The Palace of Illusions (36 page)

Bheem liked being around me. Unless I sent him away, he would hover around the kitchen, fetching water, breaking branches into firewood, fanning me with palm fronds, chopping vegetables into meticulously tiny pieces. If I'd allowed it, he would have happily taken over all my chores. He wasn't deft with words like Yudhisthir, who could hold forth on philosophy for hours. He wasn't witty like the twins or declamatory like Arjun. But when we were alone, he told me things he'd never told anyone, acting out with gestures events for which he could not find expressions. His enemies, who knew him only as a whirlwind, single-minded and destructive, would have been astonished to see it.

For instance: When Duryodhan fed him the poisoned rice pudding, the child Bheem fell to the floor paralyzed, but though he could not open his eyes, he was still conscious. He heard Sakuni's hyena-cackle, felt the creepers with which they bound him cutting into his flesh. At night, the river water was like ink. He felt his body arc through the humid air as they threw him in. He fell for days through wetness into the netherworld. The water turned to silk—or was that the snakes curling around him? Even without his eyes, he knew they were rainbow-colored. They bit him, as snakes are wont to do. Their poison canceled Duryodhan's. He sat up on a floor of green silt. Lazily, he took hold of a snake—two, three, twenty— and flung them to destruction. Someone informed the god of snakes. He rushed to kill the monster-child who was wreaking havoc among his subjects. What did he see that made him take the boy upon his lap instead and give him elixir to drink? And why did Bheem, the poisoned one, trust the king-god with his blue, striated face? He drank; the strength of a thousand elephants entered his body; the king released him into the currents that would lift him to the surface of the river so that he could go on to the heroism he was destined for.

“I didn't want to leave,” Bheem told me. “When he held me in his arms, it was so much sweeter than my mother's hugs, or my brothers'. In fact, I'd forgotten them already. I clutched the king's hand and cried, Keep me with you. He closed his glowing eyes and shook his head. But before he pushed me upward, he gave me a kiss.”

He held out his left hand and I saw what I'd never noticed before, a tiny red mark on the back of the hand, like a flower with two stamens, or a snake's forked tongue.

These were the times I liked Bheem the best, the quiet afternoons with only the wild doves calling in the tamarind trees, his
voice soft and reflective, falling away as he stopped to think of the right word. I didn't mind if at the end of the story he took me by the hand and led me to our conjugal cottage. But even then—I confess it with some shame—I didn't love him, not in the way he longed to be loved. Looking back, I see that I didn't love any of my husbands in that way. I was a good wife. I supported them through good times and bad; I provided them with comforts of the body and the mind; when in company, I extolled their virtues. I followed them into the forest and forced them to become heroes. But my heart—was it too small? too fickle? too hard? Even during the best of our years, I never gave it fully to them.

How do I know it? Because none of them had the power to agitate me the way the mere memory of Karna did.

Did Kunti sense this, with a mother's instinct? Is that why she didn't trust me completely? But surely she knew what the sorceress told me: we cannot force ourselves to love—or to withhold it. At best, we can curb our actions. The heart itself is beyond control. That is its power, and its weakness.

My regret lies more in this: recognizing Bheem's weakness, I took advantage of it. I wept more loudly when he was around, knowing it would make him rail against Yudhisthir, thus increasing Yudhisthir's torment. When we traveled, I complained of the path's hardship and allowed Bheem to carry me, though had I made an effort, I could have managed on my own. I made unreasonable demands for impossible things, pressing to see how far he'd go to please me. (Such was the case of the golden lotus.) Ultimately, at Kurukshetra, he would kill and kill again, going against the laws of righteous war not for victory or glory, but for my sake. Yes, I broke the first rule, the unwritten one, meant not just for warriors but all of us: I took love and used it as a balm to soothe my ego.

The lotus came to me in Badari, where the Ganga is cold and crystalline. This was the time when Arjun had left us in his search for divine weapons. For months now, we'd heard nothing from him. Worry ate at us, making it impossible to rest in one place. Mingled with our concern about his safety was a more selfish thought: without him the Pandavas would never win a battle against Duryodhan.

I was sitting dejected by the river when I saw it floating on the current. Yes, it was truly golden, just as Vyasa would write later (or had he written it already?). It veered toward me as if impelled by an inner purpose. I'd never seen a flower like that, nor smelled one so intoxicating. I lifted it to my face. I felt my mind slow, my fractious thoughts subside. For a while I did not crave vengeance, nor wonder guiltily if I had sent Arjun to his doom with my weeping, nor remember a pair of forbidden eyes.

