Ever so often you stumble upon a book that takes you down an old and dear memory lane. Where these memories are from and how significant were they when they first happened to us, we only know when those are the only memories we're willing to reminisce time and over again.
Reading TPOI doesn't, for a change, feel like relearning an old epic. In its stead, its let the new age girls in Hindu households to identify themselves with the barriers that don't allow them to experiment out of the strict customs. With the passion to achieve the undoable, yet not knowing where to break the rule, Panchaali is portrayed as that woman young girls should look up to. To learn where to draw a line between challenging the decorum set for women and acting out of insanity for all the suppressed years. To speak the mind yet hold the thought. To vent the heart out yet hold in it the darkest of the secrets. To stand up for honor yet swallow the vengeance.
Like everyone else, Panchaali has four chambers in her heart. The first for her twin Dhristadyumna, the second for her husbands whom she followed everywhere, the third for her Palace she weaved her happiness into, and the fourth for Krishna who held a special chamber in her heart. But there as the one who first skipped her heartbeat lay Karna, the most generous of them all. From the first time that she set her eyes on him, to the last time where she finally dies in peace upon gazing at his lovely face, Panchaali stands as a metaphorical masterpiece of all the love that a woman desires in her privacy but never yields owing to dharma.
Minute details of how Karna gives up his desire to be her husband in the eleventh hour of the war to be just to his friend Duryodhana, how he immediately resents provoking Dussasana, how ill fortune has shadowed him for way too long, invoke in the reader a sense of sympathy towards the abandoned and forgotten Pandava brother.
The plot revolves around the lines of unrequited love, courage, vengeance, puzzles, honor, and most importantly Karma.Yudhistir's unyielding honor, Bheema's unrequited love, Arjun's unchallengeable courage, Karna's undisputed loyalty, Panchaali's unquenchable vengeance, Kunti's unequalled authority, Duryodhan's undying hatred, all put together create a tale Chitra spins with plot twists intervened by Krishna and his riddles.
A must read for the reader who dwells in history, mythology, drama, plotting, mystery, and most of all, melancholy.
