The Palace of Illusions (53 page)

But Yudhisthir had sunk once again into grief and didn't hear me.

Anxious at his continued apathy, my other husbands and I took him to visit Bheeshma. Perhaps, we thought, a philosophical discussion with the grandfather would cheer him. We knew how Yudhisthir loved such things. The dying Bheeshma put aside his own pains to teach him the art of kingship:
A ruler should know how to conceal his own weaknesses. He should choose his servants carefully. He

must cause dissensions among the noblemen in his enemy's kingdom. He should be forgiving, but not excessively so, for then men of evil heart would take advantage of him. His innermost thoughts must be concealed even from his nearest ones.
Yudhisthir listened respectfully enough, but even Bheeshma could not shake off his numb despair.

Finally Krishna took him to task. He pointed out that while Yudhisthir was indulging himself with melancholy, bandits were terrorizing his helpless subjects at the edges of the unraveling Kuru kingdom. Ah, Krishna! He'd appealed to the one thing Yudhisthir couldn't shake off: his duty. He allowed himself to be led back to the city and crowned, though he took no pleasure in it.

I didn't blame him. It was hard for anyone to find pleasure at Hastinapur. The palace, which in Duryodhan's day had been filled with a frantic, garish energy, had turned dank and funereal. The few retainers that were left—perhaps in deference to the old king and queen—wore mourning and walked with a hushed step. I ordered them to dress in coronation clothing. They obeyed me fearfully, the festive attire hanging askew on their bodies. How I missed Dhai Ma then! Her raucous curses would have jolted them into action. I made my own servants pull down the heavy, dust-filled drapes and throw open the windows. I called my women to comb out my long-tangled hair and rub perfume into it. Still, all around I smelled, inexplicably, funeral incense. As I breathed it, I felt as though I was sinking into the morass of depression that had claimed Yudhisthir. The night before the coronation, I stood at my window, unable to sleep. It saddened me to think that this was the place where I would be living out the rest of my life. What I had said to Bheeshma a long time ago as a new bride still held true: it would never be home to me.

On the day of the coronation, my greatest challenge was to enter the throne room again. At its threshold my footsteps faltered, sweat sprouted in my armpits, my breath grew uneven. I had to use
all my willpower to step into the room that had been the scene of my greatest humiliation. The task must have been harder still for my husbands. Their memories were worse than mine. To see a loved one in pain is more wrenching than to bear that pain yourself. The war had taught me this. However, we knew we had no choice. The throne of the Kurus had sat in that sabha for generations. We couldn't move it, not at this time, when we needed the help of tradition to stabilize a foundering kingdom.

Once again Krishna—who else!—came to our rescue. From his own palace he sent us cooks and gardeners, musicians and dancers, even his favorite elephant for Yudhisthir to ride in the royal procession. On coronation day, he brought the entire Yadu clan—and they, not knowing the doom that hung over them, cheered us with their simple pleasure in good food and fine wine, their feckless antics. Without them, we couldn't have borne the empty seats that stretched on both sides of the throne, seats that—out of respect or guilt—Yudhisthir would leave unfilled. On the right, Bheeshma's; on the left, Drona's; in the raised alcove, the ornate throne specially carved for Duryodhan; next to his, severe in its simplicity, the chair Karna had once used.

Hastinapur after the war was largely a city of women, widows who had never dreamed that the survival of their families would depend on them. The poorer ones were used to working, but now that they were without male protection, they found themselves exploited. Affluent women, pampered and sheltered until now, were the easiest victims. Men would appear from nowhere claiming to be relatives and take control of the family fortunes. The women became unpaid servants. Sometimes they were turned out. They were too afraid—even if they'd known how—to apply to the king for
justice. I'd see them on the roadside, often with children in their arms, begging. There were others that I didn't see, but I heard of the street corners they frequented at night, selling the only thing left to them.

It was a terrible situation—and it saved me.

I knew how it felt to be helpless and hopeless. Hadn't I been almost stripped of my clothing and my honor in this very city? Hadn't I been abducted in the forest and attacked in Virat's court when men thought I was without protection? Didn't I, even now, mourn my blood-clan—dead, every one of them? And if I wasn't careful, might I not turn into one of these women—empty-eyed, capable only of churning through futile memories?

It was time I shook off my self-pity and did something. I resolved to form a separate court, a place where women could speak their sorrows to other women.

