The Fugitive and Other Poems: Karna and Kunti

Karna and Kunti

The Pandava Queen Kunti before marriage had a son, Karna, who, in manhood,
became the commander of the Kaurava host. To hide her shame she abandoned
him at birth, and a charioteer, Adhiratha, brought him up as his son.

KARNA

I am Karna, the son of the charioteer, Adhiratha, and I sit here by the
bank of holy Ganges to worship the setting sun. Tell me who you are.

KUNTI

I am the woman who first made you acquainted with that light you are
worshipping.

KARNA

I do not understand: but your eyes melt my heart as the kiss of the morning
sun melts the snow on a mountain-top, and your voice rouses a blind sadness
within me of which the cause may well lie beyond the reach of my earliest
memory. Tell me, strange woman, what mystery binds my birth to you?

KUNTI

Patience, my son. I will answer when the lids of darkness come down over
the prying eyes of day. In the meanwhile, know that I am Kunti.

KARNA

Kunti! The mother of Arjuna?

KUNTI

Yes, indeed, the mother of Arjuna, your antagonist. But do not, therefore,
hate me. I still remember the day of the trial of arms in Hastina when you,
an unknown boy, boldly stepped into the arena, like the first ray of dawn
among the stars of night. Ah! who was that unhappy woman whose eyes kissed
your bare, slim body through tears that blessed you, where she sat among
the women of the royal household behind the arras? Why, the mother of
Arjuna! Then the Brahmin, master of arms, stepped forth and said, "No youth
of mean birth may challenge Arjuna to a trial of strength." You stood
speechless, like a thunder-cloud at sunset flashing with an agony of
suppressed light. But who was the woman whose heart caught fire from your
shame and anger, and flared up in silence? The mother of Arjuna! Praised be
Duryodhana, who perceived your worth, and then and there crowned you King
of Anga, thus winning the Kauravas a champion. Overwhelmed at this good
fortune, Adhiratha, the charioteer, broke through the crowd; you instantly
rushed to him and laid your crown at his feet amid the jeering laughter of
the Pandavas and their friends. But there was one woman of the Pandava
house whose heart glowed with joy at the heroic pride of such
humility;--even the mother of Arjuna!

KARNA

But what brings you here alone, Mother of kings?

KUNTI

I have a boon to crave.

KARNA

Command me, and whatever manhood and my honour as a Kshatriya permit shall
be offered at your feet.

KUNTI

I have come to take you.

KARNA

Where?

KUNTI

To my breast thirsting for your love, my son.

KARNA

Fortunate mother of five brave kings, where can you find place for me, a
small chieftain of lowly descent?

KUNTI

Your place is before all my other sons.

KARNA

But what right have I to take it?

KUNTI

Your own God-given right to your mother's love.

KARNA

The gloom of evening spreads over the earth, silence rests on the water,
and your voice leads me back to some primal world of infancy lost in twilit
consciousness. However, whether this be dream, or fragment of forgotten
reality, come near and place your right hand on my forehead. Rumour runs
that I was deserted by my mother. Many a night she has come to me in my
slumber, but when I cried: "Open your veil, show me your face!" her figure
always vanished. Has this same dream come this evening while I wake? See,
yonder the lamps are lighted in your son's tents across the river; and on
this side behold the tent-domes of my Kauravas, like the suspended waves of
a spell-arrested storm at sea. Before the din of tomorrow's battle, in the
awful hush of this field where it must be fought, why should the voice of
the mother of my opponent, Arjuna, bring me a message of forgotten
motherhood? and why should my name take such music from her tongue as to
draw my heart out to him and his brothers?

KUNTI

Then delay not, my son, come with me!

KARNA

Yes, I will come and never ask question, never doubt. My soul responds to
your call; and the struggle for victory and fame and the rage of hatred
have suddenly become untrue to me, as the delirious dream of a night in the
serenity of the dawn. Tell me whither you mean to lead?

KUNTI

To the other bank of the river, where those lamps burn across the ghastly
pallor of the sands.

