Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [90]
The first wife, however, got her revenge. After forty years of barrenness, his first queen gave birth to Jadav Singh, whom she had miraculously conceived by lying in her spurned bed with a court painter’s likeness of her husband, the King.
“More likely, I think, she lay in bed with the court painter,” giggled the Lion, for whom the unthinkable was quite expressible. He did not seem an especially pious man, not by the standards of Salem and the Coromandel, yet he was waging a war against the Great Mughal, a religious purist, on religious principles of his own.
“Then you also have a half brother,” Hannah said.
“No longer. I was obliged to kill him,” answered the King. He read apposite paragraphs from Kautilya, not bothering to translate, but appearing very moved.
I’VE COME to trust the psychological integrity of oral narratives. The Queen Mother must have brought up the infant-king Jadav Singh with hate in his heart for his father. She had given him as toys jaws-of-death daggers and tiger claws of sharply honed metal. But that hate cannot be expressed openly; it is transferred to the man who banished the father, Hasan Beg, then his son and, finally, Aurangzeb. After he took over his father’s old throne, no longer a pretender but as absolute ruler, the old Queen Mother dictated domestic policy. She had the child-bride banished back to the jungle kingdom she’d come from. She ordered the death of the potentially troubling rival. In the ballads that survive about her, she is a multiarmed goddess riding a lion and hurling thunderbolts against the armies of the Grand Mughal.
But this is Psychoanalysis 101, and no one has successfully put Hinduism on the couch. We know that Hannah tried, because for her, the steadfast ferocity of Jadav Singh, his purity of heart and motive, while still maintaining an outer aspect of lover, artist, care giver and justice dispenser, were initially appealing. If he burned with a fire that he carried over from father to son, and even to the remote figure of Aurangzeb himself, it must be explained by some compelling vision of cruelty, one of those moments that call for vengeance even in the gentlest of hearts.
And when he couldn’t answer her questions, when he fell silent whenever she asked But what did he do? she felt his anger rise, his jaw start working. He would stalk out of her room and not return for days.
I know that reaction. It is the reaction of Mr. Abraham when I offered to dry-clean his clothes, the reaction of Venn when I tell him about some new discovery I’ve made about the Coromandel, or Hannah, or even the diamond. In India, it takes a classic apprentice five years to learn how to sit at the sitar before he’s allowed to play a note. It’s not just the reaction that says How dare you know? It’s something deeper: How dare you presume to say you know?
6
JADAV SINGH continued to court her for one pahar, or one quarter of each night. Hannah seems not to have asked him where he went after she relinquished him. I ask myself how I’d have felt in Hannah’s situation, and a plausible answer forms itself at once. With Gabriel she had clung to Salem’s do’s and don’ts. She had pulled and pummeled the familiar rules, hoping they’d help make sense of her own evolution. With Jadav Singh, she’d finally accepted how inappropriate it was in India—how fatal—to cling, as White Towns tenaciously did, to Europe’s rules. She was no longer the woman she’d been in Salem or London. The qsbas and villages of Roopconda bore no resemblance to the fading, phantom landscapes where she’d lived in Old and New England. Everything was in flux on the Coromandel coastline. The survivor is the one who improvises, not follows, the rules.
What she had left Gabriel for just months before, she would accept from Raja Singh. She was no longer a wife. She was the bibi.
HANNAH AND JADAV SINGH wooed each other in a cupola-roofed balcony overlooking the distant bay. Love made Hannah a selfish