The Rise of Hastinapur (24 page)

They stopped near a house erected on a mound on two levels. An iron fence stood around it in a circle, and Pritha saw that nails had been inserted into it so that the sharp points extended outward. Even here they had the fear of theft, then, she thought, and followed Durvasa up the path leading to the wooden gate. When they reached it, they heard a low, growling sound of a man from inside. ‘Turn back!’ he said. ‘I have a Magadhan spear in my hand, and by the gods I shall not hesitate to send it through your chest if you take one more step forward.’

Durvasa raised his hands above his head and called out, ‘We are not intruders, sir. I’m just a weary trader from Magadha with my sister. We need a place to stay for the night.’

There was silence, and Pritha could imagine the man with the spear on the other side of the grilled window, chewing ominously on betel leaves or some such, mulling it over. ‘Come closer to the light so that I can see you,’ he said. First Durvasa, then Pritha went to the right edge of the gate, under the fire. ‘Why is the lady under a veil?’

‘My sister has a beautiful face, kind sir, and young men now are not as chivalrous and kind as they were in your day.’

‘Do not get me started on the upstarts,’ said the man from inside. Pritha heard a lock click, and the door open. A man of about fifty with an unkempt beard and a falling stained turban came out, limping on one leg, carrying his spear over his shoulder like a mace. He came to the gate and stood a good three feet away from them, watching. His body bent one way to account for the bad leg, and he had a curious way of looking through one eye and cocking his eyebrow. ‘Just one day, you say? You shall find your own way tomorrow, or I shall set my bulls on you, I will.’

Durvasa bowed. ‘Just for one day, sir.’

With a groan of approval he set about undoing the latches on his gate, one after the other. While he did so he mumbled something about the spate of thefts that had been plaguing Mathura for the last few months, and how he had lost four cows. ‘It has become a nightmare, living in this town,’ he said, swinging open the gate and waving them in. Pritha waited at the front door, pulled back her veil over the back of her head, and waited. ‘Please go on, my lady,’ said the man from behind her, ‘you may find it a little too rustic for your taste, but I do have a lot of room, I do.’

Pritha went in, and in the light of the two oil lamps that stood on the spinning wheel lodged in the middle of the room, stood to one corner and watched the men walk in. The farmer hobbled in behind Durvasa, locked the door, and said, ‘They call me Nabha. I used to have the most number of cows around these parts, but in the great disease of
Ananda
, I lost a few hundred heads. The priests came and gave us more of their black stones that year, so that we could till our lands better, but no, the soil here does not hold.’

Durvasa motioned Pritha to a seat, and Nabha hurried across the room to hold the chair for her. She did not know why the garrulous man became so gentle in such a short time; but she bowed in his direction and took her seat. ‘Pray forgive me, my lady,’ said Nabha, taking off his turban and rolling the loose end around his wrist tightly. ‘I have not had a maiden in this house for a whole age. I know not how to behave with them, so you shall forgive me if I do not treat you as I ought to.’

‘You have given us your house, sir,’ said Pritha. ‘What more can we ask you to do?’

‘Ah,’ said Nabha. ‘Ah, oh, I … I have a tumbler of buffalo milk on the hearth. Will you two have some? That and jaggery; it will put you to sleep like babes, it will, and send you dreams that are white and sweet.’

Durvasa smiled at him and nodded. Nabha went into the kitchen and brought out two brass glasses and a plate with two yellow pieces on it. Pritha looked out of the window, and in the silvery moonlight she saw an expanse of land sloping toward the Yamuna, with clutches of paddy fields growing in pockets all over it, punctuated with huge smudges of brown. ‘Is that all yours, sir?’ she asked, taking the glass of milk.

‘By the grace of the gods, yes,’ said Nabha. ‘And it is to the grace of the priests and our temples that we are able to coax crops out of such stubborn land. You are from Magadha, you said; you should know, then, what my words mean.’

Pritha began to shake her head, but Durvasa said, ‘Yes, of course we do, kind sir.’

