The Queen's Play (14 page)

At noon the next day he enters the water, wades through it knee- deep, acutely aware of the currents or the slightest of declines under foot, difficult to detect by the eye, that in no time could transfer him to the centre of a treacherous whirlpool. He knows his way well through water, through the bare, uninhabited islets that are to follow one another between slim, fluid intervals, for he has crossed and re- crossed this route countless times in the past, on his trips and campaigns to the north, but always at a remove, always on horseback, on boats or elephants, and never on foot, never like this skirting danger so close, gasping for breath at every other step, never immersed waist deep in the sea, the colour and abundance of its life seething about him.

On and on it goes, land giving way to water and water turning back on the land's edge, for a day and a night and beyond, while he lives on frugal supplies of food and drink. Thirsty and hungry he finally steps upon the peninsula and for a moment it seems that the entire continent is tilting under the weight of his parched soles. Or is it he who bends forward, his centre of gravity sinking down the perineum?

He moves on, and the land or his feet slowly find a new equilibrium. Too fast has he gone in the past, with too much on his mind, and it is so that he is seeing this landscape for the first time. Soon enough he walks into a grove, picks up and bites hungrily into the fruit that lies strewn everywhere. He comes upon a settlement and the tribesfolk, taking him to be a holy mendicant, seek his blessings, bringing him first pudding and buttermilk, and then a dish of rice-balls in a thin sulphur-yellow curry, strong and savoury, with
a hint of coconut. They offer him lodgings and he decides to stay for the night.

He is woken up by the scuffle of feet, sounds of something resembling a skirmish, a woman's wail, the restless beat of a horse's hooves. He is out of the hut in no time. Outside it is a scene of mayhem. A thatch is burning, shooting balls of fire into the sky. Bandits. One comes charging straight at him, pike in hand. He leaves him in the mud, the blade deep in the victim's breast, blood spreading under his convulsing form that is fast growing cold. He pulls another down from his horse and finishes him with two solid blows of his hand, breaking the rogue's neck with the second. He takes the sword of the one fallen and climbs onto the horse. He kills three, maybe four of the attackers, and the remaining flee in terror from his demonic wrath.

He dismounts at last and the tribesmen are around him, kneeling down in a circle, children and women closing in from behind, seeking his protection. Is he not already their protector, the final protector past a series of protectors? Did he not promise safety to these lands and their people when he brought them under his dominion long ago? No, he is too far, too high up to make good the pledge of his protection to those who need it, those at the far reaches of his empire, those who so openly share their food and dwelling with him, their king. It is only now, perhaps for the first time, that he has acted as a true sovereign. But it is too late, too different now. He is in search of something else. For the moment he can do no more. And he cannot halt his journey here, though where he is headed he knows not.

He leaves before dawn, moving northward but at a slant to the east. And even at that slant, his path makes other slants, so that when he travels through the forest he ends up on the crags by the beach and when he walks along the shore, the sand shining like steel and the water a dull grey, rippling past his gaze, he reverts to the lush comfort of trees again. He steers clear of people and soon he vanishes like a column of smoke into the landscape. For days, for
months, he turns invisible.

When one sees him next, he is much changed. The elements have had time to work upon him. His skin has gone coppery, even leathery in places, indeed stretches taut over his bones such that he looks gaunt from certain angles and his eyes, deep set in their sockets, have a reddish gleam in them. His hair, long and matted, coils into a topknot over the dome of his skull, and his beard is brown and dense. He is living near the mangrove forest which sprawls over an immense alluvial delta through which the Ganga passes on its slow, meandering course to the bay. There, near a pond, is a cluster of huts, where the adepts live, a community of men and women who spend their days practicing arcane rituals, asceticism and alchemy. It is the cult of the goddess, the dark one. With them he has settled and is seen at dawn sitting before the square brick altar, performing oblations and intoning hymns to the god of fire. Each day he goes farther into this world of arcana, a world of flesh and dream, of breath, fire, and mercury, ringed in by the sea-forests, by majestic crocodiles, elephants, and tigers, by friendly dolphins and birds of the air, by bands of rhinos and wild buffalo, by greedy scavengers.

