The Rise of Hastinapur

by Sharath Komarraju

  Durvasa let the man’s head down on the cot, and he placed his arms on top of his chest. Looking up at Kurusti he said, ‘He shall sleep well tonight. One of you should keep watch, in case he wakes.’

  The boy came forward and bowed. ‘I will, sir.’

  ‘Good,’ said Durvasa, getting up on his feet. To Kurusti he said, ‘If you could arrange for a suitable bed for the lady, I am certain that you and I can then find a little corner for ourselves.’

  Pritha lowered herself onto the bed and placed one wrist over her forehead. On the level below, she heard voices of the sage and the priest, speaking in soft tones so as not to wake up Adhrigu.

  Something about that day had made her uneasy about Durvasa, but she could not fathom what. Sages were men, she had always been told – great men who had seen a lot of the world, but men nonetheless. She had not ever heard one story of sages performing tricks of the light, as Durvasa had called them. Nor had she met anyone who had seen a sage juggle balls of fire with his bare hands. Agnayi’s first words when she had asked him about Durvasa had been that he would be old enough to be his grandfather.

  There was all this talk of Mysteries, but how much did the sages of the north really know of them? She had heard tales of Vasishtha, the great seer of them all, and even he had to give in to ravages of age. Parashurama, Vishwamitra, Angirasa – all these men were old; perhaps they lived to be a hundred or even longer because of their constitution, but no one had ever heard any of these men to be young. If what Durvasa had said was true, if all of them could shed their old skins and creep into young ones, why did more sages not do it?

  She had heard that in the forest of Madhu by Shurasena, a priestess had set up her hermitage next to Parashurama’s. Pritha had wanted to visit her, learn from her what went into the making of a priestess, and how priesthood was different from being a sage. From her knowledge, what one did, the other did not; was Durvasa, therefore, a sage or a priest? He claimed to be both – but was that even possible?

  His laughter came ringing up the steps of the ladder to her ears, and she smiled. Whatever he was, he had come with her to save her brother and sister. He had accompanied her on the Yamuna, disguised himself by smearing himself with ash, and had now come to the High Priest of Mathura, not for himself but for her. And the way he had touched her the night before in Nabha’s barn – no man would ever touch a woman thus if he did not love her. Tonight too, he would come to her bed and awaken her, after the lights had gone out. She felt her eyelids grow heavy, but she shook herself away from sleep. Tonight, she would be awake for him.

  She rolled to her side, to the edge of the cot, and rolled back to the opposite edge. The bed was not big enough for both of them, but she blushed at the thought. Perhaps it was better that way; the previous night in Nabha’s barn, they had drifted away from one another in sleep, and when she had woken up, only his arm had covered her. Tonight would perhaps be a little different.

  She did not share his certainty in the thought that the priests would merely give him their Book of Mysteries, but she had seen many faces of him today. She had seen him in the image of the Destroyer himself at Kurusti’s house, and here he had cradled Adhrigu and tended to him like he would a child. Her mind went to the arm-sized water vessel made of animal hide that he had made Adhrigu drink from – he said it was just water, but Adhrigu had slept like a babe after that. Sages did not perform cures of this sort, did they?

  Her eyes fell again, and this time she did not fight it. He would come, of that she was certain, but her mind began to wander, and soon she knew nothing.

  When she opened her eyes again, with a start, all was quiet, and from underneath she heard not a sound. He had not come, she thought vaguely, stumbling to her feet and going to the ladder. She wiped off the sweat from her neck, and licked her lips once. Her tongue felt rough and dry on her upper lip, and when she swallowed her throat ached. She descended the ladder and came to the sleeping figure of Durvasa, and by his side she saw the vessel of water standing erect underneath the sack.

  She opened the sack, then the lid of the vessel, and lifted it up to her mouth to take a gulp. As the liquid flowed down her throat, life seemed to come back to her, and she felt as though she had shed two years in that one moment. Her hair seemed to grow richer, her skin softer and more moist, her fingernails clearer. She raised her hand to her eyes and turned it around, watching the black spots on her wrist vanish.

