The Rise of Hastinapur

by Sharath Komarraju

  Now that she thought about it, it was an odd practice all right. If copper coins were just as good as gold coins, as the vault-keepers told the citizens, then certainly they ought to be good enough for the traders from Hastinapur. But they somehow were not. Every time a merchant from Hastinapur sold his wares in Gandhar, he stopped by at the royal treasury on his way back to exchange all his copper for gold. When the same wares were sold to Hastinapur’s traders, though, they were happy to give and accept copper coins.

  Satyapala was still speaking about this or the other, and Gandhari waved her arm at the girl at the door, who let Shakuni in. On seeing him Satyapala stiffened a little, and he seemed to mutter something under his breath. Once Shakuni approached them, though, he got to his feet and bowed to him in the same elaborate manner he had bowed to her.

  ‘These books of yours,’ said Shakuni, ‘I am not interested in them, Satyapala, and neither is the queen. It is her decree that you must show her the gold that is in your vaults.’

  ‘The gold, sire?’ asked Satyapala.

  ‘Yes, the gold that your books say is locked up in your vaults.’

  Satyapala turned to Gandhari. ‘Do you wish to see the gold in all of Gandhar’s vaults, Your Majesty?’

  ‘No,’ said Shakuni, interrupting, ‘perhaps just the main vault for now.’

  ‘Right away?’ Satyapala glanced at the sand glass on the window sill. ‘It is rather late, the hour of robbery and ruin.’

  ‘Then we leave early on the morrow. I shall have the carriage ready for the three of us.’

  Satyapala said, ‘As you wish, sire. If I can take your leave then … I shall go to the vault and make preparations for your visit.’

  Shakuni grinned at him. ‘But it is the hour of robbery and ruin, as you said. You shall spend the night here, at the palace, and my guards will watch you, so if you even think of leaving or sending a message…’

  ‘That is enough,’ Gandhari snapped. ‘Satyapala is our guest for the night. Let us treat him as one.’ She clapped her hands twice, and two waiting-women arrived with their heads bowed. ‘Take him to the guest room, and wait on him all night.’

  Amid all this, Gandhari saw that the vault-keeper’s eyes were moving from side to side, and even when he spoke his smooth voice had cracked. But then he saw her catching his gaze, and he smiled broadly at her and bowed. Rising from his seat,he pottered out of the room behind the girls.

  THREE

  Very few lived in Gandhar now who still remembered the battle cries that had come from the edge of Kamyaka forty years ago. But every child born on the land could fully narrate the story by the time he attained the age of five. Gandhari first heard it from the lips of her father one long winter night when she was a girl of three, and that one time had been enough for the tale to sear itself into her mind. If she ever wanted to recall it, all she had to do was to close her eyes and it would appear in front of her, as though she had stood in the ankle-deep frozen marshes and watched the diamond-tipped lances crash into bronze shields.

  The first challenge was thrown by the king of Hastinapur, and though Gandhar was reluctant at first, she got goaded out into the open, beyond her walls. The Kuru forces had hundreds of archers in them, good archers, and they revelled at fighting over flatlands. Gandhar’s battle strategy was to draw them out to the edge of the forest and into the marshlands, in which their archers would sink their feet and not find stable footing. Though that also impeded Gandhar’s horses and elephants from moving freely, if Kuru’s archers could be blunted, half the battle was won.

  The first two days were quiet inside the walls of the city, for men in armour left in droves and none returned. Once every hour or so a trumpet or a neigh would pierce the air and reach them, sending men to ploughs and spades, for they were convinced that Gandhar would lose and would need to be defended by citizens. But a never-ending stream of horses and elephants left the stables and barracks that lined the eastern wall of the city, and the mines stayed open throughout the night. Bowmen were imported from Kamboja for gold, and they were deployed on the inside of the city with their arrows set to shoot.

