THE MAHABHARATA: A Modern Rendering, Vol 1 (11 page)

TWENTY THE SONS OF PANDU
 

When Kunti returned from her night on the mountain, she was with child again. Now she bore the son of the wind in her womb and she glowed with that boy, growing powerfully within her. Pandu could hardly wait for his son to be born. And when Kunti delivered her child and he cried lustily for her breast, Pandu was not disappointed. His second son was a huge baby and the grip of his small hand was as strong as his voice was loud.

Once more, a disembodied voice spoke to them, “Let your son by Vayu Deva be named Bheemasena. He will be the strongest and most loving of your children.”

And so it was. Little Bheema was so fond of his brother Yudhishtira that Pandu was delighted. From the beginning there was no rivalry between the two; rather, they seemed to complement each other’s natures perfectly. Once, when their second son was just two months, Pandu and Kunti were out on the mountain with the children. They were returning to the asrama by a steep trail, a short way they used when they were tired. Kunti tripped over a root that had stretched itself across the narrow path and Bheema flew out of her arms and fell onto a rock some fifty feet below.

Kunti ran screaming down the slope, certain her baby had been killed by the fall. His heart in his mouth Pandu went after her. But little Bheema lay gurgling happily; the fall had thrilled him no end but had not hurt him at all. The black rock on which he had fallen was smashed to bits and there was not a scratch on him. Kunti snatched him up and he snuggled against her, while Yudhishtira watched with solemn eyes that saw everything with unwinking equanimity.

A happy year passed and then Pandu grew restless again. He had been having strange dreams, in which he saw himself as the father of more children than two. He saw many Devas in his dreams; but most of all he saw one who was more majestic than all the others, because he was their king. Pandu was certain that greatest Deva spoke to him.

He called Kunti and said, “I have been dreaming of Indra. He says we must have a son by him, a perfect kshatriya, greater than even Yudhishtira and Bheema.”

She began to protest, but he laid a finger on her lips. With a sigh and an inner quaver at the thought of summoning the king of the Devas, Kunti agreed to do as her husband asked. Now she went deep into a nearby forest and inside a cave invoked the Deva king with Durvasa’s mantra. Indra came to her, stern and full of majesty. For all that, he was tender; and when he had calmed her first helpless anxiety, he was the most ardent of her unearthly lovers. Even as she lay delirious in his arms, she swore she would never use the mantra again.

In time, Kunti delivered her third and finest son. Once more, an asariri spoke to that forest family. “This is the child who will win undying fame for his father. He will become the greatest archer on earth and conquer the world in his brother’s name. Let him be called Arjuna.” The heavens opened. They heard gandharvas singing little Arjuna’s praises and soft flowers rained down on them, swathing the hermitage in the scent of other worlds.

The night Arjuna was born, Indra came to Pandu in a dream. Now he spoke clearly to that kshatriya, “Tonight Vishnu’s twin incarnations, Nara and Narayana, have been born into the world to cleanse it of evil. Arjuna is Nara, come again as a man. In Mathura tonight, Narayana has also been born. Hearken to the earth, Pandu, she sings the birth of dark Krishna.”

Pandu awoke. It was past midnight and he heard the wind in the trees like a hymning sea, full of a celebrant rumor that a blue savior had been born into the world, to purify it in blood. From far away, he thought he could hear a storm over a distant city at whose evil heart the newborn Avatara, his Arjuna’s cousin, nestled. When Pandu fell asleep again, listening to the wind outside, prophetic dreams visited his sleep. He saw his sons fight a great war for the Blue God who had been born that night. It was an ancient war between good and evil, one that would destroy the race of kings forever. But when he awoke the next morning, he remembered nothing of his dreams.

The years were full and swift with the joy of his sons and Pandu, hermit prince of the Kurus, could not have been happier. But when a year passed after Arjuna’s birth, he called Kunti once more and said, “There is a greed more irresistible than the avarice for wealth and I am prey to it. How wonderful our three children are, but I am not satisfied. Kunti, use your mantra again; give me just one more son!”

But this time Kunti was firm. “Not the direst calamity should make one summon the Gods for more than three sons. Besides, I could not bear the coming of another Deva. I would die.”

