The Rise of Hastinapur (48 page)

Bhishma said, ‘I do not understand, my lady.’

In answer Gandhari tore off the end of her sari and folded it in her hands. She laid it over her eyes and pulled it back over her head, tying the two ends in a knot above her neck. As her eyes closed, she took a sudden backward step as image after image flashed in front of her closed eyelids, each one appearing for too short a time for her to make sense of them. Her breath quickened, and her palms became wet with sweat, but the relentless flash of visions kept attacking her, hitting her with a force so strong that she buckled on her knees and fell forward against the sturdy arms of Bhishma.

‘My lady, Princess, Gandhari,’ he was saying in his hoarse, whispery voice. She heard the steps of the worried attendants, and she heard cries of alarm from the women. But all this came to her as though from a distant world, a world that the blindfold had cut off from her. Now she had to awaken to a different world, the world of magic, the world of the mind, and she had to sharpen the sense of her sight so that these figures would slow down and move to her will, so that she could speak with them and they would show her what she needed to see.

‘You shall be the wife Dhritarashtra would be proud to live with,’ said Bhishma.

She had fulfilled her first objective. She had gained his trust. Now all that she wished to do was to slip away into sleep and allow her mind to awaken.

And to devise Hastinapur’s downfall.

FIFTEEN

G
anga, Lady of the River, hunched down in front of her hut and filled the earthen vessel with water. She took out a bunch of berries from under her cloak, plucked them out, and laid them on the ground next to the water. Leaning on her stick, she got to her feet with a mumble. She looked around her. The mother doe was nowhere to be seen. She would come, though, once the light disappeared. She had kept an eye on this doe for a while now; she preferred to come lumbering in just after sunset, and left the hermitage, after having had her fill, while the moon was still yellow, almost touching the horizon.

She went to the edge of the cliff to look at the great white rock in the falling light, and at once she remembered the morning on which Prabhasa had come to teach her the Mysteries. She had often heard her mother say that after a while one did not remember which events belonged to her life and which belonged to those of her predecessors, and now Ganga felt the same. On that morning, she felt that she had been both nine and twenty-nine, that she had been both the child who partook of the Mysteries and the maiden who sat cross-legged on the porch, watching.

A black spot appeared on the brook far off the west, and as it became larger and larger, it took the form of the barge that once brought her here from Hastinapur. A dark man with white spots on his shoulders descended, looked up at her, and smiled. She could not see his face well, but he walked as though he were tired. She kept her eyes on him all along as he came up the mossy steps, barefooted. When he arrived at her side, she turned to face him, and he kneeled on one knee and bowed his head.

‘Arise, Kubera,’ she said. ‘I am glad to see that you have come back alive.’

He got up to his feet said solemnly, ‘I am too, my lady.’

‘I trust you have done all that was asked of you.’

‘I have, my lady. I have returned to the mountain, in fact, a few days ago. But my limbs were tired, and I rested them a little before making the journey up to see you.’

‘A few gulps of the Crystal Water would have helped, I am certain.’

‘I have had more than a few gulps, my lady. I have only lived on Earth for a few months, and yet I have so desperately missed drinking of the Lake.’

She nodded; she knew only too well of that burning in the throat, of that stinging thirst that would never leave a man who had tasted the water of the Lake. Only Devavrata had escaped its clutches – or had he simply learnt to live with it?

‘Give me news of Earth, Kubera. How does Devavrata?’

‘They call him Bhishma now, my lady Ganga,’ said Kubera, ‘Bhishma the terrible. He is known to be the fiercest warrior in all of North Country.’

‘And not a bad strategist, either, I hear.’ The words bore only a little of the pride she felt tingle within her heart.

‘No, not at all. He has with his own hands now put Hastinapur at the top of all the kingdoms of North Country. In a few days, Dhritarashtra will wed Gandhari, the Princess of Gandhar. And with that Hastinapur will come into possession of the gold mines.’

