The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata

by Maggi Lidchi Grassi

Flushed with success, puffed up by universal admiration, Keechaka lit upon this exquisite woman who served his favourite sister. This jewel amongst women was surely the conqueror’s reward. He approached her like a love bird, with tenderness, and she turned on him like an eagle and fled.

  Keechaka went at once to his sister and pleaded with her. Knowing that his request was unrighteous, Sudeshna protested that what he was doing would spell his doom. But he was her beloved brother and he was lustrous with victory and hard to resist. Indeed, no one could understand how a humble service woman found the strength to resist him at all, let alone so vehemently. The queen withdrew into her own apartments to consider the matter from every possible angle and, in the end, like Gandhari indulging Shakuni, she was not proof against the tears and threats of her brother that he would kill himself.

  Draupadi, by passing messages using code names, Jaya, Jayanta, Jayatsena, and Jayadbala, warned us and appealed to us. Whenever we went we saw her eyes burning like firepits. We were overwhelmed with helpless rage; it would have made no difference if it had been Lord Shiva himself who was pursuing Draupadi. To do so was to invite death by our hands, but again these hands were tied. It was true that in other circumstances Keechaka might have commanded our respect. Not only was he one of the greatest warriors, but he had an ear for good music, appreciated the finer points of dance, and paid me a neatly turned compliment when he had seen my ladies perform. It was all I could do not to strike like lightning from the heavens straight at his treacherous heart.

  I spoke to my little pupil Uttaraa. When she understood that her mother’s flower girl was not flattered by the attentions of her illustrious uncle, she was all indignation and promised to plead with her mother then and there. She was altogether a darling, this minute princess, as she grew towards womanhood, which would blossom in her like a thousand and one flowers. She treated me as though I were a kind old woman and climbed on my lap to gossip with me and I, unmoved by men’s desires, could caress her as though she were Abhimanyu himself. They had been made for each other, Uttaraa and my Abhimanyu and, like any palace woman, I relished the prospect of a wedding one day. In that I was like a fond father too, I suppose, but my primary concern just then, whether eunuch or father, was for Draupadi.

  Uttaraa found her mother in a ferment. The queen could hardly contain herself while her serving woman painted the intricate henna design on the palms of her hands. She must have argued the matter with herself until she was exhausted, and the dilemma remained: to deny her beloved brother the object of his improper desire or to give in to him so that he would descend into Patala, hell, and the wrath of five Gandharva husbands which would, at any moment, be unleashed upon them all.

  Everywhere Draupadi went on her numerous errands, there would be Keechaka, smiling at her, his eyes pleading. With her wit and will she held him at bay when he spoke to her and the five of us looked for excuses to be where she was and to keep her in sight. I alone was able to go in and out of the women’s quarters and so was there when he visited his sister and her ladies. He had often called for music and dancing, but now in his delirium he would have none of these. As the storm gathered, the queen took to sending us out while she pleaded with him. I would see Draupadi’s eyes urging me to action, and then we would be separated by our different tasks. Yudhishthira, walking with measured tread behind the king, dice on a gold tray, managed to whisper to me, “Tell her, just fifteen days.” In Virata’s palace I had almost forgotten how close we were to the end of exile. Keechaka made us count the hours and minutes.

  Draupadi went into the queen’s garden where Keechaka had first espied her and began plucking flowers. I watched her from a window. The sun on her skin was a comfort to her. She dropped her armful of flowers at his feet and gazed up at him with hands folded, begging for his protection. To whom else but the radiant Giver of Life could she now turn? Her prayers done, she swiftly loaded herself with more flowers and returned to the queen who could both hardly bear to see her and hardly bear to let her out of her sight. Keechaka came into his sister’s presence unannounced and all the women fled, Draupadi the fleetest.

  “Get her for me,” said the love-crazed Keechaka. “If I do not have her now, my life will end. If you have ever loved your brother as you have so often sworn that you do, then you will give me the one thing I crave most which is in your power to give.”

  The queen, exhausted by sleepless nights and constant argument, gave in. “Wait in your room. I will tell her I am thirsting for good wine and I will send her to you saying I want the rare wine you brought us as part of your booty and that you will pour it into your golden vessel.”

