The Rise of Hastinapur (15 page)

T
he rite of fertility usually took place on the day after the first rain of the year, after the earth was made fertile by the sky. But this time Amba decreed that it be moved back by a week. No one had asked her why, but she had told them nevertheless that it had to be on the night of the full moon. What she had really wanted to do was to time the night with the most fertile period of her month.

Seated on her bed, she turned her wrists and looked at the flower bangles she had been asked to wear by Parushni. At one time she would have perhaps smiled at them, touched her nose to them and breathed in with a deep sigh, but now she just looked at them. Her hair had been set in a plait that morning, and tender jasmines had been tied to her scalp with twine. She had asked Parushni severely if she had intended to dress her up like a maiden about to be married, but Parushni had just smiled and gone on with it.

Oil and sandal paste glistened on her arms and thighs. On her forehead was a single vertical line of vermillion, and underneath it was a yellow turmeric curve. She had been given a new white sari to wear, and her undergarments had a dry, warm feel to them. Incense sticks burnt from the corner of the room where a stone idol of the Mother sat, looking at her. Amba observed all these things with detachment, as a priestess should. There was but one thing that she could not be detached about – at least she had not been able to in the last one month – and that was Bhishma.

Eight years, she told herself. Eight years of training and she had conquered all parts of herself, and yet at one word from the Goddess she was ready to take up arms against Bhishma again. She thought she had conquered envy, but her heart burned when she thought of Ambika and Ambalika. She did not know what she envied about them; she wanted neither to be a queen nor to be queen mother. Did she just envy the fact that they had borne children while she had remained barren?

Even with Bhishma she did not know what caused her anger. Her life in the last eight years had been happy and rich with contentment, and if Bhishma had been responsible for it, she ought to be thankful to him. But then another voice sprang up inside her, one that she had long ago learnt to suppress but had lately become louder. It said: whatever you have gained is by your goodness of character. Whatever you have lost is due to Bhishma. So go, get your revenge against your destroyer. Do not rest until you have seen his dead body.

This was not the Goddess; she was priestess enough to know that. The voice of the Goddess never preached death. This was her own self, that old self that had goaded Sage Parashurama to fight Bhishma, that old self that had torn apart her hair on those long summer nights thinking of ways in which she could reach Bhishma and plunge a dagger into his heart. Back then, this voice had screamed in her ears. Now, it only whispered. And yet these eight years she had learnt to silence it. Now she let it go on.

Outside she heard drums, and through the shadows on the white curtain and the chants, she could make out that Drupad was ready. As the drums reached a crescendo and she readied herself for his entry, a small thought came to her:
you can still stop this
. But she pushed it aside with a savage shake of the head and filled her head with images of the mysterious bowman who would one day shoot the poisoned arrow at Bhishma’s heart. That bowman would be her son, she thought. The Goddess had told her so.

She smiled, and got to her feet to welcome her paramour.

She could not at first recognize Drupad. He had the skin of a leopard wrapped around his waist, and his body was smeared with ash. A round, red spot gaped at her from between his eyes, and a black vertical eyelid had been drawn on it, with long lashes ready to blink open. A live snake hissed from over his left shoulder, and when it looked at her it raised its hood and opened its mouth, revealing two sharp, hungry fangs. In his hands Drupad held a trident fashioned out of wood and iron, and in his wet, matted hair there stood a white crescent moon with a star at its bottom tip. His feet were grey and dusted with ash, Amba noticed, and his toes had been fitted with brass rings that clacked against the earth with each step.

Her mind went back to their last meeting almost nine years ago, when she had asked him if he would marry her. He had expressed horror at her question then, and now he had come back to her. But for the Goddess’s promise of a son who would kill Bhishma, she would have spat in his face and sent him back to his kingdom. In what way was he worthy of laying with a priestess of the Mother? But that did not matter. Now, for her own sake she had to endure him and stoke in herself some of the lust that she had long ago vanquished. For her own sake, for this one night, they had to be the incarnations of Shiva and his consort.

He opened his mouth when his eyes fell on her, whether in recognition or in wonder she did not know. The lines on his face had lengthened a bit since she saw him last, and there was a childlike innocence to his face, the kind into which men often lapsed in middle age.
Especially impotent men
, she thought. Men grew up with such certainty over their ability to sire children that when the tragic realization of their inability dawned upon them, it drove the light out of their eyes.

‘So we meet again, High King,’ said Amba, holding her hands out to him in a gesture of welcome.

He got down on one knee and took both her hands in his. He clutched them to his lips and sighed into them. ‘My lady, Amba! It is you, it is, indeed, you.’

‘So it is. I have heard that Bhishma has taken back the quarries you stole using me as pawn.’

‘My lady! The gods have made me suffer long and hard for that slight! I asked Sage Parashurama to tell me your whereabouts so that I could come to you and offer my apologies, but he would not.’

Amba shook her head. ‘No apology is required, Drupad. We all serve a bigger force, and She is always watching. If you say you have suffered, then I grant that you have.’

‘No, no, my lady, there has not been one night that I have slept soundly after I sent you to Sage Parashurama. Many a time in the last eight years did I wonder how it would all have transpired if I had taken you as my wife that night.’

‘But you did not, Drupad, and there is no gain in wishing the past had been different.’

