The Curse of Gandhari

by Aditi Banerjee

  It was then that Krishna touched Gandhari’s hand. His voice was as soft as Gandhari’s baby’s once was, striking softly against her cheek as she had cuddled him. ‘Yes,’ Krishna said in that soft, caressing voice. ‘Suyodhana.’

  And with that her son was gone.

  9

  Should it have even been called a curse? It was just the outpouring of grief, of anger, of bitter loss, of a mother. You can imagine the pain of losing a son – no, actually, hopefully you cannot imagine such a thing. Hopefully, you never have to imagine it, let alone live through it. But, this unimaginable thing, imagine that multiplied one hundredfold. You may think one hundred children is a lot, that they get jumbled sometimes in a mother’s memory, that it is so extreme a number that one cannot possibly love each of one hundred sons as intensely as one would love an only child. You may think that some may get lost in the background, that one’s mind, one’s heart, can only hold so much.

  No. Not for Gandhari. She grew one hundred and one hearts and gave one to each of her children. She could distinguish their cries from each other. She was surrounded by one hundred and one children whom she loved and who loved her, and she felt the presence and personality of each one palpably. If one was missing at mealtime, if one was not there in bed at bedtime when she went to kiss them good night, she knew. She knew their habits, their routines, their proclivities, how the touch of each one’s skin differed from the next. And, yes, she felt each of their deaths individually as a death blow to herself, each moment that would ruin irrevocably and forever another woman’s life, she felt a hundred times.

  It was this inconceivable grief that weighed her down when the Pandavas came to take her and Dhritarashthra’s blessings. They had mustered the courage to face Gandhari now. Or perhaps they had lost fear. After Duryodhana had fallen, after the war had officially ended, the sons of the Pandavas had been slaughtered in their sleep by the last remnants of Duryodhana’s army, led by the son of Drona, their erstwhile teacher. They had done it with Duryodhana’s blessing before he had died. Arjuna had chased Ashwatthama, the son of Drona, captured him and brought him before Draupadi for her vengeance, for the queen’s justice. And then the woman who had vowed to bathe her hair in the blood of the man who had molested her, who again and again had urged war against Gandhari’s sons, whose quest for justice and vengeance had catalysed the most devastating of wars – this mother who had lost her sons to murder in their sleep forgave Ashwatthama and let him go free.

  Gandhari had been shaken by the story of the dastardly murder and Draupadi’s grace and mercy. She felt again as she had in the assembly-hall, when Draupadi challenged the court. She felt eclipsed by the other woman’s greatness. She was determined not to be outdone this time.

  The Pandavas came and bowed at her feet and Dhritarashthra’s feet. Yudhishthira wept at the misfortune of the war, at the loss of their cousins and vowed to look after Dhritarashthra and her as their own parents, to be the sons they no longer had. It made her lip curl. As if five could substitute for one hundred. As if she would rather have Yudhishthira’s nurturing care than the absentminded, impetuous affection of Duryodhana. As if the killers of her sons could become her sons.

  Yudhishthira approached her to take her blessings. She looked down at his feet. Somehow his toes came into her view through her bandaged eyes. As soon as the left toes of his foot came into her view, they suddenly blackened and deformed under her gaze. He flinched and his brothers jumped back, suddenly fearful of her.

  Oops.

  She had not meant to do it. There was too much of Pandu in them for her to destroy them or even wish them ill. She had loved Pandu once and she would not be the cause of the destruction of his sons. But she could not tolerate the stifling presence of the Pandavas in her chambers. It was driving her mad.

  She gathered together her suddenly widowed daughters-in-law and the other wailing women of her entourage, and with the permission of Dhritarashthra, they all travelled to the battleground. It was important for her to take stock, to take inventory of the aftermath of the war, to tally up the casualties and losses. It was what her father would have done. It was the duty of a queen, of a mother who had sent her sons off to battle to die.

