‘Madhu, you are a good girl, aren’t you?’ he asked softly, weighing the words as if he were weighing her virtue.
‘Pitashree, what do you mean?’
She had been so young then, less than ten years old. She thought about it, how she finished her lessons on time, how she did not waste food that was served to her, how she woke up as soon as the maid roused her, how she repeated all her prayers. She examined the situation carefully in her mind, as her father had taught her to do. But she could not find any evil within her. Her brothers sometimes hurt small animals, often beat on each other and lied to their parents. But she never did.
Subala suddenly shook his head, as if ashamed of the question, as if to shake off the doubt that had been nagging him since the wild man had come. ‘Nothing, Madhu. Do not mind me.’ He rose and walked to the window, peering up at the night sky, at the faraway stars, as if he could divine them, as if to search out the devas who resided there.
‘Madhu.’ He did not meet her eyes now. ‘The devas are not your enemy.’
‘Of course not, Pitashree!’
‘They are not your enemy. They are not your enemy.’
The first was a statement of fact, the second a command.
Before he left, he told her the wild man would be staying in the palace, to conduct rites for protection of their home and kingdom, that she was never to cross his path or to tell others of his presence. Since then, she started even more rigorous worship of the devas.
A peculiar power started to grow around the palace since the wild man began living there. More and more brahmanas started leaving, driven off by an unsavoury magic that started to take hold of the palace. Gandhari’s family grew stronger and more invincible, yet there seemed to be a darkness that hung over them, too, that protected them like a dark, clinging shadow.
For so many years, more than ten years, she had not seen him. But she saw him now. She felt a powerful urge to run but refused to be a coward.
‘So, girl, you have come now just as you are about to leave.’ His voice was wheezing and guttural all at once.
‘What did you tell my father that day?’
He laughed. ‘I told him what I saw in the fire that day. What use is it if I tell you that today?’
Her voice was haughty. ‘Fine. Then, tell me what you see today.’
He did not move a muscle but it seemed suddenly his face was only an inch away from hers, wet and smelling of sweat and blood that was not his own, swarthy and wild-eyed. His eyes were wide and unblinking as if they would devour her. His hair was twisted into matted locks that hung like limp ropes down his back and cast fierce shadows against the walls.
‘Are you sure you want to know, princess?’ His breath was foul, like a rotted animal carcass.
She nodded.
He turned to the fire and glowered at it. He picked up a staff made of knotted tree bark lying next to him and pounded the ground with it. With each thump that shook the wooden floorboards, the flames leapt higher, snarling and sputtering. The skinny tendrils shrieked like hungry ghosts and flickered blue and black before diving down to the blackened wood and burnt offerings at the bottom of the pit and jumping up again. Finally, he held out his hand into the fire pit and the flames pooled and stretched in his palm, hovering above his flesh just barely, like a tamed wildcat curling up into itself. He tightened his fingers, and the fire folded itself into a glowing orange ball. He tested the ball of fire in his palm by moving his hand up and down, side to side. The ball obeyed his hands instantly, then suddenly, he drew back his hand and threw the fire into the opposite wall hard and fast. The fire splattered against the wall with a sickening thud and spread its tentacles even as it extinguished into oily blackness that started dripping down the walls.
Gandhari and the man stared at the wall, the dripping oil that spelled out a script on the wall that Gandhari had never seen before. The characters were runes, mesmerizing and bizarre in shape and image. Each rune was a stick figure bent in different ways, standing in different poses, carrying different items. For long minutes, the wild man read the wall intently, so close that his nose touched the soot and became blackened by it. Finally, when the oil was dried and indistinguishable from the rest of the wall, he returned to her.
‘You will be the mother of one hundred sons. You will be powerful beyond measure. Even the devas will bow down to you. Your power will be enough to shake the world and rotate it off its axis.’
His voice was full of foreboding.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, isn’t that a good thing for a princess?’
He spread his hands to indicate his disfigured body. He so cleverly disguised his deformities that she had not noticed them before. His left arm was shrunken and shrivelled; networks of fine white scars and angry red welts crisscrossed his torso. His teeth were black and shrunken, crooked and broken. He was unable to stand straight properly; his body swayed this way and that, lurching just to stand upright.
‘Power always comes at a cost, princess.’ He spewed the last word with venom.
‘Power is the currency of royalty. It is only meet that I should accumulate as much power as I can. If I am that powerful, then it means I have done my job well.’
He turned away and returned to the fire. ‘And how shall you spend that power, princess? How?’
As she walked back, his words echoed down that cold, long hallway, following her.
Gandhari walked back to her bedchamber. Ayla was packing her saris and other belongings into a trunk. Vials of scented oils, worn copies of maps and texts, heaps of jewellery, her strings of beads with which she prayed to the devas – all these were packed neatly into trunks. Ayla offered to leave and come back later so that Gandhari could rest. She did not mention Gandhari’s absence in the middle of the night; Ayla was too accustomed to the eccentricities of the royal family. Gandhari waved at her to continue. She perched on the side of the bed covered by satiny fabrics of all hues and colours. She held them one by one, letting the sheer fabric run through her fingers. She loved colours and was a constant annoyance to her maids, who carefully picked out her outfits for her, because she would whimsically decide after her bath to wear another dress whose colour better suited her mood that day.
