THE MAHABHARATA: A Modern Rendering, Vol 1 (10 page)

SEVENTEEN A CURSE IN THE FOREST
 

Kunti survived three years of anguish, every bit like a princess. Then, the planets in the heavens changed their positions and her life changed as well.

Kuntibhoja held a swayamvara for his daughter. At that gathering of the most eligible kshatriyas on earth, she chose dashing Pandu of Hastinapura to be her husband. She draped her garland of wildflowers around his neck, with a prayer in her heart that he would fill her womb with a hundred sons: so she could forget the child she had abandoned on the river. Kunti was Pandu’s first wife and Madri, his second.

Because his brother Dhritarashtra, the nominal king, was blind, prince Pandu of Hastinapura was the virtual ruler of the Kurus. From his earliest boyhood, Pandu’s natural vocation had been a soldier’s. And when he was made Senapati, the Supreme Commander of the great Kuru legions, he found the perfect chance to give free rein to his martial genius. He took an army with him and ranged the length and breadth of Bharatavarsha.

Pandu conquered the Dasarnas, Kasi, Anga, Vanga and Kalinga. Magadha fell to him like a ripe fruit from a tree. When Chitrangada and Vichitraveerya had both died young, the cares of kingdom and the responsibility of raising his young nephews tied Bheeshma down to the palace. The world had said that the glory and the fortunes of the Kurus were waning. Pandu’s triumphal march swiftly put paid to such speculation. Now they said this was the golden age of the Kuru kingdom, as no other time in the past. They also said that Pandu was the finest soldier of his day, his uncle Bheeshma had taught him well.

When the kingdoms around him were subdued to his satisfaction and the talk about the waning stars of the Kuru House was silenced, Pandu decided he owed himself and his wives the pleasure of a sojourn in the forest. Like his forefathers, the pale prince was a keen hunter and he went to the Himalayas with Kunti and Madri. There, on the southern slopes of that mountain range, the three of them spent the happiest, most enchanted weeks of their lives.

Those were perfect days to which, years later, Kunti would look back: to find strength in them and to remind her that life was not only a grim struggle. Those were the days when the forest folk mistook the three of them for a Deva and his two women come down from heaven to sport in the world. But fate was waiting in time’s wings with a curse.

In that same forest on the Himalayan foothills lived a rishi and his wife. Between long abstinences, they were enjoying an interlude of passion. It was spring. All the forest was at love, so too the hermit couple. One day, the husband decided that ordinary lovemaking in their hut hardly satisfied him. The muni turned himself and his woman into two deer in season, a stag and a hind. Musky desire took them and he mounted her in an open glade. This mating was so exhilarating that for days they were happy to be rutting deer.

One evening as the forest prepared to receive the night, Pandu saw the lustful pair. He saw the stag with magnificent antlers straddling his mate. The prince was arrogant with his recent victories at arms and time was ready to humble him. In the heat of the hunt and quite forgetting the hunter’s olden law that mating animals may never be made targets for arrows, Pandu shot the stag through his heart.

The creature fell with a bellow. Before Pandu’s eyes the stag turned back into a man, the arrow sticking grotesquely from his heaving chest. His hind was also a woman again; by her devotion to him, she too lay dying in her husband’s arms.

Blood bubbled at the rishi’s lips. He said to Pandu, “You are a prince of the noblest house in the world. How could you do this?” His breath was stertorous and in his eyes was a legend of pain. “You saw, cruel Kshatriya, that we were at love. Yet you had the heart to kill me. How could you do this to the gentle deer of the forest?”

He lay breathless for a while. Then, with an effort that made his eyes roll up white, the rishi cursed Pandu, “The moment, terrible prince, you make love to a woman again, you will also die.”

And with a sigh, the sage and his wife were gone, as if they had shared a single life. Pandu’s roars echoed through the trees. That prince was the virtual ruler of the invincible Kurus; he had recently conquered most of Bharatavarsha. Now he was like a great tree in its prime that has been struck by lightning. Fate had nudged his carefree life into hell.

He ran back to Madri and Kunti. At first he couldn’t speak, but stood panting before them, his eyes full of tears. At last, sobbing, Pandu told them what had happened. The three of them spent a night as long as a year, in dark silence.

At dawn, Pandu announced, “The world is no longer the place for me. I won’t return to Hastinapura, but seek my detachment here in the forest. From now on, I must be a brahmachari.”

