Kunti's Last Fire

Hastinapur had its king again. The white parasol stood over Yudhishthira in the great hall, the ministers came and went, and the granaries filled as they had filled in Pandu's day. Yet the palace was quieter than any battlefield. Whole wings of it were shut. The women who had once filled them were widows now, and the widows had gone down to the river.

Kunti walked those corridors in a plain white cloth. She had wanted this. She had wanted it through every year of the forest and every day after the lac house, had held it in her mind the way a swimmer holds the memory of air. Five sons on the throne of Bharata. She had bargained and begged and endured for it. Now it was hers, and she found she could not eat in that hall.

'Mother,' Yudhishthira said one evening, finding her at a dark window, 'the rites are finished. The kingdom is at peace. Ask me for anything.'

'You are a good son,' she said. 'You were always the one who asked.'

She had raised five boys in a forest on borrowed rice. She had taught them that a mother's word was law, and once, carelessly, that they should share among themselves whatever they had brought home. She had never in her life been able to afford weakness. She had called her own heart iron, and she had never told anyone what the iron cost.

Below the window the funeral fires along the Ganga had burned down to gray. Eighteen days of war had eaten a generation. Somewhere in those ashes lay a man whose armor she had recognized from the city wall, a man she had spoken with once at the water's edge and failed to keep.

'Ask me,' Yudhishthira said again.

'Not tonight,' said Kunti. She had already given him one thing he had not asked for, on the bank of the Ganga before he was ever crowned, and she had watched what it did to him.

It had happened at the water rites for the dead of both houses, on the bank of the Ganga, in the first days after the war. Yudhishthira had named them kinsman by kinsman, uncles and cousins and sons, when Kunti came down to the water and said, in a voice the priests could hear, 'Offer for Karna also. Offer as a brother offers.'

Yudhishthira turned. 'Karna was a charioteer's son.'

'Karna was my son,' she said. 'He was born to me before I was given to your father. He was the eldest of you.'

The silence that followed was longer than any speech in that war. Yudhishthira did not weep at once. He asked how, and she told him of a mantra granted by a sage and a god who could not refuse and a basket of reeds set upon a river; and she told him, because she would not lie to him twice, that she had gone to Karna herself at the water's edge on the eve of the battle and asked him to come over to her sons, and that he had refused her everything but one mercy.

Days later, when Narada had told him the whole of Karna's story, Yudhishthira looked down at his own hands, which had given the orders that killed his brother, and spoke the bitterest words of his life. 'You could have said this in the sabha. You could have said it at Upaplavya. You could have said it on any one of thirteen years of days.' And he laid a curse upon all the women of the world, that no woman from that hour should ever be able to keep a secret hidden.

Kunti bore it and did not answer. She had been cursing herself nightly since Kurukshetra and had no room for more. Later, when the court had settled into its peace, she watched Yudhishthira seat Karna's one surviving son Vrishaketu at his own right hand and keep him there like a wound he wished to tend. She said nothing about that either. She had learned exactly what her speech cost.

Fifteen years turned. Yudhishthira ruled, and in every particular he honored the blind old king as though nothing had happened. Dhritarashtra was consulted, seated first, given the courtesies of a reigning man. Only Bhima could not manage the pretense, and would say loudly, in the next room, whose arms it was that had broken a hundred sons.

At last Dhritarashtra came into the hall on Gandhari's shoulder and said the thing he had been shaping for a year.

'Child, let me go. The kings of our house end their days in the woods. I have eaten your rice and heard your kindness long enough. Let me take Gandhari and go, and wear bark, and find out whether penance will burn what I have earned.'

Yudhishthira wept and refused, and was refused in turn. Then Vyasa came, and told Yudhishthira plainly to let the old king go, for the woods were the last road of every royal sage. Gandhari, blindfolded still, said nothing at all. She had bound herself long ago to whatever her husband's feet chose.

Kunti said nothing in the hall. But on the day the old king went out through the city gate, it was Kunti who walked in front with Gandhari's hand on her shoulder, and when Yudhishthira begged her to turn back she did not answer him. At last she said it.

'I will go with them. My husband's brother is blind and my sister is blindfolded, and there will be nobody in the woods to set food into their hands. I will serve them.'

The crowd on the road saw what the whole city saw: that Gandhari's son had fired the lac house, had dragged Draupadi into court by the hair, had demanded the deaths of Kunti's children openly for thirteen years, and that Kunti, who had lost more to that house than any living woman, was proposing to spend her last strength carrying water for its king and queen.

Bhima ran after her on the road and could not hold it in.

'For whom did we fight?' he said. 'Yudhishthira has said it already, mother, and I say it again. Whose voice came to us at Upaplavya with the story of Vidula and her son, telling us it was better to blaze up for a moment than to smoulder for a lifetime? Yours. We carried that word into the field. I broke my cousin's thigh on that word. And now the kingdom is won and swept and lit, and you walk out of it to carry Dhritarashtra's water? Then tell me what we killed them for.'

'You have not understood me once in your life,' Kunti said, 'and I have loved you for it.'

She stopped walking.

'I sent that message so that your father's name would not die a coward's death, and so that you would not stand before the world as men who had been spat upon and had swallowed it. I did not send it so that I could eat sweets in a hall. The kingdom is yours. Its fruit is yours. I want no share of food bought at that price. It would not go down. What is left to me is penance, and there is no penance lighter to describe or heavier to perform than serving the two people I have most reason to hate.'

Bhima had no answer. He had never had one for her.

Earlier, before any of her sons had begun to protest, she had given Yudhishthira her charges for those she left behind, and one of them was this. 'Watch Sahadeva. He is the youngest, he says the least, and of all of you he is the most attached to me. He will not tell you when he is unhappy. Do not wait to be told.'

Then she walked on into the woods ahead of a blind man and a blindfolded woman, looking back often at her weeping sons, and did not turn back toward the throne she had spent her whole life winning.

They settled at a hermitage on the bank of the Ganga, and the years there were the plainest of Kunti's life. She rose first. She ground the wild rice, gathered the fruit, warmed the water, and set it into two pairs of groping hands. Gandhari, who had never in her life asked a servant of her own house for anything, learned to be served by her. They spoke of their sons rarely, and when Vyasa came to the hermitage both of them begged him to let them see their dead sons again.

Vidura went first, wasting on air alone, walking the woods with nothing on him until his body would not carry him further; Yudhishthira came out from the city and was with him at the end.

Then a dry summer came, and the fire that Dhritarashtra had kindled for his own worship and left burning among the leaves took the forest.

It came at them along the wind, and they were three old people, and the king had been fasting until he could not stand. Sanjaya told the king that such a death, by a fire that was not sacred, would be a calamity, though he could see no way of escape.

'Go, child,' Dhritarashtra said. 'Save yourself. We will not run. This death is no calamity for us, for we left our home of our own will. Water, fire, wind and fasting are praised as ends for ascetics.'

Gandhari did not argue, and sat as her husband sat.

Kunti said nothing that anyone recorded. She sat down between them, facing east, and turned her mind where their minds had already gone, and let the fire come.

When Narada carried the news to Hastinapur, Yudhishthira cried out that his mother, who had slept on stone in the forest so that her sons might be kings, had burned like a common woman of the woods. Narada answered that the king had died in his own sacred fire, not a common one, and that Kunti, through her service to her elders, had attained very great success. She had wished for her husband's worlds since the day the throne was won and she discovered that she did not want it.