Gandhari spent hours watching as Ayla carefully packed away her life and belongings, until the bedchamber was stripped to just the bed. In the morning, even that would be dismantled and follow her to Hastinapur. Her parents did not want her to be in any way a burden to Hastinapur, even when it came to furniture.
‘Ayla, will you come with me?’ Gandhari asked softly.
‘Yes, princess, the king has ordered it so.’
‘Won’t you miss it here? Your family is here: your parents, your brother.’
Ayla shook her head a little too quickly. Gandhari watched her closely, the downward twitch of her lips before she smoothed her expression. This is what I will have to become, a woman of iron strength and fortitude, Gandhari told herself as she unclenched a fistful of saris from her hand and let them fall to the bed.
Gandhari did not bother to move aside her clothes once Ayla closed the door behind her. She made a heaping pile of them, laying down upon them, burying her nose in them, smelling her mother as she always did in her saris – the mix of cloves and rose petals and sandalwood. Her mother often mixed scented oils and other fragrant powders to imbue a pleasant smell into their clothes and living spaces. Gandhari breathed deeply and tried to hold her breath, to keep in the fragrance.
She looked out the window, to the river in the distance, the stars in the furthest reaches of the sky. How would she survive in Hastinapur? How would she hold her own, as the wife of a blind prince, in a court full of strangers and foreigners? Was her fate to be nursemaid to the infirm prince who would not be king, to tend to him, to share in his inauspicious fate, relegated to the dustbin of the palace and history? Dhritarashthra. Even the sound of his name was sour.
Her sleep was disturbed with dreams of the wild man playing with
hissing fire, morphing into the form of her future husband, a dark shadow that invaded her, pressed upon her, passed through her, violated her, until she became as dark and insubstantial as soot drifting through air.
The next morning, the palace was filled with people come to wish the princess farewell. Citizens from far and wide across the kingdom of Gandhara came to see off the beloved princess. She was known to them. She would ride for days at a time to the furthest reaches of the kingdom to see how the subjects fared, to meet with them and talk with them, to learn of their lives, their struggles, their priorities, and she would come back and report to Subala and the ministers so they could address the needs of the people. Subala bragged that she would have made a fine spy, better than those under his command who were already the best in all of Bharat.
All the furniture was cleared out of the main audience hall to make space for the crowds. There were still thousands of people more in the grounds, stretching all the way to the banks of the river, eager to throw sanctified raw rice and flowers dusted with vermilion at her as her caravan made its way out of Gandhara.
Gandhari was carefully dressed and decorated that morning. It took hours. Her mother bathed her with her own hands, fastened the jewellery tenderly around her neck, hands, fingers, forearms, upper arms, ankles and waist, combed the thick tresses of her hair slowly with an oil-rubbed comb. The sari she wore was a deep green colour, studded with diamonds and gold thread. It was so heavy that the part tucked in around her hips would surely have fallen out had there not been two maids behind her to gracefully help her carry it as she walked. This is too much, Gandhari protested to her mother. But her mother scoffed with a grin, excited to send off her only daughter in such style. The word ‘gaudy’ would never have occurred to her.
Gandhari was the last to appear in the audience-hall with her mother and Ayla in tow, slowly picking her way down the stairs to avoid tripping over the heavy folds of her sari. The crowd quieted to watch her. She knew she was a remarkable sight. She was not conventionally beautiful, but there was an austere strength to her face – unflinching eyes, lips that never quite smiled – a face that was striking, that left an impression, and in the other sense of the word, too, striking a blow, always on guard, always at the ready to attack. She could hold a room without saying a word.
She made her procession in front of the ministers, exchanging nods and receiving their blessings with downcast, demure eyes. Their advice, too, would now be lost to her. She would have to rely on the counsel of her husband’s ministers. She walked past her brothers lingeringly. Ordinarily unruly, they were uncharacteristically solemn that day; a tribute to their only sister. Finally, she met Bhishma and her father by the altar, where she would make her last offerings before leaving home.
This was the altar where offerings were made to the ancestors, the rishis and the devas. Here she had offered marigold blossoms that she had picked herself from the gardens. Here she had placed in tiny bowls flavoured rice pudding and other sweetmeats she had made herself for the immortals to eat. Here she had prayed, every morning, after her bath, with hair still wet, for herself, for her family, for the kingdom, before her maids would drag her away to get suitably dressed.
She turned away from the others to face the altar, an empty space into which was invoked the deities, the spirits of the ancestors, the holy sages. It was a roughly hewn plank of wood, undecorated, other than a small white chalk yantra drawn by her mother’s hand, the residue of cone incense stubs and oil from the lamps marring the pale-wood varnish. The smells lingered, of camphor and incense and ghee and the sugary essence of the food offerings. This was the smell that gave her succour and comfort, and she tried to breathe it in now.
