The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata Read online

  “Great one,” he pleaded, tears beginning to flood his eyes, “in an evil moment the arrow left my unconscious hand.”

  “Aye, and your conscious mind.” The Rishi’s eyes blazed. Pandu pleaded: “O great regenerate one! You know the fate of a man without sons: I have no sons through whom to reach heaven. Allow me one son. You know you would be dooming me not only to death but to hell.” In his pain the Rishi cast a comptemptuous look at Pandu. To make sure the sage had recognized his status, Pandu said, “Rishi, I know the extent of my fault. Was I not taught time and again by Greatfather Bheeshma to be ever heedful, that fate cannot strike when we are utterly heedful of Dharma? Remorse will now follow me all my life, but I am the conqueror of a great kingdom. Take my life afterwards, but allow me one son.” He knew as we all do that rishis, while they cannot retract their curses once uttered, can mitigate them. The Rishi’s expression became as hard as Pandu’s fate and Pandu burst out in desperation.

  “One son.” But the Rishi was dead and the Rishi’s wife was dying. As life of Pandu knelt with closed eyes he reviewed his life of happiness and easy comfort, in which he thought that he had learnt everything. He saw that he had learnt nothing.

  It would have taken a lesser man longer to see what Pandu saw. He was after all the son of Vyasa and the brother of Vidura. He knew, even as the agony bit deep, that his life had been turned upside down, that a king without sons was worse than a poor man. To live like Bheeshma in the midst of palace pleasures without tasting them, would be, for him, torture. He was a Kshatriya and did not doubt that the Heaven reserved for Kshatriyas killed in battle would be closed to him unless he sired sons.

  There was only one way to avoid the mortality that would attend him in the snowy palace beds. There was only one way to make Death wait for a spring day many years later.

  He, King Pandu, would stay in the forest.

  6

  I didn’t have to be told what life was like in the forest for Pandu and his two wives. Had I not spent all my childhood in the forest ashram?

  Mother Kunti told my mother the story. She said that those chaste years in which she and Madri lived as Pandu’s sisters were happy ones, the happiest of her life. It was not so for Madri, but then Kunti was born a mother and when I say she lived as her Lord’s sister I, who saw her with her sons, suspect it would be truer to say that she mothered both Pandu and Madri in the forest and that if, for so many years, Pandu was able to keep his vow of chastity, it was as much due to Mother Kunti’s poise and wisdom as to the support of the forest sages who were always quoting the shastras to him.

  Whenever my own life has allowed me to retreat to the forest, I have remembered that existence is simpler than kings and citizens would have it. Indeed it used to be that I only had to recall the days in our little shelter, before my father went to Drupada’s palace, to find myself at peace.

  Kunti told my mother that both she and the sages knew that Pandu, having had his conquests, his riches and his power, was likely to hanker for none of these but only after progeny. A son he had to have, to open heaven for him. There is a terrible greed which is worse than the greed for gold or curds, or for Heaven itself. It is a man’s wish for sons. Fortunate Pandu. He died before he could ask himself whether, had he overcome this desire, the great battle could have been avoided. He never awoke in the dead of night to see the battlefield strewn with severed heads and the corpses of elephants and horses. The shastras say, “Desire for sons is desire for wealth, and desire for wealth is desire for worlds: both are nothing but desires,” and I have no doubt that the sages recited these verses to Pandu.

  But what makes a man truly a knower of Brahman?

  “That by which he becomes such,” say the sages enigmatically. “All the rest is chaff.”

  So for the first years, Mother Kunti said, Pandu was at peace. He gave up hunting and harmed nothing that moved. He steeped himself in the sages’ words. But what are knowledge and belief against desire? They are like a quail against an elephant in the scales.

  One day Pandu heard of the prophecy that Dhritarashtra would be the father of a hundred sons. There was no more peace in the forest for him. Like a tidal wave it came, not one torment but many: without sons the doors of Heaven were barred, for who would offer the funeral rice cakes when he died? His meditations were full of this dilemma: to beget children meant immediate death, to die without them was to be denied Heaven. Close to insanity, he ran to the sages. For the first time, instead of advising detachment, the sages prophesied children for him but said that the onus was on him to find a solution.

