PRINCE IN EXILE (38 page)

Bharat couldn’t bear to look at her face any more. At the anguish and regret of a woman who had been in the taloned grasp of a nightmare in which she committed unforgivable deeds; and now, awake again, could not live with the memories of those deeds. He glanced up at Shatrugran, standing on the other side of the bed. Shatrugan’s eyes were still red from comforting his own mother. Kaikeyi followed Bharat’s gaze, saw Shatrugan and turned on him, desperately pleading, ‘Shatrugan, my son. Tell me. It was not true. I did not do such a thing, did I? I could
not
have!’ 

Shatrugan looked away as well. Kaikeyi gazed around, but there was nobody else in the room, only a palace guard at the door - not one of her own clansmen. He stood indifferently, uncaring of the rani’s emotions, staring straight ahead as his duty warranted. Yet even in that unknown guard’s face and demeanour, Kaikeyi seemed to see something. A cold aloofness, a remoteness that went beyond discipline. An air of uncaring that verged on outright loathing. 

She struggled with the bedcovers, almost falling over herself. The dressings on her abdomen wounds began to unravel. 

‘What are you doing?’ Bharat asked, catching her before she could tumble headlong out of bed. 

‘I must go to him,’ she said, her voice rising in hysteria. ‘I must go to him and apologise at once.’ 

He restrained her firmly. ‘Father is very ill. In a coma. He cannot see anyone. Only Guruji and Maa are with him, trying to do what they can to ease his passage to the afterlife. He has only a little while longer.’ Bharat’s voice was polite and well modulated, but there was no attempt to soften the blow, to break the news gently.
After all
, the implication lay in his words,
you are more than partly responsible for his condition
. 

Kaikeyi stared up at him. ‘Maa?’ 

He frowned. ‘What?’ 

‘You called Kausalya maa and addressed me directly, without once calling
me
mother.’ 

Bharat looked away, his face showing no regret. ‘She is as much my mother as you are.’ He added slowly, ‘Perhaps more so, these past weeks.’ 

Kaikeyi stared up at him, seeing that he meant the words, that they were not spoken merely to hurt her -Bharat actually felt more like Kausalya’s son than her own. If anything, that honesty hurt her even more than any display of pique would have. She reached out, taking his face in her hands. He had so much of her in his features, his craggy jawline, those high, wide cheekbones, the ever-so-slightly slanting eyes set together predatorially close, the narrow, low forehead with its bushy brows. 

‘Putra,’ she said, her voice trembling.
Son
. ‘Putra, look at me.’ 

He looked at her reluctantly. 

‘Do you … hate me very much?’ she asked. 

He reached up and took her hands away from his face, returning them to her lap. ‘This is no time to sit around talking,’ he said gruffly. ‘I have much to do. There is trouble in the city. 

Riots threaten. The council have offered their resignations. The mountain clans are calling for a referendum to—’ He shook his head. ‘This is the worst day of my life.’ 

‘Just answer me that one question,’ she cried as he started to rise. ‘Do you hate me for what I did?’ 

He looked down at her hand, grasping his ang-vastra. ‘How can a son hate his own birth-mother?’ 

She shook her head. ‘That is no answer. I want to know, Bharat. I want to know if you can live with the knowledge of what I did.’ When he didn’t answer immediately, she went on, ‘It’s true I was under the influence of that witch, that Manthara was drugging me and controlling me through her asura sorcery. But even before that,’ she released his vastra and covered her face, ‘even before that, I was filled with so much anger and hatred. I wanted more, more, more. Whatever I got, it was never enough, only a stepping stone to the next object of desire. And so it went, endlessly. Yes, Manthara controlled me and manipulated me, I realise that now that I’m free of her spell. She used me to her own ends. But she could only push me further towards a direction I wished to go anyway. She wielded me like a sword to penetrate to the heart of this great family, just as her dark master used her as the hilt of that same sword. But a sword is made for killing, or she would not have been able to use me. Her influence would have been useless on Kausalya … or Sumitra. That would have been like trying to use a flower to do a sword’s work.’ 

