Free THE MAHABHARATA: A Modern Rendering, Vol 1 by Ramesh Menon

thought for the pain of the flames, or of the deep passage of death, only pausing to murmur Siva’s name, she walked into the blaze and was turned into ashes. They were redolent with her long austerity.
    By Siva’s grace, Amba was born again with no lease of time. Her spirit may have, otherwise, been condemned to a longer wandering in some realm of the dead; now it flitted through Yama’s labyrinths like a bright swallow that knew its way through these mandalas. The flame of her purpose still searing her soul, she was born as the daughter of king Drupada of the Panchalas. She was born amidst celebrations in that kingdom and her father named her Shikhandin.
    She was so thin as a child: as if she had been pared by some great rigor of another life. But her spirit was fierce and bold, more a male child’s spirit. Her doting father would look at his daughter’s intense face, with its dark burden behind her eyes and he would think, ‘Her expression is so familiar.’ But, of course, he could not remember where he had seen her before.
    One day, when she was just seven, her father brought Shikhandin into his court for the first time. She played quietly in the capacious sabha for a while. Suddenly the young princess saw the garland of lotuses that hung on a marble pillar, with incense and offerings set before it. She darted away from a group of indulgent courtiers and ran to that garland. Her eyes shone. Folding her small hands briefly to the fragrant thing, she plucked it off the pillar and draped it round her neck.
    Drupada sprang to his feet. He shouted at his courtiers, “Fools! Couldn’t you have stopped her? Shikhandin, put that garland back, it is not for children to play with.”
    But his daughter had grown very still. She had shut her eyes in some secret rapture when she draped the garland around herself. Now she opened them and her father was startled by what he saw there: such an adult look of triumph. Her sharp chin lifted up, she stared back at him. In the voice of Amba of old, Shikhandin said, “Drupada, I have been born as your daughter only to wear this garland.”
    A memory flared up in the king’s mind—of a beautiful woman who years ago had spoken to him in that same voice. He dismissed the similarity as coincidence; but it would return to haunt him. Especially in his dreams, the tense, pale face of Amba, princess of Kasi, would coalesce with his daughter’s; and the eyes were the same, burning with their single purpose.
    Once she had put it on, Shikhandin refused to be parted for a moment from Karttikeya’s garland. Drupada was unnerved by his dreams and at the thought of Bheeshma’s wrath. Finally, the king grew convinced Shikhandin really was Amba and had returned just to seek the revenge she was obsessed with. When she reached puberty, her father turned the princess out into exile.
    She went cheerfully, her precious garland around her neck, as if exile was a welcome step on her way to her only goal: Bheeshma’s death. She retraced her steps of many years ago. As Shikhandin, Amba went back into the plumbless forest. The jungle probed her strange destiny with subtle feelers of flower and leaf, green vapors, animal eyes and intuition: all of which perceive time so differently from human senses. In its deep stillness, the forest had known she would return. Here Karttikeya had given her the garland she now wore as if it were part of her body. She sat in the same spot where Amba had once sat, so disturbed. Locked in padmasana, facing the east, she shut her eyes. Wrapped in the caress of the unearthly lotuses, she chanted Siva’s holy name ceaselessly and his son Karttikeya’s. The years slipped by, unnoticed. She was waiting for a sign, another boon.
    One day, a yaksha of the race of tree-spirits, who pass through the twilights of the days between flesh and fleshlessness, was snared in a woodsman’s trap close to where Shikhandin sat in tapasya. She was returning from her evening bath in the nearby