At an earlier, more arrogant time I'd have tried to do it by myself, but now I asked Kunti and Gandhari for their aid. They acquiesced; together we approached Yudhisthir. A chamber was set up in the women's palace with thrones placed on the dais for the dowagers. Subhadra and I sat below. I invited Uttara, too, to help us. I had expected her to refuse, for she was in the late months of an unwieldy pregnancy, but to my surprise, she agreed. Often she was the most perceptive one, seeing directly into the heart of a problem. Perhaps it was from these sessions that the unborn Pariksit, alert within his mother's womb, learned his judicial clarity, so that in time he would be compared to Rama, that most impartial of kings.

Only Bhanumati declined to join us. She returned to her father's kingdom, and who could fault her? With the death of Duryodhan (and Karna, said a voice in my head), what was left for her in this palace that had always made her feel like an outsider? On the day she left, as she climbed into her chariot dressed in white, her forehead
bare, her arms stripped of the jingling bangles she had once so delighted in, she raised her head for a moment to send me a look of smoldering hate. At that, guilt—never too far away—speared my heart. How the war had changed the naïve girl she'd been, eager to please, happy with the littlest things! For the sake of that girl—and the man we had both loved silently, though perhaps in different ways—I prayed that she would find a measure of peace in the home of her childhood.

The court by itself wasn't enough to help the women. Yudhisthir had given us permission, but that was all he could afford to let us have. The coffers of Hastinapur had been depleted by the Great War. But unless we had the power to enforce our rulings, who would obey them?

We were at a loss until Uttara came to us—it was just a few days before Pariksit's birth—followed by two maids carrying a chest. With a start we recognized its ornate carvings—it contained her wedding jewelry. She threw open the lid and said, “I have no use for this anymore. Use it to help those who are more unfortunate than I.”

The sale of that jewelry allowed us to hire scribes to interpret the law and a queen's guard to carry out our judgments. By itself, it might not have been enough, but Uttara's action galvanized us all. We scrounged around, collecting our own jewelry and palace furnishings that weren't essential. Kunti surprised me by donating artifacts she'd held on to all these years, things that had belonged to Pandu. All this allowed us to set up the destitute in homes of their own and buy merchandise to start businesses for them. In time the women's market became a flourishing center of trade in the city, for the new proprietors took pride in their goods and were canny but fair in their dealings. We trained those who showed interest in learning to
become tutors for girls and young boys. And even in the later years of Pariksit's reign when the world had passed into the Fourth Age of Man and Kali the dark spirit had gripped the world in his claws, Hastinapur remained one of the few cities where women could go about their daily lives without harassment.

40

This is the nature of sorrow: often it fades with time, but once in a while it remains lodged below the surface of things, a stubborn thorn beneath a fingernail, making itself felt every time you brush against it. (How well I knew this, for random events would startle me into the memory of a pair of ancient eyes.) In Yudhisthir's case, the thorn moved deeper into him with time, festering as it went. At court he was just and compassionate. In the royal apartments, he was kind and undemanding. But he brooded incessantly on the many lives that had been destroyed because of what he considered his ambition. Even after Hastinapur grew back into a prosperous city where people flocked to live, much as they had once done in Indra Prastha, we never saw him smile.

It took the birth of Pariksit to change that.

The day Uttara went into labor was a stormy one. Kunti said the sky wept because it knew how hard the world was to a fatherless child, and when the labor continued for many hours, she added that perhaps the baby knew this, too, and that is why it was reluctant to be born.

I bit my lips to keep in an angry retort at such negative words, but Yudhisthir said, “Mother, you are wrong! As long as I have breath in my body, this child will never feel the lack of a father.” He
shocked everyone by entering the labor hut, a place traditionally barred to men. He laid his hand on Uttara's forehead as one might with a daughter and called out Pariksit's name (for Krishna had already decided what it was to be). Was it in response to his yearning that the baby came soon after? Even before he'd been cleansed in a ritual bath, Yudhisthir took him in his arms and kissed his head. As I watched the look on his face—tender, reprieved—I realized that I would no longer have to worry about him.

My other husbands, too, showered Pariksit with the frustrated fatherly love pent up in their hearts. Preoccupied with their troubled destiny, they'd had little opportunity to spend time with their own children. When they finally thought they would get to enjoy their company as young men, our sons were snatched from them. They swore not to let that happen again. But more than that, perhaps, they treasured Pariksit because we had so nearly lost him.