No matter how much he begged her, she would not relent. But Pandu’s desire for more sons was soon to be satisfied. One morning, when Kunti had gone to the river, Madri came to him. She looked unhappy and Pandu asked her, “Is something the matter, my love?”

And it all burst out of his second queen: the resentment she had harbored and the envy. Madri cried, “The preference you have shown Kunti doesn’t sadden me, because I know I am younger than she is. But can’t I be the mother of at least one of your children? She has borne you three sons; can’t she teach me her mantra so I can also fulfil my womanhood?”

“Kunti thinks of you as her own sister, she won’t grudge you this,” said Pandu.

But he saw Madri’s face set hard. “She is my rival for your love. She has resented me since the day you brought me home. She never shows it in your presence, Pandu. But in the things she says and does when we are alone, she makes it clear she would have rather been your only wife. I will not beg her for the mantra. You must ask her yourself.”

Pandu was only happy to go to Kunti and say, “If you won’t have any more children, will you allow Madri to use the mantra? She says that you have three fine sons, may the Gods protect them, while she has none.”

“Did she ask you for this? Is she willing?”

“She was afraid you might refuse if she asked herself.”

Kunti laughed, “Why should I refuse my little Madri anything? But she has been strange lately, as if she resents me. I cannot teach her the mantra, but I can invoke a Deva for her, whichever one she wants.”

Kunti took Madri to a secluded grove in the forest. She asked her to think of any Deva she chose. When she had murmured the words of power Kunti hurried away from that place, leaving Madri alone. As she went, behind her she felt the intense agitation of heaven and earth that heralded the coming of a God. Kunti and Pandu stayed awake most of the night in their kutila, thinking of Madri in the forest. Through the night they heard the wind moaning in the trees; it could have been the passionate whispering of a Deva. At last, near dawn, Pandu and Kunti fell asleep.

When Madri returned from the forest in the morning, a soft new radiance was upon her; her skin shone from whatever had happened in the night. But when they asked her excitedly who her Deva was, she would not tell them. “Let that be my secret,” she said.

In course of time, Madri delivered not one but two beautiful sons. She wore a look of such smugness that Kunti finally realized how much the younger woman envied her.

The heavenly voice spoke in that asrama once more, “The sons of the Aswins will be the most handsome men on earth. Let them be called Nakula and Sahadeva.”

No sooner were her twins born, than Madri’s nature underwent a sad change. She did not have a moment to spare for Kunti’s boys any more, but only carried and cosseted her own. Kunti treated all five princes equally and fortunately the children made no differences among themselves. It was in none of their natures and to Madri’s chagrin even her sons were more attached to Kunti than to her.

When the twins were a year old, Madri said to Pandu, “Tell Kunti to say the mantra again for me. Wouldn’t you like to have more sons as handsome as Nakula and Sahadeva?”

Pandu went and asked Kunti, “Will you say the mantra once more for Madri? She has only two sons while you have three.”

But Kunti’s face grew dark. “She is always setting her boys apart from mine. Using the mantra once, she had twins. I dare not think whom she will invoke, if I say it for her again. Don’t ask me to do this, my lord. Let us be content with the children we have.”

And Madri had to be satisfied with her twins and her position in the family, which was definitely of the second wife. But that asrama, set like a jewel in Satasringa, was the happiest place. Pandu’s sons grew apace there, loved by all the rishis who lived in that valley praying for the world. Those masters of the spirit performed the rituals of naming and initiation for the five princes. It was with them that the young Pandavas had their earliest tutelage.

In Mathura, Kunti’s kinsfolk the Yadavas were shocked to hear Pandu had been cursed. Now when he heard that Pandu was the father of five sons, Kunti’s brother Vasudeva sent gifts for his nephews through his family priest Kashyapa. He also sent news of the birth of his own sons, Balarama and Krishna. Charmed by the Pandava princes, Kashyapa stayed on in the forest asrama for a while. He performed the upanayanams of the Devaputras.

The rishis all adored the young kshatriyas. So did the wild creatures of the jungle, where the boys ranged as freely as the wind and the sun: inseparable and wonderfully gifted.

