We were all wounded. Krishna gave me potions with his own hands. We felt the cold wind of defeat. Krishna did not speak but comforted me with his actions. The sun had not departed, but now a dark and gloomy twilight settled that would not cede its place to night. I shivered as we sat in Eldest’s tent and Krishna threw a shawl about my shoulders. Abhimanyu’s feat brought no rejoicing. The seven days of victory were ashes in the dust. Any time Greatfather chose he could blaze forth, again annihilating us. And since I could not kill him—everyone now saw that I could not and Krishna must have seen it too—Eldest asked what else there was to do but seek peace and then return to the forest.
Bheema rested his head against Eldest’s knees and moaned. We held our silence. Krishna spoke. He was subdued but said we were invincible and nothing could change that. One day’s defeat in battle did not make a war; we would kill Greatfather. Eldest’s eyebrows met. Above his long nose, that high and noble brow that never frowned was ruffled like a lake hit by sudden and opposing winds.
“Mahatma, Greatfather has become a forest fire. It is not Arjuna’s fault. And who am I to speak of fault after these thirteen years of exile. He does not kill us Pandavas but he is burning up the armies of the kings who placed their trust in us. He throws our strategies to the winds. Virata, Panchala, and the Kekayas are losing all their men…and sons.” Eldest looked around at the tent walls and passed his finger slowly through the flame of a small lamp.
Krishna sprang up and in two strides he reached the side of Eldest. He sank down by his knees and clasped his legs as Bheema had.
“I cannot bear it when you do this.” Krishna said. “Eldest, you are the Emperor of Bharatavarsha. You hold our sacred land in trust. It is not because I say so or anybody says so. You are so by decree of heaven and I will see to it that that decree is never foiled. I tell you, Eldest, I shall kill Greatfather.” Eldest shook his head and bent to rest his cheek against the head of Krishna. He took the perfume from his hair. They embraced and wept together silently.
“You cannot, Krishna.”
“I cannot? Eldest, I promise you in all solemnity, Greatfather falls tomorrow. I am not bound by karma. I am not bound by Kshatriya oaths or any other thing on earth. Arjuna is the greatest archer in this world. He is its greatest warrior, but he has not learned to kill compassion, compassion of the human sort. He is bound by it. It finds its way into his arrows. That is what deflects them. Greatfather’s death requires one who sees beyond the earthly ties of love and loyalty. Someone above compassion. There is an ultimate compassion.” He held us in his vibrant voice. “The cosmic law will kill Greatfather and draw him back into itself. It is I who claim him, I myself.” I felt the tides reversing in me. “I am free, Yudhishthira. Give me your permission. Then the onus is no longer on your brother. Do not be perturbed when people say I am adharmic since I do not care myself. They said so when I killed my uncle and later Jarasandha. They said so when I killed Shishupala and every time I fail to have a sacrificial fire lit. But what is that to me? I came to rid the world of tyrants. Arjuna is myself. I would fling myself on to a burning pyre for him. I know that he would do the same for me. He swore to kill Greatfather. Now since Arjuna is my very self, I shall do it for him. I tell you that I shall and will kill Greatfather. I am not bound.” Krishna’s voice was full of tears and love and things I cannot name. I had not heard him speak like this before. Nobody had. The night was filled with sounds of grasshoppers and the croaks of little frogs. There was such stillness in the minds of all that I could hear the grasses moving. I suddenly became aware of trees outside, and of birds that slept. An owl hooted and I knew what he was saying.
After the long long silence Eldest said with slow and infinite tenderness, in a voice that caught something of Krishna’s vibrancy: “You are not bound by anything, Mahatma. Yet you are bound much more securely than any of us in this tent. Great Soul, you are bound hand and foot by love. Thus if Arjuna begs you not to besmirch your name, you will not do it. At the very last you will deny him nothing.” Krishna was silent. Eldest took his hand and stroked it. “You do not have to say to me, Mahatma, that you could kill Greatfather and be above regret. I have never doubted either that or that you would give your life for us. You are not only your Jishnu’s charioteer. You are the charioteer of all of us. Our fate is in your hands. It is not he alone who will not let you break your promise not to fight. When you were speaking of the first day, the memory came back to me of what Greatfather said. When we went to ask formal permission of him to do battle, did you not hear what he said? He said to me, “May victory be yours.” He said it thrice. Krishna, I know Greatfather. He has no use for words. He never has two on his tongue if one suffices. There is but one thing we can do. Let us go to him and ask him how. How he wants to die, how he can be killed.” The last dull shades of twilight had finally slid into darkness.
