The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata

by Maggi Lidchi Grassi

  So many things will never be known: was Drupada insulting only my father whom he had seemed once to love so much or, through Drona, my father’s weapon-teacher, the warrior-caste-hating Bhargava? Whichever it was, he had shot a serpent-headed arrow straight into my father’s pride. My father remained staring at him without speaking a word and at the same time looked inside himself. Any sweetness with which he had come to Drupada flamed up into a great voluptuous dream of revenge. He left the palace without a word and went straight to Hastinapura, to his brother-inlaw Kripacharya, my mother’s brother, preceptor of the Kuru princes.

  After spending several days in the house of his brother-in-law trying to calm himself, my father set out in the direction of the palace. He never told me what he had in mind when he left my uncle’s house or whether he had anything in mind at all. But the gods who presided over the great battle of Kurukshetra must have led him to his appointment. Even in the days when I most felt it was my fault, I remembered the gleam of triumph and satisfaction in my father’s eyes when he told of his first meeting with Arjuna. I did not at first, nor indeed for many years, understand the implication of my father’s story. What I remembered and will always remember was how the triumph in his eyes blended with love when he spoke the name of Arjuna, and though all the Kuru and Pandava princes were present in his story, it sounded at times as though he were alone with Arjuna, as indeed he must have been when they first met and looked into each other’s eyes. For a long time, this was another of my fancies: that Arjuna was a god. Then, when I first came to the palace and saw him, I did not quite change my mind. There were dozens of princes, most beautiful and richly dressed, but I saw him smiling and glowing; he leaned against the pillar with the grace of one of the dancers sculpted on it. I went straight to Arjuna. In my whole life, only Krishna, his cousin, ever made me thrill to the heart like that. Arjuna was part of Krishna and Krishna was a god.

  People were to say that my father loved Arjuna more than he loved me, his only son, and I took pride in this, for it seemed to make Arjuna my brother.

  If it could be said that it was my father’s desire for revenge that destroyed the race of the Kshatriyas, it could equally be said of Duryodhana’s jealousy, or of blind King Dhritarashtra’s folly. And could it not be said of old Greatfather Bheeshma’s detachment which deprived him of the passion to prevent the outrage perpetrated on the Pandavas? Or of Shakuni’s sly wickedness nobody disputed? And what of the long suffering of Yudhishthira, Arjuna’s eldest brother and son of the Lord of Righteousness himself?

  There would be no end to it. It could be said the final loss of Dharma, of law and order and honour, began when Abhimanyu, Arjuna’s son, rode into the lotus chakra formation. This pulled thread from our code of honour and revealed the darkness of night behind it.

  None of this would be true.

  After many long years in the hermitage of Vyasa, when my face had lost the animal look it had assumed after I had perpetrated the final, the grossest, the most monstrous outrage against the Pandavas by killing their sons in their sleep, I began to see the fault lay not in a thirst for milk, nor even for blood. When all was said and done and all were dead…except me, it had nothing to do with a kingdom to be won or lost, or with righteousness and unrighteousness.

  If you speak in terms of good and evil, Shakuni and his nephew Duryodhona, the spoilt prince did evil according to the counsel of his uncle. And I?

  Yes, I had become evil. The evil entered many of us…though not all: not Greatfather at the end, nor Yudhishthira, his grandson who fought against him.

  What of the action of wind-born Bheema when he disregarded the code of chivalry and attacked Duryodhana below the waist, breaking his thighs and leaving him to die like a crushed snake?

  Krishna was above good and evil. Krishna was Krishna, and perhaps the first thing I learnt, as I emerged from the shadows, was that these opposites mingle like night and day at dusk and dawn, like the sun rising when the moon is in the sky.

  This, Krishna had already taught Arjuna, but even Arjuna, who was part of Krishna, forgot in the bloody days ahead. The forces of evil had overflowed the banks, and they had to be restrained and led back. What if millions of villagers were destroyed in the flood?

