The Lament of the Women

On the nineteenth morning there was no sound of conches. The silence lay over Kurukshetra so heavily that men who had slept through eighteen days of drums woke in it and could not think why they were awake. The war was over. Eleven armies and seven had come onto that plain, and what remained of them could have been counted by a careful man in an afternoon.

In Hastinapura the blind king rose and asked for his chariot. Vidura tried to keep him in the city and could not. Sanjaya, who had described every day of it to him while it happened, now had to lead him out to walk on it. And behind them came the women.

They came out of the inner apartments in their hundreds and their thousands, women who had never in their lives been seen by the common street. They came without ornaments, without veils, with their hair loose on their shoulders, the wives and mothers and daughters of both houses walking together in one crowd because grief had made the sides meaningless. Gandhari walked among them with the bandage still tied over her eyes and Kunti at her elbow, and Draupadi walked behind, who had lost five sons in a single night's murder and had no brothers left to say so to.

They cried out as they walked. It began as separate voices and became one long sound that rose and fell like surf, and it went ahead of them down the road so that the men waiting on the field heard it coming before they saw anyone.

Yudhishthira came out to meet them with his brothers, and Krishna with him, and Vyasa. Then the road turned, and the field opened in front of the women, and the sound they had been making stopped all at once, which was far worse.

The plain was not a plain any longer. It was a country of the dead, horses and elephants and men lying so thickly in places that the earth beneath them could not be guessed at, and over all of it the smell, and the slow patient movement of birds.

Dhritarashtra was led forward to where the Pandavas stood, and he asked for them by name.

Yudhishthira came first and touched his feet, and the old man laid both hands on his head and blessed him without warmth and without cruelty, as a man does a duty. Then he lifted his face and asked for the second son.

"Where is Bhima?" he said. "Let me embrace Bhima."

Krishna had been standing very still, and now he moved. He took Bhima by the arm and drew him back out of reach, and in the same motion pushed forward the thing that had been carried out with them for exactly this: the iron image of Bhima that Duryodhana had kept for years in his practice yard, on which he had beaten out his hatred every morning with a mace until he could do it in his sleep.

Dhritarashtra's arms went round the iron. And the strength that had been famous in his youth, the strength that could break a bull's neck, came up out of the old man all at once with a hundred sons behind it. He crushed the statue against his chest. The iron gave way with a sound that carried across the field, and the fragments came apart in his hands, and he fell forward bleeding from the mouth into Sanjaya's arms.

"Bhima," he said. "Bhima, my child. What have I done."

"You have done nothing," Krishna said, kneeling by him. "Bhima is alive and standing three paces from you. It was iron in your arms, King. I knew your mind before you knew it yourself."

The old man lay still for a long moment. When he spoke again his voice had changed entirely.

"Then my anger is still in me," he said, "though every son I had is lying out there under a cloth. It is still in me and it went for that boy the moment I could reach him. Krishna, I did not know. I did not know until my hands closed." And Dhritarashtra, who had wept for his hundred, now wept for what his grief had tried to do, which is a different weeping altogether, and he called Bhima to him and held him as gently as a man holds an infant.

Gandhari stood apart with her hands folded. She had been given a boon by Vyasa long ago, and now the sage came to her and gave her another, so that though the cloth was still bound across her eyes she saw the whole field at once, entire, the way the sun sees it.

"Look, Madhava," she said. "Look with me. I am seeing at last, and this is what my eyes have been saved for."

She began to speak the field aloud, and Krishna stood beside her and did not interrupt.

"There are women out there in the middle of the dead. Do you see them? They have never walked on ground that was not swept for them, and they are walking on this. Their hair is down. They are calling names. Every one of them is calling a different name and none of the names is answered, and when a woman finds the man she is looking for she stops calling and sits down where he is, and does not get up.

"There is a woman with her husband's head in her lap and she is combing the dust out of his hair with her fingers, and she is speaking to him about something that happened in a garden.

