Arjun is Pandora’s fledgling and companion, as well as an obstacle blocking Marius’s desire to reunite with Pandora, who is miserable with Arjun because of his selfish control over her. Centuries after Pandora and Arjun separate, Amel, in his plan for liberation, manipulates Arjun against his will to immolate several vampires. Arjun appears in Blood and Gold (2001), Prince Lestat (2014), and Blood Communion (2018).
In the fourteenth century, many hundreds of years after Pandora and Marius separate, she encounters a prince of the Chola dynasty in India, named Arjun, who worships her. Pandora is instantly attracted to Arjun—who is educated in Sanskrit and the Vedas, and is very beautiful to behold—and she turns him into a vampire. They remain together for hundreds of years until they encounter Marius at a ball at the ducal palace in Dresden in the seventeenth century. Marius believes that Arjun is manipulating Pandora against her will, but he cannot prove it. He speaks first with Pandora and begs her to leave Arjun. She rejects the idea that Arjun is coercing her before spurning Marius’s invitation to leave together. Marius next speaks with Arjun, who, though more than one thousand years younger than he is, stands up to him fearlessly, telling him that he, Arjun, must willingly surrender Pandora to him, yet he is inwardly confident of his power over her, knowing that she will not leave him for Marius. Defeating Marius’s hopes to be reunited with his beloved, Arjun leaves the ball with Pandora, and the two prepare to depart Dresden for Moscow. Unbeknownst to Arjun, Pandora writes a letter to Marius, confessing that he is correct, that Arjun will not let her abandon him, that she greatly desires Marius to find them in Moscow and to take her from him. Unfortunately, the letter is lost among Marius’s many belongings, and he does not discover it for another fifty years. When he finally does, Arjun has already taken Pandora away from Moscow.
Around that same time, Pandora finds the strength to leave Arjun, and they do not see each other for another two hundred years. Arjun descends into the earth, retreating into a vampiric torpor when he can no longer suffer the pangs of an immortal existence. He survives in the earth when Akasha rises to commence the Great Burning of 1985, immolating the world’s vampire population. When Amel, as the mysterious Voice, rouses Arjun from his torpor in the earth, Arjun goes to Mumbai as if possessed, not knowing what he is doing, and commences his own great massacre of vampires, burning them with the Fire Gift. Eventually, after hearing the pleas for mercy from his vampire victims, especially those who have been vampires for hundreds of years, he laments not only what he did but how much pleasure it gave him at the time. He spends his time between his home in Mumbai and Prince Lestat’s Court of the Prince at Château de Lioncourt, where he causes Pandora no end of guilt and grief. As the years pass, Arjun becomes outraged by Marius’s long history with Pandora. He challenges Marius to combat but cannot defeat the former keeper of Those Who Must Be Kept. Marius completely destroys Arjun with the Fire Gift.
For more perspectives on Arjun’s character, read the Alphabettery entries Bianca Solderini, Marius, Marquis de Malvrier, Marquisa de Malvrier, and Pandora.