She turned and walked toward the hut, nodding at him to come with her. When they reached the porch she sat on the edge and held her staff out to her side. She looked at the bushes in hope, but the doe was out of sight. From somewhere below her she heard the sounds of children playing in Vasishtha’s courtyard. The mountain air was thin and clear; one had to only quieten down to hear the smallest sounds from leagues away.

‘They are marrying the princess of Gandhar to the blind one, are they not?’ On Kubera’s nod, she took a long, deep breath. ‘It is as it should be, then.’

‘But my lady,’ said Kubera, his voice low, ‘we had set out to weaken Hastinapur and quell the power of Bhishma. But we seem to have made it stronger than ever before. Have we not put Meru in danger because of that?’

Ganga looked at Kubera and tried to discern his real age. The water of the Lake kept people young, but if you knew where to look, you would still find signs of wear. She saw that his fingernails were yet white and had not begun to turn clear, which meant that he was yet a mere cub, new to the ways of the Mysteries. He would have learnt well, no doubt, at the feet of the old Kubera. But as the sages said, there was no better teacher than life itself.

‘Kubera,’ she said, ‘there is one thing that you must always remember. We have yet to find and probe the Mysteries of time. We are yet to find ways to be able to predict the future. Some say the sight – which some men are blessed with – belongs to the Great Goddess Bhagavati, and it is she who sees through the tiny hole that connects us to the future. But I do not agree; the present faces not one but many futures, so perhaps even the Goddess herself sees but one or two.

‘So whether what we have done will turn out to be good or bad for us, no one knows, my boy. The Wise Ones do not know, either. The high sages that come to the Meru every year tell us that the wiser you get, the more you realize that you know nothing.’

‘But my lady,’ said Kubera, ‘we have done the exact opposite of what was needed.’

‘It appears so, on the face of it, does it not? But have we?’ Kubera’s face reflected puzzlement, so she smiled and said, ‘We have three strands here, Kubera, that all come together and converge upon Hastinapur. First there is Amba, whom Devavrata has wronged and who has become a priestess and is now rearing a child of her own. Then there is Kunti, the princess from the southern kingdom who shall bear sons in whose bodies will flow the blood of the mountain. Then we have Gandhari, who shall see a lot through her closed eyes, using the Mystery that you have given her.’

Kubera said, ‘I still do not see, my lady.’

‘Neither do I, Kubera, for as I said, no one sees the future. But do you not see that even though Hastinapur is the strongest kingdom of all, seen from the outside, there are fissures deep within it, and all we have tried to do is widen them, and keep them wide enough for long enough so that one day, they will crack.’

‘Do you refer to the blind prince?’

‘The blind prince has no ambitions, Kubera, so we cannot do much with him. But look at the princesses. Gandhari, the queen of Gandhar, wronged twice by Bhishma and Hastinapur – if she had married into Hastinapur the very first time that Bhishma asked her, she would have been a happy woman, mother to sons who would make Hastinapur truly great. We did not want that, so we sent you to deepen that crack that existed between the two cities, and you have done admirably, causing a battle and seeing to it that Gandhar lost.’

‘But even now Gandhari is marrying into the royal family of Hastinapur, my lady.’

‘She is,’ said Ganga, ‘but she does so out of revenge. She does so with the sole ambition of plotting the downfall of the Kuru race, and it is vital for this purpose that she is married to the more docile prince, Kubera, and that she does not become queen, because now she will have a lot of time to think about the wrongs done to her. And the longer you think of your misfortunes, the bigger they seem to grow, and the more they begin to trouble you.’

He nodded, but his face still looked pained. ‘And what about Kunti, my lady?’

‘She is the second strand, and perhaps the most important. We did not plan for her; indeed, when Surya came to me on the day before he was to set out for Earth, his sole purpose was to find out what was happening in the town of Mathura, and he only saw her as the easiest way into the city. Without her help, we would not have taken the black stones from that city, and we would not have weakened it like we did, for if Mathura had continued on its path of studying the Mystery of the stone, I suspect it would have become a close rival to Hastinapur by now.’