Shatrugan shifted uncomfortably. Both princes were loath to hear this outburst, yet were too well mannered to walk out on her. Kaikeyi saw this and went on quickly, as if afraid that at any moment their deep-rooted conditioning would snap and they would stalk out without further regard for social mores. 

‘But the worst thing of all, my son, is that I wanted this to come to pass.’ Kaikeyi’s voice was one notch short of an outright cry. ‘In my heart of hearts, I wanted it all. I wanted you to be prince-heir, and maharaja some day. I wanted to be First Queen, and to hold the keys to Ayodhya in my fist. I wanted to see my grandchildren inherit the sunwood crown and become the forebears of the future Suryavansha dynasty. I wanted it all, and Manthara only manipulated me into using wrongful means to get what I wanted. But,’ her voice broke, ‘and you have to believe me, putra, when I say this, I did not want it
at this price!
I did not want Rama … or your father … I did not want any of these things to happen. This was not my ambition, to cause all this pain and damage. I only wanted the good things, not the bad. Try to see that. I need you to see that, as my son.’ 

Bharat stood silently throughout this long speech, listening with his eyes averted. At the end, when his mother began to regret aloud the things she hadn’t wanted, he turned his gaze back on her. His eyes were hard and remorseless. 

‘And in the end,’ he asked quietly, ‘did you get what you wanted? Are you pleased with what you accomplished? Are you content?’ 

She shook her head, crying freely. ‘No,’ she said over and over again, ‘no, no, no. How can I be?’ 

‘Then what is it you wish from me?’ he asked. ‘Forgiveness?’ 

She raised her eyes to his, hope sparking in her orbs. 

He shook his head. ‘I cannot give it.’ 

She stared at him wordlessly. 

‘I cannot forgive you. The things you did to my father and my brother, these are beyond my ability to forgive. Perhaps they are beyond forgiveness itself! But that is not my place to judge. The devas will consider your actions and weigh your karma in due course, be certain of that. Be certain also of this now: I will fulfil all my duties to you as befits an Arya son. But do not expect anything beyond duty. Do not expect understanding, or compassion, or trust. Above all, do not expect love. That I will not hate you, nor act out of hatred, is all that I can promise. But beyond that, you will have nothing from me. I will serve you as any other servant in your retinue.’ He pointed at the guard by the door. ‘I will serve you as efficiently as that guard at your threshold. But expect no more.’ 

‘I expect only a son’s love and forgiveness!’ she wailed, beating her breasts. 

‘Then you expect more than you deserve.’ 

He bowed his head curtly, performing a dutiful namaskar that would have suited his greeting of a strange courtier in a sabha session, turned smartly on his booted heel, and left the chamber, Shatrugan in his wake. 

NINE 

They left the raj-marg and turned west at the northern crossroad. Going straight would have led them eventually to Kaikeya Pass. The by-road was bumpier, being less travelled, and then rarely by royals. The traffic dwindled to a few bullock carts driven by farmers carrying their produce to Ayodhya market. Several were piled enormously high with sugarcane stalks, seemingly too great a load for two oxen or bullocks to carry. Yet the beasts trundled along, their horned heads lowered, pulling with untiring energy. The farmers must have distinguished the royal chariot from its rapid dust-churning progress up the road, for all of them were standing up on their carts by the time it reached them. They performed namaskars and called out the traditional four-word greeting, ‘Dasa naam satya hai!’
Dasaratha’s name is truth. 

Fields of freshly cut sugarcane rolled by, the late-morning air thick with the scent of the syrupy sap. Scorpion birds hovered, sipping from cut stalks, snakes slithered in the bushes alongside the marg, and across the marg at times. They were quick enough to get out of the chariot’s way in time, warned by the vibrations in the ground well in advance. At a small pond, children and oxen milled together in the muddy water, splashing about happily. They saw the chariot and waved excitedly, shouting simply, ‘Ram-rajya!’
The reign of Rama
. Clearly, news of the dramatic events in Ayodhya had not reached these backwaters yet. 

