The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata

by Maggi Lidchi Grassi

  “One year. Give me one year to show the people that your son is worthy of being king. Then your grandsons will not be shamefully dependent in a hostile house.”

  This time the silence went on and on. Duryodhana left his father and there had been no refusal.

  Dhritarashtra had two counsellors: his brother Vidura whom he loved and who advised him both officially and unofficially. The other was Kanika—the worst rascal in the kingdom; even Shakuni was only a close second. He was a lean, toothless man who did not bother to smile or mince his words. There was of course no point in consulting Vidura. Dhritarashtra knew what Vidura would have said, so he unburdened himself to Kanika. Kanika always spoke with dispassion.

  “A king must be like the courtiers and hide his weakness as a tortoise hides its head. When angry, smile, speak gently. When you strike, strike to kill. Otherwise there is no point in being a king. Be deaf as well as blind when necessary. Only when your victim is dead, allow yourself to shed crocodile tears.” He added quickly, “Never neglect pretended mourning. Grieve in public and rejoice in private. You know that a king must have spies in temples as well as in the women’s quarters, also where people gather to drink, and in public gardens. Wherever people gather, place a spy; keep a razor in your heart, but enclose it in a soft leather case. Get rid of them once and for all, and Duryodhana will be king.”

  Soon the whole court was talking of the beauties of the old city of Varanavata—how gifted people should be sent there to develop it, about its wonderful temple festival which should not be missed.

  It was at this point that my father and I realized just how much protection Arjuna and his brothers and mother would need. My father once again told me how vital it was not to let my sentiments run away with me, to have even Arjuna, if necessary, believe that I was not unfriendly with Duryodhana. I must find out their plans. I did my best to stick close to Duryodhana’s party in order to get wind of any proposed move against the Pandavas; but it was Vidura who learnt that Duryodhana, Duhshasana, their uncle Shakuni, and Karna had decided to burn Mother Kunti and her five sons to death.

  Dhritarashtra summoned Yudhishthira and his brothers and invited them to spend a year in the beautiful old city of Varanavata. There was to be a splendid festival and he was having an opulent palace built for them. Yudhishthira, though pure, was no fool. It was precisely his capacity to weigh the opposing forces which made him realize that he was powerless. He knew that wisdom lay in pretending interest in a visit to the Varanavata shrine. He went to Greatfather Bheeshma to tell him of Dhritarashtra’s wish that the Pandavas leave Hastinapura for a year, hoping that Greatfather would give him a sign if he knew of Duryodhana’s and Shakuni’s plans. Greatfather Bheeshma’s heart seemed strangely detached even from those he loved most. It may also have been true that, while he was astute, Greatfather’s own purity did not allow him to imagine the extremes to which Duryodhana and Shakuni were prepared to go. Perhaps he believed that Duryodhana wanted a year in which to prove himself, but in any case peace was what he wanted. Bheeshma gave Yudhishthira his blessing.

  It is strange how, suddenly, when someone like Duryodhana is let loose, men, one after another, come forward to support him. Purochana was one of his father’s ministers whom I had never much noticed, a medium sort of man of medium build with a medium personality. It would not have surprised me had I heard he had done a good thing, and it did not surprise me either when much later I heard that he had been chosen by Duryodhana to kill the Pandavas. His task was to leave immediately for the “beautiful city”. In Varanavata he was to build a rich palace for the Pandavas and to fit it with articles of gold and silver and emerald. It was to be called the Abode of Delight.

  Duryodhana had become a perfect disciple of Kanika who had such good advice to give on the workings of the heart. When I realized that Arjuna would be away for a year, my father’s policy of simulation became hateful. I rushed to Arjuna’s mansion. I pushed through the guards at the gates and the citizens waiting with petitions on the verandah.

  Arjuna was sharpening the arrows which he himself had fashioned for his giant bow. He was surrounded by swords, battle-axes, tridents, spears, and arrows of every shape and size. This was the treasure of Bheema and Arjuna and their brothers. For a moment I forgot my own sense of loss as I realized what Arjuna was being made to leave behind.

