Kunti

The chariot stood yoked in the courtyard of Hastinapura, its horses restless, its wheels freshly greased for the long road to Dwaraka. The war was over. Yudhishthira sat crowned. Duryodhana and his ninety-nine brothers were ash on the plain of Kurukshetra, and Krishna, having done everything that dharma had asked of him in that ruined house, was ready to go home. It was Kunti who would not let him leave so simply. She came out before the gathered court, an old woman who had given away one infant son to a river, buried a husband in a forest, and watched a hundred nephews and her own firstborn die within the same eighteen days, and she did what no one else in that courtyard dared. She asked Krishna to stay, or, failing that, to strip away everything else in her life except the sight of his face. Let calamities come again and again, she said, if that is what it takes for me to see you, because it was never in the palace, among silk and courtiers, that I held you closest. It was in exile, in the burning forest hut, in poverty and fear, that you were never out of my sight. Give me back that nearness, even at the price of every comfort I now possess. The Bhagavata Purana keeps this prayer in some twenty-six verses of astonishing tenderness, and it is remembered that Krishna's eyes filled with tears at her words. He stepped down from the chariot he had already boarded and turned back into the house with her, delaying, for a while longer, his own departure from the world she loved him in.

To understand how a woman comes to pray for suffering rather than against it, one has to go back to the girl she had been. She was born Pritha, daughter of the Yadava king Shurasena and sister to Vasudeva, the very man who would one day father Krishna. In childhood she was given, by an old bond of kinship and promise, to her father's cousin Kuntibhoja, a king with no child of his own, and raised in his household as if she were his daughter by blood. It was there that she earned the name history remembers her by. Kuntibhoja had charged the young princess with the care of guests and holy visitors to his court, and one season a famously irritable sage named Durvasa, known across the three worlds for a temper that could unmake kingdoms with a syllable, came to stay. Pritha served him with such unwavering attentiveness through his moods and his austerities that when he departed he chose to leave her a gift few would know what to do with: a mantra by which she could call down any deva she wished and receive a child by his grace, whenever she chose.

She was young, unmarried, and, as the young often are, more curious than wise. One morning, half in disbelief that the sage's words could be true, she turned her face to the rising sun and spoke the mantra to Surya. The sun god did not send a vision; he appeared before her in his own blazing form, and by the time Pritha understood what she had done, she was already carrying his child. The boy who came was marked from birth in a way that named him as no ordinary infant: kavacha and kundala, armor and earrings grown into his very skin, so that no weapon of this world could easily kill him. But Pritha was a girl standing at the edge of her own reputation and her father's honor, unmarried and terrified, and she did what fear rather than love told her to do. She sealed the child in a basket and set him on the waters of a river running near the palace, and let him go. He was found downstream by a charioteer named Adhiratha and his wife, who raised him as their own and called him Karna, never knowing, until it no longer mattered, that his true mother was a queen. Of all the griefs Kunti would carry in a long and difficult life, this was the first and, by her own testimony decades later, the one that never stopped bleeding.

In time she was given in marriage to Pandu, king of the Kurus, and some while after, for reasons of alliance, he took a second wife, the Madra princess Madri. It was on a hunting expedition that catastrophe found him: Pandu loosed an arrow at what he thought were two deer mating in the forest and killed a sage named Kindama, who had taken that form with his own wife. With his last breath the dying rishi cursed Pandu to die the instant he ever again touched a woman in desire. Undone by what he had done and by what he now could never do, Pandu renounced his throne and withdrew into the forest with both his queens, choosing the austerities of a hermit's life over a crown he felt he no longer deserved to hold, and haunted by the fear that his line, and his dharma, would end with him, childless.

It was Kunti who solved what seemed an impossible grief. She told Pandu of the mantra Durvasa had given her, and, with his blessing and by the sanctioned practice of niyoga, she called in turn upon Dharma, upon Vayu, and upon Indra, and bore Yudhishthira, Bhima, and Arjuna, sons who would carry the weight of their divine fathers' natures into the world. She then, without a trace of possessiveness, taught the same mantra to Madri, her co-wife, who invoked the twin Ashwins and bore Nakula and Sahadeva. From the day those two boys were born, Kunti raised all five as equally her own, favoring none, a devotion to the whole family rather than merely to her own blood that would define her for the rest of her life.

The curse did not sleep forever. One spring day, undone by the beauty around him and by longing he could no longer master, Pandu embraced Madri despite her pleading, and died in her arms exactly as the sage had foretold. Madri, consumed by the belief that her own allure had killed him, gave her two sons into Kunti's keeping and followed her husband onto his funeral pyre. Kunti, still a young woman, was left alone in the forest with five boys who were not fully hers by blood and entirely hers by love, and it was in that condition, a widow with no husband's protection, that she brought them back to Hastinapura, into the uneasy household of the blind king Dhritarashtra and his hundred sons, who would soon enough become her sons' bitterest rivals.

When Duryodhana's plot to burn the five Pandavas alive in a house of lac at Varanavata was discovered in time, Kunti fled with her sons through the night in disguise, becoming, for a season, a wandering brahmin woman with five brahmin sons rather than a queen with five princes. It was during this hidden interval, in the town of Ekachakra, that her instinct for other people's suffering showed itself even while her own family was in danger. Hearing a brahmin household weeping because its turn had come to deliver a cartload of food, and a family member with it, to a man-eating demon named Bakasura, Kunti refused to let the family be destroyed and quietly volunteered Bhima in the victim's place, certain of her son's strength and unwilling to let an innocent family pay a debt that was not theirs. Bhima went that night, ate the offering himself, and broke the demon's back across his knee, and the Pandavas moved on, their secret still safe, but Kunti's character now plainly visible: a woman who took in the sorrows of strangers even while carrying her own in silence.

