My Prince, Royal Prince,
Charming Prince, Eternal Prince,
You are mine and I am yours,
Virtuous and adorable, my Lord, my Husband,
sang up the innocent voice.
Part II: From The Policeman and the Rose: Stories
PREFACE
I was born in a dharmasala,1 room number one, in (the town) Beautiful, Hassana, whose goddess, the Lady Beautiful, Hassanakamma, saw her devotees only once a year, and again for just nine days, while an ancient worshipper, that lone and cursed girl, because she never did come on appointed time, became a rounded long stone, and you can still see where she started from and where she now is, there, in the large courtyard of the temple, for she goes but the pace of a rice-grain, one rice-grain step a year, so that when she reaches finally the sacred Feet of the Lady Beautiful, not only this town but the whole world will be dissolved, till, when the waters have stayed quiet for Brahma’s requisite aeons (432,000,000 man-years) and the karma of the world, lying asleep for all this while, curled deep under the waters, will wake again, and the world will revolve in its own rhythm, and man and beast will go their own conditioned way, and the Goddess Beautiful too will emerge from the earth, and the accursed girl also will, no doubt, go a single rice-step a year, till the world dissolves once more — unless one goes beyond the real, the mental, the essential, that is, beyond cause and effect, and this one, he, he will have, as you well know, neither birth nor death.
I heard all this, not that I understood it, when I was a boy four or five years of age, my grandfather a convinced Vedantin (from a family that can boast of having been Vedantins at least since the thirteenth century, and again Brahmin advisers to kings, first in Rajputana, another thousand years earlier, and yet again Brahmins to other kings, maybe the Greco-Indian ones in Gandhara, earlier yet — at least such our mythical genealogy tells us) — and my grandfather taught me Amara, that wonderful thesaurus which, like a grave and good Brahmin boy, I had to learn by heart, and thus never have to ask who the Two-Mothered One is, of course he is Ganesha, or Kartikeya, his brother, who of course is Commander-in-chief of all the armies, etc. Life would not be worthwhile if you did not know which God was what, and if you will not have understood that Shiva is so awesome, you could see him only between the two ears of his vehicle, the bull, such as I did every evening at our family temple while the women chanted hymns to Parvathi his bride, so richly adorned in gold, silk, sapphire, ruby, gifts that came from generation after generation of the family. Some kings of Mysore had given us privileges (for carrying the Royal Post, as also collecting the fee when a concubine-girl first ‘tied on her bells’) and thus the lands we had, while the Maharaja of Mysore, when he came to Hassana, had perforce to stop first in front of the Post Office House, which now explains why my mother, not finding enough room in our ancestral home for her lying-in, had to be transported to the dharmasala, room number one, and hence when my father was offering the presented ‘half-cut lemon on the knife’ to His Highness (and this was Krishna Raja Wodeyer, the Vedantin-king), my mother was so vitally shaken she threw me into the world, hence instead of being named Ramakrishna, like my grandfather, I was simply called Raja.
Now then, I had also to be educated in the modern manner, consequently every summer (duly accompanied) I started going to my father who was in Hyderabad — five hundred long miles away, and Hyderabad, because one of my grand-uncles (I should not even talk loudly of it), a handsome man, loved a beautiful concubine, and to give her joy pilfered bits of royal money from the local treasury of which he was the guardian, therefore with the help of my grandmother who gave him some of her own jewels, he slipped out of Mysore State before the Law came to his door, and being handsome and very clever, he became Prime Minister in a neighbouring state, where again, having seduced the queen, and followed by the wrath of the king, my grand-uncle, as courageous as he was handsome, escaped on his white charger, followed by his brave Sikh bodyguard (who, the family says, slew ten soldiers before my grand-uncle was across the river and safe) — and thus on to Hyderabad, where he became a lawyer, and an adviser to many of the Hyderabad rich, so that my father came to him to stay with and to study, and I went of course in the wake of my father.
And this was how a South Indian Brahmin boy entered the Madrassa-Aliya, a school meant mainly for Muslim noblemen, the only Hindu in my class. But when summer rose, and the heat began blinking on the black boulders of Hyderabad, the family took the long trip back from the city of Lakshmi (for the real name of Hyderabad is Bhagyanagar, City of Riches) to the town of the Lady Beautiful. And from there we went further still by bullock cart to the Malnad hills, where amidst rice fields and coffee plantations, we lived under the protection of Goddess Kenchamma, on the bank of the virgin Hemavathy. And when summer ended, we came by bullock cart to Hassana, and by horse cab to Arasikere, where we took the metre-gauge express to Bangalore, and again after a night here, the train took us down the ghats, and then on to the parched and cotton lands of Andhra, while the broad-gauge trains, going so fast and looking so big, took us to Wadi, and here we changed trains again in the middle of the night, and by morning we saw the dust and the minarets of Hyderabad. And I would now go back to my Madrassa-Aliya, whose headmaster was a burly Englishman called Durand, but above him was the great Principal, Kenneth Burnet, so mysterious, and, for an Englishman, riding a bicycle! I was to learn later that he had to divorce his wife, and with two or three sons at school, he could not afford more than this green B.S.A. When my father, who was teaching English under him, bought me a bicycle, Burnet was surprised. ‘Oh, and I cannot even buy one for my sons,’ said Burnet. But I was mighty proud of my shining slick machine of locomotion.