The little Raja looked still more peeved at my having learned that the sitar was no Hindu achievement. I wished to put him in a good mood again, but I was beginning to wonder if there was any subject that could be discussed without its blatantly or subtly denigrating the Hindus. In mild desperation, I turned to praising the food we had been served. It was some kind of venison, drowned as usual in the kàri sauce, but this kàri was at least colored a sightly yellow-gold and a little enhanced in its flavor, though only with turmeric, which is an inferior substitute for zafràn.
“Meat of the four-horned deer, this is,” said the little Raja, when I complimented it. “A delicacy we reserve for only the most favored guests.”
“I am honored,” I said. “But I thought your Hindu religion forbade the hunting of wild game. Doubtless I was misinformed.”
“No, no, you were rightly informed,” said the little Raja. “But our religion also bids us be clever.” He gave a broad wink. “So I ordered all the people of Kumbakonam to take holy water from the temples and go into the forests and sprinkle that holy water about, loudly declaring that all the forest animals were henceforth sacrifices to the gods. That makes our hunting of them quite permissible, you see—each killing being a tacit offering—and of course our hunters always give a haunch or something to the temple sadhus, so they will not inconveniently decide that we are misinterpreting any sacred text.”
I sighed. It really was impossible to light on an innocuous subject. If it did not explicitly or implicitly denigrate the Hindus, it made them impugn themselves. But I tried again:
“Do Your Highness’s hunters hunt on horseback? I ask because I wonder if some horses might have been lost from your royal stables. The Lady Tofaa and I encountered quite a herd running loose on the other side of the river.”
“Ah, you met my aswamheda!” he cried, sounding now most jovial again. “The aswamheda is another cleverness of mine. A rival Raja, you see, holds that province beyond the Kolerun River. So every year, I have my drovers deliberately whip a horse herd over to there. If that Raja resents the trespass and keeps possession of the horses, then I have excuse for declaring war on him and invading and seizing his lands. However, if he rounds them up and returns them to me—which he has done every year so far—then it betokens his submission to me, and all the world knows I am his superior.”
If this little Raja was the superior, I decided, as the meal concluded, then I was glad not to have encountered the other. Because this one marked the close of the banquet by leaning to one side, raising one little buttock and gustily, audibly, odoriferously passing wind.
“His Highness farts!” bellowed the shouters and congratulators, making me flinch even more than I had already done. “The food was good, and the meal acceptable, and His Highness’s digestion is still superb, and his bowels an example to us all!”
I really had not much hope that this posturing monkey could be of any help in my current quest. However, as we sat on at the table, drinking tepid cha from elaborately jeweled but slightly misshapen cups, I recounted to the little Raja and the Master Khusru the events that had brought me hither, and the object of my pursuit, concluding, “I understand, Your Highness, that a pearl-fisher subject of yours was the man who acquired the Buddha’s tooth, hoping that it would confer good fortune on his pearl fishing.”
The little Raja, as I might have expected, responded by taking my story as a reflection on himself, on Hinduism and on Hindus in general.
“I am distressed,” he muttered. “You imply, Marco-wallah, that some one of my subjects imputed supernatural power to that fragment of an alien god. Yes, I am distressed that you could believe that any Hindu has so little faith in his own stalwart religion, the religion of his fathers, the religion of his benevolent Raja.”
I said placatively, “Doubtless the new possessor of the tooth has by now realized his error, and found the thing not at all magical, and repented his acquisition of it. He, being a good Hindu, would probably throw it in the sea, except that it cost him some time and perhaps some uncertainty in the winning of it. So, for a suitable exchange, he would probably be glad to give it up.”
“Give it up he most certainly will!” snapped the little Raja. “I shall make proclamation that he come forward and surrender it—and surrender himself to the karavat!”
I did not know what a karavat was, but evidently Master Khusru did, for he remarked mildly, “That, Your Highness, is not likely to make anyone come hastening forward with the object.”
“Please, Your Highness,” I said. “Do not make demand or threat, but publish only a persuasive request and my offer of reward.”
The little Raja grumbled for a while, but then said, “I am known as a Raja who always keeps his word. If I offer a reward, it will be paid.” He eyed me sidewise. “You will pay it?”
“Assuredly, Your Highness, and most liberally.”
“Very well. And then I will keep my word, which I have already spoken. The karavat.” I did not know whether I should remonstrate on behalf of some unsuspecting pearl fisherman. But anyway, before I could, the little Raja summoned his steward and spoke rapidly to him. The man scuttled from the hall, and the Raja turned again to me. “The proclamation will immediately be cried throughout my realm: bring the heathen tooth and receive a munificent reward. It will bring the desired result, I promise you that, for all my people are honest and responsible and devout Hindus. But it may take a while, because the pearl fishers are constantly sailing back and forth between their coastal villages and the reptile beds.”
“I understand, Your Highness.”
“You will be my guest—your female, too—until the relic is retrieved.”
“With gratitude, Your Highness.”
“Then let us now cast off all dull business and sober care,” he said, dusting his little hands to demonstrate, “and let mirth and joy reign in here as it does in the square outside. Shouters, bring on the entertainers!”
This was the first entertainment: an aged and very dirty, brown-black man, so ragged of dhoti that he was quite indecent, shuffled woefully into the room and fell prostrate before the little Raja. Master Khusru helpfully murmured to me:
“What we call in Persia a darwish, a holy mendicant, here called a naga. He will perform to earn his supper crust and a few coppers.”
The old beggar went to a cleared space in the room and gave a hoarse call, and an equally ragged and filthy young boy came in bearing a roll of what seemed to be cloth and rope. When the two of them unrolled the bundle, it proved to be one of the swing-style palang beds, its two ropes terminating in little brass cups. The boy lay down in the palang on the floor. The ancient naga knelt and slipped the two brass cups onto his eyeballs, and pulled down his wrinkled black eyelids over them. Very slowly, he stood erect, lifting the boy in the palang off the floor—not using his hands or teeth or anything but his eyeballs—then swinging the boy from side to side until the little Raja felt moved to applaud. Khusru and Tofaa and I politely did, too, and we men threw the old beggar some coppers.
Next came into the dining hall a portly, squat, dark-brown nach girl, who danced for us, about as listlessly as the woman I had seen dancing at the Krishna festa. Her only accompanying music was the jingling of a column of gold bracelets which she wore from wrist to shoulder of just one arm, and she wore nothing else at all. I was not much enthralled—it might have been Tofaa stamping her familiar soiled feet and undulating her familiar bushy kaksha—but the little Raja giggled and snorted and slavered throughout, and applauded wildly as the woman withdrew.