The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-09-24)

September 24, 2020 81

whose husband, Abhimanyu, is sent
into battle before completing his basic
training: while still in his mother’s
womb, Abhimanyu had mastered the
martial art of penetrating the ranks of
his enemies, but he never learned how
to escape alive afterward. Uttaraa,
pregnant with Abhimanyu’s child—
who will be the stillborn baby that the
god revives at the war’s end—speaks in
sorrow of her slain teenage husband:

For some

thing—not quite trust, nor truly

love—happened, something

like life, undesigned. The notion

of future, earth’s gift

to our sixteenth year—the first,

and only, summer

together—that swelled and curved

to tempt him:

a curled up, compact

quarter-moon in me.

Then the refrain:

Choose, child, while still unborn;

choose, for we

no longer can, choose

to remain free.

She wants this baby to know about war,
and about the toxic cant and mendacity
that inevitably fuel it:

Heroes

are dearest when dead....

He was a son, Abhimanyu,

nephew, Kuru prince, brave,

loyal, foolishly so; bravely,

loyally

has he gone to his end. Here he

lies, he that most wished to be

not hero—this, they will not tell

you, child—but father.

Karthika, in the voice of Uttaraa, has
articulated something I remember all
too well from my own wartime service
in Lebanon. Among the soldiers in my
unit, only one, I think—our gung-ho
commanding officer—identified with
the specious rhetoric coming at us from
the politicians back home in Jerusalem.
Karthika’s Mahabharata is, among
other things, a passionate antiwar
manifesto; she and her characters are
sensitive to the perversion of language
that is always needed to generate more
dead heroes, and to the cost borne by
those who survive. It is possible to read
the Sanskrit Mahabharata itself in such
a light, just as Book 24 of the Iliad re-
frames the endless killing described
in the previous twenty-three books
and the Greek warrior’s ideal of post-
humous fame, kleos, as no more than
human foolishness sustained by the cor-
responding foolishness of the gods. A
major section of the Mahabharata, the
Book of Women (Striparvan), similarly
sings of the unbearable, also entirely su-
perfluous suffering of the widows, moth-
ers, and orphans in a devastated world.
Often the voice of a hitherto unfath-
omed character surprises us with its
nuanced, conflicted innerness. Here
is Hidimbi, a strangely alluring, man-
eating demoness (worshiped today as a
goddess in the Himalayan regions), sis-
ter to the violent Hidimba, whom the
macho warrior Bhima kills. Hidimbi
immediately falls in love with this most
lovable of the Pandavas and eventually
bears him a son, Ghatotkaca, who will
participate in the war. The two unlikely
lovers spend a year and a half in the

wilderness, playing together, coupling,

wandering as if that other world of

palaces and sordid politics were of no

concern to them. The wilderness has its

delights, as Hidimbi tells us:

I taught him smell. The odour

of roe and rabbit, of morel

and toadstool,

the distant hint of

petrichor. Scents

of chestnut,

of resin, of wild elephant

in rut. Venom in half-bloom on

nervous, beckoning

petals. The nidor

in enemy sweat, the mute

smell of death. Taught him

touch. Taught him to

read tales

of a royal courtship from lion’s

spoor, to relive the songs

of centuries

with fingers on the

whorls of a murdered

tree.

“Petrichor” is the intoxicating fra-

grance of raindrops falling on sun-

baked soil. In India, it comes every

year at the beginning of the monsoon;

no one who has experienced it forgets it.

When Hidimbi eventually has to say

good-bye to her newfound as-if hus-

band, she offers pointed insight into his

nature and that of his brothers: Bhima,

she says, is at heart

gentle,

wistful, and more loyal than

anyone

deserved.

As for the others,

these men

were to remain sons, at best

brothers—

they could seldom grow

into husbands, and never

fathers....

No, it was best to bid them adieu

though it isn’t quite that—

some ties

stay unsevered, even

when tattered.

That last statement belongs to one

of the poetic ornaments in Sanskrit,

named arthantaranyasa, “shifting to

another level of meaning”—usually an

intuition generalized on the basis of

some concrete experience. One of the

joys of reading Until the Lions is the

sudden appearance of such uncanny,

yet profoundly convincing, perceptions.

The character whose recurrent mono-

logues hold Until the Lions together

is Satyavati, a fisherwoman who be-

comes queen, grandmother, and great-

grandmother to both branches of

warring cousins. She speaks in com-

plex, jarring tones that allow for both

the memory of real happiness—“the

quiet, grateful joy of those who dare not

exult too much”—and its opposite, “the

baneful underside of bliss.” She is living

at the royal court, and she understands

politics and the exigencies of states, un-

broken succession, some semblance of

order. And she knows a lot about hate:

in the opening words of this book, in

the first of several chapters called

“Fault Lines,” she says:

Listen. Listen: hate rises, hate

blazes, hate billows from battle-

fields. Hate arrives—searing riv-

ers, shrivelling plains, reaping

deserts on its path—even to this

doorstep.... Old hate, descended

from heavens, leavened on my

land. Old hate, diffused through

blood and womb and semen.

