THE MAHABHARATA: A Modern Rendering, Vol 1 (7 page)

For a while it seemed neither archer would prevail. Then Bheeshma invoked the praswapastra. That weapon would fuse the apocalyptic fires hidden within the most infinitesimal particles; it would consume the very earth.

Bheeshma drew his bowstring back to discharge the astra at his master. But two other figures appeared between the bowmen. Midnight was brilliant, as if day had dawned. The Devas put aside cloud coverings, drew back the veils of heaven and revealed themselves. The sky was full of shining craft and stern Gods who are beyond the understanding of men.

One of the splendorous ones who stood between Bhargava and his pupil was Rudra, tall as a tree. His skin was white; dreadlocks hung to his shoulders, with a moon-sliver hiding among them. His throat was blue, where he had once quaffed smoking poison and emerald cobras twined themselves around his attenuated body. Beside him was Narada, the eternal wanderer, Brahma’s son old as the stars are.

In his voice deeper than the sky, Rudra said, “Stop, Devavrata of the dreadful vow! It is not written that you shall be the one to end this age. That time has not yet come and the task belongs to another.”

Bheeshma stood frozen. He did not hear Rudra, only waited for his hand to be free to loose the astra at his guru. Narada went near Bheeshma and spoke softly to him, calling him back to the world he was set to burn.

Slowly Bheeshma’s breathing grew calmer, his knotted body relaxed. With a sigh, Devavrata remembered himself and lowered his bow. Vast relief surged through heaven and earth.

Rudra said to him, “You are the sishya, you must withdraw first.”

Bheeshma bowed. He went up to the smoldering Bhargava. He laid his bow and his quiver at his feet and knelt before his guru. Bhargava raised his pupil up and embraced him, crying, “My son, you are Bheeshma indeed! Even I could not vanquish you. My heart is full today, that I have such a sishya.”

Bhargava cried across the clearing to Amba in the trees, “This man will give up his life, he will consume the world; but he will not break his oath. Princess, Devavrata will never marry you.”

Amba gave a shuddering howl as of a wild creature shot with an arrow. She turned and ran from that place like a dark wind.

NINE AMBA
 

Running, sobbing as she ran, she hardly knew herself any more as she went. She stopped at times and bayed at the stars in the night sky like a she-wolf that had lost her mate. All she knew was the fire in her soul for revenge, consuming her. Bheeshma may be the greatest kshatriya on earth; but he had ruined her and he must pay for it with his life.

In the heart of a forest, where not even rishis ventured, she sat under a gnarled tree and began to pray. For a year she sat, unmoving, her body fed by just her hatred, worshipping Siva’s son Karttikeya. Dirt caked her face and her hair hung to her waist in tangled jata. Her tapasya was so perfect that Karttikeya appeared before her sooner than he ever had for any other bhakta.

One day, a marvelous aroma filled the forest in which Amba sat in padmasana, the lotus-posture. The darkness she had grown accustomed to behind her eyelids shut fast was lit up like day. Her eyes flew open and there he stood: the lucific Lord Karttikeya. In his hands, he had a garland of lotuses that were from no lake on earth. They glowed as if moonlight was hidden in them and their scent spread through the forest like a blessing.

Amba fell on her face before the vision. She began to speak, “Lord…”

But he said gently to her, “I know, my child. I know everything and I know the boon you want. Look, I have brought you lotuses from a pool in my own garden. Whoever wears this garland around his neck will kill Bheeshma for you.”

With a moan, she reached out and took the garland from him. The God vanished, leaving the trees dark once more. On her careen out of the forest, Amba bathed in a stream. Peering into the water when she was clean, she saw her penance had aged her.

Full of hope, she emerged from the jungle and went seeking her champion. She wandered into many kingdoms and told her story to their princes and kings. In her hands was the fateful garland, which seemed to grow fresher every day. Those who heard her tale were not averse to fighting her cause. She was obviously noble and still very beautiful. But when she told them who it was they must kill when they wore her garland, they all refused her in alarm. Most of them dare not face Bheeshma in battle and those who were bold enough would not. They said he was honorable and taintless; they would sin if they killed him.

Cursing them all, calling them cowards and eunuchs, she would storm away. Her lotuses remained as fresh as they had been when she received them, but her hope faded within her.

At last, almost broken in spirit, Amba arrived in the kingdom of the Panchalas, in Drupada’s court. Once more, she told her story. She showed that king the garland that no kshatriya in Bharatavarsha dared take from her.

Strangely moved, Drupada heard her out patiently. But then, he also said to Amba, “Bheeshma of Hastinapura is a righteous man, I cannot fight him.”

Her face twitched in rage. With a scream, she flung Karttikeya’s garland at Drupada. But as if plucked up by an unseen hand, it flew away from him and landed around a marble pillar. Her howl of frustration echoing behind her, Amba stormed out.

