The Palace of Illusions

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  As I turned away, I thought I heard the faint, plaintive notes of a flute, borne on a moment's breeze. Could it be Krishna's? I knew he was down there in the stables, checking on the horses he was to drive tomorrow. Until the very end, he had tried to stop the war, to mediate between my husbands and their cousins. He had risked his own safety by traveling to Hastinapur to tell Duryodhan that my husbands would be content if he gave them just five villages to live in. Anyone else would have been furious when Duryodhan mocked him, saying he wouldn't even give my husbands the amount of land that could fit on the tip of a needle. But Krishna had shrugged and smiled and slipped effortlessly from the grasp of the soldiers whom Duryodhan had ordered to capture him. And now, on the eve of a battle that might be the most devastating one our age would see, he was playing his flute! What gave him such calmness, such courage?

  Arjun was explaining to Subhadra the rules that both sides would follow in this battle, rules set up by the senior warriors on each side. It was to be a civilized war, great and glory-giving and, most of all, righteous. Fighting would start only after sunrise, when the commanders of the armies blew on their conches, and it would end at sunset with a similar signal. Night was a time of truce when warriors could visit one another's camps unharmed. Wives and mothers would occupy separate camps in the rear of each army. No matter who won the war, the women would not be harmed. The battle was to be between equals—foot soldiers would fight with foot soldiers, horsemen with horsemen, and the chief warriors only with those who had similar astras. Servants, charioteers, musicians who blew the war horns, and animals would not be harmed on purpose. No one who was weaponless should be attacked, and above all, no one who had laid down his arms should be killed.

  Subhadra nodded as Arjun spoke, listening carefully. Her face was alight with admiration. Arjun's eyes softened as he looked at her, and he reached out and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. How was it he never behaved with such tenderness toward me?

  I knew the answer, of course: I never acted like Subhadra, though sometimes I wished I could. But I'd been with my husbands too long. I knew them too intimately. I was too critical. My eyes had bored into their deepest recesses, illumining every weakness.

  Even now, the skeptic in me was wondering, how in the heat of battle would people manage to keep these laws?

  Arjun's face glowed as he spoke of the nobility of this enterprise, this war unlike all previous ones, by which the heroes of our era would be recognized and remembered. I looked from his face to the faces of his brothers. They mirrored the same shining zeal. Even Yudhisthir, who had hesitated for so long, was ready. Most eager were the faces of Ghatotkacha and Abhimanyu, so sure they were entering an adventure that would imprint their names into the hearts of posterity. I couldn't help smiling as I listened to them brag to each other about how many enemies they would destroy. Some of their enthusiasm seeped into me. I lifted my face to the sky and sent forth a prayer that they would achieve even greater fame than they imagined. I'd barely finished when a star detached itself from the black fabric of night and fell. My heart expanded at this good luck sign. The gods had answered me!

  I should have remembered how tricky the gods are. How they give what you want with one hand while taking away, with the other, something much more valuable. Yes, fame would come to both the young men, and bards would sing of their exploits oftener than they sang of their fathers'. But when they did so, listeners would turn away to hide their tears.

  My husbands were discussing warcraft. Should Dhri arrange the soldiers in the ocean formation or the crocodile formation tomorrow morning? Which kings should be placed at the head of the army? Who should bring up the rear? Abhimanyu begged to be allowed to lead the first charge, but his uncles felt he didn't have enough experience yet. Uttara listened to them argue, her feverish, glittery eyes filled with wonder and dread, moving from face to face, her hands clasped over the slight mound of her belly. Had I ever been so young? I thought as I wandered to the edge of the hill where a copse of trees hunkered.

  And suddenly he was in front of me, Vyasa who had prophesied everything that had led us here today. In the dark, his eyes glittered, and the holy thread that lay across his chest gleamed as though carved from ice. He looked no older than on the day I met him in the banyan grove.

  I felt a chill grip my chest. Why had he come? I didn't have the heart to listen to another dark prophecy just when we were beginning this great enterprise. But I masked my anxiety with formal words. “It is a delight—though an unexpected one—to find you here, respected sage. I'm glad to see you looking so well.”

