Rebel Queen Read online

  Before Mother’s death, the excitement of leaving our house would have prompted me to ask where we were going, but now I simply rose and put on my sandals. There was no question of whether or not to change into a colorful sari.

  I met Grandmother at the door; a palanquin had been arranged and she waited for me to climb inside it, then followed behind me and yanked the curtain shut. I have never enjoyed dark, enclosed spaces, but there was no other way of traveling. Women were to be neither seen nor heard, and so we lived like shadows outside of our homes.

  If I had been riding with anyone else, I would have peeked out from behind the curtain to see what was happening as we moved along the streets. Instead, I sat huddled against the wooden boards, wondering where we were going.

  “Sit straight, and don’t speak when we arrive.”

  When I didn’t reply, Grandmother became irritated.

  “You may think my son loves you, but don’t confuse love with duty.”

  I thought she should take her own advice, since I felt certain that Father couldn’t possibly love anyone as cruel as Grandmother, but I continued to keep my silence, which irritated Dadi-ji even more.

  “I hope you’re listening to me, beti, because what I’m about to say I’m not going to repeat. There is nothing special or different about you. You’re going to live, and cry, and suffer the same way that every woman suffers. And where we’re going,” she warned, “the mind won’t be very useful.”

  She didn’t say anything more, and I didn’t try to puzzle out what she meant. I was too young to have understood anyway, even if she had explained it to me.

  When I heard the deep bellowing of conch shells, I knew where we were. There is nothing else like the sound of a temple; the trumpeting shells, the trickling fountain water, the ringing bells.

  “The Temple of Annapurna,” one of the palanquin bearers shouted, and we were lowered to the ground. When I stepped outside, I saw that we were in a high-walled courtyard with a dozen other women who were paying their bearers for transportation. Grandmother paid our men from a purse she carried tucked into the waist of her white sari; then we left our sandals on the smooth marble floor and climbed fifteen steps to Annapurna’s temple.

  I had never been to this temple before, so everything looked foreign and new. Not just the elaborate bronze lamps that illuminated our way to the top, even though it was daylight, but the giant metal pots housing sacred tulsi plants and the colored cages housing jewel-toned parrots. Someone had spent a great deal of money ensuring the temple was well maintained. The marble steps were clean, and fresh incense burned from costly hanging censers where the image of the goddess Annapurna resided.

  Since there are three hundred and thirty million gods in our religion, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that I had never heard of Annapurna. Of course, when people hear this number, they think that Hindus go around making up gods at whim. But in the Hindu religion, there is really only one god—Lord Brahma—and all of the other gods and goddesses are merely aspects of Brahma himself. Take Durga, for instance, who is the warrior goddess of female power. She represents Brahma’s ability to meet any challenge. Or Shiva, the Destroyer, who illustrates Brahma’s power to take as well as give. On a day-to-day basis, only a few gods really feature in our lives, and they’re the ones we pray to every morning for guidance: Durga, Rama, Lakshmi, Krishna, Buddha, Saraswati, Ganesh. Few Hindus know the names of more than a dozen or so aspects of Brahma.

  When we reached the top, I bowed, as everyone else was doing, then took a few moments to stare into the golden face of Annapurna, crowned with yellow and orange carnations.

  “We’re not here for prayer,” Grandmother said. “Remember what I told you. Keep silent.”

  I looked to my left and saw a skinny priest walking toward us. He was dressed in a very peculiar fashion, with red and white beads around his neck and thick clusters of them on his wrists and feet. But it was the unusual crown of neem leaves in his hair that caught my attention. I found myself staring at them even when I should have been looking away. He pressed his hands together in a respectful gesture of namaste, and I realized how young he was. No more than twenty or twenty-five.

  “You returned,” he said. He sounded surprised, though not as surprised as I was. I had no idea when Grandmother might have visited this temple before. But the days after Mother’s death had passed by in a haze; it was entirely possible that she had left the house without my noticing.

