Chapter 1 – Gooseberries
“A-so-ca! Put down that meat hook and get off of that stove!”
Mother talked funny but she was easily the beautifulest of the queens so I hung the hook back up. But I didn’t swing back down till I had Alexander and his flunkeys running for their lives.
“He’s shoving!” Susima whined. “And he emptied the ash bucket over Ghasita!”
Old news, but I did it to show that he was my dog and if I wished to change his colour I had every right to.
“Be a Maurya, baba,” Susima’s mother said ruffling his hair, and went on pricking gooseberries. She had good knees and I was a bit in love with her. The kitchen courtyard swarmed with gardeners dumping gooseberries.
“Oy!” they’d shout and flirt as they collided with the sorting maids. Jam- making came after the midwinter bonfires and was taken seriously at the palace. Rows of cream-and-ochre preserving jars stood in readiness, glazed like soldiers on parade. I loved that uniform, and later I put my Camelteer guard in it, cream tunic and ochre stole. Baskets of amla gooseberries covered the yard, and more were being brought in every minute from the orchard by gaping gardeners. Gooseberries spilled from the baskets and went rolling across the clay floor. Susima overcame his sulk enough to kick one back to me, but I was already taking the lids off the jars to make sure there were no centipedes trapped inside. When I saw he was trampling something I ran to join him and squashed one or two under my heel. Gooseberries squeak as they split, then die grinning. The floor was a mash of pale green fruit tagged with stalks and tiny leaves.
Mother was stirring a vat of brown cane syrup with a ladle seized from the cook whose job it was. Today the queens invaded the kitchen and stayed all day till the last jar was capped. Other royals were shucking cardamoms and pounding cinnamon. A black haze of peppercorns, roasted and crushed, hung in the air and made me cough.
I ran to the pantry where last year’s jam was stored, a route every prince knew blindfold. The last crock of the old season stood on the top shelf, out of reach. It was twice as big as me, and chockfull of jam. I dragged a spice chest over, sprang onto it, and reached up. In my rush I must have pulled too hard. The great jar fell to the floor with an explosion that shattered the morning. I felt cold spikes enter my cheek and nose and smelt a sickly fermenting smell as I fell back. Centuries passed before I came to.
“His eyes were spared, thank god, thank god!” Mother was saying as I woke up.
A bearded man with a phial of some yellow stuff was anointing my cheeks as he prepared to remove the spikes. The medicine stung and I roared freely. When I saw the pincers I bellowed louder. Susima, watching, seemed about to join in.
“It’s nothing, my little parrot,” Mother said. “We’ll be playing Eyelash in no time. Bags I first game!”
The bearded man fluttered a hand at the corner of my eye and must have removed a splinter with the other because it suddenly hurt. I began to wail. “We’ll have a bath together,” Mother whispered in my ear, “and you can use my sandalwood soap.”
The doctor had never attended me before. I was a healthy child. He caught my eye and frowned and flapped his hand: “Watch the butterfly!” Slowly he dipped it into his medical bag and produced—“TAN-TRI-YAN!”—a little clay chariot. I gave a preemptive sob. War toys I liked, but now I knew his game. Also I realized I had an audience. A ring of royals, half-sisters and cousins and concubines’ daughters had formed around us to watch the famous medicine man. My favourite was up front, her big hands folded, her probing eyes fixed on me. The servants stood back and marvelled from a distance. I didn’t know it but I had single-handedly halted the annual amla jamboree.
The doctor signalled for one of the glazed jars to be brought over.
“SHAKE IT!” his black beard thundered.
The servant, shaking herself, obeyed. Something rattled in there. The company murmured. Ceremoniously the great man removed the ochre lid and had the woman turn the jar upside down. Out fell a rain of clay triangles, the very shards he had removed from my face. The watchers gasped. My girl picked up the sharpest and stared at me as at some kind of suffering saint.
“SPIT!” Blackbeard commanded.
I spat on them with venom. He replaced the lid and with both hands hurled the jar high in the air. It hung above the extracted bits, then fell with an ordinary crash, not the explosion of the great pantry jar.
Father marched in, his jaw working, always grinding away. The concern on his face was repeated with flourishes on the faces of his ministers. With them was Uncle K, his crow black head tilting this way and that.