In the enemy camp Greatfather looked like someone who had waited for us all his life. He knew what we had come for and received us as his liberators. I saw it in his eyes. They had been staring blindly into depths and caught sight of someone beckoning. He let us kneel before him and then raised us up and took the perfume from our heads, not once but many times. Perhaps no man who is of woman born can meet his end indifferently. His eyes had softened: in their glow I saw the boy that I had only heard about: Devavrata, son of Emperor Shantanu, driving in his princely chariot, with his black and glossy top-knot crowding the diadem beneath a silk umbrella. I saw him charioteering by the riverside in order to secure for Shantanu, his father, the fisher-girl he loved. Ashwatthama always said he smelt the weedy winding river when he heard the story and saw the way that prince looked out upon the world with eyes of hope and trust while he rehearsed his noble deed. It was a fisherman’s hut. And Satyavati was the daughter of the fisher chief. They said she was beyond compare, and when we met her more than a score of years afterward, she still bore traces of it. There was the emanation of an indefinable perfume that was the sage’s gift to her. It was the last time that the eyes of the young prince gazed freely on a woman’s beauty. When Devavrata left the hut his sons were dead, as Ashwatthama used to say. He had promised he would never marry nor father children. It must have been in those few moments that his eyes became the ones that we had known, just as his name had changed to Bheeshma. How can you keep a vow like that unless you change yourself? But now there was no need to be the one who takes an awesome vow. Temptation was behind him, battle was behind him. Honour and dishonour were behind him. Everything was behind him except the moment he had sung of yesterday; he could be himself, the self he chose. He had taken Dharma by the hand and married her so many years ago; tonight not even Dharma had a hold on him.
“Tomorrow is the last day then,” he said. He looked deeply at each one of us and when he came to Krishna, he shook his head and smiled, “Krishna Vasudeva, you would not release me. You denied your Grace to me.”
“Greatfather,” said Krishna, “for the Great Bheeshma there is only Grace! But it comes disguised.” They smiled and nodded. We sat around like children watching a pageant and we waited. More lamps were lit. Our shadows danced lightly on the silken walls. And now he turned to Eldest.
“Yudhishthira,” he said, “I swore, upon my weapons and upon the Truth, to King Dhritarashtra that I would fight for him. You know that I have stood for peace. What else had I to strive for and to live for? But this world is full of wild surprises. I thought that peace was what held chaos off. And how can there be peace unless you stand by Dharma? That is what I thought.” Greatfather’s Dharma was the iron prison Krishna had come to free us from. “I kept my promises. Promises are cold bedfellows when you have to fight your grandsons.” He stopped himself from saying more. “But now it all falls into place at last. I heard her calling.” Was it his Mother Ganga or was it Mother Durga that he heard? He gave a little chuckle and his chin fell upon his breast. He seemed to doze or to try and remember as an old man might.
“Amba,” he said, his eyes still clo
sed. “She said she would come back for me and she has come with arrows. But, Arjuna…” his head jerked up and forward. This was no old man. “I want your arrows to dispatch me. It is inauspicious to be killed by one who was born a woman.” I pressed my head against his feet, hiding my tears. He stroked my head. “Promise, Arjuna. I have been deprived of many things.” He leaned and took my topknot so that I had to look at him. “At least that is what people say,” he added with a wry smile. “Arjuna should know better than I do but anyhow do not deprive me of my warrior’s heaven, son.” I put my hand upon my sword hilt and swore by all my weapons that I would take his life with them. He let my topknot go.
“Amba was the best of them, you know. There were three sisters and I brought them all from a swayamvara for my half-brother.” We had never heard the story from him and it began to sparkle. “But Amba had promised herself to King Shala, so my brother would not take her. She turned upon me like a fury and said that King Shala would no longer marry her. He said that I led her by the hand and it was for me to wed her. She had tiny hands.” Again Greatfather’s head sank down onto his breast. Remembering had made him smile. “She went to her greatfather and said, ‘I want to marry the son of Emperor Shantanu’”, so he said, “Nothing easier. I know his Guru well. Devavrata has made a vow but he is not the one to go against his guru’s wishes.” He looked into my eyes, “I could not break my vow.” He looked around and said in a final explanation, “That was my life, a vow that must be kept.” The ghee lamps sprang to life. “That roused my guru’s wrath.” He turned to me, “Can you imagine, Arjuna, your saying no to Dronacharya?” He gave a dry splutter of laughter and I laughed with him. It was like when I sat upon his lap and listened to his stories long ago.