  Draupadi remonstrated with Queen Sudeshna, but the queen cut her short. Icy with despair, Draupadi went to the commander-in-chief’s house bearing a golden cup with a fine cloth over it. Keechaka had wanted to lead her to the bed immediately and she had protested that she was below him in caste and reminded him of his wife, of the value of a good wife, and of her own five Gandharva husbands. Keechaka, blinded with passion, let himself believe that she was being flirtatious and evading him in order to inflame him still more. He promised to make her his chief wife. So saying, he lunged towards her and caught hold of her upper garment which came away in his hands. She pushed out at him and the enormous man was thrown down. She told us later that Lord Surya himself had guided her hands.

  Incensed with shame and frustration, Keechaka aimed a mighty kick in the direction from which the push had come. The kick glanced off Draupadi’s face and she began to bleed from the mouth, wearing the white silk draperies Keechaka had prepared for her. She fled to the Sabha, to the king, to Virata, to Yudhishthira, and to her husbands. Keechaka pursued her, bruised from his fall and enraged. We were all in the Sabha now and cried with the many others who witnessed all this.

  “This is a disgrace!” “Shame on you!” Arms came out to grab Keechaka, but he was past caution and his passion had given him strength to shake himself free. He was Keechaka, the hero and general on whom Virata depended for his kingdom, and we…we must be servitors for fifteen more days, as Draupadi knew.

  It was to Virata that she gasped out: “O King, you sit on Dharma’s seat, you are father to your subjects and servitors. Betray that truth and you will be irreparably weakened.”

  Subdued murmurs of support came from all over the Sabha. Bheema was on his feet, but Yudhishthira, near him, caught the ball of his thumb between his two knuckles as we had done when boys and said, “Cook, why look at that tree? If you need fuel for your fire, by all means take a tree, but do not forget green wood will not burn. Leave it for fifteen days.”

  Bheema would have understood the tone of Yudhishthira’s voice even if he could have pretended not to understand the meaning. He subsided, raging.

  Draupadi said, “When Brahma created the world he said that correct action was the most important thing for men. What has befallen me brings shame on you!”

  I froze as though in a recurrent nightmare, for here was Draupadi pleading her case alone, again, and not one of us able to help her. The king turned to Keechaka and rebuked him in a soft voice, but his eyes sparked anger. His smooth manner unleashed Draupadi’s anguish and fury. Not only Virata, but her five husbands were scorched.

  “Where are my five husbands?” she beseeched the sky. “Why do they stand like eunuchs and witness my grief? In the city of Virata, Dharma is defiled and the king himself has the Dharma of a robber.”

  Draupadi’s words did not anger Virata, and that was the measure of his compassion, but he had to plead ignorance. “But I did not see what happened. How can I be the judge?” He looked kindly at Draupadi and then frowned at Keechaka to bid him not to speak. “Do not forget,” he said, “that forgiveness is the highest truth, especially when it comes from a woman. A woman should not be forced to speak for herself like this; in youth she has her father to protect her, in middle age her husband, and eventually her sons.”

  We burned in our hearts when we heard these words. Once again
we were all victims of Dharma. Had we been able to consider and not have had to employ all our energy controlling ourselves, we would have understood without any difficulty that Virata was, as he said, powerless. He could not turn against the brother-in-law, greater as a warrior than Virata himself. Keechaka stood, his pride undiminished, head high before all the company.

  It was Yudhishthira who cut through the tail end of Virata’s speech and through Draupadi’s tears in fear of detection. “You stand there weeping and wailing like an actress and give people cause to laugh at you,” he chided like a father.

  Draupadi flung the curtain of hair from her eyes.

  “Oh, an actress, is it?” she snarled. “An actress then whose husband is so addicted to dice that he will not save his wife.” Her gaze now went to Virata. I was sure she was about to curse him and I found myself trembling—but she didn’t.

  As soon as the palace was asleep Draupadi went to the cook’s sleeping apartment and woke Bheema.

  “Bheema,” called Draupadi, “how can you sleep while Keechaka breathes?”

