A great piece of writing by Rushdie with Akbar/Birbal stories in it. I remember hearing the Birbal stories from my childhood.
The Shelter of the World
by Salman Rushdie
February 25, 2008
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/02/25/080225fi_fiction_rushdie?printable=true
At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces of the new "victory city" of Akbar the Great looked as if they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage. As the sun rose to its zenith, the great bludgeon of the day's heat pounded the flagstones, deafening human ears to all sounds, making the air quiver like a frightened blackbuck, and weakening the border between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real.
Even the Emperor succumbed to fantasy.
The city was finished at last, in time for the Emperor's fortieth birthday. It had been twelve long, hot years in the making, but for a while he had been given the impression that it rose up effortlessly, year by year, as if by sorcery. The Emperor's minister of works had not allowed any construction to go forward during the Emperor's sojourns in the new imperial capital. When the Emperor was in residence, the stonemasons' tools fell silent, the carpenters drove in no nails, the painters, the inlay workers, the hangers of fabrics, and the carvers of screens all disappeared from view. All then, it's said, was cushioned pleasure. Only noises of delight were permitted to be heard. The bells on the ankles of dancers echoed sweetly, and fountains tinkled, and the soft music of the genius Tansen hung upon the breeze. There was whispered poetry in the Emperor's ear, and in the pachisi courtyard on Thursdays there was much languid play, with slave girls being used as living pieces on the checkerboard floor. In the curtained afternoons, beneath the sliding punkahs, there was a quiet time for love.
No city is all palaces. The real city, built of wood and mud and dung and brick as well as stone, huddled beneath the walls of the mighty red-stone plinth upon which the royal residences stood. Its neighborhoods were determined by race as well as by trade. Here was the silversmiths' street, there the hot-gated, clanging armories, and there, down that third gully, the place of bangles and clothes. To the east was the Hindu colony, and beyond that, curling around the city walls, the Persian quarter, and beyond that the region of the Turanis, and beyond that, in the vicinity of the giant gate of the Friday Mosque, the homes of those Muslims who were Indian born. Dotted around the countryside were the villas of the nobles, the art-studio-and-scriptorium whose fame had already spread throughout the land, and a pavilion of music, and another for the performance of dances. In most of these lower Sikris, there was little time for indolence, and when the Emperor came home from the wars the command of silence felt, in the mud city, like a suffocation. Chickens had to be gagged at the moment of their slaughter for fear of disturbing the repose of the king of kings. A cart wheel that squeaked could earn the cart's driver the lash, and if he cried out under the whip the penalty could be even more severe. Women giving birth withheld their cries, and the dumb show of the marketplace was a kind of madness. "When the King is here, we are all made mad," the people said, adding, hastily, for there were spies and traitors everywhere, "for joy." The mud city loved its Emperor, it insisted that it did, insisted without words, for words were made of that forbidden fabric, sound. When the Emperor set forth once more on his campaigns—his never-ending (though always victorious) battles against the armies of Gujarat and Rajasthan, of Kabul and Kashmir—then the prison of silence was unlocked, and trumpets burst out, and cheers, and people were finally able to tell one another everything they had been obliged to keep unsaid for months on end: I love you. My mother is dead. Your soup tastes good. If you do not pay me the money you owe me, I will break your arms at the elbows. My darling, I love you, too. Everything.
Fortunately for the mud city, military matters often took Akbar away. In fact, he had been away most of the time, and in his absences the din of the clustered poor, as well as the racket of the unleashed construction workers, daily vexed the impotent queens. The queens lay together and moaned, and what they did to distract one another, what entertainment they found in one another in their veiled quarters, will not be described here. Only the imaginary queen remained pure, and it was she who told Akbar of the privations the people were suffering because of the desire of overzealous officials to ease his time at home. As soon as the Emperor learned this, he countermanded the order, replaced the minister of works with a less dour individual, and insisted on riding through the streets of his oppressed subjects crying out, "Make as much racket as you like, people! Noise is life, and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead." The city burst into joyful clamor.
That was the day on which it became clear that a new kind of king was on the throne, and that nothing in the world would remain the same.