  When they arrived, she was able to see through her bandaged eyes in a divine vision. She saw the grass fields reddened with blood, slippery with strewn guts and sinew. Vultures and other birds of prey swirled over carcasses broken in half, some bodies adjacent to heads that were not their own. The bodies were so badly gored that the widows could not identify their husbands. Gems ripped apart from golden crowns and carved scabbards littered the blood-stained ground. It was impossible to step more than a few feet without sliding in entrails. The odour of blood, of death, drew insects in droves and hungry birds lapping at the corpses.

  The air was rent by the groans of men dying, of widows wailing, pitiful women trying to piece together their husbands’ bodies. Some had lost sons as well and flung themselves from one corpse to the other. The orange fires of funeral pyres dotted the immense plain like torches on a foggy day. Horses and elephants trampled to death were piled in heaps. The acrid smell of burning flesh singed their nostrils.

  She looked upon the field, where each of her one hundred sons lay fallen. She looked at those fools who had thought they would win the war, that the throne of Hastinapur was worth all this. She looked at those who killed her sons and those whom her sons had killed. She knew their blood was on her hands and her husband’s. They could not escape the guilt of it.

  Then her eyes fell upon Krishna. He had been the mastermind of the war, counsellor, advisor and strategist for the Pandavas, charioteer to Arjuna, the most valiant ruler of the times. Even in the midst of all that hair-tearing, chest-clawing, air-piercing wailing that billowed out over the battlefield, Krishna was remarkably cool, composed and calm. Even then there was the slight smile curving his lips. Even then his eyes shone like obsidian.

  They approached Krishna – Gandhari, the king, the wailing widows, the Pandavas. Gandhari was overwhelmed by the spectacle of it all, the sheer number of mangled corpses, the heaps and mounds of horse carcasses, discarded armour and broken arrows strewn across the land all the way to the horizon like haphazard mountains. Jackals and vultures and other flesh-eating birds were already on the prowl, hungrily devouring freshly dead corpses. Widows had to fend off the beasts from the corpses as they were carried to the funeral pyre. The stench was so overpowering that the princesses behind Gandhari were gagging and vomiting, but Gandhari herself was impassive. She saw but she was numb to what she saw. Sight was so new to her, the sensory overload overwhelmed her consciousness. She could feel nothing after the death of Duryodhana reached her ears. She saw but she did not feel. Not yet.

  She had thought it was perhaps a punishment that she was being allowed to see this, after having been deprived the gift of sight for so long. She only knew the sight of Duryodhana and if the corpses of any of her other sons fell under the scan of her eyes, she would perhaps not recognize them in death as she had never seen them in life. But later she thought that perhaps it was not a punishment. Perhaps it was given to her to see this because only she could have done what happened next.

  No, not the curse. The curse itself was not as important as what happened in those hours before the curse. What mattered was the naming of the dead. With painstaking meticulousness, Gandhari pointed out the dead to Krishna. For hours, for what felt like hours, until her voice wore out from hoarseness, she named them all to him, all that she could see, all she could count, all she could recall – those who had died, the kingdoms from where they hailed, those they left behind. Her memory was pristine and precise from her girlhood days when she was trained by her father and her tutors to memorize the dynasties of the land. She was indiscriminate in naming them – whether they fought for her sons or fought for the Pandavas, she named them all. This is how warriors and soldiers were to be honoured. They were all due this dignity.

  Sometimes it was difficu
lt to identify them. Bodies were broken in half, one soldier’s torso above another soldier’s legs, heaped together and consigned to the flames for cremation. Sometimes it was only by the insignia of the crown that she could decipher the name, so mangled and mutilated were the corpses. Sometimes she slipped and almost fell to the ground as the puddles of blood and entrails reached up to her calves, as the wet earth opened itself and tried to drag her under. But she did not stop.

  Gandhari knew the perniciousness of large numbers. There was a difference between saying she was the mother of one hundred sons and naming each son individually. There was the loss of becoming a statistic instead of an individual. She insisted on naming them, so that they would be remembered. And when her words were recorded, as they were in the minutest of details, the names of the fallen were preserved in the books of history where, without her naming, they would otherwise have been forgotten.

