelievable that the
Vedas
can still be relied on more than two thousand years later. But really, why is it so surprising? Sanskrit was the language Pingala used two thousand years ago to write about poetic meter; a treatise that mathematicians later realized was really about binary numbers.

Even with Ayurvedic medicine, however, Father hadn’t left his room for two days. I’d brought him half a dozen books, but anyone who has ever been sick can tell you that reading for pleasure and reading to pass the time are two very different things.

Father’s pen hesitated beneath Shivaji’s words. Finally, he wrote, “Where will we get a gentle horse?”

“Give me permission to work with Sita every morning and I’ll find one.”

“When is there time? We study languages in the mornings.”

“And how will that help her,” Shivaji wrote, “if the rani announces a trial next year? Sita may pretend she’s seventeen, but her skills won’t lie. Nihal, she must learn to ride.”

Father stared out the window onto Shivaji’s land, which bordered our own; a thin layer of frost had settled over his fields, giving them the appearance of a wide glass lake. Now that the rice had been harvested, there was little for Shivaji to do. It was the best time to teach me to ride. “Fine. We will no longer study Hindi or Sanskrit,” Father wrote.

Shivaji twisted the ends of his mustache in thought. “I don’t see the point of English poetry either.”

My heart beat swiftly. No one could have been more grateful to their teacher than I was to Shivaji, but I knew his limitations. If you have ever looked at a tree blowing in the wind and thought that it resembled a woman’s long hair, or seen a cloud passing by that reminded you of a turtle, then you were someone with too many flights of fancy for Shivaji. I stared at Father and silently begged him not to stop our morning readings. In a day filled with swordsmanship, archery, and shooting, it was the only time when my mind felt free, like a hawk liberated from its tethers.

“The point of English poetry,” Father wrote, “is to make Sita a better soldier.”

Shivaji raised his eyebrows until they practically disappeared in his long mass of hair.

“What are Sita’s best subjects?” Father went on.

“Archery and swordsmanship,” Shivaji wrote.

“Because both of these things require rhythm. Shooting four arrows, one after the other, into a bull’s-eye requires not just accuracy, but timing. It’s no different from reading Shakespeare’s sonnets.”

I had never thought of archery this way. But the act of reaching back into my quiver, drawing an arrow, knocking it, then letting it loose—there was a cadence to it when it was done right. It was poetry in action, the way Shakespeare intended his words to be. “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon.” Iambic pentameter, echoing the natural rhythm of the human heart—and the rhythm of practicing weaponry with Shivaji in the courtyard.

Shivaji looked at me for confirmation, and I was surprised to hear myself saying, “It’s true.”

He blew the air from his cheeks. “Tomorrow, then. I’ll find the horse, you find the time.”

After Shivaji left, my father pointed to the chess set balanced on the wooden chair across the room. He had carved it from mango wood and teak years ago, before I was born. We usually played in the evenings, but we hadn’t played since he’d first become sick.

“Are you sure?” I wrote on his palm. “Perhaps you should rest.”

He laughed. “And give up the chance to win?” My father hadn’t won in several months. The student had outgrown the teacher. “I know you wouldn’t let a sick man lose.”

I grinned. “I think I would.”

But out of three games, my father won two.

“Either your mind is distracted,” he wrote, “or you really do feel sorry for me.”

Maybe it was a little of both.

“You’re nervous about the riding,” he guessed.

I shrugged.

“You shouldn’t be.” He held up one of the chess pieces and wrote, “Every skill you master is like another chess piece, designed to bring you closer to the king. You can do this.”