He called the soldiers and ministers who had come hunting with him. He told them about the dying hermit’s curse. He gave away all his possessions, sending detailed instructions for their disbursal through those dazed men. Pandu said, “Tell my mother, my brothers, my grandmother and, most of all, my uncle Bheeshma that I will never return to Hastinapura. Tell them Pandu has become a sannyasi.”

Kunti and Madri had resolved to stay with their husband. They sent back their silks and ornaments to the city. And so, just when its star of fortune had seemed to be rising again, a curse darkened the destiny of the kingdom of the Kurus.

Hastinapura received the shocking news. It truly seemed that all the old sins of the Kuru ancestors were being visited on the present time. Ambalika was inconsolable. Satyavati retired into seclusion and offered incessant prayers to the Gods, who must still be wroth with her. As for Bheeshma, to all outward appearances he was calm; but privately, he railed against the long misfortune that had stalked him, ever since he came of age. It had cost him two brothers and now a brilliant nephew.

Bheeshma found himself at the helm of the kingdom once again and felt his heart must surely be made of stone. Any other man in his place would have succumbed and either lost his reason, killed himself or become a hermit from grief. But none of these recourses was for him. It appeared he was destined to go on forever, if need be, shouldering his sad burden alone; and only he himself knew how time had savaged him.

There was one person in the kingdom who was some support to Bheeshma, a young man who carried an old head on his youthful shoulders: his nephew Vidura. Of course Vidura could never be king; not only was he a maidservant’s son, he was no warrior either.

EIGHTEEN PANDU’S YEARNING
 

In the asrama in the forest of Satasringa, a jade valley nestled between Himalayan slopes, Pandu settled slowly to his new life. Often, in the cold nights, the wildness in his blood urged him to seek out one of his wives. But by God’s grace, or because his time to die had not come, at the critical juncture either he himself or his women prevented the fatal contact. Some years went by in this struggle. But celibacy, even enforced celibacy, quickly brings strength and serenity; and so it did to Pandu and his wives.

Peace came over them. It became a habit and in time an easy one, to subdue the mortal enemy, desire, whenever she raised her seductive head. Many rishis came to Pandu’s asrama; from them the prince learnt the art and the joy of dhyana, meditation. After the first year, Pandu began to accept his new life. Like a molting snake does its skin, he shed the memory of his violent past. The loyal Kunti and Madri also settled into their untimely vanaprastha. The years flowed by without any outward event, but in inner transformation.

Then the initial adjustment to the new life had been made. The first shock passed, of the change the rishi’s curse had forced on them. But now, Pandu was gripped by a deep sorrow: that he could not have children. In his boyhood, his grandmother Satyavati had instilled the fear in him that no man who did not have a son could enter heaven when he died. She said only the most accursed men were condemned to childlessness.

Pandu found he could not meditate any more. When he shut them to still his mind, images of fantasial children danced before his eyes. It was as if destiny had taken a hand again, if a subtler one, in Pandu’s life in the wilderness. Day and night, he saw visions of his wives with sons in their arms; in his dreams, he saw himself a proud father. His peace was gone.

Once he went to visit some munis that lived in tapasya in that forest. They were planning to cross the mountains to the Manasarovara, lake perched between heaven and earth, which Brahma once created with a thought, where the Parabrahman, the eternal Spirit, abides.

Pandu said to them, “Take us with you; we also seek the refuge of the Brahman.”

But the eldest rishi replied, “That is not your way, Pandu, nor is it time for you to seek the Brahman. Besides, the princesses will not be able to make the crossing to the Manasarovara.”

Pandu broke down and wept. He told them how he had become obsessed with the desire for a son. Among those rishis was an old man who was a visionary and saw through time. He said to Pandu, “I have looked into your future and I have seen you having not one, but five sons. They will not be ordinary children, but kshatriyas of destiny.”

“How will I have sons with my curse?” asked Pandu.

“Your own mothers had sons after their husband was dead.”

Pandu stood transfixed by the implication. Those rishis blessed him and went on their way to the lake of the Brahman. Pandu ran home in a fever of excitement. He called Kunti, who was the older and more mature of his wives.

He said to her, “I will find only hell when I die, because I have no sons. I cannot father children on you myself, but we can ask a rishi to help us. It seems to be the fate of the Kuru line.”

