The Queen's Play Read online

  First published by Roundfire Books, 2015

  Roundfire Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,

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  Text copyright: Aashish Kaul 2014

  ISBN: 978 1 78279 861 3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014949216

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Aashish Kaul as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Among many things that this book is, that every book is, it is a book about chess. Not chess as we know it, but chess as was known at the time in which this story is based. A time of prehistory, a time of myth. Or in a sense, it is the trajectory of the game across centuries and continents, tempered and improved upon piecemeal by countless minds and actors, circumstances, traditions, topographies, subsumed here for my purposes in the space of a single consciousness, that of queen Mandodari, consort of Ravana, the demon king of Lanka, familiar to the reader of the Indian epic Ramayana, and perhaps also to one who has merely heard of it. In writing The Queen’s Play, therefore, I have taken the liberty to assume on the part of the reader a working knowledge of the Ramayana, but I see no reason why one wholly unaware of the plot might not end up further along the path of discovery.

  In the legends of the game’s origin, lost in antiquity, there are many beginnings, many speculations, many lands of birth. One of which, and as Duncan Forbes shows in his masterly The History of Chess, first published in London in 1860, the most plausible, is that it was invented in India before recorded time, and was understood and played by the people of the subcontinent from the foothills of the Himalaya up in the extreme north through the entire breadth of the Gangetic plains to the very tip of the southern peninsula. Why, then, could it not have been invented, as the legend tells, by Mandodari herself to amuse Ravana with an image of war, while his metropolis was besieged by Rama, in the second age of the world? Myth being the mother of art, of literature, it is both natural and befitting that this should serve as the basis of a novel which partakes directly of this grand and familiar setting, while at the same time charting a unique path of its own, even if now and then the narrative returns to touch or pierce through the epic tale, following its own logic and design, positing its own questions and speculating upon their answers. Isn’t that, after all, one of the more significant functions of myth?

  Accounts and ideas that branch out from the margins of history, lie concealed in the debris of so much myth and religion, here as elsewhere cut from the same cloth, may offer us moderns the possi- bility to relate tales that reveal our own face, our own predicament, to ourselves. The cursory mention this early prototype of chess finds, among other ancient texts of India, in the Ramayana lore, takes us as far back as the fifth century BCE, if not earlier. While not much is mentioned by way of explication, evidence, or conjecture as to its origins, the link between the game and the themes of the epic poem offer several interesting parallels and imaginative openings. To me, for instance, this brief reference, frozen in the byways of myth, is both compelling and poignant. For although in the old format of the game there was no piece referred to as the Queen, why, I asked myself, if a queen created the game, could I not write her into it? In this departure lies the novel’s genesis. For how the first prototype came to be is far less interesting than its evolution into modern chess. Not least because at the centre of this long journey is a queen (first entering and then growing from strength to strength to become the most powerful piece on the board) inventing a game which closely parallels the epic battle taking place not far from the royal palace, a battle which she is not permitted to join, a battle where she will lose her king. Employing the game’s development as a narrative strategy in a time period immeasurably remote from our own, allows one the requisite method and space to probe once more the perennial questions of literature –of desire and despair, the ephemerality of triumph and the weight of failure, the swelling of pride and the contraction of frustration, the sweep of providence and the jabs of free will –from which even gods are not spared.

  Some understanding of the old game might be helpful, indeed valuable, to the reader. Chaturanga (literally, ‘four-parts’ or ‘quadripartite’), Forbes tells us, originally represented an image of ancient Hindu warfare, applied to an army composed, in certain proportions, of four distinct species of forces under the command of a king. These were elephants, horses, ships (or chariots), and infantry, their present day chess equivalents being rooks, knights, bishops, and pawns, respectively.

  The pieces in Chaturanga moved substantially in the same manner as in chess, however their scope was limited. The pawn, as is the case even today in the Indian version of chess, moved only one square at the beginning, whereas the bishop moved diagonally to any third square. Rooks, knights, and kings moved just as they do now. And yet all moved only at the whim of the dice. If the throw was five, the king or one of the pawns had to be moved; if four, the rook; if three, the knight, and if two, it was the bishop’s turn. Bishops and pawns mutually captured each other, but were not allowed to capture a superior piece, while a king, rook, or knight could take any piece, but was immune from capture by any other except an adversary’s king, rook, or knight. Then as now, the board consisted of sixty-four squares, though not chequered at first, and the game had four instead of two players, the intent of each player being to capture the enemy kings. From four players and four armies to two; from dice to no dice; from play of fate to that of the will. From absence to the advent of the Queen. This is the slow arc of the game’s evolution enmeshed in the larger story.

