Pregnant King, The (29 page)

The Yaksha’s manhood had brought with it dreams, terrible dreams that made Shikhandi talk in his sleep and weep and sweat all night. He dreamt of being a woman, of being abducted on the eve of her wedding, of being forced to marry an impotent prince, of begging that she be allowed to go back to the man she loved, of being allowed to do so only to have her lover turn her away. For nights on end Hiranyavarni watched her husband writhe in agony feeling that woman’s pain, her rejection, her humiliation.

Hiranyavarni had sought the help of the priestesses of Bahugami, who were known for their oracular powers. They had recognized in Shikhandi’s dreams a painful memory of a past life. Waving branches of the neem tree and swaying in a trance, the priestesses had told Hiranyavarni, ‘That woman who haunts your husband is Amba, once eldest daughter of the king of Kashi, who was in love with Shalva, who was abducted by Bhisma of the Kuru clan, and who was given in marriage to Vichitra-virya. She immolated herself after
all of these men rejected her. Shikhandi is Amba reborn, born to kill Bhisma, cause of her misfortune.’

‘I am no woman reborn,’ Shikhandi had protested. He was determined nothing would come in the way of his new-found masculinity. Many women threw themselves at him drawn by the potency of the Yaksha’s appendage. He never turned them away, partly to make his wife jealous, partly to prove to himself that he was indeed a man and partly to convince his father that he was really a son.

Unfortunately, Drupada was not convinced. He had also heard what the priestesses of Bahugami had to say. ‘This is not the son I wanted. He is a woman at heart.’ So saying he invited the Siddhas, Yaja and Upayaja, to perform a yagna and give him a true son— an event that only fuelled Shikhandi’s sense of inadequacy. When he saw the twins, Dhristradhyumna and Draupadi, emerge from the fire-pit, he had told Hiranyavarni, ‘Bharya, my brother is more man than I will ever be and my sister is more woman that I could ever be. My father found me fit enough to have a wife but will he find me fit enough to wear the crown?’

The humiliation was complete when Shikhandi was not allowed to ride out with the Yagnaseni Kshatriyas to Kuru-kshetra. Dhristadhyumna was made commander of the Pandava army while Shikhandi was told by his father to stay back and guard the women of Panchala as if he was a eunuch.

But on the ninth night of the war, Dhristadhyumna had returned to fetch him. ‘Brother, they want you to ride into battle on Krishna’s chariot tomorrow morning.’

‘Why? Is Arjuna dead?’ Shikhandi had asked, surprised by the offer.

‘No, no. Arjuna will ride on the chariot with you. Behind you.’

‘Why?’

‘The Pandava morale hangs by a thread. Old Bhisma has proved to be an able commander for the Kauravas. He has held his ground and pushed the Pandavas back for nine days. He has smashed all my battle formations. To win, we must first be rid of Bhisma. And the only way to do so is to make him lower his bow. But he will do so only in front of a woman. As women are not allowed to enter the battlefield …’

‘… you want me to ride in on Krishna’s chariot,’ Shikhandi had completed the sentence with a bitter smile. ‘A man who is actually a woman!’

Dhristadhyumna had felt his brother’s rage and humiliation. Falling at his brother’s feet, he had said, ‘Forgive us, brother. We are only human, imperfect creatures, limited by our prejudices. But in Krishna’s eyes you are a man—not what you were born as, but what you have become.’

‘I have become a man of convenience with a weapon called womanhood,’ said Shikhandi. But he did not argue further. This was perhaps his only chance to fight like a man, and perhaps die like a man. Besides, Krishna had sent for him. How could he say no?

As he was about to put on his armour, Hiranyavarni had said, ‘I have one wish.’

‘What is it?’

‘Make love to me before you go. Let me be your real wife. Otherwise I will never be able to walk by your side in your next life.’

Shikhandi had touched his wife’s cheek tenderly. ‘Do you think I will die?’

‘I think nothing will survive this war. If you survive this war, I will put on gold anklets like a queen and sit beside you on the throne. If you don’t, I will shave my head and beat my breast as a Kshatriya’s widow should.’

