The Rise of Hastinapur

by Sharath Komarraju

  ‘Jarutha tells me you may have something to tell me, my lady,’ he said, waving her to a chair. He was big and broad-chested, and wore a moustache that drooped down over his cheeks on both sides. Like most kings from the plains, he wore his hair long, over his shoulders, and seemed to like tucking it behind his ears every now and then, much in the manner of a lady preening herself. He had two or three zits on his forehead, one of them fresh and the other two fading away. Amba guessed he could be no older than twenty.

  ‘That is so, my lord,’ she said, bending low and taking a seat. ‘I bring news that Hastinapur’s High King, Vichitraveerya, breathed his last nine days ago to this day.’

  ‘Indeed? We do not have spies in Hastinapur, alas.’

  ‘Jarutha has told me so. If you wish to take Hastinapur, Your Highness, I do not think a more opportune moment than this would present itself.’

  ‘Taking Hastinapur will be good, yes,’ said Drupad. ‘But it has not weakened as much as you say it has. Bhishma still commands her armies and guards her gates. It shall not be easy getting past him.’

  Bhishma, Bhishma, Bhishma! Wherever she went she heard his name, no matter how much she wanted to run away. ‘Talk of this kind does not befit a warrior like you, my lord,’ she said coldly. ‘The challenge of battle should spur you on, not scare you away.’

  Drupad smiled at her. Despite his moustache, he had a nice, impish smile, she thought. ‘What you say may be true if it is indeed a challenge we speak about, Princess. But fighting with Bhishma is not a challenge. It is sacrifice. You forget, perhaps, that he is old enough to be my father. He has been fighting wars for as long as I have been alive!’

  ‘He is old. His limbs are weary. Yours are fresh and young. I am certain that if you take him on–’

  ‘I shall do no such thing,’ he said. ‘But tell me this – why are you so eager to send me to my death? What harm have I ever done you, Princess of Kasi?’

  ‘I wish to see Bhishma humbled and killed,’ said Amba. ‘And I thought North Country was a land of great kings, not cowards garbed in royal silk.’

  He refused to rise to the bait. Still smiling, he said, ‘I am sure many in the land wish the same thing as you, Princess. If Bhishma were subdued, the fertile lands of Hastinapur will be up for grabs, with no king on her throne. Which king of North Country would not wish to have granaries overflowing with wheat and corn throughout the year?’ He paused and looked away for a second. Then he shook his head. ‘But Bhishma still stands.And that is the truth.’

  ‘But Your Majesty,’ she said, ‘you are admitting defeat even before taking up arms against him. He is but a man. Surely he is not invincible.’

  ‘I am certain you know the tales they tell about him. He is the son of King Shantanu and a river nymph that came down the mountains of ice up north. If what they say is true, then he has divine blood flowing in his veins. Perhaps it would take a god to defeat him.’

  ‘Do you hear yourself, King?’ she asked, her eyes suddenly ablaze. ‘Panchala’s High King fears attacking a king-less city because of one man. Your whole army against one man, my lord – surely he cannot subdue your whole army on his own?’

  ‘He who subdued an army of kings at your groom-choosing, my lady, can subdue any army of men.’ He got up and walked to the window, where dark satin screens hung from the sill. He pushed one to the side, and a blast of wind sent his hair flying. He seemed to be looking far up north, toward the mountains. ‘But I do think we can make use of your information, my lady. We cannot take Hastinapur, but we can take back our quarries that Bhishma has captured.’ He closed the curtain and turned back to face her. ‘At the northern tip of Panchala, where our boundary merges with that of the Kurus, we have quarries that fell rock to forge weapons. Over the last two years, the Kurus have inched their way into our territory, and now they hold two of our eighteen quarries – not many, I admit, but it would be nice to take back what is ours.’

  Amba twisted her hands together. ‘Won’t Bhishma come to defend them?’ she asked hopefully. ‘And if he does, will you fight him yourself?’