The country was at peace at last, but the King's spirit was never calm. The King had just returned from his last campaign; he had slapped down the upstart in
He, Akbar, had never referred to himself as "I," not even in private, not even in anger or dreams. He was—what else could he be?—"we." He was the definition, the incarnation of, the We. He had been born into plurality. When he said "we," he naturally and truly meant himself as an incarnation of all his subjects, of all his cities and lands and rivers and mountains and lakes, as well as all the animals and plants and trees within his frontiers, and also the birds that flew overhead and the mordant twilight mosquitoes and the nameless monsters in their underworld lairs, gnawing slowly at the roots of things; he meant himself as the sum total of all his victories, himself as containing the characters, the abilities, the histories, perhaps even the souls of his decapitated or merely pacified opponents; and, in addition, he meant himself as the apogee of his people's past and present, and the engine of their future.
This "we" was what it meant to be a king—but commoners, he now allowed himself to consider, in the interest of fairness, and for the purposes of debate, no doubt occasionally thought of themselves as plural, too.
Were they wrong? Or (O traitorous thought!) was he? Perhaps this idea of self-as-community was what it meant to be a being in the world, any being; such a being being, after all, inevitably a being among other beings, a part of the beingness of all things. Perhaps plurality was not exclusively a king's prerogative, perhaps it was not, after all, his divine right. One might further argue that, since the reflections of a monarch were, in less exalted and refined form, doubtless mirrored in the cogitations of his subjects, it was accordingly inevitable that the men and women over whom he ruled should also conceive of themselves as "we"s. They saw themselves, perhaps, as plural entities made up of themselves plus their children, mothers, aunts, employers, co-worshippers, fellow-workers, clans, and friends. They, too, saw their selves as multiple, one self that was the father of their children, another that was their parents' child; they knew themselves to be different with their employers than they were at home with their wives—in short, they were all bags of selves, bursting with plurality, just as he was. Was there then no essential difference between the ruler and the ruled? And now his original question reasserted itself in a new and startling form: if his many-selved subjects managed to think of themselves in the singular rather than the plural, could he, too, be an "I"? Could there be an "I" that was simply oneself? Were there such naked, solitary "I"s buried beneath the overcrowded "we"s of the earth? It was a question that frightened him as he rode his white horse home, fearless, unvanquished, and, it must be conceded, beginning to be fat; and when it popped into his head at night he did not easily sleep. What should he say when he saw his Jodha again? If he were to say simply, "I'm back," or "It is I," might she, in return, feel able to call him by that second-person singular, that tu which was reserved for children, lovers, and gods? And what would that mean? That he was like her child, or godlike, or simply the lover of whom she, too, had dreamed, whom she had dreamed into being as eagerly as he had dreamed her? Might that little word, that tu, turn out to be the most arousing word in the language? "I," he practiced under his breath. Here "I" am. "I" love you. Come to "me."
One final military engagement disturbed his contemplation on the homeward road. One more upstart princeling to slap down. A diversion into the
No man was ever free. His army moved through the white trees of the
The Emperor's eyes were slanted and large and gazed upon infinity as a dreamy young lady might, or a sailor in search of land. His lips were full and pushed forward in a womanly pout. But in spite of these girlish accents he was a mighty specimen of a man, huge and strong. As a boy, he had killed a tigress with his bare hands and then, driven to distraction by his deed, had forever forsworn the eating of meat and become a vegetarian. A Muslim vegetarian, a warrior who wanted only peace, a philosopher-king: a contradiction in terms. Such was the greatest ruler the land had ever known.
In the melancholy after battle, as evening fell upon the empty dead, below the broken fortress melting into blood, within earshot of a little waterfall's nightingale song—bul-bul, bul-bul, it sang—the Emperor in his brocade tent sipped watered wine and lamented his gory genealogy. He did not want to be like his bloodthirsty ancestors, even though his ancestors were the greatest men in history. He felt burdened by the names of the marauder past, the names from which his name descended in cascades of human blood: his grandfather Babar, the warlord of Ferghana, who had conquered, but always loathed, this new dominion, this India of too much wealth and too many gods, Babar the battle machine, with an unexpected gift for felicitous words; and before Babar the murderous princes of Transoxiana and Mongolia, and mighty Temüjin above all—Genghis, Changez, Jenghis, or Chinggis Qan—thanks to whom he, Akbar, had to accept the name of Mughal, had to be the Mongol he was not, or did not feel himself to be. He felt . . . Hindustani. His horde was neither Golden, Blue, nor White. The very word "horde" struck his subtle ears as ugly, swinish, coarse. He did not want hordes. He did not want to pour molten silver into the eyes of his vanquished foes or crush them to death beneath the platform upon which he was eating his dinner. He was tired of war.
