—You sound so strange when you say that. So far away and distant somehow.
— I think my time is coming too. For an instant, I could see into our next life. We were together, and we were loved. There is sorrow on the horizon as well, but what life is without sorrow and suffering? At least we will not be alone.
— Since I have little strength left, I will sit up and put my head on your shoulder, like this. I can’t even imagine the time when we did not touch each other, you have become more of a sister to me than my sisters ever were. Poor Ambika. I wonder if she will also get what she wants.
— It is not for us to know. Ambika has her own fate that she must follow.
— You are so wise.
— For a eunuch?
— For anyone. Now, before it’s too late. I went back to Hastinapura to talk to him.
— You went back to Hastinapura to talk to Prince Bheeshma. I think you hoped that all would come well by then. He would be so moved by your plight that he would marry you. And you had come to love him.
— I didn’t love him! Did I? Oh Lalita, you sly creature, how did you know before I truly did myself?
— I knew from the time you came back from the forest together, fresh from your ride. I think that’s when Salva noticed as well. A great love can hardly be buried, as you tried to do.
— But Bheeshma refused to marry me when I asked him.
— He said he couldn’t break his vow. You pleaded with him, your hair undone, tears across your face. You said, ‘You have ruined me, no one will marry me now, not even your brother, who is happily married to my sisters. Why must I suffer alone?’
— And still he stuck to his stubborn ways.
— And still he stuck to his vow. ‘I am called Bheeshma because I will never marry or have children. I made that vow before the gods,’ he told you. ‘How can I break it for a mortal woman?’ You looked as though he had hit you. You said, ‘And the fate of this mortal woman doesn’t matter to you? You abducted me from the life I had planned for myself and you can’t even make good on your duty.’
— But he still refused to listen. I didn’t even want to be the queen, I told him. I was happy to have my sisters be the queens in my stead, even though as the eldest of them, it was my role. I just wanted a husband. A name I could take. A shelter under which to hide. And ... I suppose I wanted him. His face smiling at me every morning, his body to anoint with sandalwood and oil before he went into battle. His, yes, his bed to share.
— For two days, you lay in your chamber without food or drink. Queen Satyavati offered you a pick of noblemen and princes, but you refused. ‘My husband will feel the same way about me as Salva did,’ you told her. ‘The only man who can marry me now and save my name is Bheeshma.’
— She was so horrible, Lalita. She said, ‘He is not the man for you.’ I still believe if she had spoken to him, maybe he would have listened. And we would not be in this forest, having run away from them all, and waiting for death.
— No, Amba. Listen to me. Bheeshma would not break his vow, not for you, not for any woman. Do you understand what I am saying?
— Are you saying...? How do you know?
— Palaces are full of gossip, and Hastinapura is no better than Kashi, for all they give themselves airs.
— So he abducted me, knowing this about himself, and refused to even give me an honest answer beyond his vow. Men have such convenient times to stand on their pride. When it suits him, it’s his vow, but what about how it hurts someone else? What is his sacrifice if it is my sacrifice as well? Do I get a reward from the gods? A boon? If so I’ll ask for it now. I don’t think I will see another dawn, so let the gods hear me now. I wish to be reborn as a warrior, a great warrior. And I wish to be reborn as the warrior who will kill Bheeshma. Do you hear me, Shiva? A maiden, and a blameless princess, asks you this. I have denied myself of food and water so that I may die thinking of my next life. I have drawn out my death, not used knife or fire to end myself quickly. Shiva, as you hear any maiden’s prayers, hear mine, the blameless Princess Amba, hear my cry for revenge on this man who has stolen it all from me.
— I, Lalita, once Jinodaya, witness your vow and ask that the gods let me serve you in our next life as well.
— Think, Lalita. Without Bheeshma, oh, I could have been anything. Anything. The mother of fine sons. Ruling my own kingdom. What right did he have ... what right...
— Hush now, you are trembling.
— I wonder if it will hurt very much when I leave this body. I’m a coward about pain.
