Karna's Wife (10 page)

If Uruvi had not been so immersed in her love for Karna, she would have realized earlier that her contentious marriage had prompted many tongues to wag nastily. Noblewomen looked at her inquisitively wherever she went, handmaids glanced at her furtively as she passed by, and royal ladies put their heads together to discuss her behind her back. Most asserted that the marriage was a scandal, some thought it was a pity, others said it was an unpardonable disgrace.

‘She is a fool! But it’s too late to do anything now…’

‘She doesn’t know what she is up against. Someone ought to have knocked some wisdom into her. How did Queen Shubra allow the marriage to happen?’

‘There’s no bigger fool than a woman in love. When such a woman has made up her mind to make a laughing stock of herself and her family, there’s nothing stopping her.’

In time, the truth slowly seeped in and Uruvi knew would be treated as the wife of a pariah. It steadily dawned on her that all the ladies she knew were ignoring her, barely acknowledging her except for patronising nods. Queen Gandhari did not invite her for a formal post-wedding feast, while Yudhishthira’s wife, Devyani, was openly cold to her, not even glancing at her when they met. The aunts and uncles at whose homes she had been accustomed to lunches and family feasts also treated her with frosty disdain.

Initially, Uruvi was so happily centred in her own private heaven that she barely noticed the scornful glances that came her way from the royal ladies assembled at social occasions. Her appearance at these gatherings caused a certain awkwardness because of her new, low status but she was happily oblivious to it all. She was as affable as always but she soon saw that things were dreadfully amiss.

She was made cruelly conscious of her unpopularity and her fall from grace. Even when she was unmarried, royal princesses and noble ladies had secretly been wary of her, resenting her air of superiority and arrogance. But the reality was she had never been one of them, because she was more interested in art, literature and medicine than in idle gossip. And she would often make fun of them with her sharp wit, leaving them fuming with indignation.

The royal women had always misunderstood her. She was perceptive and effervescent, her warm, brown eyes shining with laughter often. While she spoke to people she didn’t like with a biting wit, barely concealing her scorn with a smile, she could chat amiably with the wives of soldiers, charioteers and visiting merchants.

Now her marriage to this unsuitable man provided them with just the suitable weapon to wound her. Now they seized the opportunity to look down on her as the wife of a wretched sutaputra. She was now the outsider, the inferior one, and they made sure she never forgot this. She was neither the Princess of Pukeya any more nor would she ever be accepted as the Queen of Anga.

At a family lunch that her mother hosted, Uruvi noticed many relatives did not attend and the few who were present, stared at her, giving her the cold shoulder. Not able to bear the embarrassment on her mother’s face, Uruvi rushed home quickly, promising herself she would never make her mother suffer such ignominy again. But she could not run away from the humiliation of such a life, and each snub forced her to recall her mother’s words of caution, warning her of how people would treat her after her marriage to Karna. She felt a strange stirring in her heart. It was bruised pride.

‘Now you will know who is your friend and who is a fake,’ her mother consoled her, saddened to see her daughter hurt and smarting. But her words were a gentle warning of what was to come. ‘You shall find, dear, that the world is full of two-faced people and phonies.’

And Uruvi was to discover a cruelly superficial world, which she had failed to recognise. She was incredulous when she did not find herself included in the hallowed guest list of Queen Vibhavari, her maternal aunt, for the gala Sankranti festival feast, when the regal dowager flaunted her impressive collection of glittering jewels and family heirlooms.

Uruvi’s reversal of fate and fortune meant social chastisement. ‘Friends’ like Princess Ruta and Princess Usha fast disappeared from her life like a whiff of smoke, leaving behind a distastefulness that was hard to dismiss. Uruvi could not quite get over the sudden impertinence of her old friend, Princess Gouri, who had turned out to be a spiteful gossip. By ingratiating herself with Uruvi in the hope that she would be introduced to the right people to achieve fame as a budding poet, Gouri had shown how she was manipulative and insincere. Her father had tried to warn her about this opportunistic girl, but Uruvi was hopelessly duped.

