The Great Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata

by Maggi Lidchi Grassi

  As soon as Krishna and I mounted our Sindhu stallions, I felt a freer self emerge. At the parting of two roads, Krishna turned back to be with Eldest at the riverside.

  Who was this freer self, so easy of access when I was out with Krishna or on my own? I asked the stars that shone. A solitary bird replied. The air was cool. The road was good. I clucked my horse into a canter. The river gleamed with dawn’s first light. A deer came out to look at me and sprang away. Another jumped across my path and made three leaps towards the river. I hummed a snatch of song that I had taught Uttaraa and then wondered if Abhimanyu learnt it from her. There were fewer animals than I remembered here: the chariot wheels and conches and yells of men calling their names to frighten other men, the voices of Ghatotkacha, Alambusha, and Bheema must have driven them away. Also our hunters killed them daily to feed our armies. Would it all come back one day? Could anyone or anything return to what it was? Krishna was right, it must not. Eldest, too, was right. We had fought like dogs over a bone and the bone had lost its savour.

  The Giver of Day was rising on my left and I dismounted to salute him. I stood before a waterfall. The trees were very still and listened with me to the gurgle and babble over chutes. Upon the ground were tiny wildflowers so thick that I could not avoid them, but after my feet lifted they sprang up yellow, pink, white, blue, magenta, orange, cream with little black designs, violet with cream centres, tiny scarlet clusters with white centres. Above were dark and lighter greens on which the sun began to play. I spread my angavastra upon the ground and lay beside the river. The fields of sky grew cirrus with the dawn. Lying on my back I watched the mystery of the changing world. Had night planted a seed in Goddess Usha? Was it her hair that she shook out with morning’s colours into the sun’s first iridescence? Her daily sacrifice to Surya had ever the same intention but was ever new. A breeze stirred the cirrus. Abhimanyu’s chariot streaked across the heavens in it, his banner flying high. Something was faintly roused in me, but the feeling did not last. You cannot kill and kill and shoot arrows at your gurus and your kinsmen for eighteen days and hope to find your human heart intact.

  Below, the water striking the stones sent up a spray in which a rainbow found itself. I laid my cheek upon the ground to watch a tiny frog as he hopped away. I called to him and made him stop in his steps. I called again and he turned around, hopping towards me. I thought he might be cold and slimy but under my forefinger he was cool and dry. He stared pop-eyed at me and climbed upon my wrist to get a closer look. By the time he was on his way again, my questions were less urgent.

  I rode in the deep shade of a canopy of trees. When I reached the twisting path that led to the ashram, I had almost forgotten what I had come for.

  The low houses of the ashram were neatly thatched and stood in the shade of banyan trees. Each path was swept in graceful waves. A hum of hymns carried on the silence. Laughter welled from a nearby hut. I stuck my head in. A dozen bright-eyed faces turned to me, their glossy hair tied into topknots. One young disciple asked me if I was Arjuna, the greatson of their gurudev. Another giggled. There was a sound of feet on gravel and they briskly continued their chanting, rocking to and fro, mindful of their guru’s presence. I knew Greatfather Vyasa stood behind me. Even his shadow emitted peace and strength. He cocked an ear to listen to the hymn as I turned to rest my head at his feet:

  By Faith is fire kindled

  By Faith is offered sacrifice

  Sing me now Faith the pinnacle of joy.

  Bless Faith the one who gives…

  Singing himself, he drew me from the song. The last glad shloka followed us:

  Bless this song I sing.

  He took me by the hand and led me to the river; we strolled in silence for a while before he stopped under a neem tree. The silence ripened as we sat. He looked into me deeply and when he closed his eyes he took me with him to places far away. When he opened them he smiled and waited.

  “I came to ask your help,” I said. His eyes wrinkled in a smile.

  “That is what old sages are for.” He was so full of peace that it was contagious. I drew long deep breaths to soak up the peace, and open the pores of my being.

