When She Was Queen (9 page)

“I’ve come to see Jivraj Bhai,” he said to the men around him. A diminutive, scrawny man shuffled closer to him, his hands joined respectfully: “I am Jivraj.” He was, Nagji had been told at home, his father’s cousin. Somehow Jivraj was pushed aside and Nagji understood that a hierarchy was in place and he was in the hands of the elders.

The women were in saris and the men wore dhotis round the waist, singlets on top. All were barefoot. In a slow procession of men, Nagji was escorted inside the village to the house of the head man or mukhi, a mud structure like the others but finished with cement. He was invited to sit outside on the raised porch with some of the men to await the mukhi; others stood in a huddle at a distance, watching and listening. Above the main doorway of the house hung a few old and dusty framed photographs. The people in them reminded Nagji of his grandparents.

It took some time for the mukhi to appear; when he did, at the doorway, he looked bathed, shaved, and combed, and he wore slippers. For some moments he appraised Nagji from where he stood. Then he stepped out, space was made for him, and he sat down, facing his guest.

“We are so glad you’ve come,” the mukhi said in a soft, even voice. His name was Hirani. The men around him nodded and murmured agreement. The mukhi added, “The visit of a returning native has been foretold since ancient times; many have left this village, and a few have returned; but you seem to be the one we have expected.”

Nagji looked at the mukhi, befuddled. He didn’t know how to reply. He explained instead, “My grandfather left Be-raja some seventy years ago.”

Hirani and the men nodded.

“Are there more of my relations in the village besides Jivraj?” Nagji asked.

“No,” the mukhi said. “But aren’t we all your relatives?”

“Yes,” Nagji replied, “that is true.”

They were summoned for food, and a few men ate with the guest inside the house, which was a single room with a corner kitchen. The meal was exceedingly simple: a vegetable curry and a daal without much taste, with rice. The vegetables had been mashed in the cooking and were individually indiscernible; they had apparently been grown outside, in the shadow of the raised porch, between houses.

A young man came in and said to Hirani that Murad Bhai had come and was waiting outside.

“Murad Bhai, come and join us,” Hirani called out, though there were scant remains in the pans and the women had yet to eat.

“I’ve eaten,” came Murad Bhai’s jovial voice.

“You will stay at the Big House,” the mukhi informed Nagji. “Murad Bhai will take you there. It is his house.”

There was a tamarind tree a short distance from the mango tree in the enclosed garden of the Big House. It reminded the young man of similar trees near his home in Africa, except that this one had the look of the original thing, with a thick straight stem, thick glistening leaves, and fat tamarind pods dangling alluringly from the branches. On his first morning at the House, after a short walk he went and sat down in its shade, leaning his back against its trunk. He had been given a white dhoti to
wear, which he found perfect for the heat. As he sat contemplating the scenery—the bits of green close at hand and the parched brown and yellow beyond—he felt a sense of great calmness. His worries were far behind him now, across the ocean.

Having finished school, Nagji had worked for three years with his father. He expected to get married, but when the neighbours’ girl whom he had always known and liked married someone else, Nagji would not consider another match. He became depressed and turned into a bit of a loner. And so his father suggested that he go to India, look up their relation, and inquire about the family property. He could also try to find a bride. And so here he was in his homeland, where people spoke his language, in exactly the same manner as his mother and father did. They had accepted him so readily, though they were perhaps too effusive in the manner in which they showed this.

Nagji had forgotten to say his prayers that morning; now, his legs crossed under him, he closed his eyes and quickly, by rote, recited them in his mind. When he opened his eyes, he was startled to see a small group of people standing outside the wire fence of the garden, staring at him. Among them were his relation Jivraj and Hirani the mukhi. When they saw him staring back at them, they joined their hands in greeting. Nagji greeted them likewise, as was appropriate. But then, to his amazement, the men entered the garden through the gate and proceeded in deliberate and careful steps toward him, and went down on their knees and bowed low before him, touching their heads to the ground.

“We knew you were the guru promised to us,” Hirani said.