  Destiny is destiny. We, supporting the spoilt Prince Duryodhana, had to lose. The Pandava brothers, all five, were left alive and victorious, not, finally, because we were bad and they were good. Not even because destiny will not be baulked, but because Krishna, though he shot no arrow, Krishna…was on their side.

  That was the first thing I saw, though I had known it all along.

  Then, because Krishna cursed me to immortality, though even that was a blessing, I saw the other thing.

  I saw why the race of Kshatriyas had to be destroyed.

  2

  The story really starts long before I was born. When Greatfather Bheeshma’s father, Shantanu, was the king in Hastinapura. Bheeshma and his mother Ganga had been separated from his father King Shantanu under mysterious circumstances. The boy was found washed up on the bank of the river Ganga years later. There had never been, in the years of King Shantanu’s loneliness, an heir-apparent, and there had seldom been a prince so personable and well-versed in the arts of war and political science and the Shastras. The people almost looked forward to the broken old king’s death, for then perhaps a golden age would come. In the meantime, it was still heartwarming for them to see the old monarch and his handsome son move through the wide streets in the carriage under the royal umbrella, dazzling white against the sky.

  What actually happened was something entirely different, and all the more astonishing because of the king’s passion for his son.

  It seems the unexpected is blended with fate like salt in the sea. The king fell in love with a fisher girl. Shantanu had never loved again after his first wife Ganga left him. Perhaps the years of loneliness simply overwhelmed him, or perhaps the girl had some glimmer of the radiance of the goddess Ganga whom he had loved and lived with through eight grotesquely wonderful years: she had killed each of his seven sons as he was born, and then left him with the eighth, who was to become known as Bheeshma. By forbidding her to drown Bheeshma, King Shantanu was breaking his promise never to interfere with her actions, and Ganga abandoned him. So goes the story.

  When he fell in love a second time, he went straight to the fisher girl’s father and told him he wanted to marry his daughter. The fisher chief said that he would give his daughter “to your noble self” on one condition. The king, who was mad with love and with the girl’s flower-fragrance, thought that he would be asked for a new hut or a silver vessel or at worst an invitation to the court.

  “Yes. Yes, what is it you want?” he said.

  “You must promise that her son will become the next king of Hastinapura. That is her destiny.”

  I always imagine the poor king, with the fishy weedy smell in his nostrils, looking up in despair at the wide blue sky out of which had come what I, in his place, would have considered heaven’s second savage cut. Even with the enchantment of the fisher girl upon him, he remembered the loved faces of Ganga and his son. Bheeshma was the Yuvaraj. Shantanu would of course honour his promise to both of them; and with a new and deeper loneliness he returned to his son.

  His body was in Hastinapura, but his yearning heart lay like a newly caught fish on the bank of the river Yamuna. He no longer went hunting, and the royal umbrella became a rare sight.

  All Bheeshma’s attempts to discover the cause of his father’s despondency were met with sighs and denials. But one day, when pressed, King Shantanu resorted to an old saying.

  “An only son is no son.” He went on, “You are worth a hundred sons. But I am made distraught by the idea that something may happen to you. Your seven brothers were drowned at birth because of your mother’s promise to release them from unwanted incarnations. I saved you, so she left me. You see, I had promised her never to question her actions. If anything should happen to you in a war, the gr
eat House of Kuru would die, and how would I, sonless, reach heaven?”

  Bheeshma and his father had been inseparable for years. Any intelligent young man might, given his father’s age, have overlooked the possibility of a woman. Bheeshma went to his father’s charioteer who was supervising the oiling of a wheel.

  “Who is she?” he asked.

  “How should I know?”

  “Because,” Bheeshma said, “he speaks to you.”

  Bheeshma took his own chariot with the high-stepping white horses his father had given him, and for the second time in one season, the fishing village on the banks of the Yamuna witnessed the arrival of a royal chariot. He found the girl Satyavati; she had just brought the boat across the river and was tying it to a post. Her graceful form and, more than that, the perfume of which his father’s charioteer had spoken, led him straight to the lovely woman. Stronger than her perfume itself was his destiny. They looked at each other for a moment before she lowered her gaze. With the sun in her eyes, Satyavati had taken Bheeshma for his father. For Bheeshma, it was the last time in his life he would exchange even the hint of such a look with a woman. He saluted her, looking at her feet, and in a trance followed the jingle of her silver anklets and her perfume.