  But the fears of the city were never realized. On the third day they heard a cacophony of conches and yells, and they knew that either the battle had been won or Hastinapur had found a way to kill their whole army with one blow. If they had been able to see the wetland of Kamyaka, they would have known that the Kuru forces did kill their whole first army – sixty elephants, eighty-four cavalrymen and seventy footmen – but the reinforcements had held the enemy at bay. Once the Kuru archers were killed, the second batch came only the morning after, and during that night, without the cushion of raining arrows from behind them, their cavalry was no match for Gandhar’s.

  No one knew why Kuru’s reinforcements were late in arriving. Some said the great distance and the rocky terrain made their travel difficult, but they knew it before they began the battle. They would have planned for that. Others said that they did not have the ability to train units at the mindless speed that Gandhar could, thanks to her ever swarming goldmine. No matter what the reason, by the time Hastinapur’s archers reached Kamyaka, all they saw was green marsh turned red with the blood of their kinsmen. Hooves and trunks of fallen animals were visible in the sludge, along with twisted limbs, gashed throats and gouged eyes.

  It was said that the then general of the Gandhar army, the legendary Idobhargava, then trotted up to the head of the army, looked at the small group of archers that stood glancing at one another, and said with his sword drawn and helmet raised, ‘You may run back to your hell. We shall not give chase.’

  And as they turned back to flee, the horses behind the general stood up on their hind legs to pound the wet earth, and the elephants raised their trunks to the sky. It was this cry of victory that the citizens heard back in the city.

  In the years that came afterward, men and women wondered why the general had called his forces back when the upper hand was surely with him. Some said that the general was a man given to moments of pity on the battlefield, others said that if Gandhar’s forces had gone up to Hastinapur’s walls, they would have faced the same predicament that the archers did, and reinforcements would have had to travel all the two hundred miles of rocky terrain and get to the fighting area, whereas Hastinapur’s army would have the increased advantage of their towers, which would make their archers invincible. Fighting in the marshes of Kamyaka under the cloak of darkness was not the same as laying siege to a heavily walled city.

  But if Idobhargava had pity on the Kuru people, he did not show any, for that very day, upon his return to Gandhar, he sent by the city’s swiftest messengers a summons for Pratipa, the old king of Hastinapur, with a threat that if Hastinapur failed to give Gandhar the battle tribute that he demanded, he would descend upon it with the might of a thousand elephants. When he spoke to the gathering of people at the town centre that afternoon, his right arm still bleeding from a searing wound, he spoke not of battle strategy or of war, but of the mines. In the fight between the wealthy and the strong, he said, the victors are always the wealthy.

  Gandhar would never forget those words.

  The camel caravans started arriving a month after the battle, carrying anything that could be eaten – but not grown – in Gandhar. Every month Hastinapur gave two thousand tulas of rice, wheat and pulses in tribute, in addition to basketfuls of apples that grew in abundance on their fertile lands. In the first few weeks Idobhargava would wait at the gates for the caravans, his arm in a sling, and he would personally see to the weighing and the counting. On their return he would keep two of the camels, though what he did with them no one ever knew.

  But with time, the caravans began bringing in what the traders called items of value – tiny ivory statues of pretty princesses with their ponies, teak cots whose legs you could fold and rest against the wall, drawings in various colours on tough camel hide, coins from far off kingdoms with engravings no one could read, and other such goods for which the min
ers of Gandhar paid hefty sums. This practice began at first under disguise, but when the traders saw that Idobhargava himself began to enquire about this marble box or that velvet stole, they came out into the open, and it soon resulted in the formation of the first trade route between both kingdoms.

  Soon, the number of camels that came to Gandhar every month from Hastinapur increased almost ten-fold. If twenty camels came from Hastinapur, it was now understood that no more than two would carry tributes. The others went straight to the town hall and set up their stalls, and they sold their wares not only to the wealthy, but also to non-miners. Agriculture in Gandhar had always been difficult; it wasn’t easy to coax green shoots out of rock, and here were Hastinapur’s farmers, selling succulent apples and ripe corn for almost nothing. If farming had been a fool’s occupation in Gandhar before Hastinapur arrived, it died a beggar’s death soon after. Now, a mere forty years after the battle of Kamyaka, there was not one farmer left in the kingdom.