Kunti turned pale. “You violate the chastity of my mind with this thought. I am your wife Pandu and that is a sacred thing. I would give up my life for that and here you are asking me to have another man’s child. Whoever he may be, the very idea is hateful to me.”

He stared at her in a mixture of disappointment and a love he could not express. Her eyes turned down, she said softly, “If you think you won’t find a place in heaven without having a son, here I am before you. Father your child on me and when he is born I will follow you out of this world.”

“I am so desperate that I would do as you say. Only, I would not orphan my son as soon as he is born, but nurture and enjoy him. Kunti, listen to me, I also know something of the scriptures and the law.

In the elder days, the golden ages of the earth, women were never bound to one man. It was only Rishi Uddalaka’s son Swetaketu who forced the contrivance of marriage on women; and perhaps caused the fall of the human spirit. For when their holy freedom was restricted, women began to be secretive and deceitful.

In our own house, Vyasa was called to father sons on our mothers. There is no sin in it, Kunti. Would you rather see me die of a broken heart than do as I ask?”

She stopped his lips with her hand. Kunti had remembered something, a boon given her long ago by another rishi. Slowly she said, “I have a cure for your sorrow.”

“What is it?”

He hardly believed her. He was thinking instead of asking Madri to give him a child by a rishi, though she was even less likely to agree. Despair suffocated Pandu.

But Kunti was saying, “Many years ago, when I was a girl, Maharishi Durvasa stayed in my father’s palace for a week and I looked after him. Though I did nothing very much, he was pleased with me.”

“I am not surprised,” murmured Pandu, whom she cared for so lovingly in the forest.

“Just before he left, he taught me a mantra and told me I could summon any Deva I wanted with it. I was too young then to understand what he meant; besides, I was too frightened to invoke a God. But I still remember the mantra as if he taught it to me yesterday. If you want me to, I can summon a Deva and the Kuru line will be blessed with a matchless prince.”

She spoke half in jest and, of course, said nothing of how she had invoked the blazing sun. But her husband cried, “You must use the mantra today!”

He led her impatiently to their little hut. He called Madri out and told her they were going to visit all the asramas in the forest. They must leave at once, because today was the happiest day of his life! A bewildered Madri prepared to go with him. But she asked, “What about Kunti?”

“Kunti stays here!” cried Pandu. “She stays here and invokes Dharma Deva, the Lord of truth.”

When Madri and Pandu had gone, Kunti stood waving after them for a long time. At last, alone and afraid, she turned back into the little wooden dwelling. Briefly, she regretted having told Pandu about the mantra. She trembled when she thought of the day the Sun God had appeared before her. But then, she remembered how miserable her husband was and thought how happy she could make him.

With a sigh, Kunti stood beside the fire of worship. Fixing her mind on dharma and the God who embodies eternal justice, she chanted Durvasa’s mantra for the second time.

NINETEEN
 

KUNTI’S UNWORLDLY LOVERS
 

All night, until dawn lit the horizon, the quiet Deva stayed with Kunti in the hut. How different he was from the fiery sun, but just as overwhelming.

The next morning Pandu and Madri returned. Pandu riveted his wife with a gaze full of one question. When she turned her face away shyly and whispered, “I am with the Lord Dharma’s child,” he gave a shout that rang among the trees, as if he himself had fathered that child. All his melancholy vanished and never raised its head again the rest of his days.

Kunti was radiant in her pregnancy. Pandu and Madri pandered to her every whim, whether it was for sour mangoes or for a fish from the river. One day, when all the planets were configured in harmony1, Kunti’s labor began and she gave birth to a boy of uncommon serenity. As soon as he was born, he gazed back at his mother with calm, knowing eyes.

His heart bursting with joy, Pandu took that calm infant in his arms. An asariri, a disembodied voice, spoke out of the air, “Pandu’s first son should be named Yudhishtira, for he will be steadfast even in war. He will be the image of truth on earth and he will rule the world one day.”

1. The time of Yudhishtira birth is given as the eighth muhurta, called abhijit, noon, of the fifth day of the waxing moon, in the month of Kartika, when the moon was rising in the nakshatra Jyeshta.