In the same forest lived Sayyati’s son Suka, as if fate had brought him here. This hermit was a fine archer and he became the princes’ first guru in the wilds. So, though they grew up far from a palace, they lacked little in their education: which kshatriya boy could have asked for better masters than Suka and their own father Pandu?

From the beginning, Yudhishtira was adept with a javelin and Bheema with a mace. Arjuna was far ahead of the rest with a bow and arrows; he shot with equal ease with his right and left hands. Though, in every discipline, they were no match for one of their brothers, the twins excelled as all-round warriors. They performed equally well with the mace and the javelin, the sword and the longbow.

In just a year, Suka told Pandu, “Arjuna is already as good an archer as I am. I have nothing more to teach him. I have never seen another boy blessed with such talent. A gift like his develops only over many lives and is perfected in a final one.” He paused, thoughtfully. “After which there are no more births or deaths, because the spirit has become immaculate.”

Suka gave young Arjuna his own bow and then went away to the highest Himalaya to continue his tapasya, in preparation to leave his body. Now that he had taught Pandu’s third son everything he knew, his work in the world was accomplished. He passed beyond this earth and its affairs.

TWENTY-ONE THE SINISTER NIGHT
 

Meanwhile, when Yudhishtira was born the news came swiftly to Dhritarashtra that Pandu had a son. The blind Kuru was king in Hastinapura, but he was always conscious that he was king in little more than name. He was still childless and though he loved Pandu he was unhappy that his younger brother had become a father before him. Kshatriya dharma was clear that the firstborn prince in each generation would become king. Gandhari was even more distraught than her husband to hear Kunti had a son, whose father, rumors whispered, was a Deva. She was most aggrieved because she herself had been pregnant for a year.

A year before this time, brought once more by destiny, Vyasa arrived in his son’s sabha. Travel-worn and drawn, came the enlightened visitor. Gandhari looked after him in the palace; and even more than by her caring hospitality, Vyasa was moved by how she went with her eyes bound to share Dhritarashtra’s blindness. Vyasa blessed her with a boon.

“You will have a hundred sons, each one as strong as Dhritarashtra.”

But a pang gripped his heart even as he spoke, as if he was not blessing Gandhari but cursing her to a horrible fate. But then, she fell at his feet and thanked him joyfully and he was consoled. Gandhari and Dhritarashtra found their love kindled by Vyasa’s prophecy. One morning soon, the queen came to her husband and taking his hand, placed it shyly on her stomach. She whispered, “Your son grows in here, my lord. Already I can feel he will be as strong as his father.”

Dhritarashtra declared a celebration in Hastinapura. Nine months passed; Gandhari had to be confined in bed, where she lay in intense discomfort and often in pain. Her child—or children if Vyasa’s prediction was true—was monstrously heavy. The weight inside her was dark and leaden and her dreams were so evil she was afraid to fall asleep.

At the end of a painful year came the news from the forest that Kunti was already a mother. Gandhari’s screams rang through the harem; fate had cheated her. In agony anyway at her morbid pregnancy, the queen became hysterical. She struck herself again and again in her belly, until she began to bleed. As she fainted, she was aborted of a seething mass of flesh that was hard as a rock and stank of contagion.

Groaning dementedly in her bed, she ordered the putrescent lump cast into the forest. A maid was carrying the wretched thing out, when suddenly Vyasa appeared at the palace-gates. His face twitching, he accosted the young woman and cried, “What is it? Where are you taking it?”

She drew back the cloth that covered the shapeless flesh. “My queen was aborted of this an hour ago.”

Vyasa caught his breath. Seizing the maid’s arm, hurting her in his urgency, he brought her back into the palace. The rishi shouted to the women of the harem, “Give me a hundred earthen vats of warm oil. Put them in a hidden chamber. Hurry! There isn’t a moment to lose.”

Gandhari appeared there, disheveled and sobbing. She cried, “Muni, you said I would have a hundred sons, each as strong as my husband. Instead I have borne this putrid lump of flesh.”