He kissed her knuckles, smelled the flowers on her wrists. ‘Bhishma has been encroaching on our mountains all these years, my lady. Now he holds almost the same amount of rocky land as does Panchala. And no king in North Country dares raise his voice against the champion of Hastinapur.’

‘You have not wed, have you, Drupad?’ she asked, ignoring his comment. She held his chin and lifted it up so that she could look into his eyes. ‘How will you have sons if you do not marry?’

‘Do you think I have not tried, my lady? Ever since I was fourteen I only rarely slept alone on my bed, but never did a maiden get a belly from sleeping with me. I am known all across North Country as an impotent wretch. Pray tell me, who will give their daughter in wedding to someone like me?’

‘Not even the vassal states?’ Her mind went, fleetingly, to Subala.

‘No, my lady,’ said Drupad, ‘not even the vassal states. And now that the queens of Hastinapur have given birth–’

‘Let us not speak of them, High King.’

He looked up, puzzled; then remembered the ‘queens’ he had referred to were her sisters. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, of course. With Hastinapur now possessing heirs, a new strength seems to have taken over Bhishma. He was once cautious and diplomatic, but now he attacks my mines without so much as a warning.’

Amba felt anger rise within her, and though a part of her admonished it and fought to allay it, another part of her relished it, especially now that she held the reins of Bhishma’s future in her hands. She said, ‘I will give you a son, High King.’

‘My lady?’ he dithered. ‘I do not understand. You do not understand–’

‘I understand perfectly well!’ she said, silencing him. ‘You have slept with waiting-women, with women of your court, perhaps sisters and wives of your noblemen, but you have never slept with a priestess.’ Her voice sank low to a whisper. ‘A priestess is a daughter of the Goddess, Drupad, and the Goddess never allows the rite of fertility go to waste.’

Drupad stumbled to his feet, and though he was taller than her, at that moment, he looked like a mere child, fumbling and looking down at his hands. The snake on his shoulder wrapped around his neck tighter and stared at Amba, its forked tongue sliding out and slipping back in.

‘But Sage Parashurama told me that you are past child-bearing, that you would return strength to my loins.’

‘I shall give you a son, King of Panchala, who will one day slay the regent of Hastinapur.’

That lit up his eyes, she saw, though his manner was still that of a knave, arms waving about as he hunted for words. She reached out, fingers outstretched, to take the snake by its neck and lowered it onto the floor. ‘Come, Drupad,’ she said, ‘I shall show you how the Mother makes love to the Destroyer.’ She took his hand in hers, and as she guided him to the bed, his eyes glassed over with desire. Under the leopard skin wrapped around his hips, she saw a round bulge take shape.

With her other hand she dimmed the lamp. Outside, the chants and drums continued.

FIFTEEN

A
mba caressed her stomach. It had grown quite a bit in the last two months, and now she could not stand on her feet for very long without catching her breath. She looked at the chalk-drawn calendar on the mud wall of her hut; if her calculations had been right, her son would be born before the midsummer feast, fourteen days from now. Her body was bathed in sweat, and grains of sand and mud stuck to her palms as she pushed herself back against the wall. The sun was so harsh this year that even in the middle of the night, the breeze that flowed over the Yamuna was warm. It dried the skin and left it broken in white patches.

The house had become dirty, and she had left the plants untended for nigh on a week now. Anjasi had been around to help her, yes, but she was still new at the hermitage. Only after the priestesses kept their first rite of fertility did they become truly serene and accepting. Even Parushni had been fidgety during her first year.

She wondered if she should get up and sweep the room once, but it was late at night now. It could wait for tomorrow. A knot appeared in the pit of her stomach, and it churned and tightened, making her head swim and eyes ache. She clutched her hips with both hands and breathed in and out deliberately, as Sage Parashurama had taught her to. In a few moments, the cramps subsided, leaving her covered in a fresh layer of sweat.

When she had first asked the High Sage why her stomach turned so much, he had said male children did that because they were in a hurry to leave the woman’s womb and run and conquer countries. He might have said that just to please her, but there was some truth to his words. Her son would be the future High King of Panchala. He would need to run around a lot, and would need to fight a lot of wars – especially with the rulers of Hastinapur.

On that thought she sat up straight against the wall and bent down, so that her lips hovered around her chest, as close to her son as she could get. Then, in a low, steady croon, she began to speak. Six months of daily habit had ironed out all stutters from her speech, and the words came out on their own, one after the other, without her having to push them out with any conscious thought. Sage Parashurama had said that a child in the womb began to hear and understand its mother’s words from the twelfth week onward. He had instructed her to speak to her son, to tell him tales of gods and goddesses, of kings and queens, and of right and wrong.

‘He will one day rule the land, my lady,’ he had said. ‘His education must begin, therefore, at the earliest possible time – right from the womb.’

She had begun to tell him all that she knew of the world, but on the second or third day a thought had struck her. Why not also tell her son, she thought, of the reason for which he was being brought into the world? So she had begun to recount the tale of Amba, the princess of Kasi, the lover of Salva, the paramour of Vichitraveerya, the queen of Hastinapur, the mother to the son of Drupad, the High King of Panchala, the priestess of the Mother – and the enemy of Bhishma.