Karna
But what brings you here alone, Mother of kings?
Kunti
I have a boon to crave.
Karna
Command me, and whatever manhood and my honour as a Kshatriya permit shall be offered at your feet.
Kunti
I have come to take you.
Karna
Where?
Kunti
To my breast thirsting for your love, my son.
Karna
Fortunate mother of five brave kings, where can you find place for me, a small chieftain of lowly descent?
Kunti
Your place is before all my other sons.
Karna
But what right have I to take it?
Kunti
Your own God-given right to your mother’s love.
Karna
The gloom of evening spreads over the earth, silence rests on the water, and your voice leads me back to some primal world of infancy lost in twilit consciousness. However, whether this be dream, or fragment of forgotten reality, come near and place your right hand on my forehead. Rumour runs that I was deserted by my mother. Many a night she has come to me in my slumber, but when I cried: “Open your veil, show me your face!” her figure always vanished. Has this same dream come this evening while I wake? See, yonder the lamps are lighted in your son’s tents across the river; and on this side behold the tent-domes of my Kauravas, like the suspended waves of a spell-arrested storm at sea. Before the din of tomorrow’s battle, in the awful hush of this field where it must be fought, why should the voice of the mother of my opponent, Arjuna, bring me a message of forgotten motherhood? and why should my name take such music from her tongue as to draw my heart out to him and his brothers?