Goenawan Mohamad

PROLOGUE

CHARACTERS: SANJAYA & CHORUS.

CHORUS: No thing existed, nor did nothing exist,
There was no space spread, no sky beyond.
There was no sign of night, no sign of day
There was neither death nor immortality.

NARRATOR: And all things were one,
Like an ocean,
Until one day the edge cracked,
The sun breathed,
And My Creatures came.

Outside the conclave of the gods,
Brahma created Death
He said, ‘Kali will come,
She will wave her purple hands,
And things will be all right.’
Inside, the gathering said nothing.
Later someone saw Death hopping
From a slow-moving moon,
Dancing with a headless corpse.

It was Kali’s first dance.

KALI: Willows wilt,
Streams subside, the luster stops,
The grace is gone. On certain nights,
Gods create their own texts,
Long ones, like yards of cemetery plots
And they invite Death

They desire me.

**

SCENE 1 – THE WAITING

CHARACTERS: SANJAYA, DHESTARASTRA, GANDHARI & CHORUS.

NARRATOR: First, there is a hall. Inside the hall, a pair of thrones, a chessboard of alien knights, four-footed rooks, and a woman — the Queen on a rocking chair, listening to the slow-pace of the pawns, of the groping King, of an old man blind walking into the room. Like a silhouette on a shaking screen.

The Queen loves the shape of imaginary beings
And a feel of dusk
The King is thinking of twilight’s birds

You hear them all,
Gurgling calls of fowl, evening geckoes, dull-sounded lizards,
Gnats darting to the darker side of the yard

CHORUS: Somewhere something must live
And breathe
Somewhere something

DHESTARASTRA: I smell the stench of spleen, leftovers from last night’s offering,

GANDHARI: But I know of no offering last night, Dhestarastra.

DHESTARASTRA: You are right, Gandhari, but I smell it.

CHORUS: Maybe he dreamt it. He is 66
And she 53

It is the 7th day of their solitude
The 8th day
The 9th day of their solitude

In his blindness, he sits next to her
Rubbing the slate cover of the seat
And the breeze, filtered by the door,
Soothes the room
As they try to listen
To the uncertainty
Of the doorway

DHESTARASTRA: Sanjaya, tell me more
About the war

SANJAYA: My Lord, I hear hundreds of conches scream and chariots roar.
The Kurava’s armies march: your sons strike the first blow.
But I see the Pandhavas, ready, waiting,
Their troops on the west side of the Kurusetra,
Their soldiers like fiery ants on the plains
It is a sublime sight of calamity, my Lord:
Two warring camps, like two oceans at the end of a yuga.

We will see a great carnage, Dhestarastra.
The wise Vyasa foretold it.
Time has run out.

DHESTARASTRA: They say the war has dispersed the stars into the dark

GANDHARI: Like exiles, Dhestarastra, weightless

DHESTARASTRA: Like exiles — Every night they see in the sky wildcats howling, fighting, and the icons of goddesses vomiting blood.

GANDHARI: …crumbling, my Lord, toppling -

DHESTARASTRA: The grace is gone, Gandhari

GANDHARI: It may return, Your Majesty.

DHESTARASTRA: Sanjaya, tell me more
About the war

SANJAYA: O, let me be a gift of light
In the cavern of his night

DHESTARASTRA: The blind hear the drone of the midges,
The churning of the leaves
And the daybreak
The blind hear herons gliding over the mix of the roar
And the moan of war
And I hear crows calling from the green
Dogs’ howls in a remote ravine

SANJAYA: The dawn sees a monsoon-stained sky,
I see a man on a bloodstained horse

[…a limping man walking through the gate. The Queen: she stands from her chair, as if to honour something from her recurring dream.]

GANDHARI: Dhestarastra, it’s the messenger

SANJAYA: The fighting stopped, my Lord.
The Kuru field is quiet now.
Both sides laid down their arms, to grief.
Your uncle, saintly Bhisma, revered kin, died at dusk
A slow death. A superb death
The Pandhavas killed him. They honoured him.

DHESTARASTRA: Bhisma of seventy screams
Bhisma of a hundred wounds
Bhisma of a thousand dead
Bhisma

He who gave everything, died for nothing…

GANDHARI: Could it be Bhisma’s last gift, in blood?

