Memories of his time with the gopīs would well up in Kṛṣṇa’s heart like a spring of clear water, hidden beneath rushes. Now he was surrounded by people who knew nothing of his herdboy’s adolescence, who thought of him only as a shrewd, mature king, his body still powerful, his face furrowed with fine wrinkles. Kṛṣṇa hardly ever spoke about himself.
One day he was visiting Indraprastha, where his sister Subhadrā had married Arjuna and borne him a son. Kṛṣṇa celebrated his nephew’s birth rites. The hot weather was setting in. Arjuna said: “I’d like to leave the city and bathe in the Yamunā with our girls.” Kṛṣṇa added: “I’d like to play with our girls in the Yamunā too.” Preparations were made. At first light, a colorful procession set out from the city gate. Servant women, maids, and ladies clustered around carts laden with fragrant food baskets.
Hidden among the sunshades, Arjuna’s two wives, the majestic Draupadī and the enchanting Subhadrā, talked together. It looked like an exodus of young maidens. Among them, toward the end of the procession, came just two men, Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna. They too were talking together.
The sun was still low when they reached the banks of the Yamunā. The provisions were unloaded in a chatter of trilling voices. The girls spread white and embroidered cloths on the grass. Like skilled craftsmen they erected delicate pavilions. The water was already sparkling. Behind them the grassy clearing was surrounded by the dark presence of the Forest of Khāṇḍava, the Sugar Candy Forest. The air rang with the highest spirits. Already you could hear flutes, vīṇās, tambourines. Some of the girls had dived in the water, others had gathered in the pavilions, others were laying out the food. There was laughter, weeping, the whispering of secrets. Draupadī and Subhadrā were seen taking off their jewels and fastening them around the necks, wrists, and ankles of the first girls they came across.
Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna were not much in evidence. They had asked to be away from the group and were sitting on two inlaid chairs at the edge of the forest. Left alone, they said nothing, suddenly solemn expressions set on their faces. All at once Kṛṣṇa turned to the women in the distance: all he could see there was a swarm of colored points, milling madly. Voices and sounds came faintly through the air, a quivering in the background. He would never see anything so delightful again in all his life. Indeed he would hardly see anything delightful at all in the time that remained. Arjuna didn’t know that, couldn’t know it, but he was beginning to feel it. There was no need to speak to him. In the silence he was preparing himself for an immense catastrophe, albeit without knowing exactly what would happen.
Then they saw a tall figure emerge from the dense forest, upright, emaciated, with a red beard and skin of molten gold glimmering beneath a black robe. A brahman. He seemed exhausted and irate. He said: “I know who you are. I am a voracious brahman. Give me food I can eat.” Kṛṣṇa asked him what food would satisfy him. “I’m Agni,” said the brahman. “Only this whole forest can satisfy me. I can’t burn it because I haven’t the strength and Indra protects the place.” Kṛṣṇa looked up: he saw heavy clouds gathering darkly. They would have to fight together against Arjuna’s father, king of the gods. Secretly, Kṛṣṇa was pleased. “How can it be that Agni is unable to burn?” he asked. “I could, but only if you help me. It’s a sad story. A mad sacrifice. A rash and arrogant king fed me on melted butter for twelve years. He hoped his sacrifice would help him scale the sky. He wore me out with that butter. Now I want plants and meat. My mouth is sick of butter. Now I want nothing but wild food. I look at this forest, and I can’t make any impression on it. Seven times I’ve set it alight, and seven times elephants and Nāga have put it out. Indra poured down cataracts from the clouds. But I can offer you weapons that are invincible. And you’ll soon be needing them,” Agni finished with a chuckle. The bow called Gāṇḍīva was surrendered to the grip of Arjuna’s hands. The disk and the mace appeared in Kṛṣṇa’s.
Then the brahman turned back to fire again, creeping through the grass toward the forest. Suddenly there was a huge blaze, a whirlwind and a crash. Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa took up positions at either end of the clearing and stood motionless. Together with the crackle of fire came the piercing shrieks of wild beasts. The animals swarmed toward the clearing with desperation in their eyes. Elephants, antelopes, monkeys, buffalo, butterflies, tigers, moles, demons, goats, snakes, squirrels, colored birds. Arjuna brought them down one by one, the fiercest and the most harmless, the gigantic and the tiny, pulling out arrows from his two inexhaustible quivers. As every arrow whistled off, he felt at once and with equal intensity both the pointlessness and the necessity of what he was doing. How many more times would he have to kill? And at bottom every other killing, even the most justifiable and irreproachable, would be like the massacre of those beasts fleeing from one death to another. The pointlessness was glaring, the necessity just a thread, but the toughest thread of all, the one that tied him to Kṛṣṇa, that friend in whom he so deeply confided that it sometimes seemed Kṛṣṇa was at work inside him, ensconced there in a cell that just occasionally would open. Even now, as he drew out his arrows, Arjuna’s hand was a glove with the steady hand of Kṛṣṇa flexing inside. Meanwhile, from the opposite side of the clearing, Kṛṣṇa hit out incessantly like some automaton. Few were the animals who escaped the razor disk that flew from his hand and then immediately returned. And even those fled in vain: the mace brought them down at once. Toward the forest, nothing but devouring flame.
Amazed, the gods gathered in the sky to watch. “Why is Agni burning these creatures? Is it a sign that the world is about to end? Is the Submarine Mare raising her head?” they wondered, turning to Indra. “And why must Arjuna of all people, your son, help the world to consume itself? Why are you letting them destroy this forest you have always protected?” Indra didn’t answer. Without a word, he unleashed the waters. They fell in dense, liquid sheets. But as they approached the flames, they evaporated. Arjuna’s arrows darkened the sky and wounded the drops. By now the clearing was covered in a carpet of festering corpses. Here and there they were heaped in mounds. They were the sweetmeats in Agni’s diet, the red-hot candy he loved so much. The forest went on burning for six days. The sounds of unseen death throes went on and on. Fewer and fewer animals or Dānavas made it to the clearing. Then the shrieking gradually died down. There was still the occasional thudding sound, in the distance—and the hissing whirlwind of the flames.
Agni reappeared before Arjuna, glossy and replete, having bolted down oceans of fat and bone marrow. He thanked his two accomplices and bade them farewell: “Go where you please.” There was a moment’s sudden silence, immediately broken by a light flutter. Kṛṣṇa, Arjuna, and Agni looked up. They saw four birds flying into the sky. The only surviving creatures. They were the four Vedas.
Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa looked down again, impassive, at the charred forest. Behind them, the ground stretched dull and gray as far as the banks of the Yamunā. Standing in a line, the maidens and ladies who had come with them were watching. Together they made a ribbon, a film of ash on every face and robe. The pavilions were gone, swept away by the wind.
Thus was the war between the five Pāṇḍavas and their cousins, the Kauravas, announced. Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna lingered on the banks of the Yamunā, alone, watching the water flow by. Then they wandered back to Indraprastha like two vagrants, without so much as a word.
While the Forest of Khāṇdava was burning, Arjuna had remembered the crackling of another pyre, not long ago, where, had his Kaurava cousins had their way, he himself would have died along with his four brothers. This was the burning of the lacquer house, an elegant, flimsy, deathtrap building where they had been staying for a long festive period, in Vāraṇāvata. There too there had been melted butter. The cloying, penetrating smell mingled with the smells of hemp, cork, and cane in the four great halls. Even the narrow columns had been smeared with butter, the better to catch fire.
Hinting, enigmatic, Uncle Vidura had given the game away. The Pāṇdavas dug themselves a mole’s burrow. At night they would sneak down into their hiding place, with their weapons, and keep watch. For months they waited for a chance to escape, while letting the others think they had died in the fire. One night, five drunken, unsuspecting Niṣādas sprawled on their cushions with their mother. They didn’t even hear the flames roaring. Their charred forms convinced the Kauravas that those execrable cousins, the Pāṇḍavas, would be in their way no more.
Together with their mother, Kuntī, the Pāṇḍavas ran through the night like hunted beasts. Slipping out of their burrow, they dashed for the forest, the glow of the fire fading behind them. The trees were shaken by angry gusts. The tension of a year of forced and harassed wakefulness was melting away. But they didn’t dare assume they were free yet. Only Bhīma, in the midst of the group, cut down every obstacle. Trunks crashed to the ground as he passed. He saw the others gasping. So he gently lifted Kuntī onto his back. He grabbed the twins, Nakula and Sahadeva, then Arjuna and Yudhiṣṭhira, holding them tight under his arms. Then he pressed on, like an animated mountain. He was the stormy gale that beat down the plants, cutting a path through darkness.
• • •
Ever since they were born, the five Pāṇḍava brothers, who were Pāṇḍu’s sons in name only, each of them boasting a “portion,” aṃśa, of a particular god, in that they had been fathered in Kuntī’s (and Mādrī’s) wombs by different gods—Yudhiṣṭhira by Dharma, Bhīma by Vāyu, Arjuna by Indra, the twins Nakula and Sahadeva by the Aśvin twins—ever since they were born, the Pāṇḍavas had been aware of a malignant tension between themselves and their Kaurava cousins. When they played games together, it was as if they were fighting to the death. So tangled was their common ancestry that there was no way of being certain which of them would one day be the legitimate king of Hastināpura. The theories offered to establish legitimacy were too contradictory, though each could claim to be reasonable up to a point.
When the Kauravas, set up the lacquer house trap, hoping their cousins would be burned alive there, the Pāṇḍavas were not surprised. “And now,” thought Arjuna as the Forest of Khāṇḍava was burning, “another fire. To kill hundreds of desperate animals, I’ve had to fight against my father, Indra. In return for a deed that many will think dishonorable, I have been given Gāṇḍīva, the bow I always desired. To create a desert of ash, I have for the first time done something together with my lifelong friend Kṛṣṇa. If all that seems senseless, it must be because it makes too much sense.”
Seen from afar, the imminent war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas might have looked very like the massacre of those animals fleeing the Forest of Khāṇḍava. It would overwhelm rank and rancor in flight and death. Kāla, Time, was in a hurry to put an end to an aeon. The war was mainly a pretext to make things easier for him. Not so much that day, as he tirelessly drew his bow before a forest of flame, but later, years later, Arjuna would be constantly asking himself why that slaughter had come about. And in what sense it had come about “for the good of the worlds.” In the end, killing one’s relatives was much easier to justify.
But those animals fleeing the burning forest? Why? Arjuna never got an answer. Time and again he would see Kṛṣṇa, ruthlessly wielding his lethal disk and mace. Then he would remember how Indra, his father, had appeared, humiliated by his son’s arrows, and magnanimously offered to grant Kṛṣṇa a boon. A sovereign god, albeit of obsolete sovereignty, offering a boon to a king, who was also a sovereign god reigning over sovereigns. At the time Arjuna hadn’t even noticed the oddity and irony of what was going on. What he did remember, though, and very clearly, was the boon Kṛṣṇa had asked for: Arjuna’s friendship, forever.
It was Draupadī, princess of the Pañcālas, the people of the figure Five and of the Dolls, who first brought Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna together. Born from the sacrificial fire, Draupadī had the dark, almost black skin of charred logs (which was why they also called her Kṛṣṇa). She smelled like blue lotuses. Her father, King Drupada, proclaimed for her a svayaṃvara: this was the ceremony during which a bride selected her husband. The suitors were to compete with their bows. Disguised as brahmans, guests at a potter’s house, the Pāṇḍavas braced themselves for the challenge. There were fifteen days of sumptuous and exhausting festivities. No one had seen Draupadī yet. The sixteenth day the princess appeared in the arena, adorned with a golden garland that shone out between dark skin and bright white robe. The suitors all got to their feet, shouting: “Draupadī will be mine.” Hundreds of earrings flashed in the sun. Among the guests who had come to watch was Kṛṣṇa, at the head of the Vṛṣṇis. He was the only one in the crowd who immediately recognized the Pāṇḍavas among the brahmans. And, of the Pāṇḍavas, it was Arjuna who attracted his attention. For how long had they perched on opposite branches of the aśvattha tree that spans the worlds, for how long had they drifted together over the endless waters, for how long (a thousand years?) had they sat together in that niche of rock in Badarī, one with his right leg crossed, the other with his left, the roaring of a river in the distance? Now they would meet as men lost in a throng of men. Meanwhile, the other princes had missed the target. Kṛṣṇa saw Arjuna’s left arm slowly drawing back his bow. He thought: “Not the forest, but the tree. Not the tree, but the bird. Not the bird, but the head. Now …” There was a mighty shout. The target: pierced through. Draupadī turned radiant eyes on Arjuna. She had already chosen the man who had won her. She went toward him with a chaplet of white flowers.