‘I … I must ask you to forgive me again, sir, for what I said when you were at the gate. It is a dark night, and my eyes do not see as well as they once did.’ When he bent over the table, and his face neared the lamp, Pritha saw that his left eye was covered with a grey, smoky substance. He saw her noticing, and blinked ashamedly before turning away. ‘I said you can only stay for a night, but I have a big house, my lady, my lord, and you can stay here as long as you wish.’

‘We shall not, Nabha,’ said Durvasa, finishing his glass of milk. ‘But we have come here late, and I trust we have shaken you out of your slumber. So now I think we best retire to our beds, and perhaps tomorrow you can guide us on how to reach King Kamsa’s palace.’

The man’s one eye widened a touch, and he said in a whisper: ‘You know the High King, do you?’

‘Yes, we carry a few things that are of importance to the High King.’

Pritha saw a faint wave of suspicion enter Nabha’s face, and his manner became more reserved. After they had emptied their glasses he carried the vessels to the kitchen, and on returning, he pointed to the staircase. ‘If you please, go up these steps and take one bed each. I shall sleep here on my rope cot.’ Turning to Pritha he said, ‘My lady, I shall not brag that these are beds a lady like you is used to sleeping on. I am but a cow-keeper, and this is all that I can give you.’

Pritha got up and inclined her head at him. Durvasa’s words – that nobody could look at her and not guess that she was a princess – came back to her. Until she had the veil on her face, the man wanted to chase them off with a spear. The moment she had given him a look of her face, his manner of speaking had changed. If she had but raised her veil at the gate, Durvasa may not have had to resort to all that trickery.

They went up the stairs, and when they reached the top, Durvasa looked down, waved and said, ‘Sleep well, Nabha.’

‘Thank you, my lord, I will.’

Pritha woke up to the sound of a rooster. Gently she disengaged herself from Durvasa and sat up to tie her hair. The previous night, after they had taken their respective beds in the loft, the sage had come to her and lain his hand on her arm. She should have brushed it away and asked him to return to his bed, but she had looked at him and smiled. ‘It is a cold night, Pritha,’ he had said, ‘perhaps we can stay warm better if we shared a cot.’

She picked up her anklets from the ground and tied them around her feet. She got up, walked to the window. Every time she allowed him to touch her, they went a bit further than they had the previous time. Last night he had lifted her lower garment up to her thighs, and his hands had stolen underneath her robe. It would not be long before he would take her, she thought, as she stood in the red light of dawn and looked at the rising sun. As the first rays hit her cheeks, she closed her eyes and felt that the warmth of the sage’s touch was somehow akin to the warmth of the sun.

When she opened them again, she saw movement at the bottom of her vision. It was Nabha wheeling a contraption into his field. It looked like a small chariot, but no horse or bull was tied to it. The wheels dragged behind them a pole whose teeth – like the canines of a tiger – faced downward, toward the earth. On top of the wheels was a wooden chair with high armrests and a thick brown rope wound against its legs. On the other end the rope held together a long thin handle that pointed straight ahead, and it was this handle that Nabha was currently pulling at.

The toothed pole dropped a touch and scraped against the ground. Nabha swore. He limped across to the water wheel and dragged across a black, rectangular stone. Halfway back to his plough, he stopped and mopped his brow, and after sitting down on his stone for a few minutes he resumed his journey. Pritha watched him with a mixture of amusement and wonder; when she had seen the field last night, she had thought it would take at least twenty strong men to till it, but here was Nabha, frail and sick and half blind, going at it gamely.