  “It is so full of peace here but there is another world,” I said, “full of reproach and sadness that I must return to in the evening.” The disciple came to wash my feet and another placed some grapes before us. With delicacy, Greatfather Vyasa’s long nails peeled one for me. It was said he had frightened our Greatmother with these long nails and matted hair, but he was full of dignity and charm. His hair was oiled and dressed high upon his head. I could not see why he should frighten anybody. A squirrel came and sat upon his arm and he fed it with another grape.

  “It is Eldest,” I said. He nodded. “He is full of suffering and remorse and does not want the kingdom since he learned we killed our Eldest who should have been the rightful king, as he insists.” I told him how he had not spoken to our mother since. “He blames himself for everything. After his rajasuya and Sisupala’s death you told Eldest that when the kings walked out, he could not avoid the Great Conflagration. Can you not persuade him of his innocence?” Greatfather Vyasa said that each man is what destiny allows; each man must do what he must do. Eldest had his part to play and he had played it perfectly. He must also bear its burden.

  “He is Dharmaraj. There is no other. Karna was not and never could have been. He came for greatness of another kind. Krishna must have told you that and I possess no wisdom he does not.” He paused and scanned my face. “It is difficult to see one’s mother as a maiden. Yours was but a child when her father gave her for adoption to his cousin who was childless. This made her feel she was not highly prized, and from the day she left her father’s house she vowed with all her woman’s passion that when her child was born nothing would ever lead her to forsake it. Her uncle, her new father, loved her but grown men seldom understand the hearts of little maids. Your mother’s name was Pritha but her new father made her take his name, she was now Kunti. One can forget a name in time but there are things the heart will cling to till the last breath.” He drew a sigh and smiled. “Your mother was a docile child, not a great beauty but a handsome girl and pleasant with a ready smile and subtle charm. Her bones were on the strong side but when she looked at you her smiling eyes were all you saw. She was quiet and biddable. After Amba, these were the things Greatfather looked for when choosing family brides. He recognized her soothing presence. Later she kept the peace with Madri, her co-wife. When Kuntibhoja had Sage Durvasa stay with him, Kunti served him day and night. You know Durvasa,” he wrinkled his nose and scratched behind his ear with the long nail of his little finger. “He was as full of curses as of blessings; a sharp and double-bladed sword; his powers were formidable. You do not serve the likes of him without acquiring something. Her honesty and simplicity won him over. She learnt from him. He knew what her heart longed for before she did and he gave her mantras that could summon the child that she had vowed never to send away. Durvasa’s gifts were like that, each one a dilemma that could resolve you.

  “One morning at her window, she was worshipping the sun when a sweet yearning seized her. It drew a mantra from her that summoned Surya. Your mother was little more than a child and very innocent. She only knew a god had entered her. Durvasa’s gift brought her a greater love than any she had dreamed of in her torn life, and it tore her once again. It may sound monstrous but it is the only way to become whole. You must have learnt something of that, Arjuna, in those eighteen days with Krishna Vasudeva?” He paused and then continued.

  “When you have no powers you can make as many vows as you like and you may be able to keep them or you may not. When you have special powers you may also be able to keep your vows or then again you may not; for it is a different force that will decide. This flung your mother apart from her firstborn. Yes, she bore Karna. Being unwed she was afraid and gave the child to Mother Ganga who floated it away. Each one of us comes to solve the riddle of his life. And that was h
ers: she was afraid and passive. Only suffering tempers such a one to strength. By Yudhisthira’s silence she will be purified of her karma and the poison will be drained from her. You could say that she betrayed the gift of Surya. Help her.” Krishna had chosen Island-born Greatfather to answer questions I had not asked or known about.

  “Arjuna, never say this is the one thing I will never do, for Mother Durga hears you. It is like cursing a well and saying you will never drink from it. Your need may find it dry.”

  Why did we never think to ask? Why does it take a war and many deaths to bring such things to light? “When Pandu wanted children by niyoga, she made him promise that he would never ask her who the fathers were.”

