The Curse of Gandhari

by Aditi Banerjee

  THE CURSE OF GANDHARI

  THE CURSE

  OF GANDHARI

  Aditi Banerjee

  BLOOMSBURY INDIA

  Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd

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  First published in India 2019

  This edition published 2019

  Copyright © Aditi Banerjee, 2019

  Aditi Banerjee have asserted their right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

  ISBN: PB: 978-93-88002-00-4; eBook: 978-93-87863-99-6

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  To those who preserve and nurture the Mahabharata tradition – the keepers of manuscripts, the custodians of the oral tradition, the translators, the artists, the storytellers, the grandmothers, the gurus and rishis who keep alive the stories and bring us again and again to the churning of this sea of wisdom, otherworldly and earthly alike. I bow to them repeatedly.

  CONTENTS

  A Note to the Reader

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Glossary of Names

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  The most frequent question I received while writing this book was, ‘Why Gandhari?’ Why write a novel about Gandhari – a legendary, yet ambiguous, enigmatic character – when there were more obvious heroines like Draupadi or Kunti, colourful personalities like Satyavati or Hidimba? But I have always loved Gandhari.

  As a child, I idolized her for the grand sacrifice of blindfolding herself for her husband, the blind prince. It appealed to the romantic in me, this noble gesture of devotion. As I grew older, my fascination grew for the paradox of Gandhari. She was a queen virtuous and powerful enough to curse Krishna, the greatest of the gods, and yet there was more to her than mere virtue. There was her bitter defiance of and challenge to Krishna, the anger and pathos behind that infamous curse, gathering together the outrage and grief of all the women who lost their husbands, sons, fathers, brothers to war and confronting the divine one who allowed it to come to pass. I also marvelled at the strength of will in a woman who, upon hearing that her rival had given birth to the firstborn heir of the kingdom, struck her own belly so hard that her foetus was expelled, whose grief was so deep that she blackened the toenails of Yudhishthira with a mere glance of her eyes. What an incredible queen!

  In writing this story, my main source has been the English translation of the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata by Bibek Debroy. Parts of the book, of course, are products of my own imagination. I do not conceive of this as being the ‘true’ story of Gandhari. I would frame it as a meditation upon Gandhari, a focus on those essential qualities and ethos of her personality that can be gleaned from the sparse lines of the Mahabharata and improvising on them to conjure a speculation of what her life may have been or could have been. There are limits in interjecting oneself into the sensibilities of another civilization dating back thousands of years. There are limits, too, in writing on the Mahabharata. It is a clever text that tricks, traps and eludes you: sly, subtle, mischievous very much like the Krishna who is at the heart of the story – the more you chase it, the further it retreats; the more you think you understand, the more riddles come your way.

  Gandhari has traditionally been depicted either as a devoted, self-sacrificing wife or a bad mother who was unable to control her sons and was therefore partly responsible for the great war. She has been reduced from a complex, nuanced woman to the symbol of her blindfold. So much of the discussion about her centres on whether blindfolding herself was an act of devotion or spite, as if answering that would be enough for us to understand and judge her. Such caricature does disservice to Gandhari and to the poetic greatness of Veda Vyasa who with exquisite sensitivity and nuance depicted this enigmatic woman, who remains a mystery in some ways to the very end.

  Gandhari is not a conventional heroine. She was never beloved to the people nor did she win the titles and accolades that Draupadi and Kunti attained. Yet she was someone who even Krishna respected. She won the blessings of Shiva and Veda Vyasa, and even Krishna accepted her curse with a smile. She may not have been good, the way we traditionally define a ‘good’ woman. But she was great in her own way. And it is so uncommon for us to find female personalities in world literature who are fully fleshed out human beings, complex and ambiguous, who are not easily relegated to categories of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, virtuous or sinful. In that sense, Gandhari broke the mold. An inherently noble woman of great devotion, iron will and power, bold and brave enough to challenge Krishna himself – she may not be a conventional heroine, but she is someone who commands and deserves our respect and empathy.

  PROLOGUE

  Thousands of years after he died – if gods can die – and for thousands of years more, until the end of time, when the mountains dissolve into the stillness of the cosmic sea, they will sing the songs of Krishna’s pastimes in the forest.

  How he glittered like sapphire against the green trees and swaying grasses muddied black by the night. How he would slip away from all the young girls who chased him, flute dangling from his hand, a plain yellow silk cloth wrapped around his waist.

  How his friends – the cowherd boys who played pranks with him and the cowherd girls who longed to dance with him – would pursue him across the forests to the moonlit banks of the Yamuna river, hungering to be as close as possible to him, the all-attractive one. Radiant white cows would trail behind him by the hundreds like a swaying tail of moonlight across the dark night. Even trees would bend towards him longingly as he wove his way through the forests of his boyhood, leaves shedding their branches to touch his blue skin.