After another yojana, they began to pass villages. Some were barely a dozen thatched mud huts built on either side of the marg itself, their occupants busy binding together sugarcane stalks and loading them on to carts. Women and men, old and young, all worked together, unmindful of the sun. It had been a harsh winter, well below freezing until little more than a fortnight before Holi feast day, and people were happy to be out baking carelessly in the affectionate warmth of Surya-deva once more. 

An occasional dharamshala passed by, its mud roof bearing the saffron pennant that announced to passers-by that they could find free food and shelter here. Brahmins came out at the sound of the approaching chariot and made genuflections, conferring long life and honour on the maharaja and his lineage. 

As they climbed higher into the western hills, the road grew less populous. For a full yojana or more they saw neither a cart nor a house. Then, as they descended the far side, the vista spread open before them, and they began to glimpse distant smoke-puffs rising into the ice-blue sky. These were villages and hamlets, some sprawling across entire valleys or over clusters of hills, thousands-strong clans living together harmoniously, linked by their varna or occupational caste, each self-contained tribal township or village engaged in its own hereditary line of work, be it tanning, harvesting, threshing, or sword-making. Hills rose and fell as the chariot trundled on; the road grew rough and stony, then turned smoother and less gravelly, then wound up and down over ghats and hillocks. Once, they passed a grove filled with musicians playing happy, carefree songs, presumably stopping to rest while en route to Ayodhya. From the snatches that could be heard over the thundering of the chariot, it appeared they were singing the praises of the new crown prince Rama Chandra. They all waved happily at the chariot passing by, dipping their heads in allegiance. 

Shortly after midday Sumantra suggested that they stop briefly for a rest, more for the sake of the horses than for themselves. None of them felt much like partaking of any nourishment. Rama would not even take a sip of water. Sita and Lakshman ate some fruit, at Sumantra’s insistence, but left most of what the pradhan-mantri offered them. The land here was abundant with fruit and fowl and game, and in younger days, the prime minister informed Sita as they sat beneath the shade of a banyan tree and tried to eat their noon repast, Rama and his brothers would often ride out here and hunt for days. 

They would set themselves a target, he told her, smiling wistfully at the memory of those bygone days, always picking species that had overbred lately and needed culling - or, quite frequently, assorted predators that had turned man-eaters and were preying on the nearby villagers, and so needed to be exterminated. The four brothers would split up into two pairs he hardly needed to tell her which two went together in each pairing - and would enter the dense hilly woods on foot. They would hunt over the next several days, surviving on the land itself, and occasionally on some of their own game. All the while, Sumantra had to send out men to follow on their heels, collecting the animals they had killed, carrying the carcasses back to the city. The princes would continue to stalk and kill and even be stalked at times - he narrated a chilling yet ludicrously funny anecdote of a panther that had kept on their trails for three whole days one time - and at the end of the tour, Rama and Lakshman and Bharat and Shatrugan would all return to an appointed spot on an agreed-upon day to compare their kill-tallies. 

‘Who mostly won?’ Sita asked Sumantra, not because she had a burning curiosity but because the pradhan-mantri seemed to expect some query or response at this point. Rama and Lakshman sat with heads bowed, presenting a polite listening stance yet clearly not engaged by the telling. 

Ah, winning was rarely easy to judge, Sumantra recalled, chuckling and shaking his head. For it wasn’t a question of mere numbers but size and age and species as well. ‘For instance,’ he pointed out, after all three had declined the fruit he was offering for the third or fourth time, ‘Rama and Lakshman might have ten fully grown adult boars, three pantheresses, two male leopards, a lioness, and a few dozen stag and deer. Bharat and Shatrugan, on the other hand, might have seven female leopards but only three adult boars, a panther or two, a young lion, a hundred fowl, duck, geese, peahens.’ He laughed. ‘Either one a cache deserving of a whole royal hunting party, not just two young boys armed with nothing but simple steel knives.’ 

Sita frowned. ‘They killed all that game with just knives?’