Land of Five Rivers by Khushwant Singh

chief, ordered that she should be brought in. She was dragged to the stage as a slave. When she tried to rush out she was forced back again by her hair by Dushasana, Duryodhana’s mighty brother; she was made to sit in Duryodhana’s lap.
    After these insults, Duryodhana ordered Dushasana to strip her.
    Everyone in the hall craned his neck and fixed his anxious gaze on the stage. The God-fearing among the audience began chanting, ‘Ram Ram.’
    When Dushasana began pulling off her
sari,
Draupadi closed her eyes, and with folded hands prayed for intervention by Lord Krishna, her brother: ‘Have pity on me. Come to my rescue and save me from this dishonour. You have saved the honour of millions. Save mine too.’
    Her prayers were touching.
    When half of her
sari
had been pulled off, excitement mounted to a crescendo in the audience. Lord Krishna had thrown no wrap from the sky to cover Draupadi’s shame.
    Spectators started shouting: ‘Cast the wrap, cast the wrap.’
    The more enthusiastic among them could not rest content with shouts. They stood up and began yelling for the wrap, gesticulating angrily. Youngsters climbed up the chairs and benches and began whistling, howling and thumping.
    With a heavy thud, a bench broke down and the clamour was stilled momentarily, bringing audience and players to familiar dimensions.
    In that pin-drop silence a voice confided from somewhere behind the curtains and drapery: ‘Lord Krishna won’t throw down the wrap tonight; his salary has been in arrears for the last four months.’

t ai eesree

    Krishen Chander
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  I was in my final year at the Grant Medical College, in Calcutta and had come to Lahore for a few days to attend my elder brother’s wedding which was to take place in our ancestral home in Kucha Thakar Das close to Shahi Mohalla. It was there that I first met
tai
Eesree.
    Tai
Eesree was not really my aunt; but she was the sort of person who made everyone want to call her
tai
— elder aunt. When her tonga came into our locality and someone shouted, ‘There’s
tai
Eesree!’ a crowd of people, both old and young, men as well as women, ran up to receive her. Some helped her alight from her tonga.
    Tai
Eesree was an asthmatic and the slightest movement or speech, or even the sight of people left her out of breath. Some relatives produced money from their pockets to pay the tonga
wala
, but
tai
Eesree gave a wheezing cackle and told them that she had already paid. The way she spoke, struggling for breath, and her asthmatic laughter, was most attractive to me. The relatives looked crestfallen. They put their money back in their pockets and complained, ‘Why did you do that? You don’t give us an opportunity to do anything for you.’
Tai
did not answer. She took a fan from the hand of a young girl standing beside her and came along smiling and fanning herself.
    Tai
Eesree could not have been a day under sixty. Most of her hair had gone grey, making a pleasing frame for her brown, oval face. Everyone liked to hear her simple words, spoken through her asthmatic wheeze, but what fascinated me were her eyes. There was something about them which made me think of Mother Earth — of vast stretches of farmland and of deep flowing rivers — and at the same time they were full of boundless love and compassion, of fathomless innocence, and of sorrow unassuageable. To this day I have not met a woman with such eyes. They had that quality of timelessness which makes the biggest and the most difficult human problem appear insignificant.
    Tai
Eesree wore a
gharara
of taffeta with a gold border; her shirt was of saffron silk embroidered with flowers. And her head was covered with a muslin
duppatta.
She wore gold bracelets on her arms. As she came into the courtyard there was a great commotion. Young brides and aunts, brothers’ wives and their sisters-in-law, mother’s sisters and