DHESTARASTRA: It was his last glory, and there was no victory
They will kill Durna.
They will kill Karna.
They will kill Salya.

GANDHARI: Please speak no more, Your Majesty

CHORUS:
Go and lie low, sorrow Sidhem, sungkawa,
Go and lie low Sidhem
Warriors die Satrya palastra.
And they glow Sumirat lir surya

In darkness Ing lelimengan
Spurn the sky! Nampika bathara
In nothingness Ing moksa
Defy! Hamalesa!

DHESTARASTRA: On the day I was born
The gods forced me from the womb
And the stars slipped into the pit
And the light became bitter

Why, Gandhari?

GANDHARI: Maybe now it’s our turn. Maybe we are victims.

DHESTARASTRA: They made me blind. I am innocent.

GANDHARI: Don’t shudder.

SANJAYA: The gods talked to the sun, my Lord.

DHESTARASTRA: Did it darken?

SANJAYA: Yes, it shrivelled. And they talked to the moon.

GANDHARI: And the war?

SANJAYA: Last night they cut down Dursasana.
Your son fell and the earth was damp.
A man came to the fight and slashed him.
He ripped his belly open.
Snatched his heart out.
Sucked his gore.

And I saw a woman washing her hair in his blood

GANDHARI: Somewhere, they say,
You can sense the earth plates twitching.
You can see no wound but pus purling like flowing lava.
Somewhere, they say, self-exiled hills burst
And spurts of black blacken all plumes and petals,
Nightjars flee.
They say the birds, plunge themselves into a shattered cliff.
No one believes it.

CHORUS: It is our sad duty
Your Majesty
To bring home sorrow
But warriors die
And they glow

GANDHARI: The Pandhavas – did they also kill Durna?

CHORUS: Yes

DHESTARASTRA: Did they also kill Karna?

CHORUS: Yes

GANDHARI & DHESTARASTRA: Did they kill Duryudhana?

CHORUS: Yes

GANDHARI: They murdered all my sons.
They murdered all my kin.

Now the light will shift
Casting different shades
On the floor
And I am a mother
Of lasting silence
You are the last latch of our door

Are we blameless?

On the day you were born
The gods forced you from the womb
And the stars slipped into the pit
And the light became bitter

Are you guilty?

DHESTARASTRA: But the gods despise the moon
And think that the stars are tainted

CHORUS: It’s Brahma’s moon
And Brahma’s stars
Brahma who carves the road for the rain
And claps for the bolt of lightning

GANDHARI: Brahma who calls for Kali
And kills –
Brahma who asks, ‘How can a man be pure
And a woman sinless?’

DHESTARASTRA: I thought I knew where darkness lived.

**
SCENE 2 – KALI & BRAHMA

CHARACTERS: SANJAYA, KALI, GANDHARI & BRAHMA.

NARRATOR: Outside the conclave of the gods, Brahma created Death. He said, “Kali would come and wave her purple hands, and things would be all right.” Inside, the gathering said nothing. Later someone saw Death hopping from a slow-moving moon, dancing with a headless corpse. It was Kali’s first dance.

KALI: Let me stare at the world
Let me –

CHORUS: Listen.
Someone had to let the light pour down on the lake
But the gods said no.
They would never leave the demons defiled by the daybreak,
Even if they knew that someday the dark would be banished by their repeated words,
And they would have nothing else
Nothing else…

KALI: Willows wilt,
Streams subside, the luster stops.
The grace is gone. On certain nights,
Gods create their own texts,
Long ones, like yards of cemetery plots
And they invite Death

They desire me.

GANDHARI: You murdered all my sons.

KALI: I am the mother of your sorrow.
I am the sister of your grief.

GANDHARI: You murdered all my kin.
You helped my enemy to win.

KALI: (silence)

GANDHARI: So Kunthi wins, her sons reign.
And I am a footprint
On a buried floor
The last latch of a defunct door…

KALI: Gandhari –

GANDHARI: …a sign cut out from the gloom
In this half-finished afternoon

KALI: You close your eyes.
You refuse to see it.
It is gods’ madness

SANJAYA: My Queen, why this blindfold?

