The Rise of Hastinapur (17 page)

Amba would make sure of it.

She got up to her feet, only noticing in passing that the shimmer on the rivers had disappeared and the fawn had woken up and gambolled away. The night had become darker and more ominous, but she felt as though the Goddess had lit her from within. She ran all the way back to the hermitage and to Parushni’s hut. She entered it with a smile on her face, and rushed to Parushni’s side, where a little bundle of cotton garments lay. She knelt by its side and pushed the clothes aside so that she could see her daughter.

Her hand trembled.

The babe did not open her eyes, but when Amba placed her finger on the little one’s palm, the fingers curled around it. She picked her up gingerly in both her arms and carried her out. The breeze had died down now, and the trees appeared still, as though they had stepped into a painting. She touched her lips to the babe’s pale cheek and smoothened her brow. She recognized the lips; they belonged to the woman in her dream. Amba looked up at the stars and said, ‘No, Mother, you have not forsaken me.’

With half a mind she expected the fawn to come at her from behind the well and jump around them, but nothing happened. Amba clutched the infant to her bosom and whispered: ‘I shall call you Shikhandini.’

BOOK TWO

THE BLACK STONE

PROLOGUE

GANGA SPEAKS

T
he hardest lesson a priestess learns is that of ignoring the voice inside her. My mother, Ganga, the Lady of the River that flowed along the slopes of the holy mountain Meru before the gates came quietly sliding down, told me this on the day I was about to leave for Earth for the first time. You shall hear voices inside you, Jahnavi, she said, but do not deceive yourself into thinking that they belong to the Goddess. Priestess or not, the Goddess does not speak in mortal tongues.

This lesson has fallen on deaf ears up on the Meru too, for I see Brihaspati and Vasishta and all the other wise men claim that they know the will of the Goddess, that she has spoken to them. Common men do not share this folly; they well know that the Goddess is beyond reach, and they see the voices inside their minds for what they are: their own selfish desires. But the wise men and the priestesses believe – just because they have undergone such hardships in their training – that they have somehow come closer to the Goddess, and they insist on others the belief that the Goddess whispers to them alone, and they alone can hear her.

Amba did not have a true priestess guiding her through her trials, and though Sage Parashurama guided her as well as he could, it was perhaps no wonder that she erred. She heard what she wished to hear, she saw in her surroundings what she wished to see, and instead of extinguishing the fire of hatred that burnt her heart, she chose to kindle it, telling herself all the while that the Goddess willed it so. During the five years of her time at Parashurama’s hermitage, though, she was truly on the road to being a priestess, and if Parashurama had not come to her with the request to cleanse the High King of Panchala, perhaps she would have found that little clear spot within her – that spot within all men where the Goddess resides.

But perhaps I am being too harsh on her; after all, Shikhandini would go on to become the woman to cause me the greatest loss that I have ever known, and perhaps that goads me to have feelings of resentment toward her mother. This is the nature of all tales, then; it is impossible to remove the teller from the story, though I strive to be neutral and force myself to see in all colours, through all eyes.

To this day the vision of Devavrata haunts me in my sleep, and I do not think I shall be free of it even in death. I do not see him as the old patriarch who fell to his death on the battlefield, pierced by a hundred arrows. I do not see him as the spineless man – some said selfless – who stepped aside again and again for the throne of Hastinapur to be occupied by men who had no fire in their loins. I do not see him as the gangly youth who stormed out of my hut on the Meru, vowing never to return.

No, I see him as he was when he was four, when he cried after me and held the tip of my garment in his closed fist to prevent me from going up the well to offer my prayers. I see him asleep on my lap after I had recited to him – for the hundredth time – the story of the Wise Ones and the pitcher-girl. I see light in his eyes, I see contentment in his heart. In all the years he lived on Earth, he had neither. That is as it should be; for there is no light or contentment in life on Earth. If he is to live among the mortal people, he must live as they do.

Sage Brihaspati’s words come to me, now and then, not in the same tone in which he uttered them, but softer, almost musical. ‘Earth will shred you to pieces, Son of Ganga,’ he had said. On that day I had thought that the sage was cursing my son, but later, I understood that it was no more than a proclamation of truth. When the sage’s words came true, when the final arrows pierced into the chest of my son, I found myself strangely calm, neither surprised nor sorrowful. What had to come to pass had come to pass. But there was no denying the searing pain that shot through my breasts, as if that last arrow that felled him pierced my heart too.

On the day that Devavrata turned his back on the Meru, he turned into an enemy of the mountain, and when I became Lady of the River after the death of my mother, he became my enemy too. When he had to choose between me and Earth, he chose Earth; perhaps it is fair then, that when I had to choose between him and Meru, I chose the mountain, for it birthed and reared me. Devavrata fought with many a weapon during his time on Earth, but when he came to battle with me and the people of Meru, he found himself powerless, for our weapons were not swords and bows.