He remembered the tutor of his childhood, a Persian Mir, telling him that for a man to be at peace with himself he must be at peace with all others. Sulh-i-kul, complete peace. No Khan could understand such an idea. He did not want a Khanate. He wanted a country.
The Rana of Cooch Naheen, young, slender, and dark, had knelt at Akbar's feet, his face hairless and bleeding, waiting for the blow to fall. "History repeats itself," he said. "Your grandfather killed my grandfather seventy years ago."
"Our grandfather," replied the Emperor, employing the royal plural according to custom, for this was not the time for his experiment with the singular—this wretch did not merit the privilege of witnessing it—"was a barbarian with a poet's tongue. We, by contrast, are a poet with a barbarian's history and a barbarian's prowess in war, which we detest. Thus it is demonstrated that history does not repeat itself but moves forward, and that Man is capable of change."
"That is a strange remark for an executioner to make," the young Rana said softly. "But it is futile to argue with Death."
"Your time has come," the Emperor assented. "So tell us truthfully before you go, what sort of paradise do you expect to discover when you have passed through the veil?" The Rana raised his mutilated face and looked the Emperor in the eye. "In
In the hours after he killed the Rana, the Emperor was possessed by his familiar demon of loneliness. Whenever a man spoke to him as an equal, it drove him crazy, and this was a fault, he understood that. A king's anger was always a fault; an angry king was like a god who made mistakes. And here was another contradiction in him. He was not only a barbarian philosopher and a crybaby killer but also an egotist addicted to obsequiousness and sycophancy who nevertheless longed for a different world, a world in which he could find exactly that man who was his equal, whom he could meet as his brother, with whom he could speak freely, teaching and learning, giving and receiving pleasure, a world in which he could forsake the gloating satisfactions of conquest for the gentler yet more taxing joys of discourse. Did such a world exist? By what road could it be reached? Was there such a man anywhere in the world, or had he just executed him? What if the Rana of the mustache had been the only one? Had he just slain the only man on earth whom he might have loved? The Emperor's thoughts grew vinous and sentimental, his eyes blurring with drunken tears.
How could he become the man he wanted to be? The akbar, the great one? How?
There was nobody to talk to. He had ordered his stone-deaf body servant, Bhakti Ram Jain, away, out of his tent, so that he could drink in peace. A body servant who could not hear his master's ramblings was a blessing, but Bhakti Ram Jain had learned to read his lips now, which undid much of his value, making him an eavesdropper like everyone else. The king is mad. They said that: everyone said that. His soldiers his people his wives. Probably Bhakti Ram Jain said so as well. They did not say it to his face, for he was a giant of a man and a puissant warrior, like a hero out of the ancient tales, and he was also the king of kings, and if such a one wished to be a little nutty then who were they to argue? The King, however, was not mad. The King was not content with being. He was striving to become.
Very well. He would keep his promise to the dead Kathiawari princeling. In the heart of his victory city he would build a house of adoration, a place of disputation where everything could be said to everyone by anyone on any subject, including the nonexistence of God and the abolition of kings. He would teach himself humility in that house. No, now he was being unfair to himself. Not "teach." Rather, he would remind himself of, and recover, the humility that was already lodged deep in his heart. This humble Akbar was perhaps his best self, created by the circumstances of his childhood in exile, clothed now in adult grandeur but still present nonetheless; a self born not in victory but in defeat. Nowadays, it was all victories, but the Emperor knew all about defeat. Defeat was his father. Its name was Humayun.
He didn't like thinking about his father. His father had smoked too much opium, lost his empire, got it back only after he pretended to become a Shiite (and gave away the Koh-i-noor diamond) so that the King of Persia would give him an army to fight with, and had then died by falling down a flight of library stairs almost immediately after regaining his throne. Akbar hadn't known his father. He himself had been born in Sind, after Humayun was defeated at Chausa, and then scurried off to
Akbar lived, because his aunt wanted him to. And in
There were things, however, that nobody thought to teach him, and that he would never learn. "We are the Emperor of India, Bhakti Ram Jain, but we can't write our own damn name!" he shouted at his body servant at dawn, as the old man helped him with his ablutions.