‘Are you sure you want me to make love to you? You know what happens to women after that.’

‘The itch that will follow will be the only memory I will have of you. It will remind me constantly of your manliness that I have rejected since my wedding night.’

Hiranyavarni led Shikhandi to her courtyard. After thirty years of being together, they finally consummated their marriage. Shikhandi was slow and generous in his affection. As he penetrated her, he looked into the shadows and wondered if the Yaksha was watching, impatient to take back his manhood.

He was.

But Sthunakarna’s manhood did not leave Shikhandi. It clung to him till the day he died. And it left behind no itch. Instead, Hiranyavarni’s withered womb bloomed with life.

Hiranyavarni remembered the shocked expression on her mother-in-law’s face, just days after the war, when she announced she was with child. ‘How is it possible?’ Soudamini had asked.

‘He was a man, was he not, mother?’ Hiranyavarni had replied. ‘It is his. I assure you. He came to me before he left for war.’

‘I know my son was a man. But you stopped bleeding months ago.’

‘He was so much of a man, mother, that his seed did not need a fertile soil.’ That silenced Soudamini and all others in the palace. Perhaps in many ways it broke Soudamini’s heart. The world had finally taken away
her daughter and replaced her with a son.

Amba was born ten moons later and when she was twelve years old, Hiranyavarni told her everything about her father. She had a right to know. Amba accepted the truth fearlessly like Satya-kama.

‘Why did you name me Amba?’ she once asked her mother.

‘It was the one name your father uttered more than mine,’ replied Hiranyavarni honestly.

Mother and daughter spent hours talking about Shikhandi. What kind of a husband was he? What kind of a father would he have been? Was he actually Amba? A woman reborn? Or his father’s son? His memories were that of a woman. His heart was a woman’s. His head, a woman’s. But for the Yaksha’s appendage, there was nothing manly in his being. ‘Once I saw him staring at me as I prepared myself for a yagna and adorned myself in bridal finery. I saw regret in his eyes. And envy. I think he regretted being denied his femininity,’ said Hiranyavarni.

‘What was he to you, mother?’

‘What do you mean?

‘Did you love my father?

‘Yes.’

‘As a man or as a woman?’

‘A woman. Always,’ said Hiranyavarni, without a moment’s hesitation. But that was not exactly right. She loved Shikhandi, the person, to whom she had been gifted by her father in the presence of Agni, the fire-god. The person who stood by her as husband when the world condemned her for being a wicked wife. The person had managed to acquire a body of a man but was at heart always a woman.

‘But I think my father was a man, mother,’ Amba said.

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Hiranyavarni.

‘Is it not true that a child gets flesh and blood from the mother and bones and nerves from the father?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have both. If I was the child of two women then I would surely have been a ball of blood-soaked flesh. My father was no woman, mother. He was a man.’

Hiranyavarni was impressed by her daughter’s logic.

News of Amba’s intelligence spread, reaching even the Rishis of the Angirasa order who decided to travel to Panchala and put it to the test. ‘Are you Shikhandi’s daughter or the Yaksha’s daughter? Of which seed are you fruit?’ they asked the young princess.

Amba replied, ‘The plough belongs to my father. The field belongs to my father. I am my father’s child. And my father is Shikhandi.’ Then her face fell. ‘Perhaps that is why no one wants to marry me. Who would want to marry a girl whose father was once a woman?’

‘Fear not, my child,’ said the wandering hermits, delighted at the discovery of yet another of God’s surprises. ‘From Prajapati has come the problem. From Prajapati will come the solution.’

The rains came on time and left on time, the sixteenth time since the birth of Mandhata, an indicator that all dharma had been upheld in Vallabhi by the Turuvasu kings. Fields and pastures burst into
life once again. Rivers were full. Orchards glistened in the golden sunlight. Cows chewed on succulent grass. The gods had to be thanked. And so a yagna was organized.