  He put down his arrow and, seeing my distress, came to meet me. He took the scent from my head and we embraced wordlessly for a long moment. When he finally released me I looked around the room, picked up a dart, and threw it at the target on the far wall in a sort of helplessness. It hit the centre.

  “Sadhu!” said Arjuna. We sat down on mats and all at once his grace became a thing of poignance. What if Duryodhana succeeded in killing him? Hastinapura without Arjuna was bad enough…a world without Arjuna—I had no wish to live in it.

  “Arjuna, I have a terrible feeling you are in the gravest danger,” I blurted out.

  He said affectionately, “Even the dullest in the land have come to that conclusion.” Even now Arjuna could make me smile. “I knew that you would come.” This simple statement of faith, despite my apparent aloofness of the past months, nearly broke me. I wanted to say many things that for his protection had to be left unsaid.

  I wanted to say that when he left Hastinapura, all the light and brightness would go out of us, but I was too moved to speak. I kept my gaze stubbornly on his face and wondered even in my distress how he could remain unsullied by resentment, bitterness, or grief.

  As though reading me he said, “Bheema and I were for fighting it out. The people of Hastinapura are behind us and most of the army too. Bheema had already got together more than half of the best archers of the Yuddhashala; but Eldest will have none of it. Dharma is Dharma and for him Greatfather is Dharma, and since he has done nothing to interfere with our uncle’s decision, the word of our uncle automatically becomes Dharma even when the word means banishment. A sweet banishment to the city of Lord Shankara Shiva. We are going for the Shiva festival, do you not know? Because we are gifted people.”

  “Yudhishthira listens to Dharma in the form of Dhritarashtra,” I said.

  “That is how he is made.”

  “And you listen to Dharma in the form of Yudhishthira?” Arjuna pondered this a moment.

  “That is how we are made.”

  “No protest from Bheema?”

  “He does not argue with Eldest, but he hasn’t spared us his opinions.”

  I looked around at the room bristling with weapons, at Arjuna’s long arms and strong body, at the scar on either arm from his two-handed archery. I remembered how jubilant he and Bheema and the twins had been at the idea of war with Drupada, against whom they had no personal grudge. They were Kshatriyas born for war, but at a word from Eldest they were going to follow him peacefully to Varanavata on the whim of a blind man.

  “And if Mother Kunti said, ‘fight’?”—but I knew the answer.

  “Then fight we should. Eldest would do so himself.”

  The Pandavas each had the strength of five plus that of Mother Kunti which multiplied it five-hundredfold. People explained this strength and this bond variously. Some said it was their life in the forest that had welded the Pandavas together, others said they had the blessings of the rishis, and everyone agreed that they must have been together in past lives. Perhaps their unity would still save them after all.

  I ached to say, “If it ever comes to war, Arjuna, I will be on your side,” and then I remembered the guru-dakshina my father had asked of Arjuna, and the words strangled in my throat. My father had asked Arjuna to fight against him as hard as he could if he ever had to confront him in war. Did my father know that he would be fighting the Pandavas one day? He who loved Arjuna as much as me, and sometimes more? If my father were ever to fight Arjuna, could I let an arrow fly against my father?

  The next time I saw Arjuna, the last time for many months, he and his brothers and Mother Kunti and their attendants we
re on the verandah of the mansion, receiving and giving blessings before the journey. It was the eighth day of Phalguna with the star Rohini in the ascendant. The garden was crowded and at the gate of the mansion, there were so many people that Bheeshma and Arjuna and the guards had to open a road for Mother Kunti and her maids when they left. If anybody had ever doubted the Pandavas’ popularity, here was proof that if Yudhishthira had defied his uncle, he would even now be sitting on the throne. Voices from the crowd shouted in public what friends had told the Pandavas privately over the last days and weeks.

  “Do not go to Varanavata.”

  “Do not go away. Misfortune surely awaits you there.”