  Chess, among so many things, is a sublime symbol of the baroque in literature, where, to think of Roland Barthes, the extent is not additive but multiplicative. Gradually, the theme of every book finds its own especial form. The great surgeons of narrative, from Gérard de Nerval to William Faulkner to Julio Cortázar, to say nothing of James Joyce, went much further with their material, but rarely does the subject, the content, comes to one so clearly suited for its form. For while the game per se does not figure too predom- inantly in the novel, it inspires both the content of the story and its making. So where outwardly in the novel, a chapter may have nothing to do with chess, the narration itself can at times appear to move like a bishop or a knight on the board.

  Chess, by its very nature, employs and develops continual forkings in time and space, thereby helping to sustain a great variety of elements, shapes, and tones, intense thinking followed by swift manoeuvres where the player and the pieces quite literally become one, quest, hope, lament, but, most importantly, stasis and motion, the supreme drivers of life and, therefore, of literature.

  The world is like the impression left by the telling of a tale. Yoga Vāsiṣṭha

  God moves the player, he in turn the piece.

  But what god beyond God begins the round

  of dust and time and sleep and agonies?

  Jorge Luis Borges

 
I

  THE NEED for tales they say arose when the fetters came stuck round our ankles with a clank of inevitability, when our wings were torn slowly by the earth’s fierce pull, when even the skill of climbing trees or perching on a branch was forgotten. And yet the longing remained. For the sky, for every path that wound upward and was lost in space, for luminous summits melting in whiffs of cloud. It was then that the desire was born, to name the stars and see in them something of our prehistory, the desire to read the scrawl in the depths of the night, to form our first myths, relate stories of our hidden, unknown beginnings.

  Climbing up the old cedar near the mountain top, the god Anjaneya at last settled on a high branch, light like a bird but for the heaviness in his heart. Try as he might he could not gather its cause, for in this vast river of remembrance it was as hopeless to recall something as it was to forget anything. Something made him sneeze, and at this the starlings hiding in the tree flew like sparks in every direction, making such a racket that parrots, squirrels, and black-faced silver apes were obliged to join in, a few jackals watched from afar, sighing in chorus just once.

  With the sight that he possessed, he could have easily seen the lake beyond the rim of the hills, circumscribed in turn by a second chain of hills, its water green-black from reflecting the trees all around, and beyond that the plains stirred to life by the rivers born of these very mountains, and beyond that the wastelands to the west, and beyond that the forests of the central and southern provinces, abounding in time-traps and dangers and beasts and conjurers, but also in fruits and berries and resting groves and hermitages, and beyond that the tip of the southern peninsula, and even far beyond into the sea, into the city of gold where the demon king had once lived, how many ages ago, now less than a ball of dust rolling in nothingness.

  But such is the way of sadness, increasing the cohesion, making us fall into ourselves, that he did not wish to remember any of this. So his sight, following his intention, became merely that of a child, sharp but mortal. A child’s vision in a child’s form. He saw thus only his mud hut in the fold of the wooded valley, and the mist slowly lifting, no, moving westward at a push from the light which was fast spreading across the mountains in the east.

  He had risen early, it was still night. Outside, a heavy mist enveloped the hut. In its slow swirl he began to perceive outlines of faces, friends and teachers and demons and saints, long lost in the pit of time, faces that were slowly absorbed back into the fog where now appeared in their place words from the scriptures, all merging to form the one word, no, the sound, for the word was nothing but the sound, the sound that was also the light, light that was also matter.

  He retreated into the hut, thinking of Rudra, the blue-throated ascetic, whose incarnation on earth he was believed to be. Rudra, chief aspect of the Creator Spirit, remote, turned into himself, dwelling on inaccessible heights. What did he propose for him? The two great wars were behind him, his work, so to speak, long finished. Was he to wait until all the four stages of the world had come to an end, to wait stoically for the great rains that would temporarily suspend time, before the start of another aeon? And for that to happen…this was still the third stage, and the fourth again was to be of many many millennia. Aeon upon aeon, a thousand times, and all but a day turned in the life of the Maker. With each such day the universe began anew, with each such night it contracted into him, remaining a mere potentiality. Day after Day creation was made, unmade, and remade, until the Creator too, bent and spent, passed into the void to make way for yet another demiurge and his creativity. This was the indubitable wisdom of the seers, countless consecutive creators painting the continuously uncoiling canvas of infinity. There was no moral, no judgment, no deliverance in this. To act with will in will-lessness for a moment, for all moments, was the only way.

  When he next stirred, he could not say whether it had been a few hours, a day, a month, or a year. It was all the same, for who was here beside him to object out of boredom? Outside it was light. Already a child as he stepped out of the hut, he was now hurriedly climbing the adjoining hill. Soon he was on the slope of the mountain that towered over the surroundings, behind which, in the distance, were visible those brown peaks smeared with snow.

