Draupadi and Satyabhama

When Krishna came to visit the exiled Pandavas in the Kamyaka forest, he brought his wife Satyabhama, proud and quick-tongued, the beloved daughter of Satrajit. While the men sat together over the endless business of grief and war, the two women drew apart to talk as old friends do, sitting at the door of a leaf-thatched hut: the queen of golden Dwaraka in her silks, and the empress of Indraprastha in bark cloth, her hair unbound since the day of the dice.

They had known each other in the great days. Satyabhama looked at her friend, dispossessed and serving five husbands in a forest, and saw what everyone saw and no one understood: the five most formidable men alive were devoted to this woman past all reason.

So Satyabhama asked. "Tell me your secret, Draupadi. The sons of Pandu are young, mighty, and beautiful, and they obey you like tame deer. They never anger with you, they watch your face for wishes. Is it a vow? A drug? A mantra? Some herb gathered at the dark of the moon, some rite the rest of us were never taught? Tell me the spell, friend, and I will use it on Krishna."

She said it laughing, but under the laughter she meant at least half of it, as we always do.

Draupadi did not laugh. "You are asking me the ways of wicked women," she said, and the words were sharp because the subject deserved sharpness. "Spells and potions are how the faithless hold a man: through his food, through whispered rites, through drugs in his drink. A husband who learns of it never trusts his wife again, and he is right not to, for a woman who will dose a man will do worse. That road ends with fear in the house where love should be. No. I hold my husbands by a harder discipline than any spell, and I will tell you the whole of it, and you will see there is no shortcut hiding in it anywhere."

"I serve the sons of Pandu and their moods without ego and without deceit," she said. "I rise before every one of them and sleep after every one of them. I do not eat before my husbands have eaten, I do not bathe in comfort while they are unbathed, I do not sit idle while they stand in need. When Yudhishthira comes in from anything, I meet him with a seat and water and a face that is glad to see him, and not with complaints saved up all day. I keep from speaking ill of anyone to them. I do not laugh without cause, I do not linger at the gate, I do not keep the company of women whose counsel is poison. I never repeat outside the house a word said inside it.

"And I study them, Satyabhama. That is the whole mantra, if you must have one. I know what each of my five loves and dreads and hungers for, better than he knows himself, and I am there with it before he asks. They read my care in a thousand small acts a day, and it binds them closer than beauty ever bound a man, because beauty they can see anywhere, and being known they can find only with me."

"And do not think this is a forest wife's small housekeeping," she went on, and for a moment the bark cloth was invisible and the empress showed through. "In Indraprastha I ran the household of the greatest court on earth. I knew by name the work of thousands of serving men and maids, of the cowherds and the shepherds of the royal herds. I alone knew the whole of Yudhishthira's treasury, what came in and what went out, to the last measure. The kitchens that fed eight thousand Brahmins every day off gold plates ran to my order. The whole inner state of that empire passed through my two hands, and I carried it and gave up sleep for it and never once handed the weight to anyone else. My husbands ruled the world in the open. I ruled the thing they came home to. That too is how you hold five kings: be indispensable to the kingdom as well as to the bed."

"So there is the sorcery," Draupadi finished, gently now. "Attention, service, self-command, and no rival anywhere in my heart. Set aside pride with your husband and set aside servility too; be neither his worshipper nor his petitioner but his other self. Adorn yourself for him, keep his house as if it were your body, know his people, guard his counsel, and let him find in you a friend whose loyalty has no seam. Do this, and you will need no herb. A man may be argued out of a spell. No man was ever argued out of being loved well."

Satyabhama embraced her, no longer laughing, and asked pardon for the jest about drugs, and Draupadi gave it with the first smile of the conversation. Then Krishna's chariot was ready, and Satyabhama climbed up beside her husband and looked back at the woman in bark cloth standing among five exiled kings as a queen stands among courtiers.

She carried the counsel home to golden Dwaraka, and the epic, which forgets nothing, kept it too: a conversation at a hut door between two friends, preserved beside the battles as if the composers knew that more lives would be governed by this teaching than by all the celestial weapons in the war.