  “And this must be the girl,” he said. There was something uncomfortable about the way his smile remained in place while his eyes looked me up and down. “She’s thin.”

  “Yes, but she’s only nine.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, then circled around me and stopped when we were once again face-to-face. “She’s very pretty. With a face like hers, you’d think she’d find a good husband. Why is her father agreeing to this?”

  “It doesn’t matter why. How much is the goddess willing to pay?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “That all depends. Is she a virgin?”

  “Of course. She was raised in my house.”

  A group of women passed us and bowed very low to the priest, giggling as they went by. Their glass bangles made music on their arms, and they were dressed in the most exquisite saris I had ever seen—silk trimmed with elaborate beadwork of silver and gold. The fabrics rippled as they moved, and I longed to reach out and brush my fingertips against them.

  “Three thousand rupees,” the priest said after the women passed.

  “You do realize she’s not some Dalit. This child is a Kshatriya.”

  “If she was a Dalit, we would not be having this discussion. This temple serves the richest men in Barwa Sagar.”

  “And a girl like this will have them coming all the way from Jhansi. You think I don’t know what kind of men pay for a girl who speaks English as well as Hindi? Her customers will be rich British soldiers.”

  I couldn’t imagine why I would ever have customers. Perhaps the temple wanted me as a translator. Grandmother said that this was a place where my mind wouldn’t be very useful, and what could be more boring than translating letters for soldiers?

  “Five thousand, and that’s it.”

  “Fifteen thousand.”

  The man’s smile vanished. “You forget we’re in Barwa Sagar. Not Jhansi.”

  “And you forget that I can easily dedicate her to the Temple of Durga down the street.”

  They stared at each other, but what the priest didn’t know was that Grandmother could be as immovable as stone. Finally, the priest let out his breath and said, “Thirteen. But that’s the highest we’ve ever paid for a devadasi.”

  It was one of the few times I ever saw Grandmother’s smile reach her eyes. She grabbed my hand and started walking.

  “Where are you going?” The priest’s voice rose. “I thought we had a deal?”

  “The child lost her mother and the funeral is tomorrow. I’ll return with her next week.”

  “But—”

  Grandmother turned around. “I know you’re very eager, and I assure you—you produce the money, and I’ll produce the girl. But she’s not coming until next week.”

  The priest stared down at me, and if I live to be a hundred years, I will never forget his look. If you have ever had the opportunity to visit a zoo, then perhaps you’ve also seen the lions being fed: that fierce, untamable flash of their eyes. Well, this is the look the priest had as we left. No man, either before or since, has ever dared to stare at me in that way, and all the way home I tried to make sense of it.

  When the palanquin stopped in the courtyard before our house, Grandmother pushed her cheek next to mine so that when she spoke, I could feel her breath on my ear. “We didn’t go anywhere today. We’ll surprise your father with the good news next week.”

  But Father came home that evening looking so worn t
hat keeping my silence made me feel like a traitor. I don’t know how Grandmother convinced the milk nurse and Avani to keep quiet about our trip, but she had her ways. After all, their employment—and really, their lives—were in her hands. Only a very foolish woman would jeopardize her own well-being to tattle about a trip to a temple. For me, it was much harder. I couldn’t stop thinking about the skinny priest in his neem-leaf crown, circling me like a cat. What did he expect from me? And why had those women been giggling when they went by?

  These questions kept me awake all that night into the morning.

  There are only a few times in an Indian woman’s life when she’s allowed to break purdah, and funerals are one of them. That evening, our family and friends gathered on the banks of the river Sindh. A black scar in the sand marked the place where other funeral pyres had been built, and we watched as the men piled new wood on this spot. I’ve heard some women say that if they break purdah, they feel dread and shame. But even though I was attending my own mother’s funeral and my body was raw with grief, I also felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. I watched the geese make formations in the sky, their bodies silhouetted against the purple dusk, and I wondered: is this what it is like to be a man? I stood at the edge of the river while a soft wind pulled at my braid. Then I closed my eyes, trying to imagine having this kind of freedom every day.

