Kunti's Blessing

Vaisampayana said that after the alliance was made, king Drupada had all his fears dispelled.

It is worth pausing on the word fears, because Drupada had carried a great many of them for a long time. He had been beaten in war by Drona and had lost half his kingdom to a man who had once been his friend. He had gone to the forest and paid Brahmanas to give him a son who could kill that man. He had built a bow that nobody could bend and set a mark that nobody could hit, and he had done it in the hope of drawing out one particular archer who was believed to be dead. Every arrangement of his later life had been made by a frightened man.

And now the archer was in his house, married to his daughter, along with four brothers and their mother, and the fear was simply gone. Vaisampayana puts it as strongly as it can be put: the monarch no longer stood in fear even of the gods.

The weddings were over. They had taken five days, one prince a day in order of birth, Yudhishthira first at Vyasa's word because the moon had entered the constellation Pushya, then Bhima, then Arjuna, then Nakula, then Sahadeva, each led round the fire by the priest Dhaumya. Drupada had given away a hundred cars with golden standards and a hundred elephants and a hundred serving women, making the sacred fire the witness of every gift. The palace yard was still strewn with lotuses and lilies from the ceremony, and the troops were still drawn up in lines along it, and the whole building, festooned with diamonds and precious stones, looked like the sky with the stars out.

What happened next happened indoors, among the women of the household, and the epic slows down to record it.

The ladies of the illustrious Drupada's household came to Kunti.

They approached her and introduced themselves unto her, mentioning their respective names, and worshipped her feet with heads touching the ground.

That is the whole of the account, and every part of it is deliberate. These were the queens and the kinswomen of a great king in his own capital, in a palace they had lived in all their lives, and the woman they were bowing to had arrived in that city on foot, in the dress of a Brahmana widow, and had been living in the back room of a potter's house with her five sons begging their food in the streets. Nobody in Kampilya had known who she was a fortnight earlier. Now the household filed past her one at a time, each woman saying her own name aloud so that the mother of the bridegrooms would know it, and put her forehead on the floor.

Then Krishna came to her. That is the bride's other name, the one the text uses most often, the dark one, Drupada's daughter who had been born out of the sacrificial fire full-grown.

She was attired in red silk, and her wrists were still encircled with the auspicious thread that had been tied there for the wedding and was not yet taken off. She saluted her mother-in-law with reverence and then stood in front of her contentedly, with joined palms, and waited.

A great deal had been asked of this girl in a very short time. She had been won at a self-choice by a man she could not name, taken to a potter's house, and given by a word spoken through a doorway to five husbands instead of one, and the arrangement had been argued over in her own father's hall by her father and her brother and a sage and the men themselves, without much reference to her. She had said nothing throughout. She said nothing now.

Pritha looked at her daughter-in-law, endued with great beauty and every auspicious mark, possessed of a sweet disposition and good character, and out of affection she began to bless her.

The blessing begins with a list of seven women, and Kunti names each one with her husband, so that Draupadi is being handed seven separate patterns of what a wife can be.

"Be thou unto thy husband as Sachi unto Indra."

Sachi is the queen of the king of the gods, the consort of the lord of the thunderbolt, and to be named first in such a list is to be told that you are marrying into the highest household there is.

"As Swaha unto Vibhavasu."

Vibhavasu is fire. Swaha is his wife, and her name is the word that every offering is thrown into the flame with, so that no sacrifice anywhere in the world is complete unless a wife's name is spoken at the end of it.

"As Rohini unto Soma."

Soma is the moon. Rohini is the star he loves best of all his wives, and any night sky will show you which one she is, because he is never far from her.

"As Damayanti unto Nala."

That is the only mortal pair in the list, and Kunti has put it in the middle on purpose. Damayanti followed Nala into exile, and he abandoned her asleep in a forest at night, cutting away half her single garment to cover himself, and she went on searching for him through the wilderness and did not stop and did not blame him, and got him back.

"As Bhadra unto Vaisravana."

Vaisravana is Kubera, the lord of wealth and the keeper of the treasures of the world, and Bhadra is his queen. Prosperity, in other words, and a house with something in it.

"As Arundhati unto Vasishtha."

Arundhati is the wife of the great rishi, and she is the small star that people are shown beside the seven of the Great Bear on their own wedding night, the standard of constancy that the sky itself keeps on display.

"As Lakshmi unto Narayana."

And there the list ends, with the goddess of fortune and the god who holds the universe, because a woman is not only a companion to a house. She is the prosperity of it. Take her away and there is nothing there.

Seven marriages, and not one of them easy, and every one of them a marriage that held.

From the sky the blessing comes down to the household, and what Kunti asks for next is ordinary and specific.

"O amiable one, be thou the mother of long-lived and heroic children, and possessed of everything that can make thee happy. Let luck and prosperity ever wait on thee."