KALI: You want this to end
And I will give you a door that opens on an unsuspicious sea,
Blue as in a child’s dream. You want a sun remembered before dusk
And I will give you a city with angels and torches.
Look. Brahma created me from his yawn.
‘Go and become Death’, he said.
‘For the earth needs a cycle.’

GANDHARI: And you agreed.
The edge cracked, and you came

KALI: Could I not?

GANDHARI: Somewhere something must live
And breathe
Somewhere something

KALI: There was neither death nor immortality then
There was no sign of night, nor of day
No thing existed, nor did nothing exist,
Who held it all? And where?

Darkness was hidden by darkness
Like an ocean: endless, featureless

BRAHMA: La tua nobilitate!
Look, Kali. Look at me, the sombre one!

KALI: My Lord Brahma –

BRAHMA: Pain has its beauty.
It is transitory. Look at this war.
It is odd. But it happened before — I see it from eternity –
And soon will be no more.

KALI: But pain, my Lord,
Does not come from the dust

BRAHMA: Of course, my child, pain is my design

But gods like riddles:
What screens gem and junk,
Rock and ore?
It is a sieve called ‘war’!

KALI: My Lord, I’ve seen
In a distant city of ashes
Bodies hung on trees all the way to the sea.
Soldiers chopping hands, cutting legs,
People coming to see, loving to see —

It was a moment of victory. Or atrocity.

BRAHMA: I know. You made it happen.
Carcasses rotted.
Larvae squirmed.
Marabous moaned.
The dead dreamt.

NARRATOR: As always, someone will do what the gods want us to do

BRAHMA: Aha, you are Memory! I admire History.
I admire the fast rerun of things that have begun. 
I admire something starting from Alpha,
And ending at Zeta (or is it Beta?).
I admire crisp commas and delighted dots
Dancing around endless volumes. But as always,
I admire my world and my eternal words!

NARRATOR: O, Brahma! Riddles!

BRAHMA: No, I like replies. A question is like a crooked coil.
A reply, a symmetry.
What can I give you but form and mortality?

The end is equal to the beginning:
It is cold.

KALI: Gandhari, look at the sky – it is a vagary.
It is the clouds, like black marks
Of dried blood, like stains of crud,
Signs of sin —
It is the clouds.
Yet the shrubs sip the first drip
Of each day

GANDHARI: Should I weep?
Should you weep?

KALI: Maybe we should not. Tomorrow we will stretch our hands
And sing, and we will see the dust change. I will leave. I will sleep.

BRAHMA: I remember you were in Dhenuka
Standing on one foot
For fifteen million years
Surrounded by people who
You should have slaughtered

KALI: I was in Dhenuka
I was in Mount Meru

BRAHMA: But you are Death, my child

KALI: So I am Death
And you give me no mirror
I look at myself on the bronze of the night
On the silver of the dawn
My eyes are wet with tears

BRAHMA: But you are Death, you are Mertyu

KALI: So I am Death. I am Mertyu.
I like the sight of a bird on a pale tree,
With an acrid crumb on its mouth
I like the smell of half-burnt dung,
The enigma of unfinished things

I gave my breasts to the foul-skinned shepherd of the North
I lost my home
I lost my name

They found me lounging on the warm ash of a pyre
Clutching the burnt skull of a woman, screaming

I was in Dhenuka
And I cried
I was in Mount Meru
And I cried
My eyes were wet with tears
That fall on the open wounds of the dying

Go, Gandhari, go!
You are not the only one banished from a city
And not guilty

***
SCENE 3 – ON THE KURU FIELD

CHARACTERS: SANJAYA, KUNTHI, GANDHARI, KALI, BRAHMA & CHORUS.

CHORUS:
In the dots of the leaves Pada kutil daun-daun
In the quark of the dew Pada atom putih embun
In the foam of the sea Pada buih laut pagi
Nothing is guilty Tak ada yang tak-suci

In the bricks of dark domes Pada bata kubah tua
In glass-tiles of garrets Pada pucuk genting kaca
In wounded windowpanes Pada kusen-kusen luka
Is doom a destiny? Adakah ia petaka?