Unwilling to offend those who were his elders, after all, and a little flattered too by their respect, he resolved to play along until time came for him to depart. Slowly, people began to trickle by where he sat, out of respect and from curiosity. They expected to hear him, and so he spoke to them about East Africa: the cities there, the Indians in them, their occupations. The villagers had little idea of the world, except that everything was wonderful elsewhere, while here they were forlorn and forgotten. Over the years, in the past, people had left here and gone far away, crossed the seas to go to Burma and Singapore, Oman, Muscat, Zanzibar and the east coast of Africa; some would return for a bride, a very few others to stay; but gradually those visits had stopped, and for years there would be barely a word from overseas. Those who remained were left with the droughts to face, and increasing hopelessness. The young visitor told them about hardships where he came from, but those were nowhere near what his hosts had always experienced, as they very well knew—hadn’t he afforded the voyage back from all that distance across the sea? Their world had not merely stood still for fifty years and more, it had actually degenerated.

The young man, before setting off for India, had imagined he was going back to the fount of his essence, where peasants were simple and joyful, the women voluptuous and melodic, as in the Indian films; where people had honest, simple values and were spiritual; and from where, when at last he had reached his ancestral
village, he would learn the meanings behind all those confusing sectarian practices of faith and ritual and tradition that he had been brought up with. He had found the village; but the people he had discovered turned out to know less than he, who had grown up in a largely prosperous community, and gone daily to a large house of worship with its set and abundant routines. And so he taught them what he knew. In their ramshackle mosque in the evening, he recited hymns for them that they had not heard; he told them the history of their sect that they had long forgotten. He was giving them sermons, not in the haranguing ways he had heard in his childhood, but in the plain manner of a conversation.

One afternoon as he sat at his favourite place, Jivraj recited all the woes that had befallen him. To obtain medical treatment for his partly blinded son, he might have to sell the family plot of land and travel to Bombay. How would he earn a living in the big city? Would he be able to return to his wife and other children? What use was a life that involved so much struggle?

Jivraj had spoken a few times of inviting Nagji home, but was perhaps too embarrassed to have him there. Nagji had met his wife with a young boy one evening in the village; the woman had looked old and pathetic. In better times, she said, she would sell roasted peanuts at the bus stand on the highway; now there was nothing to sell. Nagji had put a few rupees in her boy’s hand.

Now Nagji found himself telling his uncle that one’s struggles were what gave meaning to one’s life; success or defeat were God’s to decide. And much else on the virtues of struggle. He wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, it was
simply a homily from his childhood and youth; the type of piety he recalled not too long ago having scorned. Jivraj, unshaved and barefoot, clothed almost in rags, heard him out, and then his face lighted up and he left.

From that day onward it became the practice that every morning as he sat under his tamarind tree, a stream of people would come to bring before him their personal woes, and he would give them the sort of advice he had given his relation Jivraj.

The drought was unending and food scarce. Most of the single young men had gone away to the city to become roadside hawkers; one or two young women too had gone away, though this was mentioned with greater embarrassment. There was one functioning well in the village, used by all to tend the tiny patches that fed the people. At dusk the houses turned quiet, huddled into their shadows; a few oil lamps flickered outside, with men gathered on a porch to chat or play cards. The women might stand at their doorways to watch or talk quietly with a neighbour. Only the insects and the children seemed oblivious to the hopelessness about; the insects chirping cheerily away in the night, the children with their games of hide-and-seek and tag in the dark, and cricket with cloth balls in the daytime. In the mornings, twice a week, they could be heard in their classroom reciting the alphabet after their teacher Amin, reciting the times tables, or singing the national anthem or a song in praise of Gandhi-ji.

Over the days and weeks the visitor came to believe in his authority and inspiration. How many were there, after all, who could claim to have brought such comfort and
hope to their own people? There was the prophecy about the return of a native. And there was that incident in the city with the snake god. He felt a deeper empathy with the village; he was its saviour.

A child was born and he was asked to name it; and then another. An old man asked to be blessed before he died.