But I must not make it seem that the tale of the Great War is all about the death of my son. If there is one thing that I know from being a priestess to the Great Goddess Bhagavati, it is that men and their lives are fleeting. The Goddess and her creations have always existed, and shall continue to exist even after the last man on Earth draws his final breath. What the purpose of this universe is, where it began and where it will end, only the Goddess knows. Hers will be the real great tale of the ages, if she ever chooses to tell it. All other tales, like this one, are but tiny particles of sand that make up the shore on which the Goddess treads, at her own speed, quietly, speaking to no one.

That is why, perhaps, all wise men who have looked for meaning in life have found none, and that is why this tale of the Great War must be read as if there is no purpose to it. There is no good, no bad, no justice; there is just life, and there is desire. From the time they are born, men are plagued by desire, and some men – like Devavrata, like Satyavati, like Amba – are prepared to lay down their lives to fulfil their desires. I am telling this tale to bring these people out, to show the world that they lived.

Now in my ears I hear laughter, that of a sixteen-year-old girl with a large and crooked nose.

ONE

D
evaki raised the golden silk hood from her face and peered out at Pritha, who was combing herself in front of the mirror. She saw the girl’s lips crumple up in distaste, and smiled to herself. Pritha was at that age. Devaki remembered her own days as a maiden of fourteen in this very room, in front of that very mirror. Her brother Kamsa had grown up faster than she had; men had to put on their royal faces from the time they were ten, it seemed. He would return from a day of riding or hunting and stroll into her room, and when he spotted her turning around in front of the mirror he would chide her.

‘Do not worry, sister,’ he would say, ‘there is no one in North Country that has hips like yours.’

‘Do you not feel shame, brother,’ she would reply, ‘for saying such words about your kinswoman?’

He would throw his head back and laugh. In all these years, many things had come to pass, and people around the country today called him tyrant and usurper, but in her company he would still laugh like he used to when they were growing up. Once or twice she had asked him if it was necessary to keep their father in his prison, and his face had turned grave. ‘Devaki, my dear,’ he had said, ‘our father enjoys all kingly comforts in his room.’ He always insisted on calling it a ‘room’; not prison, not cell.

‘But–’ she would say, and he would wave her arm gently at her. ‘No, sister, you and I have been good friends, have we not, all our lives? Is it not enough if I tell you that I had no other choice, that my hand was forced?’

This would make her grow quiet, for what he had said was true. They had been the best of friends all their lives, and there was some truth to what he said. Devaki had visited her father now and then in his ‘room’, and she had seen him being attended to by three menservants and two waiting-women. She had not asked him explicitly, but his manner conveyed deep contentment, the kind which she had never seen on his face during his time as reigning king.

Devaki turned her hands over and adjusted her rings so that the diamonds faced the ceiling, caught the light, and glimmered. Still at the mirror, Pritha said, ‘Hmph,’ and threw her hair over her shoulder to look sideways at her neck. It was scrawny, noticed Devaki; like most girls her age, Pritha’s growth had all been in her chest and hips, with her thighs yet to acquire the contours that would lend shape to her legs. She had the right-sized head, and the eyes were the shape of lotus petals with long lashes fluttering over the lids every time she blinked, but she had a nose that looked bitten by an angry bee. Her lips were thin, and when she pursed them, they set together into a pout not altogether ugly, but well short of beautiful. If only Mother Nature had given her nose’s voluptuousness to the mouth and the mouth’s curves to the nose, thought Devaki, Pritha would have been a beauty.

‘Come here, Pritha, my dear,’ she said, ‘sit by my side. Will you do my hair while I set right my nose ring?’

Pritha came to the bed and sat by Devaki. She was trying to be lady-like, thought Devaki with a pang, but she was not old enough to be one yet. She wanted to tell her that her time would come, but she stopped herself. Instead, she removed her hood and untied her hair, placing the clips by her side and gesturing with one arm to the attendant at the door for a tray. Pritha took a sandal comb in her hands and began to run its teeth down her hair, and in front of her, Devaki held the mirror such that she could see the younger girl’s reflection.

‘You are worried about something, my girl?’ Devaki said. She would be no more than four years older than Pritha, but she felt as though she were her aunt. She had been told that maidens grew up fast in their second decades, especially after they got married. Perhaps when both of them would be past their childbearing time, years from now, they would address themselves as equals. But now, it had to be this way.

Pritha did not reply at once. She held Devaki’s hair in one hand and ran the comb with the other. Her fingers did not fumble once. The attendant came with the tray, took away the hair clips, and on Devaki’s mute gesture he cleaned the ash from the incense sticks next to the mirror and replaced them with new ones. Devaki’s eyes smarted at the fresh burst of grey smoke, and the reddish gray tips made her look away.