NARRATOR: On the last day of the fighting, the Pandhavas kill Duryudhana in a brutal fight by the lake. The following night, a determined group of Kurava guerrillas attack the Pandavas’ camp. They butcher all the members of the noble house of Pandhu. Only the five Pandhava princes survive. The terror, the carnage, and the lives lost leave a lasting gloom upon their reign. There is no celebration in Hastinapura. The Pandhavas enter the deserted city of their defeated kin in a procession of long silence.

That same evening Kunthi walks away from the city, unattended. ‘I go to meet Gandhari,’ she says. Later, the mother of the Pandhavas would remember that evening as her longest walk.

KUNTHI: Now the shambles, the uproar is no more
Only ghostly plains, ghastly remains, the litter of war,
An orgy of crows – a binge on dregs and bones
The noise of victory

And yet of victory
What can you say, actually?
Tell me.
I am a mother of five conquerors,
I am the mother of calamity.

GANDHARI: Somewhere, they say,
You can sense the earth plates twitching.
You can see no wound but pus purling like flowing lava.
Somewhere, they say, self-exiled hills burst
And spurts of black blacken all plumes and petals,
Nightjars flee.
They say the birds plunge themselves into a shattered cliff.
No one believes it.

KUNTHI: But I believe it.

GANDHARI: You are Kunthi. You cannot.

KUNTHI: But I believe it.

GANDHARI: No, you cannot. Your sons killed all my sons.
You should not be here.

KUNTHI: You hate me.

GANDHARI: I hate you.
(To the audience)
I remember the child gripping my loin.
I remember it like a curious hope

KUNTHI: One remembers, but also forgets,
And we grow.

GANDHARI: You grow. I do not.

KUNTHI: The war has made us old.

GANDHARI: No. You grow like the sun
Grinning with glee
Over this debris

KUNTHI: Borderless debris –
Where no one is free

GANDHARI: No one, but you.

KUNTHI: I thought the war had erased everything.

GANDHARI: No. The war should not.
KUNTHI: But revenge and ruins
Are unsettled remains
Of outrage

GANDHARI: You do not belong to this
You do not.

KUNTHI: They made us mothers of fury.

GANDHARI: Mothers?

KUNTHI: Yes, we are women, we are here
To recall innocent moments
Flattened by history
Of little things, divine but lost

GANDHARI: Innocent moments!
Say something of your Drupadi.
The woman washed her hair in my son’s blood.

KUNTHI: But was she guilty?

GANDHARI: She saw Dursasana’ body
Butchered, squirming.
She rejoiced.
She saw your men
Carrying Kuravas’ heads, marching
She laughed.

KUNTHI: The horror
Tell her why it began, Sanjaya.
Tell us how it will end.

SANJAYA: Majesty?

KUNTHI: You are the gods’ gift of sight.

SANJAYA: Fifteen years ago.
Bad blood from an unremembered time,
The war began in small steps.
The Pandhavas invited to a cruel game of dice.
Your sons knew it was a fateful contest of pride,
Yet they said, “Maybe doom is not our destiny.”
And they agreed to come,
And they gambled,
And they lost.

Yudhistira knew nothing of the way of cheats,
He staked everything –
His lands, his horses, his slaves, his property
Twisted by fate and cursed by the absurd,
He also staked his bride, Drupadi
And lost.

The Kuravas gloated.
And just before midnight,
Prince Dursasana, drunk and gristly,
Grabbed Drupadi by her hair,
Dragged her screaming into the hall
And disrobed her
“Come, woman, you have been won!”

But Drupadi stood up and faced the Kurava prince.
Pale and defiant, she tore open her dress.
The gathering went quiet.
They saw everything.
They said nothing.
The five Pandhavas, controlling their rage, sat tight.
I could hear the seethe and stir of blood.
It was obvious, your Majesty,
The war had begun.

GANDHARI: I remember the child gripping my loin.

KUNTHI: We remember because we grow.

GANDHARI: I remember it like a curious hope

KUNTHI: Can’t we think of
Little things lost
Transient ruins time has tossed?

