I shot some birds with my arrows, and Utsarg dressed them and cooked them for us. For two men without any women around, we were doing very well. Utsarg is deft with his fingers and an excellent cook, and I know how to acquire just the right amount of meat for us, nothing left behind, and no animal suffers when I end their life, like so many clumsy hunters I have seen.
And we went to sleep in the glade, and when we woke up, the horses had disappeared and we were cooped in a circle of thick, thorny vines as far as our eyes could see.
Chapter Two
‘What have you done?’ I was on my feet, the bow already in my hand, ready to reach for the arrow.
‘What have I done? I thought this was your doing!’ Utsarg scrambled up as well, his hand going to his hip where his short blade sits.
‘Why would I set free our horses and bring us to the middle of a forest? And how would I do this, Utsarg, think. Would I really be able to dump you here without your knowledge, without you waking up?’
He was not paying attention to me anymore. Instead, he squatted to examine some of the white star-like flowers that grew on the base of a tree. Of all the times to admire flowers, he chose this one. I blew out a deep breath, shook my head and looked around me again. No one was watching us as far as I knew. Our captors, abductors, whoever they are, had made themselves scarce. I let the bow dangle to my side.
‘Do you know what flower this is?’ he asked, plucking one and waving it under my nose. It smells familiar – ashes and sandalwood. I’m assaulted with a memory that races through my mind so swiftly it may as well not be there. I am small and with my mother at her prayers, she lifts some of the ash from the incense and puts a dot on my forehead. She pulls me towards her and croons, ‘My little warrior.’
‘No, of course I don’t know what that flower is,’ I growled at him, but he still looked smug.
‘But you remembered something just then, didn’t you?’
I lift one shoulder to my ear and look up to the heavens again. He sniffed the flower and said dreamily, ‘See, when I sniff it, I can smell sea water. I don’t know when I was ever near the sea, probably not in this lifetime, but I see myself on a large pile of sand with my sister, running it through my fingers. The sand feels cool and heavy.’
‘You don’t have a sister,’ I told him and he looked unabashed. ‘I know I do not! This is a memory flower, its scent makes you remember moments from all your lives. This one and the ones gone by. I’ve read about it, of course, but I never thought it would actually exist.’
‘I don’t suppose this memory flower will also help us escape this?’
‘It does tell me we’re not where we were last night,’ he said, and walked to the beginning of vines caging us in, ‘See, can you smell the air, it feels thicker and cooler. I think we’re higher up. I think – I think we’re in the yaksha’s forest!’ He spun to look at me, his face wreathed with smiles.
‘Is this magic?’ I asked. I’ve heard of magic, we all have, but the days when the gods roamed the earth and you had to watch out for asuras in caves – those days are over. Once man learned to build shelter, once we learned to pass on stories to our children and grandchildren and create things when before there was only stones or trees, that’s when magic realized we didn’t need it any more. At least, this is what I think. You hear of stranger things happening all the time. There are five princes in Hastinapura called the Pandavas who, it is said, are demi-gods, born of their mothers lying with a different god each time they wanted children. But I have never seen these princes, so I can’t judge. It’s probably just a story.
Utsarg, however, has always believed in miracles. Like me, he agrees that it is not as plentiful as it might have been once, but he thinks magic still exists if you know where to look for it. And he is looking around him with interest, even though the sunlight barely comes through the leaves because they are so thick above our heads and the air is a strange blue, as though it is either dawn or twilight. There are no other sounds, I notice. Not even the chirping of a lone bird, not the sad monotony of crickets. In fact, it feels still and like everything is waiting. It’s hard to describe, but it’s almost as if everything has taken one indrawn breath.
I sat down on the grass, which I notice now is soft and just the right length, not too damp and not too dry. ‘Utsarg, if you are right, if this is the yaksha’s forest, what shall we do now? I can’t hear any birds, and I don’t know what we would eat. We might be imprisoned in here forever.’ I was trying to be brave, but there was a little tremble in my voice. To have come so far just to lose it all.
Utsarg sat down next to me and put his arm around my shoulders, which he hadn’t done in a while. He pulled me a little closer, so our heads were touching and he said, ‘I think if the yaksha has plucked us out of our journey and brought us here, it means he wants to meet us.’ His voice is low and rumbling and comforting. My voice never changed, but I began to pitch it lower around the same time as Utsarg started to sound like a man. It became such a habit with me that now I can’t remember what my real voice is. But also this is my real voice, unimpeded by the fact of my body.
I moved away from Utsarg and walked up to the vines and shouted through them, ‘O Yaksha! If you wanted to capture us, consider us captured! We are waiting for you! Come and meet us!’ I held my breath after I said it, but all I heard was an eerie echo, as though we were in a cave.
Waiting ... called out my echo ... meet.
I cleared my throat to shout again but Utsarg came up behind me and shook his head. ‘Don’t,’ he said, softly. ‘Who knows what else might be in there?’