  “A pity that the years have not been equally kind to Drupad's daughter,” he replied, smirking through his forest of a beard as though he knew how uncomfortable his presence made me. “Perhaps, instead of a box of mosquito powder, I should have given you age-conquering unguents!”

  Easy for you to joke, I thought in anger. You'd be acting differently if your loved ones were poised on the edge of a sword.

  “Would I really?” he said, startling me. “Let me tell you where I was before this: I was visiting my eldest son, who is in some distress. I think you know him—his name is Dhritarashtra.”

  “The blind king? He's your son?” I knew I was gaping. “But I thought he was the son of Bheeshma's brother—”

  “It's a long story,” Vyasa said, “and some parts of it are less than flattering to my ego. I'll tell it to you one of these days. For now, let me just mention my second son's name. It is—was—Pandu.”

  I stared at him aghast, ashamed at how quick I'd been to judge him. His grandchildren were pitted against each other in this fight to the death! No matter which side won in the war, Vyasa had much to lose.

  “How can you be so calm?” I whispered.

  Vyasa smiled. “The life that you're living today is only a bubble in the cosmic stream, shaped by the karma of other lifetimes. The one who is your husband in this birth was perhaps your enemy in the last, and he whom you hate may have been your beloved. Why weep for any of them, then?”

  The ideas he offered me weren't unfamiliar. The sages who visited us during our exile had spoken similarly in their efforts to resign me to my fate. I didn't disbelieve them, but I wasn't convinced. This world around me with its beauties and terrors held me too firmly in its grip. I wanted my rightful place in it. Perhaps there were other lifetimes. But I wanted the satisfaction of vengeance in this one.

  “The war will work itself out the way it's meant to—the way I've set down already in my book,” Vyasa continued. “Why should I grieve any more at it than if I were watching a play?” Seeing the stubborn look on my face, he stopped. “But I didn't come here to spout philosophy. I want to offer you a gift—the same that I offered to the blind king: a special vision so that you may see the most important parts of the battle from afar.”

  I drew in a jagged breath, trying to encompass the enormous-ness of what he offered. I, a woman, to view what no woman—and few men—had ever observed!

  “Did Dhritarashtra accept?”

  “He didn't have the courage to watch his sons reap the fruits of their actions—actions that he had encouraged with his misplaced love. Instead, he asked that I give the gift to Sanjay, his charioteer and confidant. Sanjay will tell him what occurs. By the end of it, he may be sorry, for Sanjay isn't one to mince his words! But you—are you brave enough to watch the greatest spectacle of our times? Are you steadfast enough to tell others what really happened in Kurukshetra? Because ultimately only the witness—and not the actors— knows the truth.”

  I hesitated. Suddenly I was afraid. For the first time, my euphoria receded and I was aware of the other face of war: the violence and the pain. Observing, I would suffer them no less than the men undergoing these experiences. And would I feel any less guilt than Dhritarashtra? Was I not, in my own way, as responsible for this war as he? Maybe it was best to wait for the couriers to bring me news, a lifetime's worth of tragedy encapsulated in a sentence.

  I took a
deep breath. Until the words came out, I didn't know what I'd say. “I accept your gift. I will watch this war and live to tell of it. It's only just, since I've helped bring it about.”

  “Don't give yourself so much credit, granddaughter-in-law!” Vyasa's smile was ironic as ever. Only later, thinking back, would I recognize the compassion in it. “The seeds of this war were sown long before you were born, though perhaps you did nudge it along a bit. But I'm glad of the choice you have made.” He stretched out his arm to touch my forehead on the spot where the third eye is supposed to lie. I braced myself—for what, I didn't know. Perhaps a burst of heavenly music, a lightning flash. But his touch was disappointingly ordinary, no more dramatic than the brush of a bird's wing. I looked around. Everything was the same as before. In the dusk, I couldn't even see my husbands.