  Bheema, if unrestrained, would have been the first to kill Duryodhana at the dice game and Keechaka now. He loved her more unquestioningly than any of us and suffered most from her torments. Alarmed as he was by the pitch of her voice and the relentless way she listed her wrongs, he could do nothing to console her and soon she had slipped into the bed beside him. Bheema the soldier remembered the danger.

  “I cannot eat or sleep until he is dead.” She put her palms to her eyes and wept. Bheema took her palms, put them on his own face and wept to feel their roughness. Bheema wept again, and I with him when he told me all this after Keechaka’s funeral.

  He told her to make an appointment with Keechaka at midnight in the Hall of Dance which was furnished with a divan.

  When Keechaka put out his arms to take Draupadi in the Hall of Dance, Bheema clasped him to his chest and squeezed the life out of him. Once he had crushed him he pushed the limbs and the head into the body so that all that remained was a lump. As soon as he had finished he called Draupadi to see what he had done. But we were desperate lest Bheema’s touch be recognized and we instructed Draupadi to remind all and sundry of her Gandharva husbands.

  Draupadi summoned the guards and cried challengingly, “Look at the fate of one who tries to molest me! Look at the revenge of my Gandharva husbands! Look at what happens to those who arouse the anger of my Gandharva husbands!”

  23

  The funeral rites were begun in the morning in the palace and Draupadi looked on, leaning against a pillar. It was madness for her to put herself in the public eye at such a moment, but she was bent on protecting us by showing that she had nothing to fear.

  One of Keechaka’s brothers said hotly to Virata, “Virata, Keechaka made great conquests for you. Look at the cause of his death gloating there. Let her go with him, let her be burned on the funeral pyre.”

  Draupadi was dragged and tied, kicking and screaming, to the pyre next to the terrible jelly that was Keechaka’s remains. She started crying for the Gandharva husbands. “Jaya, Jayanta…” and from our separate stations we heard the screams. As always, Bheema ran before he thought; even so he remembered that it was one thing to kill Keechaka under cover of night and another to unmask himself and all of us in broad daylight. His identity as Vallabha, which ran deep enough to return to him for years afterwards, as ours to us, was not strong enough to hold him then. He reached the burial ground. The cow dung cakes, the sandal, and fire wood were being rhythmically staked. To those whose task it was to look after the fire, it was of no consequence whether it was a king or a scavenger being buried.

  I followed close on Bheema’s heels. We reached the burning ground before the funeral procession arrived and Bheema welcomed the firstcomers with a great stave which he brandished at Keechaka’s relatives. He started whirling it round and round. Within moments the cremation ground was strewn with the bodies of Keechaka’s brothers and no witnesses were left alive. We freed Draupadi and fled. We had turned into Gandharvas at Draupadi’s cry and we had even less time to resume our posts under cover of the general confusion. As cowherd, cook, games master, we asked with everyone else, “What is happening?” The Sairandhri, we heard, had become the woman everyone feared.

  I stayed close to the queen’s quarters to know what fate they would decide for her. Virata, pacing Sudeshna’s room, ignoring her grief, said, “She must go. Her Gandharva husbands have murdered not only the victim of her beauty, the upholder of my empire, but all his relatives too.” The only thing that saved Draupadi was Virata’s fear of provoking the Gandharva husbands further. The queen restrained herself from cruelty towards Draupadi, but, still weeping, she asked her to go at once. She and Draupadi wept together. At the queen’s feet she begged for thirteen days’ grace. Sudeshna loved Draupadi, as anyone who knew her intimately must, and in the end Sudeshna herself went to Virata to say that she wanted Draupadi to stay.

  Rumours of the cause and manner of Keechaka’s death spread rapidly, and the woman who had arrived at the palace just a year before was reputed to be exquisitely beautiful. It was not difficult to put two and two together, or rather five and one. This would have been more than enough without reports of a master horse handler and a cattle physician skilled beyond mortal range.

  The Kauravas could not stop talking of it all. Yes. Yes. It had all come out. The Pandavas had been detected, just before the end of the thirteenth year. They were living in Virata’s palace and if the king had protected them, why, it was only fair that there should be an attack on the king—and it would serve a double purpose; the Pandavas would surely come out in defence. Duryodhana and Karna were suddenly mad to acquire Virata’s cattle wealth.