  Curious, she looked into the vessel. For a long time she stood there, unable to move. Then she replaced the lid and floated back, like a wraith, to her bed.

  ELEVEN

  Next morning, when Pritha came down from the loft to the sanctum, she found that the lamps had already been lit. Kurusti was walking about with a brass plate in hand, on which two small oil lamps stood. At each wall he stopped, applied a spot of vermillion to it, and doused it with black fumes. His shawl was white as milk today, she noticed, and only where his hand pressed down on his chest could she see the first gray mark. On the other side of the room, by the entrance to the High Priest’s chamber, Durvasa sat on the floor with one knee hoisted up.

  ‘The High Priest is feeling better today,’ he said happily. ‘He said he feels as though he has become two years younger. He will show us the black stone.’ Pritha remembered her aching throat and burning neck from the night before, but now she felt fresh as a morning flower. Her mind wandered to the water she drank from Durvasa’s sack. The smell of jasmines lingered in the air, and she realized that for the first time since she had arrived in Mathura, she did not smell cattle dung. She went to Kurusti, offered her palms to the flame, and touched her fingers to her eyes. She broke off a string of jasmines from the bunch and inserted it into her hair.

  From inside, the boy came out, a chrysanthemum stuck in his right ear. Solemnly he announced: ‘The High Priest will see you now.’

  When they went in, they saw Adhrigu sitting up erect on his bed, his eyes glowing like a child’s. None of the weakness of the previous night seemed to afflict his limbs, and his long, sinewy fingers seemed to pulsate with energy. ‘I do not know what you gave me yesterday, my lord,’ he said, joining his hands at Durvasa, ‘but I awoke today with my chest clear as a summer night! I still cough, but it is light and airy. You are a magician, sent here by the gods, no doubt!’

  Durvasa held the old man’s hands in his. Pointing at Pritha he said, ‘I came here only because of this young lady here, my good sir. And I am no magician; I am but a man like you, steeped in the Mysteries of the Goddess.’

  ‘Aye, that is so,’ said Adhrigu. ‘I feel like I can run a league without breaking my hip again, Kurusti. Can you believe that I am stronger now than I have ever been in the last two years!’

  ‘That is indeed great news, sire,’ said Kurusti, bowing.

  The older man waved him away with enthusiasm. He shrugged off Durvasa’s hands and got to his feet, humming a gay tune as he went to the corner of his room. ‘We have some work to do this morning, do we not? Our good sir would like to see the black stone at work.’ As he began to pick up various things in the corner, the boy came running along to help him. ‘Let me hold it, sir,’ he said.

  Adhrigu paid him no attention. He walked back to the middle of the room and sat down, crosslegged. He placed a small black box in front of him, and opening a little window behind it, he borrowed Kurusti’s lamp from the plate of worship. He asked for one more wick, and on receiving it, rolled it around on his finger and dipped it in the oil. He then lit it and let it slip along the side of the vessel and placed the lamp inside the window.With a wave of a finger, he snapped it shut.

  ‘Now it takes a little time to warm itself up,’ he said, looking up at Durvasa. The other end of the box had a handle attached to it, much like Nabha’s plough had. This one, though, curved downward at its outer end, and its tip had been sharpened.

  The whole thing resembled a mother hen out to pick worms in the soil.

  Adhrigu opened another small window, this one a
t the top of the box, and poured into it three thimbles of water. Then he closed it and sat back, rubbing his hands gleefully, his eyes lit with pride. For a moment, nothing happened. But then Pritha noticed that thin lines of white smoke trickled out from under the stone and disappeared into the air. From the sole window of the room, the morning sun flooded in and threw half of Durvasa’s grave face in dark shadow. It had been a good month since winter had begun, and it had been no more than an hour since the sun had risen. Why did it burn her arms, then? She rubbed her palms over her wrists to cool them down.

