The glass penthouse was lit only by city-glow and concealed lamps that gave an uncomfortable blue glow. Ved Prakash Narayan sat on a musnud, a slab of unadorned black marble. Its simplicity spoke of wealth and power beneath any ornate jewellery. My bare feet whispered on the star-filled glass. Blue light welled up as I approached the dais. Ved Prakash Narayan was dressed in a beautifully worked long sherwani coat and traditional tight churidar pyjamas. He leaned forward into the light and it took every word of control Tall Kumarima had ever whispered to me to hold the gasp.
A ten-year-old boy sat on the throne of the Mughal Emperor.
Live twice as long, but age half as fast. The best deal Kolkata’s genetic engineers could strike with four million years of human DNA. A child husband for a once-child goddess. Except this was no child. In legal standing, experience, education, taste and emotions, this was a twenty-year-old man, every way except the physical.
His feet did not touch the floor.
“Quite, quite extraordinary.” His voice was a boy’s. He slipped from his throne, walked around me, studying me as if I were an artefact in a museum. He was a head shorter than me. “Yes, this is indeed special. What is the settlement?”
Mamaji’s voice from the door named a number. I obeyed my training and tried not to catch his eye as he stalked around me.
“Acceptable. My man will deliver the prenuptial before the end of the week. A goddess. My goddess.”
Then I caught his eyes and I saw where all his missing years were. They were blue, alien blue, and colder than any of the lights of his tower-top palace.
These Brahmins are worse than any of us when it comes to social climbing, Ashok messaged me in my aerie atop the shaadi haveli, prison turned bridal boudoir. Castes within castes within castes. His words hung in the air over the hazy ramparts of the red fort before dissolving into the dashings of the musical pigeons. Your children will be blessed.
Until then I had not thought about the duties of a wife with a ten-year-old boy.
On a day of staggering heat I was wed to Ved Prakash Narayan in a climate-control bubble on the manicured green before Emperor Humayun’s tomb. As on the night I was introduced, I was dressed as Kumari. My husband, veiled in gold, arrived perched on top of a white horse followed by a band and a dozen elephants with coloured patterns worked on their trunks. Security robots patrolled the grounds as astrologers proclaimed favourable auspices and an old-type brahmin in his red cord blessed our union. Rose petals fluttered around me, the proud father and mother distributed gems from Hyderabad to their guests, my shaadi sisters wept with joy and loss, Mamaji sniffed back a tear and vile old Shweta went round hoarding the free and over-flowing food from the buffet. As we were applauded and played down the receiving line, I noticed all the other sombre-faced ten-year-old boys with their beautiful, tall foreign wives. I reminded myself who was the child bride here. But none of them were goddesses.
I remember little of the grand durbar that followed except face after face after face, mouth after mouth after mouth opening, making noise, swallowing glass after glass after glass of French champagne. I did not drink for I did not have the taste for alcohol, though my young husband in his raja finery took it, and smoked big cigars too. As we got into the car—the honeymoon was another Western tradition we were adopting—I asked if anyone had remembered to inform my parents.
We flew to Mumbai on the company tilt-jet. I had never before flown in an aircraft. I pressed my hands, still hennaed with the patterns of my mehndi, on either side of the window as if to hold in every fleeting glimpse of Delhi falling away beneath me. It was every divine vision I had ever had looking down from my bed in the Kumari Ghar on India. This was indeed the true vehicle of a goddess. But the demons whispered as we turned in the air over the towers of New Delhi, you will be old and withered when he is still in his prime.
When the limousine from the airport turned on to Marine Drive and I saw the Arabian Sea glinting in the city-light, I asked my husband to stop the car so I could look and wonder. I felt tears start in my eyes and thought, the same water in it is in you. But the demons would not let me be: you are married to something that is not human.
My honeymoon was wonder upon wonder: our penthouse apartment with the glass walls that opened on sunset over Chowpatty Beach. The new splendid outfits we wore as we drove along the boulevards, where stars and movie-gods smiled down and blessed us in the virtual sight of our palmers. Colour, motion, noise, chatter; people and people and people. Behind it all, the wash and hush and smell of the alien sea.
Chambermaids prepared me for the wedding night. They worked with baths and balms, oils and massages, extending the now-fading henna tracery on my hands up my arms, over my small upright breasts, down the manipuraka chakra over my navel. They wove gold ornaments into my hair, slipped bracelets on my arms and rings on my fingers and toes, dusted and powdered my dark Nepali skin. They purified me with incense smoke and flower petals, they shrouded me in veils and silks as fine as rumours. They lengthened my lashes and kohled my eyes and shaped my nails to fine, painted points.
“What do I do, I’ve never even touched a man?” I asked, but they namasted and slipped away without answer. But the older—the Tall Kumarima, as I thought of her—left a small soapstone box on one of my bridal divans. Inside were two white pills.
They were good. I should have expected no less. One moment I was standing nervous and fearful on the Turkestan carpet with a soft night air that smelled of the sea stirring the translucent curtains, the next visions of the Kama Sutra, beamed into my brain through my golden earhook, swirled up around me like the pigeons over Chandni Chowk. I looked at the patterns my shaadi sisters had painted on the palms of my hands and they danced and coiled from my skin. The smells and perfumes of my body were alive, suffocating. It was as if my skin had been peeled back and every nerve exposed. Even the touch of the barely-moving night air was intolerable. Every car horn on Marine Drive was like molten silver dropped into my ear.
I was terribly afraid.
Then the double doors to the robing room opened and my husband entered. He was dressed as a Mughal grandee in a jewelled turban and a long-sleeved pleated red robe bowed out at the front in the manly act.
“My goddess,” he said. Then he parted his robe and I saw what stood so proud.
The harness was of crimson leather intricately inlaid with fine mirror-work. It fastened around the waist and also over the shoulders, for extra security. The buckles were gold. I recall the details of the harness so clearly because I could not take more than one look at the thing it carried. Black. Massive as a horse’s, but delicately upcurved. Ridged and studded. This all I remember before the room unfolded around me like the scented petals of a lotus and my senses blended as one and I was running through the apartments of the Taj Marine Hotel.
How had I ever imagined it could be different for a creature with the appetites and desires of an adult but the physical form of a ten year-old boy?