Long-lived comes before heroic, and a woman who had buried a husband and had watched a house burnt down over her sons' heads would have put it in that order deliberately.

"Wait thou ever on husbands engaged in the performance of grand sacrifices. Be thou devoted to thy husbands."

The plural is used without comment, in the middle of a blessing, by the woman whose one careless sentence through a doorway had made the plural necessary. Kunti does not apologise for it here and does not explain it. She simply speaks of Draupadi's husbands the way she would have spoken of a husband, and by doing so she settles the matter inside the family for good.

Then the longest clause of the whole blessing, and the one that has the most work in it.

"And let thy days be ever passed in duly entertaining and reverencing guests and strangers arrived at thy abode, and the pious and the old; children and superiors."

Four groups of people, and they are worth separating out, because Kunti is describing an entire day. Guests and strangers who arrive at the door, whoever they are, invited or not, known or unknown. The pious and the old, who must be reverenced rather than merely fed. Children, who cannot repay anything. And superiors, elders and teachers and the husbands' own kin, who must be honoured in the correct forms.

That is the queenship being offered. Not the ornaments and not the throne, which come in the next breath, but the duty of standing at the door of a house all day and letting nobody go away empty. Kunti had performed it herself in Hastinapura when she had a palace, and in Ekachakra when she had a single room in a potter's house and five hungry sons, and had still sent a son to feed a demon rather than let the family who sheltered her lose one of their own.

She was passing on the only occupation she had never been able to lay down.

Then the old woman standing in a Panchala palace, whose sons owned nothing at all, said this to the girl in red silk.

"Be thou installed as the Queen of the kingdom and the capital of Kurujangala, with thy husband Yudhishthira the just."

Kurujangala is the Kuru country. The capital is Hastinapura, and Hastinapura at that moment belonged entirely to Dhritarashtra and his hundred sons, who believed the Pandavas had burnt to death in a house of lac and who would learn otherwise within days. Nobody had offered Yudhishthira a kingdom. Nobody had offered him a village. He had walked into Drupada's hall as a Brahmana and had been recognised only because a sage vouched for him.

Kunti names the throne anyway, in front of witnesses, and she names her son as the one who will sit on it, and she calls him the just.

And having claimed that much she goes on and claims more.

"O daughter, let the whole earth, conquered by the prowess of thy husbands endued with great strength, be given away by thee unto Brahmanas at horse-sacrifice."

The horse-sacrifice is the rite of a king who claims the earth, and the wealth it consumes is given away by the queen. So the blessing has now travelled, in three sentences, from a household to a capital to the whole world, and the thing Draupadi is asked to do with the world once her husbands have won it is to hand it out.

"O accomplished one, whatever gems there are on earth possessed of superior virtues, obtain them, O lucky one, and be thou happy for a full hundred years."

Then Kunti stopped being a queen and was only a mother-in-law looking at a bride.

"And, O daughter-in-law, as I rejoice today beholding thee attired in red silk, so shall I rejoice again, when, O accomplished one, I behold thee become the mother of a son."

That is where the blessing ends. Not on the empire and not on the gems. On a woman saying that today she is glad about a red dress, and that there is one more day she means to be glad on.

After the sons of Pandu had been married, the carts began arriving from the west.

Hari had heard. Krishna had been at the self-choice, had known the five Brahmanas for who they were before anyone else in that hall did, and had gone home to Dwaraka; and now, without being asked for anything, he sent his cousins a wedding present. Vaisampayana lists it, and the list is the point, because it is an inventory of everything a house needs when it is being started from nothing.

Gold ornaments set with pearls and with black gems, which is to say lapis lazuli.

Costly robes manufactured in various countries. Many beautiful and soft blankets. Hides of great value. Costly beds and carpets, and vehicles.

Vessels by hundreds, set with gems and diamonds.

Female servants by thousands, brought from various countries, endued with beauty and youth and accomplishments and decked with every ornament.

Many well-trained elephants brought from the country of Madra. Many excellent horses in costly harness. Cars drawn by horses of excellent colours and large teeth.

And the slayer of Madhu, of immeasurable soul, also sent them coins of pure gold by crores upon crores, in separate heaps.

Separate heaps. Somebody counted it out on the ground into piles, and the piles were high enough that Vaisampayana, who is reciting all this to a king, thought the arrangement worth mentioning.

A fortnight before, these men had been living on alms in a potter's house and dividing what they brought home in a begging bowl into six shares, as their mother had told them to. Now there were elephants from Madra standing in the yard and gold measured out in heaps, and a wife, and a father-in-law with an army, and a friend across the country who had sent all of it before being asked.

And Yudhishthira the just, desirous of gratifying Govinda, accepted all those presents with great joy.

He took them. That is worth noticing about a man who would rather give than receive, and who would spend much of the rest of his life refusing things. The gifts were not the gift. The gift was Krishna, and the only way to accept the one was to accept the other, and Yudhishthira understood that and said yes to all of it.