The Palace of Illusions

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  “Thank you,” I said into the emptiness of the kitchen after Bheem left. Whatever had happened here, I knew I didn't deserve it. I felt humbled—and guilty. “I know you want me to drop my hatred, Krishna,” I whispered. “It's the one thing you've asked me for. But I can't. Even if I wanted to, I don't know how anymore.”

  Outside the hut, the shal trees bent and swayed, their leaves like sighs.

  27

  We had many visitors in the forest— more than when we were kings. Was it because, having lost everything, we were more approachable? Dhri came often, bringing with him colorful silken tents that he set up around our huts. His cooks cleared out a compound and prepared feast foods for us all. Musicians strummed on their veenas at dusk, sending their serene notes into the darkness. For a few days while he was with us, my husbands set down the bundle of their cares to eat, drink, and laugh together.

  One time, while we were at our midday meal, Yudhisthir said, in his simple way, “Why, this is almost as good as living in a palace!”

  I felt as though someone had poured scalding oil over me. The food turned to clay in my mouth.

  “No, it isn't!” I cried, startling all around me by my vehemence. “Nothing can make up for the palace that I lost because of your folly.”

  The brightness went out of Yudhisthir's face and he left us without finishing his meal. The others looked at me reproachfully, and even Dhri pulled me aside later to say that I should guard my tongue. There was nothing to be gained by destroying what little pleasure Yudhisthir could glean from his forest existence. Wasn't he suffering enough already?

  “It would be good for you if you could be philosophical like him,” he added. “That way you won't torture yourself all the time.” He touched my face, the new, bitter wrinkles that bracketed my mouth, and spoke more gently. “Where's my sweet sister who used to bully me and play tricks on my tutor, who used to dream about breaking out of the bonds that shackled women, who was determined to change history?”

  I turned away to hide the sudden tears that welled in my eyes. Even Dhri, who had once known all my dreams and fears, wouldn't understand how I felt about the one place where I had belonged, where I had been truly a queen. To be happy anywhere else was a betrayal of my beautiful palace. I didn't want to hurt my brother, who was trying so hard to cheer us—I was sorry, already, at having ruined his feast. So I kept my thoughts hidden in the dark cave that had opened within me. She's dead. Half of her died the day when everyone she had loved and counted on to save her sat without protest and watched her being shamed. The other half perished with her beloved home. But never fear. The woman who has taken her place will gouge a deeper mark into history than that naïve girl ever imagined.

  In an attempt to get me to return with him, Dhri brought me messages from Dhai Ma, who was failing and wanted to see me before she died. As further incentive, he brought along my sons, who lived at Dwarka and holidayed with their uncle at Kampilya and were, I feared, overly indulged in both places. Sometimes Abhimanyu, Subhadra and Arjun's son, accompanied them, shining with unselfconscious charm and his uncle Krishna's easy laughter. Arjun was delighted by his martial talents and went on for hours about how the boy knew more battle tactics than a grown warrior. I felt a twinge as I watched the warm pride in his eyes. He never looked at our son this way, though he loved him well enough. But I didn't blame him. We all adored Abhimanyu. We knew he was meant for great things.

  As for my own children, I found myself awkward and tongue-tied with them. I tried to find words to tell them I loved them, that I was sorry destiny had separated us in this way. But already they were strangers, cool and distant when they weren't sulking because they'd been dragged away from courtly amusements. Perhaps their petulance also stemmed from the fact that I'd chosen my husbands over them. Which child wouldn't resent that?

  Perhaps it was a mistake, but I wouldn't leave the forest, not even for a brief visit. I told a disappointed Dhri that my place was with my husbands. That I could not bear to live in luxury while they suffered the hardships of forest life. It wasn't, however, as simple as that.

  What was the real reason I rejected my brother's entreaties to return with him to the simpler environment of my childhood? Why did I give up the opportunity to create memories with my children that would give them—and me—solace in the long years that stretched ahead? Why, even as I thought longingly of burying my face in her copious bosom, did I refuse to visit Dhai Ma, who had dedicated her life to caring for me and mine? Was it the fear that my husbands would learn they could live without me, that they would heave a sigh of relief at the quiet peace of my absence? Or was it a different kind of fear: that if I gave myself to softer emotions, I would blunt the edge of my vengeance and fail to achieve the destruction that had become the goal of my life?

