She felt the weight of the mountain of skulls beneath her. She counted each one, just as she had once counted the leaves in the trees in the forest, wondering how many had died due to her folly. It had terrified her for so many years but dispassion stilled her now as she went through the count, rattling the names of each skull she could remember, names she had once defiantly hurled at Krishna as accusations. So often she had counted the names of her son thus, one after another, one hundred times.
She felt like the mountain would draw her into itself, that she would become the crowning skull on this heap of death minutes or hours from now. That thing which was unfurling in her belly now spread out of her encompassing each skull, each person, each thing, living and dead in the world. It embraced her sons, dead and gone, her husband, at the precipice of death; it embraced the sons of Pandu and Pandu himself, who had once been kind to her, and she wished them well, those who now sat upon the throne of Hastinapur, she wished them the peace she knew would remain elusive for them; it embraced her brother, who had betrayed her; it embraced Karna and Bhishma and her father and her mother; it embraced Ayla, whom she had abandoned, and Kunti, who had never abandoned her. It spread all across her, a warmth and sudden lightness of being, a radiance that sang under her skin and flowed through her bones; it made her raise her arms and stretch them out.
She wished peace for them and wellness but something more than that, something deeper than love, warmer than compassion. She gathered them all to herself, all these lives, all these bundles of being, and embraced them to herself. Once, her grandmother-in-law Satyavati had wished for her that she could be mother to more than one hundred sons, that she could be mother to one hundred and five. It had seemed impossible to her then. Now she felt she could be mother to millions more; she could be mother even to Krishna. She took them all into her heart and held them – their pains, their joys, their dreams, their worries and anxieties, their fear, their suffering. She felt it within herself and she did not flinch. She sent forth warmth and light, the healing touch only a mother has.
It was then that the world began changing. It was then that the world began righting itself. That small twinge of feeling shook and shattered the earth upon which she sat. And that was the last lesson she learned in her life as Gandhari about blessings and curses. Rules and conditions apply when the game is selfish, when the goal is limited to oneself. That’s when Krishna and all the devas can and will come to trick you, to test you, to stop you, because the wellbeing of the world lies in the balance. That’s when decades of penance can be spent in a moment of futility, when the results cannot be predicted, when the gods and rishis will mock you. But something small in service of the infinite, something that goes beyond the circumference of one’s own self and identity, that is a power that can never be limited. That is a power beyond counting. When you bless the world, that blessing multiplies and showers itself upon you.
The earth began quaking. The skulls beneath her feet began rattling. The sun winked out in the sky. The earth began hissing and moaning as it started to break apart. The world began spinning fast, tilting on its axis. The skulls started raining down on her. The skulls fell on her, pulverized against her skin and scalp, filled her nostrils with powder of bones and death. Her toes gripped the eye sockets of the skulls below her, her arms flailing to catch onto anything solid, but there was nothing. Nothing besides Krishna, who stood upright, smiling, unaffected, calm.
A harsh wind blew, ripping against the skin of her stomach, stripping her bare, like Draupadi had been stripped by Gandhari’s sons. Her mouth gasped open, and the air was acrid with the taste of blood, the smell of offal. The wind was so stinging it made her lips crack open and start bleeding. The world was spinning so fast, she was suspended mid-air. Carcasses began hitting her from all directions, splattering her with coagulated blood.
I am not afraid. I am not afraid of the hells. I am not desirous of the heavens. I can bear this. I can bear anything. There is no fear in me. You do not know my will, Krishna. Even the devas would bow to the strength of my willpower, to the power of my penance.
Krishna nodded imperceptibly, his curly locks falling over his forehead, his gem-encrusted crown tilting slightly, rakishly. Even I bow to it, queen.
I am not afraid, I am not weak. I will not go to you out of weakness or cowardice. I do not need rescue or pity.
Here there was no pride. It was just a statement of fact.
I do not want your fear, queen. Do not come to me out of fear. Come for something else.