  Krishna patiently heard it all. She tallied up the count and heaped it at his feet, this god who permitted her and her husband, all the others, to play these vile games, carry out these murderous wars. Sometimes her voice was venom; sometimes she wept inconsolably; sometimes she came close to fainting.

  At the end, when she should have been spent, she was overcome. It was not anger; it was not vengeance; it was not even grief. It was the bafflement of the human in the face of the divine that permits such depravities of the humans to occur without intervention. It was the cry of the helpless, of millions of mothers melded into one. She spoke on behalf of all of them then, all the widows, all the mothers bereft of their children, all the maimed soldiers who had travelled far and wide to fight a war for a land they had never seen, all the horses and elephants decimated in battle, all those who survived who would find no peace in the victory. She spoke not as Gandhari but as something more than Gandhari.

  She said, ‘O Krishna! It is the way of mortals to be foolish and greedy and monstrous. But you are divine; you are Narayana himself! How could you have permitted this to happen? How could you stand by and watch these innocent women be widowed, these mothers rendered childless? Just as you have brought the ruination of our clan, just as you have left so many women widowed, so many mothers childless, so, too, in thirty-six years, your entire clan shall be destroyed from within, just as mine has been ruined from within, and you, too, shall face an inglorious death as the warriors here have found here today – a death without glory, without victory.’

  It was a cry, but there was power in that cry, power that made the earth soaking in the blood of the fallen armies tremble, that shook the trees and sent birds flying away, squawking.

  Krishna nodded slightly; his lips turned upwards imperceptibly in gracious acceptance even of the curse. ‘O virtuous queen! O one of great vows! You are a woman of immense austerity and without doubt your words shall come true. Your words will bring to fruition that which must come to pass. So be it!’

  Gandhari was nonplussed. She had expected anger, a protest, a chiding. That would have given her some satisfaction. His nonchalance robbed her of the thrill of revenge. She collapsed to the ground, spent. Krishna coaxed her, ‘Arise, arise, O Gandhari, do not give in to grief! Are you not at fault, too, for this vast carnage? You who had ignored the evil committed by your son, who watched him commit unspeakable horror without stopping him. Why do you ascribe to me your own faults? Let go of this grief. Indulgence in grief only doubles it. Just as a brahmana woman bears children for the practice of austerities, a princess like you brings forth sons for slaughter!’

  It was then that Gandhari fell silent, then that she felt an emptiness that would never again fill, that would leave her hollow like a coconut shell with the flesh removed. It was a foolish game, this business of curses and blessings. One hundred sons may not be equal to one good son. A son could be made invincible but not against his own stupidity. A son could be born who would become the bitter enemy of his brothers also bestowed from a boon given by a grumpy rishi. What chance was there of a curse against a god like Krishna?

  How could one curse Krishna if he had not wanted the curse himself?

  It was hubris to think she could bless or curse from her powers of penance alone. The workings of fate and karma were so much more intricate and subtle than that. For example, why would she have given him the grace period of thirty-six years before the curse took place? What use would it be then, when he was old, once he had wrapped up his affairs and all that he had to do in this world? No, such a thing could not have been said even through her own lips without his own intervention. That pose of a curse, which was meant to be a demonstration of her power, instead showed only the hollowness of that power.

  One could be queen and govern the lives of millions. But if one had not mastered herself, what was the use of it? Was that not the lesson she had tried to teach Duryodhana, the day he declared the war?

  And this was the last lesson she learned about curses and blessings on that battlefield with Krishna, after he had reprimanded her and she had fallen silent. It was not just about the limitations on the efficacy of curses and blessings. It was the delusion of the idea that one could do something to someone else without doing it to oneself. Yes, Gandhari was the queen who cursed a god. More importantly, though, she was the queen who had cursed herself.

