They say that when you die your whole life flashes before your eyes.
All I can remember right now, though, is a diffuse glow of green. I am in my father's mango grove, running around in my petticoat, bringing down the first green mangoes with my catapult. It is noon; I have been up for almost six hours. First I went swimming in the river, then I was talking to Lala the goatherd for sometime, stroking their big, horny heads and drinking their milk straight from the udder. Nobody back in the Panchala palace knows where I am. My nanny knows I have woken up, she must have seen my empty bed. She does not care, not as long as I am not around to annoy her, or do naughty things like open the cages and set all the parrots free, or bring the calf from the cowshed into my room. So it is surprising when I hear the sound of my name being spoken over and over again, and I look up, to see my most favourite person in the world with his swarthy face and big nose perched comfortably on the big branch of the tree. I gape, and he grins back at me, his white teeth Cheshire cat grin.
"Kanha!"
"Hi, Draupadi!"
"How did you get up there? I mean, I was here all this while?"
It's a secret."
"Come on down!"
"No, you come on up."
"I won't," I start shaking the branch, at least whatever part of it I can reach.
He laughs at my childish efforts - I was but fifteen then - and seats himself more comfortably.
"Oh, come on up, it's much more fun here. I can pick the mangoes and eat it, see?"
The proximity to the mangoes lures me. I try climbing up the tree, though I am scared of heights. I slip once, twice, but I try climbing again. Kanha just sits atop the branch, and watches me struggle. I finally make it, and once I get the hang of it, I climb a little higher than him, and settle down firmly on a branch.
My legs dangling, I ask him, "So, how did you climb up here without me noticing?"
"Secret. How have you been?"
I shrug my shoulders and bite into a sharp mango. "The usual. Where are you now? Mathura? With your parents?"
"Just for a bit now, yes. But I am going back to Dwaraka again, maybe in a couple of months."
"You are going to get married before that, aren't you?"
My question was uncommonly sweet. I had heard the news a few days back...people at the Panchala palace often tended to talk things in front of me like I was not there. I was a non-entity for most part. So nobody had told me that Krishna (Kanha to me) was going to marry shortly. But because it was all discussed in front of me, I knew. And I wanted to tease him about it and wheedle all the details out of him.
"Yes, who told you?"
"It was supposed to be a secret, wasn't it?"
"Not really. The whole world knows that I am going to bring Rukmini home next week, though her brother does not approve. I even sent her brother a letter with the date and time on it so that he can expect me."
"Are you going to fight him? Will you take me along if you are going to fight?" I was interested in all the details. After all, this was the first time Kanha was going to get married. I was interested in everything from the girl to her trousseau to her brother getting bashed up.
Kanha laughed, amused. "You know me. I never fight!"
"What about the time you beat up Kamsa, then? He was your uncle and everything."
"That was different. He was mean to my parents. And I did not hit him, Balram did, and just once."
I threw my head back and laughed. "You coward! And you go around telling everybody that you beat him up, and it was your brother who did it."
"If you go and ask Balram who did it, he would swear it was me. But on my honour, I did not inflict a single blow on him. I was just there."
"And what did you do? Glare at him or something? And Kamsa just wilted?"
Yes, something like that." Kanha smiled again.
"Liar," I chewed on a piece of mango skin. "Besides, men should know to fight. It is fun to watch them pitch into each other. My brother, for example. It is fun to watch him when he gets into a rage...but he does not have control. He goes berserk. Shoots arrows everywhere...what a waste, don't you think?"
"Anger is always wasteful, Draupadi. And you are right, that brother of yours is a hothead. But I would still say, it takes more courage not to pick up a fight than to spill blood the way your father and brother do."
"Coward."
"So be it, Draupadi, I will be the coward! I just do not find war injuries cool. I hate to see horses and elephants and men die because I have a disagreement with somebody who also happens to have elephants and horses and men."
"But it is manly to fight!"
Kanha was laughing again. "How old are you, Draupadi?"
"Fifteen"
"Too young. You will grow out of this sort of a thing."
I threw my mango's seed at him. He ducked.
"Just because you are eighty-seven does not mean you can look down upon the rest of us."
"I am not eighty-seven, I am only twenty-nine. And no matter how old I am I will always look down upon you."
"OK, OK, so tell me about this girl, Rukmini. How come I have never heard about her before this?"
I asked him this because he had always told me about all those girls...he would narrate each amusing episode to me and describe every girl. He had even told me about Radha, his first love. So the fact that I had not heard of this girl was very surprising to me.
