The Curse of Gandhari

by Aditi Banerjee

  Duryodhana said nothing.

  Krishna laughed. ‘O evil-minded one, Duryodhana! You desire to overpower and capture me. Here are all the Pandavas and the Andhakas and the Vrishnis. Here are the Adityas, the Rudras, the Vasus and the maharishis.’

  Even with the blindfold, Gandhari had to shield her eyes. She was grateful that she could not see, that Krishna did not reveal himself to her in a vision this time. She could feel the burning brilliance emanating out of him; it was hotter than a thousand suns, painful in its intense radiance. The sight was such a marvel that later all recited it in wonder – that thirty gods sprouted from his sides, as small as thumbs, as radiant as fire. Brahma appeared on his forehead and Rudra on his chest. The protectors of the directions were on his arms and Agni, the god of fire, rested on the tip of his tongue. He was adorned by the sacred conch, the discus, the goad, the spear and many other weapons, shining in all directions, held aloft by his many arms. Terrible flames and blindingly dark smoke emanated from his eyes, nose and ears. The sun shone out from the pores of his body. All the kings turned away their eyes in sudden fear, other than Drona, Bhishma, Vidura, Sanjaya and the rishis.

  The celestial drums were sounded, reverberating through the palace, making the rafters themselves shake. It felt as if the earth itself was shaking, the oceans shivering. Finally, Krishna resumed his normal form and with a whiff of air, disappeared, leaving the denizens of Hastinapur following Duryodhana, weeping and devastated.

  War had begun.

  8

  Women go to war, too. Not just those iconic figures like Satyabhama, the wife of Krishna, or Kaikeyi, the wife of Dasharatha, or Shikandi, Amba, the woman scorned by Bhishma, reborn to take revenge against him – those brave fierce warrior-women who ride into the field alongside the men to fight valiantly and become the heroines of epics and ballads and history. The women left behind – they go to war, too. They are the ones who nurse their men, who prepare them, who anoint them with the sacred vermilion power, who comfort them, who prod them when they are afraid, who sew and clean their uniforms, who have to wait for word on whether they die or live.

  For eighteen days, the war was fought. For eighteen days, Gandhari did the most severe penance of her life. Penance was not just abstinence. Once you have given up food, sleep, the senses, bodily comforts, what is left to give up? Penance was also what you put into it, how much kindling you could gather together and ignite into an inferno of power that could alter the course of fate, that could bring down the gods to grant blessings, that could work miracles. In penance, Gandhari was unrivalled. It was not just austerity. It was her intensity, her iron will, her laser focus. The same spirit that allowed her to keep that mass of flesh within her belly for over a year, that ball of flesh that grew into her one hundred sons, whom she nursed with her own blood and marrow, whom she protected hawkishly.

  For eighteen days, Gandhari poured an incessant stream of intense prayers as oblations into her internal fire of penance. She did not sleep. Hours passed between breaths, between the passing of heartbeats. In the adjoining room, Sanjaya regaled Dhritarashthra with news of the war, but Gandhari was impervious to sound or sight or smell or taste. She was lost in penance.

  She could not tell you what it was that was the focus of her penance. Did she wish to win the war for her sons? No, she was not so foolish. Did she wish to somehow stop the war? No, she was not so naïve. Did she wish to save herself? No, she had lost that hope long ago. But it was her war, something she battled for inside herself, to kill not enemy soldiers, but the barriers and limitations on her own power. She wanted to become stronger than iron, more powerful than the blessings and boons that had been granted her, something better than a queen.

  Gandhari remained in her meditation, impassive, impervious to the cutting down of Bhishma, the fall of Abhimanyu and the other great heroes, the fall of Drona, the carnage whose screams, whose smells of blood, reached her quarters. Her meditation did not falter as millions died, as both armies decimated themselves against each other. The sounds of the dialogue between Sanjaya and Dhritarashthra, as he recounted the unfolding of the events of the battle to Dhritarashthra, did not penetrate her ears. She was oblivious to the devastation of the war transpiring all around her. It was only on the seventeenth day that her penance was interrupted.

