Pregnant King Read online

  ‘King or mother?’

  ‘I am king. I am also mother.’

  ‘No. Mothers cannot be kings. If Shilavati cannot be king, Yuvanashva cannot be mother.’

  Yuvanashva was silent.

  ‘My lord, what use is a wife if she cannot be mother. Let me be what I was brought here for. Your son’s mother. I will love him as my own. You stay king.’

  ‘He is mine. I gave birth to him. You are nothing,’ said Yuvanashva angrily.

  Simantini struck back. She had thought about this long and hard. She spoke with confidence, ‘To be a mother you must be a woman. Are you saying you are a woman, Arya? If you are a woman you have no right to sit on the throne.’

  Yuvanashva said, ‘I will not let you take my son away from me.’

  ‘Either your son or your crown. Choose what you wish to give up.’

  ‘I can see you have been talking to my mother. She has made you a pawn in her game to get back at me.’

  ‘She is right.’

  ‘She is vicious and vindictive. She is using you.’

  Simantini felt sorry for her husband. Her voice softened, ‘It is for your own good, Arya, that I do this. And for the good of our family. The world must not know that you are an aberration. They will cast you into the same pyre into which you cast those two boys. I will not let them do that to you. Let the world see you as it wants to see you. A great king, with three wives and two sons. Virile and strong and obedient. The flame of the Turuvasu clan. Be a father. Leave motherhood to me. I am your wife. Your chief queen. You owe me that.’

  He did.

  ‘And this scar? Do you want to deny the truth of this scar?’ asked Yuvanashva, parting his dhoti, revealing the gash of childbirth on his left inner thigh.

  ‘Everybody knows what that is,’ said Simantini, turning away, with Mandhata in her arms. ‘A hunting accident, where you were gored by a great boar’s tusks.’

  Outside, the crows cheered. What a brilliant lie! Order had been restored. The family tree was in full bloom. Its honour intact.

  Book Seven

  no one turns up

  Sixteen years after the carnage of Kuru-kshetra, a young girl in the city of Panchala felt blood seeping between her thighs for the first time in her life.

  ‘Devi,’ cried her handmaiden addressing the girl’s mother, ‘It has finally happened. The princess has bloomed.’

  Hiranyavarni, the widow queen of Panchala, heaved a sigh of relief: it was three years overdue. Turning to Soudamini, her now toothless mother-in-law, she said, ‘Now, no one will doubt your son’s masculinity. The forefathers will welcome my husband into the land of the dead.’

  The girl’s name was Amba. Born ten moons after the battle of Kuru-kshetra, three moons after Mandhata, she was the last of the Yagnasenis, daughter of Drupada’s eldest son, Shikhandi.

  A messenger rushed to Hastina-puri whose king, Yudhishtira, had served as Panchala’s guardian since Drupada and his sons met with their death in Kurukshetra. ‘The daughter is a true woman,’ he said. ‘So the father must have been a man.’

  Draupadi, who had never doubted this, wept on receiving the news. ‘If only he was alive to hear this.’ she told Yudhishtira.

  A flood of memories gushed into the palace of the Pandavas. The dreadful dawn following the night of victory, the headless bodies of Draupadi’s two brothers and her five sons, and Ashwatthama, son of Drona, laughing hysterically, holding their seven heads, describing in gory detail how he slipped into the Pandava camp at night, and slit the throats of all the warriors as they slept, breaking every code of decency.

  ‘What decency are you talking about,’ Ashwatthama had barked when the Pandavas finally caught up with him. ‘You broke each and every rule of war in order to secure victory. Where was decency when Yudhishtira lied to my father, told him I was dead, breaking his heart and making him throw down his weapons? My father killed Drupada fairly, in keeping with the rules of battle, but Drupada’s son struck him down after he had laid down his weapons. He was unarmed, Yudhishtira, and yet you let Dhristadhyumna chop his head off. Was that appropriate? Was that dharma? I don’t regret killing Dhristadhyumna as he slept. I wanted to kill the five of you too but I killed your sons instead. That was a mistake. I regret that. They were children, the youngest barely sixteen. I also regret killing Shikhandi. She was a woman after all.’

  ‘Cut his tongue out, Arya,’ Draupadi had screamed. ‘Is it not enough that he killed my brother? Now he calls him a woman. Insults him even in death. Cut his tongue out, break his bones, throw him to the dogs.’

  Realizing there was still an opportunity to make Draupadi cry, the vengeful Ashwatthama had retorted, ‘Shikhandi was a woman. So what if Krishna took him into the battlefield. Even Bhisma lowered his bow out of decency. Your father, you, your husbands, can pretend as much as you want. But that does not change facts. Your perverted father got her married to a woman. Such adharma. He deserved to die. In fact, now that I think of it, I don’t think killing Shikhandi was wrong. To kill a woman who pretends to be a man is dharma indeed.’

  Yudhishtira had wanted to rip Ashwatthama’s tongue out himself. But he had restrained himself. ‘Forgive him,’ he had said. ‘That will be his worst punishment. He wants to die. So he provokes us. But let us not give him that satisfaction. Let him suffer the memories of his crimes for the rest of his life. Wherever he goes, people will say, “There goes the son of Drona, a Brahmana, who gave up his varna to become king. There goes the son of Drona, child-killer, woman-killer.”’

  Years had not healed the deep wounds of that night. Wiping her tears, Draupadi told her husbands, ‘I want my niece’s swayamvara to be the grandest in Ila-vrita.’

  How could Yudhishtira say no? It had made his wife smile. No expense was therefore spared. Emissaries were sent to each and every kingdom along the banks of the Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati, inviting worthy kings and princes to Panchala so that Amba could select a Gandharva from amongst them.

  It had been a long time since Panchala had seen a royal wedding. The whole city came alive, like the red earth in summer yearning for the rain. The palace walls were painted with bright images of nymphs, gods and sages. The streets were watered. Flags were hoisted atop every house. Gates were decorated with flower garlands. Musicians and dancers and storytellers were invited to entertain the guests. Pavilions were set up on the many roads that led to the city where the royal entourages could rest and where their horses and elephants and cows could be watered. Yudhishtira personally oversaw all the arrangements to the satisfaction of Draupadi and to the relief of Hiranyavarni.

  Young Kshatriya boys climbed the topmost beam of the city gates eager to identify the arriving princes by their fluttering banners. They waited, and waited, and waited. Days passed. The flowers withered and the roads dried up. But not a single banner could be spotted. For not a single prince in all of Ila-vrita had accepted the invitation to Amba’s swayamvara.

  mandhata rejects amba

  Mandhata too had received an invitation. He too had turned it down.

  A spitting image of Yuvanashva, Mandhata was as handsome as his father had been when he was sixteen, with broad shoulders, slim waist, long muscular arms and thick long hair reaching down to his waist. His eyes were as piercing and his lips as full. In the hermitage of his teacher, when he moved around wearing nothing but a loin cloth, his brown body covered with sweat glistened like polished bronze in the sunlight. And when he entered the river one could almost hear the Apsaras gasp.

  Vipula had informed Yuvanashva that the young prince was ready to step out of brahmacharya-ashrama and step into grihastha-ashrama. Yuvanashva was sure that if his son went to Panchala, he would surely become Amba’s Gandharva. Mandhata’s decision not to go took him by surprise.

  ‘Why did you not go?’ asked Yuvanashva.

  ‘Because she is Shikhandi’s daughter,’ replied Mandhata.

  ‘So?’

  ‘How can anybody accept as his bride a woman whose father was