Gouri had pretended that she was very upset about the disgrace that had befallen King Vahusha and Queen Shubra due to Uruvi’s unprecedented marriage. ‘What a downright shame,’ she would say to people she met, fuelling the raging fire of controversy each time she found someone she could recount it to, garnished with spite. There was nothing that thrilled Gouri more than the misfortunes of her friends. Their unhappiness was her happiness. Their business was her business. Her other business was penning excruciatingly pedestrian poetry.

Uruvi knew she had to use the royal ladies as pawns in her new game of survival. Whenever she came across them, she walked up to them and laughed with them, putting on an act of cordiality. With a chuckle, Queen Shubra told herself that her daughter treated them as if she were tolerating fools. Her daughter was wonderfully capable of dissimulation and her act came easily to her.

It wasn’t really in Uruvi’s nature to look down on people, but she often caught herself thinking the royal ladies were abominably dull, without any intellectual interests that made life so fulfilling. Most were smug about their wealth and status, but capable only of mediocre thoughts. Though they were mothers, their intellectual level remained unfailingly stupid.

They read nothing that was worthwhile. They liked to talk more often about themselves or the latest piece of jewellery they had got for themselves. These pitiable women were devoured by petty jealousies and obsessed by pettier rivalries. They were malicious. Cushioned by wealth and power, they were pathetic in the smallness of their minds. What did it matter if they looked down on her now? Uruvi dismissed them in her mind, knowing that her acumen was far greater. When she smiled, she asserted herself as a winner. She was clever and beautiful and she had married the man she was in love with, something the preening ladies could not boast of—yet secretly envied her.

It was tiresome that she had to pretend to be kind to them. Most often, she was mischievously mocking since they did not deserve her attention anyway. She chatted with them brightly as if she did not have a care in the world and was contemptuously amusing while taking care to be pleasant, which irked them. She took a delight in observing that they resented her when she was so cloyingly nice to them, thinking that she was putting on airs or that she was poking fun at them. They were not wrong—she was.

‘Courage is very odd,’ King Vahusha told his wife gravely. ‘Any other person would have locked herself in her home to hide from this deliberately cold treatment and the unkind remarks. But not my Uruvi; she’s a lioness all right!’

The men were slightly more polite, but she did not fail to notice that they tried to cover their embarrassment by exaggerated courtesy. Bhishma Pitamaha was one of them. At first, Uruvi dreaded meeting him face to face, so she avoided Hastinapur’s palace as much as she could. Then one grey day, on an impulse, she went to meet him.

Bhishma Pitamaha raised his silver head as she entered the room. His eyes looked pained. For a few long minutes neither of them spoke. Uruvi wondered how she would begin the conversation. She was too uncomfortable to voice her thoughts as volubly as she otherwise would have.

‘I realize you are not too happy with what I have done,’ she began slowly, her voice soft and sad.

For a moment, Bhishma Pitamaha did not reply. Then he turned gently to look at her and smiled softly. ‘No, dear, I was not happy, but if you wished to marry Karna, you have my blessings.’

‘But you don’t approve of him, do you?’ she blurted out frantically. ‘Perhaps you couldn’t be expected to because Arjuna has always been your favourite. You have the same prejudice as the others have about him because he is a charioteer’s son. But Karna is an extraordinary man,’ she spoke quickly, her words tumbling over one another in impassioned heat. ‘You proclaimed him yourself as a formidable archer. He is generous. He is kind. He accepts others for what they are and he accepts himself as well. He makes no secret of the fact that he is a sutaputra and is not ashamed of it. He has not forsaken his family and is as devoted to them, even now as the King of Anga. I love him. Is it unnatural that I should have married him?’

‘It will only end up in you losing the distinction between right and wrong,’ the grand old monarch replied quietly. ‘One day, you will have to answer this question yourself—is Karna a bad man doing good things or is he a good man doing bad things? You will need to remove this confusion and know the difference between the good and the bad.’

