Deepa's grandmother told her a story once, sitting on the veranda of
their house in Madurai, peeling tamarind pods while the ceiling fan
clicked overhead.
"There was a potter in our village," Paatti began, "named Selvan. He
was the best potter in the district — maybe in all of Tamil Nadu. His
hands could coax a lump of clay into a water pot so smooth and round
it looked like the moon had fallen into his workshop. People came
from Trichy and Thanjavur to buy his pots.
"Selvan learned everything from his uncle, Ratnam. Ratnam had no
children of his own, so he poured his whole life into teaching
Selvan — how to wedge the clay, how to center it on the wheel, how
to feel when the walls were thin enough. He taught Selvan the old
songs the potters sang while they worked, the ones that kept the
rhythm of the wheel.
"When Selvan grew up, a rich man from Chennai offered him a deal.
'Come to the city. I will set up a factory. Your pots will be
famous.' There was only one condition: the factory would replace
Ratnam's small workshop. The rich man wanted to buy the land where
Ratnam worked.
"The money was more than Selvan had ever imagined. A house with two
floors. A motorbike. School fees for his daughters. All he had to do
was sign a paper, and his uncle's workshop — the place where he had
first touched clay, where Ratnam's handprints were still pressed
into the walls — would become a parking lot."
Paatti cracked a tamarind pod and dropped the seeds into a steel bowl.
"Selvan signed the paper."
Deepa waited. "And then?"
"And then he built his factory and made his money. But he told me once,
years later, that every pot he made in that factory felt wrong. Not
crooked. Not ugly. Just — wrong. Like something was missing from
the clay."
That feeling is what Arjuna means by "rudhira-pradigdhan" — stained
with blood. He is not speaking only about the physical blood of
battle. He means something deeper: that victory built on the
destruction of the people who made you is a hollow victory. You
can eat the feast, but every bite tastes of ash.
Better to beg, Arjuna says. Better to have nothing and be clean than
to have everything and know what it cost.
He is wrong, as Krishna will eventually show him. But he is wrong
for beautiful reasons.
