The Palace of Illusions (57 page)

And Yudhisthir replied, in that dispassionate voice of his, “No, Bheem. It's because although she had many good qualities, she had one major fault. As do each one of you. Like her, you, too, will fall when you reach the level beyond which that flaw can't proceed.”

“Panchaali?” Bheem exclaimed. “I don't believe it! Why, she was the most devoted of wives.” (I smiled through numb lips at his words, generous Bheem who had forgotten the many times I'd berated him, the many difficulties in which I'd landed him.) “What fault could she have had?”

“She married us all. But she loved one man more than everyone else.”

“Who was it?” I could hear the longing in Bheem's whisper.

In that moment, if I could have chosen where love fell, I would have given it to Bheem. I consoled myself with this: at least I'd kept my feelings hidden from my husbands. I'd spared them the pain of knowing who it was that occupied my innermost thoughts through these years. Whose admiration I'd longed for, whose taunts had hurt me the worst. At whose death all colors were leached from my world.

“It was,” Yudhisthir said—and then he paused.

He knew! The secrecy I'd prided myself on—he'd seen through it. Lost as he was in his world of ideals, I'd never credited him with much perception. But I'd misjudged him. My heart constricted as I waited to hear what he would reveal. What he would accuse me of. I was surprised to discover how tense I was. I'd been wrong in thinking I wanted nothing more from the world. Though I wouldn't see them again, my husbands' final opinion suddenly mattered immensely to me.

Yudhisthir let his words out in a rush. “Arjun. It was Arjun. She cared most for him.”

He had spared me. He'd chosen kindness over truth and uttered, for the sake of my reputation, the second lie of his lifetime!

Thus in my dying hour Yudhisthir proved that he had loved me all along. In doing so, he left me at once grateful and ashamed for the many bitter words I'd directed at him, and those I'd held festering inside.

Bheem gave a resigned sigh. “Can't really blame her, I suppose,” he said. “Him being such a great warrior, and so good-looking, too. Why, even the celestial dancers at Indra's court couldn't resist him!”

How easy he was with his forgiveness where I was concerned, how magnanimous! I wished I could tell him how much I admired him. And my other husbands, too—each had his strength, his tenderness.
Nakul with his jokes, Sahadev with his consideration, Arjun who had never hesitated to stand between us and danger. When I'd had the chance to appreciate them, I'd spent it venting my dissatisfaction. Now it was too late.

“What are the flaws that will cause the rest of us to fall?” Bheem asked.

“Sahadev's is pride in his learning, Nakul's is vanity for his good looks, Arjun's is his warrior's ego, and yours is your inability to control yourself when you are angry.” Yudhisthir spoke calmly as always, but this time I caught the sadness beneath. It was a lonely life he'd led all these years, set apart even from those he loved most by his passion for righteousness. I'd been foolish to let it infuriate me, to wish that he would give up his stiff, silly principles. Righteousness was his nature. He couldn't give it up any more than a tiger can give up its stripes. And because of it he would go on, abandoning his dearest ones in the moment of their death, to the ultimate loneliness: to be the only human in the court of the gods.

43

The last of the footsteps have passed beyond my hearing. The light on the hills has dimmed, or is it my vision that's fading? My body, too, seems to be fading, parts of it floating away: feet, knees, fingers, hair. It strikes me that, like every home where I've resided, this body, too—my final, crumbling palace—is beginning to fail me.

How shall I spend these last moments of my life? Should I remember my mistakes and practice contrition? No. What use to berate myself now? Besides, I made so many errors, I wouldn't even get past my childhood! Should I forgive those who harmed me? Should I ask forgiveness of those I'd harmed? A worthy enterprise, but fatiguing, particularly since they're all dead now. Perhaps I should recall the people I loved and send them a prayer, for prayer is one of the few things that can travel from this realm to that next, amorphous one. Dhai Ma with her ribald jokes, her loud, affectionate scoldings; on her deathbed she'd bolted upright, delirious, calling for me. Dhri of the conscientious eyebrows and startled laughter, my first companion; he was murdered because of a war I helped cause. My boys that grew up without a mother; the way they'd greeted me after my years in the forest, wary respect in their eyes for the legend
I'd become. Pariksit with his searching glance; I'd failed to answer his question and end his search; I'd failed to warn him of the calamities that lay in wait for him. And Karna who was born under an ill star, who sat alone in the midst of a jeweled court, his eyes filled with a bitterness that I'd put there. Torn in two by his love for me and his hate, he had sacrificed himself rather than give in to Kunti's temptation:
You, too, could be Draupadi's husband.
Would he feel vindicated right now if he knew that in the hour of my death I thought of him rather than my husbands, wondering again, one last time, whether at my swayamvar I'd made the wrong choice?

But the faces swirl away even as I call them up—perhaps because I've hurt them, because I've betrayed them all in some way. They merge into each other, then into the blackness that has covered the sky, and I'm left alone. Left alone to die on a frozen hill! I, whose life had been a rush of attending to the needs of my five husbands—how ironic that at the moment of my own final need not one of them should be with me!

A long time ago I'd asked Vyasa's fire-spirits, Will I find love? They'd assured me I would. But they'd lied! I'd gained glory, yes, respect and fear, yes, even admiration. But where was the love I'd longed for since I was a girl? Where was the person who'd accept me completely and cherish me with all my faults? Self-pity (that emotion I've always scorned) rushes through my being, what's left of it, obliterating my heroic resolutions as I realize this.

It begins to rain, if one can give that name to the icy needles piercing my face—the only part of my body that remains with me. To distract myself from the pain I place my mind on how Krishna had loved rain, how once when I visited Dwarka he had called me to the wet balcony to show me peacocks dancing in the downpour.