  Pandu lost no time in meditation but went straight to Kunti. Eleven ways of having sons are approved by the shastras when a wife cannot do so by the seed of her husband. His brother may father them, or a sage, or they may be adopted, or some worthy person may be chosen to beget them out of compassion or out of necessity, for monetary gain… but when Pandu finally implored her to give him sons through someone his equal or some great sage she, who had guarded his life by day and night, protested that she would rather risk his death and hers than consider having sons by another man.

  My mother could usually make Kunti’s feelings clear to me, but all she knew in this case was that Pandu was devoured by the need for sons and that he went so far as to remind Kunti that according to the ancient customs of his lineage, women who gave themselves to men out of love were not held in disrepute, no matter what their caste. Though this sounded outlandish to me, it is true that the Kuru women of the north still live freely like this, taking husbands but loving where they will.

  Now everyone knows the story of Kunti’s first son, born to her before she was married to Pandu and abandoned for fear of her father’s wrath, and also of the incantation that the irate Rishi Durvasa bestowed on her when she was still in her father’s house. I myself learnt of it only on the eve of the great battle when I heard Krishna urging Karna to come to the Pandava side and take his rightful place as the eldest son of Kunti. I went to the one person in whom she confided and my mother told me this story. It was as though I had always known.

  Kunti was the sister of Krishna’s father Vasudeva. She was a bright, sweet-tempered child. This is said of so many young girls, especially when their swayamvaras approach, but it was true of Kunti, though she was not exceptionally beautiful like Madri. She was adopted by her childless uncle Kuntibhoja from whom she took her name. Kuntibhoja somehow found himself host to the sage Durvasa for a whole year, a very risky thing as anyone knows who has heard the stories of that sage’s temper and curses. The whole palace would find itself living on the edge of a volcano for a year. None of the maidens wanted to go near him. It was said that if you brought his food so much as a few minutes late you might wither away. So he was given the affectionate young girl to serve him, and her decorum and lightheartedness pleased him. She did not know there was any cause to be afraid, and she rather liked the old man whose large head was imposing but whose eyes knew how to laugh. He teasingly promised her a present at the end of the year. She thought of tiny jewelled boxes and mirrors, though the sage carried nothing and had nowhere to keep such trinkets; his water vessel and his staff were his only possessions.

  On the last day of the visit he solemnly taught her a mantra which she repeated carefully after him. She supposed he might still be playing with her when he told her that she must keep the words secret for they would summon any god to her side.

  The rest of the story is not for a man to tell, hardly for a mortal at all, and so here it is in the words of Kripi, my mother, as far as I can remember them. Her voice turned to silver when she told it and tears came to her eyes.

  “In the morning when the Sun rose in the east, the child stood at the window combing her hair with her heart filled with love for this great glorious god, too powerful to be approached but touching us all; and she longed to offer him worship. Without thinking, but with a tremor of excitement and a sense of not being fully prepared, she began reciting the mantra that the sage had g
iven her as the Sun pressed his rays against her body, warming her and penetrating her closed eyelids.

  “When she opened her eyes, the Sun was speeding along the river. And then there he was, in front of her. He said he had come to be her husband; and when she replied that was not what she had called him for, he gave a laugh like liquid fire and said that the incantation had more power than she knew; besides, the gods expected him to fulfil his mission.”

  Kunti remembered the embrace of the tender god, and how he had blinded her with his radiance, and how she had then been filled, in every part of her body, with light. Her hands, her skin, her mind, her heart had turned to gold. He touched her navel and then told her that he would be with her and that he had left her his son. The next thing she remembered was the god striding up the river along a molten path to reach the great ball of light before it separated itself from the water.

  When the heart of the child Kunti faltered within her at the thought of the shame she might bring to her father, the Sun penetrated the air all around her, and into her heart, saying, “We are gods and beyond human Dharma. There is no loss of Dharma for you in this. Our son will surpass all other men in the greatness of his heart, he will grace the earth with his presence and will never be forgotten. He will be a great warrior and archer. He will be graced with protective armour and earrings. You will see me in him.”

