Read Online The Queen's Play by Aashish Kaul - Free Book Online

motives that had their begin- nings in those obscure iron-blue depths of the heart that nobody has ever traversed to the end, motives that like silken threads tangled and untangled, until the whole sorry tapestry was lost in the gathering darkness of the deepest past. Or perhaps she was destiny herself come to meet the demon king from an earlier life, incite him to such base, no, for someone of his powers and intelligence, simply befuddling action so that he should pay for the wrongs done then or make good some ancient unremembered pledge. Honour, however, hardly could be the name of what erupted from the many non- rational springs of action and feeling of all those involved, a number so vast and indefinite none could have predicted it. Honour was not in being truculent and a little too free with your hands, not in the matter of that hanging nose dripping a steady flow of blood into the victim’s convulsing bosom.
    I was there, quietly passing my time in the forest, waiting for events to catch up with me, recalled the child in the old cedar. In the forests at the foot of the
Nilgiri
, the blue mountains that made up the western edge of the southern provinces, not much farther from the hill where I was born. Wind-born they told me, for a kite had flown away with a pinch of the divine pudding in its beak that fell straight into my mother’s hands, and which she promptly transferred to hermouth taking it to be a blessing from heaven, a pudding that I later learnt was meant for the womb that would give birth to the exiled prince. God-incarnate, he was called. And so I became one of them, the gods. Life’s affinities, you could say. Elective affinities. So it was I felt a spontaneous sympathy for the elder prince the moment I laid eyes on him, and so was I ready to do his bidding from the start, whatever it be, without doubt or indecision, although I wasn’t then aware of the special connection that bound us together. The pudding, the kite, the breeze.
    At the time I was living with the tribe that took the monkey as its totem. Its members went about wearing a crude image of the primate round their necks, and the tribe’s triangular flags, too, were painted with something resembling it. The men were swift climbers of trees and could camouflage themselves on the spur of the moment. More than a few among them had developed this into an art form and were seen as sublime shapeshifters.
    I had come to the tribe upon completing my instruction in the
Vedas
and certain esoteric practices that granted one the power to change form and move with ease over wind or water, this supreme knowledge transmitted then as now orally from teacher to disciple, one to one in strict confidence, whereupon my teacher asked me to join and aid the brother of the tribe’s ruler who had also been his student in old days and had recently fallen on hard times, banished by the elder one, the ruler, for what he saw on the former’s part to be an unpardonable act of betrayal and cowardice.
    Another affinity, another exile. Exiled in your own home, a wilderness where others came from far away to serve their respective exiles. It seemed like the season of exiles.
    When I met him he was living in hiding with a band of his followers in a cluster of rock caves with a system of underground streams. It was not the ideal place to live, for the rocks constantly dripped water the colour of rust, and it was wet and cold on most evenings. But the place offered protection in that it lay concealed in the darker part of a ridge with clear views of the forest in three direc-tions and there was no lack of food or firewood. He was dejected and in utter despair, left with next to no self-esteem, for the elder brother had gone ahead and taken this man’s wife as his own queen, following the tribe’s custom. In there, accompanied by the sound of dripping water and the hiss of the flames sawing the darkness, I listened to the exile’s tale of ruin