Drupada held the garland that hung on the white pillar in awe and fear; not he, not anyone in his court ever touched it. They lit lamps before it and worshipped it at every sandhya of each day. That garland hung there, never fading, as fragrant as it had been when Amba first received it. It hung waiting for the kshatriya who would dare take it up and wear it.

Across wild plains, through mysterious forests, fording sacred rivers and hardly aware of any of these, went Amba. Her face was set in a mask. Her eyes stared straight ahead, seeing nothing around her. She came to the foothills of the highest mountains in the world—the Himalayas, which are said to be the threshold between heaven and earth. Unworldly beings, elven gandharvas, centaurian kinnaras, knowing siddhas and charanas lived here. They renewed themselves upon the Himalaya, because these are the holiest mountains in creation.

Rishis also, hermits in solemn numbers, lived on the mystic slopes of the Himalaya. Some were lost in sweet oblivion, adrift on the ocean of the spirit that welled in their hearts. Others mortified their bodies in streams that carried ice floes down to the melting plains. They sat motionless, entranced in dhyana. Past them all, whether they were solitary or congregated in asramas, climbed Amba. She did not pause to greet them; perhaps she did not see them at all for the single flame that consumed her.

Up she went through the wooded foothills, crossing biting rillets. She climbed over the sheerest faces of rock and ice, which nimble kinnaras would have shunned for being too hazardous. Through breathtaking gorges, hidden in the naves of towering ranges, she climbed on and on, like a spirit who had lost her way in eternity.

Magical sunrises and sunsets lit the landscapes around her in reverberant colors and her tiny form as she went along, at times crawling on all fours through sculpted snowdrifts. She had no eyes for their incomparable beauty; locked into her obsession, she plunged blindly on. At night unparalleled moons bathed her in ethereal luster. Some nights, just the stars, seeming like small moons themselves at this height, shone down in distant kindness. But she hardly noticed that they sought to comfort her with their subtle influences.

On she went, while knots of sapphire-eyed kimpurusha fauns and their oread mates stepped out of caves embedded in the ice-faces of deep valleys and paused their pale orgies to stare at her. Grave siddhas heard her footfalls pass them, where they sat in meditation, often covered entirely by snow. Snowflakes fell off their eyelids as they blinked at the human princess. For princess she so obviously was who climbed along this secret way with darkness filling her heart to bursting. Once a young gandharva Elf whistled hopefully to her, his mellifluous note echoing off glassy slopes. But Amba did not hear him.

She went grimly past five mountains, one of them a secret, golden pyramid. She ate just wild berries on her white way. At last, she crossed the Himalaya and arrived at a solitary massif that thrust its peak at the sky to the north of the great range. Seeing that most sacred of all mountains, Amba’s eyes softened. The lone mountain was her destination; here she hoped to find the redress she had not found anywhere else. She lay on her face in the snow and worshipped Kailasa, looming like a full moon before her. She called out, in agony and devotion, to the master of that mountain: Siva, Lord of Gods.

She climbed halfway to the summit of Kailasa and she was exhausted now. She made her home in a shallow cave and began a tapasya fiercer than her penance in the forest. This one lasted years.

One day, when spring flushed on ice-bound Kailasa after a savage winter, Amba felt impelled to open her eyes that had seen nothing for a year but the inner spaces. There, in glory and in an eternal hermit’s guise, stood Siva the Mahayogin. He smiled at her, while the emerald cobras he wore as ornaments on his ash-coated body twined around him.

With a sigh, Amba prostrated herself at the Lord’s feet. Smiling, Siva said, “Stop your tapasya, my child, or you will melt all the snow on Kailasa! I have come to bless you with what your heart desires and I see it wants just one thing.”

Amba cried, “Who will kill Bheeshma?”

His eyes, which had seen the constellations begin, twinkled at her. “Why, you yourself, Amba, for nothing would please you more.”

“I, my Lord? But I am no kshatriya, certainly not one to match Bheeshma.”

“Not as you are in this life, but as you shall be in your next one.”

She was dismayed. “But I will not remember anything of this life. What sweetness will revenge have if I don’t know what it is for?”

But Siva, whose power turns the nebulae on their axes, replied, “But you will, Amba. You will remember every bit of this life, as clearly as if there was no break of death between it and the one to come.”

Her cry of joy rang among precipices and she fell to kissing his feet. She was light as a bird, when Siva had blessed her.

“Lord, where will I be born when I am dead?”

“Where a garland of lotuses hangs, waiting for you.”

He melted out of her sight, leaving just the ineffable memory of his presence and his boon. Feverish Amba built herself a pyre from dry branches. She kindled it with a twig she set alight with the power of her mind. With no thought for the pain of the flames, or of the deep passage of death, only pausing to murmur Siva’s name, she walked into the blaze and was turned into ashes. They were redolent with her long austerity.