  Among all our guests, Yudhisthir most enjoyed the sages. He'd always been attracted to holy men. Sometimes I thought that if he didn't have to be a king, he would have liked to be a monk. He spent hours discussing philosophy with them. Their serenity, I'm sure, was a welcome change from my laments or his brothers' silent fuming. Unlike our friends and relatives, they neither blamed nor pitied him. Unlike strangers, they didn't come to gawk at our altered circumstance. To them, our situation was merely a thread in destiny's great pattern, something to be borne with patience until the colors of the weave changed around us. To divert our minds from our misfortunes, they told us stories of people whose sufferings were far worse.

  Yudhisthir loved these tales. They appealed to his didactic nature. For weeks after a sage left us he'd go over them, drawing morals, making sure we hadn't missed the virtues they upheld. I, too, was intrigued by the stories, though I noticed that the things they led me to contemplate were not necessarily ideas of which my husband would have approved.

  My favorite was the story of Nal and Damayanti, perhaps because of its parallels to our life—parallels that Yudhisthir didn't seem to see. (Though later I wondered if Yudhisthir understood a lot more than he admitted to. Who knows, perhaps it was a wiser way of living, allowing him to avoid a great deal of unpleasantness.)

  This is the story, in the bareness of its bones: Nal the Nishad king loved the beautiful princess Damayanti. At her swayamvar, she chose him over gods. One of the gods, Kali, infuriated by this, tricked Nal into losing his kingdom in a game of dice to his brother Pushkar. (Nal did, however, stop short of wagering his wife.) Nal then begged Damayanti to return to the safety of her father's palace, but she would not leave him. When he lost his last piece of clothing, she tore her own sari and shared it with him. But he left her sleeping in a forest, believing it would be the best for her to be rid of him. They suffered apart for many years. Finally, he—deformed now, and with a false name—became the charioteer of King Rituparna, who was an expert at dice, and learned the subtleties of the game from him. Meanwhile, Damayanti, back in her father's kingdom, sent out searchers for her husband, and suspecting this charioteer to be Nal, invited Rituparna to a swayamvar. But the swayamvar was only a ruse so she could meet Nal. At this meeting, there were accusations and weeping, forgiveness and new declarations of love. Nal regained his handsome looks, challenged Pushkar to another game of dice and regained his kingdom.

  The sage telling us the story said, “All through the history of the world, the virtuous have suffered for causes unseen. Learn from Nal and Damayanti to bear your misfortunes bravely. Like theirs, your evil times, too, will come to an end.”

  Yudhisthir said, “Look how Nal never swerved from righteousness, no matter what happened. And Damayanti never rebuked him for his losses but gave him all the support a man needs when in trouble.”

  I said, “And how did he repay her? By abandoning her in a forest. How was that righteous?”

  Yudhisthir looked pained. The sage diplomatically declared it was time for his prayers. I went to the kitchen. But I couldn't put Damayanti out of my mind. Waking in a forest not unlike this, with only the sounds of night animals for company, how frightened she must
have been—and how brave. Because she didn't go back to her parents right away. Instead, she searched for Nal for years. Once she was almost stoned to death as a witch—her, a princess who had been famed the world over for her beauty!

  That's what loss can do to you, I thought, touching my own matted hair, wondering if I, too, looked like a witch. I knew, though

  Yudhisthir was too polite to ever say so, that I was no ideal wife. He would have been happier with someone like Damayanti. She was a better woman than I. (But is better the word I was looking for? At what point does forbearance cease to be a virtue and become a weakness?) Once I returned to my father's home, I wouldn't have kept searching for my husband. And had I called for a second swayamvar, I would have made sure it was a real one.

  28

  It was Bheem's year to be my spouse, and he was determined to make the most of it. No, not in the obvious bodily way, though he certainly enjoyed sex, the iron-limbed Bheem, and his enthusiasm left ample evidence upon my body. If I pointed out a bruise, he grew shy and penitent. He wanted to redeem himself by doing whatever I desired. That was his weakness: his need to make me happy. None of my other husbands cared in the same way. When I lost my temper, they pragmatically found themselves things to do elsewhere. Only Bheem would remain, hanging his head as I railed on, until I grew ashamed and skidded to a stop.