That convinced me, his skittish expression, eyes moving from side to side, the way he said ‘else’ conjuring up images of asuras and ghosts and demons, all watching us from behind the vines, their teeth bared and eyes glinting. It might have been an enclosure for us, but it might also have kept them out. So, for a long time, we said nothing, alone with our thoughts, maybe he slept, maybe I did, and thus, did the long hours pass of our first day in the cage.
Chapter Three
My family is very large. I have ten brothers and one sister, and it seemed when I was growing up that my mother was always with child. Not the twins though – my father found Draupadi and Dhristadyumna outside a burning house about five rains ago. Everyone else in that house had perished, but someone – perhaps their real mother – had placed them outside, swaddled in a cloth. Believing in omens, my father brought them back to my mother and told her that these two would also go a long way in destroying his old enemy, a teacher called Drona, who trains those young so-called demi-god princes in Hastinapura.
Drona and my father both studied under the sage Bhardwaja, who was Drona’s father. They grew up together like brothers, and as small boys are wont to do, my father promised Drona half his kingdom in the same way you’d promise a playmate half your sweetmeat. The kingdom of Panchala wasn’t my father’s to promise then, however. Many years of battles and acquisitions and timely marriages later, my grandfather Prishata was proud to hand over the reins of the kingdom to my father, peace and prosperity was finally throughout the land, the subjects were happy, the interlopers had been removed, my father had just been married, and his wife was about to bear their first child. It was into this that Drona came, a friend my father hadn’t seen in years, but who he nevertheless made welcome. Drona was plied with riches and good food and when he told my father that his family was struggling, my father offered him an estate with farmland, right outside Kampilya for his very own.
But Drona insisted my father give him the half of the kingdom he was promised when they were children, and not just any half, but the most fertile land, with the richest subjects who paid the highest taxes. It would be as though your childhood friend, to whom you had offered your doll, came back and asked for your child. My father refused, shocked that this man would take such advantage of their relationship, and in return, Drona spread it far and wide that he had defeated my father in battle – using his youn
g students, who were little boys then as archers – and he, in fact, owned Panchala. The news buckled the kingdom for many years, subjects were unsure who to pay taxes to, several people tried to set up residence by force on large estates by claiming to be related to Drona, and worst, everyone thought my father was a warrior who could be defeated by children.
My father’s life has been linked to Hastinapura, where Drona lives, since before I was born, but I can’t tell if the faint prickle of revulsion I feel each time I hear that city’s name is altogether because of his ancient grudge.
Except for Satyajit, I don’t think very much of my other brothers. They are my brothers, and I love them, but they very quickly started to live their own lives. Satyajit took an interest in all of us, but it was me he loved first. My first memory is of him squatting down with me and Utsarg and telling us about how the sun god moved through the sky on his chariot drawn by seven horses. I was the first child born to his stepmother, and though she tried to love us all actively, after nine children, she hadn’t the energy to do much more than smile kindly at us every now and then.
She does enjoy having a daughter now, though, my mother. For little Draupadi, she has boundless attention, she is never too tired for Draupadi to go and sit in the same room and tell my mother all her doings. She had so many sons after I was born, and sometimes I wonder if she longed to turn me back into a woman again. If she did, she never mentions it. I am very fond of my small sister myself, so are all of us. We indulge her as we would a pet, but she is a sweet-tempered thing and not spoilt by all our kindness.
I remember right before we left for Dasarna, she came into my room and stood there watching me.
‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Do I pass?’
And she said, solemn faced, ‘Brother, why do you wear that always?’ pointing at my binding cloth, cinched around my chest as it always is.
‘I wear this so my chest can be flat and strong like the earth,’ I told her. She hadn’t yet reached the age where she saw me as anything else but her powerful older brother. I’ve seen it happen with each of my siblings, one moment they are children and they accept me, their Shikhandi brother as who I am. The next, they are looking at me in the mirror of adulthood, and they see I am not quite like everyone else. I can always tell when that happens – because they stop examining me frankly, their chins up and their eyes meeting mine, instead they dart away like fish in a pond when I go closer.
‘No one else wears one,’ Draupadi said, her face growing troubled.
I shook my head, ‘No, no one else does.’
I waited for the realisation to hit her, but she just tilted her head to look at me, ‘Does it make you stronger than everyone else?’
It does make me stronger than everyone else, but not in the way she was thinking. That day, I let her clamber on to my back and we pretended to be bears, roaring through the palace with our hair standing on end, much to her delight and the shock of everyone we passed.
Chapter Four
‘You are not listening,’ says Utsarg, and I break off from thinking about my family and look at him. I have been helping him as he looked for a way out since we rose this morning – at least, I think it was morning, it is still the same light as it was before, and I still don’t see any sort of path in front of us.
‘I’m so hungry,’ he says, and leans against a tree, ‘I think I will faint with hunger. All our food was in the packs next to us, and that yaksha did not think that we had to eat when he picked us up and placed us here.’
‘Maybe he did not like us searching for him,’ I say. ‘Maybe this is a trap, like the sort we make for mice, only much bigger and we’ll keep going around in circles until we starve to death.’ When I say that, I’m struck with a memory of a tree and the feel of it against my back, and someone stroking my hair.
‘Your thoughts might be light because you haven’t eaten anything,’ he says, but he goes closer to the vines to examine them anyway.