"There are jackals in the banners. Do you see the great flags of the kings, lying half in the dust, and the jackals moving through them as if through undergrowth? There are cranes standing on the chest of a man whose name was cried in every hall in Bharata. There are vultures that will not rise when a living woman walks up to them, because they have learned in eighteen days that the living do nothing.

"The earth is strewn with heads. The earrings are still in the ears. The arms are lying separate from the bodies and the hands are still closed on the sword hilts, so that a woman must open her husband's fingers to take the weapon away from him.

"And the mothers, Krishna. The mothers of kings are going about with their upper cloths held out like baskets, gathering heads, turning each one to the light to see whether it is theirs. That is what the fruit of my son's kingdom looks like. Take a good long look at it. I am."

She saw Uttaraa before she saw her own.

The girl was very young, and she had found Abhimanyu where the six of them had brought him down inside the wheel, and she had cleaned his face, and she was talking to him. She spoke as though he had merely fallen asleep in company and could be shamed out of it.

"You would not do this if you were awake," she said. "You never let me speak this long without answering. Speak to me. Everyone is watching and you are making me look foolish. Your father is coming. Your mother is coming. Do you want them to find you lying in the dirt with your armour cut open? Get up and speak to me. There is a child, and you have not been told about it yet, and now you will not be told, and he will ask me what his father said and I will have nothing to give him. Speak to me once. Once."

Then Gandhari came to her hundred.

She went from son to son and named each one, and the naming took a long time. Vikarna, who had stood up alone in a full hall and said that Draupadi had not been fairly won, lying with the wheels over him. Dushasana, whose chest was open, and whose right arm, the arm that had held the hair of an empress, lay some distance from him. Durmukha. Dussaha. Chitrasena. Boys she had carried and had not once seen.

And at the last she came to Duryodhana, and there she went down onto the ground.

"He went out on the first morning at the head of eleven armies," she said. "Eleven. The earth shook under him and every king in the world was in his pay. And now the dust does not even stir where he is lying, and his thigh is broken, and there is nobody left to send for. My son. I never saw your face. I put the cloth on for your father before you were born and I kept it, and so I have never once seen you, and now I am seeing you for the first time and this is what you have arranged for me to see."

The kings of the earth were burned in their thousands with sandal and ghee and broken chariots for fuel, and the smoke stood over Kurukshetra like a second sky. Then the whole house, victors and defeated, went down to the Ganga to offer water for the dead.

They stood in the shallows, the women in front, and each family named its own. Kunti stood with her sons and made the offerings for Pandu, and for the sons of Draupadi, and for Abhimanyu. Then she did not come out of the water.

"Offer also for Karna," she said.

Yudhishthira turned to her. "Karna, mother? He was Radha's son, the charioteer's son, and he fought against us to the last hour. Why should we give him water?"

"Because he was my son," Kunti said. "He was born to me before your father ever saw me, of Surya, by a mantra I was given as a girl and used the way a girl uses a thing she does not understand. He came out of me wearing armour and earrings that were part of his body. I put him in a basket and set him on the river. He was your eldest brother. Give him water. There is nobody else left to give it."

Yudhishthira stood in the Ganga with the water running past his knees and could not speak. Every hour of the eighteen days went through him again with the account corrected: the man he had feared, the man he had ordered killed, whose feet he had never touched.

"He would not have let one of us be harmed," he said at last. "Five words from you, mother, and there would have been no war, and I would have had a brother."

Then he lifted his hands out of the water, and his grief turned in him and came out as a curse. "Let it be this way from now on," he said. "Let no woman anywhere ever be able to hold a secret. Let whatever is hidden in her come out of her, so that no man ever again stands where I am standing now."

He performed the rites for Karna himself, and wept doing it. And that was the true accounting of the war: not the armies, not the eighteen days, but water offered late to a brother nobody had claimed, and the field of widows behind them still smoking.