  Without Keechaka, Virata was hampered, and warriors were to join the marauders and win booty for themselves. The most eager of these was King Susharma, King of the Trigartas, who had an old grudge against Virata and who, with his brothers, swore to kill me or die.

  Susharma, who had been with Jayadratha when he abducted Draupadi, attacked Virata’s kingdom of Matsya from the south.

  One morning, before anybody in the palace knew what was happening, plaintively mooing cows were dragged out of their sheds, some of them still heavy with milk. Milk pails were turned over. Fodder fell from the mouths of frightened animals. Hundreds of cowherds and thousands of cows were killed, but hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle were kept alive to be driven away.

  At the best of times an army cannot be called out to action in minutes, and this, without Keechaka, was the worst of times for Virata. The news was brought to him just when Eldest had him in check; Virata put up his hands to ward off the messenger. It was early morning when we poured into the chess room. The first rays of the sun fell on the faces of the two kings, and the carved ivory and gold pieces glittered.

  When Virata finally understood what his generals were telling him he swept the chessboard from the table. We had only heard of his temper in our eleven months of hiding, but then none of the three objects of his passion had been attacked in this time.

  Virata, his brothers, and his eldest son were calling for their armour and the horses were being harnessed, Yudhishthira, Kanka the chess player, managed to get the ear of the king.

  “Vallabha is a great warrior,” he whispered. “I myself have won many victories, O King; the cowherd and your chief of the stable, Granthika, are no mean fighters.” Virata at once called for armour for all four. Yudhishthira was trying to explain that the eunuch dancing master was the best of us all, but Virata ignored this. There was such a clank of armour and tramping of feet all over the palace that one could hardly hear the sound of one’s own voice.

  I enviously watched Virata’s sons donning their armour. The handsome Sweta, who sometimes joked with me, put on a coat of adamantine steel adorned with gold. Virata’s coat of mail was magnificent, decked with a hundred suns, a hundred spots, and a hundred eyes. I particularly liked that of his eldest son. It was impen
etrable burnished steel, adorned with a hundred eyes of gold. I was still examining the corselets when Matsya’s standard was raised on his chariot and a shout went up from all the Kshatriyas. Before I could think I found myself roaring too. Only a few of the women stared in surprise, for there was too much emotion and coming and going for anyone to question too closely what the dancing teacher was doing. But it was with a sinking heart that Brihannala watched Virata’s army march out of the city in battle order. When the elephants, mounted by trained warriors, moved behind the king like slowly advancing hills and the hoofbeats of thousands of horses drummed in my blood, I did not know whether to weep or to rage.

  The army had rushed towards the southern border of Matsya where the greater part of the cattle were kept. It seemed to me even from the Dancing Hall that it was a hazardous thing to leave the northern border exposed, but there was no help for it. I hoped that there might be some incident here to give me an excuse to fetch my Gandiva down from the tree. I had not twanged my bow in eleven months. My lips longed for the cool touch of my conch. I felt the bite of Urvashi’s curse. Here I was in my fancy dress and stylish hairdo, chattering with the ladies about the terrible things that had happened, while my brothers were fighting with borrowed weapons.

  I thirsted to know what had happened and learnt that, hearing of Keechaka’s death, Susharma of the Trigartas, Virata’s old enemy, had made the obvious move and attacked before a new commander could be appointed. I could discover only so much in the women’s quarters. I had to wait for my brothers to come back to learn what had happened on the southern border.

  The Trigarta brothers were mighty men and redoubtable foes. Only Keechaka’s reputation had kept them from attacking Virata before. The Trigartas were astonished at the organization of Virata’s army, which Eldest had deployed in the eagle vyuha. He himself was the head of the bird. Each twin was a wing and Bheema guarded the tail. Yudhishthira forged forward and mowed down a large part of the opposing army. Virata, exhilarated by this, made his way into the enemy ranks and, spying Susharma through the dust raised by horses and chariot wheels, challenged him.