By Siva’s grace, Amba was born again with no lease of time. Her spirit may have, otherwise, been condemned to a longer wandering in some realm of the dead; now it flitted through Yama’s labyrinths like a bright swallow that knew its way through these mandalas. The flame of her purpose still searing her soul, she was born as the daughter of king Drupada of the Panchalas. She was born amidst celebrations in that kingdom and her father named her Shikhandin.

She was so thin as a child: as if she had been pared by some great rigor of another life. But her spirit was fierce and bold, more a male child’s spirit. Her doting father would look at his daughter’s intense face, with its dark burden behind her eyes and he would think, ‘Her expression is so familiar.’ But, of course, he could not remember where he had seen her before.

One day, when she was just seven, her father brought Shikhandin into his court for the first time. She played quietly in the capacious sabha for a while. Suddenly the young princess saw the garland of lotuses that hung on a marble pillar, with incense and offerings set before it. She darted away from a group of indulgent courtiers and ran to that garland. Her eyes shone. Folding her small hands briefly to the fragrant thing, she plucked it off the pillar and draped it round her neck.

Drupada sprang to his feet. He shouted at his courtiers, “Fools! Couldn’t you have stopped her? Shikhandin, put that garland back, it is not for children to play with.”

But his daughter had grown very still. She had shut her eyes in some secret rapture when she draped the garland around herself. Now she opened them and her father was startled by what he saw there: such an adult look of triumph. Her sharp chin lifted up, she stared back at him. In the voice of Amba of old, Shikhandin said, “Drupada, I have been born as your daughter only to wear this garland.”

A memory flared up in the king’s mind—of a beautiful woman who years ago had spoken to him in that same voice. He dismissed the similarity as coincidence; but it would return to haunt him. Especially in his dreams, the tense, pale face of Amba, princess of Kasi, would coalesce with his daughter’s; and the eyes were the same, burning with their single purpose.

Once she had put it on, Shikhandin refused to be parted for a moment from Karttikeya’s garland. Drupada was unnerved by his dreams and at the thought of Bheeshma’s wrath. Finally, the king grew convinced Shikhandin really was Amba and had returned just to seek the revenge she was obsessed with. When she reached puberty, her father turned the princess out into exile.

She went cheerfully, her precious garland around her neck, as if exile was a welcome step on her way to her only goal: Bheeshma’s death. She retraced her steps of many years ago. As Shikhandin, Amba went back into the plumbless forest. The jungle probed her strange destiny with subtle feelers of flower and leaf, green vapors, animal eyes and intuition: all of which perceive time so differently from human senses. In its deep stillness, the forest had known she would return. Here Karttikeya had given her the garland she now wore as if it were part of her body. She sat in the same spot where Amba had once sat, so disturbed. Locked in padmasana, facing the east, she shut her eyes. Wrapped in the caress of the unearthly lotuses, she chanted Siva’s holy name ceaselessly and his son Karttikeya’s. The years slipped by, unnoticed. She was waiting for a sign, another boon.

One day, a yaksha of the race of tree-spirits, who pass through the twilights of the days between flesh and fleshlessness, was snared in a woodsman’s trap close to where Shikhandin sat in tapasya. She was returning from her evening bath in the nearby stream, when she heard his subliminal cries echoing in the ethereal zone between day and night. Coming to that panicstricken being’s help, she freed him with a mantra.

The grateful yaksha, Sthunakarna, stayed with her until dawn, when he could slip back into his other world through a crack in the legends of leaves and birds, between darkness and light. That night she told him the story of her two lives. The wild being, with leaf-skin and bright bird’s-eyes, was moved. He thought, surely, the hand of fate had snared him in the woodsman’s trap.

The yaksha said in his uncanny voice, “I have a boon for you, if you want it.”

Sensing a blessing from Siva, who is the Lord of the yakshas, Shikhandin readily agreed. An hour before dawn, in the night’s last yaama, with just a touch of his green fantastic fingers the yaksha transformed Shikhandin into a man. Amba, princess of Kasi, lost her womanhood and the princess Shikhandin became prince Shikhandi of the Panchalas.1

1. Another story is that Sthunakarna, the yaksha, exchanges his own sex with Shikhandin, becoming female himself.

And it came to pass that one day, years later, Shikhandi rode before Arjuna’s chariot in the war on the crack of the ages, the Mahabharata yuddha on the field of Kurukshetra. Coming face to face with great Bheeshma, that prince cut him down with the first arrow that pierced him. Bheeshma knew Shikhandi had once been Amba of Kasi, the woman he loved. He would not raise his bow even to defend himself against her. This was the only way that invincible kshatriya could be killed and the war would be lost if he did not die.