"Yes, O most blessed entity, father of many sons, husband of many wives, monarch of the world, encompasser of the earth," said Bhakti Ram Jain, handing him a towel. This time, the hour of the King's levee, was also the hour of imperial flattery. Bhakti Ram Jain proudly held the rank of Imperial Flatterer First Class, and was a master of the ornate, old-school style known as cumulative fawning. Only a man with an excellent memory for the baroque formulations of excessive encomiums could fawn cumulatively, on account of the repetitions required and the necessary precision of the sequencing. Bhakti Ram Jain's memory was unerring. He could fawn for hours.
The Emperor saw his own face scowling back at him from his basin of warm water like an augury of doom. "We are the king of kings, Bhakti Ram Jain, but we can't read our own laws. What do you say to that?"
"Yes, O most just of judges, father of many sons, husband of many wives, monarch of the world, encompasser of the earth, ruler of all that is, bringer together of all being," said Bhakti Ram Jain, warming to his task.
"We are the Sublime Radiance, the Star of India, and the Sun of Glory," said the Emperor, who knew a thing or two about flattery himself. "Yet we were raised in that shithole dump of a town where men fuck women to make babies but fuck boys to make them men—raised watching out for the attacker who worked from behind as well as the warrior straight ahead."
"Yes, O dazzling light, father of many sons, husband of many wives, monarch of the world, encompasser of the earth, ruler of all that is, bringer together of all being, Sublime Radiance, Star of India, and Sun of Glory," said Bhakti Ram Jain, who might have been deaf but who knew how to take a hint.
"Is that how a king should be raised, Bhakti Ram Jain?" the Emperor roared, tipping over the basin in his wrath. "Illiterate, ass-guarding, savage—is that what a prince should be?"
"Yes, O wiser than the Wise, father of many sons, husband of many wives, monarch of the world, encompasser of the earth, ruler of all that is, bringer together of all being, Sublime Radiance, Star of India, Sun of Glory, master of human souls, forger of thy people's destiny," said Bhakti Ram Jain.
"You are pretending you can't read the words on our lips!" the Emperor shouted.
"Yes, O more insightful than the Seers, father of many—"
"You are a goat who should have his throat slit so that we can eat his meat for lunch."
"Yes, O more merciful than the gods, father—"
"Your mother fucked a pig to make you."
"Yes, O most articulate of all who articulate, f—"
"Never mind," said the Emperor. "We feel better now. Go away. You can live."
And here again with bright silks flying like banners from red palace windows was Sikri, shimmering in the heat like an opium vision. Here at last, with its strutting peacocks and dancing girls, was home. If the war-torn world was a harsh truth, then Sikri was a beautiful lie. The Emperor came home like a smoker returning to his pipe. He was the Enchanter. In this place he would conjure a new world, a world beyond religion, region, rank, and tribe. The most beautiful women in the world were here, and they were all his wives. The most brilliant talents in the land were assembled here, among them the Nine Jewels, the nine most brilliant of the most brilliant, and with their help there was nothing he could not accomplish. And then there was Birbal, the best of the nine, who were the best of the best. His first minister, and first friend.
The first minister and greatest wit of the age greeted him at the Hiran Minar, the tower of elephants' teeth. The Emperor's sense of mischief was aroused. "Birbal," Akbar said, dismounting from his horse, "will you answer me one question? We have been waiting a long time to ask it." The first minister of legendary wit and wisdom bowed humbly. "As you wish, Jahanpanah, Shelter of the World." "Well, then," said Akbar, "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Birbal replied at once, "The chicken." Ak-bar was taken aback. "How can you be so sure?" he wanted to know. "Huzoor," Birbal replied, "I promised to answer only one question."
The first minister and the Emperor were standing on the ramparts of the city, looking out at the wheeling crows. "Birbal," Akbar mused, "how many crows do you imagine there are in my kingdom?" "Jahanpanah," Birbal replied, "there are exactly nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine." Akbar was puzzled. "Suppose we have them counted," he said, "and there are more than that, what then?" "That would mean," Birbal replied, "that their friends from the neighboring kingdom have come to visit them." "And if there are fewer?" "Then some of ours will have gone abroad to see the wider world."
A great linguist was waiting at Akbar's court, a visitor from a distant Western land: a Jesuit priest who could converse and dispute fluently in dozens of languages. He challenged the Emperor to discover his native language. While the Emperor was pondering the riddle, his first minister circled the priest and all of a sudden kicked him violently in the backside. The priest let out a series of oaths—not in Portuguese but in Italian. "You observe, Jahanpanah," said Birbal, "that when it's time to unleash a few insults a man will always choose his mother tongue."
"If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal. "And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none."
