I closed my eyes and imagined having a conversation with someone who understood how hard it was to train so relentlessly and wait for a day you weren’t even sure you wanted to arrive. Certainly there were hundreds of women preparing for the next trial in Jhansi, the city where Maharaja Gangadhar Rao and his rani resided. But in my village, I was unique.
So when Anuja laid her soft head against my chest, I wished, more than anything else in the world, that she was old enough to understand what my training was like. I rubbed my calf, which was sore from the previous day’s training. “A story . . .” I tried to think of one. “How about the tale of The Peacock and the Turtle?”
She nodded and I began.
It might have been true that nearly every family in Barwa Sagar had heard Father and Grandmother’s fight after Mother’s funeral, and it was certainly true that everyone in my house knew Father’s feelings about either of his daughters ever becoming devadasis, but so long as Grandmother was alive, there was a very good chance that if something happened to my father, we would end up in a temple anyway. You might wonder how this could be, but if my father died, who would actually step forward to welcome two extra girls into their home? Aunt had children of her own; her husband wasn’t going to work harder to feed and clothe my sister and I for as long as we lived, since that was what would be required. I was too old to be marriageable, and since no trial had been announced I was not even earning money for Anuja’s dowry fortune as a member of the Durga Dal. Who in Barwa Sagar would take on a heavy burden like us?
You will understand why, then, when Father became sick that winter, Shivaji insisted I stop studying subjects like Hindi and Sanskrit—both of which I was proficient in anyway—and study horseback riding instead.
“Every member of the Durga Dal knows how to ride,” Shivaji wrote in father’s small red book. “I know you’re afraid to see her on a horse, but we’ll find a gelding before we give her a stallion. It’s her only weakness.”
My father was wrapped in three layers of heavy clothing, resting beside our charcoal brazier. The doctor had said it was a sickness of the lungs and not to expect any improvements for several weeks. But he had instructed Father to take in hot vapor with eucalyptus oil three times a day—Ayurvedic medicine.
If you don’t know about Ayurveda, it is the oldest medicine in the world. It is based on several Vedas—what we call certain texts composed in ancient Sanskrit—written more than two thousand years ago, and it details everything a doctor should know, from eye and nose surgeries to the delivery of a child who isn’t positioned right in the womb. A hundred years ago, British physicians came all the way from England to watch our doctors perform surgeries on patients. They took what they learned with them across the seas and spread their new knowledge throughout Europe. Some people find it unbelievable that the Vedas can still be relied on more than two thousand years later. But really, why is it so surprising? Sanskrit was the language Pingala used two thousand years ago to write about poetic meter; a treatise that mathematicians later realized was really about binary numbers.
Even with Ayurvedic medicine, however, Father hadn’t left his room for two days. I’d brought him half a dozen books, but anyone who has ever been sick can tell you that reading for pleasure and reading to pass the time are two very different things.
Father’s pen hesitated beneath Shivaji’s words. Finally, he wrote, “Where will we get a gentle horse?”
“Give me permission to work with Sita every morning and I’ll find one.”
“When is there time? We study languages in the mornings.”
“And how will that help her,” Shivaji wrote, “if the rani announces a trial next year? Sita may pretend she’s seventeen, but her skills won’t lie. Nihal, she must learn to ride.”
Father stared out the window onto Shivaji’s land, which bordered our own; a thin layer of frost had settled over his fields, giving them the appearance of a wide glass lake. Now that the rice had been harvested, there was little for Shivaji to do. It was the best time to teach me to ride. “Fine. We will no longer study Hindi or Sanskrit,” Father wrote.
Shivaji twisted the ends of his mustache in thought. “I don’t see the point of English poetry either.”
My heart beat swiftly. No one could have been more grateful to their teacher than I was to Shivaji, but I knew his limitations. If you have ever looked at a tree blowing in the wind and thought that it resembled a woman’s long hair, or seen a cloud passing by that reminded you of a turtle, then you were someone with too many flights of fancy for Shivaji. I stared at Father and silently begged him not to stop our morning readings. In a day filled with swordsmanship, archery, and shooting, it was the only time when my mind felt free, like a hawk liberated from its tethers.
“The point of English poetry,” Father wrote, “is to make Sita a better soldier.”
Shivaji raised his eyebrows until they practically disappeared in his long mass of hair.
“What are Sita’s best subjects?” Father went on.