Draupadī didn’t have long to enjoy feeling that she was wife to the man she had chosen: Arjuna. She knew she was marrying into an unusual family, with those five brothers as different and interlinked as the fingers of a hand. She found them all extremely charming, but, when she looked at Arjuna, she needed no more. And at once the others were right there beside him: Yudhiṣṭhira, solemn and authoritative, something dark in the background; Bhīma, whom the others called Wolf’s Belly and who looked like a tower; Nakula and Sahadeva, the twins, two thoroughbreds. “Who keeps them together? Their mother, Kuntī,” thought Draupadī. She feared the moment she would have to meet her.
They left the city. Draupadī walked in Arjuna’s footsteps, dreaming of her new life. Little did she know that she was never to recover that lightness and euphoria again. There was a tangle of cane. Their feet sank in the mud. Those who met them on the way thought they were a group of pilgrims. Arjuna was up front. He wanted to be the first to go to his mother. He came out of the forest in front of a low house surrounded by jars. They went into a huge, dark room and sensed a presence. “Mother, look what we’ve brought for you …” Without even looking up to where the door was filled with light, Kuntī said, “Share it out among yourselves.” She meant whatever offering they had brought. But a mother’s word is final: thus, Draupadī became the bride of all five brothers, shared equally among them. An inexhaustible bowl of rice. When night came, she lay at the feet of those five men she hardly knew, like a cushion.
They decided for how long and in what order Draupadī was to live with each of the brothers. Then they added just one rule: if one of the Pāṇḍavas disturbed Draupadī when she was alone with another of them, he would have to go off into the forest for twelve months. It happened to Arjuna.
He burst into the room to get the weapons beside the bed and interrupted Yudhiṣṭhira and Draupadī as they were making love. It was a conscious violation. If he hadn’t done it, he wouldn’t have been able to defend an unarmed brahman who was asking for his help. Yudhiṣṭhira tried to keep his brother from leaving, citing possible cavils that would have allowed him to get around the punishment. It was Arjuna who insisted on going. He wanted to find out what it meant to be alone in the world. To get away from brothers, cousins, mother. And even from that wonderful wife, whom he could hardly get near. He was looking for something exotic and out of the ordinary: experience, any experience, exposing himself to chance.
The spiteful said that no one had visited so many holy places and so many pretty women on the Island of the Jambū as Arjuna in the months of his travels. He wandered around like one of the many brahmacārins, students of brahman, devoted to purity and chastity. He bathed in the waters of the Utpalinī, the Alakanandā, the Kauśikī, the Gayā and the Gaṇgā, where Ulūpī, daughter of the King of the Nāgas, drew him underwater in a delirium of desire. Arjuna overcame his scruples when Ulūpī convinced him that the only thing that could save her was sex with himself. But then he immediately felt reassured when he saw that even on the bed of the great river, in the palace of the Nāgas, rites were being celebrated before the brahmanic fire. He didn’t say, but he thought that the dharma could not survive unless allied to the Nāgas. Behind the visible hostility between spirit and serpent, the most ancient of pacts holds good. Then it was intriguing to spend a night of liquid love with a snake-girl. And he was to have another watery adventure too. One day in the swamps of the deep south, he found himself locked in a fight to the death with a crocodile. Then he saw the horrifying creature clutched in his arms turn into an Apsaras, who immediately spoke to him: “There are five of us. We are proud and beautiful, irreverent and cursed by an ascetic. My name is Vargā. We have been waiting for you to pay our ransom …” “Even a crocodile turns into a girl in his arms,” the spiteful were quick to mock once more, as soon as word of this story began to make the rounds.
Arjuna’s wanderings brought him to the shores of the western ocean. Kṛṣṇa found him at Prabhāsa. They embraced and sat down in the forest. As yet they had never spoken alone together. First Kṛṣṇa asked: “Why are you visiting all the holy places?” And Arjuna told him. They might have been friends swapping stories after a long separation. But Arjuna realized, and wanted to take his time over the realization, that Kṛṣṇa was the eye that watched his eye, the mind at the bottom of his own mind, that already knew everything Arjuna was seeking to know. With this companion, whether visible or invisible, his whole life changed. It wouldn’t be enough now to be a warrior who excelled with his bow. Nor to fight for dharma, the Law. Before doing that, his mind must open out wide toward those two focal points. A sense of calm, unlike anything he had felt before, spread through Arjuna: now he knew that, whatever he did, Kṛṣṇa would never do anything against him, even if he were to oppose—and how often that was to happen—his thinking, his gaze, his words. And now those words seemed more and more spaced out, as if in the intervals between them Arjuna were being absorbed into the other watching him in the silence. Kṛṣṇa broke into his reflections: “Let’s go up to Mount Raivataka. There’s a big festival on, with actors and dancers.”
• • •
The mountain was lit up by torches like a huge hall. The young Vṛṣṇis were milling around, showing off garlands and bracelets. Arjuna wandered among them, cheerful and intrigued, Kṛṣṇa behind him. Suddenly he saw Subhadrā and stopped stock-still in the throng. She was beauty incarnate. But something else too: she was a propitious creature. Time opened up before her. Behind him Arjuna heard Kṛṣṇa’s quiet, suggestive voice ask: “Why on earth is a powerful ascetic like yourself, someone accustomed to the forest, suddenly getting mixed up in love? That is Subhadrā, my sister.”
Now everything happened very quickly. Arjuna said: “When I look at her, the earth smiles at me.” Kṛṣṇa had already assumed an absorbed, pensive expression, as when he used to speak of the art of government. He said: “For a kṣatriya, the rules recommend a svayaṃvara. But one can never be quite sure which suitor will win. Someone else might be preferred to yourself. However, a kṣatriya may resort to abduction. That is also allowed. Carry off the beautiful Subhadrā. That’s my advice. I’ll look after everything else.”
At the end of twelve months, Arjuna went back to his brothers and Draupadī. He had Subhadrā beside him, dazzling in a red silk robe. Draupadī looked at Arjuna and said: “When you undo a bundle, it’s the oldest knot that comes loose first.” Arjuna tried to object, as though duty bound to do so. Proud and tough, Draupadī seemed not to hear.
Some time later, Arjuna went to Draupadī again with Subhadrā. He had got her to dress as a gopī. If possible, she was even more beautiful. She refracted a distant happiness: that of her brother Kṛṣṇa’s infancy. This time it was Subhadrā who spoke to Draupadī. She said: “I am Subhadrā, your servant.” Draupadī smiled at her: “May your husband at least be without rivals …” In an earnest voice, Subhadrā answered: “So be it …” From then on the women quarreled no more. A few months later Subhadrā gave birth to Abhimanyu.
Nothing ever generated so much curiosity in Indra’s heaven as the imminent arrival of Arjuna. “His son! His son! His favorite!” was the general murmur. Meanwhile Arjuna looked around, among the peaks, moraines, and dark blue valleys of the Himālaya, where he had discovered terror and absolute solitude. Now he greeted the mountains, at once grateful and moved. “I have been happy among you …,” he said. “It was here I discovered tapas and practiced it until the forests began to steam. Here I sat motionless for months, eating the wind. Here countless ephemeral creatures passed before my eyes, creatures with no karman, obedient only to the one imperative: “Live! Die!” Here I fought a wild hunter who reduced me to a bloody lump of sacrificial meat before giving me the weapon that surpasses all others, the severed head of Brahmā, a weapon that can be wielded with a thought, with a glance of the eyes, with a word or with a bow.” He went on with a meticulous list of his solitary adventures. Heaven didn’t seem to hold much attraction for him.
It was then that Mātali, the charioteer, burst out of the clouds unfurling the deep blue Vaijayanta standard above a chariot waving with snakes. “Your father is calling you,” he said. “He wants all the Celestials to welcome you …” As the chariot rose with him on board, Arjuna saw thousands of other chariots wandering in the air. They shone brightly, so that already the sun and the moon seemed superfluous. Mātali acted as his guide, pointing them out to him, telling him the names of those they belonged to. For the most part they were sages of olden times, whose names Arjuna barely knew. He realized the chariot was getting close to the divine residence when a vast, white, four-tusked elephant appeared. “It must be Airāvata …,” thought Arjuna, and suddenly there before him was Amarāvatī, city of Indra. A noisy, colorful crowd had gathered to greet him. It wasn’t so much the gods, whom he gradually began to recognize, that struck him as the multitudes of Gandharvas and Apsaras. Airy, vibrant, and fickle, more beautiful than the gods perhaps, these beings seemed to him the natives of the sky. Then he saw his father, under a tall, white umbrella, screened by a fan that gave off perfume. The Gandharvas’ hymns rose and fell frenetically, while the Apsaras swayed slowly on their hips. No one had ever seen so much tenderness in Indra’s eyes. He went to Arjuna, took him by the hand, stroked his cheeks and long arms. Then as, cautiously, almost incredulously, the king of the gods moved a hand toward Arjuna’s chest, at the same time breathing in the smell of his head, his open palm could be seen to bear the scars left by thunderbolts. Indra led his son toward the throne and sat down beside him. For Arjuna this was perhaps the first moment of unthreatened beatitude in his life. Nothing was asked of him. The weight of duty was lifted. The sky was a spectacle decked out for this occasion.
He watched the Gandharvas busying themselves with basins full of water to wash his feet and refresh him after his long trip. Arjuna’s eyes took in the seething circle of the Apsaras. In a low voice he asked Mātali, who had stayed close beside him, what their names were. Mātali listed them: “Ghṛtācī, Menakā, Rambhā, Pūrvacitti, Svayaṃprabhā, Urvaśī, Miśrakeśī, Duṇḍu, Gaurī, Varūthinī, Sahā, Madhurasvarā …” And he went on. Arjuna couldn’t follow. Some of the names evoked stories he had heard as a child, of princesses, ṛṣis, warriors, hunters. But these heroines seemed to have returned to their places in a chorus of dancers, as if together they made up just one single story, one single face, happy to merely refract and sparkle. “I must learn how to recognize them …,” thought Arjuna. And his eyes went on running tirelessly across those faces, those bodies. In their exultation, their splendor, the eyes he met had something vacuous and jaded about them, as though they were no more than inset stones. Even the swelling breasts held high in pearl bodices, even the soft thighs seemed painted. Until Arjuna’s eyes were compelled to settle on those of one Apsaras among many. “High cheekbones, like mine,” he thought. And he realized his gaze was sinking into eyes as remote and unruffled as the surface of a lake. “Who is that Apsaras with the high cheekbones?” he asked Matali. “It’s Urvaśī,” said the charioteer.
“What to do in heaven?” wondered Arjuna in his rooms, his thoughts already turning to the brothers he had left behind. “Receive gifts of arms,” his father would soon explain. Indra trained him in the use of the vajra, the thunderbolt. “But that’s not everything,” he said. “Now you must learn the dances and hymns that men don’t know.” He nodded to a Gandharva who was following him. “This is Citrasena. He will be your friend and teacher. Trust him.”