"Well, there's nothing very special to say. I liked her, she liked me, but her brother does not like me. I asked her if she minded it, and she said she would choose me anytime over her brother. So I am going to bring her home next week. That is all."
It amuses me, now, lying to die, how nonchalant he could be. There is no other word for it, Kanha was cool.
"I wonder who I shall marry." My words were more of an unconscious muse than a statement to Kanha.
"Why, who do you want to marry?" Kanha sounded amused again."Some wrestler? Or a bullfighter?"
"Don't be silly now. He should be strong, yes, should know to fight, yes, and he should be dark and handsome, with a nice nose..."
"A nice nose?"
"Yes, a nice nose, and he should be a prince, and allow me to stay in the forest as long as I want to..."
It was ironic, I thought, lying down to die, that those five husbands I had eventually married, had let me stay in the forest for a long, long time. It was also ironic that Kanha, Kanha who was always with me no matter where I was or what I did, had forsaken me as well. They say he's dead.
As I ruminate on my story, I continue to look, not at the upward path where my five husbands had disappeared, but at the path leading downhill, expectantly. Sahadeva's last message, the secret, still weighs on me.
The eternal in life is never exclusive, never the prerogative of one. The earth, for example, is yours as much as mine. What you do with her differs from what I do with her. The sun, the moon, the night sky, the trees, the creepers, the songbirds, the very music they make, the crunchy leaves of the forest and the water of the brooks and rivers - the salt in the sea, the winds which carry your imagination to far off lands...all these are neither all yours nor all mine. These are shared, shared between men.
Like all eternal things, Woman is shared.
I am shared.
I yearn to possess, but I am not possessed by any one. Or, I am possessed by all. Whichever. Like all things eternal.
Now, I can see your eyebrows furrow. Woman? Shared? Certainly not, not in a society like ours. Indian, pan-Indian or the dominant global society, we believe in monogamy. Even if there may be patches of time, a woman belongs to only one man during that patch of time. Temporally specific. One woman may not, should not belong to more than a man any given point in time. Take your turns! Even when I was shared among five husbands, quite a large number for a single woman to manage by the way, I was shared equally - one year with each, when the others would cease to think of me as a wife, but would instead accord me the respect due to a brother's wife. Or at least, that was the plan.
The truth is far simpler. Possession begins and ends in the head. It did not matter whose apartment I went to for the night. I was always, always shared. Like a woman on one of your public roads, who gets everything from looks to leaches for being a certain way or doing certain things. Also like the woman who prefers to be a stay-at-home mom, the woman who prefers the cocoon of a burkha, the woman who speaks her mind, the woman who sells her body and the woman who works for a salary in an office for nine hours a day and works unpaid at home for another nine. The local neighbourhood mom, the one who bakes the best cookies that all the kids in the block eat after school, she is the shared mother. Vishwa-maatha. In short, all woman are shared, either over a cup of coffee or in the pages of a gossip magazine or over the telephone line or in the apartments of the Hastinapur palace. Because, she is Woman.
And, I am the symbol of all women, because I was shared so blatantly. It is almost like my life was a satirical take on the universal phenomenon of the sharing and baring of Woman.
I have been labeled many things, called many names. My very birth was premeditated and revenge was my twin brother. I am the woman who took five husbands, a veritable wh**e. I am the woman who was the essence of vulnerability - a weak woman that patriarchal society could override and strip naked in public, in full view of the men who vowed to support her and geezers in positions of authority who strove to stand by justice. I am the woman whose single tinkle of laughter brought about the destruction of an entire race. For whose sake men, women and children, horses, mules and elephants, shed blood and tears for eighteen days and beyond. I am the daughter - brought up to exact revenge. Foster sister - of the cunning almighty. I am a woman who loved in vain. I am the woman who was dutiful wife, obedient daughter-in-law, fond lover, sneering coquette, opinionated, arrogant, giving, sharing. I am Indian, I was dark and I was called beautiful. I am the epitome of all paradoxes.
My story is the story of Woman. It is this story that you will read in the months to come - the story of the Woman. She is your mother, your friend, your wife, your daughter, your sister. She is the nun in the church, the harried looking woman with the black handbag you see on the train every day. She is the woman you see in the po*n video, she is the Goddess, she is globally warmed Mother Earth. She is the feminine in every masculine aspect - the flower in the tree, the life in the seed, the furrow in the earth, the moon in the sky. She is naked joy, storms of passion, calm oceans of peace.
And, she is shared. With you.
Cricket
Health and Fitness
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