  Kunti stumbled into Gandhari’s quarters. She landed at Gandhari’s feet in a wet heap, sobbing and wailing. It took a few moments for Gandhari to come back to consciousness, to regain the ability to speak and move and feel herself again a part of this world. Gandhari steeled herself. What could it mean if Kunti was crying? Was it possible the tides had turned in favour of Duryodhana?

  But Gandhari could feel the air, heavy with the smell of rust and rot, the sour acrid smell of bloodshed everywhere, and so she knew the tidings could not be good. ‘Kunti, what has happened?’

  Kunti’s voice was choked with sobs. Gandhari had never heard her so weak. Kunti wailed, ‘Karna has fallen. He has died.’

  Gandhari shuddered. Immediately she wanted to go to her son, Duryodhana, to comfort him. How badly he would take the loss of his dearest friend, the one he loved even more than his blood brothers. But she had never seen Kunti like this, not even when she came back after Pandu had died. She could not leave her.

  Gingerly, Gandhari sat herself on the ground, next to Kunti. They did not touch, just sat side by side. Kunti was bedraggled and wet. Had it been raining outside? Gandhari did not even know. In between choked sobs, Kunti said, ‘For once, sister, we are united in grief. You have lost the general of your army, your son’s dearest friend, and I have lost –’ Another woman, a weaker woman untested by the travails visited upon Kunti, would have howled, but it was in a measured tone that Kunti completed the sentence ‘–my son.’

  Even though Gandhari had always suspected, always intuited this, since the day of the tournament when Karna had first entered Hastinapur, Kunti’s words made her wince. Later, there would be time for details. Later, she would hear the story of how it happened, how Kunti had come to give birth as an unmarried mother to this boy who had been born with a golden armour and earrings, bestowed by Surya, the sun god, to his son from Kunti. Before the war, Karna had given away his armour to Indra, when Indra asked it of him so that Indra could protect Arjuna, who was the son of Indra from Kunti. It was for this that Karna became famed as the most generous of men. But this was not the time for such storytelling, not at the moment a mother had lost her child.

  Gandhari did not have words. Comfort had always been awkward for her; softness had never come easily for her, or compassion. She knew how to serve, how to be reverent and devotional. She knew how to care for elders. Even with her one hundred sons, when they had fallen and hurt themselves, she had tended to their injuries efficiently, pressed the wounds with her fingers to remove the pain; she had made soothing tonics and fed them; she had put them to bed; she had held them. But it was something brusque, competent, efficient. She had not cosseted them; she had never sung them lullabies or cooed to them. She had just breathed in the scent of their hair, muttered a prayer with a kiss to their forehead.

  With her husband, she was even more useless as she did not have the patience to listen to his incoherent rantings, his paranoid delusions, his constant need of reassurance. She gave him concise curt words of advice, tended to his bodily needs, and left him closeted with Sanjaya, and in the old days, Kutili, who had the patience and indulgence that she lacked. She had given birth to one hundred sons but she sometimes wondered whether she had been mother to them. Should she have laughed more, played with them more, coddled them more? Should she have been softer for them? Would that have prevented all this?

  This was something even worse. Gandhari reached out a hand awkwardly, intending to land it on Kunti’s shoulder but instead it ended up on her head, patting her hair. Duryodhana had always loved this. This is how he had fallen asleep as a child, with her hand wrapped in his curly, tangled locks, so hot in her palm — his restlessness
a palpable thing that warmed his body from hair to toe, that made his thick locks of hair perpetually unruly.

  Kunti turned her face into her hands. Her body was trembling slightly. Another would not have noticed it, but Gandhari did. She pulled down a blanket and wrapped it around her. Kunti accepted it wordlessly. She sighed repeatedly, reminding Gandhari of Dhritarashthra. Then she laughed bitterly. ‘Do you know, sister, before the war started, I went to meet Karna. The very first time I presented myself to my son, my eldest son, he who should have been rightfully crowned the king of Hastinapur. A fully-grown man, the king of Anga, and this was the first time I met him when I finally went to visit him right before the war started. Do you know what I said?’

  Perhaps it was rhetorical. But Gandhari had too long been trained by Subala to be quizzed and expected to answer instantaneously. So, she guessed, ‘You asked him to not take up arms against your other sons.’ It was the obvious conclusion.