This was not speech. There was no space for speech in the world anymore. It was just reverberations within skulls, communication that was all the more intense for its silence. Monsoon gusts of wind and sea spray were being spewed out of the splintering earth. The wind was one long howl of agony. The spinning of the earth off its axis was emitting a high-pitched wheezing tone that would momentarily cause her eardrums to break.
Something else.
She was afraid for a moment, suspicious, that this was yet another of his tricks, that she would be duped yet again. She almost turned away from him. But she could see now, and she could see that there was promise in Krishna’s eyes. That which drew all the denizens of the world, the devas, the rishis, the humans, the immortals, the animals, even the plants, into his forests, into battle, into his kingdom. She had thought that hope was something for girlhood, for someone at the beginning of life. Yet she felt it now, old, emaciated, on the cusp of death. Not for the heavens, not for happiness, but simply for the game of life, for the chance to make another throw of the dice, to play once again.
She loosened her toehold on the skulls below her and they fell away. She leaned forward and leapt off the land, into the skies, into the starry night of the cosmos, and stepped into the circle of Krishna’s arms, his hands gently steadying her shoulders as the world righted itself once again.
Life. At the moment of her death, she had chosen life.
12
The world had been washed anew by the time the dust settled. That towering mountain of skulls was now buried underground, forming strata of smooth rock supporting the ground beneath her feet. They never really leave, the ones who have died, the ones we have known and loved, lifetime after lifetime. We carry their bones with us, ground into the fine powder of our consciousness, impressions of love and life and connection. How many millions of lifetimes we wander the world, reincarnation after reincarnation, and how many memories of the remote past, are carried in the deepest recesses of our consciousness. They, our ancestors, our departed ones, never really leave, so long as we the living carry forth the memories and remains of the dead.
But they did not haunt her now, as she stepped out of the circle of Krishna’s arms and felt the soft steady earth through her footsteps. They did not trouble her. There was peace for them and peace for her now in this new world she had created. It was a bare, barren world, clean and untainted, waiting for her to make her mark.
She turned back to face Krishna. He was so beautiful, so enchanting, so disarming as she looked at him. It was hard to remember she had once thought him her enemy. It was hard to summon the anger and distaste she had once felt for him. She smiled at him, and it felt a little strange, an unaccustomed expression, but she could not help herself.
Then she frowned. There was something important that she had to do. She met his eyes. This, too, was a farewell, her last farewell. She remembered that Kunti had asked of him a lifetime of sorrow as that was the only way she could be sure of never forgetting him, never losing his blessings.
What would she ask of him?
Gandhari thought about it. She thought about it hard. She said in a slow, steady voice, a voice full of conviction and certitude, ‘O, Krishna, I may forget you. I may lose my way and leave you. But you must never let me go. You must never leave me.’
It was somewhat calculating, somewhat clever but with undercurrents of sincerity and devotion; it was queenly, to put the burden into his hands rather than her ow
n; in short, it was quintessentially Gandhari.
Krishna laughed, a laugh of delight and approval. His eyes warmed and sparkled, and Gandhari felt as if, after so long, she had finally chosen the right boon and blessing.
‘So be it,’ said Krishna.
She began walking away towards her new life, a life she knew would be warmed by the touch of Krishna. She wondered who she would be this time around. She did not care if she was man or woman, queen or servant, beautiful or plain. Those were not the things that mattered. She just wanted to be good.
Once, in another lifetime, she had named all one hundred and one of her children herself. Her husband had lost interest as soon as he was certain that he had gained an heir, so she alone had named them. Even the priests had not wanted to get involved, so afraid were they of the ill omens that had surrounded her eldest son’s birth. Already their names were starting to slip from her memory. Now she began thinking of naming herself. She began thinking of the vast stillness of the world, of the furthest corners of it, all the lands she wanted to explore.
‘Madhu?’
It took her a few moments to respond to that name. Already everything of the past was slipping away, including her identity.
