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through months of incessant crying. In Kekaya, she had been acknowledged for this. But Ayodhyans had no concept of honor at all. They threw victims of abduction into prostitution, thinking it a brilliant solution.
So Manthara had bit her tongue and retreated to her room. Without asking, she knew who the order had come from: that self-centered king who never thought of anyone but himself. He certainly never considered Manthara’s feelings. Instead of treating her as an ally, as Ashvapati did, he was always seeking a reason to send Manthara back to Kekaya. Well, Manthara was ahead of his game. In due time, she would reveal herself.
With unusual speed, Manthara left her chamber. Her fingers were restless around her cane. If they barred her entry again today, she would have less self-control. As Manthara walked past guard after guard, they made no gesture of acknowledgment, no deference to speak of. Was she considered a maleficent spirit haunting these corridors? That’s what they made her feel like. If Kausalya walked by, they fell to the ground slobbering at her feet. If Kekaya was known for its horses, Ayodhya should have been known for its sycophantic servants. Manthara saw right through their pretend sincerity. The only thing indestructible about Ayodhya was its arrogance. The people were so proud of the city, as if they had built it with their own hands. Manthara rolled her eyes. Ayodhyans were constantly taking credit for things they knew nothing about. Look at this magnificent archway, they would say. “Who built it?” Manthara would ask, and they would look at her as if she had spoken in another language. They didn’t have the brains to realize that a building was like a mind, built the way it was for a reason. Manthara disliked people who were too sincere, and she disliked people who were insincere. Every single Ayodhyan was one or the other. They dared to whisper that Kaikeyi was manipulative and selfish! Oh, yes, Manthara had heard it said, and all because Kaikeyi was honest. Unlike the likes of them.
Distracted by her own grumblings, she tripped on her silk cloth and fell.
“Let me help you,” a guard said, stepping forward.
“I can do it myself,” she snapped. She had managed all her life without help. Beneath his smile, she could see the disdain, the meanness. She knew they pitied her at best or found her disgusting. She got back on her feet with the help of her cane. It had more backbone than the guard.
As she hobbled along to Kaikeyi’s quarters, she strictly avoided eye contact with any of the hypocrites. Sometimes she felt like a lonely witch, accusing shadows of their shapeless-ness. But wasn’t it suspicious that in two full years living in Ayodhya, not one unkind word had been spoken to her face? They hid their ugliness well, while Manthara was not shy of displaying hers.
Her only safe place was with Kaikeyi. To boost her own spirits, Manthara fondly recalled a memory from when Kaikeyi was three. The little girl had cried herself to sleep, saying, “I want one too!” She meant the hump on Manthara’s back. That’s what you call disarming!
The child’s innocence made Manthara forgot how she saw herself. The child thought she, the hunchbacked hag, had a desirable form. It had melted Manthara’s heart like nothing else, before or since. If she ever was cross with Kaikeyi or with anyone, she would bring this 137
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to mind and feel instantly soothed. Kaikeyi, as a little girl, would stroke and pat Manthara’s hunched back, making it the object of her admiration and affection.
Even now, Kaikeyi would bend down and kiss Manthara’s curved back. For good luck and love, Kaikeyi would say. She had done this before she left for the battle with the king.
Just then she walked through Kaikeyi’s archway and stumbled upon the young queen.
“Manthara!” Kaikeyi cried out at once, and even clapped her hands together several times, before she smothered the old woman with hugs and kisses. And this was a miracle to Manthara. The only one. Surreptitiously, she wiped her tears with her sari.
“Oh, don’t cry,” Kaikeyi coaxed, noticing anyway. “I’m alive and well!”
Only then did Manthara feel the rush of withheld grief, her previous certainty that Kaikeyi would never return alive.
“The battlefield is no place for a queen,” she heard herself blubber, reiterating her first warning to the queen.
“I know, I know, but if I wasn’t there, the king would have died.”
Taking Manthara’s hand eagerly and leading her to a seat, Kaikeyi proceeded to tell her what had happened. As the story unfolded, as Kaikeyi described her brave escape, Manthara did not fail to notice how Kaikeyi addressed the king. Until now, the two of them had always called him simply “the king,” formally and with a distance that Manthara approved.
Now the young queen was bubbling with the event as it had transpired, but all Manthara could hear was how she went from “the king” to “Dasharatha” to “my husband” and even
“my love”!
“You love him,” Manthara said, interrupting her, and feeling the tendons in her neck strain. She could feel the accusation in her tone and in her eyes.
“Of course I do,” Kaikeyi replied instantly. “He is my husband and king.”
She pretended not to notice Manthara’s total dismay. Well, she would.
“But you married him to be queen, not a foolish blushing bride.”
Kaikeyi fell silent, staring at Manthara. They both knew that a servant could never speak like this to her queen, so frankly and openly. But Manthara could. Suddenly fear squeezed her heart, because she saw a new reserve in Kaikeyi’s face.
“Don’t close your heart to me,” Manthara said at once.
“Is my every thought so obvious? You read me like a child reads its stories.”