The Kshatriyas of Vallabhi marked the site for the ceremony by shooting arrows in the four corners and a fifth one in the centre. ‘We have pinned down Vastu,’ they cried. The Shudras then set up the precinct by raising an enclosure using long sheets of matted palm leaves. The Brahmanas used rice flour and traced on the moist ground the image of Vasuki, the serpent king, who rises up during the rains. In its coils they scooped a fire-pit around which bricks were laid out in the shape of an eagle. The Vaishyas provided the butter and grain that would be given to Agni, the fire-god, who would carry the gifts of the king of Vallabhi above the clouds to Indra, the sky-god. Thus would the god who hurls thunderbolts and forces dark rain-bearing clouds to release rain be thanked.

‘Tell your son, tell your son,’ the two ghosts kept nagging Yuvanashva.

‘After the rains,’ said Yuvanashva. ‘After the yagna.’

‘If he has to be king he must learn to face any truth.’

‘My truth is complicated,’ argued Yuvanashva.

The yagna began. Melodious hymns filled the air. Fire crackled in the pit. A plume of smoke rose up connecting earth and the autumn sky. Yuvanashva watched the fire blaze. ‘What truth should I tell my son? It escapes my tongue. Defies the structure of language.’ He raised the ladle to pour the butter into the fire-pit and thought, ‘I have created life outside me. I have also created life inside me. I am the ladle that pours the butter. I am the pit that receives it. I am the
sky and the earth. I am seed and soil. Man and woman. Or perhaps neither. A creature suspended in between, neither here or there? Unfit to be a Raja, unfit to be a Yajamana. Will Agni accept my offering? Will Indra turn it away?’

‘Svaha,’ he said as he poured the offering. ‘Svaha,’ he said again. Each time the fire-god accepted the offering, so did the sky-god, as they had for sixteen years.

But Yuvanashva’s discomfort remained. What was the truth that the Devas accepted? Was it the truth that Vallabhi ignored or the truth that Vallabhi preferred? Was he Mandhata’s father or mother? He needed clear answers. All he got was silence. A silent earth. A silent sky. Silent rivers and silent orchards. The hills were silent. The palace was silent. Bards were silent. Even Vipula was silent.

For sixteen years, the world saw a picture of domestic bliss in the palace of Vallabhi: a king busy in the mahasabha upholding varna-ashrama-dharma, his widowed mother meditating in the room that was once her audience chamber, his three wives sitting richly dressed beside him during pujas and yagnas, and his two sons living in the inner quarters with their mothers and studying in the hermitage outside the city with their teacher.

Mandhata was for everyone the first son of the first queen. It did not matter to the servants who helped Simantini bathe that she had a flat stomach and firm breasts with signs of neither pregnancy nor lactation. They found a good reason for it. ‘Asanga is a great physician. Almost a magician who can restore a mother’s virginity,’ they said. If one pointed out the
stretch marks on Pulomi’s once beautiful body, shapeless and loose after the birth of Jayanta, they would say, ‘The women of Vanga respond differently to the potions.’

The ghosts of Sumedha and Somvati were the only ones who challenged this apparition of order. ‘Vallabhi deludes itself. But below, behind and beyond, sits Prajapati, witnessing it all, the lies of its king and the rot of the royal soul.’

‘Give me time. I need time to prepare him for the truth.’

Yuvanashva looked across the fire at Mandhata who sat with his brother and teacher and other students of the hermitage. The boy was a stranger to him. He had never ever been given time alone with the boy, to know him, and to let himself be known. He did not know what his son’s dreams were, what he desired and what he feared. Ever since he was taken into the women’s quarters, the queens had done everything in their power to keep them apart. Shilavati had warned them, ‘Motherhood is a disease when it springs in a man’s body, like kingship is in a woman’s. Let us both be cured of it.’ And so, Shilavati never opined on matters of state, no matter how grave the situation. And the queens saw to it that their husband was never alone with Mandhata, lest he wanted to indulge his maternal instincts.

For Mandhata, Yuvanashva was a distant father, who was more interested in Vallabhi than in his children. They met only for a few hours on ceremonial occasions when the princes were paraded on elephants and chariots and palanquins as proof of the king’s virility. He had spent the first seven years of his life with his
mothers, and the next nine years with his teacher. Soon he would be with his wife, then with his duties, with only formal knowledge of his father.