Maya.

The first thing my son Ashu said while giving me his copy of The Palace of Illusion was: "I wish somebody would make a movie of it."

After having read it, I couldn't agree less.

While there's plenty of spectacle, action and drama in Chitra Banerjee Devakaruni's novelisation of The Mahabharata - in other words, what a shrewd filmmaker looks for in a novel before deciding to make a movie of it - most of it "happens" in Draupadi's mind. How do you show it except, maybe, using the current by-now already clichéd device of switching to (say) black and white footage from full colour to depict what she "saw" in her mind's eye?

Not good enough, if you ask me.

While the event horizon of the novel broadly resembles the Vyasa epic's, Devakaruni's reference point seems more in the vicinity of Dr Irawati Karve's Yuganta: The end of an epoch. She mentioned it as one of her secondary sources in a recent Sunday Mid-day interview. Chapter 7 of Yuganta, by the way, is about Mayasabah, "The Palace of Maya".

The closest a movie can come to a book is by suggesting instead of actually showing. Alfred Hitchcock knew this well. He never forgot the unique movie screen and projector each one of us possesses. His was the conjuror's art.

This is the kind of stuff The Palace of Illusion and The Mistress of Spices are made of. When you read them, you can run your own movie in the privacy of your mind.

Just after I started reading The Palace of Illusion, I thought it was a bit overwritten. I changed my mind on that score soon enough. In fact, whenever push came to shove, I found Devakaruni at her deftest. She knows her craft really, really well. She knows when not to overdo it. She is the Mistress of Spices. And, of Illusions. She is the supreme sorceress of subtlety when it comes to story-telling. Draupadi's swayamwar, her disrobing, the 18-day war and its aftermath are all written with great restraint using the power of suggestion.

The Palace of Illusion, a Vyasa redux in one sense, makes light even of its load of Advaita sagacity. Try to remember that you are the instrument and I the doer, Krishna, her platonic boy friend, tells Panchaali when he comes to help her soul's final journey.

(By the way, I owe the Krishna="boy friend" equation to Dr Irawati Karve's Marathi eponymous essay written in 1970, the year of her death. She described how her son-in-law called Vithoba of Pandharpur her "boy friend" once after her return from her journey there. http://tinyurl.com/5h2tvq. It puzzled her first, she writes. On reflection, she found the descriptive tag appropriate. After all, had Vithoba (an incarnation of Vishu) not been called "mother", "father", "companion", "relative", "sweetheart" and the like? So what was wrong with "boy friend"?)

Earlier, when told to confirm if Sikhandi's narration of his past is true, Krishna says: “He believes it to be so. Isn’t that what truth is? The force of a person’s believing seeps into those around him – into the very earth and air and water – until there’s nothing else.”

In reply to Panchaali's final query Are you truly divine?, he laughingly replies: "Yes, I am. You are, too, you know!"

No drum roll. No trumpets. The world is maya after all.

Got it?

P.S.: Devakaruni's feminist and pacifist concerns make their presence felt throughout, though. For instance, the initiative taken by the women of the Pandava clan as well as Gandhari to rehabilitate the widows of the war is strongly reminiscent of Maitri, the helpline for Asian women in abusive situations that she established in 1991.

Afterthought: Avantika, 15, Ashu's younger daughter, a Digital Native from New Jersey, a good writer for her age but a lazy and reluctant reader, was given the first option on The Palace of Illusion by her dad before it was passed on to me. I hope she decides to read it someday soon.

Early learners?

Ashtavakra and Abhimanyu – both from the Mahabharata – come to mind. The latter learned the right way of penetrating into a chakravyuha (but not the way out of it) by listening to Arjuna from his mother Subhadra's womb. Partial knowledge was his undoing in the war. Ashtavakra’s case is even more fascinating. He was a Vedic scholar, a jnani – not a warrior. He was deformed (‘vakra’) in eight (‘Ashta’) joints of his body. I came across two versions of how his body got deformed. In the first version, his ambitious mother, Sujata, the daughter of Sage Uddalaka, was married to Kahor, his star pupil. When she was pregnant, she had high hopes for her child. She wanted him to be far above the ordinary. So, she began to attend the Vedic discourses given by her father and her husband. The unborn baby in her womb was so intelligent that, one fine day, he corrected his father’s chanting of a verse. Kahor apparently had a prima donna mindset. He couldn’t stand the humiliation of being publicly chided by his unborn child. Had he an ounce of common sense and humility, he would have felt proud that he had sired a super brilliant brat. Instead, he chose to stand on his dignity and his seniority like a father in a Bollywood flick. He cursed his progeny saying that he be born deformed in eight parts of his body. In the second version, though, Ashtavakra did not speak out his mind publicly. Instead, he bottled his discomfiture and displeasure at his father’s faulty rendering of the verses. He winced with embarrassment and his body twisted inside the womb at every slip of his worthy sire. King Janaka became Ashtavakra’s disciple. The dialogue between the two of them went on to become the celebrated Ashtavakra Gita or Ashtavakra Samhita. Here are a few quotes to get a feel of it. http://www.tphta.ws/TPH_ASHG.HTM.

“You do not consist of any of the elements – earth, water, fire, air or even ether. To be liberated, know yourself as consisting of consciousness, the witness of these .” (1.3)

“Righteousness and unrighteousness, pleasure and pain are purely of the mind and are no concern of yours. You are neither the doer nor the reaper of the consequences, so you are always free.” (1.6)

“Since you have been bitten by the black snake, the opinion about yourself that ‘I am the doer’, drink the antidote of faith in the fact that ‘I am not the doer’, and be happy.” (1.8)

“If one thinks of oneself as free, one is free, and if one thinks of oneself as bound, one is bound. Here this saying is true, ‘Thinking makes it so’.” (1.11)

“Pure illusion reigns in samsara which will continue until self realisation, but the enlightened man lives in the beauty of freedom from me and mine, from the sense of responsibility and from any attachment.” (18.73)