But Vyasa said, “Go back to your bed, woman. A hundred sons you shall have. The words of Vyasa Dwaipayana have never yet been proved vain.”

When the earthen vats were ready in a cellar below the harem, Vyasa took the abortion down into that chamber. He sprinkled the flesh with cold water and then patiently divided it with his hands into one hundred pieces. He gave them to a midwife to be immersed, each one in a separate vat of oil.

Gandhari also arrived in that room, in irresistible curiosity. She stood at the door, her bound face craning to the sound of Vyasa’s fine hands at their strange work. The lump of flesh dwindled as he pinched off more and more thumb-sized bits. The queen counted every one from the sounds that were so clear to her powerful hearing. As he neared the end of his task, a wish flared into Gandhari’s mind. “I will be the mother of a hundred mighty sons. Can’t I have a daughter as well, a sister to those hundred?”

At that very moment, Vyasa had given the hundredth bit of flesh to the midwife. But he still had one final piece left in his hand. As if he divined her thought, her father-in-law said to Gandhari, “I have placed a hundred pieces of the flesh you bore in vats of oil. They shall be your sons. But I have one small piece left; let this be your daughter.”

A hundred and first vat was called for and Vyasa gave the midwife that final shred of flesh to sink in it. The moment this was done, a susurrus filled that cellar, as of countless bees buzzing. The startled midwife saw those hundred and one earthen vats glow dully, with a malignant aura. Vyasa came out of that room and said quietly to Gandhari, “The future has been set in motion.”

Blessing Gandhari and Dhritarashtra, that they may find the strength to bear the trial that lay ahead of them, Vyasa went away from Hastinapura. He wended his way back to the Himalayas, which are cosmic masters of the Spirit dwelling on earth as towering mountains. There, he would perform a tapasya to save the world. That rishi, who saw deep and far in time, already realized the danger those hundred vats contained, especially the first of them, in which the piece of flesh was somewhat larger than in the others.

The pieces of flesh grew into tiny human fetuses. They grew in those vats of oil as if in a hundred and one women’s wombs. As they grew, their weird luster filled the cellar, which Gandhari had sealed as Vyasa instructed her to. That light was like an evil sun risen in the bowels of Hastinapura.

Another year passed and it was the same night when, in a faraway forest, Kunti gave birth to Bheema. It was a night when uncanny fires rose from the earth around the city of the Kurus and spumed into the sky in livid geysers. Wild beasts from deep jungles, wolves and black panthers with gleaming eyes, jackals and hyena-packs, came crowding and baying into the city’s streets as soon as the sun had set. Crows, vultures and other birds of carrion flew down in teeming swarms and settled on the terraces of the palace. Twisting cyclones that are seen only out at sea and other winds, dust-laden and flecked with sulfur, lashed the city of elephants. Squadrons of vampire bats, flown from some hell to greet their master to be born, obscured the face of the full moon. The planets hid themselves in the sky and a thousand spirit-hosts stalked the land, while it rained glowing, hissing drops of blood and flames. In the cellar below Dhritarashtra’s palace, the first of the one hundred and one vats burst open with a report that reverberated through the passages and brought Gandhari and her midwife running.

When they unlocked the door and went in, the maid cried out in fear. There on the cold floor, in a pool of luminous slime, lay an immense child. His terrible serpent’s eyes were wide open and stared at them unwinkingly. Those eyes belonged to a Demon of the pit that had taken a human form to become the bane of the earth. The child’s body glowed with the same macabre aura that colored the fetal slime in which he lay. The sinister infant gave a dismal cry and the poor midwife felt her blood turn to ice. That cry was not in the least human, but the long scream of a feral beast.

Outside, there arose the greeting of the night—the grunts, wails, howls, chatters, roars, growls, shrill ululations, the manic laughter and a million wing-beats of the animals and birds of darkness congregated to welcome their lord into the world. And he called back to them, his creatures, in a devilish voice that was all their voices at once: bat’s screech, wolf’s bay, hyena’s deranged cackle, bray and growl, roar and howl, in vile cacophony.