  Sitting weightless, dangling his legs, he took stock of the distance he had covered. He stretched his arm, and a mango, a delicious yellow and red in colour, appeared in the hollow of his palm. He bit into the mango, spat the skin, and began to suck, pressing it gently with both his thumbs and index fingers. Out of nowhere a baby monkey landed on the branch, which shook under its weight, forcing the child to glance sideways, to see it watch him with watery eyes. He turned away and made as if to suck again, but then threw the mango toward the little one, that leapt in the air to catch the half-eaten fruit, fell through the green cover, and was seen no more.

  There now appeared in the child’s hand a peach, which he promptly put into his mouth. Awhile he sat thus, but then, on a whim, let himself fall from the branch, hanging upside down, like those sages hanging from trees for months and years, dead to the world, dust crusting their taut, reptilian skins, ash caking in streaks across their face, green snakes crawling in their entangled hair, staring into unknown dimensions with unblinking fiery eyes. Blood began to rush to his head from every part of his body, and his sight seemed to recede as all the world’s shadows poured into his eyes, darkening them, from red to maroon to slate-grey to coal-black, calling forth the night.

  II

  THE QUEEN is in a temper. She has summoned her help, who is now approaching the royal chambers at the edge of the gold palace with a shuffle in her step. In a moment she will enter those rooms where countless little flames are quivering in the breeze, marking the walls with dark arabesques. But amid this net of light and shadow, the queen will not be seen. For the queen is out in the balcony, standing deep in its curve and watching the darkness which is the sea.

  A glance into these calm depths, and you will never be yourself again. The lady-in-waiting knew this all too well, so the moment the queen turned to look at her, she made as if to bow. Better it was to avoid the mercurial eyes resting on her, not their usual ash-green tonight, but of a black that bespoke a despair which comes only after you have quelled extreme rage inside you. Clearly the queen was beside herself, floating above the void she returned to often these days. Prepare the bath, she ordered, and the help retreated to see to the task. Behind, the sea had turned choppy, and a moon of burnt crimson was lifting from its waves.

  A scent of myrrh and jasmine filled the air. Pale green water poured out from horse and lion heads into the round pool, smooth like the inside of an egg. She stepped into the pool parting the petals and quickly slipped to its bottom. Water, always water, could give the oblivion she so desired at such moments. One by one thoughts released her from their hold, and a sky vacant and pale green, as if a star had burst or some flower had blossomed, filled her vision. Then in the distance a dark spot took shape, moving toward her, first slowly and in time urgently, but unable to go much further lost flight and fell straight into her cupped hands. There it lay helplessly beating its wings, suffocating from thirst and fatigue. The queen felt the bird’s agony like a shooting pain numbing her heart and spreading outward. She rose suddenly to the surface, catching her breath and laughing softly. Colour rose in her face. Colour, too, crept back in her eyes, gently pushing the black in whose shade the palest of green was beginning to emerge.

  Do sounds ever die? The queen’s voice is down to a whisper as she dabs herself behind the wood-filigree partition. Surely they outlive the moments of their birth, like these sounds that grow sharper with each clash of the scimitars. And here she is, alert and perspiring, moving with agility to avoid the weapon that is many weapons at once, that covets her flesh. The sun is getting stronger and the wind has fallen. From each corner of the yard elephants watch the contest. These are the king’s favourite beasts, having led him to victory in many a battle. Yet this is no battle, regardless of the du
st that fills the air or the smell of the hunt that circles the combatants.

  A draught from the sea sweeps past the palace courtyard, and the queen moves inside it, takes the king by surprise.

  The king lets his weapon fall. It meets the ground with barely a sound, as befitting a lost ambition, unnecessary and forgettable. Although her heart has not yet settled in her breast, the thrill of the game, the delight of success, is leaving her. Something salty stings her tongue. Is it her sweat, or is it the taste of the sea the current has left there? Drops have trickled down her brow and spoilt the kohl that rings her eyes. Drops have collected on her back and hips, making the dress stick to her figure.

  Scimitars clashing under the morning sun. These sounds will never die. Now and then they will please and upset me by turn. I will continue to be on this island until the sea is inside me, while he annexes one princedom upon another. She will petition him no more. That was her resolve this noon when the king departed to crush an uprising in the Blue Mountains. She was again refused permission to accompany him. Instead the prince of the serpent clan, a protectorate on the southern edge of the continent across the sea, was to be his ally.

  Now she stands fighting the last bit of despair and thinking of the king relieving his fatigue of battle in the impassioned embraces of foreign women. And she can almost feel his eyes on the youngest of them, beneath whom having first slid a feather cushion with one hand, he has, with the other, bunched her hair so as to open with the slightest of tugs, the successive depths of her neck and chest, which are heaving frantically, leaving somewhere in the extremity of her toes a hint of pain. Meanwhile, from the four corners of the tent, others take in the suppressed moans of this young initiate with a mixed look of jealousy and lasciviousness, twitching at their colourful quilts, and waiting to claw and pinch her at the slightest opportunity. The daily petty rivalries of the harem.