Palace of Illusions - book review

I got the book amidst high expectations. After all, the timeless story told from the perspective of the woman whose curse caused the greatest of the battles ever fought – it surely had a potential of a good book. And the title aggravated my hunger to know one of the most strong-willed woman I’ve heard about. Draupadi – a girl born without a mother, married to five guys – the most prolific brothers of their times, and who put her at stake and lost her in their frenzy over a game of dice. Her curse, however, brought down the greatest of empires, and resulted in a bloody battle of Mahabharata, wiping off almost the entire race of Kuru.

So from the time I heard about this book in which the writer gives voice to Draupadi and presented her point of view, I took a mere 3 days to order, read, and then discard it off to some decrepit corner.

The book isn’t bad, to start with. I mean, if you like Chetan Bagat-ish writing, you’d like her way of story telling. Or, if you are totally ignorant of the original story of Mahabharat, you might like the plot and the twists and turns. But, if you are looking for another view point of the original story, it would be a complete let down.

First of all, Mahabharat is a story where there is no absolute good or bad. Everything is a shade of grey. But each shade has a purpose and a reason behind it. If Krishna instigated Duryodhana, it was for a reason. If Karna was wronged, it again had a deep and dark reason behind it. The fall of Bheem – another cause of intertwining fates. So the point is, this book is a very amateurish take of a very deep and dark political satire. The writer has just concentrated on the breadth of the story, and the depth goes missing.

But, the worst part of the book has to be the character portrayal. it is not just lagging in sufficient research, it is so bad that it leers towards being frivolous. Where Yudhishthir is shown as a drunkard who, when he is not busy betting his wife and brothers on the game of dice, is busy boasting about his self-proclaimed virtuousness. Arjun is a snobbish warrior, who can never forgive his brothers with whom he has to share his prized catch- his wife. Nakul and Sehdev are no more than mere caretakers of their elder brothers and Draupadi. And Draupadi herself? Well, she’s no better than any average woman-next-door who hates her mother in law, just because she is her MIL, and keeps playing mind games with her which are totally absurd, and totally unbecoming of a queen. She likes Arjun before marrying him, and remains a grumpy baby even with five husbands in her tow (I accompanied them to the forest not because I loved them, but because I wanted to keep reminding them of how they wronged me). In her heart, she keeps harboring unsolicited love for Karna till the end, which is ok, till the depiction becomes so cheap that you wonder whether you are reading a road-side “a schoolgirl’s wild fantasies” novel.

Its not so much of the story and the liberty taken with the original story, but the way it is depicted that leaves a very bad after-taste. But then, I might just be one from the generation which grew up watching this story religiously, and conjuring up larger than life images of the characters, and may be I had kept very high hopes for a book which is just a figment of a writer’s imagination, who might have just heard the bits and pieces of the original story from various sources. Some amount of research and some more seriousness in dealing with this saga would have gone a long way.