Pritha, the Given Daughter

In Mathura, in the house of Shurasena of the Yadavas, a promise had been made before there was anyone to give away. Shura's cousin Kuntibhoja was childless and would remain so, and Shura had said, in the easy manner of young men swearing to things that cost nothing yet, 'My firstborn is yours.'

The firstborn was a girl. They called her Pritha.

She was four, or five, for the tellings differ and a child that age keeps no count, when the chariots came from the west and the household began to move around her with a strange new politeness. Her mother dressed her in new cloth. Her father lifted her and held her longer than he ever had before. Her brother Vasudeva, who would one day be the father of Krishna, stood at the gate and did not wave.

Nobody lied to her. That was the cruelty of it. They told her plainly that she was going to be another man's daughter now, that this was dharma, that a promise once given must be kept even when the thing promised has grown a face and a name and a laugh. She was told she was fortunate. She was told she would be a king's daughter in the Kunti country and want for nothing all her days.

The road ran west and south for many days, and somewhere along it the smell of the air changed and the trees stopped being her trees.

At the end of it stood Kuntibhoja on his steps, a kind man, an anxious man, a man who had wanted a child so long that he had forgotten to be afraid of receiving one. He took her two hands in his. He gave her his own name. From that hour the girl Pritha of Mathura was Kunti of Kuntibhoja's house, and nobody thought to ask her which of the two she would rather be.

Kuntibhoja loved her the way a man loves a thing he has been given rather than a thing he has made: carefully, gratefully, and always a little as though it might one day be reclaimed. She was never struck, never scolded, never hungry. She was also never careless.

A child in her own father's house may sulk, may break a bowl, may be a nuisance for a week and remain a daughter at the end of it. A child in a house that took her in learns early that her welcome is a thing she must earn each morning. Kunti learned it before she could have put a name to it. She rose early. She remembered the name of every servant. She did not cry where anyone could see her. When the queen praised her she said thank you and did not glow, because to want praise too visibly is to admit that you might still be sent back.

By the time she was ten the king had given her the highest duty in the house, and the most dangerous. It was Kunti who received the guests.

In that age a guest was a god and also a hazard. Ascetics came in off the road with matted hair and bare feet and appetites that were tests. Some wanted only water. Some wanted a bath at midnight and a fire built at noon. Some came to bless, and some came, as everyone understood, simply to find out what kind of people lived here. A kingdom's fortune could turn on whether a hungry brahmana left the hall satisfied, and Kuntibhoja placed that fortune in the hands of a girl who had been in his family less than a decade.

She never once gave him cause to regret it. Not once. That was the thing about her that the whole household noticed, and that nobody thought to ask the cost of.

Then Durvasa came.

The king's face when the name was announced told her everything the stories had left out. Durvasa was a sage of enormous power and no patience whatsoever, a man whose blessings had founded dynasties and whose curses had emptied heaven itself. To house him was to carry a lit lamp through a room full of oil.

'I will stay a while,' Durvasa said from the doorway, without a word of greeting. 'Set someone to serve me. I am difficult. I do not soften. If your household angers me, you will know of it.'

Kuntibhoja bowed. 'My daughter Kunti will attend you, holy one. She is devoted and skillful, and she will not fail.'

When the sage had gone inside, the king drew her aside. He was sweating.

'Child, I have spoken rashly. That man can burn my kingdom with one word. Serve him with everything you have in you. Do not be proud. He is a brahmana and he is the guest, and whatever he does, you will bear it.'

She looked at the old man who had wanted a child so badly, and who had just staked his country on her, and she understood something clean and cold that she would carry for the rest of her long life: that she was useful. That being useful was how she stayed.

'Do not be afraid,' said Kunti. 'He will have no complaint of me.'

It was not a boast. She had already begun to calculate. Where he would sleep. How the water would be kept warm all night. Which of the cooks could be trusted with a fire at any hour without waking the house. A girl in a borrowed home learns to plan, because planning is the only power she is permitted.

He stayed a year, and the year was a siege.

He asked for food at dawn and, when it stood ready, walked out and did not return until the stars had gone down; and when he came he ate it cold and said nothing. He asked for a meal at midnight and refused it at midnight. He sent her for fruit that grew half a day away and was asleep when she came back running with it. He praised her in the morning and told her in the evening that she was a fool and a king's pet, unfit to hand water to a man of the road.

Once he required his food scalding, taken straight off the fire and eaten upon her body, and she knelt and bore it, and the marks stayed on her skin, and she brought him his water afterward with steady hands.

Not once in three hundred and sixty days did Kunti let her face say anything her mouth would not.

What she was doing was not meekness. Meekness cracks. She was executing a discipline she had chosen at the beginning: his behavior was weather, and one does not resent weather, one dresses for it. Every rudeness was a thing to be absorbed and set down. Every impossible order was a problem of arrangement. She slept when he slept, which was seldom, and rose before him, which was always.

At the end of the year Durvasa sat and looked at her for a long time, and there was something in that terrible old face which the house had never seen there.

'Girl,' he said, 'I tried you. I have tried kings and burned them. You have not failed once. Ask.'

'I have nothing to ask for,' said Kunti. 'You are pleased. That was the whole of my duty.'

'Then I will give unasked,' he said, 'which is the only kind of giving worth anything at all.'

What he gave her was a mantra, and with it an instruction that any woman of that age would have recognized at once as a door left standing open.

'Call,' Durvasa said, 'and the god you name will come to you. He will not refuse. He cannot refuse. And of him you will have a son with his own splendor in him.'

She said what a careful girl says. 'Holy one, I am not married.'

'I know what you are,' said Durvasa. 'I have given what I came to give. What is done with a gift is the business of the one who holds it.'

Some say he foresaw the whole of it and gave the mantra anyway, because the gods had need of sons in the world of men and this girl was the door they had chosen. Some say he simply did not think, and that a sage who can burn a kingdom cannot always see one year forward into the heart of a child. The epic lets both stand.

Kunti thanked him, and touched his feet, and walked him out to the road, and went back to her rooms carrying inside her the most dangerous thing in Kuntibhoja's kingdom.

She was thirteen, or near it. She had been given away once already. She had spent a year proving that she could endure anything a holy man could invent, and had been rewarded with a power she had not asked for and could tell nobody about.

What happened next belongs to another telling: a morning, a window, the light on the water, a girl's curiosity, Surya standing in her room in the shape of a man, and a basket of reeds set adrift on a river with a child inside it.

The girlhood ends there. What it had already taught her was the one lesson she ever fully trusted: that everything given can be taken back, except what you have learned to bear.