She did not know when the idea came to her or when she had decided for sure. Years later, even at the end of her life in the forest – those few times she permitted herself to think of it – she could not recall, she could not identify it with precision. Was it as soon as her father had told her she was to marry the blind prince? Or had she been driven by the fury of her brother, Shakuni? Was it that last night, when she had seen the wild man, when she had looked into the fire and that black spidery writing on the wall? Or an answer given by the devas as she slept on the pillow wet with her own tears? Was it just now, when she heard Bhishma sigh behind her, and she thought of that man, his vow? Was it her bitterness against him, or the one who stood silently by him, her father?
Or, was it something different, was it all those tales of sacrifice and great vows, the stories of her heroes, of the great ones, the immortals, this desire to be great in one way if she could not be great in another? Was it a yearning to be good, to prove herself good, to answer her father’s troubled eyes from all those years ago, as he begged her to remember that the devas were her friends? How could she ever defy the devas she had worshipped so devotedly? Was this her way of proving it?
Was it an impulse or something she had really intended to do? Was it a mistake or a choice? She did not bother asking herself this, not until the very end of her life, when it was too late.
She did not know what it was that made her look at her wrist, to the hem of her upper cloth as it hung above her clenched fists. But she did. A dress as ornate as hers had to have a plain upper cloth for balance. That made it easier. She picked up the hem of her upper cloth and held it between the fingers of her left hand, bruising the delicate fabric with the sweat of her hand. She held the fabric with her right hand, pulling at it, testing the weight, the strength of the fabric. It was flimsy. She carefully tore it in a straight line, tearing off a plain green strip of the cloth.
In the quiet of the assembly at court, there were gasps and indignant whispers at what she was doing. Subala whispered loudly, Madhu! But none dared to disturb her. One’s time at the altar was inviolable, sacrosanct.
Gandhari placed the strip of cloth on the altar and smoothed it into the wood with her fingers. This was to sanctify it, to make it auspicious and sacred. She whispered her prayers, invoking the devas one by one – Indra, Varuna, Mithra, Agni, Surya, Narayana, Rudra – asking them to bear witness to and bless her vrata, her sacrifice, her vow. She offered her obeisance to the forefathers, vowing to bring only honour and fame to their line and name. And then it was time.
She wanted to do it at the altar. This way she could face the devas. She wanted to face the divine ones, not the humans behind her. She wanted them to be the first to bear witness. Her hair was so elaborately coiffed and tied on top and at the back of her head that it was nearly impossible to tie the cloth in a way that would not cause her hair to become loose and in disarray. But she managed it and tied the cloth around her eyes.
She took her time about it, did not rush. None could stop her now. There was a queen called Kalavati once who had been singing a hymn to Vishnu when her palace started burning down. But she refused to leave her spot until the hymn had ended, and the servants and her family knew better than to drag her away. She walked away just as a flaming beam from the rafters fell down and would have killed her in the next moment.
When Gandhari turned around, she was blindfolded. Bhishma spluttered in rage, ‘What is the meaning of this, young woman?’
‘I will not see the world my husband cannot see. He will never be at a disadvantage to me. As his wife, I will be deprived of sight by the choice of my vow, as he has been deprived by the fate of his birth.’
Bhishma sighed but did not say anything further. Who was he to interfere with a vow?
She could hear choked sobs from her father next to him. Her mother was gushing at the sight of it, the quiet drama of devotion that would finally make Gandhara famous, give the kingdom its due. Gandhari would have to become a better listener now; there was no other way of understanding the tumult that was going on around her. Thus she began her lifelong practice of picking out the threads of sounds around her, attributing them to the people making them and interpreting their meaning, now that she could no longer see their faces, the language of their bodies.<
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Subala touched her with trembling hands. The only relief was that she did not have to see his face. ‘Daughter, what have you done to yourself?’ His voice cracked with anguish.
‘I will be the most devoted of wives to Dhritarashthra. I will be the most virtuous and best of wives. I have done this as my first act of a good wife.’ And it was true. From that moment, she never even thought or spoke of another man. Since the day she met her husband, she did not let any unspoken desire or need of his go unfulfilled. She would not eat until he had eaten, sleep until he had slept, argue or utter one disagreeable word to him. She became as quiet and loyal as a shadow.
That was the day Gandhari became famous. The news of this astonishing act of sacrifice, this woman of extreme piety and devotion, travelled far and wide. She received adulation even as she walked out of the palace; the ministers, the elderly, her brothers, falling at her feet to receive her blessings. She continued walking without pause.
But there were no conches that sounded, no rain of flower blossoms from the skies. It was deathly quiet in the heavens.
It was Bhishma who led her out of the palace. Bhishma who had once been Devavrata, before he had taken his vow. And then he had become known as Bhishma, the one who had uttered the terrible vow. The conches had sounded for him; flowers had fallen from the sky for him. His name had changed. He became someone else. But she was still Gandhari, the princess of Gandhara, before and after her vow, before and after her marriage.
Perhaps for a man to do something so extraordinary, he became different and transformed by it. For a woman, to do something extraordinary was just an attestation of the powers of womanhood, her inherent femininity. Extreme piety, purity and devotion were not extraordinary to women but inherent to them. Perhaps for women such acts were not transformations but rather affirmations of who they were.
The Curse of Gandhari Page 4