A year went by, with the blissful father and his wives absorbed in the growing child. One day Pandu took Kunti aside and said, “These are dark times and Yudhishtira will have need of brothers, especially if he is to be a king. We must have a second son to be his support: to do his bidding, to love and to serve him.”

Kunti gasped. “You want me to invoke another Deva?”

“There is no sin in it. Heaven is all awhisper in my heart, telling me to have another son. They say we must have a boy of unrivalled strength.”

Kunti flushed. She could not deny, which mortal woman could, that the temptation of a Deva’s vertiginous embrace was hard to resist. Since he spoke of strength, she guessed which Deva her husband wanted her to summon this time. The mere thought of that God made her quail.

“Pandu, I am afraid. Being with a Deva is more than any woman can bear.”

“I will take Madri and Yudhishtira away to the rishis’ asramas. Invoke Vayu now, he is the strongest Deva. Great Hanuman, who carried a mountain through the sky to save his Rama’s life, was Vayu’s son.”

What she had feared was true: it was the Wind her husband wanted a son by, to be Yudhishtira’s brother. Pandu said gently, “Think of the future, Kunti; think of Yudhishtira without a brother in this treacherous world. If he is to be a king, he will need more than friends to protect him.”

She bowed her head, acquiescing. How could she tell him she needed little persuasion to invoke the Deva, that the very thought of lying in the arms of the tameless wind made her blood course? But she did say, “Let me go to higher reaches of the mountain. I fear our asrama may not contain Vayu Deva when he comes. Besides, I cannot be with him in the same house we live in with Yudhishtira.”

The weather was clear and fine and Pandu agreed. Kunti did not mention that she had felt shame even the last time, when Dharma was with her: shame, because it was herself she could not contain. If she must be with a God again, she would rather it were in a place in which she did not have to live, or ever return to.

Well before the sun set the same day, she set off by herself for the higher mountains above Satasringa. When she had climbed for an hour, she came to a depression between some large rocks. The view of the setting sun from here was spectacular. He, her lover once, bathed the white massifs all around in melting bronze and scarlet, ethereal violet and burning pink. The wind already swirled through the gorges, restless and powerful, as if that Spirit knew why she had climbed here and was impatient for her. She thought he caressed her with wanton fingers of air.

As the sun sank over immense ranges, Kunti settled herself in the declivity. The crags around her had stood like sentinels through lonely ages. The seasons and centuries had taken slow toll of them, with snow and sleet, rain and blizzard, warm days and icy nights. As the last ray of the sun broke across her face and the wind plucked at her hair that she had left loose, Kunti said the mantra Durvasa had taught her. Today she said it aloud, calling Vayu the Wind God to her.

Suddenly, all the zephyrs and breezes stood still, breathless to hear those words. It seemed even the sun paused at the rim of the world, startled to hear the familiar mantra, now said to summon another God. To Kunti, holding her breath, it seemed an age passed of that surprised stillness. Then slowly, a tidal whispering of airs gathered in the sky. It spread around her in a tempest, until it whistled above her, below her, blowing from everywhere. Storm winds lashed the mountain as if to uproot it and blow it away.

Kunti shut her eyes in terror and again, the stillness and silence. She sensed a flickering brightness in the growing dark and opened her eyes. Night had fallen. But before her stood an irradiant being, his body made of spinning airs. His hair, flowing back from his shining face, was a storm contained. His smile was glorious and the look in his eye entirely wild. She shook with fright: his presence was not a comforting one as Dharma Deva’s had been, but one of tumultuary excitement, as when the Sun God stood before her.

She could see through his face and his body. He was a world of intense whispering, always restless, full of the strangest news of undreamt-of lands and seas across which he blew in a million breezes and winds, gales and cyclones, covering the earth. She stood rooted by the vibrancy of him.

At last, he spoke to her with surprising softness, “Don’t be afraid.”

Perhaps she moaned in reply, because she was speechless. He knelt quickly before her and, gathering her lightly in his arms, flew away to a luminous cave set high on a golden mountain. From there, he showed her some of his secrets. He showed her visions of the earth—how it was day somewhere else, always fleeting, like the wind and how the round world turned steadily.

He gave her an ambrosial drink that calmed her and soon Kunti felt easier in his company. She found him affable and gentle, though he was unnerving as well. When he had won her trust in the lofty cavern and she did not tremble any more but wondered what it would be like to be in his gusty arms, he reached for her in the starlight.