Palace of Illusions
There are various kinds of good books. Some of them are thrilling nail biters, some crushing tragedies. But a prerequisite to all these kinds is a story that is new, fresh and never heard before, something that spawns enough curiosity in a person that they venture into that unknown to find out what it is. But, palace of illusions is another kind altogether. It’s a retelling of an epic that has been systematically fed to people through generations, one that is regarded as the cultural foundations of the contemporary India. That might be one of the reasons why epics are boring. Because within their numerous characters doing mystifying feats as part of their grand plotlines, they lack the human touch that makes people root for a character.
Palace of Illusions is an epic told from a practical human point of view. It’s the story of Mahabharata told from Draupadi’s lens. The beauty of this book lies in those descriptions of little details in her life. Her fascination with her palace which she loved even more than her husbands, her secret fantasies of someone her family considered their sworn enemy, her angst shown in the form of throwing things at her husbands whenever they married other women. All these details slowly shift our perceptions of her from a demi god to a princess until she becomes a normal human with the same desires and emotions like the most of us. That is when you truly fall in love with her.
The most interesting transition in the story happens at the time of her marriage, when she’s no longer a princess but a wife. This marks a shift in her thought process as her world transforms from lavish luxuries to stanching slums. She walks for miles with bleeding feet along with a stranger who completes a task and claims her. Even before she could process the changes happening to her life, before she opened herself to the life around her, she has four new husbands who share her in an agreement. These things would have been easy to digest if it were part of a huge 18 part epic where Draupadi was viewed simply as a pawn, an instigator of a great war whom everyone despised. But palace of illusions magnifies her and the reader is forced to inhibit her mind and experience things as they happened to a woman in flesh and blood, one cannot help but pause for a moment and feel the devastation as it spread from her psyche into your bones.
Although her desires were complex and cryptic, her love for her palace provides an insight into her thoughts as she searched for a feeling of home in places, people and things around her. She couldn’t love her husbands because they saw her as a shared object of desire or as their mother put it, glue which would hold them together. She was bought into a male centric world where she was many things to many people but none except Krishna, accepted her completely for what she was. That is why she found her refuge in palaces, gardens and in Krishna.
To understand Draupadi or any woman, one has to make an attempt to accept her completely along with her flaws, for her beauty lies not in her skin or her wit, but in complete understanding of her existence as a person.