One morning as he sat down under the tree with a banana, as he was about to peel it, a hand reached out from behind and snatched it from him. The creature bounded away from his reach and, brazenly standing in front of him, finished peeling the fruit and ate it with all the time in the world. It was a female monkey. A band of monkeys had recently started invading the nearby mango tree; Nagji’s first reaction to these invaders was to see them as pests and thieves. He kept a stick to ward them off, but the banana thief made it a practice to pay him a visit every afternoon, sitting some distance away, grooming herself and minding her babies, watching him curiously. He became used to her, called her Kanta Behn, after a querulous neighbour back home. Sometimes he gave her food, which she accepted with dignity and shared with her brood. He began to talk to her and it seemed to him, and to the others who watched him, that he could communicate with the monkey.

One day Kanta Behn and a friend performed a virtuoso thieving feat that left the guru gaping. Chappatis were being prepared by a maid in the kitchen of the Big House. First, Kanta Behn’s friend started showing her face at the window of the kitchen, shoving her arms through the bars, and making a lot of threatening noises.
The maid finally went out to chase away the monkey, and in that short time Kanta Behn, who had been lurking on the other side of the door, dashed in and came away with the prize. When the maid raced after Kanta Behn, the friend loped into the kitchen in a few big strides and came out also with a fresh chappati. Kanta Behn stood before the amused Nagji, utterly composed, ready to eat her chappati. But then she tore it in two and presented one half to a grateful Nagji.

Nagji knew now that he utterly belonged. Not only the snake god but also the monkey god had accepted him.

A village couple had invited him for dinner and to bless their childless home. The hovel was no worse than most he had seen by now, but it had a pile of rubble in one corner that let off a dank, unpleasant odour. A supply of cement had apparently been ordered but not arrived. The meal was village fare, which he ate with the man, Raju, while he delivered his usual homilies about struggle and faith. Raju’s wife served them when required, otherwise stood by in the shadows. She was not much older than him, Nagji observed in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp, as she bent over them to serve, and her face was flushed. She was in sari, the threadbare blouse stretched tight across her breasts. Her husband Raju sat up straight, legs crossed, watching an uncomfortable but hungry guest eat; he was tall and rather sombre-looking, with a long unshaven face and an almost bald head.

After they had eaten, the two men went to sit outside in darkness for a while, and between awkward silences Nagji learned that Raju went every day to hawk plastic
jewellery on the highway from a cart that he rented. His wife came from a group of five villages, a day’s bus ride away. He had relations in the city of Rajkot.

When finally Nagji asked permission to leave, Raju said, “I want one more favour from you, guru-ji.”

“If I can do it, it’s yours,” the guru told him. He was touched by the man’s quiet dignity, preserved amidst such extremely humble circumstances.

“I would like you to bless my wife’s womb, if you will, please.”

The young guru was not prepared for this, whatever it meant. “I will bless both you and your wife,” he said after a pause, “may you have—”

“Come, guru-ji,” Raju said, standing up, and the two men went inside, where the wife sat beside the lamp, whose wick had been lowered to give the barest illumination. Raju muttered something to her and left, and Nagji unexpectedly found himself alone with the woman, his heart beating insistently inside him. She was on a sleeping mat, one leg folded under her, the other partly stretched forward. She had been combing her hair. Some stale flowers were spread out on a small pillow; there was the odour of hair oil, a whiff of burning incense.

“Come,” Kulsum said in a quivering voice, taking his hand, and the young guru went along with her guidance, all defences vanquished, hostage to his virility and a child in her arms. He went to bless her womb two more times, after which it was understood he was no longer required, and he was racked with guilt and confusion. He was chosen, but surely not to bestow blessings in such a carnal manner; to be the recipient of such a trust from simple
men and women seemed extravagant and wrong. He had actually enjoyed himself, melting into that dark body with its odour of musty spice and just plain flesh; looking forward to the next day, and the next. And the woman had received him with evident pleasure. He had only once coupled with a woman before, had hardly been aware of what transpired. Now, initiated, could he ever look upon the women with innocence, as a teacher, a saviour?