Read Sun and Moon

“We lost in Mahabharat.”

That sentence stayed with me. I was about five, perhaps a little older, when I heard my great-grandfather say it. I remember the loss belonging to us. [1]

Around those childhood years, the Mahabharata was on television. What drew me was a moon symbol between the eyes, as I remember seeing it on the screen. I was pulled towards that mark more than towards the stories being told. I wondered why so many of those people were being made to look bad, and why Krishna seemed to receive the credit for everything. Those questions belonged to the child watching. [2]

When I was a child in India, I would sleep on the open terrace on the roof of our house during summer. I remember lying in the moonlight, feeling so comfortable, looking up and asking, “Why?” [2]

That comfort has stayed with me. Standing beneath the moon still brings a strange calm, as though I have known the feeling for centuries. As a child, I did not think of the thousands of years before me. Now I wonder how many of those who came before me lay beneath the same moon and felt something like it.

I wonder about the stories a grieving family might have told a child beneath the stars. Might they have pointed to a light and given a mother or father who had died a place in the sky? A child could grow up still looking for that light. I find myself wondering what people might have said about the moon. My heart beats differently when I look at it. I cannot tell what an ancestor felt, but I can ask what the sky helped people keep close when someone they loved was gone. [160]

I had the feeling before I had a genealogy. My great-grandfather’s words about our loss reached me before I could follow the arguments about who deserved the kingdom. The word that keeps drawing me back is we.

The word lets me enter a story before I understand it. It places me beside people I have never met and makes their defeat feel closer than another person's victory. That is part of its power. It also means I arrive with a preference. I am already listening for the account that will give those people back their dignity.

I do not want to pretend I began this search without that attachment. A name can open a book for me that I might otherwise have left closed. The harder part comes after opening it, when the person on the page refuses to be the person I hoped to find. I want to stay long enough to hear that person too.

The account I inherited kept bringing me back to the Kauravas, Puru and Suhotra. [1] Before I knew how to compare the texts, those names had already become questions I wanted to follow.

A story heard at home can reach a child differently from a story first encountered in a book. I wanted to understand the loss in that sentence, and why it had stayed with me.

Dhuleta gives the inquiry a nearer starting point. My family are farmers as well as people who remember warriors. A history of swords alone would leave out the work that allowed a family to continue between conflicts. Someone had to remain with the land. Someone had to carry a name into another generation when the men praised in stories were gone.

That work rarely gives a family a single great moment to remember. A battle has an outcome; the work of keeping a household alive has to begin again. When I follow the warriors, I want to keep that other life in view. The person who makes a vessel, brings water or teaches a child may leave no royal 

title behind. Yet the next generation needs what that person knows.

So the question I carry is larger than whether an old king belongs in my family tree. I want to understand what people managed to pass on, and what was lost while they were trying. The names are where I begin. They cannot be the only people I allow myself to see.

The route west also matters to our account: Multan, Sindh and Dera Ghazi Khan recur as places of earlier belonging. Nearer at hand are Kuleta, Dhuleta and neighbouring villages. These are the places through which I follow the story.

The child in that memory heard a defeat. The man following it has had to ask who belonged to that “we,” where their children went, and what survived the journey. Those questions take me first to four names: Suhotra, Sahotra, Sahota and Sihota.