  ‘No, my lady,’ Drupad replied, adjusting his hair.‘I shall only send Jarutha with a band of men to drive the usurpers away. From what I know of Bhishma, and if what you say is true – that Hastinapur is kingless – then they will not respond to our attack, at least for now. We can take back what is ours, and we can continue to make weapons that will one day,’ he looked away into the distance,‘make us the supreme kingdom in North Country.’

  ‘Not as long as Bhishma is alive,’ she said, trying to goad him.

  Drupad merely shrugged. ‘Perhaps you are right. But he cannot live forever, can he, Princess?’

  ‘He will, perhaps. Have you not seen how well he wears his age?’

  She saw his eyes twitch and his moustache bristle, and knew that her words had hit their mark. No one who saw Bhishma even once would fail to notice how the man seemed to grow young with every passing year. It fed the myth – and Amba did not think it anything more than a myth – that he was, indeed, the son of a god. Perhaps when white hair begins to show in his beard, she thought, people will realize that he is but a man.

  ‘You wish to kill him,’ he said, ‘even more than I do. What has he done to anger you so?’

  ‘That, Your Majesty, is none of your concern.’

  ‘Perhaps you are right. But you are still young, Princess, no more than twenty, I would assume. You have your whole life ahead of you. Would it not be prudent to go back to Hastinapur and stay there? God willing, you may still bear the future High King, and become queen mother.’

  ‘I was not wedded to Vichitraveerya.’

  ‘Even so,’ said Drupad, ‘you carry the blood of Kasi in you. Bhishma and Satyavati will be fools not to allow you to bear sons for Hastinapur’s throne.’

  ‘I wish to see the death of Bhishma,’ said Amba simply.

  ‘That, my lady, shall only come in the wake of Hastinapur’s destruction.’

  ‘Then I wish to see Hastinapur destroyed.’

  Drupad came to stand by her. ‘I would not like anything better than to see Hastinapur destroyed and under my rule, Princess.’ He placed a hand on her shoulder. His palm was bruised and callous; the hand of a swordsman. ‘But there is a time and place for everything, is there not? Hastinapur shall fall, it is written in the stars; but not now.’

  Amba looked up, and she heard herself say, ‘Take me as your wife, Your Majesty.’

  Drupad withdrew his hand. ‘My lady!’ he said with a short laugh.

  She got up to her feet. ‘Why? Both of us want the same thing, do we not? Take me as your wife, and together we shall plot the death of the fiend that champions Hastinapur’s throne.’

  Drupad took another step back. ‘My lady, I am betrothed to the princess of Chedi. We are to be wedded this midwinter.’

  ‘So what? It shall not be the first time a king takes more than one wife.’

  ‘But you are not just another princess–’

  ‘Yes, I have the royal blood of Kasi flowing in me. I shall continue the line of the great king Rama himself, who is said to have united all of North Country in his time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Drupad, ‘yes. But taking you as my wife will only anger Bhishma. He may come to attack us.’

  ‘He would not!’ she cried, reaching for his garment and tugging him toward her. ‘He banished me from the kingdom.’

  ‘That does not mean he will sit idle while Panchala and Kasi become allies, Princess. It may be true that we do not have spies in Hastinapur, but Hastinapur has many in Panchala. They will carry news of our wedding to Bhishma, and I promise you that he will wage war on Panchala and take you away.’

  ‘Only to banish me again!’ she said.

  ‘That may be so, yes. You can stay here in Panchala, of course. I shall not deny you that. But as long as you stay unmarried, or stay married to an obscure nobleman – I shall see to that, if you allow me – Hastinapur will be quiet. But if you ever were to
wed a High King, I am afraid they will not allow you.’

  ‘Who are they to allow or disallow me, Your Highness? They do not own me.’ She wound her fingers tight around his garment. His own hands were wrapped around her wrist, gently but warily. She could see in his eyes that he was alert to any quick movements on her part. ‘They do not own me.’ Her grip loosened, and she moved away to cover her face with her hands. In her mind she saw herself as a cowering speck over which the large, dark, lanky shape of Bhishma’s shadow loomed. She shivered.

  ‘The day Bhishma won you in the fight, my lady,’ said Drupad, ‘you became Hastinapur’s property.’