  “It is a plot against you.”

  “You will never come back alive.”

  “Dhritarashtra is blind, but Bheeshma is more blind.”

  These words were yelled above a general sort of wailing and mourning from the crowd. Hai! Hai! It was more like a funeral than a farewell. The Pandavas climbed into their chariots and raised their arms frequently in blessings and acknowledged the blessings of Brahmins with bowed heads. At the gate of the city Yudhishthira raised his hands to his forehead. The crowd followed him. People would not turn back. Then with tears in his eyes, he made anjali. It was a gesture of surrender, of love, of gratitude, of helplessness, of supplication. At that, part of the crowd turned back, others waited, and some of us accompanied him in chariots.

  Vidura, at the last, got down from his chariot. When he saw he could not shake me off, he spoke to Yudhishthira in a Mlechha dialect which I recognized but could not understand a word of. I knew it must have been a warning and my heart was relieved. If anybody could be trusted in this strange moment when the kingdom was being rent apart it was Vidura.

  Vidura, like Yudhishthira, was Dharma, but of course so was Greatfather Bheeshma. Why then had Greatfather not said the word that would have left Yudhishthira on the throne of the Yuvaraj? He was following his own Dharma, but why did it have to diverge from Vidura’s?

  I was often to ask myself that question about Greatfather Bheeshma in the next few years, but it took me a long time to get any sort of an answer, and when I did, I could not use it.

  13

  Hastinapura was dead and empty without the Pandavas.

  On the other hand certain tensions eased. My father and I grew closer. With Arjuna away he had more time for me. There had been moments when Arjuna had done things that I envied, but if that was jealousy, then the gods are more jealous than men. I might wish that I had jumped laughing into Drupada’s chariot in place of Arjuna, but an instinct taught me that certain moments and certain gestures are reserved for those beloved of the gods. My love for Arjuna was, with my mother’s love, the certainty of my life.

  My father wanted us to establish ourselves in the kingdom we had won from Drupada, and so we passed weeks and months there where there were no shadows of the past and where the echoes of beloved voices did not cry in the corridors. But we always came back to Hastinapura.

  Duryodhana changed for the better after the departure of the Pandavas. It was easier to be in his company, even in a way to be his friend without pretence. Yes, he was spoilt—which was a shame, because that generosity that the crowd had recognized when he had crowned Karna king lay buried under the layers of frustration and stubborn self-will.

  Duryodhana loved things: jewels, gold, and silver-encrusted weapons and vases, ornaments, silk carpets. He enjoyed giving them. He loaded me with presents: gold earrings, a jewelled belt studded with rubies, and emeralds, a knife with a fine elephant foot design worked into the handle and, on the blade, a chain of silver elephants trunk-to-tail, an ivory chess board, a set of golden dice, and a sword so well-balanced that I was loath to let it out of my hands.

  When I protested that there was no need for all these presents, though I was glad enough of them, he said with a charming smile that gifts to Brahmins were enjoined by the shastras and brought blessings.

  Yes, life was easier, you might say. We realized now what a burden on the spirit the tension between the Pandavas and the Kauravas had been; yet if that constant burden was lifted, something essential had gone, like the tension in a bow. Where the Pandavas’ presence had been a constant goad towards higher achievement, the energy now sank to a level where pleasures replaced joy, vanity pride, and unbridled hilarity stood in for mirth. With Yudhishthira as Yuvaraj there had been limits beyond which the courtiers and young princes did not go. Duryodhana and his brothers had always drunk a lot of wine and now they, especially Duryodhana, drank too much.

  Shakuni and Kanika had not been officially promoted, but behaved as though they had been. Their voices were constantly raised in the Council Hall now that Yudhishthira was absent. Greatfather came out much less often after the banishment of the Pandavas. He may have been detached from many things and have had his own reasons for allowing the sons of Pandu to leave Hastinapura, but we realized, when we saw him aged and withdrawn, that he had not been as neutral as we thought. He minded more than he wished or cared to show. His consolation must have been that the cousins had been prevented from getting at each other’s throats. Peace-keeping was his bleak mistress.