“About time you thought of me,” he says.

Amazed, I try to turn toward that beloved, familiar voice, but I can no longer move my head. I think I catch, out of the corner of my eye, a glimpse of yellow. Or is it merely the force of my desire?

“So now you think you've imagined me! I'm quite real, I'd like you to know. But what are you doing here, lying in the snow in this awkward and downright unqueenly posture?”

“I'm trying to recite a prayer,” I tell him with what little dignity I can muster. “But the problem is, I can't recall a single verse.”

“You probably didn't know too many of them to begin with!”

He's right—I've never been one for formal rituals. Still, I want to tell him off—as I did so many times—for his ill-timed levity. But annoyance takes too much energy. “I'm dying, in case you didn't notice,” I say, in a tone that is, for me, fairly mild. “If I don't put my mind to praying, I'll probably be whisked off to the fires of the underworld—if they're real. Are they? You should know, being dead already.”

“They are and they aren't,” he says, “just as I am and am not dead.” I see that he hasn't lost his old habit of speaking in riddles. “But don't think of hellfire now. And if you can't remember a prayer, don't let that distress you. Think instead of something that makes you happy.”

I consider my life. What was it that made me joyful? What made me experience peace? For I guess that's the kind of happiness Krishna means, not the wild up-and-down of the wheel of passion I'd ridden all these years, delighted one moment, distraught the next. Certainly none of the men or women I'd been close to had given me that type of joy—nor I them, if I were to admit the truth. Even my palace with its strange and beautiful fantasies, the palace that in some way I'd loved more than any of my husbands, the palace that was my greatest pride, had ultimately brought me only sorrow.

There's the lightest of touches on my head, Krishna's hand, I imagine—for I can't see it—moving in a soothing motion such as a mother might use to comfort a fevered child. Though here, too, I'm mostly imagining, having had no mother, and having relegated most of the mothering of my own children to other women.

“Can't remember,” I say, the words beginning to knot up in my mouth. Soon, I know, I'll be unable to form them. I don't want to die with the question that had bothered me for so long still pent up within my chest, so I ask, “Why didn't Bheeshma help me in the sabha even when he saw how much I suffered?”

“How your mind leaps, like a drunken monkey! Bheeshma thought too deeply about the laws of men. It paralyzed him. He wasn't sure whether you were already Duryodhan's property—in which case he had no right to intervene. But sometimes one has to drop logic and go with the instinct of the heart, even if it contradicts law.”

I want to agree, but a treacherous lethargy is taking me over. I recognize the signs, and though all this while I'd resolved to be brave, I find that I'm suddenly terrified of this dissolution into nothingness. Don't let go of me, I try to tell Krishna. For some reason I don't fully understand, it's crucial that he keeps touching me when I die. But I can't bring out the words.

“Don't worry,” he says as though he'd heard. “Focus now: you have work to do. Take another look at your life. Are you sure you can't remember a single happy moment?”

And, unexpectedly, I do.

I stand beside Krishna's chariot at the gates of Hastinapur, handing him a cool drink of coconut water before he leaves for Dwarka. I complain that we hardly see him nowadays, that perhaps we were better off when we were wandering in the forest because there he came to us more often. He says, You needed me differently
then. But in my heart I'm with you just as much! When he smiles, there are wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, strands of white in his hair, the first soft footfalls of age, hastened by the war he let himself be pulled into for friendship's sake. Love takes me in a wave even as I pretend annoyance. Don't wait so long next time, I tell him. I won't, he says. I'll come when you're not expecting me. I watch him ride away. The winter sun lies soft as a shawl around my shoulders. If someone were to ask me, at this moment, what I wanted, I would say, Nothing.

I don't know that this will be the last time I wave him goodbye.

Other memories follow, tumbling like fallen leaves in wind. They're in no particular order, for here I am, a child in the courtyard of my father's palace, chasing after a butterfly that evades me, getting sweaty and teary until Krishna holds out a hand. The butterfly lands on it, and silently he extends it to me. And I, understanding something beyond my years, don't grab but instead gently stroke, once, the dusty yellow wings.

Here's one in Indra Prastha, in our great hall, where Krishna is pretending to read our palms, my husbands' and mine, only when it's my turn, he makes me double over with embarrassed laughter by prophesying a hundred and fifty children. Here's one where I've prepared a meal for him myself, waving away the services of our many cooks—something I don't do even for my husbands—and he's complaining (falsely, of course) that the food is too salty. And here I'm showing him my garden—which is the most beautiful garden on earth, which would be perfect except for the fact that I haven't been able to find, anywhere, a parijat tree to plant. He smiles and extends his fist, and when I pull it open, it holds a single seed. I'll plant it, and it will grow into an entire grove of parijats.

Here's a more somber moment when I'm going from Kampilya to Hastinapur after my marriage. All of a sudden I'm afraid of leaving
behind the walls that I'd chafed against all these years as though they'd imprisoned me. Of exchanging the company of my dearest brother for that of husbands who are strangers. Krishna takes me by the hand—how familiar the gesture, though I'm sure he's never done this before—and guides me to Yudhisthir's chariot. He helps me up, whispering that it'll be a great adventure—and when I hear him say so, that's what it becomes. Here, years later, after the Rajasuya yagna is tarnished by Sisupal's blood, we sit shrouded in gloom. But Krishna will not let us mope. He claps his hands and calls for the servants to bring lamps, more lamps. In their glowing halo he assures me—for though he speaks to my husbands it's me he looks at—that Sisupal brought his death upon himself, that throughout the incident we behaved honorably, that if a curse should follow, it will fall on his head rather than ours.