Then the smell disappeared. I looked at the flower and saw that it had faded. Its color had paled; its petals drooped; my sorrows returned full force.

I knew that the remedy lay not in finding a new flower but in what Krishna had advised me over and again: Let the past go. Be at ease. Allow the future to arrive at its own pace, unfurling its secrets when it will. I knew I should live the life that teemed around me: this clear air, this newborn sunlight, the simple comfort of the shawl around my shoulders. But because it was easier, and because I wanted the gratification of the look that would leap into his eyes, I went to Bheem instead. In silence I held up the dead flower, and in silence he bowed and set off to bring me what I wanted.

Days later he would return, his arms filled with lotuses. At night, in bed, he would weave them into my matted hair.

He said (or perhaps I imagined the words): “All day and all
night I traveled, following the flower's fragrance as a hunter follows spoor. The forest was black, studded with the jewel-eyes of stalking beasts. I blew on my conch; the four corners of the earth vibrated; the eyes disappeared. I smiled. This is the way, I thought, that I will rout my enemies on the battlefield. In a grove I came across an old monkey, his tail blocking the trail. I ordered him to clear my path, told him I was Bheem of the Pandavas, son of the wind god. He blinked in confusion and did not seem to know me. Perhaps he was senile. He requested me to push his tail off the path and continue on my quest. I bent down to flick it aside with a finger—and could not! Nor with both hands, nor with the strength of my whole body. I fell to the ground, crying, Who are you? He smiled and informed me that he was Hanuman.

“I stared at him. He had crossed the ocean in a single leap to do Rama's work! I had heard the story as a child and thought it legend. But here he stood, elder son of the wind god—and thus my brother. A god in his own right. He embraced me and said, I give you my strength. At Kurukshetra I will be with you, though none will see me except as an image on a chariot flag. He pointed me toward the lake of flowers and disappeared. At the lake I battled a thousand demon guards, killing not a few, to get you what you wanted.” He lowered his face onto my breasts. “Are you happy now?”

“How did it feel,” I asked him later, when we lay satiated, “to touch a god?”

He didn't answer. Perhaps he was asleep. Or perhaps there is no answer to such a question. For later when I'd ask Arjun the same thing, he, too, would be silent.

29

The years passed like molasses, suffocating and formless. We all labored under their sluggishness, but no one suffered more than Arjun. Yudhisthir had his morality to keep himself occupied, Nakul and Sahadev their fascination with the beasts of the forest to divert them, and Bheem his love for me that held him fast in its coils like the mythic ajagar. But quicksilver Arjun, who wanted fame more than anything in the world, who saw himself less as husband or brother or son than as hero, chafed under the restrictions Yudhisthir's promise had placed on him. He longed to battle the Kauravas and win back his honor, but he knew he couldn't, not until our years of banishment were done. Because he couldn't avenge me, he avoided me: my tangled hair, my accusing sighs, my pepper-hot tongue.

From the beginning our relationship had been troubled, with him blaming me for what his mother had ordered—my marriage to his brothers. But in the Palace of Illusions, for a blessed, magical time, we'd been at peace, both of us busy with things we loved. He'd been the commander of the city, in charge of its security. He'd traveled to the edges of the kingdom to make sure things were safe. In between, he had tournaments to perform in and his other wives to visit. Now once again, submerged as we were in the sameness of our
days, the tensions surfaced. I should have read the signs, should have softened my ways. But I was caught in the coils of my own serpent, and no less blind than Dhritarashtra. Arjun began to spend longer hours in the forest by himself. He said it was for hunting, but more and more he would return empty-handed, with a distracted frown. And one morning he left us.

He had a reason, of course: the impending war, for which he needed to improve his battle skills and learn new techniques. And how could he do that, hemmed in by our rustic, rusting existence? Time gnaws on me, he told Yudhisthir. I fear I will disintegrate before the war even begins. He decided to go to the mountains of Hi-mavan and try, through penance, to please Shiva. He would ask him for Pasupat, the divine astra that would make him invincible.

“Once I have the Pasupat,” he said, “Karna is a dead man!”

When I heard that, the blood fled from my face. My knees buckled and I fell to the ground. I, who hadn't weakened so even at the moment of my great insult in Duryodhan's court. My husbands bustled around me. Yudhisthir lifted my head onto his lap. Bheem splashed water on my face. The twins fanned me. A flattered Arjun took my hands in his, even though it was not his year as my husband, in a rare gesture of affection.