  The beak began to move slowly toward the ground. It paused for a moment just as it was about to touch the earth, then rose back up. After it repeated the motion twice, it began to gather speed as the trickles of smoke became continuous streams, and Pritha saw a faint shade of grey in it now. The sound of a whirring top that she had heard on Nabha’s farm began here as well, though this was more of a soft buzz, low and content. The beak moved up and down, up and down, up and down, never stopping for breath or rest. She saw Durvasa’s one eye that was illuminated by the sun; the blue had darkened so much that it appeared almost black, the colour she had seen his eyes turn into when he came to her bed, slaved by desire.

  ‘Fire and water have often been called enemies of each other, sir,’ said Adhrigu, as the beak began to slow down. ‘You cast fire into water to put it out, they say, and even the Mysteries of the two elements are studied separately, are they not?’

  Durvasa nodded, his gaze fastened upon the stone.

  ‘But perhaps this enmity is something that we humans have set up. Perhaps the Goddess does not discriminate between her five elements.’ Adhrigu gazed down at his creation. ‘Fire moves water, makes it run, and if we can catch it, we can make things run too.’

  ‘You do the same with your boats, then,’ said Durvasa, and his voice seemed soft and childlike, without the usual hoarseness.

  ‘Our ploughs and our boats, yes. We wish to make such stones for everything. The kingdom grows a lot of maize, and too many people grind maize everyday in her farms on grinding stones, by the strength of their arms. If they use the strength of water and fire, they can move all those people into their army.’

  ‘So that is why Magadha is so powerful,’ said Durvasa.

  ‘Aye, and that is why we are so strong in our defence too. But we do not know enough of the Mystery to make stones for all those other things, sir. We are trying, but we do not have enough priests, nor do we get enough time from mending all the stones that come from Magadha every day.’

  ‘Then perhaps it is better if you do what Kamsa says, and write down the Mystery as you know it.’

  Adhrigu smiled. ‘I suppose I must,’ he said, ‘but I do know that once I write it down, the High King will take it from me and cast me away. He will get a new group of priests – perhaps Kurusti will be one of them – and he shall take my baby away from me.’ He picked up the stone with the tips of his gnarled fingers and planted a kiss on its smooth edge. He sighed. ‘But there is, perhaps, no other way.’

  Durvasa stood and went to the window, hands clutched behind his back, looking out at the sun. ‘High Priest,’ he said, turning back, ‘I shall take your book with me, if you permit it.’

  Adhrigu’s smile vanished. ‘I do not permit it.’

  ‘I am a student of the Mysteries too,’ said Durvasa, returning to the middle of the room, but standing so that he towered over the High Priest. ‘I shall take good care of it, and it shall help the men of my land too.’

  ‘That may be so,’ said Adhrigu harshly, ‘but I have not written in it the workings of the stone, and if you take it by force and you do not open it the way it is meant to be opened, it will destroy itself, sir, I warn you!’

  ‘I have no intention of taking it from you by force, sir,’ said Durvasa. He turned to Pritha. ‘Will you leave the room and wait for us in the sanctum, Princess? I shall join you in no more than a few minutes.’

  Adhrigu looked at Pritha and then back at Durvasa. ‘I doubt if there is anything that will make me give up the Book of Mysteries, sir.’

  Durvasa looked down at the priest and smiled. ‘You will do me the honour of letting me speak, my lord, if for nothing but giving you two years of your life and freeing you from the dreaded cough and night chills.’

  Adhrigu’s nostrils flared, his eyes widened in anger; He looked at Kurusti and waved his head in a queer way, upon which Kurusti came to Pritha and bowed. ‘If the lady pleases, we shall leave the two men together,’ he said.

  She tried to meet Durvasa’s gaze and gather anything she could from his face, but he refused to look at her. She got up and followed Kurusti out of the room. Just as the door was about to close, she turned around to see that the sage’s lips had curled together into a knowing smile, whereas Adhrigu looked up at him weakly, with his forehead set into a deep frown.

