Book Extract : The Dharma Forest By Keerthik Sasidharan

Chapter 2 : A Night Full of Loves (Draupadi)

In the early afternoon, she began to fight sleep that seeped in, like some narcotic, and now threatened to overwhelm her hard-fought wakefulness. Her mind—which was these days often nostalgic for the effortlessness with which she traversed through life in her youth despite all the hardships—watched an archipelago of knots and aches wander through her middle aged body. But more than this weariness, it was the silence in the quarters that made her feel lonely, and lulled her into sleep. On the northern ends of her tent, beyond the gently sloped valley, after which the plains began, a war raged. Between her husbands, her brothers, her kinsmen on one side and their cousins and allies striking from the other. But in here, shrouded in this tent’s humid darkness, those righteous insanities of war seemed far away, even foreign. Outside, walls of heat rose from the earth, but within Draupadi’s quarters, a cool breeze slipped in and out, like an expert spy. Without the breeze, the horses and elephants would have no doubt suffered, but worse, at nights, the soldiers would have found it impossible to keep awake beyond the first cycle of sleep, which was necessary for any human body but obviously not enough for rest.

Among her five husbands, Bhima, to her own surprise, given his gargantuan appetites, was the lightest sleeper. But these days, the five of them barely slept, unless they had been sedated by an Ashwagandha and poppy seed paste that also helped medics to remove pierced arrowheads or to tear out shrapnel and splinters from exploding chariots that had lodged in them. On most nights, however, the desire to inflict revenge, to slip swords into the bellies of their cousins and their enablers, the fearful frenzy to out-think their enemies and the phantoms of unspeakable violence they witnessed sapped their bodies of its natural need for rest. Three nights ago, when Bhishma had decimated an entire regiment of Panchala horsemen—her own countrymen—she saw Arjuna pace hurriedly, promising all who would hear that, come sunrise, he would burn the world with his arrows. She had struggled to calm him. Like her other four husbands, he too found it difficult to lay still, far less sleep. Since warring at night had been prohibited, she had taken it upon herself to quell their furies and fears. Her world-conquering husbands, she realized, wanted somebody to listen to them, approve of their vanities, and so sought her assurance. Occasionally, she was tempted to think of them as no different than children. But that, she knew, was a mistake. Children sought to comprehend the world, while her husbands demanded that the world comprehend them.

It was Nakula, the fourth of the brothers who, as far as matters of self-validation were concerned, intrigued her the most since he needed her the least. He spent his nights walking among horses and camels. Surrounded by their brooding silence that occasionally came crashing thanks to a tail swatting flies or a guttural neigh, he wandered in the stables, feeling the animals and their presence. On the eight night of the War, when Bhishma was still raining death, Nakula said to her that after spending his days among the dead or those suffering in its shadows, he longed to be with the living. And then, in case she didn’t get the drift of his message, he reiterated with a didacticism that came easily to him, amid those who are truly alive, by which he meant the horses. On some nights, he spent his hours till dawn, cleaning and scrubbing the animals, cleansing their wounds and occasionally, just staring at them from afar in silence, as if hidden in their moves and twitches were signs from the worlds hereafter. Then, at dawn, after a dip in a nearby stream, he would head out to battle. Hungry, sleepless, and thus even more filled with a zeal to murder the enemy. She believed Nakula when he said that he could read meanings and portents curled inside the dimensions of the night’s shadows. He was not one to joke freely. On some nights, with the breeze from the north entering the stables, Nakula and thehorses lay under the night sky listening to the periodic hum of snores from the stable hands, grass cutters and pages, all of whom slept outside the stables. Nakula’s only bond with the world of humans during the War had been the lowest rungs of Kuru society, with whom he communed with an ease that surprised her. She was moved by his willful self-abnegation.

Three nights ago, she went looking for him and found him lying on an unfurled roll of hay, surrounded by the drone of tired horse breath. She thought him to be asleep and was, for a moment, relieved to see him resting. Both, man and beast, it seemed, had abandoned all thoughts of war and instead had sought a reprieve in a dreamless sleep. As she was about to tiptoe away, she heard him say, ‘The stars portend another blood bath tomorrow.’ She turned around and smiled. ‘I thought you were lucky enough to finally sleep.’ He ruefully nodded and continued, ‘There is plenty of room in here, if you are tired of your bed.’

‘Are you sure the horses won’t mind me sharing their space?’ She smiled mischievously and walked towards him, dressed in the attire of a farm hand, belying her stature as the putative Empress of the Aryan world, if—and only if—they won the War. But that hour of the night was not the one to think about the future. Since that conversation, much had happened, including the fall of Bhishma at the end of the tenth night, after which the outcome of the War was suddenly less predetermined in the minds of many than ever before. Confusion reigned as to who would take over the Kaurava army as the commander in Bhishma’s stead. On the Pandava sides, some thought it would be Karna, the charioteer’s son turned warrior, for he was the only one who could defeat Arjuna; yet others opined assuredly that as long as Drona, the master of arms, was alive, there could be none. Yet others bet on the idea of Salya of the Madra kingdom or the mighty Bhagadatta of Pragjyothisha— the son of the demon-conquistador Naraka—as the generalissimo of the Kaurava army. During their nightly meet in the Pandava camp,they argued about the possibilities that lay ahead in Duryodhana’s calculus; the five brothers—her husbands—sought her thoughts all the more keenly for only a small circle of insiders knew that she was more than just their wife.

(‘Excerpted’ with permission from Penguin Random House India)