For Satyavati, if there is one primary

cause of the overdetermined cataclysm,

it must be hatred, which is not the same

thing as evil. As Vyasa, Satyavati’s

son who is also the author of the Ma-

habharata, says to her: “Many good

men hate.” She begs him to rewrite the

story, to erase all this hatred and save

the world. He understands her wish:

“This is a splendrous—if gruelling—

epic to read or write, but not one you

want to inhabit, Mother, no, not when

the killers and the killed will all be your

own sinew and blood.” Unfortunately,

however, “I cannot invent the story.

The story invented itself, invented you

and me. I can merely act as channel, as

implement.” Satyavati, recognizing the

truth of this typically Indian notion in

which the author is internal to, indeed

created by, his own book, says in terror,

“The night was damp with unspilled

blood, the sky hung low, clouds of un-

shed tears dragging it to earth.”

This is a Mahabharata for our gen-

eration. It includes stories that have

attached themselves to the classical

epic via local, regional traditions.

The most trenchant of these are three

monologues that tell the tale of Ar-

avan, son of the hero Arjuna and the

snake-woman Ulupi, as it is known and

ritually enacted each year in the Tamil

country. The Pandava brothers need

someone to be sacrificed to the fierce

goddess Kali in order to achieve victory

over their foes. Aravan, very young,

still a bachelor and a newcomer to the

war, volunteers; he says he belongs to

Kali anyway and is ready to die, but he

wants two things in exchange: first, to

be married and to spend a night with his

bride, and second, to remain a witness

to the entire war. The first wish is not

so easily fulfilled; no woman wants to

marry a boy who will leave her a widow

the day after the marriage. Eventually,

Lord Krishna assumes his seductive

female form as the enchantress Mohini

and marries Aravan. In Karthika’s in-

spired reenactment, Aravan’s serpen-

tine mother mourns him proleptically:

I knew the ache to belong

would send him here, to this

crazed, dissonant swansong

of war—for sons will slash their

lifelines for distant

fathers, to please kin who’ve

disdained them all along

while mothers and lovers and life,

in an instant,

are forsaken for combat, for the

swift, brilliant

death or painless triumph they

believe lies ahead.

Neither—they will find, alas—

proves to be constant.

Krishna cynically persuades the Pan-

dava king that this sacrifice is neces-

sary, a purely instrumental event:

Look,

Yudhishthira, someone must die,

must kill himself, and

willingly, so

we can prevail....

someone must die, Yudhishthira,

the reason countless others will

also die....

Finally, Mohini, the one-night bride,

now a tormented, leftover part of the

god, cries out to her dead husband

and curses everyone involved in the

grisly ritual—gods, demons, kings,

warriors, the earth, night and day, the

bloodthirsty goddess Kali, the Pan-

dava brothers (including Aravan’s fa-

ther, Arjuna), Krishna (“for spinning

this loathsome universe into light for

this war”), and herself, her womb, her

“transient woman’s soul” that will re-

vert the next day to maleness. Aravan

is worshiped in Tamil Nadu in tem-

ples devoted to the goddess Draupadi

and, in particular, in the village of

Kuvakam, where transvestites and

transgender people come from all over

South India to mourn the dead warrior

at his annual festival. Usually one finds

him in the form of a huge painted head

that, in accordance with his wish, sur-

vived to watch the war to its end and is

now watching us.

In the introduction to the American

edition of Until the Lions, Karthika

writes of the relevance of the Ma-

habharata for a world in which ruthless

(mostly male) authoritarian rule has

become the norm. She also speaks of

her father, a soldier who fought in three

of India’s wars: “Each of the characters

in the book views one or more of the

triggers and upshots of war through

separate vantage points, whose exis-

tence I learnt from my father’s earlier,

farsighted self.” (“Earlier” since his

views on war changed over time.) Her

poems share the kaleidoscopic quality

of the epic text, its persistent, dizzying

perspectivism as it moves from one epi-

sode to the next, one ardent speaker to

another.

One could also see the Mahabharata,

as the anthropologist Don Handelman

has suggested, as a vast laboratory for

existential experiment, in which the

great themes and above all the ethi-

cal quandaries of a civilization can be

brought to light, played out, and exam-

ined. Such themes are not abstract en-

tities but lived human realities, mostly

agonizing and opaque, eluding any

simple or, indeed, possible resolution.

From a point somewhere deep within

this laboratory, Karthika Naïr has

captured in words the tonality of this

mammoth text:

We’re all dying, less or more

broken.

The sages say this is what it means

to be human.

To be human, like runes on

parchment:

to fade, to tear, to melt—and,

sometimes, to be unmeant....

Each light I shall weep—weep

and recite

their names, etch their voices on

these woods, this wind, this

night.

(^) Q