— I don’t think it will hurt at all.
— Let’s be silent now, Lalita. Let’s watch the sun set fire to the sky. Listen, the birds are returning to their nests. Tomorrow, it will be a world without me in it. It sounds so strange to say it, and yet, I have loved this world. I have loved my life, my comfortable life, someone to comb my hair for me, and the meals I was given, and the baths I once sunk into without ever stopping to think about how precious they were. I have loved people – you, and my sisters, my Sauvee, and awful Salva, and my poor mother and my dictatorial father, and, I suppose I have loved the man who stole me away from my life. I have loved the smell of the world, the feel of it, the brush of feathers from a falcon, the muzzle of a horse, the way silk falls on my body, the shine of jewels. At this moment, I am all the Ambas, the infant Amba, presented to her father, the girl Amba who grew up watching over her sisters, and the woman Amba, disappointed. Will anyone wonder what became of me? Will my mother wake up as I die, and feel it pierce her heart? Will my sisters have children and see something in their faces that remind them of me? Will Salva mount his new wife and think to when we touched each other with such gratitude? And will Bheeshma think of me from time to time, perhaps when he is riding or hunting, will he think once I stole a girl and I stole her life?
There’s my traitorous heart again, thumping out its rhythm, I’m alive, I’m alive.
I am born and I die, and I am born and I die, the cycle of rebirth, over and over again, until I can find the perfect life to slip into. The perfect life for me to fulfil the vow I made to myself and to the gods, I will be born a great warrior to a great king. Fifty rains pass, and in Hastinapura, a blind prince and his pale brother are born, they have sons – one hundred for one of them, and five for the other. Bheeshma grows older, his beard streaked with grey, his face wrinkles, but his eyes – now more sunken than they were – are still shrewd as they watch over his nephews and great-nephews. And in another kingdom, a queen has a daughter, but when she looks into her baby’s face, she sees a son.
Part Two: Shikhandini
Listen, I had that dream again, where I’m in the forest. But I’m not alone, I have this comforting presence next to me, and we are both so young, and it was so many years ago. I know this because of the light, it’s textured and soft. I am leaning against a tree, and watching you, and you are burying a knife, it glints in the light, and you dig a hole with your hands. I watch from where I am because my limbs are so weak I can’t move them, not even to help you. The soil is black, and comes away in great lumps, like flesh, and you put the knife at the bottom of the hole, and you let the dirt trickle from your fingers until it’s buried and you whisper, ‘No one will ever know’ and I know it’s a promise to me, but the me that I am. You are calling across time to me, and I am listening. In my dream, we are sitting side by side, and you are telling me a story about a little boy and his father, and I am only half listening, because I’m also watching a leaf detach itself from its branch, and fall, half-suspended, to the ground. When the leaf comes close to me, I see that it is covered in blood, and that is when I gasp, and when you turn to look at me, I see that you are you, after all, and not that long-ago person, and I reach out to touch your face and you dissolve like water, but not before you smile at me, and I see your face is still your face but on top of it is another face, that I do not know, like a mask, but how odd, they fit together.
Chapter One
My mother was the one who decided who I should be. I was part of a set of twins – a boy and a girl – and my brother died before I arrived. My father had a son by his first wife – a sweet infant called Satyajit, who would be the heir to Panchala and its capital Kampilya – and my mother longed to prove herself worthy of having sons as well. The first wife had died young and Satyajit was brought up by the servants still loyal to the memory of his mother. My mother was – is – kind, and she had been making an effort to mother him by telling him that soon he would have a baby brother to play with. She was determined to have that little boy, as was my father, because the astrologers told them both that their next child would be a great warrior. No such predictions were ever made for my older brother, and he remains a gentle man as he was a gentle boy, large eyed and soft spoken. The people love him, the subjects of Panchala cheer for him when he goes on tours with my father, or increasingly, in lieu of my father. He has a wife – Haradevee – and two small children born in quick succession and he is so unabashedly happy with his life. I’ve never met anyone more content than my brother Satyajit. I envy him sometimes. No, I envy him often.