  Bheem liked being around me. Unless I sent him away, he would hover around the kitchen, fetching water, breaking branches into firewood, fanning me with palm fronds, chopping vegetables into meticulously tiny pieces. If I'd allowed it, he would have happily taken over all my chores. He wasn't deft with words like Yudhisthir, who could hold forth on philosophy for hours. He wasn't witty like the twins or declamatory like Arjun. But when we were alone, he told me things he'd never told anyone, acting out with gestures events for which he could not find expressions. His enemies, who knew him only as a whirlwind, single-minded and destructive, would have been astonished to see it.

  For instance: When Duryodhan fed him the poisoned rice pudding, the child Bheem fell to the floor paralyzed, but though he could not open his eyes, he was still conscious. He heard Sakuni's hyena-cackle, felt the creepers with which they bound him cutting into his flesh. At night, the river water was like ink. He felt his body arc through the humid air as they threw him in. He fell for days through wetness into the netherworld. The water turned to silk—or was that the snakes curling around him? Even without his eyes, he knew they were rainbow-colored. They bit him, as snakes are wont to do. Their poison canceled Duryodhan's. He sat up on a floor of green silt. Lazily, he took hold of a snake—two, three, twenty— and flung them to destruction. Someone informed the god of snakes. He rushed to kill the monster-child who was wreaking havoc among his subjects. What did he see that made him take the boy upon his lap instead and give him elixir to drink? And why did Bheem, the poisoned one, trust the king-god with his blue, striated face? He drank; the strength of a thousand elephants entered his body; the king released him into the currents that would lift him to the surface of the river so that he could go on to the heroism he was destined for.

  “I didn't want to leave,” Bheem told me. “When he held me in his arms, it was so much sweeter than my mother's hugs, or my brothers'. In fact, I'd forgotten them already. I clutched the king's hand and cried, Keep me with you. He closed his glowing eyes and shook his head. But before he pushed me upward, he gave me a kiss.”

  He held out his left hand and I saw what I'd never noticed before, a tiny red mark on the back of the hand, like a flower with two stamens, or a snake's forked tongue.

  These were the times I liked Bheem the best, the quiet afternoons with only the wild doves calling in the tamarind trees, his voice soft and reflective, falling away as he stopped to think of the right word. I didn't mind if at the end of the story he took me by the hand and led me to our conjugal cottage. But even then—I confess it with some shame—I didn't love him, not in the way he longed to be loved. Looking back, I see that I didn't love any of my husbands in that way. I was a good wife. I supported them through good times and bad; I provided them with comforts of the body and the mind; when in company, I extolled their virtues. I followed them into the forest and forced them to become heroes. But my heart—was it too small? too fickle? too hard? Even during the best of our years, I never gave it fully to them.

  How do I know it? Because none of them had the power to agitate me the way the mere memory of Karna did.

  Did Kunti sense this, with a mother's instinct? Is that why she didn't trust me completely? But surely she knew what the sorceress told me: we cannot force ourselves to love—or to withhold it. At best, we can curb our actions. The heart itself is beyond control. That is its power, and its weakness.

  My regret lies more in this: recognizing Bheem's weakness, I took advantage of it. I wept more loudly when he was around, knowing it would make him rail against Yudhisthir, thus increasing Yudhisthir's torment. When we traveled, I complained of the path's hardship and allowed Bheem to carry me, though had I made an effort, I could have managed on my own. I made unreasonable demands for impossible things, pressing to see how far he'd go to please me. (Such was the case of the golden lotus.) Ultimately, at Kurukshetra, he would kill and kill again, going against the laws of righteous war not for victory or glory, but for my sake. Yes, I broke the first rule, the unwritten one, meant not just for warriors but all of us: I took love and used it as a balm to soothe my ego.

  The lotus came to me in Badari, where the Ganga is cold and crystalline. This was the time when Arjun had left us in his search for divine weapons. For months now, we'd heard nothing from him. Worry ate at us, making it impossible to rest in one place. Mingled with our concern about his safety was a more selfish thought: without him the Pandavas would never win a battle against Duryodhan.