  One evening, after a choice dinner of venison and other delicacies, my poor mother was listening for the hundredth time to Father who was telling us what Drupada’s face had looked like when Arjuna jumped into his chariot and pinned his arms back. She pulled her fingers through her short hair in frustration. As always, this provoked my father’s spurting little laugh. My mother, who was getting plump and comfortable, pretended with a good-natured smile to enjoy my father’s humour, but immediately afterwards she stifled a yawn.

  Apart from us, that is my father and myself, my mother’s only relative in Hastinapura or anywhere else was her twin brother Kripa, and though she was close to him in the way twins are, his talk was, like ours, full of the new weight and height of bows and arrows, swords and tridents, of the new military formations and tactics my father and I were always devising. She missed Mother Kunti, her friend and confidante. While she got tired of our military talk, she still got irritated when we began talking in whispers or retired into another room to discuss secret matters, one of which was a new interlocking and impenetrable military formation we had not yet named. She, like Mother Kunti, had picked up a good deal of military jargon and they loved to use such terms as the needle formation and fish formation for daily household matters. They would then double up with laughter.

  One evening at dinner the three of us, my parents and myself, were enjoying the cosy intimacy of family jokes and playful reproaches when we heard what might have been a strange sort of animal wail or human keening. It seemed to come from the courtyard. My father, whose ears were sharpest, heard it first and it cut his laughter short. With the habit of quick movement, we were both on our feet before my mother had even finished her complaint against the crudeness of soldiers’ humour.

  I brought in from the courtyard a young woman with streaming hair and swollen face. She wept convulsively. Her face was so distorted by grief that at first we did not recognize her as one of the maids from Mother Kunti’s household in Hastinapura. She flung herself at my mother’s feet. When she tried to speak her hoarse sounds from her throat were so horrible that my mother’s tears began to flow as she stroked the girl’s head. We had already guessed that something had happened to Mother Kunti, but none of us was prepared for what she finally said:

  “They have all been killed. All are burnt… All are dead… They have been burnt, all of them.”

  We stared at her, not daring to look at each other, not daring to ask for names. “Mother Kunti is dead.” She sobbed into my mother’s skirt.

  “And the princes?”

  “Not one is left alive. All burnt to death.”

  The Abode of Delight had been set on fire. Even when my mother plied the girl with hot milk and honey, she could not tell us more.

  A world in which Mother Kunti and her five sons had been massacr
ed by those now in power was desolation without light, a ravaged landscape where madmen strutted.

  My parents mourned and I knew the whole court at Hastinapura would be plunged into mourning, real for Bheeshma and Vidura and Kripacharya and others, and fake for Duryodhana and Shakuni. Karna would not pretend to mourn.

  I galloped all the way to Varanavata. I reached the site of what was already being called the Abode of Delight and Death. It was completely destroyed. People had been waiting all night to cross the moat and were now moving across it in both directions.

  I have seen many terrible things in battle and I have a strong stomach, but I had to turn back from the charred remains of the bodies. I was afraid of finding Arjuna. I thought of Mother Kunti’s fineness and goodness and I saw, in my mind’s eye, Nakula like a god on horseback, Sahadeva in his wisdom, Bheema’s strength and laughter, and Yudhishthira. All that was left was bones and ashes. I began to weep.

  The citizens of Varanavata were weeping and moaning around me. “Hai! Hai!” They had welcomed the Pandavas, had loved them and had felt honoured by their presence. As they brushed past I felt the grief and outrage of the people and my own swelled within me as I sobbed. My distress grew and grew and grew. We were mourning not only for the Pandavas but also for the passing of the age of Dharma. We were moving into darkness.

  There was nothing for me in Varanavata. A man engaged me in conversation and, not knowing who I was, tried to make me voice my horror of Duryodhana and Dhritarashtra, but I had no words. When my sobbing had subsided, I looked dumbly at the world and saw nothing good.