The Palace of Illusions —A Review

‘Love comes like lightning, and disappears the same way. If you are lucky, it strikes you right. If not, you’ll spend your life yearning for a man you can’t have.’ —Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

 It has been raining stories set in historical and mythological pasts, retold in startling perspectives and flavours. Novel methods and innovations have been pressed into service with wide-ranging outcomes. Mahabharata too, that colossal epic of ambition, heroics, intrigue, treachery and vengeance, goes through the customary tweaks and twists in ‘Palace of Illusions’ by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

 Believed in tradition to have unfolded around 3100 BC, the saga of the Mahabharata is a veritable mine of complex beings, terrestrial to celestial, human to divine, in tiers, mixtures and mutations whose paths intersect and intertwine, catapulting the fortunes of the small and the great. There are few accounts as vivid and panoramic, of the petulance and starkness of human failings, and the elegance or perfidy of men. Divakaruni’s adventurous version of the age-old tale undertakes to ‘uncover the story that lay invisible between the lines of men’s exploits’ through the eyes of Panchaali, the princess who pulverised her times.

 Once upon a time under an ancient sun, a king prayed the gods for a scion who could avenge his dishonour by an onetime friend. A boy walked out of the sacrificial fire, followed unexpectedly by a girl whom the gods foretold would change the course of history. She would grow into a vivacious princess, keener on politics and duelling than cooking and music, be won at an archery contest by a Pandava prince disguised as a beggar, and, through an unwitting command of his mother, become wife to all five brothers.

A temporary division of the kingdom between the Pandavas and their Kaurava cousins would end disastrously in a wicked game of dice in which the Pandavas lose their kingdom, themselves and finally the princess. Dragged by her hair into a jeering assembly led by Duryodhana, she is almost disrobed while her five husbands sit helpless. Stung for life, she vows not to tie her hair until the offender is killed and his blood applied to her tresses. The humiliation would help propel the clans towards a cataclysmic war drawing in the kings of the continent. Most would perish in eighteen days of horrific bloodletting, ushering in the end of an age of humanity.

Divakaruni seems unawed by the grandeur of the epic or the majestic sweep of its verses and its religious overtones. Well, at least not initially. She sets the ball rolling at a comfortable pace in an intimate, conversational tone. When the courtesans and the king are dumbfounded by the appearance of a girl out of the sacrificial fire, ‘It was so quiet, you could have heard a housefly fart.’ The irreverence of that one sentence at the outset signals the colloquial style sustained through most of the book.

The grudging welcome of the princess is a brilliant touch, symbolic of the place she would occupy for the rest of her life. The momentary hitch before she is picked up by her putative father would leave a lifelong scar —a craving to be loved unconditionally that would never be quenched. We share her feelings as she grows up amid the damp, stony corridors of the bleak palace, in a dark chamber with a window set high in the wall; even its bars are rusted. While she remains cloistered, her twin brother is free as a bird, absorbing exotic arts and knowledge. The bond she shares with her brother Dhri throbs noticeably through the pages.

 The picture begins to get crowded as characters pour in. The eunuch sibling, the sorceress, a boatload of husbands and their stony, shrewd mother; the blind king and his sulking wife, the maddening Kauravas; the larger-than-life grandfather Bheeshma —all with vendettas and grievances of their own. The creation of the ‘palace of illusions’ strikes the right chord as a fulfilment of the protagonist’s craving for splendour. The diction, for a change, rises a few notches:

 “Above us our palace waits, the only one I’ve ever needed. Its walls are space, its floor is sky, its center everywhere. We rise; the shapes cluster around us in welcome, dissolving and forming again like fireflies in a summer evening.” 

But the proceedings flounder with the Pandavas’ crusade to secure heaven for their departed ancestors. The Kauravas’ overstay at the palace drags it down further. By the time the Pandavas lose everything to mind-numbing wagering, the narrator’s sense of proportion has slipped through her fingers. The story has moved erratically across swaths of time, cruising past where it should have pondered, and lingering at inconsequential shrubbery. Panchaali does fetch snippets from her yet untold future now and then, but they stand out like unsightly patches on the fabric, enriching neither the present nor the bygone. The burden of its largely linear structure begins to choke the story’s movement. Then the Pandavas hit the forest for twelve years of exile and a year of hiding. It is a testing time for the reader as Panchaali goes about heaving and hoeing, stinging each brother with clockwork regularity lest they forget the unforgivable wrong done to her. More than vengeance, there is exasperation in the air, thick and palpable. The book is dead by the thirteenth year and the war has not even begun.

But the greatest failing of the story lies in its handling of the first-person voice. The vivid consciousness of the princess, compelling when she speaks from within herself, gradually drifts outward, until she seems to look upon herself almost as another character and, eventually, the singular woman dissolves into the universal. “But a strange implacability had taken over me…. I stitched discontent onto my features and let my hair fall.” “A woman doesn’t think that way.” “But was a woman’s heart any purer in the end?” Somewhere along this passage from I to a woman to a woman’s heart, Panchaali slips out of her own consciousness, becomes the narrator of her own tale, and finally, having wandered too far from herself, turns into a rambler.

Perhaps it is easy to be swept by the expanse of the canvas when your source is an epic like Mahabharata. A seer penning a momentous saga has the luxury to splurge in characters, bump them in and out at will, each with a potful of life of its own. It is a pitfall, perilous to a novelist retelling an epic, to peer at infinity. It is best for both author and audience that the focus be selective, characters few and emotions consistent. It pays even with a contentious premise, like the love between Panchaali and Karna, provided it is carried to a credible conclusion.

Then there is the question of language. The decision to defang a mammoth, half-sacred epic has already been taken, and the style matches the severity of the dilution for the most part. Yet there are sparks of lyricism that rise at times to the sublimity of the task at hand, only to be rubbed away quickly by the lingo of Facebook chat. Here is how an epic prince narrates a crucial moment in the epoch-churning battle: Nakul said: “You know how Eldest Brother is, very noble and admirable, only sometimes he doesn’t think things through. So he tells Duryodhan, You’re alone here and tired out, and there’s five of us against you, which isn’t fair…” 

The sense of disproportion plagues the book till its excruciatingly delayed end. This is what the dying arch-villain slaps on Panchaali at the close of the carnage: “You will rule a kingdom peopled with widows and orphans and wake each morning to the grief of loss. Who is the real winner, then, and who the loser?” Gosh! That’s enough to turn the victory into ash in the mouths of an entire race. The panting book has ended with a beautiful sting and for a moment one is reminded of that age-old adage, all’s well that ends well! But Divakaruni would rather not stop there. She would meander aimlessly for fifty more pages, copying and pasting sorrow, widow after widow, mourning the headless dead and the listless living, brooding over the detritus of kingdoms. Eventually, she would fall while trying to follow the Pandavas into the clouds of heaven. Yudhishthir’s fading voice would be replaced by Krishna’s philosophical crooning, till there is nothing but death whistling in her ears.

Whence did she speak to us in the book?