#padmavati

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Vrishaketu is cold. There is a metal pot cooling his hand, and cold water within. The warmth he knows is burning in pyres, and his bones are freezing, and his fingertips burn. Perhaps if he jumped in, the fire would heat him from within.

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In his dreams, his mother weeps over their inevitable fate. “Run!” she tells him. “Run! Don’t let us ruin you!”

He wakes, and his mother weeps still. “Run!” she tells him. “Run! Don’t let them ruin you!”

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There are hands on him, holding him back. He is too weak and too young, a mere boy by the measure of their people, and he cannot fight back.

“Prince,” someone says. It is the man holding him, lamenting like a widow. “Please, young prince… I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! Oh gods, take me, and spare them! Spare them please, my children and theirs – they are faultless! Oh gods, gods…”

The hands that hold him are red with blood.

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“Your uncle wishes to make you a warrior,” his mother says.

She has aged, her hair streaked with white, her face wrinkled. She is still in her mourning clothes, and as beautiful in white as she had been in red and gold. Vrishaketu thinks she will never stop mourning.

“Yes,” he answers, because it is true, and because Vrishaketu will agree.

“He killed your father and your brothers.”

Mother always loved them more than they loved her. His father had been a passionate man, who gave himself to many things, striving each day for greatness. Most of his brothers had taken after him. Vrishasena, eldest of them all, had even routed two Pandavas and fought Arjuna. Those that had been different were secretly too ashamed to be so.

Vrishaketu is like his father too. He loves his mother less than she loves him, and he too would leave her to be a warrior, like his brothers and his father before him.

“Father killed his sons too,” he tells her. “It was war.”

Mother looks listlessly to the side. She knows what he knows, that Anga is theirs by the mercy of Hastinapura, as it always as been, but their only friend in the Emperor’s court is the pity of the man who killed their husband and father, and the keeper of Anga is only a boy.

When Arjuna comes to take him, Mother’s  face is as lifeless as a field of cut grain. She listens quietly to Arjuna’s tearful promises about keeping him safe, and bids him farewell with only a simple “Be well.”

Vrishaketu rides away from Anga with his father’s murderer. Karna is standing at the border, silent and ghastly, as handsome in death as he had been in life. His eyes are gentle, his lips are pulled in a paternal smile. The man who had challenged a prince in front of the world, who had tricked the most terrible teacher of them all, understands his son like no one else.

Vrishaketu stares at him till he disappears at the horizon, and doesn’t look back again.

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“How much did… er, your father teach you?”

They are in the garden, because Arjuna seemed to think this would make things less tense, less formal. Vrishaketu watches the man in silence. He has never looked for it before, but now that he does, he sees the familiar arch of his father’s brow, the sharp curve of the cheekbone, the long lashes of his eyes. It is not comforting at all.

“Not much,” he tells Arjuna, before the silence grows awkward. “If His Highness so wills, we may start from the beginning.”

Arjuna looks vaguely reluctant. Perhaps he doesn’t want to teach Vrishaketu, and now regrets offering. Perhaps he doesn’t want to teach something that Vrishaketu’s father had taught him, perhaps he thinks that would be like tainting a memory. Perhaps he is judging his father for not teaching him enough. Or perhaps that is what his face looks like regardless.

Vrishaketu cares little about such things. He is here to learn.

In the end, when no other answer is forthcoming, Arjuna sits down with him, and slowly starts with the basics of each weapon. Vrishaketu listens attentively. When the lesson is over, he bows and says, “Thank you, Your Highness.”

Arjuna flinches. Then he says, haltingly, “I know things have been hard among us…”

Vrishaketu carefully keeps his face neutral. Arjuna falters.

But this son of Kunti, of all of them, cannot be accused of cowardice, so he soldiers onwards foolishly, “I–  uh. You have been rather, um, quiet, coming here. I understand this place is unfamiliar to you, but please, consider it your home.”

“I thank His Highness for his kindness.”

Arjuna flinches again.

Shut up now, Vrishaketu thinks, you have said what you wanted to.

Arjuna doesn’t shut up. “There is a… uh, a room, in the east, where there are books. I was told you like to read – ” here, Vrishaketu sees suddenly the image of his father, kneeling with him and Sushena, laughing and pressing dried flowers on expensive paper “– and my son… Abhimanyu… yes, Abhimanyu, he liked to read there. Before. So, uh. You can do that.”

Vrishaketu stops, and does not turn towards Arjuna. “It would have been so much better, wouldn’t it,” he says casually, “if the late prince Abhimanyu lived, and I died? Fate is indeed cruel.”

Arjuna’s wooden sword drops on the ground with a clatter. There is a hot, gasping breath, as if he cannot hold back tears, and then Arjuna dashes past him and into the palace. Vrishaketu is left standing in the garden, dusk falling around him. In the distance, lamps are being lit in the palace.