“What happened? We heard the bang all the way from the armoury.”
“It’s as you see,” Mother bowed. She swallowed the betel juice she was holding. “Your son is safe, and sorry.” She caught my eye. “He’s had a narrow escape.”
“Honestly—thunderclaps, monkeys scooting, women screeching! Talk about misrule! Have you any idea what’s happening beyond the gates? People are keeling over, dropping like flies. It’s quieter than a month of Sundays— and you start up a war!”
“But you know,” Uncle K intervenes, “that—how would you say, detonation?—gives me an idea.” His eyes glittered with menace and he smiled an inward smile.
For once Father ignored him. He was overwrought—over me! Mother retold the story. I could see she was beginning to enjoy the telling. Susima’s mother twisted her mouth and looked sideways. My girl gave me a long adoring look that said we were the only two in the room. She had slanting eyes and a wide forehead that sweated like cool butter.
“Come along, Luscious,” her little follower said, dragging her off now the spectacle was over.
Father came up close. His arm sought out Susima as he listened to Mother’s account. He was watching me fixedly in the way he had of looking just over my shoulder, and his gaze must have settled on the pillow because it grew hot there. He drew his firstborn to him and rubbed his back as if he were the injured one.
“You’re all right,” he said at last, boxing Susima’s chin. “That’s the main thing.”
Susima glowed. I hated him right then, though I saw he was not out to steal the show, or Father’s heart. And looking back, at this great remove in time, I feel sure of his sympathy. He was, truth be told, the noblest of us all. He didn’t lie or cheat or push and shove and scramble. But then he didn’t have to. He carried himself as if the crown were a settled thing.
You shouldn’t, really.
Chapter 2 – Crocodile
I’m lying spreadeagled on a rock, naked in the sun. It’s a broad flat rock with a smooth face that extends beyond my extremities. My knees shine. Susima and Prayagraj and Uday are paddling in the shallows. None of us can swim.
The river is not one of those purling streams that flow through the palace grounds. It is the Ganges. It is said to have crocodiles twice the length of a man. Fishermen are casting their nets from the steps on the far bank, little stick figures, while others work from boats. Out of the corner of my eye I watch a lone boatman steady himself like a spider and spit his web fully formed into the sky.
We’re not supposed to be here. The river is out of bounds. We pretended we were going to the infirmary and doubled back at the watergate where we jumped over the palisade and ran without looking back. The palisade is visible from here, its wall of sal trunks stained municipal brown, but we don’t look that way. We could be any boys playing by the river. This bank is the sluggish inner curve where the current drops and silt gathers and rushes grow. The rock I’m lying on is a rare outcrop, surrounded by pooled water that holds a reflection. Reeds stick up though white scum, and herons stalk fearlessly just out of reach. Where the reeds end the river flows with unknown force.
“That was clever of you telling Gurungji we were wanted for inoculation!”
Prayagraj has the makings of a court smoothie. At nine he already has the receding hairline that will leave him bald at thirty. Gurung is our drill sergeant who also teaches swordsmanship. Weapon drill is the one time when our angels slack off: the sessions can stretch into the afternoon so they wander off for lunch. Prayagraj is Gurung’s favourite, an earnest swordsman inclined to fence; Susima, eleven, and the oldest, gets impatient and longs for the bow and arrows to appear, when he can shine; Uday favours the bludgeon. I tell them I prefer the scything discus—pick out your man, pick him off—but the truth is I trust only my sling. The inoculation was no brainwave: there’s pox in town.
A corpse floats by on the current, face down. Some poor creature whose family couldn’t afford cremation, offered up to the river whole. I don’t believe any of us has seen a dead body before, but we know instantly what it is. We watch in horror as it strikes some hidden obstacle and slowly turns over. It travels on without slackening its speed and we watch it out of sight in silence. Susima fires an imaginary arrow after it.
“What’s fermentation?” Prayagraj wants to know. He’s looking a little sick, but even in that state can’t help answering his own question. “It has something to do with gas, like when your stomach swells up.”
“Gasbag!” Rightly or wrongly I feel I’m the resident expert on explosions.
Susima finds his tongue. “Mother says you now have beauty spots. She said now we just wait for them to join up!”
