What Ashwatthama did on learning he had become immortal

When Ashwatthama woke up, there were boils all over his body. Thousands of them, or at least a number that was impossible to count. He felt ill, but tried to get up anyway. When you had trained your life for war, the only time it was permissible to lie on unknown ground for more than a few moments was when you were dead.

The boils on his body squeezed against the earth. He winced. The pain was intense. His eyelids opened slightly but were pinned back by the sharp light. Maybe it would be wise to take it slow. He rubbed the ground around him gently with the palms of his hands. The rough, grainy texture felt like sand.

Once more then.

He forced his eyes open slowly, pushing away the heavy brightness that tried to assert itself, and peered around. As the initial blurriness cleared, he saw nothing but sand. He tried to pick himself up once more, slowly this time, but the pain overpowered him again. He gave up for the moment and tried to orient himself.

It was noon, or close to it, as the intensity of the sunlight revealed to him; he was probably in the middle of a desert. He took a deep breath, clenched the sand around him, and willed his entire body to rise. The boils throbbed, almost in unison, and his body shuddered with pain. He collapsed back into the sand.

Calm down.

He exhaled and controlled his breath, pushing it gently out of his nostrils. Once all the air had been evacuated, he drew it back, like an archer drawing a bow. Slowly. Steadily. He controlled the path of his breath and guided its motion, through his neck, chest, arms and legs and down into the pit of his belly.

Think of your breath as a wall, his father had told him – a wall between your skin and nerves, and the pain that seeks to enter their sanctum. Pain is contemptible. It is a minor inconvenience. It must not be allowed to penetrate the sanctity of your body. The pain does not exist within you, it comes from the outside and like footwear at a temple, must be left outside, he had said.

Ashwatthama drew in another breath and concentrated upon spreading it through his body as his father had taught him. The pain grew weaker and then left the surface of his skin, unannounced as it had arrived. He sat up on the sand, and his mind crept back to alertness.

The bastard cowherd had placed a curse on him. The Amrityuvar – the immortality blessing.

The sages had a sense of humour for sure – to call the curse of eternal life a blessing. A sequence of words that stopped the churn of time inside your body and froze the youth in your sinews for as long as you wanted and more, much more. Youth without restriction or restraint; youth not hemmed in by the fencings of time; youth that would reinvigorate and rejuvenate whenever threatened or depleted. Youth without end.

Youth without meaning.

The cowherd had placed the Amrityuvar on him with the added blight of eternal leprosy. For what reason? Perhaps as an additional cruelty? There was no shortage of it these days, and the cowherd was one of those who dealt it out liberally.

He tried to form a mental picture of what he looked like but lost the desire almost instantly when he glided his palm down his arm and felt a thick, sticky film of pus on it. Horrified, he stuck his hand in the sand and tried to wipe it off but the sand stuck to his palm. Flies swarmed about him trying to land on the red-yellow layer of pus and blood that had formed on his body. He realised that he had been left lying in the sand with nothing except his loincloth. No robes, not even a shawl to clean the foul-smelling pus.

How did the cowherd know how to place a curse? Was he a tatvakarman in disguise? Did he really know how to manipulate tatva?

He calmed himself. Curses required a great deal of concentration and mental rigour. Men who had studied the ways of tatva for centuries had trouble mastering it. There was a chance that the curse wasn’t fully in effect yet, or hadn’t been placed properly. Many times, curses that were pronounced in a state of anger and high emotion could be misguided and were known to work at less than their full potency. Maybe the curse hadn’t taken effect? It had only been a few hours since the cowherd had placed it on him. He had heard that powerful blessings or curses took a full day and night to take effect. Was there still time to escape its shadow?

There was only one way to escape the Amrityuvar.

He turned around slowly. A sharp object tugged at his dhoti. Tentatively, he groped with his hands. A weapon was half buried in the sand. He pulled it out. It was his own weapon – Anamika. A heavy war scythe joined by a chain to a large metal crusher ball with spikes. There had been none like it on any battlefield. His eyes lingered over the scythe, pausing awhile at the black-red stain on its edge – the last trace of the Pandava bloodline.

He had disembowelled people before. Using the outside of his curved scythe to carve up the underside of a belly just between the hips where the skin was at its softest. A fairly easy stroke if there was no armour between blade and skin.

He had never disembowelled himself before.

The casualness with which the idea occurred to him would have surprised him on another day. In the light of what had happened before he found himself in the desert, there were only two alternatives left to him. He could wait and hope that the cowherd’s emotions had overwhelmed him, and the curse would never take full effect. The other alternative was to kill himself and be rid of all doubt. Even if he wasn’t immortal now, there was no point living in a leprous state for the rest of his days. Besides, curses were highly unpredictable. If this came into force later, he would have to live like this forever. There was no time to think. Every moment lost was a moment closer to immortality.

It was easier to die than to live anyway, as his father used to say.

There were no guidelines to what he was about to do. His ancestors had not given any instructions on how to take one’s own life under these circumstances, away from a battlefield and without assistance, with the threat of immortality looming.

“Mother...Father...” he mumbled to the desert at large.

His last thoughts must be happy ones, he decided. He closed his eyes and tried to form a narrative of his life. He was a child. His earliest memory was of being lifted by his mother and the feeling of weightlessness as he left the world beneath him. He remembered being squashed in her long delicate limbs and then being passed over to his father and his short, hairy ones. He felt a deep and sad longing for his mother and father and his childhood.

He remembered Duryodhana. He had never had a brother, but Duryodhana had loved him like one. He would leave out Kurukshetra, the death of his father and the death of Duryodhana from this final recollection of his life. He tried bringing his father and mother and Duryodhana together in a single thought and took a deep breath, as if to suck them into his body forever.

Slowly, he raised himself to his knees and brought the scythe to his belly.

Excerpted with permission from Palace Of Assassins: The Rise of Ashwatthama, Aditya Iyengar, Hachette India.