MAHARANI
The jasmine garlands still wind around the posts of our marriage bed, almost as fresh as the night we were wed. In the vacant dark, with his head turned away from me, I almost want him. For the night is a dear accomplice. She blurs his features. His lips grow fuller. Softer. His poker straight hips yield. Curve. I imagine that when his eyes open, they will blaze with fire, hot coals ignited by feeling. I imagine that they will burn me like the day we met.
But the sun betrays me. The light taunts me, reveals the heaviness of his jaw, the hair on his upper lip. When he brings his hand to my waist, it takes all the strength in me not to take the sword from his sheath and slice it to bloody ribbons. It takes all the strength in me not to call for my chariot and ride, breathless, to where my beloved reigns by the banks of the Yamuna.
But I rule here. I was never meant to be Maharani. But my father died, and my brother after him, so I sit upon the throne, jewels strangling my neck like a noose. My courtiers are witless, my king , my grief as immeasurable and boundless as the sea. And even if I ran, I would not find the man I loved. I would find a queen.
But do not mistake me. I thought I’d feel a sense of loss when I first saw her in a sari, tresses long and lips stained with red. Instead, terror bloomed in my chest, for when she cast her gaze upon me, her eyes were as feverish as before. I remember that I swore to love her by maidenhood, honour and truth. The drum my heart beat against my chest reminded me that I kept that vow still.
So I bear the trials of the day. For with the night comes the inevitable dream of her mouth. Her birdsong mouth. Rubious lips. Honey heavy breath.
SHIKANDI
For 30 days and 30 nights, I prayed in the bitter cold. I held one image in my mind, not divine, but painfully mortal. A face like mine, with laughing eyes. I willed my brother back to life.
A god came to me, throat touched with blue. He promised to return what I had lost. His third eye glittered.
I awoke to a flattened chest. A face not wholly mine, nor my brothers. At once, I was all the daughters and sons of my house. Don’t believe the priests when they say the gods don’t have a sense of humor.
I played my part. I wooed a queen I didn’t love for a king I did. I felt her gaze slide, slick as a tongue, across my parted lips. I didn’t want her, but I wanted the person she saw. Between boy and man, girl and woman, as indefinite and untrappable as the mist hovering low over the mountains.
But time has undone the knot I tied, returning my body and my brother to me. Sometimes when I sit laughing with him by the banks of the river, I am seized with the ridiculous urge to rip his moustache from his upper lip and place it on mine instead. Sometimes when my husband runs his hands through my hair, I think of asking him if he liked it as much when it was trimmed short. If he liked me as much in my breastplate, bow and arrow at my side.
Sometimes I want to ask my brother’s new queen who she saw before the gods undid their magic, so that I may become them again.
I call to the gods. I lay offerings of ghee and saffron at their temples. I beg till my voice is hoarse.
My chest remains swollen. The gods do not answer.
PURNIMA
The moon hangs in the ink dark sky, a single pearl, dizzy with its own light. Before the sun sunk into the mountains, I heard the men shouting to each other from the fields, the wind blowing the smell of overturned earth to the palace from where they were sowing new wheat. It is the fourth day of the darkest fortnight, and today, women fast for the long lives of their husbands. I know not why - kings are greater fools than I, and often, I feel my queen would do better without either. But I am paid to clown, not philosophize.
I roam the halls of the palace, the lilt of my voice adding to the cacaphony of a thousand chittering women. All men are barred from this paradise today, save the fool with a bird in his throat. It is a celebration of sisterhood as much as marriage. So they slide bangles onto slim wrists, smooth tinctures of turmeric over skin, laugh and chatter and pretend they are thinking of their husbands instead of the rice and fruit that will break their day long hunger.
I stray onto a balcony. The night is pierced with a thousand pinpricks of light. The incense is dizzying, sandalwood thick upon the air. My queen slides a finger down a smooth cheek, eyes heavy with something unamable. I remember, when it all came undone, how she asked if her beloved would think her as well a sister as a wife. I wonder what she wishes to be now, as she grips a cone of mehendi with bone-white fingers, swirling intricate patterns over her bahu’s golden brown wrists. They do not look each other in the eye.
As I pass by, I imagine that I catch a few whispered words. “Would you have me as I was?”
“I would you were as I would have you be.”
“And what is that?”
“Mine.”
Silence. I strum a few notes that are lost to the dark, a forgotten song on my lips. I hear the ring of bangles as my lady rises. She speaks again, voice heavy with longing, bitter with shame.
“Get you to your lord.”
Analysis
By Twelfth Night’s closure, Lady Oliva has discarded passion for sisterhood, and Viola, masculinity for femininity, permitting the cast to rearrange themselves into safe hetronormative pairings. I drew from the myth of Shikandi and the festival Karva Chauth to disrupt the safety of that ending and allow Olivia and Viola to explore desires that the world will not allow them to permanently realise. "Get you to your Lord" is a lyrical rejection of Twelfth Night’s cishetronormative conclusion that repurposes the hallmarks of Indian mythology and tradition to not merely recenter the queerness inherent to Shakespeare’s narrative, but that of my own culture.
While I initially planned to explore this concept through a screenplay, I soon realised that prose might be better suited to convey such large number of ideas in a limited amount of space. Regardless of this shift in medium, I tried to ensure that I conveyed Olivia’s longing for love and Viola’s longing for identity through visual as opposed to abstract ideas--in the ‘dizzying’ scent of sandalwood, as intoxicating as desire; in Feste’s half forgotten song, like a half-held wish. As lyrical as Twelfth Night is, its plot is grounded in the body and I tried to reflect this by grounding my narrative in physicality. The central focus of this story is a body that no longer exists-- Cesario’s. Olivia yearns for it and Viola longs to reenter it, and their inability to achieve their desires results in a state of profound disenfranchisement and sorrow, conveyed through Olivia’s nighttime fantasies and Viola’s fervent prayer.