She turned back. Krishna was arching an eyebrow at her. She smiled at him again, girlishly, foolishly, wondering how she had ever harboured anything resembling a grudge against him. He was bright blue and effulgent. And she felt a twang of regret that she had been so stubborn, that she had pushed him away again and again, that she had cursed him instead of calling to him. How much time she had wasted – years, decades, a whole lifetime. And there was a river running through this world also, a river of regret and remorse, of wistfulness, because that, too, we carry with us; that, too, never leaves us.
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
She frowned.
Oh yes, I have to die.
#
In the Forest, Now
Finally, the morning came. Gandhari wandered through the forest in search of the others. The wildlife had run away, escorted by the acolytes of the ashram to safety. She found them at the edge of the river. Only Dhritarashthra and Kunti remained. Sanjaya had been dispatched to safety along with the others, to give the news of their passing. Later he would say that the forest fire had started auspiciously from the fire of the sacrificial yajna performed in the morning. That was the omen that had convinced Dhritarashthra that it was the right time for them to leave their bodies.
He and Kunti sat in meditation. His eyes were closed; he was already lost to the world. Kunti’s eyes were wide open, calm. She saw Gandhari and did not say a word about the bandage missing from her eyes, for which Gandhari was grateful. Gandhari saw Kunti’s face for the first time, a face worn by age, by tragedy, by the five children she had raised and the one she had abandoned. Gandhari had not dared to look at her own face, to see how time and life had ravaged what once was a beautiful face, a clean face, a face upon which so many dreams and ideals had been written and then washed away.
They looked at each silently for a long moment. No smile was exchanged between them. They had gone through too much for that, individually and together. They would never be friends but they were not enemies either. Perhaps they were just sisters, who knew each other as no one else would have known them, who understood the mysteries of each other that others, even husbands and children, could not crack.
The bards, when they started singing tales of the great war, would not sing of them. They would never be at the centre of the story of the heroic Pandavas and the wicked Kauravas. They lacked the flamboyant defiance of Draupadi. They were women of a different era, who could draw down the gods into the affairs and world of the mortals, who could stack the deck in favour of their sons, who plotted behind closed doors, whose power was no less potent for being less visible, less obvious. They had fought with the weapons at their disposal – their wit, their devotion, their virtue, their strength as mothers and wives first and foremost.
At least they each knew what the other had accomplished.
Gandhari sat between Kunti and Dhritarashthra. She wondered what it had been like for Kunti when Pandu had died, when she had walked away from the funeral pyre to look after her own children and those of her co-wife, that beautiful, flighty dim-witted woman who Gandhari had thought was no match for the steel and brains of Kunti. What it was to choose the messiness of life, responsibility, dealing with the dirt and mud of the real world, instead of martyrdom, instead of escape that was as illusory as it was alluring. To be something more than an ideal.
Gandhari sat but she did not close her eyes. When she reached out to take the hand next to her, it was not her husband’s, it was her sister-in-law’s. Dhritarashthra was oblivious to her presence. He was at the doorway of the heavens and no longer felt the need for her. Her work was done.
When the fire came to the edge of her sari, when the first fingers of flame licked at her hungrily, Gandhari was not in prayer, she was not in contemplation. There was only the sound of laughter, floating away as light and carefree as a scrap of cloth on a breeze.
GLOSSARY OF NAMES
Arjuna – Third of the Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu, rivals to the sons of Gandhari.
Ayla – A maidservant of Gandhari, who followed her from Gandhara to Hastinapur.
Bhima – Second of the Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu, rivals to the sons of Gandhari.
Bhishma – The venerated patriarch and protector of the throne of Hastinapur. He took a vow of celibacy so that his father could marry Satyavati and her descendants would inherit the throne. Despite not having his own heirs, Bhishma remained loyal to the throne and protector of the Kuru clan for the rest of his life.
Dhritarashthra – Blind at birth, destined to never be king, the husband of Gandhari.
Draupadi – Wife to the five Pandavas.
Duryodhana – Gandhari’s son; the first-born of one hundred sons and one daughter born to Gandhari.
