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Bhishma On The Bed Of Arrows: An exclusive excerpt from Ashok K. Banker’s Mahabharata

An exclusive excerpt from The Seeds of War: Book 1 of The Mahabharata by Ashok K. Banker. (c) Ashok K. Banker 2005. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce, copy, email, or quote any or all of the following text, unless you have written permission from the author.



//om ganesha namaha//

//jaya jaya jaya jaya hai//

//prologue//

the last burden

And so it ends.

Upon this battlefield strewn with the butchered corpses of princes and kings, peasants and priests, shepherds and warlords, bloody limbs intertwined in the grotesque intimacy that makes all men brothers and equal as the gods intended us to be, and as we staunchly refused to be in life.

This is where I shall die today.

For it is given unto me to choose the time and place of my own death, and no power in all the worlds known and unknown could cause me to release my hold upon life’s warm hilt until I chose to do so.

I shall choose so today.

It is time to end this mad dance of days and nights, snuff out the sputtering torches, and pull close the drapes across the windows of my soul. I am done playing the dice game of flesh and fever some call living. I seek emancipation. The cool soft touch of an eternal pillow to replace this bed of arrows on which I lie now, placed at my own request that I may not touch the earth until my time of passing. My soul’s release from the endless cycle of births and rebirths, unshackling these invisible chains of dharma that bind me and you and us all to the eternal wheel of time.

Dwaipayana, my friend.

Hear my last words, wise one. Chronicler of the sacred Vedic texts. Most gifted of poets.

Someday, you will write the chronicle of these days at the end of one age and the start of another. This bitter cusp of history which birthed one era from the blood-spattered womb of another dying one. The Age of Kali has begun. As predicted, it began with great bloodshed and the most terrible war ever waged. This battle of brothers on the field of Kurukshetra that pitted a once-united land against itself and sundered the proud heart of the Bharata nation as nothing else ever did before, nor will again.

You will tell this tale. For it is the bloodsmirched foundation upon which the future of this great people shall rest forever and even the loftiest tower that kisses the sky must acknowledge the firm earth upon which its proud eminence stands. It is the history of the Bharata nation and its people. It is the chronicle of our days and our lives. Within its pages, you will tell everything worth telling about life and love, and everything else that matters. What is not to be found within its pages, will not be found anywhere else.

It will be the fifth Veda, recorded, studied, debated, and retold endlessly from now to the end of days. I have no doubt it will be your greatest achievement.

Perhaps you will call it simply Bharata. Or, as scribes are wont to do, embellish that simple title with some flowery flourish of grandeur. Add a suitable prefix or suffix. History of the Bharata nation. Battle of Bharata perhaps. Great War of Bharata even.

For after all, at the heart of the story, there is a great battle, a terrible war. The mother of all wars ever fought in the history of the world, now and forevermore, comparable to no other war, past or future. Though countless scribes shall wrack their feverish minds to attempt to match the grisly glory of this true historical tale, none shall succeed. For truth is always fiercer than fiction. And this fiction is truth itself.

And so, if it pleases you, if it does not offend your artistic sensibility, then I would ask of you that you pen a title that conveys not just the bloodshed and the suffering, the agony and misery at the end, the pain and the conflict.

That you give it a name such that conveys that ultimate meaning, the secret kernel that lies at the journey’s end. That pot of gold at the end of that very long rainbow. Dwaipayana, name it such that you convey the glory as well as the grist. The pride as well as the pomposity. The majesty as well as the muck. The regal splendour as well as the offal-spattered reality. The beauty and the darkness. The nobility and the deceit. The passion and the poison. The sacrifices and the betrayals.

Portray both sides with equal vigour. For there is no right or wrong in this history of the mother of all wars. No good and no evil. The best of them did the worst of things to achieve their righteous goals, the worst of them sometimes behaved nobly when it mattered most. Here, you will find no mindless evils or secret villains lurking behind the scenes, nor will you find pristine heroes with unsullied hands – when war erupts, all involved must equally shoulder the heavy burden of blame, the way that four shoulders shall equally carry the weight of my corpse, the last burden.

In war, there are no heroes, not even those who count themselves among the gods. War makes wretches of us all. Participation itself is a crime against nature; condoning the crime is participation. Not even blind kings who sit in distant palaces, hearing rumours of battlefield tales from their faithful heralds are blameless; and even the deva who watches the carnage from his heavenly chariot shares in the immortal shame of this splendid blasphemy.

Give it a name that conveys the terror and pride and unending sorrow of that as well. Better yet, a name that mocks the fleeting triumph while commenting on the irony that all are losers here in the end.

Call it Jaya.

Victory.

After all, it is a tale about the victory of the spirit over the frailties of flesh. The triumph of dharma over a-dharma. The joy of winning the just fight, the true cause.

A victory of truth and justice. The greatest triumph ever won by any mortal being.

And yet, victory itself is such a paltry prize for the decimation of entire bloodlines and the murder of brother nations. A lewd license for misguided fools who would slaughter their neighbours in the name of granting them freedom: Ha! Freedom? Yes. The ultimate freedom – freedom from life! In the thicket of such lies nestles the seed of mankind’s demise: burn the bush, and you will truly be free. Free of war. That is the only freedom that matters.

I know this now at the end, I who have waged more wars than any president of decadent plutocracies.

The only true Jaya is victory over war itself.

An end to violence.

If it pleases you, call it by that ironic, self-effasive title. Jaya. It will please a dying man’s vanity.

And now, Dwaipayana, it is time.

These are my last breaths. I prepare myself to go across the river. Across my mother’s breast.

I hear her voice calling me now. If you listen closely, you may hear it too, sussurating like the ocean, like a mother’s lullaby at bedtime.

She does not call me by the name you know me by. Not Bhishma. Or Bhishma-pitama. That was a title given to me for the vow I took. Bhishma: He Of The Terrible Vow. Pitama, for I was a forebear to all of them. (Even though–chuckle–you, my friend Dwaipayana, you were their forebear in truth.) Bhishma-pitama they called me, out of love and respect. And I bore that title with honour until now.

But it is time to reclaim my true name.

Devavrata.

I have waited a lifetime to hear that name called. To hear my mother the river take human form once more and call out my name. Summon me back to her warm motherly embrace. The cool welcoming waters of Ganga await me.

I go now, Dwaipayana. There. I have drawn my final breath. Hear now my last word and your first…

Jaya.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 8:38 am. It is filed under Ashok. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.