  I had seen my mother only in a sort of dream, immobile and it came into being with my first memory of her. She was a surface without substance, but now I walked around her. In a sense it was my first pradakshina to her and in my mind I placed my forehead on her feet. Seeing her as a girl uttering a rishi’s mantra, quite innocent of what she wrought, I saw we are all children and must do what the great gods decree so they can fashion us to resemble the godhead. We had fallen into silence and I closed my eyes. The words the disciples chanted came through to me: “Which limb does the moon take for its measuring rod when it measures the form of the great support?”

  As always, when I visited this ashram the lives that we had led in Hastina and Indraprastha, in Virata and the forest, faded and shrank in significance, and the universe billowed up before me to touch infinity.

  After a while I said, “Even before our births, did Durvasa know this war had to be?”

  “It had to be.” I knew I could not question him further.

  But I had to show him what had festered in me since our days of exile: “Do you remember in the forest you said, “Wait your exile out for thirteen years before you think of fighting. Then Dharma will be with you.” When Krishna came, he said, “Fight now!” He looked at me with deep-set, glowing eyes that filled the sky, the universe.

  “I gave you my knowledge. What else can anybody give? I walk within my Dharma. Krishna is free of Dharma as humans understand it.” After a pause he said, “It will not work to act as if we are free if we are not unless… unless…” He waved his hand towards the river. I waited for him to finish. He did not. I prompted him.

  “Unless…”

  “You see the river,” he said. “It has no self. It gives itself and does not know it gives itself. If you annihilate the self that thinks it is doing, then you can act within this freedom. If you can be the arrow that Krishna lets fly, then that is freedom. Without that, each one of us must walk within his human Dharma. Arjuna, just as you have lived obsessed with Karna, he lived with you too. All these years you have lived in each other like brothers in one womb. You were too close.

  “When Balarama taught you wrestling, he spoke to you of body-eyes. When they are working you do not have to think. And when you see with the eyes of your soul, you do not have to think.” He got up. I took the dust from his feet and gazed upon the retreating figure of the one who had sired my father. I gazed upon the flowing river. A kingfisher skimmed over it. It almost felt like spring, which bought along with it the promise of a complete renewal. A warbler sang pure notes. The sky was serene— unaware that war drums had outdone its thunder.

  A second warbler answered. And then I saw two oxen, white and perfectly matched, climbing the ashram field. They walked in unison, moved by a single heart that prescribed their lumbering grace and undulating oneness, a harmony men can rarely match. Their movement lived within a realm that lay beyond them, a place where things that happen here are seen in their unbrokenness. I looked towards the river. Between the longed-for seas of Dwaraka and the mountains of the north where Shiva came to me as a hunter, there stretched a plain that was the warp and woof of life itself. Here were the poisonings, the Palace of Delight, the dice game and the insults, the exile and the embassies, the akshauhinis and the field of battle. What happened there when I had released my arrows here to kill? Our arrows aim at unknown targets. Our lives themselves are arrows shot from the unseen into itself. The river in its flowing told me of this. And all of us here, so unpredictable, so flawed, there lived whole. There came on me the sense of heaven pressing close, a whirring chariot as when Matali came to take me. I heard his little bells but they stopped short of me. I was not to be transported, only suspended, purring softly through my birth and life towards some target.

  There is a silent place which drinks the chaos of the world and turns it into speechlessness. It is what warblers try to reach. It is the centre of our very selves where hate has no existence. That was what Karna’s smile had told me. The river was my tears; it washed my stains away.

  I left an ashram different from the one I had come through. To my right I heard the hymns that are sung after death, and to my left I walked into the hymns that are offered to the sacred fire which Island-born Greatfather kindled in me. We had sometimes seen it as his obsession: to divide the hymns into their four directions which was why they had named him Veda-Vyasa. But now I saw them as pillars of the coming yuga.