The first minister and the Emperor were standing at the Khwabgah, the Place of Dreams, looking out over the still surface of the Anup Talao, the monarch's private, formal pool, the Pool Without Peer, the best of all possible pools, of which it was said that when the kingdom was in trouble its waters would send a warning. "Birbal," said Akbar, "as you know, our favorite queen has the misfortune not to exist. Even though we love her best of all, admire her above all the others, and value her above even the lost Koh-i-noor, she is inconsolable. 'Your ugliest, most sour-natured shrew of a wife is still made of flesh and blood,' she says. 'In the end, I will not be able to compete with her.' "
The first minister advised the Emperor, 'Jahanpanah, you must say to her that it is precisely in the end that her victory will be apparent to everyone, for in the end none of the queens will exist any more than she does, while she will have enjoyed a lifetime of your love, and her fame will echo down the ages. Thus, in reality, while it is true that she does not exist, it is also true to say that she is the one who lives. If she did not, then over there, behind that high window, there would be nobody waiting for your return."
Jodha's sisters, her fellow-wives, resented her. How could the mighty Emperor prefer the company of a woman who did not exist? When he was gone, at least, she ought to absent herself as well; she had no business to hang around with the actually existing. She should disappear like the apparition she was, slide into a mirror or a shadow and be lost. That she did not, the living queens concluded, was the sort of solecism one had to expect from an imaginary being. How could she have been brought up to know her manners when she had not been brought up at all? She was an untutored figment, and deserved to be ignored.
The Emperor had put her together, they fumed, by stealing bits of them all. He said she was the daughter of the Prince of Jodhpur. She was not! That was another queen, and she was not the daughter but the sister. The Emperor also believed his fictitious beloved was the mother of his firstborn son, his long-awaited firstborn son, conceived because of the blessing of a saint, that very saint beside whose hilltop hovel this victory city had been built. But she was not Prince Salim's mother, as Prince Salim's real mother, Rajkumar Hira Kunwari, known as Mariam-uz-Zamani, daughter of Raja Bihar Mal of Amer, of the Clan Kachhwaha, grievingly told anybody who would listen. So: the limitless beauty of the imaginary queen came from one consort, her Hindu religion from another, and her incalculable wealth from yet a third. Her temperament, however, was Akbar's own creation. No real woman was ever like that, so perfectly attentive, so undemanding, so endlessly available.
She was an impossibility, a fantasy of perfection. They feared her, knowing that, being impossible, she was irresistible, and that was why the King loved her best. They hated her for her theft of their histories. If they could have murdered her they would have done so, but until the Emperor tired of her, or died himself, she was immortal. The idea of the Emperor's death was not beyond contemplation, but so far the queens were not contemplating it. So far, they bore their grievances in silence. "The Emperor is mad," they grumbled inwardly, but sensibly forbore to utter the words. And when he was galloping around killing people they left the imaginary consort to her own devices. They never spoke her name. Jodha, Jodhabai. She wandered the palace quarters alone. She was a lonely shadow glimpsed through latticed stone screens. She was a cloth blown by the breeze. At night she stood under the little cupola on the top story of the Panch Mahal and scanned the horizon for the return of the King, who made her real.
Jodha knew that her illustrious husband must have had witchcraft in his blood. Everyone had heard about Genghis Khan's necromancy, his use of animal sacrifice and occult herbs, and how, by the use of the black arts, he managed to sire eight hundred thousand descendants.
Everyone had heard the tale of how Timur the Lame after conquering the earth had tried to ascend to the stars and conquer the heavens, too. Everyone knew the story of how the Emperor Babar had saved the dying Humayun's life by circling his sickbed and luring Death away from the boy to the father, sacrificing himself so that his son might live. These dark pacts with Death and the Devil were her husband's heritage, and her own existence the proof of how strong the magic was in him.
The creation of a real life from a dream was a superhuman act, usurping the prerogative of the gods. In those days, Sikri was swarming with poets and artists, those preening egotists who claimed for themselves the power of language and image to conjure beautiful somethings from empty nothings, and yet neither poet nor painter, musician nor sculptor had come close to what the Emperor, the Perfect Man, had achieved. The court was also full of foreigners, pomaded exotics, weather-beaten merchants, narrow-faced priests from the West, boasting in ugly, undesirable tongues about the majesty of their lands, their gods, their kings. When the Emperor showed her the pictures of their mountains and valleys they'd brought with them, she thought of the Himalayas and of Kashmir and laughed at the foreigners' paltry approximations of natural beauty, their vaals and aalps, half-words to describe half-things. Their kings were savages, and they had nailed their god to a tree. What did she want with people as ridiculous as that?
