It was a cold wintry pale afternoon in Mumbai when Pothead asked me, “Why do you think Mahadev gave such a ridiculous boon to Draupadi’s wish for a really great guy for her husband in the next birth?”
My opinion of the male species keeps varying according to how I feel for certain members of them at a given period of time. So now I said, “Because even Mahadev knew you could never find a guy who would measure upto Draupadi’s expectations of a complete man. And, as Mahadev, for all his wisdom, was after all a guy himself, he would naturally bungle it up somewhere. So he thought he was doing a smart act by allotting 5 guys to her, overlooking the fact that for human beings, the whole is a lot more than merely the sum of parts. And by throwing 5 guys into the equation, he was also bringing in 5 times more of male dumbness and immaturity. You see Ph, men were simply not made complete. It’s rather unfair to women.”
Pothead didn’t have to deal with Hobbes for a husband, so her views were less affected by the practicalities of dealing with a man, and more based on textual, theoretical, ideological interpretations. “For all your women are smarter rant”, she said wryly, “women sure seem to be doing great! Exactly what have women done? They are nowhere! Which great contribution did they carry out in human history other than producing babies?”
I knew this discussion would lead nowhere, except me babbling a lot, which I wasn’t very keen to do right then. I was more interested in expounding to her how dumb the whole Mahabharat related episode was. So I switched tracks and replied instead, “How does that make Mahadev’s boon any smarter? How does it even make any of the Pandavas remotely worthy of being the dream partner for D?”
“Bhim loved her faithfully enough. She paid two hoots to him though.”
“You seriously think that simpleton glutton could fathom someone as layered and complex as D? Then take Arjun- the glamour guy young girls would fall for at 18 and hate at 28. Nakul and Sahadev seem so washed out and insignificant. And Yudhisthir suffered from the Gandhi syndrome. Or maybe Gandhi suffered from the Yudhisthir syndrome. That unending quest for standing out as the peace loving righteous guy before enemies and conveniently forgetting all the injustices you subject your own kith and kin to. Also, his moral issues were nonexistent when the five tribal brothers and their mother were left by the P’s in the Jatugriha to be burnt alive instead of them. I don’t think D could really like such a ‘holier than thou’ pompous ass as Y.”
“Why couldn’t she have married Krishna? He didn’t even fight for her. If there was a man who would be her match, you’d think it would be K. What was he even thinking?”
“No clue baby. I seriously don’t get what, if at all, men think. They seem to act first and think later. And mostly screw up everything if left to their judgment. Look at the mess they have made of this world. K probably hadn’t even thought of D before she got married to those 5 numb nuts.”
“You think he thought about her later?”
“He may have. I don’t know. He may have realized that in his more mature years. She was only eighteen when she had the swayamvar. How much of a Draupadi could she have become at such an early age? And adversity shaped her up a lot. There’s this young starry eyed princess dreaming of her knight in shining armour and gets insanely happy that he has won her. And within hours she is faced with the prospect of accepting four other men she has no interest in to be her husbands. No one thinks of consulting her or asking her permission. She must have been jolted into a quick unpleasant maturity.”
“It wouldn’t have been any better if she had been straddled only with Arjun, though. She would have quickly seen through him anyway and all her hero worship would fade away. So either way, it was destined to be a bad deal for her. Would Karn have suited her better?”
“Somehow I just don’t see them together. Both were much too independent and headstrong to be compatible. Also, Karn was more of a serious idealist with a lot of emotional issues for him to deal with. He wouldn’t have really been the sort of involved lover D would love to have. She would have loved to be pampered and made much of. She needed to be the centre of focus. She had to feel that the man was discovering her everyday, bit by bit. She would have wanted to be in control of major affairs. In a way, she was a little vain. She would not have enjoyed being the wife of a lesser king, whatever his personal attributes may have been. She would somehow feel low to be a small time insignificant queen without powers in central politics. She had to be important, don’t you see? That was crucial. She was not a just somebody. She was her! She was conscious that she was worth more than the plethora of pretty faced queens all around. She wasn’t made of a stuff to be content being merely someone’s queen, someone’s wife. That would be a secondary obscure role and she would be doing a crime against herself if she allowed herself to sink to that. She was ambitious. Just like a capable king would be. And she had the brains and the skills and the charisma to go with it. She was not a Mumtaj, she was a Noor Jahan.”