  But there was once a time when Krishna was the one in pursuit; once, he was the one chasing a woman, in a different forest when he was much older; when a gem-encrusted crown had replaced the peacock feather in his hair. The woman he chased was emaciated and old, yet elegant still, despite the white gauze bandage wound tight around her eyes, blindfolding her. She was running away from him, desperate to avoid him.

  But he would not relent. He had come to confront her – Gandhari, the erstwhile queen of Hastinapur – one last time, to prepare her to die.

  1

  IN THE FOREST, NOW

  Gandhari woke up on the forest floor, and the first thing she tried to do was quieten her hunger. It had been over a year since she had eaten food. She told her stomach to behave itself. She knew it would obey her. She touched the earth beneath her. Her first prayer was to the earth for bearing her weight and the weight of all the humans who trampled upon her and destroyed her. Her fingers brushed against the straw pallet carpeted wi
th leaves that served as her bed. She preferred the bare earth, but the men in the hermitage denied her that austerity, seeing in her still the queen she no longer was.

  Where are you?

  This is how she oriented herself in the world every morning since the day she had blindfolded herself, the day she could no longer see.

  I am in the forest ashram of Veda Vyasa, fifteen lengths of a bow from the river. She tested herself. Yes, now she could hear it: the chants of the yogis finishing their morning prayers; the hiss of oblations being poured into the sacrificial fire, the murmur of water being poured into clay pots for cooking the day’s meals.

  Listen more closely. What is different today? What is missing?

  The wind.

  The wind had fallen silent in the trees looming above her. So many nights, for years, she had lain on this forest floor, blindfolded and bored, counting the leaves by their individual sounds as they rustled through the wind, numbering them, leaf by leaf, high above her where the topmost branches of this giant canopy of trees met and mingled. She counted them as she had once counted the lives lost in the great war. Eighteen million leaves, that’s how far she had counted. How long it had taken to count to that number, how many nights spent awake in this forest, an insomniac. But there had been even more lives lost, lost by her, because of her. That unsettled her. She stopped counting then. She was afraid that if she counted more, if she counted all the leaves in the forest, it still would not add up to the number of lives lost on her account. Just the thought of the war that had cost her all her sons, all her kin, the kingdom that should have been her sons’ – stirred up the dormant anger, the fury.

  Focus. What else do you hear? What else is missing?

  The insects had fallen silent too. The forest that had always hummed and vibrated as termites gnawed through trees, as cicadas hissed, as innumerable creatures feasted on sap and pollen and rotting vegetation – it had become deathly still, as quiet as a cave.

  It was then that she started to worry.

  She touched her face, pressed her palms over her eyes, warming them through the coarse white bandage. Her gnarled fingers combed through her hair. This, and the splashes of water across her body in the cold river where she would now go to collect water, would be her only grooming for the day.

  Once upon a time, it had taken several hours and two serving girls simply to dress her hair for the day. They would waft the smoke of sambhrani incense through her tresses and thread gems and flowers into the strands of her long hair, as straight and strong as black iron. She had always insisted on tying the bandage herself. She would screw her eyes shut as her deft fingers loosed and retied the bandage after her wash so that there was no chance of inadvertently casting her eyes on the world.

  She had spent years cultivating her physique, smoothing her skin with creams and scrubs that stung her sensitive eyes. She had learnt to drape her dresses at an angle that made her appear taller, to suggest the dip of a waist where there was none. She had sketched elaborate coiffures for her hair, wreathes of braids, cascades of curls like a carefully sculpted waterfall, artful scatterings of pins and shells. Her hair was so heavy when tied up that her neck hurt, but she practiced her gait, the soft, measured tread, the slight elephant-like sway to her hips, the butterfly fluttering movements of her hands. She did this not out of vanity but with the miserly fastidiousness of a merchant hoarding his wealth, carefully investing and growing it.

  Beauty was one of the few assets young princesses had.

  She wondered how grey her hair had become now.

  She rose from her makeshift bed and listened to her own measured tread, the deliberate footfall as she picked her way down to the river. The others had taken to being barefoot but she wore bark sandals to keep her feet clean and supple. They thought it an indulgence perhaps, the act of a spoiled queen. But she needed to be surefooted. She was determined that no one think her weak, that the only sign of her self-imposed infirmity be that white strip of cloth bound elegantly across her eyes. She was adamant in each step to not trip over a pebble or bump into an unexpected tree.

  In the beginning, it had taken her two hours to walk that little distance to the river, one slow step at a time, so careful was she not to err. The young boys studying in the ashram had taken pity on her and marked the path from the river to the ashram with spiked posts and a rope hanging between them that she could hold as she walked.