Behind her Durvasa moaned. She looked over her shoulder to see if he was waking up. But he only rolled over and went back to silent breathing. When she turned around she saw that Nabha had succeeded in bringing the black stone to the plough, and he began to tether it to the back. She felt sorry for the old man; he had told her last night that it had been long since he had a maiden in the house, which meant that there was a time when he had family too, perhaps a wife, a son, a daughter…

What misfortune would have occurred to leave him alone at this age, to grapple with tools that he could no longer use? From Durvasa’s sack she removed a neem twig, broke it in two, and carried the piece with her down the stairs, to the back of the hut where she presumed the water tumbler was kept. After cleaning her teeth, she splashed water over her face and arms. The skin under her upper arm smarted as water hit it, and she turned it over to examine it. She saw Durvasa’s teeth marks. She felt the base of her neck with her forefinger, and pulled it back when it felt rough and tender to the touch. She thought of her brother and his wife in Kamsa’s prison; while they languished in captivity, here she was, cavorting with a sage. Angry at herself, she hurled the water vessel back into the tumbler and walked out of the front door and onto the field.

When she came to the doorway, the sight that met her eyes made her stop. ‘By the gods!’ she said, as her eyes widened and her step faltered. She shut her eyes once, shook her head, and then opened them again, certain that what she saw would disappear as an apparition would, but there it was, still. She fumbled over to the edge of the field, not noticing the smell of dung in the morning air.

Set against the sun, Nabha sat on the chair mounted on his plough, slumped, as though he had had his fill of arrack. With his hands he gripped the handle in front, and he seemed to push and pull at it. Behind the wheels the toothed pole dug into the earth. The wheels kept turning at a steady pace, and white smoke rose into the air from the black box. Pritha first thought that the plough had been set on fire, but the smoke rose only to disappear in a second.

Then she asked herself:
Where are the bullocks?

She ran into the sun for a closer look. The farmer worked through his field in straight lines, starting from the leftmost end and ending at the right, and then turning around. As he approached she found that the contraption moved at no great speed, and that a faint whirr emanated from it, as though a top were spinning inside. When Nabha saw her, he straightened on his perch and gave her a bow.

The sun had become stronger now, and she felt sweaty and dizzy, though at the back of her mind she knew that it was not the sun that was wringing her head. She had heard tales when she was a child that there were charioteers that cracked the whip with such speed and precision that it appeared to the naked eye as though they merely pointed with their arms and their horses followed. It was said that their horses galloped, but so smooth was their movement on the earth that they appeared to have wheels on them. Her father had laughed at these tales, and he had said that such horses and such charioteers perhaps existed only on Meru, where the gods rode winged beasts. But now here she was, not on Meru but in Mathura, the kingdom right across the river from her own home, where a sick, gnarly farmer was tilling his plough with invisible oxen.

Suddenly it came to her why Mathura was known as the kingdom that could never be defeated, how a tiny city such as this with no fertile land could stand up to the might of the Great Kingdoms. It had been blessed by the gods. She had heard the farmer speak of temples and priests; perhaps they had sought the gods’ blessings with untold austerities, or perhaps they had ploughed the Goddess herself for secrets that she is said to have held within her, away from human beings.

How often had she heard in Shurasena that Mathura’s boats sailed on water as if they were in flight, that their war barges cut though Yamuna’s harshest currents without drifting off course even a furlong, that the boats carried twice the number of archers as other boats the same size. If boats could be persuaded to sail on their own, thought Pritha, what need was there of oarsmen? On all boats there were more oarsmen than archers, and if Mathura could make boats that did not need oarsmen, she could stack them to the brim with archers, and she could scuttle enemy ferries in a trice.

How often had she not heard in Kunti that Mathura was impregnable, and how often had she thought that it was just a tale of fancy, told and re-told by travellers on cold nights around a bonfire. But now here she was: on a bright morning on an open field, watching magic unfold. There was no fire around her, no sacrifice, no Brahmins chanting verses from the scriptures, no rituals – nothing – and yet this was magic beyond all the sages of the world.

She looked back over her shoulder and saw Durvasa, folding his wet shawl in his arms and peering out from the doorway to the hut. Even from this distance, she saw that his face was set in a deep frown. She ran across the field back to the house, her feet digging into the fresh, moist earth with each stride. By the time she reached Durvasa her toes had black mud between them, and she panted like a dog. She bent forward, hands on thighs, and looked up at the sage.