Arjuna soon learned to sing and dance the way they do in Indra’s heaven, something men know nothing of. Every day he practiced along with the Gandharvas and the Apsaras. But he couldn’t relax. He kept thinking of his brothers, homeless and persecuted back on earth. Citrasena understood and was good at distracting him. “What’s the name of that Apsaras who just went by and turned to look at us?” Arjuna asked one day. “It’s Urvaśī,” answered Citrasena. Meanwhile, he was thinking: “If anyone can keep Arjuna in heaven, it’s Urvaśī.” Citrasena went straight off to talk to Indra. And he was given the task of acting as go-between and bringing Arjuna and Urvaśī together as lovers.
Urvaśī welcomed him as if she already knew the mission Indra had given him. “Citrasena, no need to waste words. I’ve seen how handsome Arjuna is. And you know I love men,” she said with a joyless smile. Then, in a lower voice, as though speaking to herself: “I’m compelled to love men …” That very evening, smelling sweetly of sandalwood paste and with a faint tinkling of anklets, a slightly tipsy Urvaśī went to Arjuna’s rooms. Far from being delighted, Arjuna was overcome by a new kind of terror. Without thinking, he lowered his eyes and whispered a few deferential words. In her contralto voice, Urvaśī said: “When you arrived and had hundreds of celestial beings all around you, you looked at me just once, with your unyielding eyes. I remembered that look. I’ve known it for hundreds of years. Then Citrasena came to visit me and said that you had remembered it too. Now I am here …” The more Urvaśī spoke, the more terrified Arjuna seemed to be. He stuffed his fingers in his ears like a child. Then he said: “It’s true that I looked at you. But then I realized: you are the mother of the lunar dynasty. And I am the last of the children of the lunar dynasty. You are my mother. How could I embrace you?” Urvaśī’s eyes were sorrowing and cold. She said: “We Apsaras know no bonds. Our realm is emotion. We abhor usefulness. Yet if you men have fire on earth, it is only because one day long ago I left the man who desired me and was your ancestor. It was my absence that unleashed fire in the world. It still burns today. It will burn forever. This time it is I who follow you. Don’t reject me.” Arjuna had grown more obdurate: “I owe you nothing but respect.” Urvaśī was livid now. “You are insulting a woman your father has offered you. You are rejecting a woman you desire. Well then, you will live like a woman among women, and you will dance with them. You are not fit for anything else.” Then Urvaśī vanished in the night.
Still pale with anger, Urvaśī undressed mechanically, scornful syllables on her lips. Then she lay on her bed and recovered that expression that many admired so much and said was hers alone: one of immense distance and sadness. She thought: “But no one looks more like Purūravas than Arjuna.” Then once again, as had happened countless times before and for hundreds of years, she withdrew into the lake of memory.
No sooner had Urvaśī gone than Arjuna felt annoyed with himself. He knew he would never see her astonishing beauty again. And why have so many scruples and be so nervous over an ancestor of fifteen generations back? Yet some powerful instinct had ordered him not to touch her. As he was thinking, he had a hand on his right thigh. Something tingled under his fingertips, like an ancient wound. With it came the fleeting vision of a scene, though he couldn’t remember when or where. Two young, almost identical men sitting on a rocky seat. Air bright, as in a mirror. In the distance, the roar of rushing waters. All around, a whirl of perfumes, of Apsaras. But the two men were unimpressed. Suddenly one of them slapped his thigh. A tiny female figure popped out, ornate and perfect. Then it grew bigger and pointed up to the sky. He recognized her, and murmured: “Urvaśī, you from the thigh, ūru … You are also my daughter …” But he wasn’t able to articulate that thought and fell fast asleep.
For a year Arjuna lived as a eunuch in the court of King Virāta. His hair hung down on his shoulders, long earrings twinkling in his curls. His wrists were circled by gold bracelets encrusted with mother-of-pearl. He kept his arms covered to hide the scars that came from using his bow. Virāta couldn’t believe it when he saw him. This strikingly feminine figure, he realized, was the warrior himself. Indeed, with senile rashness he offered to grant him his kingdom, thus cutting out his son. But Arjuna insisted: “I am a eunuch. All I want is to teach music and dance to your daughter Uttarā.”
It was a year of subtle, ceaseless rapture, and an arduous, exhausting trial. In the evenings Arjuna told stories of monsters, princesses, and warriors to a small group of girls who adored him as soldiers do their leader. The days he spent in the dance pavilion. Virāta’s kingdom was rich and troubled. Blind and deaf to the spirit, life followed physiological rhythms. The only people Arjuna saw were girls who imitated his movements. The torture was Uttarā. Arjuna immediately promised himself he would never so much as touch her. Yet both had the impression of being constantly glued together, as when Arjuna sang and Uttarā’s voice sang over his. “Uttarā, Uttarā …” Arjuna found himself murmuring in the long stillness of the afternoons, immersed in the sticky air as though in an amniotic liquid. “The Extreme, the Ultimate, She-who-comes-from-the-north, She-who-takes-us-across, Uttarā, Uttarā …” He knew that all he could do as far as his pupil princess was concerned was fantasize, feverishly. And he imagined her as a creature come down from Uttarakuru, that square land no one had ever trod but which everyone always told stories about, in the far north. His wanderings had brought him to its borders. Indeed now that he had visited both the watery depths and Indra’s heaven, and had had his fill of both of them, Uttarakuru was the only name still pregnant with the unknown for Arjuna. And then he recalled one of the many stories he had heard about the place as a child, a story that hadn’t meant much to him at the time but that now came irrepressibly back. It was the story of two lovers who are born together and die together too, in each other’s arms, after eleven thousand years—and those last thousand intrigued him. Then a flock of Bhāruṇḍa birds lifted the two bodies with their powerful beaks and laid them down in huge mountain caverns. Not a trace or memory was left of them. And it was this—not their immensely long lives—that elated him, as if for a moment he were putting down the burden of the impending war, of the dharma, of his brothers, of the reputation one was obliged to leave behind. Fascinated, he went on repeating: “Eleven thousand years and not a trace.”
For Uttarā it was an even more tormenting time. Still barely more than a child, she was about to emerge from the cocoon of her invisible lovers. “The first to have her was Soma, then came the Gandharva. The third husband was Agni, the fourth is he who is born of man.” The female mind knows no state without lovers but only a succession of states, where the son of man can only come fourth. Without knowing it, Uttarā had lived with Soma, with the Gandharva, with Agni. Now she was waiting for a man, any man. And she found him in Arjuna, this eunuch who was teaching her to sing, who passed on his voice to her like a shiver, and withdrew from every contact. “You are more elusive than a Gandharva, more distant than all the gods, yet I am inside you, modulated in your voice …,” murmured Uttarā, sobbing with happiness.
Then Arjuna understood just how far—and it was far indeed—Urvaśī’s revenge would go. Because he had rejected her, as if she were his mother, now he must reject Uttarā, as if she were his daughter. Arjuna remembered some words Kṛṣṇa had once hurriedly spoken: “Even the curses we undergo must be of use to us.” And slowly he thought up a plan. There was something about Uttarā that went beyond beauty. Something that was the beyond itself. Her pores emanated an odor he’d never come across before, a briny smell, the secret sign that she could ferry one to another world, the world that would come after the one about to be swallowed up. So Arjuna set about getting Uttarā to marry his adolescent son, Abhimanyu. That way he and she could go on exchanging lovers’ glances without ever touching each other. Uttarā would give birth to the last of the Pāṇḍavas: Parīksit, who was born dead but then brought back to life by Kṛṣṇa. He then fathered Janamejaya, who would be the first to hear tell the adventures of his own ancestors: the Mahābhārata.
As a king, Janamejaya went to extremes. The powers of sacrifice and storytelling were stretched to the breaking point in him. It was Janamejaya who celebrated the sacrifice of the snakes, which was more an attempt at extermination than anything else. It was Janamejaya who encouraged Vaiśampāyana to get Vyāsa to tell him the story of the Mahābhārata so that Vaiśampāyana could then tell it to Janamejaya himself and to the many brahmans who took part in the sacrifice of the snakes. The extermination of the snakes was thus to alternate with the story of the extermination of the heroes. Each explained the other. Each became the other. And if both failed, it was because in each case something, someone, was left over, a residue: Janamejaya himself, last survivor of hero stock, who fought furiously to exterminate the snakes but didn’t succeed, because once again one snake survived, the very moment it was about to fall in the fire. That snake was Janamejaya’s archenemy, Taksaka, who had already survived the burning of the Forest of Khāṇḍava. And two survivors will suffice to ensure that the stories go on, that they mingle with further sacrifices, further wars, further exterminations, to make sure that that interwoven and sovereign couple, king and snake, will go on propagating their kind. Until such time as they launch themselves on the waters once again, one supine on the other, god and snake, Viṣṇu and Śeṣa.
Janamejaya and his three brothers were crouched down during a sattra, one of those interminable sacrifices that obliged officiants, among other things, to creep rather than walk. They got down on the soil of Kurukṣetra that three generations before had been drenched in the blood of their forefathers on every side of the family, and that many more generations before had been trodden by the gods when celebrating their own different sacrifices there before escaping to the sky. It was a sultry day, the air quite still. Oppressed, the four brothers exchanged glances. A dog came up to them, a stray. It was shy, hesitant in its approach. Not only did it not dare to go and lick the offerings at the center of circle but it was even afraid to look at them. It moved sideways, head down. All of a sudden, as if in response to a sign given among them, Janamejaya’s three brothers got up and began to beat the dog. Their long, thin sticks came down hard on its skinny flanks. The dog yelped and squealed, its only defense. Then it limped off and disappeared.
All that had happened for thousands of years in Kurukṣetra poured down on that moment, that scene, in a cataract of time. It was the moment the seer Vyāsa chose when he began to retrace the long stream, tell the story of all that had happened in Kurukṣetra. He chose the most futile moment and the most obscure so that something “immeasurable, sanctifying, purifying, atoning and blessing” might spread out from it, something “at whose expense the best of poets would live, as ambitious servants live at the expense of a noble patron.”
Meanwhile the wounded, beaten dog had crept back to his mother, Saramā, she-dog of Indra, and was complaining to her. “You must have done something wrong,” said Saramā. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t lick the offerings. I didn’t even look at them. But Janamejaya’s brothers beat me.” Then Saramā thought that Janamejaya, who had only looked on, deserved punishment. She paid no attention to his brothers. Watching the crime was worse than having done it.
There is no story so complicated as the Mahābhārata. And not just because of its length: three times as long as the Bible, seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. But why did Vyāsa choose this of all ways to tell the tale of a war fought between cousins in a plain of northwest India? Why is the frame in which the narrative is set so complicated that it alone would be enough to generate a sense of vertigo? Was it an artifice to allude to the infinite complication of existence? That would be banal—and wouldn’t have required such an enormous effort. Even a tenth of the stories would be enough to generate the same impression. And the rest? Whatever happens in the Island of the Jambū, there’s always a residue, an excess, something that overflows, goes beyond. Never the sharp profile, carved in the air, but long friezes, strips of stone bursting with action. They could have gone on forever. They are crests on the waves of a “migration,” saṃsāra. The war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas is a “knot” (and the books that make up the Mahābhārata are called parvans, “knots”), just one of the innumerable stitches in the weave of everything with everything. Going back in time to what came before it, or forward a little, after it ended, we encounter a net that brushes against us on every side—and immediately we are struck by the conviction that we will never see the edges of that net, because there are no edges. And already this is a less obvious reflection: that end and beginning, terms the mind is ever toying with, don’t, in themselves, exist at all. When the seers speak of the beginning, and push as far back as they can to where the existent and the nonexistent hadn’t as yet been separated, even this point is not a beginning but a consequence. A residue. Something happened before—a whole other world happened before—in order to bring about that lump that drifts like flotsam on the waters. The beginning is a shipwreck. Such was the unspoken premise of the seers. And likewise of the Mahābhārata.