“To refuse my weapons-guru…” He opened his eyes and looked straight into mine once more. “Life presents you with hard tasks,” an understatement from one whose life had been a bare cupboard, an arid keeping of the peace in a mirageless desert. I knew that he had fought his guru Bhargava and understood what he was telling me. Tomorrow I would have to kill him who was a guru to me as well as Greatfather.
Sometimes a person thinks of you when he is facing death and puts himself where you are. It gives you strength and a belief in the nobility of man. It can make you forget yourself. He saw I understood and he took his gaze from me. It shifted to the past.
“My guru had to own he could not beat me, so he embraced me and we rocked with laughter. That was the worst of all for Amba. She was pride incarnate and could not bear the laughter. She could no longer face life. She threw herself into the fire, vowing she would kill me in another life. She always had the warrior steel.” He said this musingly. It was the only time I saw him glow with admiration for a woman. Had Great Bheeshma’s heart been won by fiery Amba then? Perhaps it was his way of telling us before he left that he had feelings we had never known. He meant to say, I think, he loved us more than he had dared to show.
“Arjuna, no one in the three worlds save you or Krishna can kill Devavrata, son of Ganga. Do not leave the fighting to Shikhandin, and remember, I have sworn to fight for Duryodhana, so do not think that I will make it easy for you.” By the time we left him there he had withdrawn again and sat with hooded eyes. My mind was silent, and the battle in me finished.
There are times where no words will serve, not even tears, nor rites nor hymns. Your spirit wells within you into a music which shies away from shaping. Sweetness conquers sadness and carries it into a world beyond the mind. If men could live there, strife would melt away: life as Kshatriyas know it would fade like dreams at dawn. But, then, so would the rest of life, for life demands a shaping. The day demands a substance extracted from the dreams of night.
All night I lay in peace as though in someone’s loving arms: sometimes they seemed to be Greatfather’s, sometimes I thought they must be Mother Durga’s. I did not pray to her. She needs no prayers where conflict is resolved, where peace is absolute. She cradles you. War is another of her ways to bring you peace.
When you have spent a night like this the day dawns bright. The lake where we were camped was rippled by a breeze; the wind god smiled gently over its surface, then blew a secret kiss. The stones were polished by the crystal water. The sacrificial flames rose smokeless and auspicious. The hymns the priests and men intoned came from full hearts and open throats. The soldiers standing faced the sun in worship. Some crossed their arms over their breasts and others touched their eyes. Still others bent in yogic pose, their bodies fresh and pure from their baths, their hair and lashes wet. I felt my body finely tuned, my mind was humming like a bee dance.
The time had come to speak to Shikhandin, so Krishna brought him to my tent. How can I relate what happened then? I could say that Krishna sat crosslegged on the couch and spoke, that Shikhandin paced up and down, that I stood by the entrance flap of my tent, first staring at the lake to keep my mood, then turning back to him. It was curiosity that carried me from one world to another. Shikhandin had been born a girl child and hidden by her mother, then helped to malehood by a forest Yaksha. I had first seen him at Draupadi’s swayamvara and had heard the story then, but it was Draupadi’s twin brother, Dhrishtadyumna, standing in pride beside her beauty, that had drawn our eyes that day.
When Krishna told Shikhandin how he must ride before me and make Greatfather lay down his arms, I felt the pain, a blunted edge against my heart. I looked at Shikhandin. His brow was noble. His hair and body emitted a strange radiance. In fighting you could count on him to be beside you when you needed him. From funeral pyre to womb he had brought along his hatred that was half love.
I saw he did not like it. He had to act as shield to me. No warrior chooses to be a decoy. Krishna then reminded him he would be more exposed than anybody else, with the whole Kaurava army after him. So he agreed and left the tent. I turned to Krishna and said, “I would hate it too.”