  She knelt at the edge of the river, and despite her best efforts, it was an ungainly movement as she lowered herself onto her creaky knees on the pebble-strewn ground. The sharp wind pierced her belly like daggers under her thin, pale yellow cotton sari. The wind invaded her body, clawing at her throat and stinging her eyes through the bandage. Her hands trembled, spilling water from the copper vessel she filled for her husband.

  What kind of cold is this? This is the not the cold of winter.

  She leaned over the surface of the water to wash her face. As she was about to dip her hands into the icy water, a blast of cold air pushed against her from beneath the water and her eyes flew open beneath the bandage. She could not see; but she saw now. She saw the broad surface of the river frozen white, rippled with stiff waves stuck in mid-motion. Her death was etched across that blank white mirror of the river. There was no lettering, no image, no vision, yet she saw it with certainty, as if the guardian spirits of the water had whispered this to her:

  Gandhari, it is time for you to die!

  They did not seem particularly disturbed at the prospect. Why should they be? She was an old woman now.

  She rose and made her way back to the ashram. The wind clung to her, clasped her behind the neck, played with her hair. It would not let her go. She wrapped her sari around her more tightly but the wind was relentless. It mocked her, howling against her skin. The way back was slow. She gripped the rope a little too tightly, fraying her skin against its rough knots. I am going to die¸ I am going to die, she told herself with every step. A sickly dread settled in her stomach.

  She finally reached the hermitage and detected through the sounds of conversation that the others had already gathered in front of the sacrificial fire. She had often thought what an odd sight they must make: these four elderly guests from the royal court of Hastinapur, uninvited guests living among the hermits. They wore the garb of hermits but held themselves awkwardly, stiffly, as if presiding over a court at which they no longer had authority or power, a place where they were now just tolerated guests.

  Kunti, her sister-in-law, the widow of her husband’s brother, the one who had taken it upon herself to look after Gandhari and her husband.

  Sanjaya, the king’s erstwhile charioteer and trusted advisor, the closest thing the king had ever had to a friend, who had also accompanied them to the forest to serve them.

  The old king himself, her husband, Dhritarashthra, blind from birth. Even now his blindness did not sit easily with him. While the others sat ramrod straight and still, his hands flailed in his lap, grasping at empty air, for something solid to hold. His head wobbled from side to side like a bird, groping for sounds to tell him what his eyes could not. Especially here in the forest, bereft of the whispers of courtiers and ministers, he felt himself vulnerable. He agitated the air all around them.

  Gandhari approached Dhritarashthra with the cup of water that she knew he would refuse. He had taken to refusing water in the last few months along with food, but she insisted on serving him. When he waved away the cup, she poured it onto a nearby plant with a feeling of perverse satisfaction. It was hard carrying out the duties of a devoted wife to a renunciate. These rituals that had become meaningless were all that she had left.

  The hermit currently in charge of the ashram lowered himself down to the forest floor, sitting next to the four of them. The morning worship had ended. He said gently: ‘My revered ones, I must share certain bad omens with you. You know that the sacred fire speaks to us. It tells us of inauspicious tidings. Death hovers nearby.’

  ‘For w
hom?’ Kunti’s voice was as placid as the slow ebb and flow of the river where Gandhari had just bathed.

  ‘For us all. Danger hangs over this forest for all of us in the next few days.’ He paused to let them take it in. They continued to sit motionless. Even Dhritarashthra’s movements had stilled. ‘Of course, we will look after you and protect you with our lives.’

  ‘We will die tomorrow,’ Gandhari said flatly.

  Dhritarashthra gasped. ‘So, it is really true then? I have also seen it this night in my dreams! Are we to die? At long last? Is the day finally here? Have we foreseen our own deaths?’ His voice trembled with excitement.

  Gandhari rolled her eyes behind her bandage. What was so surprising about that – that they should be dying and that they should foresee it? Those who did penance acquired siddhis, supernatural powers born of spiritual practice, the ability to curse and bless, to see and manipulate the future. There was nothing remarkable in that. It was just another form of capital. She had been a princess once, a queen; she knew how to build and spend capital, whether it was financial, political or spiritual. Her years of sacrificing her eyesight and devotion to her husband had given her powers, powers she had exercised, capital that she had wasted, foolishly.

  ‘My lord,’ the hermit said. ‘There is no need for you to worry. You have done so much penance all these years. Surely, you will go to the heavens.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dhritarashthra’s voice brightened. ‘I – I think, even if I have not lived well, perhaps I can at least die well.’

  Even now, the smugness. Her husband felt entitled to the heavens. He had been raised all his life to know the greatness of the Kurus, the valour and glory of the dynasty into which he had been born. Whatever else he had done, whatever grievous wrongs, could not affect the essence of what he was, his heritage and his birthright. He was born into a dynasty of heroes and should have earned the afterlife of heroes, in his own mind.