They came in search of—what, exactly? Nothing of use. If they had possessed any wisdom, the inutility of their journeying would have been obvious to them. Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.
Yes: this place, Sikri, was a fairyland to them, just as their
She had never left the palaces in which she had been born a decade earlier, born an adult, to the man who was not only her creator but her lover. It was true: she was both his wife and his child. If she left the palaces, or so she had always suspected, the spell would be broken and she would cease to exist. Perhaps she could do it if he, the Emperor, were there to sustain her with the strength of his belief, but if she were alone she wouldn't have a chance. Fortunately, she had no desire to leave. The labyrinth of walled and curtained corridors that connected the various buildings of the palace complex afforded her all the possibilities for travel she required. This was her little universe. She lacked a conqueror's interest in elsewhere. Let the rest of the world be for others. This square of fortified stone was hers.
She was a woman without a past, separate from history, or, rather, possessing only such history as he had been pleased to bestow upon her, and which the other queens bitterly contested. The question of her independent existence, of whether she had one, insisted on being asked, over and over, whether she willed it or not. If God turned his face away from his creation, Man, would Man simply cease to be?
That was the large-scale version of the question, but it was the selfish, small-scale versions that bothered her. Was her will free of the man who had willed her into being? Did she exist only because of his suspension of disbelief in the possibility of her existence? If he died, could she go on living?
She felt a quickening of her pulse. Something was about to happen. She felt herself strengthen, solidify. Doubts fled from her. He was coming.
The Emperor had entered the palace complex, and she could feel the power of his approaching need. Yes. Something was about to happen. She felt his footfall in her blood, could see him in herself, growing larger as he walked toward her. She was his mirror, because he had created her that way, but she was herself as well. Yes. Now that the act of creation was complete, she was free to be the person he had created, free, as everyone was, within the bounds of what it was in their nature to be and to do. How strong she suddenly was, how full of blood and rage. His power over her was far from absolute. All she had to be was coherent. She had never felt more coherent. Her nature rushed into her like a flood. She was not subservient. He did not like subservient women.
She would scold him first. How could he stay away so long? In his absence, she had had to combat many plots. All was untrustworthy here. The very walls were filled with whispers. She had fought them all and kept the palace safe against the day of his return, defeating the small, self-serving treacheries of the domestic staff, confounding the spying lizards hanging on the walls, stilling the scurry of conspiratorial mice. All this while she felt herself fading, while the mere struggle for survival required the exercise of almost the full force of her will. The other queens . . . no, she would not mention the other queens. The other queens did not exist. Only she existed. She, too, was a sorceress. She was the sorceress of herself.
There was only one man she needed to enchant, and he was here. He was not going to the other queens. He was coming to what pleased him. She was full of him, of his desire for her, of the something that was about to happen. She was the scholar of his need. She knew everything.
The door opened. She existed. She was immortal, because she had been created by love.
He was wearing a cockaded golden turban and a coat of gold brocade. He was wearing the dust of his conquered land like a soldier's badge of honor. He was wearing a sheepish grin. " 'I' wanted to get home faster," he said. " 'I' was delayed." There was something awkward and experimental about his speech. What was the matter with him?
She decided to ignore his uncharacteristic hesitancy and proceed as she had planned.
"Oh, you 'wanted,' " she said, standing upright, in her ordinary day clothes, pulling a silken head scarf across the lower portion of her face. "A man doesn't know what he wants. A man doesn't want what he says he wants. A man wants only what he needs."
He was puzzled by her refusal to acknowledge his descent into the first person, which honored her, which was supposed to make her swoon with joy, which was his newest discovery and his declaration of love. Puzzled, and a little put out.
"How many men have you known, that you are so knowledgeable?" he said, frowning, approaching her. "Did you dream up men for yourself while 'I' was away, or did you find men to pleasure you, men who were not dreams? Are there men that 'I' must kill?" Surely this time she would notice the revolutionary, erotic newness of the pronoun? Surely now she would understand what he was trying to say?
She did not. She believed she knew what aroused him, and was thinking only of the words she had to say to make him hers.
"Women think less about men in general than the generality of men can imagine. Women think about their own men less often than their men like to believe. All women need all men less than all men need them. This is why it is so important to keep a good woman down. If you do not keep her down, she will surely get away."