“She couldn’t have loved any of those five, could she? She would have pined for A for a good long time and shed tears at her inability to make him completely her’s. She would have longed for A on nights when she was mandatorily in serial monogamy with one of the other four. She would have burned inside for being unable to hold A’s attention as much as she would have liked to, and cursed the five yearly plan. It would take a very mature her to finally get disillusioned with A. But what the heck! Here a king marries multiple queens and it is his will. A princess is straddled unwillingly to five men and she has to go through a yearly serial monogamy! What the F*! They must have been paranoid about paternity issues. Though it hardly mattered to them that those five sons were butchered to save them after the war.”
“But why would Kunti advocate such a thing for D? “
“I hate that woman. Totally. She is one of those sly ones who get away with a lot of stuff under the garb of being very traditional. She must have been jealous of D. She was petty in a lot of ways, she was never meant to be a great queen. Maybe she wanted someone else to be there who would have five men in her life like she had. First, there was Surya, then Pandu, then Dharma, Pavan and Indra. She was probably setting a precedent for her times. And she was secretly conscious of being under the danger of being labeled. She had been irresponsible as a young girl, abandoning her baby to the mercy of fate, and had never gathered either enough courage or compassion to do the right thing even in later life. She was an ordinary woman at best. Using her newly gained authority as a matriarch vested with powers to dictate a daughter in law, she did something mean. She was also using her native woman cunning. She was preventing any split based on jealousy between the P’s. Her womanly intuition would have told her immediately that D was a woman who could create havoc in men’s hearts. That had to be reigned in. D, if given the right ambience, would make her insignificant much too soon. She was preventing that.”
“It’s all so mixed up. If I took moral lessons from the episode it would be like, there’s no point in a life’s worth of penance to get yourself a great man, because it’s not going to happen. And with the foresight that even the Devadidev Mahadev, who by the way is the only sensible one among the gods, shows, there’s not much trusting them. They’ll keep bungling affairs of mere mortals. Also, marriages can be pretty farcical. Mother in laws have their own motivations for acting strange. In any case they will not be acting out of pure goodwill for the DIL. Is it worth pining for a man?”
“The trouble is there’s no choice. If you are a woman, you’ll want to hope that there’s this great guy somewhere who’ll introduce you to a wonderful new world. There’s this hope, this ardent wish coming from within. That there has to be someone, who’ll be that guy. Maybe when women are past their prime they realize, that quest is a futile one. That a great guy is a unicorn. Always fantasized, never in existence. And then maybe they console themselves that it is like the journey to Ithaca. There’s no Ithaca to go to in reality. But if the quest for Ithaca had not filled the romanticized brain with all sorts of awesome ideas, the journey would never be undertaken.”
“But, Krishna could be, just could be that guy for D, couldn’t he?”
“He grew to be her closest friend, her confidante, her only saviour when the hour required. Somehow, all the other five paled before him in comparison. You think she would never have thought about him in her moments of aloneness? That she would have never thought how it would be if things were different? If she had waited for herself to mature into a woman before committing herself to a lifetime of marriage?”
“That way, the wait would never end, would it? As you grow older, you change, your world view changes. What you are looking for in a man changes. So, how do you ever decide who to be with?”
“What if you never have to decide?”
“In that smooth or jerky transition from man to man, which seems so seamless inside your head as a story plot, you are forgetting the real life ramifications. You will also forego getting comfortably careless with one man. You will miss not being able to be just ordinary. You’ll have to keep yourself interesting and mysterious, longer than you’d probably care to. The great thing about not having to worry who you are with, once both of you decide on its finality, is the freedom to pull your hair down, put your feet up, look out of the window on a cold morning and sip a cup of strong coffee and feel contended.”
(to be continued...well maybe)