  When Kunti gave birth to Karna, it was said that the earrings were as much part of him as my head gem was part of me, and certainly I never saw Karna without them from the day I met him to that on which he was obliged to part with them. It was said too that the god gave him invulnerability as impenetrable as armour, but later he surrendered it to the great god Indra. Certainly, Karna had the brightness of the sun, a brilliant and sometimes unbearable presence.

  So here is the end of my mother’s tale: As Kunti held the child to her heart in fear and uncertainty, its father strode down the river again to tell her what she must do. She wrapped the child in silk and laid him in a wicker basket and floated him down the river, saying: “The Sun, your father, will guide you, the Lord of the Waters will guard you, all the gods will protect you. I am the most fortunate of women because you are my son and the most miserable because I cannot keep you with me. Whoever finds you is, of all people, blessed.”

  Once Kunti had finally revealed the story of this son to her Lord in the forest, not only was she lightened of her burden, but the Deer-Rishi’s curse lost its sting, for while Kunti suffered only because she could not comfort her Lord, and he because his wife had to live without his embrace, sons were what mattered now. She still suffered for her brother Vasudeva whose first seven children had been killed by Kamsa, but Pandu was no longer a warrior king and could make no move to avenge him.

  In the forest, many years after the birth of this sun child who became known as Karna, Kunti uttered Durvasa’s mantra three times. Three sons were born to her. The first of them was Yudhishthira.

  In the eighth month, while the moon was on his bright path, Yudhishthira, son of Dharma, Lord of Righteousness, was born. At his birth she heard a voice speak out of heaven, telling Kunti that he would be the most noble and the most virtuous of men.

  In the second year Bheema, of great strength, was born of Vayu, the Lord of Winds; Kunti had seen him coming to her riding a deer. He was born on the same day as Duryodhana, whose mother Gandhari, jealous at the news of Bheema and impatient for sons, struck her womb with her fist. Arjuna, Kunti’s third son, came from the great god Indra himself, Lord of Heaven. A voice said that Arjuna would be an incomparable hero and conqueror.

  And this time there was a great hush in the forest, not a bird sang, not an animal moved, not a leaf stirred, the slightest breeze died, and Kunti heard the voice prophesize, “He is Nara, the other half of his cousin Krishna who is Narayana. These two have come to cleanse the earth of all her poison.”

  To cleanse the earth of her poison.

  To cleanse the earth of her poison.

  To cleanse the earth of her poison.

  Kunti’s maternal qualities became a legend in her own time. But the more she gave to her three sons, the more she aware became of what she had been unable to give her firstborn, Karna. As for Pandu, even now his hunger for sons had not been appeased. But Kunti refused to use the mantra again, reminding him that the sages had said that women who slept with more than three men, must be regarded as defiled and that one who slept with five, must be a whore. On this point she stood firm, but when pressed, she agreed to use the incantation so that Madri could bear him a son, and my mother regarded this as a proof of Kunti’s great good nature. I teased her and asked whether she would have refused. She cuffed me and said one impertinent son was trouble enough. Madri must have known that there would be no repetition of this generosity and she prayed to the celestial twins, those paragons of beauty, the Ashwins, the divine physicians. She bore the two handsomest sons of all, dark and beautifully proportioned Nakula and wheat-coloured Sahadeva. Sahadeva of all the five was to become the dearest of the children to Kunti. It was the last time she used Durvasa’s mantra. One more son for Madri would have made them even.

  One day Kashyapa, family priest of the Vrishnis, came secretly, bringing gifts to Kunti and news of her brother Vasudeva who had been Kamsa’s prisoner. Krishna, his eighth child, had been saved and hidden in a village with a foster-mother. It was a season of rejoicing for Kunti.

  The Rishis in the Satasringa forest had performed the rites for the naming ceremony. The five boys were much loved, not only by Pandu and his queens, but by the Rishis of the isolated valley as well—and Kashyapa was so charmed that he stayed for the sacred thread ceremony.

