What would an evil act like this do but stoke the fire of these rebellions?
Evil? Who was it that cut off the nose of his sister?
Yes, I had seen that horror. And wept with pity at the sight of her ruined face, this woman who had danced in my wedding procession with an untrammeled joy. And yet—does an evil act beget another? On and on and on and on? Surely he is the more honorable, just and reasonable and unruled by emotion.
He lost his patience and exclaimed that a woman couldn’t possibly understand the situation’s complicated politics. This stung, and I told him so; he had never resorted to this tactic in any of our arguments. He regained himself, his cool, he didn’t apologize to me, but his tone was apologetic, he praised my wisdom in many matters—in all matters—and nuzzled me, rasp of beard against a bare shoulder, and said, My heart, let us talk of other things now. Or better yet, not talk of anything at all.
On the edge of sleep I mused. I was not my husband’s only wife, but long ago I had made peace with my jealousy: my unease had another source. Something inside him trembled before her. Her beauty? I had seen more beautiful within the walls of our palace. Perhaps it was simple pride. I knew his mind so well I could often guess his thoughts before he voiced them. But this—I didn’t understand. It was the action of a weak man, one desperate, to take another man’s wife. I fell asleep, and had a nightmare, awoke alone, morning already, and bathed, and did my morning puja at the temple. Then I went to see my youngest son. The elder two were their father’s sons, mine was this boy: thirteen, and gawky, and sweet, and growing, dark-skinned, like his father, but with my features, the proud nose, the big lips, the large eyes. He was too old now to let me pick him up in my arms and cuddle him, but he let me smooth his hair away from his face, and broke his fast with me after his lessons were finished from the food on my plate. When he was little, and asked me how he was born, I told him he was once a small rabbit, and I carried him around in a fold of my sari. Before a rabbit? A mouse. Before a mouse? A little moth that used to perch on my shoulder. Before a moth? A whisper. He was a plump-cheeked child, shy around men, his brothers, even his father, but lively around me. Question after question: What was the shape of the world? An egg. What was outside the egg? Pure nothing. Why was he a prince while this teacher a teacher, the sweeper a sweeper, the nursemaid a nursemaid? We progress this way, I told him, through many lives, passing from one thing to the next, burning away our bad deeds, accruing merit, ascending to the highest plane though effort and discipline. Like your father. Once he climbed to the top of the world, where there were two lakes, one freshwater and one salt, and sat between them for centuries to pray. It was blue, blue, blue there, sky and mountain and waters, unearthly still, as time gathered around his body but didn’t dare touch. Now your father is powerful. Like one day you will be. What if I’m not? What if the gods made a mistake? The gods are too powerful to make errors. More powerful than my father?
No.
I left him with his archery teacher. I watched them stride out to the range together, carrying their bows, until they became small figures moving across the wide green plain. He might have glanced back at me with an expression of anxiety—he was not a warrior, my youngest, though he tried—he was too gentle, and was beginning to feel shame for it.
I took my afternoon meal with the women. My husband’s two young wives were shy with me: one pregnant, the other had given birth some weeks before to a girl, who was born too early and stood for some time in the gateway between life and death. The mother was worried and ashamed. I told her that it was a joy to have a girl in the palace after so many bellicose little boys (second wife, her sons would never be kings, we all knew). We went to see the child together after our meal. In the nursery, a big demon woman held the child in her arms, feeding her from her own breast, and stroking the little head with her dark hands. I took the girl in my arms and kissed her, blessed her. She had the smell of milk, her mouth was so tiny and tender, and her eyes were closed.
When I was a girl, I didn’t know I was a princess. I thought perhaps I was a boy. I learned astronomy and the plant sciences and read the scriptures, and ran wild when my lessons were finished. I never knew my mother. She had coupled with a god and been turned into a frog by his jealous consort—so my nursemaid told me. My father said nothing about her. Like a frog, I was easy in water and on land, and had the certain coolness of skin that amphibians have. Was I happy? It blurs. I’ve lived so many years now that I only remember color: yellow, yellow, gold, the royal color, and the jewel tones of the palace garden. One day someone slapped me and reminded me I was a girl, a woman—I don’t know who dared, it must have been my father. I bled and bore sons, yes, I was a woman. The girl in my arms would grow, learn words, lengthen, be left one day on the steps of another’s palace, a beautiful present, and then we would be instructed to think no more about her. She unwound herself into a cry: live, tiny, sputtering. I gave her back to her nurse.
For some days there was a weight to the air that sat in my ears. Then a storm came; I could see the laundry women running to pull the clothes off the lines. It was warm-rained and gentle, and did nothing but wet the parched earth. My husband did not come for some days to visit me in my chambers. And when he did come, his eyes were febrile and unsettled, and he paced the room a hundred times, walking miles and miles in that room while he talked to me almost unceasingly. It was talk of the girl’s stubbornness, that the proud bitch would not yield to either threats of violence or love, that her husband was assembling an army full of undisciplined children, how he had foxed him, this husband, who wandered the earth in search of his lost wife, how he would break her, the proud bitch—
Don’t speak like this.
—the proud bitch, how she would one day meet her husband at the Capitol’s gates and tell him to find another wife because her heart belonged to another. How it would break him. How it would crush the rebellion before it even began.
Sit.
He wouldn’t. We argued. He slapped me for the first time, hard across the mouth. Then he became quiet and we could hear the sea thrashing on the shore. My mouth was warm and wet, I touched my hand to it and pulled away red. He had slapped me because he wouldn’t let himself touch her, I knew, and I knew also that he had forgotten himself, he had forgotten everything, for an instant, but his own frustration. He said my name, quietly, but I was afraid to look at him. After a little while he left the room.
The girl gave me some comfort. She ate her food now, took water, but still refused the jewels my husband sent. She had set up her small mat under the ashoka tree and spent the brutal heat of afternoon dozing under its shade. Some evenings I brought her ripe yellow breadfruit to eat, it seemed to delight her, this fruit, and I asked her questions about her exile. She said that she was happiest outside, eating berries, wearing simple clothes, free from the constraints of courtly life. Her husband was teaching her how to swim, how to use a bow. The two men, her husband and his brother, became playful away from the eyes of the kingdom, sparring and joking like teenagers. From her royal life, she missed not her servants, her father, her silk bed—nothing. She had never been so happy.
Color had come back to her voice, and with it, her bearing: she now did not let me see her fear. Her fear she kept for herself in the long waking hours between night and morning when every sound she heard was that demon my husband, come to take what he felt was rightfully his. She hardly slept, her attendant told me, each night, she sang and talked to herself quietly for hours, until her voice was spent. Even then she would sit mumbling to herself some calming nonsense. Her mother tongue.