"The wife is the property of the husband, no less so than a cow or a slave"

 I have so much I want to talk about, but I will hols back so that I am not deflated come time for the "end book"/book vote meeting.

For this blog I will speculate on part of the is question for the second part of our reading segment, "How does the author's foreshadowing through the eyes of Panchaali enhance your experience of the tale?".

At the beginning of the story I was not sure how I felt about all of Panchaali's foreshadowing. It is clear from the start that she is telling us this tale from the very end of whatever major has happened to her. We get snippets of disaster and misfortune mixed with hope and destiny.  At first I didn't think I wanted to know that her future was going to be full of death, destruction, and misery, but it is clear to me now that if there had not been this great amount of foreshadowing I probably would have had a sever stroke or heart attack from the shear suspense of it all. I think it also makes a clear path in what could be a very convoluted and confusing story for those of us not intimately involved with the Hindu religion and the story of the Mahabharat. So, now that I am almost finished with this novel, I am grateful to Divakaruni for being insightful enough to add such a dynamic to this story by using the foreshadowing as a regular technique to aid in the interest of what is to come but to also clarify things by giving us the background before it has even happened. I love it!
I am also very interested in what I am learning regarding the unusual cast system that is happening here. Not only do we have the issue of gender inequality (which is clearly demonstarted by the quote I used to title this blog post) but there is also the cast inequality struggles that seem even more outrageous than that between the men and women. We learn from chapter 21 "afterlife" that the descrimination of the different levels of society are continued into the eternal,

"The boundaries of afterlife are even more complicated than the rules that pen us in on earth. Depending on their deeds, the dead can be dispatched to many different abodes. Fortunate brahmins are sent to Brahmaloka, where they can learn divine wisdom directly from the Creator. The best among kshatriyas go to Indraloka, filled as it is with pleasures both artistic and hedonistic. Lesser warriors must be content with the courts of the god of death, or the sun and moon deities. For evildoers. there are one hundred and thirty-six levels of hell, each corresponding to a particular sin, and each with its own set of tortures, such as tongue-tearing, being boiled in oil, or being devoured by ravenous birds, all of which our scriptures describe with great relish." (155)

This is all well and good, but nowhere does it mention where someone like Karna or Dhai Ma would end up.
I think for the third installment of Palace which I am about to indulge in will have its bearings within this particular quote from Panchaali that stood out to me, "At what point does forbearance cease to be a virtue and become a weakness?" (210)...a little foreshadowing.