She hadn't dressed up to receive him. "If you want dolls," she said, "go over to the doll's house, where they're waiting for you, prettifying and squealing and pulling one another's hair." This was a mistake. She had mentioned the other queens. His brow furrowed and his eyes clouded over. She had made a false move. The spell had almost broken. She poured all the force of her eyes into his, and he came back to her. The magic held. She raised her voice and continued. She didn't flatter him. "You already look like an old man," she said. "Your sons will imagine you're their grandfather." She didn't congratulate him on his victories. "If history had gone down a different path," she said, "then the old gods would still rule, the gods you have defeated, the many-limbed many-headed gods, full of stories and deeds instead of punishments and laws, the gods of being standing beside the goddesses of doing, dancing gods, laughing gods, gods of thunderbolts and flutes, so many, many gods, and maybe that would have been an improvement." She knew she was beautiful and now, dropping her thin silk veil, she unleashed that beauty, and he was lost. "When a boy dreams up a woman, he gives her big breasts and a small brain," she murmured. "When a king imagines a wife, he dreams of me."
She was adept at the seven types of unguiculation, which is to say the art of using the nails to enhance the act of love. Before he left on his long journey, she had marked him with the Three Deep Marks, which were scratches made by the first three fingers of her right hand upon his back and his chest, and on his testicles as well: something to remember her by. Now that he was home, she could make him shudder, could actually make his hair stand on end, by placing her nails on his cheeks and lower lip and chest, without leaving any mark. Or she could mark him, leaving a half-moon shape upon his neck. She could push her nails slowly into his face. She could perform the Hopping of the Hare, marking the areolas around his nipples without touching him anywhere else on his body. And no living woman was as skilled as she at the Peacock's Foot, that delicate maneuver: she placed her thumb on his left nipple and with her four other fingers she "walked" around his breast, digging in her long nails, her curved, clawlike nails, which she had guarded and sharpened in anticipation of this very moment, pushing them into the Emperor's skin until they made marks resembling the trail left by a peacock as it walks through mud. She knew what he would say while she did these things. He would tell her how, in the loneliness of his Army tent, he would close his eyes and imitate her movements, imagine his nails moving on his body to be hers, and be aroused.
She waited for him to say it, but he didn't. Something was different. There was an impatience in him now, an irritation almost, an annoyance she did not understand. It was as if the many sophistications of the lover's art had lost their charms and he wished simply to possess her and be done with it. She understood that he had changed. And now everything else would change as well.
As for the Emperor, he never again referred to himself in the singular in the presence of another person. He was plural in the eyes of the world, plural even in the judgment of the woman who loved him, and plural he would remain. He had learned his lesson. ♦
__._,_.___
*****************************************
Sign the Petition : Release the Arrested University Teachers Immediately : An Appeal to the Caretaker Government of Bangladesh
http://www.mukto-mona.com/human_rights/university_teachers_arrest.htm
*****************************************
Daily Star publishes an interview with Mukto-Mona
http://www.mukto-mona.com/news/daily_star/daily_star_MM.pdf
*****************************************
MM site is blocked in Islamic countries such as UAE. Members of those theocratic states, kindly use any proxy (such as http://proxy.org/) to access mukto-mona.
*****************************************
Mukto-Mona Celebrates 5th Anniversary
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/5_yrs_anniv/index.htm
*****************************************
Mukto-Mona Celebrates Earth Day:
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/Earth_day2006/index.htm
*****************************************
Kansat Uprising : A Special Page from Mukto-Mona
http://www.mukto-mona.com/human_rights/kansat2006/members/
*****************************************
MM Project : Grand assembly of local freedom fighters at Raumari
http://www.mukto-mona.com/project/Roumari/freedom_fighters_union300306.htm
*****************************************
German Bangla Radio Interviews Mukto-Mona Members:
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/Darwin_day/german_radio/
Mukto-Mona Celebrates Darwin Day:
http://www.mukto-mona.com/Special_Event_/Darwin_day/index.htm
*****************************************
Some FAQ's about Mukto-Mona:
http://www.mukto-mona.com/new_site/mukto-mona/faq_mm.htm
****************************************************
VISIT MUKTO-MONA WEB-SITE : http://www.mukto-mona.com/
****************************************************
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
-Beatrice Hall [pseudonym: S.G. Tallentyre], 190
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch to Fully Featured
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
__,_._,___