SIXTEEN
A month passed and Kunti had almost forgotten about Durvasa and his mantra. Her youth was flowering, her body filling out into womanhood. Warm new yearnings awoke in her. One day, fate took a dramatic hand in her young life.
It was spring and dawn. Kunti had just woken up. The morning sun crept over the horizon and poured in through her window in a cascade of crimson and gold. She rose and sat on the edge of her bed, so she was drenched in that first light. Under her window, the river lapped at the palace walls, she also touched awake by the livid star. Kunti thought how wonderful it must be to be a naked river, embraced each dawn by a replenished sun. Every night must be like a death and each morning like a new birth: ecstatic! The birds in the trees sang as they have done every sunrise since there was a world.
Kunti felt her youth inflamed by the sheer magic of the hour. Like the river, she felt intimately caressed by the sun. She quivered with sensations she was certain were quite improper and all the more delicious for being so. She felt as if burning Surya Deva held her in incandescent arms.
Kunti hardly knew how, but she folded her hands like a lotus bud and whispered Durvasa's mantra.
As the mystic words spilled from her lips, there was the strangest flash of light. Something extraordinary was happening to the stream of sun's rays that flowed in through her window. They had become intolerably bright and shone with a hundred colors. Kunti shut her eyes in terror. What had she done? Then she heard it, a low, but quite distinct sound: there was someone else in the room. Could it be…?
Her eyes flew open and she cried out—standing not five feet from her was a dazzling being whose body was a cool fire and his hair wavy flames. Kunti breathed, "Durvasa's mantra worked! I called and you came." Almost as if she was talking to herself and he was just a dream. "Oh, how splendid you are, Surya Deva!"
He stood there, so implacable, his light blotting out the rest of the world. It was as if just she and he were alone together in a place that was not only her bedchamber, but also another world. She saw his eyes roving over her with a far from innocent look.
He, the God, said slowly, "What do you want from me?"
She knew what she wanted from him and wouldn't dare admit it. She mumbled falsely, "Why, nothing. I saw you rising and you set the river alight and the birds all sang to you. I thought I would like you to come to me. So I said the mantra and here you are."
"The Devas do not appear before mortals for their mere fancy. We come only when a great purpose of fate is to be fulfilled."
Kunti bit her lip and whispered, "Deva, what do you want from me?"
"Young woman, I want you."
"Oh! How can you even think such a thing?"
But his eyes were grave and mocking. With a sinking feeling, she knew he would not relent. The cool Sun said, "The rishi taught you a mantra for childbearing. Perhaps he did not say?"
The Sun God clicked his tongue and shook his head of spectral flames.
"But what will the world say if you give me a child? What will my poor father say? It will kill him if he knows I am not a virgin." Tears rolled down her face in a slow procession.
It is told that even the Sun, who has burned in the sky since before earth was made and is the witness of the world, lost his heart to young Kunti. He put his arms around her and unearthly warmth surged through her body, calming her. He stroked her hair and her face. Soon she began to forget all her fears; instead, she was on soft fire.
He assured her, "Our child will be born immediately and you will feel no pain. You will still be a virgin and no one will ever know what happened between you and me."
He was invading her with his delirious warmth. Ripples of excitement flowed from some core of her that she had never known existed. She heard his assurances and knew he would not lie. Young Kunti gave a moan of sheer lust. She flung her slender arms round his neck and kissed him feverishly. That kiss coursed such dreams through her heart, dreams with the power of sun-flares. She hardly knew when he lifted her nightgown over her head. She did not hear herself cry out, as the God fastened his lips to her breast.
Kunti was borne far from herself, far from the earth. With him beside her, she flew in a burning chariot of the sky, through visionary mandalas. And made a woman by the Sun himself, she draped her legs around his neck like a wild-flower garland and a hundred tumults shook her.
When he had finished and rose away from her, she smiled gratefully at him.
"We are in another world and no time passes on earth," said the God.
He placed his hand on her flat, young girl's belly. When she looked down, she saw her body there was full of light. "My son grows in you," breathed Surya Deva. The child in her grew swifter than time. In moments, with just a quavering of her loins, he was born. The father held the glorious infant in his arms.
"Look, he wears kavacha and kundala." It was true, their baby was born wearing golden armor and earrings. Already, the little one looked like his luculent sire.
The Deva went on, in wistful prophecy, "He will be the greatest archer on earth. He will be kind and generous to a fault, but proud and sensitive as well, because he is born to a twisted destiny. Yet, his fame will live in the world as long as the sun and the moon are in the sky."
Surya handed the child to its mother and vanished from her room as abruptly as he had come. Kunti tried her best to raise a spark of motherhood, but she was too young to feel maternal toward her fabulous child. The whole morning seemed like a dream, except for the baby she cradled in her arms, his long eyes still shut fast in the slumber of infancy.
Now that her supernal lover had gone, shame and fear returned sharply. The princess dreaded to think what would happen if the child was discovered. True, before he went she felt the God restoring her virginity. But how would she explain the infant with the golden armor and earrings?
She crossed to the window, thinking even to be rid of the child by flinging him out. She felt no twinge of anything maternal, only panic. Under her window, the river flowed as calmly as ever. As she stood there with the unwanted infant in her arms an idea stole over the princess Kunti, rather as the sun had.
In a fever of haste, she pulled a square of silk from among her clothes and swaddled her baby in it as securely as she could. From the next room, she fetched a sandalwood box in which she had received a gift the previous day. She set him down in it, making him cozy by stuffing its sides with more cloth. She fetched a long cloak, which she put on.
Hiding the box under the cloak, Kunti stole out of her apartment. Nodding perfunctorily to the servants she saw along the passage that wound down to the level of the river, she strode along. At last, with a whimper of relief, she came out through a side-door into the sunlit day. This was her private garden, at the bottom of which the river flowed through the palace grounds. She saw there was no one about.
Kunti broke into a run and reached the bank of the river. Under a tree that grew out over the water, she turned to make sure she was unobserved. Kneeling quickly at the current's edge, she was about to float the little box on the murmuring flow, when her sun-child opened his eyes and gazed up at his mother. He gurgled in his little throat and smiled at her. She bent helplessly to kiss him and now tears streamed down her cheeks. Kunti floated the wooden box down the river.
She raised her eyes to the sky. She folded her hands to the burning Deva and cried, "Watch over our son, let no evil befall him."
Young Kunti wept beside the river. As he floated out of her life, bobbing upon the bland current, she blessed her baby: "May all your paths be auspicious. May the lord of rivers guard you; may the lord of the air watch over you; may all the Gods protect you. And when I see you again one day, let me know you by your golden kavacha and kundala."
She sobbed after him, "How fortunate she will be who finds you and raises you. But oh, my son, I am not that woman."
The box with its precious cargo grew smaller; soon it was only a dark speck on the water. She cried after it, "God bless you, my child, God bless you!"
Her son was lost in the distances of the river. She stood gazing after him for a long time before she turned back to her father's palace. In a single incredible hour, her life had been transformed forever.
Everyone said a new maturity had come over the princess Kunti; it was time she married. She smiled and asked innocently how she, who lived such a cloistered life in her father's house, could mature so suddenly. But at nights when she slept and whenever she was alone, an unvarying image haunted her dreams and her solitude. She saw a wooden box floating away from her. She saw the small, brilliant face of him who lay in that box and Kunti thought she would go mad with guilt.