‘And we did not want that.’

‘No,’ said Ganga. ‘We wished for Hastinapur to be the strongest kingdom. Also, the black stone is a marvellous Mystery, and it will do for us a great amount of good. If we use it right, we may never have to fight a war with any kingdom again.’

‘About Kunti–’

‘Yes, Surya was smitten with Kunti, and he thought she would make a great queen to Hastinapur. She would be the other half, with Gandhari being the first. She would bear the powerful sons, the sons of the Celestials, and she would arrive at Hastinapur expecting to rule it, expecting to be the Queen Mother in time. So you have ambition on one side, and entitlement on the other.’

‘But there was another son, my lady,’ said Kubera, ‘the one that Kunti bore Surya.’

Ganga’s mouth twisted at this. The sun had begun to sink in the sky now, with only half of its shape visible over the horizon. She had the feeling that the Celestial was hiding his face from her anger. For he had been strictly forbidden from bearing any Earthly maidens children, and yet he had gone ahead and done it. He had said that the boy would grow up in Hastinapur and play a ‘great role’ in its destiny, but it was hard to believe him. For one, Celestials always believed that their sons were destined for great things.

‘He,’ she said, scratching her forehead with one finger, ‘was a mistake.’

‘A mistake!’

‘A small one,’ said Ganga, ‘but a mistake nonetheless. He will be in Hastinapur, so perhaps Kunti will take him in and rear him as her own. Perhaps he shall play no part at all in what is to come, I know not. But he adds one more ingredient to the broth, Kubera, and when you try and shape the future, perhaps more is not necessarily bad. We shall find some use for him, for after all, he is the son of a Celestial.’

Kubera nodded. ‘I am still troubled,’ said he, ‘because I fear for the future of the mountain.’

She patted him on the cheek. ‘The mountain shall be safe, Kubera. With the Crystal Lake and now the black stones with us, I think not that any kingdom on Earth shall ever touch us. No, not even Hastinapur.’

‘But you said there were three strands–’

‘Yes,’ said Ganga, and even as she said it, her heart grew heavy. She had told Kubera that no man or woman could foretell the future, and yet whenever she thought of Amba, her vision blurred, her stomach turned. Somewhere deep within her, she felt that she knew the answer. But she dared not give it voice. ‘The third strand is Amba,’ she said. ‘She is another of those women that Devavrata has wronged, and we have nurtured her and seen to it – through the High Sage Parashurama – that she has borne a child, a female child, who shall grow into a maiden.’

‘The father is the king of Pachala, I hear,’ said Kubera.

‘Indeed,’ said Ganga, smiling. ‘Panchala and Hastinapur have been enemies for a long time now. Drupad has not had a child before – or even after this babe – so he shall have no choice but to accept her as his. And she will grow up a princess, then perhaps she will grow into a queen, but wherever she goes, she will carry within her heart her mother’s hatred for Devavrata.’

‘I see,’ said Kubera, and for once she saw the knot in his eyebrows smoothen, and the creases on his cheeks vanish.

‘You do see,’ she said. ‘There are two ways to fight your foe, Kubera. One is by force, by battering him down repeatedly, making him weaker with each blow, until he falls down never to get up again. That was the way of the Dark Ones before us, but we – we think it is better to strengthen your enemy and make him bigger than he has ever been, but make sure that you build in these little cracks in the founding pillars, so that you can later find and widen them as you need to.’

‘All of this,’ said Kubera, ‘to get at one man?’

The sun had disappeared, and the stars began to twinkle in sight. When Ganga turned her head to the other side she saw the yellow crescent just about to begin her rise. Like she had on that unforgettable night all those years ago by the peepal, she looked for a star at the tip but found none. Any time now, the mother doe would bound out of the bushes for her berries, and she did not wish to be around to scare her away.