  She heard the words that Drupad did not say but meant to, that lay hidden beneath his kind, avuncular tone: She did not understand the world of men. She had thought she had grown more aware, but the fact that she had persuaded herself to come to Panchala and meet the king, the fact that she had thought she could goad and threaten the High King of Panchala to wage war on Hastinapur for her sake, the fact that she had asked the king to marry her – this did not show understanding. This showed foolishness; and a childish delusion that she could turn men around her little finger, that she only needed to ask them to marry her and they would jump at it.

  No, she thought, none of the Great Kingdoms would see her as anything more than a petulant child. No High King worth the title would even consider marriage with her as long as she was Hastinapur’s castaway. She had to leave. She had to find means within herself to gain her vengeance.

  Drupad, as though reading her thoughts, said, ‘In the Madhuvan forest west of here, Sage Parashurama has made his hermitage.’

  She lowered her arms and looked up at him, eyes bloodshot and filled with tears.

  He turned away from her. ‘He will look after you well, my lady. He is a knowledgeable man too, so you may find his advice useful. I will ask Jarutha to take you there at daybreak. You can spend the night here, if you wish.’ He turned to face her. ‘You should not cry, my lady. You are still young, as I said, and your life lies ahead of you.’

  Amba wiped her tears and bowed to the king.

  ‘Jarutha!’ Drupad called out.

  Jarutha appeared at the door with his head bent.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘Show the lady to her room.And before day breaks on the morrow, you shall take her to Parashurama’s hermitage.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  SIX

  But for the faint streak of grey over the western horizon, the sky was black. Amba looked up and saw no stars because of the heavy, low-hanging clouds. Whenever a breeze blew from over the corn fields to the north, she smelled rain in the air. It reminded her of the monsoons of Kasi and tugged at her heart; growing up in Kasya’s castle, had she ever imagined that today she would be seated on a lone horse, about to embark upon a journey into the woods? Even now she could tell Jarutha that she had no will to seek out Parashurama, to exact her vengeance on Bhishma, that she wanted to return to Kasi, to her father’s arms; but she stopped herself. Her father would not take her back. She remembered the cold mask he had worn at Ambika and Ambalika’s wedding, how he had made sure that he would never be caught with her alone, how he had not once looked into her eyes.

  ‘We will journey on horseback, my lady,’ said Jarutha, gathering the reins of her horse in one hand and his in the other. ‘We would have arranged for a palanquin for you, but we need to cross the Yamuna on our way, and the ferries do not allow palanquins on board.’

  ‘That is fine, Jarutha,’ she said. ‘We shall go.’

  ‘At any time you feel the need to stop and relax, please tell me, my lady.’

  At her nod they began to descend the slope down from the castle, across the corn fields. The stirrups of her horse had been padded with cotton so that her feet could rest against them. Her saddle, too, had been propped up with silk and satin so that she would not feel any discomfort during the journey. She passed a sidelong glance at Jarutha’s horse, trotting along bare-backed on her right. The stirrups were no thicker than mere metal wires, and the saddle was a thin slice of browbeaten leather.

  On the streets of Panchala she saw maize heaps in front of each house, sorted by size and shape, ready for peeling and plucking of the kernels. In a week or so, leaves would begin to fall. The second crop of the year was the more expensive one. It would require employing water-carriers to transport water from the river to the fields. It would require oxen and carts to distribute water evenly. It would mean digging and preserving water pits, ensuring that stored water did not get lost to the sun, and many more such headaches. Even for a city on a riverbank, rain afforded the least difficult way to water crops.

  They reached the gates of the city, where Jarutha spoke a few words in a barely understandable dialect to the turbaned man on guard. The door swung open, slowly, silently, to let them pass.

  By this time the grey had spread to the rest of the sky.

  The rain she had smelled at the top of the hill that morning must have passed in another direction, because by the time they reached the bank of the Yamuna, the sun was out. As the two fishermen led their horses away toward the ferries, Amba asked Jarutha, ‘Are all the stories about Parashurama true, Jarutha?’

  Jarutha bowed. ‘If you are referring to the tale in which he is said to have killed his mother on the order of his father, people say that it is true, my lady, yes.’

