When she closes her eyes at night, Padma Patil sees battles happening before her in the darkness.
Since a young age she has always been much too obsessed with what she should not know. Forbidden knowledge is the apple of temptation for her, the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden that Eve bit into. Her grandmother used to joke that if in the next life she is reincarnated as a Christian, she will be named Eve.
Padma is naturally drawn to knowledge and intelligence. She is, after all, a Ravenclaw. She believes resolutely that wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure. In her first few months at Hogwarts, her only friends were her sister and the Gray Lady, resident ghost of her House. Padma was one of the few people who knew the Gray Lady's story, and she sympathized with Helena, whom knowledge was the downfall of.
However, although she is attracted to knowledge, she isn't always brave enough to seek it. Ravenclaws are not renowned for their bravery. That's where Parvati comes in.
The two girls are different as any two people can be—a Gryffindor and a Ravenclaw, one always in the library and the other doing Divination homework, one practically a hermit and the other a social animal—but they love each other dearly. The twins complement each other and make up for each other's weaknesses. Their grandmother used to lament that although they are identical twin sisters, they are as different as night and day. Parvati and Padma don't feel that way though—rather, they instead consider themselves two sides of the same coin.
Padma is the one who seeks the knowledge, and Parvati, with her Gryffindor courage, is the one who gets it. The Patil partnership began at a young age, when they were five years old and living in India.
The girls, like most Indian children, grew up on the many and varied tales of Indian mythology. Their grandmother, however, filtered the stories that they read so that the girls were condemned to reading stuffy little sermons and happy-ending stories. She also only allowed them to read the Ramayana, and not India's other great epic—the Mahabharata. The Ramayana was comprised of characters who represented ideal roles in society—ideal son, ideal wife, ideal warrior, etc. The main characters were all reincarnations of gods on earth whose lives were already decided before they were born.
Both Parvati and Padma quickly grew bored with the way the Ramayana dryly narrated Rama's perfect life, never deviating once from right and wrong. The Mahabharata, on the other hand, was a much more accurate representation of real life—how many stories, many personal agendas and lives all came together in the great catastrophe of the Kurukshetra war. No one can claim to have followed the rules of life completely. Their grandmother, however, did not want the girls to be traumatized by the story of a family torn in two by war.
Even at a young age, Padma longed to read the Mahabharata. She shared her secret desire with Parvati, who agreed to sneak the copy to their bedroom. That night, Parvati lugged the huge volume tucked away under their grandmother's bed and together they read the forbidden story.
Most of all Padma was captivated by the story of the hero Abhimanyu. For much of his childhood, his father and uncles, the Pandavas, were exiled, cheated out of their father's kingdom by their cousins the Kauravas. His mother Subhadra raised him and the other children of his father and uncles, during the thirteen years of exile. When finally the Pandavas returned and began preparing for the war against the Kauravas to win back their kingdom, his marriage was arranged to the princess Uttara.
He was eager to help his uncles in the war, but he was only sixteen. Nevertheless, he was the greatest warrior of his time. On the thirteenth day of the 18-day Kurukshetra war, he was finally allowed to fight in battle. The Kauravas, knowing they could not him easily, used the terrible formation of the thousand-petaled lotus to trap him. Knowing he was doomed, he chose to make his death as expensive for the enemy as possible. In one day, the boy killed 10,000 soldiers.
Eventually six of the Kauravas' best warriors began attacking him at once, even though the war code dictated that only one warrior would engage another in combat at a time. Undaunted, he continued fighting even after his bow and chariot were destroyed. He picked up a wheel of his chariot and used it to continue to fight. After that broke as well, he fought his enemies with a mace until finally his opponent crushed his skull. Abhimanyu died, but his death had been terribly costly for the Kauravas. In the days that followed, his uncles killed the men responsible for his death, and he was remembered forever for his bravery.
Over and over, Padma has imagined what the last day of Abhimanyu's short life must have been like. His boundless delight at being allowed to fight. The unyielding determination that pulled his muscles taut and sent his arrows flying with dead-on precision. The terror he must have known when he was trapped inside the formation. His decision to die a hero. The resourcefulness that enabled him to use a chariot wheel.
And every night, when she goes to sleep, she sees the battalion in the shape of a thousand-petaled lotus dancing before her, capturing the sixteen-year-old boy in one of its countless curves. For when she thinks of Abhimanyu, she thinks not of him holding aloft a wheel, or sending arrows flying at ten thousand warriors, but of a boy trapped who did not let resignation guide him, but resolve.