KARNA

Am I there to find my lost mother for ever?

KUNTI

O my son!

KARNA

Then why did you banish me--a castaway uprooted from my ancestral soil,
adrift in a homeless current of indignity? Why set a bottomless chasm
between Arjuna and myself, turning the natural attachment of kinship to the
dread attraction of hate? You remain speechless. Your shame permeates the
vast darkness and sends invisible shivers through my limbs. Leave my
question unanswered! Never explain to me what made you rob your son of his
mother's love! Only tell me why you have come to-day to call me back to the
ruins of a heaven wrecked by your own hands?

KUNTI

I am dogged by a curse more deadly than your reproaches: for, though
surrounded by five sons, my heart shrivels like that of a woman deprived of
her children. Through the great rent that yawned for my deserted
first-born, all my life's pleasures have run to waste. On that accursed day
when I belied my motherhood you could not utter a word; to-day your
recreant mother implores you for generous words. Let your forgiveness burn
her heart like fire and consume its sin.

KARNA

Mother, accept my tears!

KUNTI

I did not come with the hope of winning you back to my arms, but with that
of restoring your rights to you. Come and receive, as a king's son, your
due among your brothers.

KARNA

I am more truly the son of a charioteer, and do not covet the glory of
greater parentage.

KUNTI

Be that as it may, come and win back the kingdom, which is yours by right!

KARNA

Must you, who once refused me a mother's love, tempt me with a kingdom? The
quick bond of kindred which you severed at its root is dead, and can never
grow again. Shame were mine should I hasten to call the mother of kings
mother, and abandon _my_ mother in the charioteer's house!

KUNTI

You are great, my son! How God's punishment invisibly grows from a tiny
seed to a giant life! The helpless babe disowned by his mother comes back a
man through the dark maze of events to smite his brothers!

KARNA

Mother, have no fear! I know for certain that victory awaits the Pandavas.
Peaceful and still though this night be, my heart is full of the music of a
hopeless venture and baffled end. Ask me not to leave those who are doomed
to defeat. Let the Pandavas win the throne, since they must: I remain with
the desperate and forlorn. On the night of my birth you left me naked and
unnamed to disgrace: leave me once again without pity to the calm
expectation of defeat and death!

When like a flaming scimitar the hill stream has been sheathed in gloom by
the evening, suddenly a flock of birds passes overhead, their loud-laughing
wings hurling their flight like an arrow among stars.

It startles a passion for speed in the heart of all motionless things; the
hills seem to feel in their bosom the anguish of storm-clouds, and trees
long to break their rooted shackles.

For me the flight of these birds has rent a veil of stillness, and reveals
an immense flutter in this deep silence.

I see these hills and forests fly across time to the unknown, and darkness
thrill into fire as the stars wing by.

I feel in my own being the rush of the sea-crossing bird, cleaving a way
beyond the limits of life and death, while the migrant world cries with a
myriad voices, "Not here, but somewhere else, in the bosom of the Faraway."

The crowd listens in wonder to Kashi, the young singer, whose voice, like a
sword in feats of skill, dances amidst hopeless tangles, cuts them to
pieces, and exults.

Among the hearers sits old Rajah Pratap in weary endurance. For his own
life had been nourished and encircled by Barajlal's songs, like a happy
land which a river laces with beauty. His rainy evenings and the still
hours of autumn days spoke to his heart through Barajlal's voice, and his
festive nights trimmed their lamps and tinkled their bells to those songs.

When Kashi stopped for rest, Pratap smilingly winked at Barajlal and spoke
to him in a whisper, "Master, now let us hear music and not this
new-fangled singing, which mimics frisky kittens hunting paralysed mice."

The old singer with his spotlessly white turban made a deep bow to the
assembly and took his seat. His thin fingers struck the strings of his
instrument, his eyes closed, and in timid hesitation his song began. The
hall was large, his voice feeble, and Pratap shouted "Bravo!" with
ostentation, but whispered in his ear, "Just a little louder, friend!"