The word Maharani means ‘great queen’. The title implies power and prestige, the capacity to obtain whatever you please, which stands in stark contrast to the titular character’s futile desire in the text. In the original text, Lady Olivia’s passion is so powerful that neither ‘wit not reason’ could conceal it (TN. 3.1. 156). Her irrational, feverish passion for Cesario stands in stark contrast to the dignified, elegant, dry persona she projects in public, and to her disdain for any other man’s suit. The queerness of her character is immediately evident when one considers that the first man she desires is unconventionally feminine, his entire appearance still ‘semblative a woman’s part’ (TN. 1.4. 36), and that the only way she ends up in a heterosexual pairing at the end of the play is through a supposedly comedic misunderstanding, mistaking Sebastian for Viola. The comedy of this arrangement dissipates once one disregards their wilful suspension of disbelief and looks at the conclusion of the play through a realistic lens-- Olivia is now married to a stranger who she never intended to wed, and the fact that he is unbearably close to being the real object of her desire might not be a panacea, but result in greater pain. In this reading, her acceptance of Viola as a ‘sister’ seems more like an attempt to convince herself of the suitability of this uncomfortable arrangement. In "Get you to your Lord," I expose the futility of this wish, and explore Olivia’s terror when she realises that regardless of a heteronormative quick fix, her homosexual desires have not dissipated.
At the closure of the play, Viola discards her masculine identity for her ‘woman’s weeds’ with similar ease to Olivia’s rejection of desire, but unlike Olivia, her relationship to queerness is far more ambiguous (TN. 5.1. 285). We never fully comprehend Viola’s initial motivation to cross-dress: does she masquerade as a man for the sake of safety? To grow closer to Duke Orsino? Or to grieve her dead twin in the best way she knows how?
I explore the latter possibility while pulling from the Indian myth of Shikandi, from the epic Mahabharat. Genderqueerness is a core element of Hindu mythology and Indian culture, the nation having long acknowledged the existence of a third, non-binary gender and our religion featuring gods, heroes and sages who cross the gender binary. Shikandi is born a daughter of a king, but is transformed into a man through divine intervention by Lord Shiva in order to kill a man who wronged him in a past life. In my story, Viola follows a common mythological ritual to get the gods to grant her boon, praying non-stop to have her brother returned to her. She has no way of knowing her brother is alive, but Lord Shiva (known for having a ‘throat touched by blue’ and a ‘third eye') grants her wish by returning her brother through her newly masculine body, reversing her transformation when they are reunited. However, I take this genderqueer reading of her character a step further by suggesting that her performance of masculinity wasn’t merely a means of grieving, but that the unfamiliarity of her situation and environment permitted her to explore an aspect of herself she would not have been permitted to otherwise. She’s aware that stepping back into femininity will enable her to wed the man she loves, but it forces her to discard a body and persona she loves, resulting in painful dysphoria.
I bring my story to a close through the festival of Karva Chauth, viewed through Feste’s eyes. I chose Feste for a narrator because the original text already implies that he is aware of Cesario’s identity prior to Act 5, his jest about him being ‘nothing'--a euphemism for a woman’s genetalia--being a subtle acknowledgement of queerness (TN, 3.1. 30). Furthermore, he validates Olivia’s desire not to wed, his statement that she will ‘keep no fool, till she be married’ echoed in the line about ‘kings being greater fools’ than him (TN, 3.1. 32-35). Karva Chauth is the perfect way to highlight the impossibility of Olivia and Viola’s ‘sisterly’ relationship, the millennia-old celebration not only intended to strengthen marital bonds, but sisterly ones. Women in both ancient and modern India tend to move into their in-laws homes, augmenting the necessity to form strong relationships with the women of the house, particularly their sister in laws. The very name of the festival originates from the word ‘karwa’, referring to clay pots full of small presents that the women would give to each other! The title ‘Purnima’ refers to the full moon, when the festival occurs, the reference to sowing wheat signaling that it is late October, the beginning of the winter crop cycle.
I choose to maintain ambiguity when Viola and Olivia express their feelings. We’re merely eavesdropping on a fragment of a conversation, which, in the annals of history and literature, is often the most information we ever get about queerness. Does Olivia desire Cesario, Viola, or both? Why might Viola invite a conversation about this? I repurpose a line from Olivia’s original confession here - ‘I would that you were as I would have you be’ (TN. 3.1. 146). It’s the only statement in the original play that implies that Olivia may be aware that Viola is not cishet, and that she may not care. Here, she makes no statement about what gender she would prefer Viola was, no hint as to the precise nature of her sexual orientation, and merely makes an admission of impossible love.
"Get you to your Lord" ends inconclusively, with no hint of a happy ending. While I am not in favour of the idea that all historical queer narratives must, for the sake of realism, end tragically, I am in favour of acknowledging that the queerness that Shakespeare uses as impetus for the plot cannot be easily shelved at a narrative’s conclusion. This creative piece further serves as a means of protest when one considers the sheer number of far-right Indian politicians who insist that queerness is ‘not part of our culture,' regardless of all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps here, tragedy can be seen as bittersweet triumph--here, regardless of the heteronormativity enforced both in the Tudor era and the time of the Mahabharat, queerness is stubbornly present, asserting itself in a system that seeks to narrow it.