The Palace of Illusions

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Was this, then, how the people viewed me? All this time I'd seen myself as the wronged one. I'd believed that the people of the country—especially the women— sympathized with me because of the insults I'd suffered at the hands of Duryodhan. That they admired me for the hardships I'd chosen to share with my husbands in exile. When I'd looked down on the huge Pandava host on the battlefield, I'd surmised that those soldiers had chosen to join my husbands because they supported our cause. Now I realized that for many of them, it was merely a job, an alternative to poverty and starvation. Or maybe they'd been forcibly conscripted by their overlords. No wonder that for their wives, I was a harbinger of ill luck, the woman who had torn their husbands from the safety of their homes, the witch who might, with a wave of her hand, transform them into widows.