At which din, the second vat burst open and then quickly the third and the fourth; and then, two, three and more, all at once. Gandhari and the midwife shrank back in fear. Now the king came down into that chamber with Vidura. Vidura stood horrified to see those children of hell lying in their slime, while their creatures outside still howled their welcome through the shocked night.

Fortunately for them, Dhritarashtra and Gandhari saw nothing of what happened in that cellar; but Vidura’s gaze never left the first and biggest of those hundred and one infants. That monstrous child grinned with needle teeth; his green eyes were on fire. Grunting like a pig, he had already managed to pull himself into a sitting posture. He sat fondling himself lewdly, while all around him the earthen vats continued to burst open, until the last one, from which a little girl was born. All those children howled back at the night, in a bizarre chorus.

Feeling suddenly weak, Dhritarashtra grasped Vidura’s arm and said, “Take me out of here!”

But Gandhari stood rooted. Soft mother’s joy was upon her and she said to the midwife, “Give me my first son and my daughter. Don’t you hear them crying? They are hungry.”

She heard no wolf howl, no bat screech, or hyena cackle from her children’s throats. By the sublime mystery of motherhood, she heard only human babies crying to be fed. She squatted on the floor and bared her breasts for her son and her daughter. They fastened greedy lips to her flesh and fed voluptuously.

In his lamplit sabha, Dhritarashtra shivered as if he had a fever. Wild visions of evil danced before his blind eyes. He saw crimsoned battlefields, where corpses lay piled like hills and blood flowed in rills. He saw them as clearly as sighted men see the light and the events of day. Only Vidura stood beside his brother and he knew what this night presaged. Vidura already saw what must be the tragic future of their royal House, founded by Manu, the lawgiver, himself.

At last, Dhritarashtra said, “My son is a year younger than Pandu’s firstborn in the jungle. Yudhishtira will inherit the Kuru throne.”1

The jackals and wolves outside howled in long unison and the night was alive with fear. The king leaned forward in his throne and whispered, “But tell me, my brother, will my son rule after Yudhishtira’s time? Vidura, I am terrified by the omens. The birds and beasts of death have flocked into Hastinapura’s streets. Listen to the wolves baying! I am told occult fires leap into the sky from the earth’s belly and the very world quakes, as if in fear at my children’s birth. What does it all mean, Vidura? Do my sons seem strange to those who can see?”

Vidura said softly, “The omens mean only one thing, Dhritarashtra: that your firstborn son will be the ruin of the House of Kuru. It is for him that the dog-packs bay and the wolves howl and the bats of hell wheel in dizzy circles. The omens cry that he is the terrible one of whom the old prophecies warned. He will destroy everything that has been held sacred through the ages and fetch doom to this holy land.”

Dhritarashtra breathed, “What can I do to keep doom away?”

1. This is the same day that Bheema is born in the forest.

“What you will not do, my lord. You can sacrifice your son. Kill him tonight.”

The blind king gasped. Vidura went on, “The wise have always said an individual may be sacrificed for the good of the family, a family for the good of the village, the village for the country. And everything, even the world itself, may be sacrificed for the sake of the immortal soul. O my brother, it is for the soul of mankind that this monstrous child of yours has come from the depths of hell: to corrupt and to destroy. Kill him now and I swear his brothers will be harmless. And you can enjoy them, ninety-nine fine princes. But him you must not leave alive.”

But that child, of whom the darkest prophecies told, was Dhritarashtra’s firstborn. Vidura was right to assume that his brother would never do what he asked.

The same night, a vaishya woman in Dhritarashtra’s harem was also delivered of a son sired by the blind king. That child was named Yuyutsu. And so Dhritarashtra had one hundred and one sons and a daughter whom they named Dussala. And his eldest, the Demon, was Duryodhana2.

As they grew into strapping young princes, the king was pleased with his powerful boys. He laughed in joy to think of the hundred of them and Gandhari rejoiced as well.3

1. Duryodhana is also frequently called Suyodhana, throughout the original text. Yudhishtira is also known as Ajatashatru, (he who has no enemies) and Bheema is often called Vrikodara, while Arjuna acquires ten names. Karna is called Radheya and Vaikartana, too.

2. See Appendix for the hundred names.