“It’s only because I know you and serve your best interest. Don’t forget your father’s caution. What was his first teaching to you? The moment you give your love to this man, you surrender; you lose the upper hand, and he will have the power to break you.”
She could see the incomprehension in Kaikeyi’s face, almost as if she was shaken by Manthara’s confrontation. What was so hard to understand here? Usually Kaikeyi would rise to any challenge and pull Manthara with her by the force of her passion. They had talked about this so many times.
But Kaikeyi answered in a shaky voice, “Aren’t you happy that I don’t have to be unhappy like my father?”
Manthara felt herself step back. Is that how Kaikeyi thought of her father?
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“I didn’t think this unity was possible,” Kaikeyi said, “but Dasharatha and I have become one heart, one mind.”
She was purring like an overfed cat, and Manthara couldn’t stop what came out from her mouth: “Pah!”
They stared at each other then, at total odds, like two strangers speaking mutually incomprehensible languages. All the joy of reuniting was gone.
Kaikeyi threw out her arms and let them drop to her side, smacking her own thighs impatiently. “What is the purpose of marriage if not the meeting of two minds, two hearts, two souls?”
“I’m shocked by you!” Manthara said. Secretly she was pleased; she had missed this tension, this exchange of minds. “What’s the purpose of marriage,” she mimicked sourly.
“Really? Are we then to start from your first letters again? From zero?”
Kaikeyi looked away, shaking her head, avoiding Manthara’s persistent gaze. This was perhaps the most important premise of Manthara’s lifelong views.
“Love and all that,” she said, “might be right for some fisherwoman with no ambition.
You are a queen! I will not let you get trapped in so-called love. The purpose of your marriage is not romance, but power!”
“Why are they mutually exclusive?”
At least she didn’t deny it. Manthara felt herself tap her cane against the ground, as she did when agitated. She tried to still her hand, to speak calmly and rationally. “Love is not power but its opposite. Since the beginning of time, love has been the bane of a woman’s existence, the reason she is content with less—content being subordinate, and indeed thinking herself lucky to be in a man’s favor. But why can’t a woman be queen and rule in her own right?”
Here Manthara cleverly appealed to Keyi’s childhood aspiration to be king of Kekaya—
an aspiration that Manthara had rightly shattered. Still it was good for the grown woman to remember that pure desire for great power.
Manthara added: “The dream-befuddled lover wanders around in the rose garden smelling the flowers, content in her love and her dreams. But at any time, the gate to the rose garden can be barred to her forever. What would she have in her hands then? The same she had to begin with. Nothing!”
And then Manthara bashed her cane on the ground with each word: “Nothing, nothing!”
The violence of her outburst echoed around them only because Kaikeyi did not rise to the bait. Her face was passive, giving little away. This in itself squeezed Manthara’s insides again.
“No, Manthara, my dear, you are wrong,” Kaikeyi said. There was no anger in her voice.
She didn’t add the rest, but it was written there, as bright as pictures in a storybook: You wouldn’t understand. You don’t know. You have no husband. You have never enjoyed a man’s company or his love. You are unloved.
This young woman was standing before her and telling her in so few words that she knew more than Manthara about love, about love and how it worked. For the first time, Manthara felt her dark heart turn on her young queen—the daughter she never had.
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You are ugly, she heard herself think. Your beauty is temporary. You will be discarded. You think you are so clever. Without me, you would be nothing but a shallow beauty.
“Manthara? Your expression scares me.”
She can read you too, old hag. Be careful.
“Speak,” Kaikeyi said.
Manthara regarded that worried expression on Kaikeyi’s pretty face that would turn ugly and wrinkled one day soon.
The queen said, “You’re not one for silences.”
No, she hadn’t been, but things were different now, were they not?
This was completely new, the need to censor her thoughts, to pick and choose what to say and what to withhold, all because of “love.” Because Kaikeyi was foolish enough to fall into the king’s trap. Manthara hated that man without reservation, and she allowed her body to fill up with the pure and hot feeling of hate. The king’s “love” would sway Kaikeyi and turn her blind and weak, like she was already turning a deaf ear to Manthara.
But Kaikeyi waited for her response, so she smiled at her queen—not a genuine one, but the effort was enough.
“Very well, love him then, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Oh, don’t be a boor,” Kaikeyi said, throwing her arms around Manthara, kissing her on the cheeks repeatedly. “I just now came home. I didn’t know you would pick my brain and get to my depths within the first minutes. But then, no one in all of Ayodhya is as astute as you. Of course I’ll consider your words with care.” Then she pulled away and added, “If you also heed mine?”
“What?”
“Give Ayodhya a chance. Give the king a chance. I see now that we never did. We came here with so many reservations. We decided that Kekaya was a better place than Ayodhya. We decided that we knew more than anyone in Ayodhya. I think we have been foolish. Embrace this new life we have here, Manthara, in the same wholehearted way you embrace me.”
If only you knew. But that was a private thought now. Out loud she sighed, to demonstrate the effort this would take from her.
“Don’t expect any miracles overnight,” she said to Kaikeyi. “I am who I am.”