  Amongst the many living an ascetic life in this valley was Shuka, one of the best archers in the whole of Bharatavarsha. He trained the five princes in the martial arts, and Pandu lived to see Yudhishthira expert with the javelin, Bheema with the mace, and Arjuna a promising archer. The twins excelled with the sword.

  Bheema was the strongest and nobody but his teacher dared approach him when he circled with his mace, but of the five, it was Arjuna in whom everybody took special pride. Besides being the most charming, he was a prodigy who could use either hand to shoot with; he did so with such grace and accuracy that Shuka told him he had become his equal and made him a gift of his own bow, an unadorned but massively elegant weapon which Arjuna showed me much later in Hastinapura. I lifted it with some effort, but he had been able to shoot with it when only thirteen.

  I never saw Madri of course, but everyone agreed that she was exceedingly beautiful and had a reckless kind of charm. Those of Kunti were sweetness and wisdom and the beauty that goes with them.

  It had been a bitter winter even for those protected by the thick walls of palaces. I have seen spring come to the Satasringa forest: peacocks sit in the trees; the birds sing sweetly. Elephants with ichor streaming from their temples lead the herds past the huts of hermits shaking the ground. Watching them, men feel a sweet tremor. Perfumes fill the air and the river sings a love song.

  One spring day, when Kunti was visiting a neighbouring hermitage with the five children, Madri wove garlands for Pandu. She took them to him as he sat by the river listening, they say, to the songs of the swans and the cranes and, since Kunti was not there, nothing in the three worlds could have prevented what happened. Pandu died in Madri’s arms and she persuaded Kunti to allow her to join their lord on the funeral pyre.

  “You are the wise one, Kunti, so wide and patient that Durvasa found no fault in you.” Touching her sons’ heads she mounted the funeral pyre.

  Arjuna told me much later how it was: “Having taken his ritual bath, the Purohita Kashyapa collected ghee, curds, rice, and sacred water. In our new clothes we sat watching, tasting deep grief for the first time, and it was bitter. The Rishis chanted, ‘May he reach Heaven this very day. May all his good deeds be rewarded and may there be compassion for his omissions.’ Our souls rose in the smoke. The ghee, curds, and rice were offered to
the fire. The first part of our life was ended.

  “It was the day of my fourteenth birthday. I was already a man and Yudhishthira was head of the family. He it was who took us back to Hastinapura.” Arjuna wept as he told this story and I wept with him.

  7

  Everybody knows of the Pandavas’ entry into Hastinapura. People say they heard a great tap-tapping early one morning and when they looked from the windows, they saw nothing but matted topknots and animal skins and the glint of metal water pots in the sun, so that it seemed that all the sages of all the forests in Bharatavarsha were filing through the streets of the capital. The sound came from the tapping of pilgrim staffs, but the sages themselves were solemn and silent. The mood they brought was one of peace. They had come to the court with news of the death of Pandu, and also out of love for Pandu’s sons and Mother Kunti who were following with more rishis. Hastinapura had never seen so many holy men together. The citizens flocked to the ascetics, brought them food, filled their water pots, and offered them shelter.

  By the time Mother Kunti came with Yudhishthira, Bheema, Arjuna, and the twins, the road was lined with citizens of all castes, and Greatfather Bheeshma himself was at the gate of the city to receive them with Ambika, the mother of Dhritarashtra, and Ambalika, the mother of Pandu. Gandhari had come with Satyavati, though they hardly ever left the palace.

  The eldest Rishi presented Greatfather Bheeshma with the remains of Pandu and Madri. I often wondered afterwards how someone who had sobbed with grief as Dhritarashtra had done at the loss of his brother could have allowed what later happened to Pandu’s sons. He sobbed continuously for hours and hours on end, and it was feared that he would fall ill and himself die of grief, but he waved away the calming potions and repeatedly told his remaining brother, Vidura, to distribute, in the name of Pandu, more wealth and cattle than had ever been distributed before. The twelve days of official mourning began and the five Pandava brothers slept on the ground beside the river. Those in the city gave up sleeping in beds to mourn with them. The five brothers had been taken into the hearts of the people.