It was as if everybody were suddenly tired of doing things that had meaning. They wanted to sit down, in the grass or around a heap of smoldering logs, and listen to stories. And often the stories described the same rites the listeners were performing. But now those rites had become episodes inside long and bloody adventures, pretexts for skirmishes and treachery. The stories were no longer a breathing space within the ritual sequence, but the rite itself became an event within the stories, in the same way as a duel or a night of passion might be. So where did meaning lie? Did the rite give meaning to the stories? Or was it only the stories that meant something—using the rites as their material? And what if both rite and stories were meaningful—but their meanings opposed to each other? There was a back-and-forth between a clutter of too many meanings that canceled each other out, to the point of paralysis. The rites—it was well known—served to conquer the sky. And the stories? What were they for? After all, the whole tale of the Mahābhārata looked forward, as though to its final consequence, to the sacrifice of the snakes, the sacrifice that Janamejaya, the only surviving heir of the poem’s heroes, had so much desired. That sacrifice was a long act of madness, not so much a ceremony as an attempt to wipe out a race—the snakes—at once more ancient than men and quite likely destined to survive them, since what are men in the end if not the dream of a god as he drifts around on a snake’s coils? So was it that the meaning of the stories could only emerge within a meaningless sacrifice? But wasn’t the meaninglessness of that sacrifice precisely the secret meaning that only someone who had followed the whole story of the Mahābhārata could grasp? And how had it come about that the fullness of ritual meaning ended up by bubbling over into meaninglessness? Whatever the answers, there was something new to come to terms with: gesture was no longer enough on its own. Now it had to be recounted too, along with other gestures—not all of them ritual. Now, as the times grew dark, as everything was turned upside down and inside out, one would have to begin—and end—with the stories of one of the many dynastic quarrels, one of the many wars that had taken place in an area that was really quite small, albeit long frequented by the gods. It was precisely this reckless profusion of random events and adventures that formed the cocoon that allowed the preceding body of knowledge, no longer able to exist alone, to be saved. Thus the Mahābhārata was called the Fifth Veda—and at its outset one reads these proud words: “A brahman who knows the Four Vedas with their branches and likewise the Upaniṣads but who does not know this poem possesses no knowledge whatsoever.”
There came a day, as the times grew dark, when it became evident that the Four Vedas did not exhaust every form of knowledge. The hymns and ritual gestures went on, self-sufficient in their meaning. But, in the space between one ritual act and another, time was penetrated by the act of someone telling a story. Sitting in the ritual enclosure, people listened. For months and months, while the sacrificial horse wandered freely around, the king listened to stories. Then the horse was led back to him so that it could be killed, so that its lifeless body might lie a night with its hooves intertwined between the naked legs of the mahiṣī, the first queen. In the beginning, stories were no more than appendices to knowledge, but gradually the time given over to them grew in the gaps in that knowledge like grass between the bricks of the altar of fire, expanded and multiplied in stories that generated more stories, until they covered the whole construction of knowledge in which they had made their first furtive appearance as no more than an intermezzo. Thus literature began. Literature is what grows in the intervals of the sacrifice. First a grass, then a creeper that slips into the joints between the bricks and breaks them from within.
And there came another day when the bard Ugraśravas took advantage of a break in a twelve-year sacrifice celebrated in the Forest of Naimiṣa to begin the story of the war between the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas, a story he had heard Vaiśampāyana tell during a break in the sacrifice of the snakes celebrated by King Janamejaya, great-grandson of Arjuna and last descendant of the Pāṇḍavas, in the place later to be known as Taxila. And Vaiśampāyana had heard the story from Vyāsa, who had had an overall vision of the tale and was also involved in it himself, being grandfather to both the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas and likewise their counselor. Thus was the Mahābhārata told.
In the beginning the Āryas celebrated rites that were also hymns of praise that illuminated those rites. Then at a certain point they found themselves celebrating the same rites, but with their attention now concentrated on the intervals between the various phases of the rites, during which long stories of kings and warriors were told, stories in which the very rites that they were now celebrating played a part. The ancient hymns of praise were brought together in the Ṛg Veda, which is the knowledge of “praise,” ṛc. The stories told in the intervals within the rites made up the Mahābhārata, the longest epos the world has ever known. As to how and why they passed from the one form to another, never a word was said. But though dates slither back and forth across a range of hundreds and hundreds of years, one can safely say that the two forms were separated by at least a thousand years. What happened in that time? Why were the hymns established and settled once and for all? Why did the stories of kings and warriors go on multiplying?
They moved on to the epic, which is the threshold of history, when they recognized that the system of ritual was producing aberrant results. Once it had been ritual that absorbed history: the rājasūya, the ceremony that consecrated the king, was full of hints of ambushes and forays and duels. But now the opposite was true. One began the celebration of a rite, Yudhiṣṭhira’s rājasūya, for example, or, three generations later, Janamejaya’s sacrifice of the snakes (during which Yudhiṣṭhira’s sacrifice was already being recounted), and something escaped one’s grasp: the consequences of the rite became facts now—a crude, poisonous category of events. And facts that were horribly visible. Draupadī abused, the Pāṇḍavas exiled, Arjuna cut down by his own son. Not only was ritual no longer able to contain violence but it multiplied it, like a machine—not of desire now but of disaster. Indeed, might not ritual itself, this faith in the absolute precision and truth of gesture, be the very thing, in the end, that was provoking the worst of evils?
Should they say all this? It would be a wicked notion, like so many others making the rounds of the city streets. Could they show it perhaps? But how does one show something? By having it happen. There is a point at which having something happen and recounting something converge: they both leave an impression on the mind. Telling a story is a way of having things happen at the highest possible speed, that of the mind. What was needed was a story that would bring all this out—that would itself be everything, since ritual deals with everything there is. But stories are always strictly referential, they are stories about one person or a few people in a certain segment of time, in a certain combination of circumstances that could not have occurred previously. So they needed a story that would bring together everything, going back in time and pointing forward in time, and have it run in a single channel, like the water that ran from a stone yoni. It was the story of five brothers in a kingdom of the plain that lies between the Gaṇgā and the Yamunā. Thus Vyāsa, who composed the story (who saw it), and played a part in it himself (after all, those five princes were his grandsons), said from within this story: “Whatever is here, on Law, on Profit, on Pleasure, and on Salvation, that is found elsewhere. But what is not here is nowhere else.” It was the first of those “works that are too complete, works in which everything is expressed,” that from then on were to present themselves from time to time, and imperiously so—right up to Wagner’s Ring and Proust’s Recherche—as somehow unavoidable, and that would quickly arouse not only admiration but also a certain intolerance, because they mean too much, even though, once one has listened to them, every other story “will sound harsh as the crow sounds to one after hearing the cuckoo sing.”
The story of the last battles beneath the walls of Troy was told by Homer, a blind poet; the battle of Kurukṣetra was handed down to us as told to a blind king by someone to whom Vyāsa, the author of the narrative and likewise a participant in it, had granted the gift of total vision: the omniscience of the narrator. At some point of the act of narration, a point that may be moved but not eliminated, we find blindness. Is this simply because he who sees too much, as Tiresias did, is punished with loss of sight? Or is it a hint at something beyond that, something that has to do with storytelling itself? Narration presupposes the loss of the reality narrated. It makes no sense to tell a story to someone who witnessed it. But when the real has sunk away in space and time—and such is its most usual state—all that is left is a dark room where words ring in the ear. Whether that dark room be that of the author, as with the Iliad, or the first listener, as with the Mahābhārata, is hardly important: in the beginning, author and listener merge. All that is really required is a scene of blood confined in a perpetual light, and a gaze that follows fleeting signs forming against a shadowy backdrop.
Satyavatī was dark, beautiful, dressed in rags. She gave off a subtle odor of fish and musk. She didn’t know it, but she was a princess. Every day she ferried pilgrims across the Yamunā. It seemed to her her life had always been made up of these monotonous gestures. She could recall nothing different in her infancy. The only thing the fisherman who had brought her up had told her was that she came from the river. Satyavatī felt this herself. But the fisherman hadn’t explained exactly how he found her: on opening up the belly of a big fish that had swallowed the seed of King Uparicara. Satyavatī rarely spoke. She held out her hand to take the pilgrims’ coins. She knew every inch of the Yamunā’s banks: the canes, the mud, the stones. She had no desires and never thought of herself as any different from her boat or the water beneath it. One evening, toward sundown, she brought her boat to the bank to pick up her last cargo of pilgrims. But this time there was no one there. Then she saw a brahman detach himself from the shadows. His eyes were bright, and he carried a stick. Without a word he climbed into her boat. Satyavatī didn’t wait and pushed off into the open water. As on hundreds of other occasions, she was gazing at the other bank, sensing the boat slide lightly along beneath her bare feet, when she felt two hands on the nape of her neck. A thread of fire darted up her back: or that was how she described this shiver she had never felt before. She didn’t even turn her head as the brahman ran his hands slowly over her. Thin, strong fingers slipped inside her rags. They lay down on the bottom of the boat, which, without veering off course, was drifting toward the further bank. The two bodies mingled with the puddles and scraps of food on the bottom of the boat. They said nothing. Suddenly they found themselves looking up toward the overarching sky suffused by the last light of the sun, already set. Backs on the damp wood, like leaves on a stream, they thought, without telling each other, that they had never known such happiness—that every further happiness must be measured against this. The prow touched the shore. Satyavatī got to her feet to tie up. She held out her hand to the brahman as he left the boat. Her fingers closed on a coin. The brahman looked at her, without saying good-bye. Soon the forest’s thick curtain had swallowed up his vigorous back. Thus was Vyāsa conceived, author of the Mahābhārata and grandfather of its protagonists.
If we go back to the origin of that imbalance that led to the war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas—and this is problematic, since anything any of the characters does reminds us of something their ancestors in various branches of the family did before them; and if then we restrict ourselves to following the line of Pāṇḍu, putative father of the Pāṇḍavas, each of whom bore the traits of one of five gods, we appreciate that that long convulsion of the lunar dynasty that lasted three generations and ended in massacre was triggered by the strange, unreasonable insistence of the king of the fishermen that the offspring of his adoptive daughter, Satyavatī, an abandoned orphan found in the belly of a fish and hence unable to claim any recognizable lineage, should prevail over all others. And, since Vyāsa later took Vicitravīrya’s place when it came to generating children, it was he who championed the privilege of the unknown line. For if Satyavatī presented herself as an abandoned orphan, Vyāsa was the fruit of an illicit love between Satyavatī and an unknown brahman. As the decisive crisis approaches, two orphans, offspring of unknown fathers, assert themselves within the lineage that must save the dharma. The irony receives further and glorious confirmation when five gods take the place of Pāṇḍu, Vyāsa’s son, as procreator, to generate the five princes who will fight in Kurukṣetra. Remote and legitimate, the lunar dynasty lurches toward the spasm of fratricidal war in a multiplication and exaltation of clandestine fathers, who endow it with impenetrable, shadowy powers, as though a slowly and laboriously achieved order needed to nullify itself in a welcoming darkness, the better to regenerate itself in the unknown.
Lying on a bed of arrows that passed right through his body and stuck deep in the ground, his head resting on yet more arrows that Arjuna had shot out of a sense of pity; tortured by hundreds of mortal wounds, which would not kill him until he himself decided to die, until, that is, fifty-six days had passed and the sun began its journey northward, Bhīṣma talked. He talked for hours and days. Around him, in a circle, were his Pāṇḍava nephews, Kṛṣṇa, a few princes, a few brahmans. Worn out, they took turns listening. Bhīṣma talked and talked. Nothing was too big, nothing too small to be named. The encyclopedia of encyclopedias flowed calmly from the mouth of the venerable warrior.