  TWELVE

  They rowed in silence. Pritha wedged her feet against the cold hard surface of the boat to keep her balance against the Yamuna’s current. In the water, brown fish scurried up to their oars and swam away as they turned. Only so close to the fall did the water of the river appear so clear. Pritha felt that if she could look closely enough, she could see the bottom. In one of the old tales a princess immerses her hand in the river only to lose her ring, without which her lover, the king, refuses to take her as his wife. But the ring gets swallowed by a fish which gets caught by the royal fisherman, and that very night, when the king sits down for his dinner, he sees in front of him, on his plate, a ring set in white gold.

  Durvasa smiled at her. The sun caught the water and beamed into her eyes, making her cover them with her hand. She did not know if her mission had been successful, and since Devaki and Vasudev were still in their prison, it did not appear so, but the sage had coaxed the High Priest to part with his Book of Mysteries, and if, indeed, the people of Shurasena could build black stones of their own, perhaps it would not be long before they could wage war against Mathura and win.

  She wondered, though, what the sage offered the High Priest in return for the book, for Adhrigu was adamant that he would not share his mystery with any outsider, even if the outsider saved and prolonged his life. And then she thought of the night before, when she took a sip of the water in Durvasa’s sack, and what she had seen when she peeped through the mouth of the container.

  They approached the shore of Shurasena now, and Durvasa deliberately veered them away from the fishing settlement toward the woods. Pritha did not protest, for if the sage had given her what she had wanted, she had to give him what he wanted from her. But as they entered the shade of the banyan trees that took root on the edge of the river and threw their branches out onto the river, she once again thought of the water, and the queer little yellow lines of light that she had seen in it, travelling up and down from surface to bottom, rotating about themselves like just-born tadpoles.

  She had always heard stories of the existence of an elixir – the balladeers called it by different names; some called it nectar, some called it soma – that was fabled to heal diseases and the afflictions of age. Men who drank it, they said, retained their youth and lived forever, and when she thought of that she heard Adhrigu’s words ringing in her ears: I feel younger by two years.

  She had consumed the water too, and how could one describe what happened to her when it slid down her throat? She was as yet a maiden of sixteen, in the prime of her youth, and yet she had felt a surge of life pass through her body, and all traces of fatigue and mental greyness had disappeared, and she had slept as though she had been drugged. When she had woken up this morning she had felt unlike she ever had; she felt … she felt as though a divine force had cleansed her mind, her body, her spirit.

  But the elixir was merely a staple of tales, was it not? Even if it was not, it belonged to the gods who lived up on the Meru and never came down to live among the earthmen. All tales of gods revolved around how much they wished to protect this life potion from everyone else; so th
ey would not share it with men of the north; no, not even with renowned sages. Perhaps they would allow some select men to live with them on the mountain, perhaps they would even share in their Mysteries, but not the water of life.

  Their boat stopped, and Durvasa got out to steady it with one hand and extended his other arm to her. His face appeared constant to her; he looked now just like he had in the High Priest’s room that morning, half his face mired in shadow and his blue eye aglow with desire.

  She took his hand.

  When they came up to the grassy mound where they had shed their clothes the previous evening, Durvasa took her hands in his, and for a moment she lowered her gaze, allowing him to pull her gently toward him as the evening shadows lengthened all around them. Just as he leaned in to touch his lips to her cheek, she stiffened and drew back a touch.

  ‘You are not Durvasa,’ she whispered.

  He did not react in any visible way. The pressure of his fingers over her hands did not change. A little spring of doubt took birth in her mind, so she began to speak, hoping that the words would find their own meaning. Her cheek rested against his, and once again she noticed how his chin and face were completely devoid of hair, even more than hers.

  ‘I know not whether you are a sage or a priest,’ she said, her voice still soft, ‘and I know not how a sage is different from a priest. But I do know this: sages do not study the Mysteries. Sages pray to the gods of the Ice Mountains and gain knowledge of the practice of the Mysteries, but they do not gain knowledge of the Mysteries themselves. Is that not so?’