Chapter One...
fire
Through the long, lonely years of my childhood, when my father's palace seemed to tighten its grip around me until I couldn't breathe, I would go to my nurse and ask for a story. And though she knew many wondrous and edifying tales, the one I made her tell me over and over was the story of my birth. I think I liked it so much because it made me feel special, and in those days there was little else in my life that did. Perhaps Dhai Ma realized this. Perhaps that was why she agreed to my demands even though we both knew I should be using my time more gainfully, in ways more befitting the daughter of King Drupad, ruler of Panchaal, one of the richest kingdoms in the continent of Bharat.
The story inspired me to make up fancy names for myself: Offspring of Vengeance, or the Unexpected One. But Dhai Ma puffed out her cheeks at my tendency to drama, calling me the Girl Who Wasn't Invited. Who knows, perhaps she was more accurate than I.
This winter afternoon, sitting cross--legged in the meager sunlight that managed to find its way through my slit of a window, she said, "When your brother stepped out of the sacrificial fire onto the cold stone slabs of the palace hall, all the assembly cried out in amazement."
She was shelling peas. I watched her flashing fingers with envy, wishing she would let me help. But Dhai Ma had very specific ideas about activities that were appropriate for princesses.
"An eyeblink later," she continued, "when you emerged from the fire, our jaws dropped. It was so quiet, you could have heard a housefly fart."
I reminded her that flies do not perform that particular bodily function.
She smiled her squint-eyed, cunning smile. "Child, the things you don't know would fill the milky ocean where Lord Vishnu sleeps--and spill over its edges."
I considered being offended, but I wanted to hear the story. So I held my tongue, and after a moment she picked up the tale again.
"We'd been praying for thirty days, from sun-up to sundown. All of us: your father, the hundred priests he'd invited to Kampilya to perform the fire ceremony, headed by that shifty-eyed pair, Yaja and Upayaja, the queens, the ministers, and of course the servants. We'd been fasting, too--not that we were given a choice--just one meal, each evening, of flattened rice soaked in milk. King Drupad wouldn't eat even that. He only drank water carried up from the holy Ganga, so that the gods would feel obligated to answer his prayers."
"What did he look like?"
"He was thin as the point of a sword, and hard like it, too. You could count every bone on him. His eyes, sunk deep into their sockets, glittered like black pearls. He could barely hold up his head, but of course he wouldn't remove that monstrosity of a crown that no one has ever seen him without--not even his wives, I've heard, not even in bed."
Dhai Ma had a good eye for detail. Father was, even now, much the same, though age--and the belief that he was finally close to getting what he'd wanted for so long--had softened his impatience.
"Some people," she continued, "thought he was going to die, but I had no such fears. Anyone who wanted revenge as badly as your royal father did wouldn't let go of body and breath so easily." She chewed ruminatively on a handful of peas.
"Finally," I prompted her, "it was the thirtieth day."
"And I for one was heartily thankful. Milk and rice husk is all very well for priests and widows, but give me fish curry with green chilies and tamarind pickle any day! Besides, my throat was scraped raw from gabbling all those unpronounceable Sanskrit words. And my buttocks, I swear, they were flat as...
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