Uruvi smiled slightly, but her eyes were grave. ‘Perhaps we make too much of the difference between one person and another. The best of us can be worse, and the worst of us can be good. Who can say?’

‘Are you persuading me to believe that white is black and black is white, dear?’ There was sincere affection for her in his voice.

‘No, sir. Karna is a warrior by his deeds but each time, whenever he and Arjuna were compared, Arjuna has won because of his noble birth and not because of his merits. Is
that
not so unfair, that it has blown up into a huge wrong?’

Bhishma’s reply was exceptionally blunt. ‘Have you ever wondered why such a fine young man as your husband joined up with the Kauravas?’ he questioned quietly. ‘He is one of them now—he is their heart and soul, their comrade, their brother. Yes, Duryodhana is an opportunist and found in Karna the one person who could counter Arjuna. Besides which, he has enough charisma to woo over anyone if he decides to do so.’

‘His generosity might be selfish, but he was the only one who stepped forward to help Karna. The Pandavas never did,’ Uruvi reminded the veteran warrior, her voice sharpening. ‘Neither did Guru Dronacharya and Kripacharya. Or you,’ she dared to say, looking at him accusingly. ‘Did you reprimand Bhima when he insulted and humiliated Karna by calling him a man of low birth, when what really mattered was the deed, the merit, and not the birth? If you had intervened, Karna probably would not have been with the Kauravas at all!’ she charged, trying to temper her accusation with some politeness.

The old man remained undaunted by her words. ‘The fact is that Karna was drawn to Duryodhana, irrespective of Duryodhana’s charisma as a leader and his generous gesture,’ he explained to her. ‘Karna’s greatest hunger at that time of the archery contest, and, my dear, remember this—a hunger that shall remain forever in him—is for acceptance, for social recognition. This young lad with every sign of aristocracy in him, and signs of a divine birth with his kavach, his natural armour and his kundals, the earrings that he seems to have been born with, knows that he is not the son of his adoptive parents. He guesses that his parents are high-born, which is also why he is so arrogant. Keep him away from evil company. A noble and generous warrior like Karna will suffer grievously because of the company he keeps—Shakuni, Duryodhana and Dushasana. Are they the kind of friends a wise man would have? How do you decide what is good and bad? The one who sees the bad in what is good is a bad man. Karna is a good man, but he sees good even in what is bad. His seeing it as good doesn’t make the bad good, but makes his goodness look bad. Being constantly with Duryodhana, I fear, has made Karna vain and blind to evil too.’

‘And Arjuna is not vain?’ Uruvi flashed. ‘Arjuna is full of conceit and self-importance. He cannot believe that anyone can be better than him—but Karna is. So he hates him. Being your favourite, as well as Guru Dronacharya’s and Krishna’s, Arjuna has always been privileged as the blue-eyed boy whom everyone loves. Unfortunately for all of you, I don’t love this Prince Perfect. He may be brave, dutiful, good and wise, yes, but he is weak. If not for Krishna, who is he? You and many others would have preferred—and had planned accordingly—that I marry Arjuna. I did not heed your wishes and for that disobedience, I have come here to apologise.’

‘But you are not sorry for what you have done.’ There was no reproach in Bhishma’s voice.

‘No, I am not. But I am sorry for hurting the people I love most with my decisions and actions.’

‘You did what you had to,’ he sighed, and suddenly looked old and painfully tired. ‘And you have my blessings. Just a word of caution, child. Karna is valiant and righteous. So is Arjuna. But Karna is on the side of evil and Arjuna is on the side of truth. Karna can never win against him.’

Uruvi kept silent as she silently agreed with the old man. ‘True,’ she murmured. ‘But you cannot deny Karna is a superior archer than Arjuna.’

‘Individual skill is only a part. Victory in battle is a whole. The part, however great, cannot win against the whole. Remember this, my child, and make Karna understand this. Or else he will move towards doom…’

Uruvi did not hear the words he muttered under his breath, ‘… and eventually, so will you.’