Bhīṣma talked without looking at his listeners. He kept his eyes fixed on the sky, on its blessed neutrality, which mirrored his own. He let the rains wash his bloody scabs. He exposed his old and withered skin to constant sunshine. The doctrines he had to set forth before dying were many and complex. They would be of service to those who had beaten and shot him: the Pāṇḍavas. And above all the greatest of them, Yudhiṣṭhira, who was overcome by anguish and kept saying: “This victory feels like a defeat.” But the only essential thing was this: that the doctrines be set forth for a last time in every detail. Bhīṣma didn’t expect that they would be understood in every detail. He knew that his function was first and foremost that of recapitulating an interminable sequence of truths and precepts that was already melting away in much the same manner as his life, the last hours of which were now trickling from his body. He was perfectly aware of being at the origin of everything that had happened at Kurukṣetra. For if his nephews had fought each other to the death, luring whole tribes and peoples to their deaths with them, if from now on all claims to legitimacy would forever be accompanied by the mocking shadow of doubt, then this was simply because one day he, Bhīṣma, fruit of King Śāṃtanu’s love of a goddess, Gaṇgā, and hence legitimate and indisputable heir to the kingdom, had agreed to renounce not only his birthright but likewise the right to procreate, in order to allow his father to keep by his side that obscure ferry-girl Satyavatī, with her subtle odor of fish and musk, who had usurped the role of his mother and, obedient to the inflexible will of the king of the fishermen who had adopted her, was to become the mother of Śāmtanu’s successor. At the time Bhīṣma was called Devavrata. But when he made a public declaration to the effect that he was simultaneously renouncing both sovereignty and offspring, after uttering this denial at once so unnatural and unreasonable, depriving him as it did of what almost everyone yearns for, power and women, while nevertheless leaving him in the midst of power and women insofar as he was to continue to carry out his work as chief counselor—after uttering this denial Bhīṣma heard a sigh and a word: “This man is terrible, bhīṣmo ’yam!” And from then on, he was simply called Bhīṣma, the Terrible. Why did he do it? Was it just an excess of filial devotion? If so, why was he so determined later on to ensure that the heirs of Satyavatī should in their turn have descendants? Why did he go so far as to abduct the three princesses of Kāśī with their enchanting and childish names—Ambā, Ambikā, Ambālikā—to marry them to one of those heirs? And how was it that he attracted the savage hatred of one of those girls, Ambā, who thought him the most vile of rapists, when on the contrary he observed a strict vow of chastity? And why, finally, when Vicitravīrya, Satyavatī’s last son, died, worn out by his pleasures but childless all the same, did Bhīṣma, again obedient to his vow, refuse to take the place of his half brother, agreeing instead that the queens should accept the repellent embrace of Vyāsa, Satyavatī’s illegitimate and neglected son, to bring forth their offspring with his seed?
No one knew. Least of all Bhīṣma himself, despite the fact that everybody bowed down before his knowledge, elusive as it was. “The moment comes,” thought Bhīṣma, “when the sky no longer touches the earth, just as my head and back, resting on these arrows, are not touching it now. It is a terrible moment, it is Bhīṣma’s moment. The words of the sky are still there, but they no longer touch the grass. Then the sky may seem empty. Yet its power is intact and unappeased. But it is no longer recognized. And, unrecognized, it becomes even more cruel. That is why no war was ever so bloody and treacherous as the war fought between my noble nephews. And I lived here and walked this earth so that all this could be prepared, so that it might come to pass.” He thought this in the last watch of the night, with the sky graying in a first hint of dawn and the group around him much thinned out. Weary with standing still, those remaining looked on with solemn faces, while Bhīṣma stared at the sky and his mind wandered far away to where no one wished to follow, nor he himself wished to be followed.
An invocation may one day become a person. “Ambā! Ambikā! Ambālikā!” groaned the mahiṣī, thighs tightly pressed to those of the sacrificed horse. That tortured cry to “mother,” ambā, to her diminutives, ambikā, ambālikā, and to the waters as surging wave, ambhas, was embodied, thrice embodied, in the princesses of Kāśī abducted by Bhīṣma to become the queens of a king who secretly tormented women’s hearts but did not procreate: Vicitravīrya. One night, after Ambikā and Ambālikā had been widowed, they saw a shaggy, smelly man coming to their bed. Stiff and silent, they suffered his embrace. They could no longer groan, calling out to a lost mother, because they themselves were that mother. The world had shrunk: there was no other to call out to anymore.
Ambika closed her eyes in coitus—and conceived a blind boy: Dhrtarāstra. Ambālikā turned white when Vyāsa penetrated her—and conceived a disturbingly pale child: Pāṇḍu. Neither of the women recognized the dead horse or the compiler of the Vedas, in Vyāsa. This outrageous expedient was the method the dharma had chosen for avoiding extinction. More and more, paradox, trickery, and horror had to be treated with prudence, and even delicacy. They might always turn out to be the last resource for saving the dharma.
More than love or war, what really set stories going were curses, and, though these were of secondary importance, the vows and boons that often served to ease a curse. It wasn’t only men’s lives that teemed with curses but the gods’ too. Destiny’s turning points, a little attention shows, occur at the moment when a great caster of curses—and they are generally brahmans, and in particular seers—pronounces the fatal words. Whether anybody realizes a curse has been cast or not makes no difference at all. Śakuntalā suffered the pains of lost love for many years as a result of a curse she was quite unaware of. For those who told these stories—Vyāsa, for example, who was himself in a position to pronounce terrible curses—cursing was obviousness itself, life’s bedrock, and above all precious, the most precious formal artifice for rendering life complex in a way consonant with its nature. The same texts that spend pages over every single action, describing everything down to the last detail, have nothing at all to say about the curse that prompted it, as if this were self-evident. And it is not just individual destinies that depend on curses but likewise the destiny of the world. More often than not a cosmic cataclysm is unleashed by some futile gesture that nobody has noticed.
Despite their ability to resort to metamorphosis when, for all their overwhelming powers, they find themselves in trouble, the gods can do little or nothing against a curse. Before they can free themselves, they must suffer like the merest of mortals. And when they appear among men, it is usually not to come to their aid but to free themselves from a curse. Even Viṣṇu’s various avatāras, generally presented as those great deeds that periodically saved the world, were, as some saw it, first and foremost something he was condemned to by a curse.
The defining characteristic of the curse, or so it seemed, was this: that it always worked. As one approaches the realm of the curse, one comes up against the invisible wall of certainty. But what is invulnerable certainty? The supremacy and pervasiveness of the mind. The curse is a purely mental act. And while one day this kind of act would be considered by definition ineffective, in those days it was precisely its mental character that made it seem efficacy itself. That is why the custodians of the curse are mostly brahmans, creatures of the mind. They owe their authority, their power, and even their name to their contact with brahman—and to nothing else. Brahman strikes more swiftly than the sword. So the brahman has no need of the sword. For a word articulated in his mind already conceals “a sharp-bladed razor.” More than their internal quarrels or their perpetual war with the Asuras, what most frightened the gods were certain encounters, above all with solitary old men who might very well appear to be the merest beggars or pilgrims, but would then all at once start darting flames from their eyes if something should irritate them. More terrifying and impenetrable than all the others was the brahman Durvāsas.
Durvāsas was a “portion,” aṃśa, a splinter, a glowing coal of Śiva. He too was a ṛṣi, but not a master of mind and gesture, like Yājñavalkya, or one of those who saw the hymns, like Viśvāmitra, or a weaver of plots and poetry, like Vyāsa. Durvāsas’s realm lay beyond the word, in the fury and excess that lie behind the many-colored curtain of the world of appearance. Curses and boons were the only ways he showed himself, as if in him the world were reduced to but two elements: prodigy and punishment. Everything was a source of offense for Durvāsas. There was nothing that might not spark his retaliation. Once he met Indra and offered his elephant, Airāvata, a garland of flowers. But the garland bothered the animal. Slowly, using his trunk while Indra looked on, Airāvata got the garland to slither to the ground. Immediately Śrī, the Splendor of the World, plunged into the ocean. Indra sensed that he was about to be stripped of his power. He looked around and saw nature desolate, buckling under some obscure burden. The garland rejected by the sluggish elephant had been consigned to Durvāsas directly from heaven. That garland was Śrī. Now the world would be bereft of splendor. It went back to being an arid wasteland. It was because of this petty incident that the gods had to undertake the toughest of all their labors, the enterprise that was supremely theirs: the churning of the ocean.
If Durvāsas showed himself at all, the meaning was clear enough: something ferocious and devastating was about to happen. In this emaciated brahman the gods were obliged to recognize spirit in its most remote and rugged form: flare, willfulness, devouring fire, at once out of control and inexhaustible. Every time history tightened in a noose, Durvāsas was there. Whether wayfarer or guest, the more casual his involvement, the greater the crisis it provoked. Thus when time was ripe for the massacre at Kurukṣetra, Durvāsas arrived at the court of Kuntibhoja. Everybody served him eagerly, but they were faking. And Durvāsas never failed to recognize haste and ill will behind apparently abject deference. Only one little girl came to wait on his orders as if nothing in all the world could be more gratifying. But that wasn’t enough, because Durvāsas “more than anything else enjoyed putting people to the test.” One day, climbing out of his bath, Durvāsas found his boiled rice served in a scorching hot bowl. Without so much as a word, he raised impatient eyes to the little Kuntī. Then Kuntī got down on all fours, like a stool, to let Durvāsas put the bowl on her back. The muslin cloth she was wearing quickly burned through, exposing the skin. Kuntī suffered in silence. Durvāsas ate his rice, slowly.
At last the day came when Durvāsas was ready to set off again. He called Kuntī and said: “Child, listen to this mantra. One day, you will be able to use these words to evoke the gods. You will be able to touch them. Those whom others cannot even see will be your lovers, if you like.” As soon as Kuntī had learned the mantra, Durvāsas was gone, without saying good-bye. Years later, Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīma, and Arjuna formed in Kuntī’s womb, each conceived from divine seed. In order for the twins Nakula and Sahadeva to be conceived, Kuntī revealed the Aśvins’ mantra to Mādrī, Pāṇḍu’s second wife.
Nārada had barely said good-bye, and already Kṛṣṇa was nostalgic for that old gossip who knew everything about everybody in every inch of the Island of the Jambū, and other worlds too, and went from one world to another as if they were different parts of the same town, cunning and curious, infatuated by detail, hardly interested in exercising his own power, so entertaining did he find it to watch others exercising theirs, intrigued above all by stories involving women. Stories without women, he maintained, got boring after a while, perhaps because he had once been a woman himself, not to mention a worm and a monkey, and this explained why, whatever the subject under discussion, he was never reduced to amazement and debated with great precision, as if delicately shaking the dust from some past experience or other.
Nārada had barely said good-bye when another brahman arrived at Kṛṣṇa’s palaces. He couldn’t have been more different from the one who had just left. Dressed in rags, he stepped gloomily forward on legs thin and long as a wading bird’s. His skin was burnished with a hint of dirty green. His lips moved in a dismal cadence. “Who will welcome the brahman Durvāsas to their home?” These were the only words anyone could make out. They were spoken with a malevolent chuckle. No one volunteered. They sensed the brahman’s unreasonable rage and didn’t want to provoke him. But Kṛṣṇa went to speak to him, offering a calm welcome, as if unaware of anything out of the ordinary. Meanwhile he was thinking: “The Guest again. This will be the hardest of all trials. No vow could be so strict. The Guest is the unknown. He takes precedence over all else, prevails over all else.” Kṛṣṇa at once called for Rukmiṇī, first among his wives. Rukmiṇī appeared in all her splendor and asked the guest to order everything that would give him pleasure. Durvāsas didn’t even seem to notice her. His eyes wandered among the ornaments, as if through a break of dry bush. When they offered him all kinds of delicious food, he ate with inhuman voracity. He haunted the palace, paying no attention to anybody, Kṛṣṇa not excepted. Every now and then a servant would find him laughing at nothing in a corner, making a sound like dried leaves. But others found him weeping copious tears.