  Was Vyasa indulging in a joke at my expense?

  “Suspicious, aren't you? Don't worry. Starting tomorrow, for eighteen days—because that's how long this carnage will last— you'll see every important moment of this war.”

  He stepped back into shadow. Darkness swallowed everything except the unraveling whiteness of his beard.

  “Wait!” I cried. “You say you've already written the story of the war. Tell me then, who will win?”

  “Is it fair to ask the playwright to give away the climax of his play? But in this case, I'm not even the playwright—merely a chronicler. It would be presumptuous of me to reveal the end before the ordained time, O granddaughter who has learned no more patience than when I first saw you!”

  With that, he was gone.

  “Where are you, Panchaali?” I heard Yudhisthir call. “We must go down for our night meal now. We need to ready ourselves for tomorrow.”

  I allowed him to take my hand and answered his courtesies ab-sentmindedly. We made our way by smoky torchlight to the camp. The attendants had raised up a crude structure with a roof of palm fronds that would be home for us women until the war ended. They had tried to make it comfortable with silk hangings and sandalwood incense, and had even brought in a musician who plucked at his single-stringed lute and sang softly. Still, there was an unquietness in the air, as before a lightning storm, and under the floor coverings the ground was hard with rocks so that Kunti grimaced as she sat down. As for me, I didn't care. Once I lost my palace, all places—be they mansions or hovels—became the same to me.

  As we sat down to eat, my sons came in, followed by Dhri and Sikhandi. They greeted me with courtesy if not tenderness, and I knew I should be satisfied with that. There had been so much I'd wanted to say to them, but now I couldn't remember any of it. Dhri looked harried. Sikhandi, whom I hadn't seen in a great while, had grown his hair long. It gave his face ambiguity—male from a certain angle, female from another. My sons were dressed in armor, though surely there was no need for it yet. But for them it was part of this new, exciting game. I watched with fascination as the firelight played on their metal skins. I have no remembrance of what I said in blessing when they touched my feet, and strangely, though I knew I should be concerned as all other mothers were on this day, I felt no fear.

  Already Vyasa's gift was working on me. It was as though I'd fallen into a river, as though I was being borne toward a waterfall, away from the people I'd thought of, until now, as my dearest kin. In the distance I could hear the rushing of water, or was it voices crying out in confusion? Soon the current would speed up, pulling me over the edge. I looked at the faces around me. They were stern and blank, carved in stone. No one noticed my consternation. Each man was locked in his own inner world where he visualized himself as the protagonist of a glorious drama.

  Only Krishna, entering the tent last of all, shot me a quizzical glance. At the end of the evening, when he said goodbye, he whispered another of his cryptic statements into my ear, something about this body being like cast-off clothes, about there being no reason to grieve.

  At some point that night, I found myself outside the tent, gazing at an enormous, coppery moon that hung low in the sky. I didn't know enough sky lore to tell if this was a good omen or bad. In the empty terrain where once the river Saraswati had flowed, I caught a sudden movement. At first I thought it a wild animal, but it was a woman, gathering the wild cactus that commoners sometimes eat when food is scarce. She ceased moving and stood still, watching me with wariness. Backlighted by the moon, she was scrawny-boned, her sari patched and knotted. A camp follower, I guessed, maybe the wife of one of our foot soldiers. I beckoned to her, thinking I would give her a coin.

  The woman advanced a few feet, scrunching up her eyes to see more clearly. Then, all of a sudden, she turned and fled, flinging up her hands in a gesture I recognized with a shock. It was a sign against the evil eye!

  I stood frozen. I knew she'd recognized me—no one could mistake my uncombed, striated hair. Was this, then, how the people viewed me? All this time I'd seen myself as the wronged one. I'd believed that the people of the country—especially the women— sympathized with me because of the insults I'd suffered at the hands of Duryodhan. That they admired me for the hardships I'd chosen to share with my husbands in exile. When I'd looked down on the huge Pandava host on the battlefield, I'd surmised that those soldiers had chosen to join my husbands because they supported our cause. Now I realized that for many of them, it was merely a job, an alternative to poverty and starvation. Or maybe they'd been forcibly conscripted by their overlords. No wonder that for their wives, I was a harbinger of ill luck, the woman who had torn their husbands from the safety of their homes, the witch who might, with a wave of her hand, transform them into widows.