  The impossible nature of his mission, the sensuous power of the woman and the weight of an eternal moment all heightened his senses. The sound of the birds startled him and the sky hung like a blue portent above his head. His stomach tightened to a knot he had never known in battle, and when he came before the fisher chief, he blurted out his question.

  “Why cannot my father the King marry your daughter?”

  The fisher chief, a huge dark man with a fierce moustache, looked at Bheeshma with calm eyes. He bowed his head and folded his hands without a trace of servility. “My Lord,” he said. Then he had a mat spread for Bheeshma to sit on. Ignoring it, Bheeshma said with a flick of his head, “Yes?”

  “My Lord, there is nothing that stands in the way of marriage. It is a question of my daughter’s son, as I explained to His Majesty. My grandson must be the king.”

  Bheeshma sank to the mat. All impatience and superiority left him. There was a long silence. This was what he had been riding towards all morning. This was his fate. Tears welled up without reaching his eyes, whether for himself or for his father he knew not.

  “I explained this to your father, His Majesty, my Lord, but you have been crowned Yuvaraj. Though the king is desperate for my daughter, he loves you more, my Lord.”

  The fisher chief remained standing with folded hands and bowed head.

  “He loves you more.” The words resonated in Bheeshma; they evoked his own great love for the father he had found after long separation. He heard himself saying: “So be it. Your grandson,” Bheeshma gave a great sigh, “shall be the king.”

  The doubts which had hovered about his mind vanished. There would be a grandchild. It would not be a girl.

  It was done. Another sigh forced itself through his frame.

  Silence came to Bheeshma again and with it a liberation. He had learned political science with the great sages Brihaspati and Vasishtha. Wise words.

  But words. Nothing had prepared him for this.

  Yet he was free. Life at court was one of a thousand wise deceits, of meting out punishments to unfortunate wretches, of upholding Dharma. He was no more bound than this fisher chief who so simply stated his case. He would walk out under the wide and lifted sky a free man, lighter, truer, closer to his innermost self, and when he died the death of a warrior, he would have no thought of guarding the lineage of the great House of the Kurus. Never again for the sake of his father and lineage would he have to shield himself, the Yuvaraj.

  The man before Bheeshma waited respectfully.

  “Speak,” said Bheeshma reassuringly, thinking of his father’s happiness.

  “My Lord, bear with me.” This time the fisher chief fell silent. It was he who sighed. Bheeshma with his new freedom and lightness surveyed the fisher chief with something like compassion.

  Behind this large man with the astonishing request was he whom the gods had sent. Bheeshma was not the same man who had stepped over the threshold of the hut with the weight of the crown on his head. The two could speak as equal souls.

  “Speak,” he repeated.

  “Forgive me, Lord. My Lord, you are indeed more noble than they say…” The man looked up and there was respect in his eyes. “All that we had heard of you…” he hung his head. “Forgive me, I must say this…”

  “Speak, man,” said Bheeshma. Curiosity stirred his calm.

  “O Best of the Bharatas, my heart trusts your nobility.”

  “Yes?”

  “What of your son, my Lord?”

  Moments earlier, Bheeshma had wondered whether this light gladness, this invulnerability was permanent. Now he knew. The warrior in him knew the pain and outrage of being stabbed in the back. This time silence followed devastation. Inside him the Kshatriya warrior trained by Bhagavan Bhargava sprang to the defence with all weapons, his unborn sons. Yet, trained by Rishi Vasishtha, he sat immobile. Perhaps for the last time, the terrible fury of one of the world’s greatest warriors boiled through his whole body and rushed to his head. Yet he sat. Not a finger trembled. Not a feature moved.

  When at last his heart stopped pounding and the blood settled, his sons were dead. “I shall find heaven without sons,” he said. “I swear by my Guru Bhagavan Bhargava, by my Guru Vasishtha, by my Holy Mother Ganga, and by the Lord of Dharma, of righteousness itself, that I will remain chaste for life.”