  ‘Then why did your king send me to see him? Why would a man who did not care for his own mother care for me?’

  The fisherman laid a plank of wood to bridge the gap between the boat and the bank. Jarutha stepped on it, tested its strength with two light skips, and then turned to give Amba his hand. Once they had both seated themselves, Jarutha said, ‘There are two reasons why His Majesty has asked you to see Sage Parashurama, my lady. The first of them is that the sage is said to have trained Bhishma in the craft of weaponry when he was being fostered atop the Meru.’

  ‘Jarutha!’ Amba said. ‘Surely you do not believe in such tall legends.’

  Jarutha’s voice was grave. ‘If you had seen Bhishma fight, my lady, you would find it difficult not to believe in tall legends such as this.’

  ‘So you really think, then, that he was fostered on the Meru, along with the gods?’

  Jarutha signalled to the ferryman to be careful as they lurched into the water. Turning back to her, he said, ‘They say that Sage Vasishta himself tutored him about the Vedas.’

  ‘Yes, and Brihaspati taught him about the tenets of justice,’ she said. ‘I know the tale.’

  ‘Then you know the reason why we are on our way to see Parashurama. If, indeed, the sage tutored Bhishma when he was young, he may have a certain way with him to make him obey his command.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Amba, ‘are we not being foolish to assume that Bhishma would put aside his vow just to honour his old teacher?’

  Jarutha shrugged and rubbed his beard. ‘What can anyone say? If he does not succeed in making him marry you, he may at least ask him to let you back into the city. Would that not be agreeable to you?’

  ‘No,’ said Amba, ‘it would not.’ She turned her gaze northward, where the river turned a sharp bend and disappeared. Mother Satyavati’s village would be on the same bank a few hundred leagues upstream, she thought, and when they passed an island she wondered if it were the same one on which she had given birth to the man who had taken to dividing the Vedas. They said the boy sprung from her womb fully grown, and that Mother Satyavati had only to spend a few minutes in labour.

  How nice it would be, Amba thought, if it were truly that easy to bear a child.

  ‘Are these islands ever covered by mist?’ she asked the ferryman.

  ‘Only in the winters, madam,’ said the ferryman without looking in her direction, using his hefty arms to twist and turn the paddle. ‘At midwinter we do not ferry people across until it is a good time past noon, for the morning fog has often caused many a boat to crash against the bank and break in two.’

&n
bsp; They finished the remainder of the journey in silence. When they got off, Jarutha paid both the ferrymen with a silver coin each and helped her back on top of her saddle. Jarutha tied together the reins of both horses and took them into one hand. He then drew his sword and said in a whisper to Amba: ‘We shall not confront any wild animals as long as we keep to the eastern edge of the forest, my lady. But if fate would place one before us, and if I were to be conquered by it, I bid you to ride northwest of here in a straight line for four miles. That will take you to the hermitage of Parashurama.’

  Amba said, ‘I shall not leave you to the beast, Jarutha. I know my way around a dagger and a sword; in fact, in Kasi the princesses are trained in hand weapons. So if you have one on you, give it to me and I shall stay on the alert too.’

  Jarutha looked back at her for a moment, then turned around and resumed walking. ‘My lady, if a beast gets past my sword and reaches you, I doubt if your hand knife will prevail.’

  As the two made their way through the forest, Amba heard lizards and squirrels among the leaves strewn around her. Her horse was undecided too, only stepping forward after he had tested the ground first with his hoof. Jarutha grunted commands at both animals, but they pulled away resolutely and snorted every time he tugged at their bridles. Amba had never been in the woods on horseback, and though she had once dreamed of being carried away by a prince on a white horse to the waterfalls that lay in the middle of a forest far away, in her dream there were no wild beasts and lizards and spiders; only koels and peacocks and prancing fawns.

  After they had gone some distance, Amba said to Jarutha, ‘You spoke of two reasons why we are seeking out Sage Parashurama. What is the second?’

  ‘The second reason why we seek the sage,’ said Jarutha at length,‘is because he has a natural enmity toward the Kshatriyas. They say he has obliterated their clan twenty-one times.’

  ‘Twenty-one times?’