Palace of Illusions

THE PALACE OF ILLUSIONS BY CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI; PUBLISHED BY PICADOR PAGES-360; PRICE-RS--495/-
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning author and poet. She has been published in over 50 magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies. Her books have been translated into 16 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Russian and Japanese.
The folktale of Mahabharata has a number of versions all over India. All versions are often depicted from the point of view of any of the male protagonist. The women in the Mahabharata are denigrated to the background. No version ever talks about the pain of Gandhari who spent a lifetime blindfolded or the travails of Kunti who had progeny from six celestial beings. This is where the Palace of Illusions stands out. The tale comes from the point of view of Draupadi.
The young Draupadi,(she hated the name as it identified her only as the daughter of her father and nothing else) dark skinned and born out a yagna, spends her childhood trying to decipher how her life would be charted out. Also called Krishnaa she feels an unknown affinity to Lord Krishna, the reason for which she is never able to decipher. She ponders how the prophecy of her having the strength to change the course of the future would come true.
As she grows into a young adult and gets ready for her Swayamwar (choosing her husband), she oscillates in her heart over having to choose someone who would win a contest. This irked her as she felt it denied her the right to choose her own life partner and the Swayamwar lost its meaning.
The book runs like a brook through her childhood, her relation with her brother, her growing fascination for Karna, whom she cannot marry, her willful decision to accompany her husbands to the forest to ensure that she keeps them in control, her anger at them getting married to other women, her preference for Arjuna over Bheema who loved her very passionately, her friendship with Krishna are all well illustrated in the book.
Draupadi had to pay a huge price for being married to five men. She was given the boon of being a virgin every time she moved in with the next husband. This she felt was very male chauvinistic. “I would prefer that I do not carry their memories”, she says. But as usual she didn’t have a choice in the boon. It was thrust upon her.
Her strained relationship with Kunti also brings to the forefront how again she did not enjoy any motherly affection from Kunti. The only person she related to as mother was her Dhai Ma, the old lady who looked after her when she was young. This lack of motherly affection somewhere translated into a lack of affection from her side to her children. She never lived with her children. She bore five of them, one from each husband but always maintained a distance from them. She could never bring herself to act or react as a ‘mother’. Her sons too accepted the distance she maintained.
She lived a strange life, an unasked for daughter, a wife to five men, a mother to sons who didn’t know her, a woman so mysterious that she questioned her own identity.
This is what the author brings out in the book. Though the read slackens at times,it does bring out many pertinent issues related to the representation of the women in Indian mythology, especially the Mahabharata.