  There was nothing left to be done now but mourn the dead. The funeral rites were performed. Sandalwood, aloe, perfumes and costly silken robes and other cloths were piled onto large heaps of wood. Funeral pyres were lit. Broken chariots and weapons accompanied the corpses in cremation on their last journey. Torrents of clarified butter and oil were poured over the bodies so they would burn quickly. There were hundreds of thousands to be burned. Those who came from remote realms and were friendless in this foreign clime were heaped together and their rites presided over by the wise and compassionate Vidura.

  There was an order to this, too. First, the bodies of Duryodhana and his brothers were burned. This was the last honour due them: their seniority among the dead, the vanquished. There was a solemnity of silence, a pause, as the first of the funerary rites were performed for Duryodhana. Even the Pandavas were in mourning. There was a wrongness in killing one’s own kin, no matter how horrible they may have been, and the Pandavas felt the weight of it now, the cost of their kingdom, the cost of their justice and vengeance. It was righteous, yet not right.

  Gandhari was later told how their heads were bowed, their faces etched in grief and regret as her one hundred sons’ corpses burned on the pyre. Her own eyes were dry. She felt nothing. Dhritarashthra next to her was weeping. She handed him her handkerchief, but her hand did not even tremble.

  Then came the others. Shikhandi, the reincarnation of Amba, the maiden whose advances Bhishma had spurned and who had been reborn to kill him in vengeance. She had succeeded. The sons of Draupadi, murdered not in battle but in their sleep. Shakuni, her brother. And so many more.

  After the bodies were burned, Yudhishthira with the consent of Dhritarashthra gathered together all the mourners on both sides in a procession to the banks of the Ganga river. Yudhishthira placed Dhritarashthra at the front of the procession and followed him as the new king of Hastinapur. They gathered by the thousands, the relatives of the slain kings and princes and their priests.

  It was time for the water rites, the offering of oblations of water to the departed. This was performed by the women, offering water to their fathers, grandsons, brothers, sons, husbands and other kinsmen. And for their friends. So many women marched to the shores to perform this rite that the pathway to the river became smooth, trodden down by their feet. It became like the shore of an ocean.

  Suddenly, Kunti cried out, ‘O sons! That great warrior and hero, Karna, who preferred glory to life, was your elder brother! O sons! Offer oblations of water unto that eldest brother of yours who was born to me by the sun god, Suryadeva, who wrapped himself in clouds of grief at the death of his son.’ She fell to the ground, weeping.

  It was then that Yudhishthira broke. All the
Pandavas were distraught – even from a distance, Gandhari could hear their muffled cries, their hands covering their faces in shock, the bitterness of their sighs and muttered curses under their breath. But it was Yudhishthira who was especially devastated. Already reluctant to fight the war, he became totally undone at the realization that he had not even been the rightful heir to the throne. It had been Karna who should have been king.

  Yudhishthira spoke out bitterly. ‘O Mother! You, the mother of Karna? How is it that you have kept this a secret for so long? Because of this secret of yours, we have become undone. The grief I feel at Karna’s death is a hundred times greater than the grief caused by the death of Abhimanyu and the sons of Draupadi. I am burning with grief. With Karna at our side, nothing would have been unattainable by us.’ He wailed out loud. Later, he would tell Kunti that at the assembly-hall, the day when Draupadi had been disrobed, he had seen Karna’s feet and felt strangely calmed by them, the feet that so uncannily resembled Kunti’s. The feet he should have bowed to as the feet of his elder brother; the true heir to the throne.

  Yudhishthira’s bitterness was such that later, in the depths of his sorrow, he cursed all the women of the world that henceforth no woman would succeed in keeping a secret. Gandhari had smiled at that, later, much later, when she was once again capable of the semblance of a smile, at the naiveté of the king, who did not understand that a woman’s secrets could never fully be revealed or understood.

  Then, with full devotion, Yudhishthira offered the oblations of water unto his older brother killed by his younger brother. He called forward the wives and other members of Karna’s family to join him in performing the rites for Karna. Gandhari could imagine how low Arjuna felt, that his arch nemesis, the one he hated and fought with so bitterly for so long, the one he had been able to defeat in the end only through cheating and breaking the rules of warfare, was his elder brother. Even that glory had been snatched away from him now.