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Time is even and merciful. No matter how long this year might seem, it will in truth be no longer than a year of joy in Indra Prastha.”
Is this how men looked at ordinary women, then? Women they considered their inferiors? A new sympathy for my maids rose in my mind. When I became queen again, I thought, I would make sure common women were treated differently.
Just as we cast off worn clothes and wear new ones, when the time arrives, the soul casts off the body and finds a new one to work out its karma. Therefore the wise grieve neither for the living nor the dead.
The pleasures that arise from sense-objects are bound to end, and thus they are only sources of pain. Don’t get attached to them. And: When a man reaches a state where honor and dishonor are alike to him, then he is considered supreme. Strive to gain such a state.
I didn’t know how to live without attachment or feel the same way toward honor and dishonor. Perhaps only when one possessed a greater treasure could one let go of this world. Krishna hinted that such a treasure was inside me—Weapons cannot harm it; fire cannot burn it; it is eternal, still and blissful
“It was the end of the world—the world as I knew it,” Arjun said. “Now the meaning of everything is different—our lives, our deaths, what we do in between.” He stared into the distance and didn’t say any more, but the sorrow was gone from his face.
You must be born on earth as humans and undergo all the suffering of humankind.
Or perhaps, as his end grew nearer, he tired of the knotted affairs of men—and women—and wished only for peace.
How a promise—made to another or to oneself—could paralyze a life! How pride had kept them from admitting their mistakes—and thus from the happiness that might have been theirs. Only much later did I realize I was weeping for myself as well, my own lethal vow of vengeance that had locked the Pandavas and Kauravas in their stance of enmity.
I had no energy left for raging, I to whom rage had come so easily all my life.
Thus my brother fulfilled the fate he was born for, gaining revenge and losing himself, and spawning (for such is the nature of vengeance) a further drama of hate.
But the part that was a girl at a swayamvar facing a young man whose eyes grew dark with pain at her words, the part that didn’t owe loyalty to the Pandavas yet, couldn’t hold back her tears.
“What happened? Why are you crying? Did I say something wrong? Now you’re laughing? Ah, women! I’ll never understand them!”
You call them mine, and you call the others theirs. For shame! Hasn’t this been the cause of your troubles ever since the fatherless sons of Pandu arrived at Hastinapur? If you’d seen them all as yours to love, this war would never have occurred.
To see a loved one in pain is more wrenching than to bear that pain yourself.
But you—I’ve always known you to be stronger than your husbands.”
“I’m trying to find someone,” he said shyly. “I don’t know who he is. He was the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen—except he wasn’t really a person. He was tiny, about as big as your thumb. His skin was a beautiful, shiny blue. He stood between me and a huge burst of fire and smiled—and the fire faded. Maybe it was just a dream.”
There was an unexpected freedom in finding out that one wasn’t as important as one had always assumed!
The more people dissuaded me, the more determined I became. Perhaps that has always been my problem, to rebel against the boundaries society has prescribed for women.
It would be sudden and clean, an end worthy of bard-song, my last victory over the other wives: She was the only consort that dared accompany the Pandavas on this final, fearsome adventure. When she fell, she did not weep, but only raised her hand in brave farewell. How could I resist it?
Rules were always more important to Yudhisthir than human pain—or human love. I knew then that he alone would reach the gate of heaven, for among us only he was capable of shedding his humanity.
Karna would never have abandoned me thus. He would have stayed back and held my hand until we both perished. He would have happily given up heaven for my sake.
“She married us all. But she loved one man more than everyone else.”
He’d chosen kindness over truth and uttered, for the sake of my reputation, the second lie of his lifetime!
Righteousness was his nature. He couldn’t give it up any more than a tiger can give up its stripes. And because of it he would go on, abandoning his dearest ones in the moment of their death, to the ultimate loneliness: to be the only human in the court of the gods.
It strikes me that, like every home where I’ve resided, this body, too—my final, crumbling palace—is beginning to fail me.
Perhaps I should recall the people I loved and send them a prayer, for prayer is one of the few things that can travel from this realm to that next, amorphous one.
Would he feel vindicated right now if he knew that in the hour of my death I thought of him rather than my husbands, wondering again, one last time, whether at my swayamvar I’d made the wrong choice?
I, whose life had been a rush of attending to the needs of my five husbands—how ironic that at the moment of my own final need not one of them should be with me!
I stand beside Krishna’s chariot at the gates of Hastinapur, handing him a cool drink of coconut water before he leaves for Dwarka. I complain that we hardly see him nowadays, that perhaps we were better off when we were wandering in the forest because there he came to us more often. He says, You needed me differently then. But in my heart I’m with you just as much! When he smiles, there are wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, strands of white in his hair, the first soft footfalls of age, hastened by the war he let himself be pulled into for friendship’s sake. Love takes me in a wave even as
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They had passed me by when the last man looked up at me. It was Krishna!
Over the next months that glance would remain with me, as palpable as a warm hand slipped into mine, reminding me that I wasn’t forgotten. It gave me the strength I needed to survive, to hold back from acts of desperation that might have exposed us all.
It’s only now I see that he’d always been there, sometimes in the forefront, sometimes blended into the shadows of my life.
He loved me even when I behaved in a most unlovable manner. And his love was totally different from every other love in my life.
But he understands. I feel his breath, warm and perfumed with a scent I do not know, on my forehead. And the memory comes.
Try to remember that you are the instrument and I the doer. If you can hold on to this, no sin can touch you.
“You could also call it waking,” Krishna continues. “Or intermission, as when one scene in a play ends and the next hasn’t yet begun.
I can take his arm in view of everyone. If I wish, I can embrace him with all of myself.
At his touch something breaks, a chain that was tied to the woman-shape crumpled on the snow below. I am buoyant and expansive and uncontainable—but I always was so, only I never knew it! I am beyond name and gender and the imprisoning patterns of ego. And yet, for the first time, I’m truly Panchaali. I reach with my other hand for Karna—how surprisingly solid his clasp! Above us our palace waits, the only one I’ve ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming and dissolving again like
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