The crowd was restless; some yawned, some dozed, some complained of the
heat. The air of the hall hummed with many-toned inattention, and the song,
like a frail boat, tossed upon it in vain till it sank under the hubbub.

Suddenly the old man, stricken at heart, forgot a passage, and his voice
groped in agony, like a blind man at a fair for his lost leader. He tried
to fill the gap with any strain that came. But the gap still yawned: and
the tortured notes refused to serve the need, suddenly changed their tune,
and broke into a sob. The master laid his head on his instrument, and in
place of his forgotten music, there broke from him the first cry of life
that a child brings into the world.

Pratap touched him gently on his shoulder, and said, "Come away, our
meeting is elsewhere. I know, my friend, that truth is widowed without
love, and beauty dwells not with the many, nor in the moment."

In the youth of the world, Himalaya, you sprang from the rent breast of the
earth, and hurled your burning challenges to the sun, hill after hill. Then
came the mellow time when you said to yourself, "No more, no further!" and
your fiery heart, that raged for the freedom of clouds, found its limits,
and stood still to salute the limitless. After this check on your passion,
beauty was free to play upon your breast, and trust surrounded you with the
joy of flowers and birds.

You sit in your solitude like a great reader, on whose lap lies open some
ancient book with its countless pages of stone. What story is written
there, I wonder?--is it the eternal wedding of the divine ascetic, Shiva,
with Bhavani, the divine love?--the drama of the Terrible wooing the power
of the Frail?

I feel that my heart will leave its own colour in all your scenes, O Earth,
when I bid you farewell. Some notes of mine will be added to your seasons'
melody, and my thoughts will breathe unrecognised through the cycle of
shadows and sunshine.

In far-distant days summer will come to the lovers' garden, but they will
not know that their flowers have borrowed an added beauty from my songs,
nor that their love for this world has been deepened by mine.

My eyes feel the deep peace of this sky, and there stirs through me what a
tree feels when it holds out its leaves like cups to be filled with
sunshine.

A thought rises in my mind, like the warm breath from grass in the sun; it
mingles with the gurgle of lapping water and the sigh of weary wind in
village lanes,--the thought that I have lived along with the whole life of
this world and have given to it my own love and sorrows.

I ask no reward for the songs I sang you. I shall be content if they live
through the night, until Dawn, like a shepherd-maiden, calls away the
stars, in alarm at the sun.

But there were moments when you sang your songs to me, and as my pride
knows, my Poet, you will ever remember that I listened and lost my heart.

In the morning, when the dew glistened upon the grass, you came and gave a
push to my swing; but, sweeping from smiles to tears, I did not know you.

Then came April's noon of gorgeous light, and I think you beckoned me to
follow you.

But when I sought your face, there passed between us the procession of
flowers, and men and women flinging their songs to the south wind.

Daily I passed you unheeded on the road.

But on some days full of the faint smell of oleanders, when the wind was
wilful among complaining palm leaves, I would stand before you wondering if
you ever had been a stranger to me.

The day grew dim. The early evening star faltered near the edge of a grey
lonely sky.

I looked back and felt that the road lying behind me was infinitely
removed; traced through my life, it had only served for a single journey
and was never to be re-travelled.

The long story of my coming hither lies there dumb, in one meandering line
of dust stretching from the morning hilltop to the brink of bottomless
night.

I sit alone, and wonder if this road is like an instrument waiting to give
up the day's lost voices in music when touched by divine fingers at
nightfall.

Give me the supreme courage of love, this is my prayer--the courage to
speak, to do, to suffer at thy will, to leave all things or be left alone.
Strengthen me on errands of danger, honour me with pain, and help me climb
to that difficult mood which sacrifices daily to thee.

Give me the supreme confidence of love, this is my prayer--the confidence
that belongs to life in death, to victory in defeat, to the power hidden in
frailest beauty, to that dignity in pain which accepts hurt but disdains to
return it.

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