Vikram Seth - some more problems

[mrabe at artic.edu]

In affirmation of Peter Banos who replied as follows to:

> Ruksh - this should be a name of some war-horse, the sentence sound like
>         'he is not a war-horse like Ruksh or Bucephalus' (this is not
>         a citation), where Bucephalus is the name of the horse of Alexander
>         the Great.

This sounds like the name of the horse of one of the heroes of the
Shahnameh - Rustam I think?

There's a spectacular painting of this horse, "Rakhsh" fighting off a lion
to protect his sleeping master Rustam, from an early 16th c.Tabrizi mss. of
the Shahnama in the British Museum: now on the jacket-cover of Sheila Blair
and Jonathon Bloom's opus, _The Art and Architecture of Islam 1250-1800_
(Yale, 1994).

And as an alternative to Carolyn's very plausible suggestion:
>
>>Rat    - In the beginning of a letter to her beloved Kabir, Lata writes:
>>         'My sweet Rat, my sweetest sweetest Rat' or something like this,
>>         the capital R is correct. My Indian informant told me: "this must
>>         be the English 'rat'", but I hesitate.
>
>rat is "night" in Bengali--might, then, be a term of endearment for a lover?
...
>Carolyn Brown
>International Writing Program
>Univ. of Iowa

What about "rath" as chariot--with all it's festive, rathosvava
connotations; plus the innuendo of elephants in rut... [this without having
read Seth].