I join in the laughter, but I feel betrayed, as by a lover. It’s not the barb that hurts, any more than the spikes did: fright made me cry that day. The shards left scars—as if this face needed them—but what hurts is the way they say things. They talk fruity, like their mothers, they say A-sho-ka and Su-shi- ma. Mother was a country girl Father spotted on a tour. I have her sibilant s, her tender glottal c.
A-so-ca, A-so-ca, she croons in my ear when sleep won’t come.
I lie back and doze. My blood warms to rock heat and I feel my body melt into that unforgiving surface. I would like to punish Susima, even though I know he was just reporting, not needling. But my thoughts scatter like seedcorn. They need to settle in furrows, like lettering. Letters I’m good at, the discus just a fantasy. Our scriptor has a special tone he uses with me. He alone doesn’t want my writing hand tied behind me simply because it’s my left. Uday spins an imaginary discus on his left forefinger. He knows I’m watching, so the discus wobbles and falls and he mimes an awkward scramble for it.
The rock sends up waves of heat. I feel their passage through me like anybody else, perhaps better. When you come with a coarse hide you work twice as hard at sorting impressions. You think fast too, to outdo normals, you enlist words. Nowadays I parade rubric for column, ferule for ruler. But I’m sick of speech: I want to do.
I used to wonder what our father did, as king. A teacher teaches, a potter pots, a hunter hunts. A king kings it? Rules, Susima was quick to correct me, a year older, but that was no better, in fact more vague. What is it to rule? And why just one ruler? Why couldn’t they take turns being it? Or join together, ruling? But now I begin to understand why Uncle K is always at Father’s side, borne along on his special litter, and why Father listens and nods. Uncle K talks like a book, and I can see Father’s a little afraid of him. Lately they look especially grim. The word famine tolls like a bell, ministers frown, and priests scratch their heads. Until the other day I thought famine a disease, like the pox that stipples your cheeks. Susima laughed and said: “Then you must have a bad case of famine.”
“We should be going back, Prayagraj says.
“What’s the big rush?” Uday wants to know and does a belly flop. Next I look he’s pleasuring himself in six inches of warm water.
It’s about then that I begin to have my hallucination. My eyes are half open but also half shut. I have a sense of floating on stone. The sun beats down on the rock and strikes sparks off the mesh of my eyelashes. I roll my stricken head from side to side and the world rocks like a boat. On one side is Uday fooling about in the water, on the other is Susima firing arrows into the sky; in between is something that wasn’t there before. It’s as if the riverbank has shifted and come nearer. I’ve watched lizards on the wall at home, the way they can hold still forever, longer than a yogi, then when you look again they’re still frozen, but in a new place. This is like that. As if a reptile were about to gobble up the hunter Susima. Under the hammer of the sun my revenge has taken the shape of a crocodile that will rid me forever of his taunts.
It happens very quickly. Susima begins to scream but it’s me Uday is staring at. My eyes open wide. The river has risen from its bed and is travelling at speed towards the rock. I roll over to one side, away from the sword of water and as I fall off the rock I hear a sound like the lid of our camphor chest falling. I scramble to my feet and run. The rest are already running. We are all screaming.
We don’t stop till we get to the palisade. Still not looking back we scale it and drop to the grass on the other side. We lie there staring wide-eyed at one another. Prayagraj would like to run on home but Uday stops him.
“First,” he says, “we have to make a pact.” He looks fiercely at us. He’s no older but he’s a bruiser, and we’re all a little afraid of him. “We tell nobody we were here. We went raiding, okay?”
Prayagraj starts bawling again; he wants to tell his mother the truth. But we form a square and lay our hands one upon the other.
“We went raiding,” I say when Mother asks. “Plums.” I don’t often lie to her and I want to own up. But I remember the pact. When I see Susima’s mother, I repeat the plum story.
“Liar!” she whispers, bending down to me. “You went to the river. Susima told me about the crocodile.” But she crushes my cheeks and slips her thumb into my mouth.
Was that when I first saw Susima was unfit to rule? A king can’t go back on his word.
Not even in the service of truth.
Irwin Allan Sealy is the author of Zelaldinus, a collection of poems from Almost island, and most recently Asoca: a sutra. Penguin published the 30th anniversary edition of his novel The Trotter-nama last year.