  A priest once asked Greatfather Vyasa why he sorted out the Vedas and why he did not leave them whole, as one great body. He said that with the Kali Yuga the human mind would sharpen, but would also shrink and it must be given crutches. The mind would be a little knife to chop the world into pieces. Division would be the order of the day, for Truth in its integrity would not be held. Island-born Greatfather’s last words to me at the entrance when I left were: “I sort out the Vedas so they can sort out men. Their inner meaning will be lost and our rituals will further petrify. This is inevitable. You cannot stop the chariot wheel when Lord Kala whips the horses. But they will guard the knowledge until a wisdom such as we have never dreamt of, sets them to rest forever. Until then they will be the raft that will carry us across the darkness of a yuga.”

  In his little ashram Greatfather was re-ordering a world as well as grooming it for death and rebirth. The Vedas followed me and I pulled them along behind me to Eldest.

  27

  I saw what I was looking for. As though she knew and waited, within the dark opening of the tent, my mother in her widow’s white stood gazing out. As I came closer to her I saw that she was weeping. I flung myself upon the ground in full prostration, and clasping both her ankles, laid my head upon her feet and would not let her raise me. My tears poured out of me, as did all the words I could never utter. At last she sat down beside me and we pressed our wet cheeks to each other’s. I stroked her head as she stroked mine.

  I had forgotten Eldest’s ravaged face until I came into the royal tent. He lay mourning on the floor; Draupadi’s lap cradled his head. The physician and his servitors were around him. Nakula was feeding him a potion. Bheema and Sahadeva sat by the far wall with glum empty faces. With closed eyes Draupadi had withdrawn herself.

  His wounds were festering and had given him a fever. I thought it might have touched his mind. When I put my fingers to his feet he drew me up and made me sit beside him. I looked into his eyes but he caught nothing of my serenity. He was locked within his sadness. I said as I embraced him: It is over, it is over. We did what we must do. Let us not waste it.” I think he never heard me.

  “Abhimanyu is dead,” he might have been telling us something new. “Ghatotkacha is dead. Our sons by Draupadi are dead. What will they say to Krishna in Dwaraka when he tells them that we let our cousins slaughter Abhimanyu?” I looked across at Krishna and his hand turned my thoughts back. “I have a pain here, brother,” he sighed and ground his fist into his chest. “Karna was our uterine brother.” He said this too as though he had just learnt it. “She told us when it was too late. With Karna on our side, we could have challenged all the gods and demons. With you and Karna both, there could have been no war. Duryodhana would not have dared to look at us. Never…

  “I would have said to Karna, ‘You are my brother.’” He turned his eyes, and they were lifeless.
I took his hand and stroked it. “You are my brother,” he repeated. Did he speak to me or Karna? I looked again at Krishna who was standing at the door and gazing at us. “He would have come to us if I had asked him. But we always called him Suta. We made him hate us. Did you ever notice, Brother, that his feet were like our Mother’s? I used to stare at them in the assemblies. It was the thing that kept me calm. I should have guessed the truth. Who could have cursed him? Who could have cursed us?” Draupadi and Sahadeva looked to each other without speaking. Their arguments were exhausted. Eldest now said what I expected him to say, “We should not have come back, Arjuna.” Then he set to telling us again what we all knew. “How we misjudged him. He was loyal to Duryodhana from love, not because he ate his salt. We insulted him but he spared our lives.” Bheema was yawning and I feared an outburst from him.

  “He spared Bheema, Sahadeva, and Nakula. On the very day he died he could have killed me, instead he tapped my shoulder with his bow, I felt the friendship in it. We could have loved each other.” We sat in silence. There was something holy in his ranting which we dared not interrupt. He was staring at our mother’s feet and struggled to rise to go and get a closer look at them. I could not hold him back. He would not look into her face, but only gazed at her feet. My mother turned her face away. I waited as long as I could stand it and then I went to him and drew him back. My heart wept for my mother. I took him back to where he had been lying. He sat up.

  “We have all suffered enough, Eldest. What is the use of this? Can you not stretch your mind to see how our mother suffers? You have always offered all the sacrifices that the priests ordained. You will offer more and purify yourself. You betray their purpose.”