I think that I absorbed some of my twin brother’s soul. That when he died inside our mother’s womb, his life left him, but his atman flew into me, so I had two selves. I think my mother saw that shadow of him the first time she held me, weeping with disappointment over the death of her son, and I think if she hadn’t been so wild with grief, so tired after many hours of birth pains, and if she hadn’t been left alone for that brief spare moment when the midwife took the body of the other infant out of the room, I don’t think she would have noticed. But she did, and she saw her son in that child’s face, her living heir, and she stopped crying and held me close to her and told my father that they had another boy. No one argued with her, not even when they removed my swaddling cloth and saw what I had between my legs. I was the second son, my father is a deeply superstitious man and he went back to the astrologers who told him to raise me as a man and eventually I would become one.
For the first hour of my life, I lay next to my mother and we watched the sun rise together. And then the wet nurse came in, she had just had a baby boy as well, and she took me from my mother’s arms and placed me at her breast and I reached out one palm as I sucked and on the other side of me, her new baby reached out his and that was the moment Utsarg and I met. ‘A lovely baby, Majesty,’ said Utsarg’s mother. Her name was Kausuma, and she died three rains go, poor woman. My mother said, ‘Yes, his name is Shikhandi, isn’t he perfect?’
Kausuma told me later that she would never wish the fate I had on any child. ‘Born one thing and told you are another, indeed! If I took a rooster and told him he was a swan, he would still drown.’
‘But Kausuma-ma, I like being a boy,’ I remember telling her. We had run into her quarters for food and comfort, some of the other boys were teasing me because I wouldn’t piss like they did, standing up.
‘No doubt you do, my little darling, my Shikhandini, but it will cause you trouble later all the same,’ she said and kissed me hard to make up for whatever she saw in my future and gave us both honeyed cakes. While my brothers outgrew their wet nurses and their nannies, I somehow never tired of going to Kausuma’s and having her love me in her worried overpowering way, holding me close to her pendulous breasts even after I was too old to crawl into her lap. Utsarg stayed dry eyed the day they cremated her, but I wept enough for the whole palace, even though I was old enough then to be a man.
I am thinking of my mother as we lie in the forest. We have exhausted ourselves with calling for help, our throats are sore with the shouting and the smoke of the fire we built in the hope of attracting rescuers to us. And keeping wild animals away. I am skilful with my sword, but not if a wolf was to start eating me while I was still asleep.
‘I wonder if Sthunakarna will know who we are,’ I say, just to make conversation, and Utsarg, who is lying next to me, sticks his finger in his mouth as he ponders this. ‘They say yakshas know everything,’ he offers, after a bit.
‘Everything? Like gods?’
‘They are known as the wise folk. At least, they were, when magic was thick on the ground. There used to be stories about yakshas who would give you your heart’s desire if you answered three questions correctly. Riches. Kingdoms.’ Utsarg’s eyes go round as he imagines getting his heart’s desire. Probably more food, I think to myself, and snort.
‘You’re making them sound more and more like gods,’ I tell him and he looks back at me, his face taking on the expression that I know means he will now give me a lecture. We were educated together, even though the sutas usually only learnt very little compared to princes, because I could not bear to be parted from him, and my father said, ‘Oh why not, let the children be together if they must.’ But Utsarg soaked up all the knowledge and grew like a learned little lotus, while I preferred to hear stories about great wars and the great families who fought them, and didn’t pay attention at all to all the rest.
Now he draws a deep breath and begins, ‘Not at all like gods. While gods are wise and just, the yakshins are the opposite of that. They are fey tricksters, liking nothing more than luring unsuspecting humans into their traps for bargains full of loopholes that only the yakshins can fathom, so you might answer all three of their questions and get your heart’s desire but you’d have to live the rest of your life in the body of an ass. Do you see?’
I nod, a little warily. ‘So this bargain we want to make with Sthunakarna?’