When he lay on the ground, they mistook him for a heap of rags. He would go for days without eating. Kṛṣṇa had given the strictest orders: everybody must obey him in everything. Once, a thick smoke spread through the corridors. It was coming from Durvāsas’s room. When they got there, they found the brahman had set his bed alight and gone off. Some hours later, they caught sight of him again in the shadow of an alcove, deep in thought, as if he had never moved. No one asked him anything. On other days he would go into a room and hurl anything he could lay hands on against the walls. Finally there came the morning when he wanted to sit at Kṛṣṇa and Rukmiṇī’s table. The conversation was desultory but apparently normal enough. Then he wanted rice cooked in milk. Immediately the servants offered him this common food, the pāyasa, that Kṛṣṇa had ordered to be kept ready along with countless others to satisfy Durvāsas’s every whim. The brahman then ordered Kṛṣṇa to undress. His tone was brusque. “Come here,” he said. Kṛṣṇa stood naked in front of him. Durvāsas ordered him to smear the white mush all over himself. Kṛṣṇa maintained an unworried expression. He was thinking of when, as a child, he used to climb on the kitchen stool to steal butter, and how some would always be left on his face. He avoided looking toward Rukminī. Kṛṣṇa’s body turned white, smeared all over.
Now every pore of Kṛṣṇa’s skin was covered. Only the soles of his feet on the cold floor had not been spread with cream of rice. Durvāsas’s eyes were veiled, absent. In a hoarse voice he ordered Rukmiṇī to undress. Rukmiṇī couldn’t help sneaking a resigned glance at Kṛṣṇa, who paid no attention. He stood beside her like a puppet. One by one Rukmiṇī removed her delicate, sumptuous clothes. Durvāsas didn’t even look at her body. Meticulously, he began to spread the pāyasa over her. The cream was still dripping from her nipples when Durvāsas ordered a cart to be prepared. The servants obeyed. Then Durvāsas yoked up Rukmiṇī, cracked his whip, and set off south. Kṛṣṇa walked behind. Now and then Durvāsas would yell out like a rude cart driver and bring down his whip on Rukmiṇī’s shoulders, leaving pink welts that mingled with the white of the rice and trickles of sweat. Then he got off the cart and started walking in the same direction. Naked, white, impassive, Kṛṣṇa and Rukmiṇī followed him. All at once Durvāsas stopped and turned to them. He saw they were bowing slightly in his direction. He said: “Now go back. You will find everything I broke is whole again. You”—this to Rukmiṇī—“will ever give off a fragrant odor. Your beauty shall not wither. You will follow Kṛṣṇa even after death.” Then he spoke to Kṛṣṇa: “You will die like any other man, because you didn’t smear the soles of your feet. But what does it matter? You have understood. Go in the company of this mantra, which you must recite in silence.” He murmured some formula or other. “As long as there is food, you will be loved. As long as there is a just man, you will have glory.” They were his last words. Already he was veiled in flame. Then he disappeared.
Kṛṣṇa and Rukmiṇī walked back to the palace in silence, their bodies encrusted with dust and rice. They found everything intact, as if Durvāsas had never stayed with them.
The approach of the last age began to make itself felt. This was the Age of the Losing Throw, the kaliyuga, when one development became clear to all: sacrifice was no longer effective. Risk par excellence, first of all voyages, and hence with every chance of becoming first of all shipwrecks, sacrifice, this undertaking within which exactitude and truth might be measured, could no longer hold up on its own, in its keen-edged abstraction. It turned into war. But that wasn’t all. War and sacrifice easily become two sides of the same coin. Sacrifice became the failed war. An inexact, fraudulent war, and necessarily so, a war that ended up looking like pure massacre. That was what took place between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas.
What used to happen before an avatāra, before these “descents” of the god upon the earth in time of disorder? The rites. And they were enough. But what were they? Reality elaborated in thought to the point of exhaustion, everything, every moment, every nook and cranny, articulated in the mind. A constant preoccupation that distracted one from any other conquest. But clearly something eluded this thinking. Something bubbled over. Or sifted down like some poisoned, indestructible dregs. So it was that one day gods or men or the earth itself, oppressed by the sheer weight of too many creatures, went to Brahmā to ask for help. Upon which Brahmā declared himself impotent. Impotence had dogged him from the beginning—perhaps precisely because he was a creator god. Brahmā relied too much on thought, thought was his element, as other gods had their elements in some power of nature. And what Brahmā thought immediately became ritual formula. But that didn’t mean its effectiveness was assured. Brahmā was the first to have doubts about the efficacy of the rites. His mind frequently dwelled on the problem. He realized that he tended to associate it with certain episodes of his life: the flight of his born-of-the-mind children, his desire for a girl’s body, Śiva’s severed fifth head. All stories that made a mockery of him. He looked on those seeking his help, and they were many, with feelings of detached sympathy. He felt sorry for them, petitioners to a helpless king. Then one day he gestured toward Viṣṇu and said: “Ask him. He will find a way to do what I cannot.” Then he fell back into his lucid melancholy.
During the first seven avatāras, events followed a coherent sequence: an evil king (though he might just as well be a saint) achieved excessive power, disturbed Indra’s lovemaking, and hounded him out of heaven. Order was overturned. A figure of even greater power had to come to establish a new order. The avatāra. The repertory of possible events offered a great variety of plots, but the decisive steps were always duels, challenges, curses, boons, escapes, exile. Only when one arrives at Kṛṣṇa, and then the Buddha, in the eighth and ninth avatāra, does everything become irrevocably complicated and far more ambiguous. There are still duels and cosmic contests. But they are no longer decisive. What is decisive is what takes place in the spectator of the duels, that is Kṛṣṇa, with Arjuna fastened to him. And with the Buddha a further and more disquieting level is reached. Now, seen from without, nothing happens at all. Life goes on in all its mediocrity, a mere succession of unimportant events. There is no longer a cosmos, nor even an empire, just a provincial backwater. There is the usual grating comedy between rich and poor. Some begging monk or other in the midst of it. Of duels and wars not a mention now. Everything seems to be portrayed in the mind of a monk, the Buddha, whom one may come across in the shade of a tree or walking some beaten track along with everybody else. Yet the duel goes on with new names, different gestures—in the sealed chamber of that mind.
Thus began the age of Kṛṣṇa: men yearned for stories, interwoven stories, characters who needn’t always be the Devas, the Asuras, and the ṛṣis. They could no longer sustain Vedic abstraction, nor the fact that the entire world and everything that happened in it should end up as glosses on an everlasting ritual. Not everything, they thought, frightened almost by their own blasphemous boldness, could converge in the construction of the altar of fire. Now the bricks would be so many stories, and to bake them, to give them substance, the gods agreed to come down to the earth again, injecting a “portion,” aṃśa, of themselves into those heroes who would fight at Kurukṣetra, on that great open space, that battlefield that reminded the gods of something else, for in a remote past they had held a sacrifice there. Or was it from there perhaps that they had ascended to heaven, and won their immortality? They couldn’t rightly remember, so much time had gone by.
“Ritual is dangerous,” Vyāsa reminded Yudhiṣṭhira before the ceremony that would consecrate him as king. It was a warning that might seem pointless, obvious. The ṛṣis had always spoken of ritual as a voyage over which shipwreck ever loomed. But that danger had to do with some eventual shortcoming in precision of thought and gesture. Whereas now Vyāsa was alluding to a new danger: in one phase of the rājasūya, the regal consecration, there was a game of dice that the king had to win, by cheating if necessary. In a game one is aware of tension, yet the rite is still, as always, detached from the world of fact, as if keeping itself two palm breadths above the ground. It cannot allow itself to be invaded. But with Yudhiṣṭhira the opposite happened. He lost his game and everything else with it. Or rather: he really lost twice. What went wrong? Like capricious demons, the dice had smashed the ritual order from within. They were no longer a prescribed act, but agents of the invading daiva, of that “fate” that operates wherever and however it will, both outside and inside the rite. No finery of thought could stop it. It was a wild horse. Now the daiva acted alone: all it needed were those tiny, rolling nuts. One day, in a sudden rage, King Virāta hurled the dice in Yudhiṣṭhira’s face. Blood began to drip from his nose. Draupadī hurried to collect it in a golden cup to prevent it from touching the ground. But this was the warning that soon blood would touch the ground, and drench it too. The last barrier between game and blood was down now.
In the immensity of its structure the Mahābhārata can be seen as an overwhelming demonstration of the futility of conflict. Of every conflict. Was the dharma really renewed when the Pāṇḍavas at last, and at a cost of countless dead, succeeded in defeating the Kauravas? Hardly. Peace was a half life, still oppressed by memory. The dharma did reign again, but as it were for a fleeting interval. There was still something brooding that would have to burst out. Thirty years after the end of the war, the Vṛṣṇis, Kṛṣṇa’s people, wiped themselves out in a massacre that began as the merest drunken brawl. It was as though the war that had come before, conducted as it was along the lines and rhythms of a complex ceremony, had only served to offer a pretext for this stupid slaughter.
Throughout, the Mahābhārata is the story of the dharma’s being sick, exhausted, weighed down by the impediments that history accumulates along its way. It is not the victory of the dharma over the adharma but their near equality and convergence in a disaster that is prelude to the world’s taking a new breath, in a desert scenario, where only the tiniest residue will testify, through the word, to past vicissitudes. Every victory of Hero over Monster or Order over Disorder or Good over Evil is ingenuous when set against this vision, because this alone accommodates Kāla, Time, which generates constant inequalities, but only as a stratagem for arriving later at a leveling on a vast scale. While the only irreversible inequality is the one that only now became clear: detachment, the doctrine that Kṛṣṇa passed on to Arjuna before his hostile relatives, lined up for battle.
“The Law is subtle, great king, and we do not know its course,” said Yudhiṣṭhira when obliged to persuade Draupadī’s father that his daughter be shared equally among the five Pāṇḍava brothers instead of belonging to the one, Arjuna, whom Draupadī had chosen at the svayaṃvara. And how many more times, later on, and on how many other occasions, many of them bloody, would he return to that observation concerning the subtlety of the dharma. Excessively subtle, hard to follow, or even simply to recognize, and this for the man who was Dharma’s son: Yudhiṣṭhira. It was as if the dharma were being woven, thread after thread, since time began—and now those threads entangled everyone, on every side, like an oppressive net. Once caught in the net, anyone who moved too brusquely risked being strangled by its threads. Yudhiṣṭhira’s normal state of mind was this: he was always speaking of the dharma, but he was always thinking of something that lay beyond it: death or liberation. Which was why his remarks about the dharma were so often the prelude to Yama’s devastations, as if for him law and death tended to merge, to the point of coinciding. There was something distant and melancholy about Yudhiṣṭhira—something that was never more obvious than when he eagerly joined in the fatal game of dice with the Kauravas, loving to play but not knowing how. That game was the “lesion,” bheda, that would never be healed: the proof that fate may not only ignore the dharma but even hold it in contempt. Perhaps all Yudhiṣṭhira wanted was to arrive at that irreparable evidence.
In the war of the enemy cousins, the heartrending figures, those who generate the most pathos, are the ones who abandoned the roles assigned to them by birth: Bhīṣma, the kṣatriya who behaved like a brahman, pronouncing the loftiest of thoughts while stretched on a bed of arrows; Droṇa, the brahman who became master of arms to both the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas and taught them how to eliminate all around them, hence the world, so as to concentrate on one tiny point, the target; and Karṇa, the obscure sūta, the charioteer who didn’t know he was the son of Sūrya, the Sun, and who became an invincible warrior, the only one who was a match for Arjuna. They had been the first to sense that delicate distortion of the dharma which ushers in every new era and is sealed by every new avatāra. For order to continue to have a sense, they had to be the first to damage it. There was something in their behavior that went beyond occasion and passions. An unspoken imperative compelled them to make manifest, in what they did, something nobody else had dared point to, a form, an uncommon combination of elements. Each invented his own style. They were artists of the gesture, who ended up—and there was a subtle cruelty to it—suffering the consequences of their artistry, as though a surplus of torture necessarily went hand in hand with those new forms they had chosen to experiment in.