“Greatfather loved Amba and she loved him,” he said. “It is her love that will release him. Her love will let loose Shikhandin’s arrows but yours must kill him. Love can do its work through hate. Higher laws can use what is to hand and serve themselves.”
Bheema and I were guarding Shikhandin’s chariot wheels. I thought Greatfather had no more surprises for us. On his last day he proved us wrong.
There was no confronting Greatfather. Wherever we were, he was not. His silver chariot streaked away as though the horses laughed at us. His army swirled around him, raising screens of dust. And from behind all this, Greatfather killed more men than on the day before. It was his way of paying for his salt.
Greatfather paid his last debts on the tenth day, the one to Duryodhana: and the older one, to Amba. When Shikhandin’s arrows thumped into Greatfather’s chariot, Greatfather smoothed his beard as though to fight his anger. His white head lifted and he called up to the sky: “I will not fight Shikhandin.”
“Why not?” Shikhandin bellowed. The fighting all around us died.
“Arjuna, I am waiting.” Greatfather was before me, his arrow hidden by its snakehead. It was Greatfather—waiting. My hand moved; the string’s pluck sounded dull and hollow to my ear. The arrow whistled past Greatfather’s diadem. His hand lifted to his quiver.
“In front,” Krishna called to Shikhandin’s charioteer. “Shield us. Shield us.” I felt shame and anger.
“I shall not fight Shikhandin,” and Greatfather’s hand that held the arrows dipped.
“Why not? Are you afraid of me?” Greatfather’s charioteer had wheeled around and the wind blew at us the answer to Shikhandin’s query. It ricocheted off the corridors of time:
“You are still the creature God created when you were born.” The words were said in love, I thought. From behind I saw Shikhandin stiffen. His fingers opened…an arrow pierced Greatfather’s chest below the shoulder.
“My son Arjuna, it is your arrows I am waiting for.” This raised Shikhandin’s hackles. He rained his volleys on Greatfather with a brilliance I had never seen in him, his bo
w perpetually at full stretch, but Greatfather ignored him, and calling out to me he tried to heat my blood. His words were like shafts. “You are a Kshatriya. Behave like one.” The ancient habit of obedience still prevailed, his voice charmed arrows from my quiver and they found their mark. “Dispatch my soul, Arjuna. You are the one to send me on my journey. You and Krishna are my liberators. Do not deprive me of a warrior’s…” His body bent and his knees buckled. Clinging to the mast he called in triumph. “These are Arjuna’s arrows. They bite like crabs. They sting like venomous snakes.” Slowly he slid down crying out in a victorious ecstasy of pain, “They cannot be Shikhandin’s. These arrows taste of Arjuna. They guzzle my blood. Like crabs who sip their mother’s flesh, they are devouring me.” The thwacking of the bowstring on my finger-guards died out. The silence travelled back in waves. A hush descended on the battlefield. You could hear distant banners slapping at the wind. I watched Greatfather. He straightened himself slowly. The whole world leaned to listen. A darkness opened in his beard and his words were slow and distinct.
“Arjuna, stop hiding there behind the hermaphrodite. Come forward.” He drew his sword and slung a burnished shield over his arm. I saw the war-gleam come into his eyes once more. He wanted to be sure of death from me. But he was full of arrows, he had no further need of wounds. Streamlets of blood were running down his arms and legs. How could he stand? “Come, Arjuna, take up a shield.” He put his sword down and raised a javelin. “I send you this.” The warrior in me stepped aside. It hit my shield and jarred me to the teeth. The men from both sides cheered, but quietly. They cheered for both of us, for something that we stood for that we hardly understood. I crouched behind my shield and took the javelin that Krishna handed me. Greatfather caught it on his buckler. Weak as he was, it made him stagger. “Come closer, come close, son,” he said to me. “We both have sword arms. Why do you stay away?” I did not want to have to hack Greatfather so I picked up another javelin. Before I had decided what to do I felt my left arm jolted at the shoulder and the warmth flowed over my angada into my arm’s crook. That throw came with the last of Greatfather’s strength. I sent the javelin into his chest. Energy raced up my arm and shoulder, I poised for another throw. My third lance pierced his armour below the collarbone. He slumped and, holding on to the pole, collapsed. His shield slipped off and clattered before it settled. He toppled from the platform.
The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata Page 46