Ashwatthama is still alive

Fiction

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“I met Ashwatthama.” When Doctor Prabhakar told me this, I thought he was talking figuratively. Metaphors were his weaknesses. “The real virus is in the human heart, Jai,” he had told me when the pandemic named Covid-19 started holding the country hostage. I thought his Ashwatthama was similarly figurative.

Ashwatthama was Dronacharya’s son in the Mahabharata. He was blessed with immortality by Shiva. But the blessing became a horrible curse when Krishna punished him for killing the Pandava kids deceptively after Kurukshetra was brought to peace, however fragile that peace was, using all the frauds that a god could possibly use. Krishna of the Kurukshetra was no less a fraud than a run-of-the-mill politician in my imagination. He could get an innocent elephant named Ashwatthama killed and then convert that killing into a blatant lie to demoralise Drona. He could ask Bhima to hit Duryodhana below the belt without feeling any moral qualms in what came to be glorified as a dharma-yuddha. The foundations of his morality were like tectonic plates that shifted as and when it suited him. If Dharma was so helpless in the hands of a God, where would it ever be safe? This was a problem that never ceased to beleaguer me.

Was Ashwatthama any worse than Krishna? I used to wonder again and again. At any rate, he was a better warrior. Moreover, his morality did not sway like a bamboo reed in the wind. If you can use deception, I too can. His dharma was as straight as the arrows he shot in the battlefield.

But Krishna seemed to believe that fraudulence was his personal prerogative.

“I love imagining Ashwatthama standing in the Pandava camp that night, after killing the Pandava children mistaking them for the illustrious warriors, and laughing like a contented savage.” I once told Dr Prabhakar. “Ashwatthama’s laughter must have been the last laughter of the Mahabharata. Tit for tat. You kill my father, I kill your children. “The futility of human dharma is what Ashwatthama’s last laugh underscores, Dr Prabha,” I said. “The ultimate farce is that this dharma has been taught by none less than a god.”

“But Ashwatthama didn’t know how to take back his weapon when he needed to,” protested Dr Prabhakar as if the inability to take back a fired bullet made you an inferior shooter. While Arjuna could take his Pashupatastra back, Ashwatthama was only able to redirect his Brahmastra at the last crucial moment even when the gods requested him. Ah, the gods, imagine them standing with folded hands before Ashwatthama! That was perhaps the most glorious moment in the entire Mahabharata, I used to gloat. Dr Prabhakar did not appreciate my irreverence.

But I did share Dr Prabha’s indignation about Ashwatthama sending his deadly missile into Uttara’s womb that carried Arjuna’s grandson. The end of the Pandava lineage was not what roused my indignation, but the attack on a woman, on her womb, on the innocent life that was just sprouting there.

“India has particular fondness for targeting wombs,” I said with a sigh. “We are Ashwatthama’s descendants.”

That is why Dr Prabha’s claim that Ashwatthama was alive did not perturb me. We are all Ashwatthamas, aren’t we?

Krishna cursed Ashwatthama for his dastardly act of driving a whole cosmic missile into a woman’s womb. “Live your entire immortal life carrying the stigma of a leper on you,” Krishna uttered with an uncharacteristic solemnity. Even Krishna could be touchy about certain things, you know. Thus the immortal Ashwatthama became an immortal leper.

“I met Ashwatthama,” Dr Prabhakar told me. “He had that terrible stigma on his forehead. A deep hollow that went as far as his brain. I could see his brain festering.” Dr Prabha was disconcerted and he was trembling. “He came to me for a painkiller. I stared at him for a moment and then asked, ‘Are you Ashwatthama?’ The man groaned. The groan faded away and also the man. It was like the Cheshire Cat fading away gradually. Like the Cat’s grin, this man’s groan lingered in the end. For a while.”

Ashwatthama is still alive, I told myself. We are all Ashwatthamas, aren’t we?
 

PS. This story was inspired by a reportedly real incident that I stumbled on this morning: Mahabharat: Is Ashwatthama still alive?