ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother’s kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg traveling down an ostrich’s neck.
A traveling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realized that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons—the Pandavas—poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It, is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.
They are your brothers. Your own flesh and blood. Promise me that you will not go to war against them. Promise me that.
Karna the Warrior could not make that promise, for if he did, he would have to revoke another one. Tomorrow he would go to war, and his enemies would be the Pandavas. They were the ones, Arjuna in particular, who had publicly reviled him for being a lowly charioteer’s son. And it was Duryodhana, the eldest of the one hundred Kaurava brothers, that came to his rescue by gifting him a kingdom of his own. Karna, in return, had pledged Duryodhana eternal fealty.
But Karna the Generous could not refuse his mother what she asked of him. So he modified the promise. Equivocated. Made a small adjustment, took a somewhat altered oath.
I promise you this, Karna said to Kunti. You will always have five sons. Yudhishtra I will not harm. Bhima will not die by my band. The twins—Nakula and Sahadeva—will go untouched by me. But Arjuna—him I will make no promises about. I will kill him, or he will kill me. One of us will die.
Something altered in the air. And Rahel knew that Estha had come.
She didn’t turn her head, but a glow spread inside her. He’s come, she thought. He’s here. With me.
Estha settled against a distant pillar and they sat through the performance like this, separated by the breadth of the kuthambalam, but joined by a story. And the memory of another mother.
The air grew warmer. Less damp.
Perhaps that evening had been a particularly bad one in the Heart of Darkness. In Ayemenem the men danced as though they couldn’t stop. Like children in a warm house sheltering from a storm. Refusing to emerge and acknowledge the weather. The wind and thunder. The rats racing across the ruined landscape with dollar signs in their eyes. The world crashing around them.
They emerged from one story only to delve deep into another. From Karna Shabadam—Karna’s Oath—to Duryodhana Vadbam—the Death of Duryodhana and his brother Dushasana.
It was almost four in the morning when Bhima hunted down vile Dushasana. The man who had tried to publicly undress the Pandavas’ wife, Draupadi, after the Kauravas had won her in a game of dice. Draupadi (strangely angry only with the men that won her, not the ones that staked her) has sworn that she will never tie up her hair until it is washed in Dushasana’s blood. Bhima has vowed to avenge her honor.
Bhima cornered Dushasana in a battlefield already strewn with corpses. For an hour they fenced with each other. Traded insults. Listed all the wrongs that each had done the other. When the light from the brass lamp began to flicker and die, they called a truce. Bhima poured the oil, Dushasana cleaned the charred wick. Then they went back to war. Their breathless battle spilled out of the kuthambalam and spun around the temple. They chased each other across the compound, twirling their papier-macha maces. Two men in ballooning skirts and balding velvet blouses, vaulting over littered moons and mounds of dung, circling around the hulk of a sleeping elephant. Dushasana full of bravado one minute. Cringing the next. Bhima toying with him. Both stoned.
The sky was a rose bowl. The gray, elephant-shaped Hole in the Universe agitated in his sleep, then slept again. Dawn was just breaking when the brute in Bhima stirred. The drums beat louder, but the air grew quiet and full of menace.
In the early morning light, Esthappen and Rahel watched Bhima fulfill his vow to Draupadi. He clubbed Dushasana to the floor. He pursued every feeble tremor in the dying body with his mace, hammering at it until it was stilled. An ironsmith flattening a sheet of recalcitrant metal. Systematically smoothing every pit and bulge. He continued to kill him long after he was dead. Then, with his bare hands, he tore the body open. He ripped its innards out and stooped to lap blood straight from the bowl of the torn carcass, his crazed eyes peeping over the rim, glittering with rage and hate and mad fulfillment. Gurgling blood bubbles pale pink between his teeth. Dribbling down his painted face, his neck and chin. When he had drunk enough, he stood up, bloody intestines draped around his neck like a scarf and went to find Draupadi and bathe her hair in fresh blood. He still had about him the aura of rage that even murder cannot quell.
There was madness there that morning. Under the rose bowl. It was no performance. Esthappen and Rahel recognized it. They had seen its work before. Another morning. Another stage. Another kind of frenzy (with millipedes on the soles of its shoes). The brutal extravagance of this matched by the savage economy of that.
They sat there, Quietness and Emptiness, frozen two-egg fossils, with hornbumps that hadn’t grown into horns. Separated by the breadth of a kuthambalam. Trapped in the bog of a story that was and wasn’t theirs. That had set out with the semblance of structure and order, then bolted like a frightened horse into anarchy.
Kochu Thomban woke and delicately cracked open his morning coconut.
The Kathakali Men took off their makeup and went home to beat their wives. Even Kunti, the soft one with breasts.
Outside and around, the little town masquerading as a village stirred and came to life. An old man woke and staggered to the stove to warm his peppered coconut oil.
Comrade Pillai. Ayemenem’s egg-breaker and professional omeletteer.
Oddly enough, it was he who had introduced the twins to kathakali. Against Baby Kochamma’s better judgment, it was he who took them, along with Lenin, for all-night performances at the temple, and sat up with them till dawn, explaining the language and gesture of kathakali. Aged six, they had sat with him through this very story. It was he who had introduced them to Raudra Bhima—crazed, bloodthirsty Bhima in search of death and vengeance. He is searching fir the beast that lives in him, Comrade Pillai had told them—frightened, wide-eyed children—when the ordinarily good-natured Bhima began to bay and snarl.
Which beast in particular Comrade Pillai didn’t say. Searching for the Man who lives in him was perhaps what he really meant, because certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.
The rose bowl dulled and sent down a warm gray drizzle. As Estha and Rahel stepped through the temple gateway, Comrade K. N. M. Pillai stepped in, slick from his oil bath. He had sandalwood paste on his forehead. Raindrops stood out on his oiled skin like studs. In his cupped palms he carried a small heap of fresh jasmine.
“Oho!” he said in his piping voice. “You are here! So still you are interested in your Indian culture? Goodgood. Very good.”
The twins, not rude, not polite, said nothing. They walked home together. He and She. We and Us.
Chapter 13.
The Pessimist and the Optimist
Chacko had moved out of his room and would sleep in Pappachi’s study so that Sophie Mol and Margaret Kochamma could have his room. It was a small room, with a window that overlooked the dwindling, somewhat neglected rubber plantation that Reverend E. John Ipe had bought from a neighbor. One door connected it to the main house and another (the separate entrance that Mammachi had installed for Chacko to pursue his “Men’s Needs” discreetly) led directly out onto the side mittam.
Sophie Mol lay asleep on a little camp cot that had been made up for her next to the big bed. The drone of the slow ceiling fan filled her head. Bluegrayblue eyes snapped open.