  How little we know our own reputations, I thought with a bitter smile.

  That night my sleep was a disturbed one, but in between waking and dozing I dreamed the last dream I would have until the war ended. In it, Krishna was talking to me. When he opened his mouth to speak, I could see the entire earth inside it, and the heavens with their spinning planets and fiery meteors. He said, once again, what he'd told me in the evening—only this time I understood. Just as we cast off worn clothes and wear new ones, when the time arrives, the soul casts off the body and finds a new one to work out its karma. Therefore the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.

  I searched deep inside and found that he was right. Truly, whether we won or lost, lived or died, there was no cause for grief. The core of my Self was burnished like a new sword. Sorrow could not touch it any more than rust could inhabit pure steel. Buoyancy filled me, a sense that the great drama of life was unfolding exactly as it was meant to. And wasn't I fortunate to be a participant in it?

  But in the morning when I woke, my heart was despondent once again. I repeated Krishna's words to myself, but they sat on my tongue inert as stones. I could not understand why they'd made me so happy. In a few minutes, they began to break up, like a cloud picture in a windy sky, and I could not even recall them. I recalled perfectly, however, the look on the woman's face from last night. What is it in us that carves negative impressions so deeply into our brains? A terrible doubt came upon me as I saw her once again holding up her hands against me: had I pushed my husbands—and perhaps an entire kingdom—into calamity for my own petty satisfactions?

  33

  The morning of the war found me tired and aching; my head felt as though it were stuffed with prickly jute fibers. All night, in between fragments of dreams, faces coalesced out of the darkness of my tent: my husbands, my sons, Dhri, and last of all, a man with ancient, unsettling eyes. When he appeared, I could not bear to lie in bed any longer. Although the sun was barely up and the war had not yet begun, I decided to climb the hill. Last night, I had informed no one of my conversation with Vyasa or the gift he'd given me. (To tell the truth, I didn't fully believe in it myself.) Now I merely instructed my maid to tell Subhadra where I was going so she would not worry. I added that no one should disturb me because I would be at prayer. It wasn't quite a lie. As I observed the war, I would ask the gods to protect the people I cared for. Wo
uld it be treachery if one of them was fighting on the other side?

  As I climbed, I heard the trumpets calling warriors to readiness. The horses neighed in excitement. They knew something momentous was about to begin. I confess: my heart, too, speeded up in anticipation. If Vyasa had spoken the truth, I was to be a witness—the only witness on our side, the only woman ever—to the grand spectacle that was about to play itself out. No matter how the war ended, my role in it was something to be proud of.

  But as I reached the summit, against my will my footsteps slowed. My legs would not hold me up. A great weight pulled at my eyelids. I sat down—I didn't know whether on a rock or the bare ground. I saw and heard nothing. I did not feel the sun beating down on me. As I was pulled from the state I'd always thought of as consciousness, I realized that the role I would play now had nothing to do with Panchaali's pride. The force that was entering me—I felt its pounding roughness in every cell of my body—would use me for its purpose. Too late, I was afraid.

  For the rest of the war, I climbed the hill each morning and passed into this state—for want of a better word, I call it a trance. All day, I experienced neither hunger nor thirst, though by evening I was exhausted and could barely make my way down. It was during this time that my hair turned white and flesh melted away from my body. When Subhadra realized what was happening (though she didn't understand it) she sent a maidservant with me, to give me water—for that was all I could take—and bring me down safely each evening. The girl told me later that I often wept or laughed, scaring her. Sometimes I chanted in an unknown language. I have no recollection of this. But for the rest of my life, I wouldn't forget the images that came to me—those that I would try to find words for later, and those that were so terrible that I left them locked inside me.