“And I love you,” the queen said, her arms again around her.
No, you love him, she thought. As if it was either-or. But wasn’t it?
Did the king love all his wives equally? No. Love was for one person only. That was the law of love. The more you shared it, the less there would be. Soon enough, Manthara was certain, Kaikeyi would not remember to hug her and kiss her and tell her she was the smartest one in Ayodhya. The king would need all that love and encouragement. There would be none left for Manthara.
“Don’t look so disheartened, my dear,” Kaikeyi coddled. “Ever since I was born, it’s been you and me, has it not? Nothing has changed and never will. You are my best friend.”
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made. She would tread carefully around Kaikeyi from now on. Maybe it had begun when the queen went off to this battle Manthara did not sanction.
“I must be going,” she said. “You need to get ready for the king.”
They both knew how many hours it took to create Kaikeyi’s best looks for the king, looks that none of those other creatures called queens could hope to compete with. Oh, regardless of today, Manthara was unspeakably proud of her lovely queen. But to her surprise, she saw Kaikeyi throw up her hands again.
“Oh, that? Is it really necessary?”
That casual disdain of all her training made Manthara’s temper flare up all over again.
“You listen to me, little girl! You will sit in front of the mirror right now and make yourself beautiful for the king, as you have done every day before this and will continue to do!”
“It’s just that on the battlefield, all that was not necessary. And still we came much closer to each other.”
“I will not listen to another word of this. Go to your mirror at once. This is another kind of battlefield, and don’t you forget it!”
To Manthara’s immense relief, Kaikeyi sighed and did as she was told. She felt her breath struggle to pass back and forth in her lungs. Her spine ached. All she wanted to do was lie down and rest. Instead, she followed Kaikeyi to the large mirror and said, “I will oversee your dressing today, as before. You don’t seem to be yourself.”
“No, I don’t think I am,” Kaikeyi said.
Nevertheless, she surrendered herself into Manthara’s hands, and Manthara started commanding the maids to bring this and bring that. Several times she had to swat those useless creatures with her cane. It looked like Manthara had to do it all herself today. Thank the thirty gods, they had the whole day for this. Manthara was able to sit down at times and take deep breaths to revive herself.
“Here, I can do this braid,” Kaikeyi said to one of the maids, taking over with deft fingers. “Go massage Manthara’s back. She is overexerting herself.”
“Only because you are not doing your part,” Manthara complained, but closed her eyes with joy when she felt the strong young fingers digging into the flesh of her neck.
Finally, when Manthara was satisfied with Kaikeyi’s look for the day and dismissed the maidservants, Kaikeyi turned to her with a determined look in her kajal-smeared eyes.
“I was bent on keeping this a secret,” Kaikeyi said—and few things sounded so delicious to Manthara—“but I’m determined to prove the king loves me beyond all else, and I him.”
Manthara waited.
“When the king returned from death’s side to me, he said he owed his life to me. Without me, he said, he would not be alive. So his life belongs to me.”
“Any man would say such a thing to please his woman. It’s common.”
“I’m not finished. Then he said, ‘Ask me for anything.’ He gave me two boons.”
“What did you ask for?” Manthara said, breathless. She couldn’t even imagine what she herself would think to desire when presented with such an expansive possibility.
“I spoke my heart. That my prayers had been fulfilled. He had returned to me alive.”
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Manthara rolled her eyes at that. Such romance. Pah. But then she looked again at the well-adorned queen. This was exquisite. Two secret boons, fragrant with power. Manthara felt slightly intoxicated, and had to grip her cane, lift her eyebrows, and shake her head.
What she hadn’t counted on was that the king would be a victim of it too! He had clearly lost the upper hand now. That meant one thing: they—Kaikeyi and Manthara—now had a secret weapon that they would use when they needed it.
“I think he didn’t believe me at first,” Kaikeyi said, speaking almost to herself, certainly not seeing the calculating look in Manthara’s eyes. “But when I insisted that I couldn’t think of anything else I desired, he said with such tenderness, ‘My promises and my love will be yours forever.’ And then he reached for me, and . . .” Kaikeyi blushed, falling silent. That moment had been an intimate one, not meant for Manthara’s prodding eyes.
“And you made love,” Manthara said for her, waving her hand dismissively. “I wasn’t born yesterday. That is the method, after all, to beget sons. You seem to forget its ultimate purpose, which I bless. Or had you forgotten that such physical union is meant to produce life? Your father, and in fact all of Ayodhya, are waiting for your son. And yet all you can think of is that your union proves that the king loves you.”
Kaikeyi’s cheeks were flaming angrily. “Oh, I should never have told you!” She turned away. “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
I understand more than you think, Manthara thought.
“You did the right thing, telling me,” she assured the queen. “I keep your secrets. You know that.”
“But the whole point was not about the boons themselves, but about what it shows you about the king.”
“You mean your lover?”
“Yes.”
“That man is clearly ready to sacrifice anything and everything for your happiness. You were wise to keep those boons for another time.”
“It was not a calculated act,” Kaikeyi insisted.
Manthara turned away muttering, “He will be our doom. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