Vrishaketu does not bother to pack.

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It takes him eight days to ride back to Anga. All the way he imagines what he would tell Mother.

“I could not do it,” he imagines himself saying.

Or, “I messed up.”

Or even, “I missed you more than I imagined I would, and they all pity me – the poor orphaned boy, and I can’t stand it anymore!”

In each case, his mother opens her arms and welcomes him back. They leave, because of course they do, and they forget all their past life, and live anew.

At the border, people gawk at him.

“Oh,” someone says, “he’s back!”

“Thank the gods,” says another, “the messenger must have been quick!”

And a third says, “Poor thing! Ride harder, prince!”

Why are you pitying me? Vrishasena thinks crossly, you are worse off.

And then, what messenger?

The path to the palace is empty, the flag of Anga is missing. His father’s last remaining minister (now his) runs down the steps to him.

“My prince,” he sobs, gathering him in his arms. “Oh my boy, my boy!”

His father’s ghost lingers by the doorway, silent and sorrowful. Vrishaketu knows what has happened even before he sees the body.

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Arjuna, the better rider, comes to Anga on hearing the news seven days later. Vrishaketu has not written him a letter, because there is nothing he can say that the messenger previously sent wouldn’t. He doesn’t perform his mother’s last rites, because he doesn’t know what to do, and there is no one to teach him the customs of his family, and this is not a war funeral. He doesn’t cry, because there is nothing that can be achieved by crying, and all tears had done to his mother was to send her to an early death.

By leaving, Vrishaketu had done that too.

Arjuna jumps from his horse and straightaway seizes his father’s minister (now his) by the front of his clothes.

“Your prince!” he shrieks, close to tears. Arjuna, he notes absently, cries a lot. “Is your prince here? Oh please, please tell me he is here!”

“Yes…?” the minister wheezes; presently being rudely disabused of the unconfirmed notion that Vrishaketu had informed anyone in Hastinapura of his whereabouts.

“Your Highness,” he calls from the top of the stairs, “be welcome.”

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Vrishaketu learns that the Dowager Empress Kunti is coming, as are Emperor Dhritarashtra and Empress Gandhari. Emperor Yudhisthir is coming too, with his brothers and wives. It is to be a grand ceremony, with a lot of emperors and empresses. Too many.

His father’s minister (now his) advises him to wait to receive them. His mother’s corpse, bathed in oils and balms, tells him otherwise.

“They said you should do it if they are too late,” says Arjuna, referring to the funeral.

His father is standing at the doorway, looking longingly at his mother’s casket. He offers no advice.

“I will do it now,” Vrishaketu decides.

In the evening, he takes a lit log to his mother’s pyre, and watches the familiar fire burn away his family. He is awake and dreaming, for his dream is his reality, and it is a nightmare.

Mother rises from the pyre slowly. Unlike his father, she is not wearing the funeral whites. The familiar gold and red looks gentle on her. She seems younger, her hair black again, and his father bends over the fires to help her out. Karna was divinely beautiful – the son of the sun – but Padmavati had been lovely in her own rustic way.

She clings to his arm now, like she did in life, and he snakes his hand around her waist and presses his lips to her hair – a familiar picture of seven long years that he did not know to cherish before.

They come to him then: his mother puts her arm around his shoulders, his father pats his head. It is a weightless, ghostly touch, beyond this world, known only by a minute supernatural thrill, but he feels it as if it were as real as it had been less than half a year ago, and his father says quietly, “Live. We will wait for you.”

Vrishaketu looks up at them, and then beyond, where all his brothers are standing over his mother’s pyre, and holds this last image of them close to his heart, watching them till they fade away – together, his mother finally no longer waiting.

Arjuna comes to stand by him.

People murmur, for Karna had been dearly loved, in spite of his temperamental ambitiousness, or perhaps because of it. What do they think of his son standing so close to his killer?

“I’m sorry,” Arjuna says.

“Why?”

“I shouldn’t have said that before.” He kneels by his side. “Please, I am not here to replace your father.”

“No,” Vrishaketu acknowledges thoughtfully. “You are here because you killed your brother and now you feel bad about it.”

There is a long silence, and then Arjuna says, “…yes. Will you still come with me?”

“I have nowhere else to go.”

“That’s not– ” Arjuna begins protesting, then stops. Karna would have spat at Arjuna's feet and clawed his way to vengeance. Vrishaketu is not his father, he really has nowhere to go.

“I’m sorry,” Arjuna says again, at last, and wraps his arms around him. They are warm and heavy, like an anchor tethering him to earth.

Vrishaketu’s chest feels tight. “I hate you.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Me neither.”

“I want to go home.”

“Me too.”

“Where is home, uncle? Where is home?” There are fat tears rolling down his eyes. Where Arjuna’s face rests, his shoulder is wet.

“I don’t know.” Arjuna sobs.