  I was sitting dejected by the river when I saw it floating on the current. Yes, it was truly golden, just as Vyasa would write later (or had he written it already?). It veered toward me as if impelled by an inner purpose. I'd never seen a flower like that, nor smelled one so intoxicating. I lifted it to my face. I felt my mind slow, my fractious thoughts subside. For a while I did not crave vengeance, nor wonder guiltily if I had sent Arjun to his doom with my weeping, nor remember a pair of forbidden eyes.

  Then the smell disappeared. I looked at the flower and saw that it had faded. Its color had paled; its petals drooped; my sorrows returned full force.

  I knew that the remedy lay not in finding a new flower but in what Krishna had advised me over and again: Let the past go. Be at ease. Allow the future to arrive at its own pace, unfurling its secrets when it will. I knew I should live the life that teemed around me: this clear air, this newborn sunlight, the simple comfort of the shawl around my shoulders. But because it was easier, and because I wanted the gratification of the look that would leap into his eyes, I went to Bheem instead. In silence I held up the dead flower, and in silence he bowed and set off to bring me what I wanted.

  Days later he would return, his arms filled with lotuses. At night, in bed, he would weave them into my matted hair.

  He said (or perhaps I imagined the words): “All day and all night I traveled, following the flower's fragrance as a hunter follows spoor. The forest was black, studded with the jewel-eyes of stalking beasts. I blew on my conch; the four corners of the earth vibrated; the eyes disappeared. I smiled. This is the way, I thought, that I will rout my enemies on the battlefield. In a grove I came across an old monkey, his tail blocking the trail. I ordered him to clear my path, told him I was Bheem of the Pandavas, son of the wind god. He blinked in confusion and did not seem to know me. Perhaps he was senile. He requested me to push his tail off the path and continue on my quest. I bent down to flick it aside with a finger—and could not! Nor with both hands, nor with the strength of my whole body. I fell to the ground, crying, Who are you? He smiled and informed me that he was Hanuman.

  “I stared at him. He had crossed the ocean in a single leap to do R
ama's work! I had heard the story as a child and thought it legend. But here he stood, elder son of the wind god—and thus my brother. A god in his own right. He embraced me and said, I give you my strength. At Kurukshetra I will be with you, though none will see me except as an image on a chariot flag. He pointed me toward the lake of flowers and disappeared. At the lake I battled a thousand demon guards, killing not a few, to get you what you wanted.” He lowered his face onto my breasts. “Are you happy now?”

  “How did it feel,” I asked him later, when we lay satiated, “to touch a god?”

  He didn't answer. Perhaps he was asleep. Or perhaps there is no answer to such a question. For later when I'd ask Arjun the same thing, he, too, would be silent.

  29

  The years passed like molasses, suffocating and formless. We all labored under their sluggishness, but no one suffered more than Arjun. Yudhisthir had his morality to keep himself occupied, Nakul and Sahadev their fascination with the beasts of the forest to divert them, and Bheem his love for me that held him fast in its coils like the mythic ajagar. But quicksilver Arjun, who wanted fame more than anything in the world, who saw himself less as husband or brother or son than as hero, chafed under the restrictions Yudhisthir's promise had placed on him. He longed to battle the Kauravas and win back his honor, but he knew he couldn't, not until our years of banishment were done. Because he couldn't avenge me, he avoided me: my tangled hair, my accusing sighs, my pepper-hot tongue.

  From the beginning our relationship had been troubled, with him blaming me for what his mother had ordered—my marriage to his brothers. But in the Palace of Illusions, for a blessed, magical time, we'd been at peace, both of us busy with things we loved. He'd been the commander of the city, in charge of its security. He'd traveled to the edges of the kingdom to make sure things were safe. In between, he had tournaments to perform in and his other wives to visit. Now once again, submerged as we were in the sameness of our days, the tensions surfaced. I should have read the signs, should have softened my ways. But I was caught in the coils of my own serpent, and no less blind than Dhritarashtra. Arjun began to spend longer hours in the forest by himself. He said it was for hunting, but more and more he would return empty-handed, with a distracted frown. And one morning he left us.