Dvaipayana Veda Vyasa – the compiler of the Vedas, the author of the Mahabharata. He was also the firstborn son of Satyavati, Gandhari’s mother-in-law. Biological father through niyoga of Pandu, Dhritarashthra and Vidura. He blessed Gandhari to bear 100 sons.
Karna – Best friend and crucial ally to Duryodhana, Kunti’s firstborn son.
Kunti – First wife of Pandu, sister-in-law and rival to Gandhari.
Krishna – An avatar of Lord Vishnu
Kutili – Maidservant to Dhritarashthra.
Madri – Second wife of Pandu.
Nakula – One of the Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu, rivals to the sons of Gandhari.
Pandu – Brother-in-law to Gandhari, the crowned king of Hastinapur.
Sahadeva – One of the Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu, rivals to the sons of Gandhari.
Satyavati – Grandmother-in-law to Gandhari; married to Shantanu, the king of Hastinapur, and grandmother to Pandu and Dhritarashthra.
Shakuni – Gandhari’s brother.
Subala – Gandhari’s father.
Vidura – Brother-in-law to Gandhari; brother of Pandu and Dhritarashthra.
Yudhishthira – First of the Pandavas, the five sons of Pandu, rivals to the sons of Gandhari.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the blessings and guidance of my diksha guru, Bhagavat Bhaskar Krishna Chandra Sastri-ji, popularly known as Thakurji, and my siksha guru, Sri Nagendra S. Rao. One Sunday afternoon, when I was struggling with the last third of the book, Thakurji remarked to me that Gandhari was of a high stature and someone who Krishna respected tremendously. This single line inspired me to power through the rest of the manuscript with this one rasa in mind. Any knowledge that I have comes through the grace of my siksha guru, Sri Nagendra S. Rao; anything I have slightly understood about dharma, sadhana and the worldview and ethos of the Itihaasa comes from him. Any merits to be found in this book are due to their teachings and blessings; the errors are mine and mine alone.
Sri Rajiv Malhotra has been a mentor, role model and dear friend for over fifteen years. It was with his encouragement that I co-edited my first book, Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America. His wholehearted support and promotion of my story made this book possible. He devoted time and energy from his incredibly hectic schedule to help make my dream come true. His belief in me helped me believe in myself.
Jennifer Hawkins, my book coach from the Author Accelerator program, is a mentor, editor, coach, cheerleader and friend all rolled into one. She patiently guided me back every time I wrote my way into a corner or lost the thread of the story. She kept me motivated and gave me the confidence to work my way through the book. Most of all, she supported my vision of the story I wanted to tell and helped me tell that story – that unique sensitivity and empathy is really what made writing this book possible. Without her, I would not have had the will or confidence to write week after week. Without her, this book may never have come to be.
I am grateful to Nandita Aggarwal and Himanjali Sankar for their editorial vision and for transforming the raw manuscript into a proper novel.
Prof. Thomas McNeely, whose course I took through the Stanford University online creative writing program, was the one who inspired me to write this story as a novel. From my seed of an idea, he saw the story it would grow into before I did. Prof. Otis Haschemeyer, whose course I was fortunate to participate in through the support of the Indic Academy run under the auspices of Sri Hari Kiran Vadlamani, was my first writing teacher since my college days long ago, and he taught me the importance of both being a good writer and a good storyteller. His words often come back to me as I write today, years after I first took his class. Sri Hari Kiran Vadlamani and the Indic Academy, a platform and incubator for budding writers, thinkers and artists, have been instrumental in my taking the first steps as a novelist.
Although my father passed away before I even started the first draft of this story, I firmly believe it was his blessings that saw this through. The grief of his passing, the coming to face-to-face with death and one’s own mortality, was the emotional backdrop for the entire story. I wanted more than anything to be able to give him a peaceful passing to a better world, and this fueled my desire to find a happy or at least redemptive ending to Gandhari’s story.
The Curse of Gandhari Page 31