  Kunti sniffled. ‘That would have been one thing. Imagine, to finally be reclaimed by your mother, only so she could ask you to give yourself up for your brothers, who are also your sworn enemies. That would have been bad enough. And, I did that, too. I revealed myself to him as his mother, having done nothing for him that a mother should do for her son. But I – I went even further than that.’ She swallowed hard and then whispered in a mortified voice, ‘I tried to bribe him.’

  Gandhari stiffened.

  Kunti continued, her voice stoic now. ‘I offered him the throne, his rightful place as the eldest Pandava, the one who would rule the kingdom.’ It was the legally correct answer. A woman’s sons belonged to her husband, even if they were born before marriage. So, Karna would indeed have been Pandu’s heir. Again, Kunti’s bitter laugh. ‘And I offered him Draupadi. I did not think the throne would sway him, but I thought perhaps she would.’

  Gandhari remembered that day in the assembly-hall when Karna had urged the disrobing of Draupadi, the tortured anger in his voice, the ferocity. Even then she had wondered if the depth of contempt in his voice had disguised something else, desire morphed into vengeance?

  Gandhari kept her voice neutral and bland. ‘Why did he refuse?’ If he had not refused her then surely Duryodhana would have lost on the first day of war itself. Karna and Bhishma were the greatest deterrents against the Pandavas, the only counter they had to the five sons of the devas. Had Karna joined the Pandavas, Duryodhana’s war would have been lost immediately. That they still had a chance, as remote as it was, was largely due to the threat of Karna. Gandhari knew he had sat out the war until the thirteenth day. But even knowing that he was waiting in the sidelines was enough to worry the Pandavas and their allies. He was nearly invincible.

  ‘Loyalty to your son. He refused to abandon Duryodhana, after everything Duryodhana had done for him. Duryodhana was his friend, and he would not leave him.’

  Gandhari started to cry. It twisted her heart to know that it was Kunti’s eldest son who had ended up being Duryodhana’s greatest supporter, his last ally, his only true friend. She remembered that day when Duryodhana had threatened suicide, the worry in Karna’s voice as he had begged her to save him, how steadfast he had been even when the others around Duryodhana prepared to abandon him when they thought he would take his own life.

  Gandhari cried out, ‘If Duryodhana had known –’ She wanted to say that if Duryodhana had known the truth about Karna, he would have set aside his claim to the throne for the sake of their friendship. She wanted to believe there was still that generosity in him, that brash impulsiveness, that rush of emotion and loyalty that made him crown Karna the king of Anga, that love for his friend would have triumphed over his jealousy of his cousins. She wanted to believe that. But she could not quite finish the thought.

  Kunti took a deep breath to calm herself. ‘He gave me one promise. He told me that he would spare four of my five sons and that it would only be Arjuna that he would kill. So that I would always be left with five sons, all the sons of Pandu or Karna and the four other Pandavas.’ Then her sobbing began afresh. ‘As a mother, I never gave him anything, not even the milk from my breasts. And yet I revealed myself to him only to ask of him a terrible promise. I am not even a mother! They say there is no such thing as a bad mother, only a bad son – they only could have said that before there existed a woman as accursed and evil as me.’

  Gandhari did not know how to respond to that so she asked, ‘Was it Arjuna who killed him?’

  Kunti laughed softly. ‘Of course, it was. Goaded by Krishna.’

  Krishna was always behind everything.

  Kunti whispered, ‘Tonight, sister, I cannot go back to my sons. They are revelling in the defeat of Karna. They are mad with celebration and bloodlust at the death of my son. Please let me stay here, just for tonight.’

  Gandhari nodded. She did not know what else to say.

  After Gandhari had put her to bed, draping a blanket on her, Kunti said, ‘Do you know, Gandhari, he was so beautiful as a baby. I still remember how golden and radiant he was the day he was born. He was fat and big and happy, laughing, waving his fists around, already a warrior. None of my sons could match the pure beauty and majesty of Karna. The hardest thing I ever did was put him in that basket on the river. I did not think I would ever see him again.’

  Gandhari sat next to her silently. She put her hand next to Kunti’s without touching it, just so she would know she was there.