Bībhatsu, He-who-feels-repugnance: of all Arjuna’s many epithets, this one stands out on its own, offers decisive significance. The figure of the kṣatriyas, those determined, powerful warriors who do not even know what doubt is, who smash through every obstacle, who fight with wild beasts—men who can only affirm, ever avid of new strength, men who breathe fire, was seen for the last time and most perfectly of all in Arjuna. Yet he never managed to free himself from a feeling of nausea. About what? The monotonous duty of killing? Or something else too? Arjuna was eaten up with repugnance for the world: not for certain aspects of the world but for its very existence. This creeping nausea gripped him as soon as he passed the peak of affirmation—and from that moment on it spread a delicate, irreversible coloring over everything. It showed in his eyes as a sporadic absence, a perennial distance from whatever was happening to him. Arjuna said nothing of all this, except in his secret conversations with his charioteer, with Kṛṣṇa. Others knew nothing about it. They saw him as the exemplary warrior, the seductive young man, the just man. Yet very often the ringing, authoritative words he would find himself pronouncing sounded vacuous and worn out to Arjuna.
It was difficult to be flexible, on the Island of the Jambū. Every path was lined with vows, boons, curses. Every step was a precept. If life was to become more fluid again, more diffuse and confused, then a god was required, an avatāra, an unclouded, far-seeing mind: Kṛṣṇa.
Nothing could be more subtly contrary to the law than some of Kṛṣṇa’s shrewd counsels, betrayals, and deceptions during the war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas. Nothing could be more subtly damaging to people’s faith in the gods than some of the Buddha’s doctrines. Yet Kṛṣṇa and the Buddha were both Viṣṇu’s avatāras, come down to earth to heal the wounded dharma, reduced as it was to a quarter of itself. Nothing of the kind had happened with the previous avatāra: the Dwarf, the Boar, the Man-Lion had appeared, done what they were supposed to do, and then melted away, leaving the world ready for another cycle. But in the last cycles, when the smell of the pralaya, the general dissolution, was already in the air, everything got mixed up and the rules were turned upside down. Defeating an Asura who had in his turn defeated Indra was no longer enough. There was something infantile and empty about those sovereignty games now. Rather than beating one’s enemy, the important thing these days was to imitate him, to assume some of his gestures: but this had to be done in a certain way, superimposing this new knowledge over the old and allowing the two to live together in the energy of their collision. This, perhaps, was the peculiar mystery of the kaliyuga, the obscure age much favored by women and those without caste, who, in the general confusion, might seize a chance for liberation otherwise denied them. In the flagrancy of contradiction, there was no longer any cult that could act as axis and lodestone, only bhakti, the heart’s devotion, that addresses itself to anything, is ready for anything, a perennial emotion whose first messengers were Kṛṣṇa’s gopīs, wandering around alone with their herds.
King Śiśupāla was saved by the chemical purity of his hatred for Kṛṣṇa, saved because he didn’t repent. He too will enter into the body of Kṛṣṇa, he too will be liberated in Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa penetrates the ranks of his enemies and does not seek to avoid their wiles, or trickery, with the result that his enemies open a breach in him. All this would be in complete violation of the Law, were it not for the fact that the Law itself demands it, the new Law Kṛṣṇa gave first to the gopīs before showing it to the warriors. Thus, in the successive avatāra, the Buddha’s, the doctrine of the anattā, of the “non-Self,” of the emptiness of every element, the proclaimed inexistence of the intrinsic, the doctrine that dealt an ax blow to the sovereignty of the ātman, of the Self, and hence of the brahman, which is coincident with it, and hence of everything, this doctrine was not only not rejected but welcomed. Why this and not another of the many heresies that were making the rounds? It was welcomed because of the cruel and drastic purity of its opposition to everything the ṛṣis had taught. Yājñavalkya and the Buddha sat face-to-face, but not as enemies. They lived in the same mind now, and each went on pronouncing his own words, without moderating them at all.
Before the battle of Kurukṣetra, Kṛṣṇa enlightened an Arjuna paralyzed with anguish as to the nature of what is. During the battle most of the help he gave Arjuna had to do with the art of deception. And perhaps he never exercised that art so treacherously as in the duel between Arjuna and Jayadratha. A curse hung over whoever killed Jayadratha. His father, Vṛddhakṣatra, had proclaimed that whoever brought his son’s head to the ground, that man’s own head would split into a hundred pieces. The two warriors were fighting it out as the sun’s tawny disk sank in the sky. The moment it was hidden behind the horizon, Arjuna’s word would lose all contact with the truth, because his vow to kill Jayadratha before sunset would have been shown to be vain. “If the truth is lost to Arjuna, it is lost to the world,” thought Kṛṣṇa. It was then that he whispered a few feverish words of advice to his friend: “Cut off Jayadratha’s head cleanly, so that it flies into his father’s lap.” With his supreme ability as an archer, Arjuna aimed the fatal arrow (which he had saved up, honoring it with perfumes and flowers, to kill the killer of his own son, Abhimanyu) so that Jayadratha’s head would fly away from him—right to where Vṛddhakṣatra was sitting at the edge of the forest, absorbed in the ceremony of twilight. Like a stone from the sky, his son’s head, ornamented with extravagant earrings, fell on his knees. Vṛddhakṣatra didn’t even notice. He was a severe ṛṣi, capable of blocking out the world. As soon as his prayer was over, he got up. Jayādratha’s head rolled to the ground, upon which Vṛddhakṣatra’s head was seen to burst into a hundred pieces. The last rim of the sun was sinking down.
What happened in India, from the Vedas to the Buddha, belonged to the trunk of a single tree, the immense aśvattha rooted in the sky, that spread its branches everywhere, covering the earth. What was inside that trunk? Brahman. And what was brahman? The “unique that awakes,” says the Maitri Upaniṣad. The brahman was consciousness and what brings consciousness to birth: the Awakening One. In the end, a solitary monk came to sit at the foot of the tree, which on this occasion was a common fig tree, in Bihar. He told himself he wouldn’t get up until awakening passed from the tree to himself. It was the Bodhisattva who was about to become the Buddha. The tree he was sitting under was called the Tree of Awakening (bodhi), and it grew in Gayā, later to be known as Bodhgayā. Many were the pilgrims who went to visit it, for centuries. What they saw was a nyagrodha, a banyan tree with aerial roots, the tree that strangles its guests, but they went on depicting it as an aśvattha, the fig tree that contains within it the seed of fire.
The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge looked like a single tree: when the branches rustled, that was the Vedas who were its leaves, speaking; when the air was still, soma dripped from its trunk, offering life without end. Looking at that huge plant carefully, you saw that there were in fact two trees, inextricably twisted together. One thrust its branches upward, the other toward the ground. They were a śamī and an aśvattha. It was hard to see which was which. On two opposite branches, at the same height, two birds could be made out, “inseparable friends.” One was eating a berry, the other was watching it intensely. To light a fire, you need to rub a twig (araṇī) of aśvattha against a twig of śamī. Pushing out its aerial roots, the aśvattha slowly strangles the śamī. Consciousness slowly strangles life. But life exists—or is perceived to exist—only to the extent that it allows the parasite of consciousness to grow upon it.
The first of all stories is vegetable and has no plot. It is the twining of two trees, their perennial and motionless coitus. One’s roots stretch off into the sky; the other’s into the ground. Their branches mingle, some pointing up, some down. Every image of a god embracing his partner—Śiva with Pārvatī, Viṣṇu with Laksmī—recalls the shape of the two entwined trees, as if two figures with human limbs had been expelled from those tangled branches, and, joining together, strove to recompose them once again. The many heads, arms, legs, feet, hands that so shocked and frightened travelers when they first discovered the idols of India all testify to the fact that before being what it is now, the human figure was a tree with many branches. There was a time when the thirty-three gods lived not in celestial palaces but among the leaves and branches of that tree. Perched on those branches, they fought enemy snakes coiled around lower branches—and what they were fighting for was the liquid oozing from the trunk that fed all of them, Devas and Asuras alike.
In every story, if you go back, as far back as you can, to the point where every horizon disappears, you find a snake, the tree, water. It’s either a snake that covers a spring of water with its coils or a lump, a knot drifting on the waters, a circular cushion bearing a divine figure as it slithers across the waves. Or a snake coiled around a trunk growing out of the water. And you can also find all this by looking inside yourself, as the Kaṭha Upaniṣad claims some people did long ago (“a certain wise man who was seeking immortality looked inside himself by turning the globes of his eyes back to front”). The snake is coiled around the trunk from which the essence, the rasa, dribbles down, just as the Twisted Goddess, Devī Kuṇḍalinī, wraps her coils three and a half times around the suṣumnā, the vertical stream that crosses the meru, the spine, but also Mount Meru, emerging below the vault of the skull or the cosmos, where Śiva on his lotus throne awaits the awakening call. The stolen cows, the imprisoned oceans, the lost soma—they’re all hidden away in an anatomical recess, where a stream is blocked and begins to seep up through the coils of a snake. Devī awakens, arches up from her residence in the mūlādhāra, the “stool root,” between phallus and anus, climbs the suṣumnā, the rootstock of the lotus, follows the royal way that leads upward, punches through the six cakras, the “wheels” that she finds in her path, like so many archons, becomes Śiva’s sheath, and from their coitus drips amṛta, the “immortal” liquid that irrigates and inebriates every dendrite.
The two birds of the Vedic hymn turn up again in Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna. No longer on the two opposite branches of the same tree but on a war chariot. Kṛṣṇa is the charioteer, Arjuna the archer. Arjuna was the bird that ate “the sweet berry.” But now eating meant shooting the lethal arrow. Kṛṣṇa watched, like the other bird, “without eating.”
With its seething tangle of human, animal, and divine adventures, its proliferation of words, the Mahābhārata was an attempt to impose a silence in which the dialogue between those two birds perched on opposite branches of that unique tree composed of an aśvattha and a śamī might once again be heard. It was the oldest dialogue, and unceasing. But time’s concretions, ritual’s weave, divine and human chatter had almost suffocated it. The real challenge was not to find it again in the rustling of the forest. That was too easy—and almost a profession. No, but to be able to hear it once more amid the clash of arms, in the moment of pure terror, in the mind’s disarray and to cause that battlefield, which had once been a clearing where rites were celebrated, a place of such dense silence as is a precondition of ritual—to cause it to be invaded by an even denser silence now, a deafening silence, until once again one might hear as it were for the first time the shrill voices of the two birds who that day presented themselves dressed up as warriors, and were called Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna.