  Hastinapur did not replace just the farmers. Before the tributes began, Gandhar had been the home of cotton. Kingdoms further to the northwest, where the sun was harsh and the monsoons light, would come to Gandhar and buy their fine gowns and tunics. But once camels from Hastinapur came bearing bales of the soft fabric they called silk, and once they began to sell each silk tunic at half the price of a cotton shawl, tailors began to coach their sons to become miners instead.

  The same could be said of carpenters. The teak of Gandhar was soft and soggy, and lent itself to delicate structures with curves and steep angles. Hastinapur’s was tough and durable, and as a demonstration, her carpenters would set up stalls in the town hall and challenge anyone willing to try and break one of their cots or chairs with his bare hands. Men who twisted Gandhar’s furniture into grotesque shapes could not so much as move Hastinapur’s. After a few years of this, carpenters in the city took to creating tiny artistic pieces designed to hold candles.

  But all of this did not matter as much as the arrival of the vault-keepers – or as some in Gandhar called them by their later name – the lenders. Nobody seemed to remember when they first came to the city, but most people agreed that it was around the time of Igobhargava’s death. They came not on camels but on elephants, and they came not bearing light wads of silken clothes but giant metal enclosures with heavy doors. When they set up their stall in the town hall, one of the miners went to him and asked what their contraption did. ‘Nothing,’ said the vault-keeper, ‘except that it allows you to sleep well at night.’

  For the people of Gandhar, among whom everyone owned gold, it was the first brush with fear of loss. Before the vault-keepers arrived, no one had told them that their gold could get stolen, and once they were told of the danger they were in, it refused to go away from their minds. All vaults, naturally, were sold out in no time.

  For each coin the keeper put into his vault, he gave out a copper coin which he called a ‘token’, and in no more than a month, all of Gandhar’s gold was in his vaults, and the people who owned the gold had copper coins in their hands.

  Soon the people of Gandhar began exchanging the copper coins because all of them knew that the gold was safely held within the vaults, and when the king – Gandhari’s father – stepped in and made copper coins the legal tender and decreed that all gold vaults would be kept under the supervision of the king, the tokens issued by the vault-keeper became the money in which Gandhar traded.

  The vault-keepers charged a tiny fee for storing the people’s gold, and they were paid in copper coins. Whenever they left for Hastinapur they would stop by at the royal treasury and change their copper coins for gold. The traders, too, did business with Gandhar in copper, but everyone knew that each copper coin really stood for a gold coin; so on their way out of the city, the traders would stop at the treasury and exchange their copper coins for gold.

  From that day to this, the vault-keepers would come and go, but the vaults would sit in their huts, locked up and filled with Gandhar’s gold.

  But now Shakuni had seeded the doubt in her mind: was the gold still there? Gandhari shifted in the chariot as it rattled along on the rocks with the mine fires flickering in the distance to her right. The morning breeze brought with it remnants of rain in the faraway basin of the Sindhu river. We have a great river of our own, she mused; why do we not use her water to till our own lands? Why do we allow ourselves to be at the mercy of these barbarians?

  To her side Satyapala was nodding off to sleep under his heavy white turban, and opposite her, on the hard wooden seat at the base of the chariot meant for the charioteer’s companion, sat Shakuni, bent to one side and rubbing his palms together. When they passed an occasional street fire, the ruby in his ring gleamed with an orange light.

  The sky had not yet turned grey with the first light of morning, and as they passed the town square she saw milkmen look up sleepily from lugging their brown jars of milk in the dust. If nothing else, Gandhar had once been the city of cattle; people used to say that for each man in Gandhar, there were six cows and bulls – but now even those numbers were dwindling. Milk was milk, whether one extracted it in Gandhar or in Hastinapur. How, then, did their milkmen drive ours out of work?