GANDHARI: You have so many words.
You do not belong to this.
I have seen the sun sitting, colourless,
Callous, mute. I laughed. Someone said, ‘this is the end.”
Honestly, I do not know.

And the gods moved on.

SANJAYA: Gods and war and destiny
Banish marvels of uncertain use:
Like a girl gathering cones the wind has shaken loose,
A child’s verse, a song of sisters.

SANJAYA: Your Majesty,
This is a theatre of clarity.

GANDHARI: I see the light shifts
Casting different shades on the floor

SANJAYA: In the beginning was light
Of a thumbnail moon
And the words became lines
And darkness began to drawl

KUNTHI: And the world resists no more.

SANJAYA: Let the weight of our dream fall
Into the dawn

CHORUS:
Too much light
Too much liquid light

BRAHMA: But this is the morning of the gods
This is the morning when we carve the first cipher,
Driven into a mass of stone, like an ancient blade
And I say, “So the earth shivers, and the law is born”!

GANDHARI: I hear the sound.
It is like the voice of the dying.

KUNTHI: But somewhere something must live and breathe.

BRAHMA: Do not be afraid.

GANDHARI: I tighten my throat.
I begin to walk. I believe in death.
I think of a damp kingdom, of sullen days of ashes.

KUNTHI: And we whisper. We whistle. We fly
Like good-for-nothing doves –

BRAHMA: Do not be afraid.
Do not grieve.

GANDHARI: I smell the stench of spleen,
Leftovers from last night’s offering.

KALI: You want this to end
And I will give you a door that opens on an unsuspicious sea,
Blue as in a child’s dream. You want a sun remembered before dusk
And I will give you a city with angels and torches.
Look. Brahma created me from his yawn.
‘Go and become Death’, he said.
‘For the earth needs a cycle.’

BRAHMA: This is the morning of the gods.
Now you see the white colour of truth and of death.

KUNTHI: And the chastity of space.

SANJAYA: And the obstinacy of hate.

GANDHARI: And the blindness of time.

BRAHMA: I like a good grip of fate. It is weird, but I like equilibrium.
Remember, I meditated on void and purity, and I brought in flood. The purge cleansed the city, and the sky became strong. The earth sat on stillness. The landscape, pure and pious, was as level as a flat roof.

KALI: I saw you shouting, “locusts”, and the lands were plagued
With flies and frogs

BRAHMA: And the death of the firstborn
And the pain of dogs

KALI (to Gandhari and Kunthi)
I have seen
A distant city in ashes
Bodies hung on trees all the way to the sea.
Soldiers chopping hands, cutting legs,
People coming to see, loving to see –

BRAHMA: Remember you are Death, you are Mertyu!

KALI: But, my Lord –

GANDHARI: They say to kill is to begin.
I never know why.

KUNTHI: I am with you. Here.

BRAHMA: Don’t be afraid.
Don’t grieve.
Don’t hope.

CHORUS:
Hope is like
A rope
Left in the air

Like a track
Of a blurred nowhere

Like a gift
Of gods’ despair

KALI: Perhaps it is a short-lived lie.

BRAHMA: And yet there will be a rebirth
Of destroyed birds and lost seeds.
There will be a rebirth of scorched lice,
Dead centipedes.
There will be you, to die, to give.

***
SCENE 4 – THE USINARA STORY

CHARACTERS: NARRATOR, USINARA.

NARRATOR: To begin with, a window and an unconcealed sky. A dove-like fowl passes through. A huge pair of unidentified wings strains the clouds.

The blind king thinks of a terrified bird.

The wounded warbler flees, a hawk chasing, she cries for help, and a young prince opens his window and puts her on his lap. He is not aware of Death.

He nurses the gnawed part of her nape. He wipes the blood dripping from the wound. And he is not aware of Death.

Then he sees the dark crown of a falcon.

The bird of prey says, ‘She is my food. And I am hungry’, and the prince refuses the plea.
‘I am your quarry,’ he says.

He cuts his own biceps. He offers his bleeding flesh. The falcon likes it.

And Fate likes it. The cutting never ends. The bird, the hawk and the wound grow, merging into a convulsion of pain, and the room is a sea of red, the prince fainting, falling…

***

 SCENE 5 – THE FUNERAL PYRE

CHARACTERS: DHESTARASTRA, KUNTHI, GANDHARI, KALI, SANJAYA & CHORUS.

