How much of our stories are written before we are alive, before we are born before we are even conceived? How much of our future is written in stone and how much of it dependent on the choices that we are to be faced with? What does it mean to know that all the great secrets of our life have already been written and the idea that we might not have any way to change them.

The Kaunteyas by Madhavi Mahadevan is a revelation. It tells the story of Kunti, the woman scorned for not looking when Arjuna brought her Draupadi and saying to share the princess from Panchaal as though she was a sweetmeat at the dinner table. The mother of the 5 Pandavas.

The Kaunteys is written in an extremely descriptive manner. The descriptions are done well, using flowery language to describe the beauty and weaving dense darkness around scenes that required more of a sinister depth. The language and writing is a masterpiece. The characters are all given depth even though some might appear for only a page, characters from Saubali who appears only for a sickening assault scene to Gandhari who considers blindness by choice a virtue to Kunti herself, are given an inexplicable depth. They may have only a passing role in the story and yet the emotions and pain they feel are tangible on one’s tongue as we read.

Often I have wondered at the world that authors who write retellings of the Mahabharata and Ramayana create. It is indeed a mirror of historic India from the idea of caste and God and rank and war and kingdoms that one sees in the kingdoms of the past from Magadha to Gandhara. But it takes some semblance of skill to write and create a world wherein most of history records how people behaved and what correct behaviour was for every caste. To create a world that has mostly been chronicled through rules and war is a task. And yet Mahadevan has built an immersive subcontinent. One where the Ganges flows in a rush through the land illuminating kingdoms with life and vigour. But it is the characters within these kingdoms that Mahadevan has written that is the true masterpiece of the book. From the snakelike Dhritarashtra to steadfast Kunti, all of them have an intriguing story to tell, where every word they utter or step they take proves cataclysmic for events yet to take place. They all play their roles in bringing about the battle of Kurukshetra that annihilated the kingdoms. And above all are the women, the pain of every single woman palpable, pulsing across the entire story. At its very heart, this story is about women. From the very first page to the last word written, this is a story about women, one to be passed on in stone rather than water.

A point of interest was the ideas of names. Children carry the names of their fathers and those unable to are considered bastards, shamed for life to carry the name of their mothers. Why has that been a point of shame I wonder. After all, it is the mother’s womb that carries the child, her life’s blood that nourishes it, her pain and damage as she pushes it into the world and yet the child is denied the name of its mother, the name that allows its blood to run through its veins. The idea that Kunti would rather forego raising Karna than simply give him her name, allow him to be called Kaunteya, should be looked at more closely. Even today children take their father’s name when it is the woman who contributes more in every aspect. It is a sad truth of life, one we are capable of changing and yet do not.

In the Palace of Illusions, the book focuses mostly on Draupadi and her experience as the catalyst of the Mahabharata. Other women’s stories are told in passing, fleeting through the story as barely there. But in The Kaunteyas, Mahadevan focuses on every woman in Kunti’s life with equal detail, giving the story immense depth as we read about women raped on the dictate of their own family members, women forced into blindness to prove a point, women denied desire due to curses that they have not been told about. In the tales of men, the women are always on the losing side. Kunti’s sons win the war, they win Hastinapur and yet she still loses Karna. Gandhari married Dhritarashtra and availed the respect of maharani and yet has forsaken sight. Sairandhris and serving girls who live lives better than village girls are cornered like animals so their flesh may be used for pleasure. In the stories of men the women always lose, even when they stand on the winning side.

So when I finally turned the last page of the book, I wondered how much of our lives have already been penned down? Are we simply chess pieces placed on a wider cosmic board, ready to play the roles that have been written for us? In the very beginning of the book, the sage Durvasa looks through Kunti’s future before giving her the boon he gifts. Did he not know when he gifted the boon that Karna would be the unwanted result, that he would change the course of the great war, that he might have prevented it had he been kept? Why then did he not tell Kunti the true danger of using it? There are so many threads within the Mahabharata. Story within story that comes together to bring men to the battlefield, and I can’t help but wonder how different it might have been if only one man, had had a different story.

The compelling writing, the characters, the descriptions and world-building, and the epiphanies that come forth in a readers mind make this book a true literary paragon. Five glowing, golden stars.