  Shakuni’s face was set in a smile, and his eyes danced from her to the bent, sleeping head of Satyapala. ‘I have made you think, sister,’ he said, in a voice just above a whisper.

  ‘You have filled me with slander and lies!’ she said. ‘I cannot believe I have let you talk me into digging for our own gold when our citizens are rolling in wealth.’

  ‘Rolling in wealth, sister? Wherever did you hear that?’

  ‘Devapi told me today.’

  Shakuni lifted his head and laughed. ‘Devapi, the idiot! I have stopped wondering why you surround yourself with such asses, my dear. The only advisor of yours that has been blessed by a brain is Chyavatana.’

  ‘You would say that. I have seen how well he licks your feet.’

  Shakuni grimaced at first, but then looked down at his feet. He leaned back and held one of them up for her. ‘Then pray tell me,’ he said, ‘why my shoe is so dirty and yours so clean.’

  The chariot sped away toward the eastern gate of the city, where the main vault of the people’s treasury was kept. The smooth stone road had given way to loose dust and mud now, and Gandhari made a mental note to herself to order this road to be mended. Satyapala muttered something in his sleep when the chariot began to sway, but soon he fell in with the rhythm and resumed snoring.

  ‘You say your citizens are wealthier,’ said Shakuni, leaning in and grabbing her arm. ‘Devapi must have told you how many more copper coins your citizens have this year compared to last.’

  She tried to pull away from him, but he held firm. ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘But what do they own, sister? What do your citizens own? Do they own their lands? They do not. Do they own cattle? They do not. Do they own any skill with which they could make something someone else would want? They do not!’

  ‘They own their lands, of course they do!’

  Shakuni spat into the wind and smiled viciously at her. ‘The vault-keepers bring copper coins from Hastinapur, my lady, and they use them to conduct trade in this country. Why do you think the price of milk is going up as it is? Why do you think your citizens have more copper coins with them than ever before? Ha! Wealth!’

  ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Each copper coin is equivalent to a gold coin, as per the decree of our father’s law.’

  ‘Sister, my lady, Your Majesty, for one second, will you please think? One copper coin can never be the same as a gold coin. A copper coin is made of copper, by the gods, and a gold coin is made of gold!’

  ‘Oh, come off it, you know well enough that if the number of copper coins is the same as–’

  ‘If, sister, if! Your own Adbudha must have told you that we have mined the same amount of gold this year as last?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Then how did the number of copper coins go up? Where
is all the copper coming from?’

  Gandhari felt her head swim, as it did whenever she let Shakuni speak to her at length. For him everything was a conspiracy, every man a traitor. She closed her eyes and let the wind hit her face for a few moments, and the smell of faraway rain made her smile. She opened her eyes and asked, ‘You tell me, where is the copper coming from?’

  ‘They bring it,’ he said in subdued voice, nodding at Satyapala.

  ‘To what end?’

  ‘So that each person in Gandhar has more copper coins today than he did yesterday. Then they can price their Hastinapur goods higher, and on their way back they collect gold for their copper.’ He bared his teeth in an expression of disgust. ‘We have been giving them gold for copper, Your Majesty, for thirty years, one coin for one coin.’

  ‘I do not believe you.’

  ‘You do not have to believe me, my lady. Just look around you. Your own advisers have told you that the amount of copper in Gandhar has gone up, and year after year we send more and more miners into our mines, for the same amount of gold. Why?’

  Gandhari looked about her. ‘Because it is harder to find gold.’

  Shakuni slapped his thigh. ‘Because we give all the excess gold away to them!’

  ‘But … but we keep our gold … our vaults …’

  ‘That we shall see soon enough,’ said Shakuni, sitting back and hoisting his bad leg over his knee. He began to wave his foot with ardour. ‘We shall see soon enough.’