He walks around them for a while, and I drop to a squat on the ground, waiting for him to finish. If there is a way to escape, then Utsarg will figure it out. He’s always been clever like that. He may not have been the best fighter in a game of war, but everyone wanted Utsarg on their side when it came to creating the battle formations. Not that he would go on any side that didn’t have me in it. And I emerged from the games a better fighter than I was before, because of his skilled advice on where I should go and what I should do.
It is strange being in this quiet forest, the only sound is our breathing, and even though the leaves are still, there is a definite breeze lifting up strands of our hair and tickling the back of our necks. The light hasn’t changed either, and by now, I am used to it, but if I stop to think about it, I’d probably be terrified. It’s hard to explain what is so scary about quiet trees and a blue light washing over everything, but that feeling like something is waiting just gets stronger when I go towards the vines with the sword. I look around me nervously, and glance at Utsarg who is nursing his hand from where he cut it on a thorn and looks unconcerned. Maybe it’s just a story I’m telling myself.
I take a deep breath and slash at the vines, which immediately start spurting deep white sap. Some of it gets on my fingers and I yelp and draw back, seeing my flesh raise and welter like a burn scar where the sap gets it. I look at Utsarg and he looks back at me, his face all circles with horror. ‘You will not get the better of me,’ I mutter, and slash again, but this time the vines begin to grow almost before my eyes, so fast that my feet are tangled in them where before I was stepping in just grass, and I am falling towards them, and any minute now, my eyes will be scratched out and I will be blind, no use as a warrior.
Utsarg has me before I can fall though, his hand around my elbow yanking me back. For the first time, I begin to doubt my instinct to find Sthunakarna. I haven’t seen any magic in my life, nor known anyone for whom magic has happened, but it has happened in the past, and people have lived to tell stories about it. From what I know it is a strange and capricious thing, capable of lifting you up so you feel like a god, and then crashing you back down so hard you could break every single bone in your body. The gods are great, but they do not always listen to all our prayers, sometimes, they amuse themselves in toying with our little human lives, they sometimes give you boons and then kill you for them. Sometimes, they don’t appear at all. Perhaps I was being lured by an evil thing – a rakshasa, an asuram, someone so far removed from the world that they think nothing of snacking on willing human flesh.
And then there is worry about Utsarg. If I die, how will he survive in this forest without me? How will he fight and live without me to fight for him? I have a strange feeling around my heart – I’m sadder at the idea of Utsarg dying alone and bereft without me than I am of the idea of dying, and that’s when I decide I will live.
‘Don’t worry,’ I say and he half smiles and comes a little closer.
‘I won’t if you won’t.’
Chapter Five
What is it like being set apart, different, from everyone else you know? I would not know myself as a woman, and yet, I wonder if I had been given a choice when I was born, the choice my mother took upon herself to make, I wonder if I would have chosen woman instead of man, Shikhandini instead of Shikhandi. I might have chosen to let my hair, short and wild and as curly as it dares to get, grow past my shoulders, but since curly hair is not becoming of a princess, my mother would have had someone oil it and comb out all the knots and tightly braid it so it behaved just as I would be expected to behave – demure and quiet.
As Shikhandini, the only daughter till Draupadi was brought into our midst, I would have enjoyed certain privileges. I would have been spoilt and cosseted by my father, teased but still indulged by my brothers. I would have had an army of maids, maybe one or two special companions chosen for me because of their gentle demeanour and good manners. I would wear a sari from the time I could walk, and I would be told to keep the cloth tightly wound around myself for modesty
. I might join my father and brothers for meals, but only on special occasions; mostly, I would be by myself or with my mother in the queen’s quarters, learning how to run a large palace from one room. Instead of the art of battle, I’d learn how to hire my staff so they were always loyal, but also adequately fear. I would sit with my mother for her many confinements, and learn what it is that happens to a woman when she gives birth. I would have to accept that fate for myself as well.
Somewhere at the back of my head, I feel like I know what it is like to be a Kshatriya princess, as much as I know the bow scars on my arm. I know it not as Shikhandi – or my other life not lived, Shikhandini – but deeply, as though I have lived it. The prickles of presentiment have grown greater since the last grishma, and I first felt it when the sun was highest in the sky and beating down upon all of us as though it would flay our skin from our bones. I couldn’t speak, I remember, because even the act of breathing in through my nose was painful, the air so hot, it seared my nostrils. Even our stepwell, set into the middle of the palace, which normally meant that it was never too hot to bear, was drying up slowly, we had not much rain the previous year. Mother instructed the slaves to place shallow pots of water with rose petals in them in all our rooms, during the night, the water left as though drunk by some invisible beast, and the heavy scent of roses mixed with the smell of sweat from us and from our slaves who waved palm leaves over us for as long as they could stand.
My young brothers, Kumar and Yudhamanyu came to find me as I lay on the floor of my room. ‘We’re going to swim in the stepwell,’ said Kumar, popping his head in to look at me. ‘Father said we could, since it is so shallow. Do you want to come?’
Girls of the Mahabharata Page 14