  Then something happened.

  I, Ashwatthama, was not yet born; but Satyavati, the fisher girl who became Bheeshma’s stepmother, and those of the court all felt it and heard it. The earth shifted and as though wounded gave out a great hissing sigh. “BHEEESHSHMAA…BHHHEESSSHSHMA.” This sigh sped across the world like a snake. When Satyavati first told me of it, I thought I heard it too.

  And then, it is said, flowers showered down from above. There was a rain of blossoms. Heaven approved and the earth protested.

  Bheeshma, Bheeshma, Bheeshma.

  “Come, Mother,” he said to Satyavati, helping her into the chariot, “let us go now.”

  “Bheeshma”, he who fulfils a stark and dreadful vow. Until then Bheeshma, son of Shantanu, had been known as Devavrata. But never again was he officially addressed as anything but Bheeshma—and later Greatfather, except by the one who was the instrument of his renaming: Satyavati.

  Every time I relive the scene with my inner eye, an invisible garland of champaks descends round my neck.

  3

  Two sons were born to King Shantanu and Satyavati: Chitrangada and Vichitraveerya.

  Bheeshma’s father had obtained his heart’s desire but had lost the peace gained by long years of austerity, and the joy in the bond with his son. He had bound his son to celibacy with his own senile attachment to life.

  There was little you could give to Bheeshma once this vow had been taken. But King Shantanu gave him, with the insight born of love and pain, a singularly appropriate gift. Shantanu’s austerities had earned him enough merit to grant the following boon: Death, like a faithful servant, would have to wait on Bheeshma. Bheeshma lived his life with death at his elbow, but, or course, he would not call this servant until he had paid his dues to life: and the king must have known this.

  As I said, remorse ate into King Shantanu’s life, and when he died, Chitrangada was much too young to reign; so the freedom Bheeshma had tasted in the fisherman’s hut was shortlived. He became Regent and had Chitrangada crowned. While still a youth Chitrangada was challenged and rode out to fight in single combat on the sacred battlefield of Kurukshetra. He never returned and so Bheeshma became Regent for the Yuvaraj Vichitraveerya. He was brother, father, mentor, and everything else to the boy and it was in seeking a wife, or rather wives, for him that he prepared his own end at the hands of a woman.

  There were three lovely and much coveted p
rincesses of Varanasi: Amba, Ambika, and Ambalika. Traditionally, the House of Varanasi offered its daughters to the House of Kuru, but in the case of Ambika and her sisters, it was decided that a swayamvara would be held so that the daughters could choose amongst the royal suitors. Whether because the Yuvaraj was considered too young or his brother’s death inauspicious, or whether it was thought that Bheeshma might change his mind about his vow, I do not know.

  The pavilion prepared for the swayamvara was splendidly decorated. The pillars were hung with jewelled and embroidered silks, the air was dense with incense, and music was everywhere. Kings in their silks and diadems had come from Kosala, Vanga, Shamba, and all corners of Bharatavarsha to offer themselves for selection according to the Kshatriya tradition. The perfumes of the suitors mingling with the incense were intoxicating. As always, each king, prince, or potentate came with his followers, who themselves did everything possible to highlight the magnificence of their champions. Conversation was carried on in unabashed hyperbole. Nobody could prevent the suitors from strutting around, as Kshatriyas cannot help doing, and passing remarks, but everybody was eager to avoid the duels that sometimes ended in cremations instead of marriage.

  According to the Kshatriya code, it was legitimate to carry off the princesses; the king of Kasi had hoped to avoid this. When Bheeshma stood on the threshold, he must have known he had failed. There was a diminuendo of voices; the music continued. Bheeshma walked up to the throne to salute the king of Kasi, and as the assembly parted for him, he saw snide smiles on several faces, or so the story came down in court circles.

  “What of your vow, O great Bheeshma?”

  “Ah, nature will not be baulked, eh, Bheeshma?”

  “Are you not a little past your prime?” asked one of the princes, trying to take his arm.