SEVENTEEN
Kunti survived three years of anguish, every bit like a princess. Then, the planets in the heavens changed their positions and her life changed as well.
Kuntibhoja held a swayamvara for his daughter. At that gathering of the most eligible kshatriyas on earth, she chose dashing Pandu of Hastinapura to be her husband. She draped her garland of wildflowers around his neck, with a prayer in her heart that he would fill her womb with a hundred sons: so she could forget the child she had abandoned on the river. Kunti was Pandu's first wife and Madri, his second.
Because his brother Dhritarashtra, the nominal king, was blind, prince Pandu of Hastinapura was the virtual ruler of the Kurus. From his earliest boyhood, Pandu's natural vocation had been a soldier's. And when he was made Senapati, the Supreme Commander of the great Kuru legions, he found the perfect chance to give free rein to his martial genius. He took an army with him and ranged the length and breadth of Bharatavarsha.
Pandu conquered the Dasarnas, Kasi, Anga, Vanga and Kalinga. Magadha fell to him like a ripe fruit from a tree. When Chitrangada and Vichitraveerya had both died young, the cares of kingdom and the responsibility of raising his young nephews tied Bheeshma down to the palace. The world had said that the glory and the fortunes of the Kurus were waning. Pandu's triumphal march swiftly put paid to such speculation. Now they said this was the golden age of the Kuru kingdom, as no other time in the past. They also said that Pandu was the finest soldier of his day, his uncle Bheeshma had taught him well.
When the kingdoms around him were subdued to his satisfaction and the talk about the waning stars of the Kuru House was silenced, Pandu decided he owed himself and his wives the pleasure of a sojourn in the forest. Like his forefathers, the pale prince was a keen hunter and he went to the Himalayas with Kunti and Madri. There, on the southern slopes of that mountain range, the three of them spent the happiest, most enchanted weeks of their lives.
Those were perfect days to which, years later, Kunti would look back: to find strength in them and to remind her that life was not only a grim struggle. Those were the days when the forest folk mistook the three of them for a Deva and his two women come down from heaven to sport in the world. But fate was waiting in time's wings with a curse.
In that same forest on the Himalayan foothills lived a rishi and his wife. Between long abstinences, they were enjoying an interlude of passion. It was spring. All the forest was at love, so too the hermit couple. One day, the husband decided that ordinary lovemaking in their hut hardly satisfied him. The muni turned himself and his woman into two deer in season, a stag and a hind. Musky desire took them and he mounted her in an open glade. This mating was so exhilarating that for days they were happy to be rutting deer.
One evening as the forest prepared to receive the night, Pandu saw the lustful pair. He saw the stag with magnificent antlers straddling his mate. The prince was arrogant with his recent victories at arms and time was ready to humble him. In the heat of the hunt and quite forgetting the hunter's olden law that mating animals may never be made targets for arrows, Pandu shot the stag through his heart.
The creature fell with a bellow. Before Pandu's eyes the stag turned back into a man, the arrow sticking grotesquely from his heaving chest. His hind was also a woman again; by her devotion to him, she too lay dying in her husband's arms.
Blood bubbled at the rishi's lips. He said to Pandu, "You are a prince of the noblest house in the world. How could you do this?" His breath was stertorous and in his eyes was a legend of pain. "You saw, cruel Kshatriya, that we were at love. Yet you had the heart to kill me. How could you do this to the gentle deer of the forest?"
He lay breathless for a while. Then, with an effort that made his eyes roll up white, the rishi cursed Pandu, "The moment, terrible prince, you make love to a woman again, you will also die."
And with a sigh, the sage and his wife were gone, as if they had shared a single life. Pandu's roars echoed through the trees. That prince was the virtual ruler of the invincible Kurus; he had recently conquered most of Bharatavarsha. Now he was like a great tree in its prime that has been struck by lightning. Fate had nudged his carefree life into hell.
He ran back to Madri and Kunti. At first he couldn't speak, but stood panting before them, his eyes full of tears. At last, sobbing, Pandu told them what had happened. The three of them spent a night as long as a year, in dark silence.
At dawn, Pandu announced, "The world is no longer the place for me. I won't return to Hastinapura, but seek my detachment here in the forest. From now on, I must be a brahmachari."
He called the soldiers and ministers who had come hunting with him. He told them about the dying hermit's curse. He gave away all his possessions, sending detailed instructions for their disbursal through those dazed men. Pandu said, "Tell my mother, my brothers, my grandmother and, most of all, my uncle Bheeshma that I will never return to Hastinapura. Tell them Pandu has become a sannyasi."
Kunti and Madri had resolved to stay with their husband. They sent back their silks and ornaments to the city. And so, just when its star of fortune had seemed to be rising again, a curse darkened the destiny of the kingdom of the Kurus.
Hastinapura received the shocking news. It truly seemed that all the old sins of the Kuru ancestors were being visited on the present time. Ambalika was inconsolable. Satyavati retired into seclusion and offered incessant prayers to the Gods, who must still be wroth with her. As for Bheeshma, to all outward appearances he was calm; but privately, he railed against the long misfortune that had stalked him, ever since he came of age. It had cost him two brothers and now a brilliant nephew.
Bheeshma found himself at the helm of the kingdom once again and felt his heart must surely be made of stone. Any other man in his place would have succumbed and either lost his reason, killed himself or become a hermit from grief. But none of these recourses was for him. It appeared he was destined to go on forever, if need be, shouldering his sad burden alone; and only he himself knew how time had savaged him.
There was one person in the kingdom who was some support to Bheeshma, a young man who carried an old head on his youthful shoulders: his nephew Vidura. Of course Vidura could never be king; not only was he a maidservant's son, he was no warrior either.