  But when the funeral pyre was complete, I felt as cold and insignificant as the grains of sand beneath my feet. I cried as the priest arranged Mother’s body, feet to the south, so her spirit would know to walk in the direction of the dead. As the fire began to burn, I thought: would Grandmother have taken me to the temple if Mother had been alive? Somehow I knew the answer was no.

  Father put his arm around my shoulders. I knew he was looking down at me, but I was too distraught to look into his eyes and risk seeing my own misery mirrored there, so I kept my chin to the ground. The rising flames felt hot on my face, drying my tears even as they fell. Father held out his palm, but I had nothing to write. There were too many images passing through my mind: the man in the neem-leaf crown, the women in their saris, the temple with its soft piles of red kunkuma, a powder made from dried turmeric for devotees to smear across their foreheads as a sign of devotion. I tried forcing my thoughts back to Mother and two images came; one of her in the garden picking tulsi—called holy basil by some—for our altar, and one of the little tortoiseshell brushes she used to line her eyes with kohl in the mornings. Then the images of the temple came back to me, and I felt an overwhelming sense of dread.

  When Father’s hand remained outstretched, I took it quickly and wrote, “Please don’t send me to work in the temple.”

  “What temple?”

  “Where Dadi-ji took me yesterday. I don’t want to work for soldiers. Please, Pita-ji. I want to stay with you.”

  Father looked across the burning pyre at Grandmother, and when her eyes met mine, I knew she realized what I had done.

  It didn’t matter that our neighbors had gathered in our courtyard or that half of Barwa Sagar was outside. There was never a bigger fight in our house. The walls seemed to shake with Father’s bellowing and Grandmother’s shrieking, both sounds incoherent with rage. I hid in my room, and Aunt came to sit with me.

  “Did she really take you to the temple, Sita?” she asked.

  “Yes. The priest said he’d pay thirteen thousand rupees. Do you know what that means?”

  Aunt nodded, her eyes closed, but she didn’t explain. We listened to the fighting until suddenly, my door swung open, and Father pointed to my diary. I fetched it from its shelf and gave it to him, unsure whether I was supposed to write in it, or if he was.

  A moment later Grandmother appeared, and Father took a pen from my desk. On an empty page in the diary he wrote, “Every person here bears witness to the fact that if something should ever happen to me, neither of my daughters shall ever”—and he underlined the word ever—“become devadasis. There is no money for a dowry fortune large enough to find them both suitable husbands. So tomorrow, I begin training with Sita for a position in the Durga Dal.”

  Since Grandmother couldn’t read or write, she looked to Aunt for a translation. When she heard what he had written, she sucked in her breath.

  “The Durga Dal is the most elite group of women in this kingdom! No woman in Barwa Sagar has ever become a Durgavasi,” she said.

  My father’s nostrils flared. He might not have heard her words, but he understood her meaning.

  Only ten women are chosen for this role. “You want Sita to become one of the women who not only guard the rani but entertain her?” She took the pen from Father’s hand and handed it to Aunt. “Ask him what will happen if she fails. Ask him!”

  Aunt wrote the question in her small, neat handwriting.

  “She will not fail,” Father wrote back. “She has me and she has our neighbor, Shivaji. We will train her.”

  As soon as Aunt relayed this message, the color rose on Grandmother’s cheeks.

  “They haven’t held a trial for a new member in three years. You don’t have the time for this!” She instructed Aunt to write. “What about a new wife? A woman who can raise your baby and give this family an heir?”

  Father replied, “Until Sita becomes a member of the Durga Dal, I will never consider remarrying. Ever.”

  He put down the pen. The decision was final.

  From this moment, Grandmother began to pretend that I didn’t exist. And since she could only communicate through crude signs to Father, our house became extremely silent. I’d like to tell you that this was ideal, that it gave me more freedom, but as anyone who’s ever lived inside a house of eggshells knows, nothing is more fragile.

