The Rise of Hastinapur
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Authors: Sharath Komarraju
The Rise of Hastinapur
SHARATH KOMARRAJU
HarperCollins
Publishers
India
CONTENTS
T
he wise men who reside at the foot of these mountains say that desire is the root of all evil. For hours every day they stand on one leg in their soiled white loincloths, and they join their hands above their heads. They wish to conquer desire, they say; desire for food, for water, for the flesh of another. Only a man who has conquered his desires has conquered all, they say, with their kind smiles in their dulcet tones.
And yet, these men who serve the gods tour North Country and become guests of honour at various kingdoms for three months every year, when the wind from the Ice Mountain becomes so chilly it turns the skin blue at a mere touch. It is during these tours that they perform acts for the betterment of the world: acts which have, over the years, prevented the disappearance of the race of kings from Earth. In return for these acts of kindness, the kings offer their silk beds and their nubile waiting-women so that the sages do not experience the discomforts of winter.
Up on Meru’s slopes we defer to the will of the Goddess Bhagavati, She who is present in a drop of water, in a grain of sand, in a mite of dust. If She has decreed that living beings shall be ruled by desire, that desire must be the one thing that drives their lives relentlessly forward, we do not question it. All that the Goddess has given us, we accept, we covet, we revere.
But now I am no longer on the Meru. I am no longer Ganga, Lady of the River. I am but a woman whose skin has pale yellow patches and parched green spots. I do not speak often now, but when I do, my voice is like the cackle of a crow. Every morning, I walk up to the great white boulder that now covers the Cave of Ice, and I whisper the incantation that would have once opened it. My son, Devavrata, would have laughed at this foolishness, and he would have said that the world of Earth was nobler than the world on Meru; but perhaps this is the difference I speak of. I do not fight my desires. I give in to them.
They say that the Great War has brought about such destruction in North Country that it has hastened the end of the epoch of Dwapara, and that the Crystal Lake has all but dried up. Indra’s explorers, however, must have found lands and lakes further up north, for they seem to have forsaken all interest in the sixteen Great Kingdoms – or what remains of them. The salt route continues to exist, shrouded in magic. The dead lake is covered in mist that only a Celestial can clear. Devavrata’s old Mystery has doubtless been enhanced, and I doubt that now even he could find his way to the lake.
What shall happen from now is not in my hands. I know that the door to the world of Meru shall remain closed, at least until my death. What will happen thereafter is not to my concern. They teach us on Meru – though not many of us listen – that the future is but an illusion which no man can know. The past is unalterable, but at least it is real. The two worlds are different in this, too; here on Earth, men and women fixate upon their futures, and in doing so they forget to spend a little time, every now and then, reminiscing about the real, rigid – and often pleasant – memories of the past.
They say in the new epoch (the wise men call it the age of Kali) earthmen will kill each other, that the gods will shun them, that they will descend from Meru at the end of it all to populate North Country with life of their own kind. But how quaint is the idea. North Country lays barren of life
now
. Brother has killed brother in the Great War. The cleansing has already happened. The Meru people have already forsaken the earthmen. And yet the wise men look ahead – as I have said, on Earth, the eye is forever on the future, the one thing it cannot see.
But I, from sheer force of habit, must look unto the past.
I must go back to the time before Vichitraveerya’s passing, back to the time when Devavrata, perhaps vain of his strength, won all three princesses of Kasi for his brother. Ambika and Ambalika fulfilled their destinies in their own strange ways, and bore sons that carried forward the line of the Bharatas. But what of Amba, the first princess of Kasi who should have become queen? Her tale is a long and tortuous one, but in the end it is she who had a bigger say in the fortune – and fall – of Hastinapur.
Fortune, because she brought about the great marriage alliance of the age which merged Kuru and Panchala into one. Fall, because her child would grow up to be the warrior who killed Devavrata, the undefeatable champion of the throne of Hastinapur.
I used to hear it being said that no warrior in North Country could drive a chariot as swiftly as Devavrata. No one could fight with a sword as skilfully as he. No one could shoot arrows as rapidly as he. He read the scriptures and understood them; he debated with Brahmins and was hailed as their equal. In politics and battle strategy he was peerless. It warmed my heart to hear such things, but I was also wary. I was wary that Devavrata’s destruction would come about from that one place men scarcely care to look: from within. He would be destroyed – as all powerful men eventually are – by the consequences of their actions, by the ache they cause through their choices.
Amba’s tale, then, is also the first chapter in the tale of Devavrata’s ruin.
W
hen she was ushered into the waiting room, Amba saw that the floor carpets were of the wrong colour. Seating herself on the edge of the blue-cushioned teak chair under the central lamp, she nodded at the attendant waving the fan to go a little faster. The autumn had been pleasant this year; pleasant enough to allow her to sleep on the palanquin the previous night – but somehow, in this forbidding country she found a layer of fine dust on every surface. That morning, when they had first arrived at the border of Saubala after skirting along the edge of Khandava, her head palanquin bearer had asked her to cover her nose and mouth with a cotton cloth dipped in cold water.
Her breath had caught in her throat in spite of the precaution, and even now, surrounded by washed silks and sparkling brass vessels, her eyes pinched. ‘Once I begin living here,’ she thought, ‘I will make sure this place is cleaned with soap water at least three times a day.’ She undid the clasp of her gold arm-bands and laid them aside, signalling to the servant in the corner of the room to come take them away. She removed her coronet and laid it on her thigh – one that Mother Satyavati had given her on the eve of her departure. ‘Until you are wedded to someone else,’ she had said, ‘you are the queen of Hastinapur. And it is important that you look like one.’
Amba slid off her ivory hairclips one by one, placing them in a row beside her on the seat. She shook her head to loosen her hair and let it fall in a heap over her shoulder and upper back. As she first became aware of the faint whiff of jasmine and sandal coming from the incense sticks the attendant had lighted on her arrival, and as the catch in her throat eased somewhat, she felt grains of sand in her hair brush against the back of her neck, and grimaced. ‘Make arrangements for my bath,’ she said.
‘Yes, my lady.’
Sand and dust, everywhere. When Salva was courting her in Kasi she had once asked her courtiers to tell her about his kingdom. They had said it was situated on the banks of River Saraswati, which flowed for half the year and remained dry for the other half. It had once been a large kingdom, Saubala, back when the Saraswati was one of the Great Rivers, when its current was strong even through the summer. But now that fertile land had become a desert. Wedged in between a mountain and an endless sea of sand, Saubala was no more than a vassal state.
She had heard about all that, but now that she realized just how it was, she wondered if she would ever get used to it. One must make small sacrificesfor one’s love, she told herself. Surely Salva would find her different to the maidens of his own land. Would he not learn to like her ways too? Was that not what love was about?