It was not long after that her household grew by one more, and in the strangest way possible. Returning from Draupadi's swayamvara with news that Arjuna had won a great prize, the brothers called out to their mother from outside their hut before she had seen what they carried. Without turning to look, Kunti answered from habit, in the words she always used when her sons returned from foraging: whatever you have brought, share it equally among yourselves. When she turned and saw Draupadi standing there, she was horrified at what her own words had unwittingly bound her sons to, yet she would not take them back, for a mother's word, once given, was to her as fixed as any vow. It fell to the sage Vyasa to explain that this had never been an accident at all: in an earlier life, Draupadi had prayed with such longing for a husband who combined every virtue that no single man could answer her prayer, and so five would. Kunti's slip of the tongue had simply given voice to a destiny that had been waiting for her all along.

After the game of dice stripped her sons of their kingdom and sent them into thirteen years of exile, Kunti did not walk into the forest with them. Old already, and needed, by long tradition, to remain near the court, she stayed behind in Hastinapura, in the keeping of the wise and steady Vidura, and endured those years the only way available to her: in silence, in prayer, and in watching. She had already learned, long before, that waiting without bitterness was its own kind of discipline.

The cruelest test of her life came just before the war itself. When Krishna's peace mission failed and battle became certain, he told Karna, gently and without warning, who his true mother was. Kunti went to find her firstborn son at the banks of the Ganga, where he stood facing the rising sun in prayer, exactly as she had once faced it herself to call him into being. She waited behind him in the heat until he turned, and when he did, and saw the shade of her presence on the ground before his own, he greeted her with the courtesy due any stranger, calling her, still, only a well-wisher's guest. Then she told him the truth: that she was his mother, that the Pandavas were his own brothers, that he need not die on the wrong side of this war. Karna's answer was one of the most sorrowful in the whole epic. He told her that whatever claim blood gave her had been surrendered the day she set him on the water; that Radha and Adhiratha, who had raised him with nothing to gain, were his true parents; and that he could not now abandon Duryodhana, who alone among kings had given him honor when the world called him low-born. But he was not without mercy for her. He promised that whatever happened on the field, she would not lose her five sons: he would meet Arjuna, and only Arjuna, and whichever of them died, she would still be able to say, truthfully, that she was the mother of five.

When the war ended and Karna lay dead, it was Kunti who had to tell her surviving sons the truth she had hidden for a lifetime: that the great warrior they had fought so hard to kill, whose death they had celebrated as the fall of their most dangerous enemy, was in fact their own eldest brother. Yudhishthira's grief on hearing this was so total that he is remembered to have cursed all women, from that day, to be unable to keep a secret, so unbearable did he find the years of silence his mother had kept. Kunti received his anger the way she had received every other sorrow in her life: without excuse, only sorrow of her own, for a wound that had never actually closed since the morning she first floated her son down the river.

It is against this whole life, and not against comfort or theology in the abstract, that her prayer to Krishna at the end of the war has to be heard. She had known, more intimately than almost anyone in the epic, that sampatti, worldly ease and standing, was precisely what made people forget the divine; it was only in vipatti, in exile, poverty, and fear, that she had never once lost sight of Krishna's face. Her prayer therefore asked not to be spared but to be kept in that same nearness, whatever the cost, and closed with the recognition that only darshan of the divine, not wealth or even victory, could end the cycle of birth and death she had watched claim husband, son, and nephew alike. The old doha that opens her portion of the Bhaktamal, praising the love of fish and other simple creatures whose life itself departs at the moment of separation, is really a description of her: prema proven true not by what it enjoys, but by what it cannot survive without.

Her last years were spent, by most accounts, at Vyasa's forest hermitage on the banks of the Ganga, where she had gone with the blind Dhritarashtra and Gandhari after handing the kingdom fully to her sons, the three of them living out their final seasons in tapasya, fasting, and simplicity. Tradition holds that a great forest fire eventually overtook that hermitage, and that Kunti, along with Dhritarashtra and Gandhari, chose not to flee it, accepting the flames as a fitting end to lives already given over entirely to the world beyond this one. The Bhaktamal's own telling draws her death even closer to Krishna's, saying that when she heard Hari had left this earth for his own abode, she could not remain in her body a moment longer and gave it up at once to go to him. Whether it is read as literal chronology or, as seems more likely, as devotional truth placed ahead of itsel, the meaning is the same either way: this was a woman for whom life had only ever had one point, and once that point was gone from the world, there was nothing left in it that she wanted to keep.

What makes Kunti's place among the Bhaktamal's saints so unlike the others is that she was never a renunciate, never a wandering singer, never once outside the ordinary and often brutal responsibilities of being a wife, a widow, and a mother of five contending princes. Her sadhana was the raising of children who were not entirely her own, the keeping of a secret that cost her a son's love, the waiting through exile she did not share, and, at the very end, the courage to ask God for hardship rather than ease because hardship was where she had always found him. Anyone who has ever prayed for comfort and quietly suspected it was the wrong prayer will recognize, in Kunti's plea to Krishna, an older and harder wisdom: better the fire that keeps his face before you than the palace that lets you forget it.