  The last thing Kunti told her that night, the last thing she said to her before the end of the war, before the cold dawn in which she made that lonely walk back to the Pandavas’ camp on the other side of the battlefield was this: ‘I wish I had never seen him again. That loss would have been more bearable than seeing my son dead. Oh, Gandhari! I have lost my son! It is a grief I cannot comprehend or survive. It is unbearable! Oh, Gandhari! We are at war but may you never suffer as I am suffering now! Gandhari, you have one hundred sons and today I wish you may never lose even one. We are at war but I cannot wish this upon you. Better we die ourselves than see our own flesh and blood die before us.’

  Gandhari froze, paralysed by a fear she had never before known.

  Some think it is magic, this play of blessings and curses, but it is not, not really. It is only one who has never gone through the rigors of sadhana, the science and math of it, who do not realize the workings of its power. Just as a man counts the coins in his treasury and knows what it is he can buy and what he cannot afford, one trained in sadhana, one who has accumulated piety and merit, knows one’s own store of powers, what it can achieve and what it cannot.

  When she was a girl, Gandhari had needed the promptings of the devas, of rishis like Dvaipayana, to teach her what was within her abilities and what was not. But she was a woman now, beyond the prime of her life, and she had come into her own. She had spent a lifetime cultivating piety, undergoing penance. So it was natural to her that she knew in a matter-of-fact way, that night after Kunti had left, that she had the power to make her son invincible. And she knew she never wanted to go through what she had seen Kunti reduced to that day over the death of Karna – Karna, a son Kunti had never claimed, never known, never before embraced. How much deeper the pain would be to lose a son one had nursed and raised.

  Gandhari sent a messenger to Duryodhana, summoning him to appear before her at dawn, bathed and naked. Totally naked, she had specified. She did not give him the reason why – that would have detracted from the power of what she intended to do. It needed to remain secret. The secrecy was like a screen that kept the power of the blessing from disintegrating diluted into the surroundings and from being contaminated by the energies of others. And then she prepared herself. Once there was an objective, all the penance, all the merit of her meditation, had to be channelled and directed towards that end. She spent the night gathering together the threads of her penance, her meditation, the strength of her vow, her merits of devotion as a wife and as a mother, the blessings bestowed upon her by the rishis once upon a time, by the
devas once upon a time, and she concentrated them into a ball of light and heat that she fortified in those last few hours before dawn with a new fervour of prayer and outpouring of silent mantras and invocations to all the devas, all the celestial beings, all the forces auspicious and good in the universe, to keep her son safe.

  Duryodhana appeared before her at the appointed hour, at dawn. She could sense the sky slowly turn to pink behind him, feel the auspicious rays of the sun washing the world anew. Even the sun seemed wan and sad that morning, still mourning the son he had lost the day before. Gandhari stood up slowly, standing some distance away from Duryodhana.

  ‘Have you come bathed and naked, son, as I had told you?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘Keep standing there like that. Do not move.’ She did not want to reveal the purpose of what she was doing. But he was too unpredictable, his reactions too potentially volatile if he did not understand what she was doing, so she told him, ‘For a moment, I will remove my blindfold. My gaze will protect you from all weapons and keep you safe from all destruction. Do not say a word. Do not move a hair on your body.’

  Duryodhana gasped in excitement and agreed immediately.

  She was careful not to cheat too much. She raised the blindfold only to her eyebrows so she could immediately lower it as soon as she was finished. She looked at him as a healer would look at a patient, not as a mother would look upon her son for the first time. Sentiment and attachment got in the way of such things; they interrupted the flow of the life force, prana, and it was her prana that would protect him. So, she kept herself at a distance physically and psychically. She was clinical as she started with the top of his head, those curly locks of hair she had felt so often between her fingers, that had rested below her nose so many nights as she sniffed his head with affection. She did not let herself become greedy, to let her eyes linger for even a fraction of a moment as they moved downward, to his eyes, bright with hope and wide with shock at what she was doing, to his mouth, slightly agape with wonder. She took in the breadth of his shoulders, the muscled chest. He was the first person she had ever seen since the day she blindfolded herself, since she had seen Krishna. But she did not let herself become greedy for sight.