‘We’re not going to bargain,’ he says. ‘We’re going to request and appeal to his higher nature. If creatures like him even have a higher nature. I, for one, am sceptical.’
I snort again, and look to the heavens for some help but none is forthcoming. It seems I am stuck on this journey with just Utsarg and his plain-speaking ways.
We had taken off, riding like thieves in the night, our horses run till they couldn’t run anymore, just because someone said the yaksha Sthunakarna who lives in a forest would help me when I needed it. I’m beginning to doubt the person who told me, it was so long ago. A sage called Kanakeshvara had come to Kampilya, because he knew he could count on my father’s hospitality, my father was a great believer in sages and how their blessings helped your kingdom run better.
Kanakeshvara was quite young, as sages go. His hair was not yet matted, his face only lined very little, his beard just a little below his chin. He was quite jolly, round and perpetually amused, and he had us all laughing with his absurdities. For example, I remember crying about my toy cart which had lost its wheel, and he said, ‘Bring me that, child’ and I did, thinking he would fix it with his magic. I had heard that sages knew all sorts of prayers that could make the impossible happen. But Kanakeshvara held the cart up and looked at it and said, ‘Oh, I see what the problem is! You think you’ve broken your cart whereas in fact this is a hat.’ And as my mouth dropped open, he perched it solemnly on his head and began talking to us about how things were often not as they seemed, because this world is full of illusion, and he looked so funny like that, my sides hurt later from laughing so much. I wonder now if he looked at me and thought, ‘That which you call a boy is in fact a girl, that is the problem.’
Right before he left us to move onward on his pilgrimage, Kanakeshvara asked my father to send in all us children one by one to him. He had a soft spot for children, and we, in turn, were sorry to see him go, because his smiling face made a dull lesson brighter, and he was never too busy to romp along in all our games. When it was my turn, he pulled me to him and looked straight into my eyes.
‘There may be a time when you want to be more than who you are,’ he told me, his face serious for the first time since we had known him. ‘When that time is upon you, hunt for the yaksha Sthunakarna. He will give you what you seek.’
I held that name close to me for a few days, and then, as children do, I forgot all about it, till our dash from Dasarna, and then I told Utsarg, who asked the right que
stions and found out where we had to go. Utsarg is plump and has a loud laugh and I have known him almost exactly my entire life. As far as heroic companions go, he does not fit the picture – he is so clumsy, he is almost always covered with bruises, and his feelings get hurt easily, so you must be careful what you say to him. My brothers all have their own companions who are almost as dashing as they are, and if not handsome, they are brave, or noble, sutas, who have learned warfare. I sometimes wish I had been given one of those sort of men for my lifelong companion and helpmate, but then Utsarg will grin at me, as he bounces along on his horse, and then I wonder what I would do without him. It’s a lonely feeling, imagining life without Utsarg, so I don’t think of it too often.
We stopped only after we had ridden all night, and some of the next day, the horses could not go on, and I was half-sliding from my mount, my very bones weary. Utsarg noticed and said that we should stop in a little copse, sheltered from the road and with a handy stream nearby for us and the horses to drink.
I somehow had envisioned us going quickly, day and night, and over fields and lakes, riding as fast as we could, but that was silly. Our horses needed to rest, and so did we. It’s just that when my ayah told us stories, the prince always rode all day and all night to get to his beloved. Also, I knew Utsarg was stopping because of my luckless body.
He is the only one who mentions it without mentioning it, like it is a part of my character, like some people have big noses or sly mouths. As it happened, I was glad he stopped because I would not have. The binding cloth around my chest was cutting into my skin, my thighs were chafed and sore, but I’m sure Utsarg’s were too. I’m sure when the moon comes out that it will be close to my own moon time, the time I hate the most, because it is the biggest reminder of who I am not. Shikhandini instead of Shikhandi. Graceful instead of powerful. Swaying waist instead of broad chest. It is the time I hide myself from the entire world. Even Utsarg sometimes.
Girls of the Mahabharata Page 13