  In the mornings when Avani came to help me dress, there was no more laughter. Grandmother had told her I was a shameless child, and whether or not Avani believed this, we no longer shared happy moments together. But I watched her with Anuja, and the tenderness she showed my baby sister made me understand that if I had been younger, more pliable, less shameless, things might have been different. Eventually, I grew so accustomed to the silence in our house that I became like a frozen stream—hard and impenetrable on the outside, but secretly bursting with life within.

  Chapter Four

  1846

  Father honestly believed I would be accepted into the rani’s Durga Dal and become a member of the elite Royal Guard. True to his word, he enlisted our neighbor Shivaji to help prepare me for the day when one of the rani’s Durgavasi retired. It could happen in a month or in five years—we didn’t know—but whenever it occurred, I had to be ready, for the rani always had ten women protecting her, and as soon as one retired a trial would immediately be held to find her replacement.

  Although Shivaji had three sons at home, he came to our house for several hours each day to train me. I was the only child in our village rising before dawn to begin lessons in poetry, Sanskrit, English, Hindi, and all of the martial skills the Durga Dal required: swordsmanship, shooting, fighting, archery. Before we began my mind was filled with the swashbuckling tales I had read with Father: The Three Musketeers and ballads about Robin Hood. I wore a new pair of nagra slippers for my first day of training: they were plain leather with simple red and gold lotus designs, but I thought they were the most exotic things I’d ever seen.

  “You see these thick leather soles?” my father wrote, turning the shoes over when he presented them to me. “These will keep you from slipping.”

  “Can I wear these every day?” I couldn’t believe my luck.

  “Yes. Especially when it’s raining.”

  “And what about those?” I pointed to a green angarkha he’d brought in with the shoes; a cotton, knee-length shirt that was fitted at the waist.

  “Yes. And these churidars,” he said, holding up a pair of green pants. I had never worn pants before. They were tight at the ankles and waist, but loose and air
y in the legs for quick movement. With a white piece of cloth, or muretha, tied around my head to keep the sweat from dripping into my eyes, I felt powerful.

  But the truth of it was far different: nothing is less glamorous than being woken from your bed in the predawn chill to set up a target and shoot arrows at it not once, but a hundred, even two hundred times, until all of your shots hit their mark. In the summers, the heat in my village was suffocating. In the winters, when the wind blew like a river of cold air, I could feel it in my bones, no matter how many layers I would dress myself in. When you’re standing in an open courtyard with a frozen scimitar in your hands, fighting against a man who is more than three times your size, there is very little that feels like something out of The Three Musketeers. It is hard, grueling work.

  But I learned how to fight using only a stick. And how to sever a man’s head with a single stroke of my sword. And in case I was ever rendered weaponless, I learned how to defend myself with punches, kicks, choke holds, and shoulder grabs. Day after day I practiced these moves until they came as effortlessly to me as walking or running.

  And over several years, I metamorphosed from Sita the child into someone else. At first, the changes were subtle. Muscles appeared in my arms and legs that had never been defined before. My hands, which had once been full and soft, grew strong and callused. Then, the physical changes became more obvious. My waist grew narrower, my cheeks more hollow. The roundness of childhood was gone. In its place was a tall, lean girl who could carry heavy rocks from one end of the courtyard to another, morning after morning, and still not feel fatigued. She was a girl who could swing a metal sword, carry a man’s burden of wheat on her back, and lift multiple buckets of water with both arms. Sita the child could do none of these things. She’d been an average girl with average strength. Now, I was probably the strongest woman in Barwa Sagar.

  On the first morning I bled, I told Avani, who let Grandmother know I had become a woman. It felt more frightening to me than anything I had learned with Shivaji in the courtyard, and Grandmother’s rage didn’t help. I could hear her in the kitchen, shouting at Avani, “Well, it’s all over now. There’s not a man in Barwa Sagar we could trick into taking her.”