GANDHARI: At dawn,
Before the birds,
Hurried gods clamoured for words.
‘Send us words,’ they said, ‘make them your sacrifices.’

But the forest hid the words. The trees put them back to silence.
And they became dream, a polyphonic dream.

I want the dream, Kali.

NARRATOR: Now and then the end begins with trees.
Shrouded line-ups of trees.
The blindfolded queen sits still,
Gathering the patience of the forest.
It is infinity.

Even the hermits who walk with the King into his shelter
Know that it is the rain that grasps the distance.

The distance is green.
No one gives it a name.

GANDHARI: This is the place.
I can even hear
The drone of insects
And the daybreak

SANJAYA:
Yes, this is the place.

This is the space
Of the eager tree barks
Opening their pores
Life’s first cue

This is the space
Of cast-off grief
Of way-worn kings
Of unplaced residue

GANDHARI: This is the place.
The air grips you.
The sacred warns you.

KUNTHI: And tells you to endure.
But what if the gods say something untrue?

CHORUS:
The glade
Is like a breach

Like a gap
White,

Like a gap
Dazed

By the rain

The hum of the rain
The hum of the rain

DHESTARASTRA: I dream of Kali
I dream of a limestone cave
Each night I escape
To the brink
And listen to the bats and the wind.

I hear the passing of pollen grains
As if life was here, then there, then here again

DHESTARASTRA, KUNTHI & GANDHARI:
While leeches suck a doe’s shin
And lily leaves snare a fly:
A noiseless daily savagery

KUNTHI: I dream of Kali
As the gods keep sending their signs
Through crack and joints

DHESTARASTRA, KUNTHI, GANDHARI: I dream of Kali.

KALI: Go to the Gangga
And you will hear me, dimly
From the brackish water
Of the estuary

You will hear the flow taper
Under a vapid menace
Of unseen vapours.
Go to the Gangga.

NARRATOR: And they walk to the Gangga, like three trembling cranes, and the scent of the pines follows them. Up in the gods’ sky there is a circle of dark where violence gleams.

KUNTHI: I see a penumbra of fogs
Pre-dawn ghosts swimming to the hills
Fireflies flicking past a fisherman’s door

GANDHARI: The sun hides it furtive imps
Under the fish bed
And the river forgets

DHESTARASTRA: But the sky is disappearing.
The sacred scares me.
The pure kills my body.
The sacred scares me. Gods scare me.
The place says a prophecy.

SANJAYA: It is inevitable.

SANJAYA: Gods create their own texts,
Long ones, like yards of cemetery plots.
They invite Death, and Death is here,
A salt-splattered face,
Standing below this flood-formed levee,
Where the flow stays drab and the stream heavy
As the river moves away from a distant gorge
To an indifferent, grey, sea

KALI: You will find me between the delta and the sea.

GANDHARI: So you are Kali.
I heard your ankles crashing,
A different wind rushing

A different odour
A gentle thunder

Before I die

KALI: But I am here to end a cycle
I am here to enkindle
A thousand stems
Of desiccated leaves,

I am here to retrieve
Cut-off petals,
Withered anthers,
Torn down gossamers.

I am here to set the world anew
I am here to burn you.

NARRATOR: The foliage turns into a furor of flame. The forest shoots burning bodies of birds into the dark, like fireworks of heat. I see carcasses of fawns raining down, scorched, torn, grisly.

Gandhari opens her blindfold. She looks at the charred face of Kunthi, the headless body of the king. She hears the howls of hyenas in pain, the shrieks of smoke-blinded marmosets.

GANDHARI: At dawn,
Before the birds,
Hurried gods clamoured for words.
‘Send us words,’ they said, ‘make them your sacrifices.’

But the forest hid the words. The trees put them back to silence.
And they became dream, a polyphonic dream.

I want the dream, Kali, but the fire is devouring me.

KALI: I will sing
Of cities of grief
On gods’ hideous hills

My limbs are ruined fossils
Of cities of grief
I will dance

***

Curtain