For some time now, a dog has kept him company, follows him everywhere, at times running back and forth, at other times moving in circles around his moving form, like a planet tied to a shifting sun. At night, it sleeps with him, huddled together on a deer's pelt inside the outmost hut. On moonless evenings, when ceremonies for the goddess take place, when the drum booms and the flames cut fiery swoops on the air, when metal enters bodies and flesh meshes with flesh, pure terror shines in the animal's eyes, and it is afraid of the master it so loves, in fear it mewls like a kitten, before going completely still. In those nights, as he dreams of a tiger decimating herds of bison in open grasslands, and later riding the same tiger over snow-blocked passes, the dog sits on its hind limbs, cowed and shivering in a corner.

At the onset of spring, he again treads north, and the animal is
glad for it. Through fields of maize and barley, golden under the noon sky, he observes the diffused outline of the first hills. At first hardly a smudge on the horizon, their form grows clearer with each step, acquires weight, until he can see beyond a mustard field, yellow on green, the sheer slate-blue bulk of the mountains, snow etched in their folds, rising from the earth's womb. He, his dog following, heads straight toward them and reaching the top of a knoll he watches from a breach in the pines the rays of the declining sun throwing them into stark relief.

He moves through wave upon wave of oaks, pines, and walnut trees, through a forest of rhododendrons oozing red blossoms, through mighty cedars and evergreens that block the sun and make the air cold and damp, past lakes that shine like molten silver in the clear light of the moon, and it is so that he is no closer to those tall peaks cutting into the sky in all their silence and splendour. He looks for food and the dog looks with him, sometimes splitting away on its own, but returning always to share its find with him.

On the sixth day, he has left the tree line behind and the landscape grows rocky and bare before him, there is snow by the wayside, with only eagles for company, and they too few and distant, soaring and circling in the thin air over the summits, and suddenly he is upon the high mountains, skirting along a foot-wide track at the edge of a vertiginous gorge that collects the terrible echo of the river gushing hundreds of feet below. At dusk, he hits upon a nomad trail and soon finds a group making camp on a high plateau by the edge of a small lake. He joins up with them and although he understands nothing of their dialect, he is given a bowl of soup with mutton fat in it, his dog likewise, and is ushered toward the campfire. Under a heavy canopy of stars, with the fire crackling in the logs and the tribe's wild shaggy oxen tinkling their bells and releasing puffs of breath from their shiny muzzles, very white against the chill of the night air, he sits with the rest of the group that is singing or talking in whispers. The dog curls up in the hollow of his legs, and he stares long into its wet eyes, the fatigue visible in them, perhaps even the
first signs of illness, and deep in their solitary island, he hums softly to it.

Early at dawn the nomads break camp, and he goes with them, falls in line behind one of the couples, their young daughter, a child really, observing him from the back of an ox, never letting him out of her sight. Men and beasts go slowly in file up the mountain. A night passes, half a day. Now there is ice everywhere, although it is beginning to thaw in places. The track lies frozen, and they inch ever cautiously up the pass full of snow. Within an hour's march from the night camp, his dog had coughed up blood, and because it kept faltering and falling behind more and more as the ascent steepened, he now walks with the animal resting across his shoulders and he feels its laboured breath on the nape of his neck.

Wherever the sight travels, there are just mountains. Fold upon fold of rock and ice, a feeble sun skipping through tatters of cloud. He walks in a kind of daze, in a spell cast by some mountain spirit, and he is long past the top of the pass, can already make out a beige landscape merging with the bluest sky in the distance, when the form girdling his neck suddenly feels cold and heavy. No throb, no pulse reaches him from the animal's flesh, and he hopes that it left him at the high point of the path, up there in the clouds.

He keeps descending as before, holding the dead animal up close. If the others notice, they say nothing. The girl has gone to sleep on the back of the ox, its blanketed hump her pillow. At a bend in the road stands a cairn with an old flag fluttering from its crest, and it is here that he leaves the carcass for the birds that depend on it.

They go down fast now, on the other side of the mountain face, and the dry earth stretches before them into a lunar wilderness. Crags raising their shoulders above the low shrubs that cover them, meadows and patches of grass watered by thin icy channels where agile, skittish goats graze in their own blue radiance, and soon there are not even shrubs, only cactus-like plants and rocks that glisten with quartz and salt. Dry, loose earth wraps the unending landscape
in a mantle of ochre and brown, and tiny round stones scrunch underfoot. The tall peaks of the Himalaya refract like crystals behind them.

When they are on the high plains again, the caravan halts. The sun declines in the west and they decide to pitch camp for the night. This is the final stop before the group splits. The larger of the two will continue north the next day, while those remaining will turn west. It is west he will go. By a happy coincidence the family he has become familiar with over the past few days heads west too. He has picked up enough of their strange speech to make meaning from the short low grunts and gestures that do service for words here.

