Pregnant King Read online

  ‘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.’

  procrastination

  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.

  ‘Let us at least go on a hunt together. I need to spend some time with my son. He must know who I am,’ Yuvanashva had once requested Simantini.