Night falls like a clap from heaven and a fierce chill reigns, stars glitter sharp and cold like jewels and the sky is of a black that shines with its own darkness. By the fire he sits, sipping the dry, heady liquor that leaves in its wake a taste of burnt wood in the mouth. By now used to his presence among her kind, the child crawls into his lap and he slowly sings her to sleep.

A few days pass like this, the camp growing ever smaller, and members branching out like streams from a river, until at last he is on his own again, walking forever west, toward the place where, it is said, creation first sprang forth. Toward Lake Manasa, its waters the cosmic flux of the universe, the fluid mind of Brahmā, to the source of all life he travels, which, because he too comes from it, is his own source, his own antecedence. Isn't he the grandson of Pulastya, born of Brahmā's mind just like the lake?

And yet it is not to his source alone he goes, but to his end too. For past Manasarovar, remote in its astral sphere, above a wave of brown hills, floats Kailas, the visible earthly speck of the invisible Meru, the pivot of the universe, which no mortal can glimpse and live to tell the tale, at least not in words intelligible to anyone. On Kailas, older than the oldest mountains, dwells Rudra, god of death and destruction, and all that lies beyond them. Śiva, the supreme yogi, god beyond gods, lives on its highest slope, turned into himself in eternal silence. He alone is worthy of prayer, he who is untouched
by time, the timeless one, destroying and reviving the world in the blink of an eye.

He walks in a country of planetary uniqueness. Here the sun burns in all its might, yet the cold is relentless. The wind funnels through far away rocks and crashes against glacial parapets with all its force but it is so that there is no sound and the silence is ever deeper, seems to have no bottom. Sometimes the trill of a lark reaches him, or the long melancholy groan of a crane, and this too is a form of silence. Here the leopard hunts on padded feet, and the ibex leaves no trace. Distances stretch and contract, refract and multiply endlessly and time is meaningless. He goes along the river, its bed silted with gold, and it seems to wither away into the bare, sandy landscape, but the further he walks, the further its source appears to be. What seems close is far, and what looks far is suddenly there. Across the river, hillocks appear now and then, mounds really, pockmarked with caves and gravel pits. To his left forever, the chain of the Himalaya, their eternal snows a prism of light. He knows of their origin. How the god once awoke from his cosmic slumber at the summit of Kailas and roared with laughter. A shudder went through the earth and the crust cracked and split in a million places, drifted away from sheer force and then recoiled, colliding and rising in folds to stupendous heights, lending vapour the touch of stone, eclipsing Kailas itself. The might of pure, uninhibited laughter.

He wades through the river, gold dust sticking to his ankles, in search of a place to rest for the night, juniper shrubs bursting through shale, lining the crevices along the climb. He enters a cave, its mouth a sliver between jagged piles of stone. Inside, the smell of dust and mould, a whiff of charred wood trapped in the cave's perfect eternity, its sloping rock roof, black behind the black of old soot. Half wedged in stone, hanging limp, a piece of red sash. Absence. He finds it suitable for his purpose, plans to settle here for a certain duration, to think, meditate, perform rituals, to deepen his knowledge of the arcana.

Enveloped in darkness he sits for many dawns and many dusks, and when next he blinks a thin stream of light floods his pupils and he cannot say if he still holds onto his flesh or melted away long ago, whether in fact he awakes in the world from which he turned and not another. Then vague shimmering forms begin to emerge in this gash of light, and he slowly distinguishes the air from the river and river from the peak above, all as if of molten silver yet grading in contrast from one to the other. He stands up, walks out of the cave, cuts through the river and flies straight to the nearest peak. But his body refuses to budge, for his legs have remained crossed for so long that no blood flows into them and the cells seem to have asphyxiated. He moves his palms in circles over his knees, uses the strength that remains in his arms to separate and stretch them open on the ground. He imagines the blood flowing from his head downward, right to the tip of his toes, then pulls himself up against the rock. He feels no pain. After he has stood thus awhile, he is able to move his foot and toes at the joints. He takes slow steps toward the source of light. Soon he is coming down the dirt track, over rocks and shale, the river in his eyes. The cold doesn't touch him and the sun shines through a soft halo. He remembers his past life in its entirety, but it has now receded to a mere speck stuck to the arc of his skull that rings in a space of utter emptiness.