Nara and Nārāyaṇa were two ṛṣis unlike others but very like each other. Brahmā saw them pass by one day, side by side. “Those two are older than I am,” he thought—and already they had gone. “But how can it be that I, who am progenitor of everything, feel that I come after someone else?” Gnawed by doubt, he turned to Kaśyapa, who said: “Whether the existent world be made of mind or fire or some aggregate called matter is, in the end, hardly important. It only exists if consciousness perceives it as existing. And if a consciousness perceives it, within that consciousness there must be another consciousness that perceives the consciousness that perceives. They are inseparable friends. They are Nara and Nārāyaṇa. You can spread yourself across ten thousand worlds, but without them you don’t exist. One day Śiva said of them: ‘The world is held up by the splendor of the two of you.’ That is why they are continually appearing and disappearing. They were the two birds on the aśvattha tree. They will be Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna. Nara is Man and Water, as his name suggests. He is the one and the other, when he is not torn apart, when he is the single wave. It is through Nara that we have knowledge, but our knowledge would be limited, no greater than the knowledge of a muscle that contracts and relaxes, if it were not reflected in Nārāyaṇa’s eye. In which, what’s more, we lose ourselves: to pass from one eye to the other is to pass from a river to the sea. Thus true knowledge is cloaked in uncertainty. But that is enough to live with. The supreme, ultimate relief is to know that Nara is indissolubly tied to Nārāyaṇa. And it was Nārāyaṇa, Kṛṣṇa at the time, who when granted a boon by Indra asked for the perennial friendship of Nara, Arjuna at the time. The boon was asked of Arjuna’s father, against whom, together with Arjuna, Kṛṣṇa had fought and won. Friendship prevails over kinship. Every family dies out, but the tie between the mind and his Guest does not. When men feel dumb and afflicted, they remember what Nārāyaṇa once said through Kṛṣṇa: ‘I cannot look at this world even for the briefest instant without Arjuna.’ Then there is a detail that betrays all the kindness, the almost studied carelessness of the god: Nārāyaṇa is a patronymic. As if the god who has no name had, in choosing a provisional name, decided to give precedence to man, to the point of having himself pass for his son. You, with all your children born-of-the-mind, would not have been capable of this.”
When the five Pāṇḍavas showed themselves, they dazzled the eye. But only so long as they had Kṛṣṇa beside them, that relative, friend, counselor who never bore arms himself. As soon as Kṛṣṇa left them, a veil of dust fell on their faces. Their words became dull, lifeless. They would launch into redundant oratory, like actors who have played a part once too often. One day, Arjuna realized he could no longer bend his bow. He thought of time and how it corrodes. He didn’t know that at that very moment Kṛṣṇa lay dying.
This is how Kṛṣṇa died: he was lying down, eyes closed, back resting on a tree trunk. The soles of his feet were propped up on a clump of grass. Jara, an Asura hunter, was chasing an antelope. Dazzled by the sudden light of the clearing, he shot an arrow at the soles of Kṛṣṇa’s feet, which he had mistaken for the antelope’s ears. It was the only part of his body on which, one day long ago, while obeying the orders of the brahman Durvāsas, Kṛṣṇa had not spread the cream of rice.
• • •
Everything begins with an arrow shot in perfect consciousness at two copulating antelopes; everything ends with an arrow shot in perfect unconsciousness at the sole of a foot mistaken for an antelope. In the beginning: everything emerged from the indistinct wave. Later: everything was suddenly submerged by another indistinct wave. In the middle: a devastating war, won by the five Pāṇḍavas, only in name sons of Pāṇḍu, who had been cursed by a brahman he had shot in the hunt while, in the form of an antelope, the brahman was copulating. “As soon as you penetrate a woman, you will die” were the brahman’s last words. From that moment on Pāṇḍu committed himself to a life of chastity. One day he was in the forest with Mādrī, his favorite wife. He lifted his eyes in a look of desire and farewell. He died the moment he penetrated her.
When Pāṇḍu’s funeral rites were over, Vyāsa went to his mother, Satyavatī, who was “blinded by the pain of sorrow.” He delivered a lofty speech, full of pathos, which he would later insert in the Mahābhārata: “The happy days are gone, now there are horrors in store. Tomorrow after tomorrow, each day will be worse. The earth has lost its youth.” This epitaph for Pāṇḍu was also an epitaph in advance for the Pāṇḍavas, and it resounds throughout the poem like the tolling of a bell. Yet Ānandavardhana, who knew more than anyone of dhvani, of “poetic suggestion,” maintained that the dominant rasa—the flavor, the taste, the tonality—of the Mahābhārata was the sāntarasa, the “peace rasa.” To many this claim seemed paradoxical and provocative. Where was peace to be found in that appalling chain of events? None of the poem’s protagonists could be considered an appropriate bearer of such a rasa. Who could feel peaceful upon hearing of a succession of slaughters framed by a general disaster? Yudhiṣṭhira himself, who was the very stuff of dharma, would remain unappeased, even in Indra’s heaven. But Ānandavardhana was right. Peace was there, in the tone of the narrative voice that never wavered, never buckled. A voice as willing to reveal the “most secret knowledge of the secret” as to list the members of a Nāga dynasty, or press on with a story told within a story and creating a frame for other stories, or to give us the most minute details of a massacre. The most immediate objection to Ānandavardhana’s theory might be this: the introduction to the poem “expressly states that the Mahābhārata gives instruction on all purposes of life and contains all the rasa.” How could anyone deny it? And how can we subordinate the many rasa of the Mahābhārata to that “peace rasa” which, what’s more, was not included in the original list of the rasa, written down in the Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata? Ānandavardhana was aware that the fate of his whole theory, according to which the noblest poetry does not admit of mixture but is based on one dominant rasa, depended on the answer to that question. And he wrote: “An essential meaning generates even greater beauty if made manifest without being directly explicit. This is common custom when refined and cultured people meet together: the thought they have most at heart is made manifest implicitly, not directly and explicitly.”
The old blind king, Dhṛtarāṣtra, so fearfully thin; his wife, Gāndhārī, blindfolded since their marriage; the Pāṇḍavas’ mother, Kuntī, widowed now, were walking together toward the Gaṇgā. Behind them was the vast forest where they had spent three years in silent wandering. They sat down to look back at it. An evil wind was shaking the foliage. Then flames leapt above the tops of the trees. Scorching waves licked over them. Shrieks, trumpetings, and howls came from the forest. The animals rushed out of the vegetation to save themselves. They rushed past the three witnesses, who sat motionless, wrapped in clouds of smoke. Dhṛtarāṣtṛa was a pole clad in rags. To each side, as though escorting him, were the two women and beyond them the fire that had reduced majestic trees to ash burned up the grass of the clearing, and their bodies too.
When Vyāsa told Yudhiṣṭhira how his mother, Kuntī, Dhṛtarāṣtra, and Gandhārī had died, the man who was the Law wept like a child. “Oh, Fire, oh, Agni, so it’s not true that you were assuaged that day by the endless arrows Arjuna loosed against his father’s waters while the Forest of Khāṇḍava burned … Oh, Agni, you chose to seize the mother of your benefactor … He who had a hundred sons has seen them all die … He who was once fanned by a hundred palm fronds waved by the beautiful hands of young girls is fanned now by a hundred vultures’ wings … The march of Kāla, of Time, is subtle and hard to understand … We are alive, and yet we are dead.” Then Yudhiṣṭhira looked at Vyāsa to ask him a question, as if behind his pain he sensed a torment at once fiercely intense and ceremonial, a torment for which only the great ṛṣi could offer relief: “There were many sacred fires in that forest … How can it be that Dhrtarāstra and my mother were burned by a wildfire?” Calmly, Vyāsa answered: “It’s true, there were many sacred fires, and Dhṛtarāṣtra tended them. They celebrated their rites with those fires in the most remote part of the forest. Then he decided to abandon them. The brahmans who were with him didn’t check to see that the fires had gone out. They followed the blind king. So the fires spread through the forest. I was told as much by the ascetics who live nearby, on the banks of the Gaṇgā.”
They walked slowly, at a good distance from each other, along the narrow climbing path. To their right, boulders and shale, steep and dazzling. Before them, a barrier of rocks and snow, thrust into an enamel sky. There were six of them plus a dog. Five brothers, their common wife, the dog. The long and lanky Yudhiṣṭhira led the way, followed by the black mongrel that they had found wandering around the western slopes and that had followed them ever since. They called the animal Dharma, because it was always at Yudhiṣṭhira’s feet.
They never spoke and rarely stopped. They had trudged along interminable beaches, then headed for the highest peaks, crossed the Himālaya and the desert that stretches beyond, and now were climbing again toward Mount Meru, which joins the earth to the sky, toward Indra’s paradise. They were wearing faded rags held together with strips of bark. But their steps were warriors’ steps. Their minds met in memory and mourning. They counted the dead of that single family that had fought against itself to the point of extinction. The appalling carnage of Kurukṣetra was the central vortex. It was there that the chains of earlier events converged, from there that the chains of future events emerged. The links were welded together with boons and curses that went far, far back, intertwining with other stories that distracted them as they tried, sometimes in vain, to reconstruct their every twist and turn. “Time! Time!” were the only words that Arjuna answered when Yudhiṣṭhira in a tone of sober acknowledgment told him that everything was over now. “It is time that cooks each creature in its pot,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. And now it was time to leave the world. The others had agreed with a nod of their heads. And as they stubbornly climbed on and up like tiny parasites hugging the world’s back, everything that had happened, the shame and the glory, the rancors and the spells, seemed to level out and break up, blending their colors in one knotted, worn-out drape.
The still beautiful Draupadī brought up the rear. As always she emanated a scent of lotus, mixed with sweat. Every so often she would raise her head and narrow her proud, bright eyes, a delicate embroidery of wrinkles forming on the burnished skin at their corners, to look at the strong shoulders of those five men among whom her body had been equally shared. She dwelled just a little longer on Arjuna, who, with his strange, high cheekbones, still looked like a boy and a foreigner. From the depths of the silence came the roar of a distant stream, hidden in a gorge. The occasional muffled thud. Ice breaking up. No birds in the air here. No animals on their path. No one noticed when Draupadī missed her footing and fell. But the brothers turned together and saw something dark, like a bundle of rags, rolling down through the boulders till it disappeared. They said nothing, gathering around Yudhiṣṭhira. “You know why it happened? Because in her secret heart Draupadī always preferred Arjuna to the rest of us,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. No one answered. They set off again. Every day the sun followed its obsessive course, ever nearer. Sometimes they would be beset by fogs. Then even their feet were lost to them. One by one they fell, even Arjuna. Each time, with a few terse words, Yudhiṣṭhira would explain why. When Bhīma fell, and he was the last, as he lay dying he managed to ask: “Why?” “Because you were too greedy, when you were eating you never asked yourself whether there was enough for others,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. Then he walked on along the path, without turning back. Now there was only the dog behind him.
Yudhiṣṭhira walked on for days and days. When he slept the dog stretched out at his feet. They were only ever apart when they came across running water. Then the dog crouched down in the freezing stream. His dusty coat became shiny and smooth again. As he watched Yudhiṣṭhira on the bank, his tongue hung down from happiness.
Yudhiṣṭhira had always hoped that the Law would not be suffocated by life’s tumultuousness. Now that all the others had fallen, the Law shone within him like a crystal, but it had nothing in which to be reflected. The mountains don’t ask anyone to defend the dharma. They have no need of it. Yudhiṣṭhira’s Law had survived, the only living being in an immense void. No voice could ever answer him again, save the dog’s timid bark. When Yudhiṣṭhira had called it Dharma, he never thought that one day he would find himself conversing with the animal as though with himself.
As he went on climbing, Yudhiṣṭhira noticed that from a certain point upward there was an alteration in the air’s transparency: beyond that invisible barrier, the very rocks, snows, and those unlikely plants that still grew at this height took on a different consistency, a graphic presence they had never had anywhere else.
Yudhiṣṭhira was curious to see how the air would part at that point. But he wasn’t able to. As soon as he got there, Indra’s resplendent chariot descended on him with a sudden boom. “Welcome to my heaven, Yudhiṣṭhira. You are about to enter with your body.” “All the others have fallen, my brothers and Draupadī. Without them I have no desire for heaven,” said Yudhiṣṭhira, his voice distant and weary. “You will find them again here,” said Indra, with hurried cordiality. “They got here before you.” “But they are not here with their bodies,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. “So it is decreed,” said Indra, suddenly serious. “But you can ascend with your body.”
Yudhiṣṭhira was silent. At that moment the dog jumped awkwardly, happily, onto Indra’s chariot. Violently, Indra kicked it out. Yudhiṣṭhira felt a sudden rush of anger. “That dog is devoted to me. He must come with me. My heart is full of compassion for him,” he said. Indra immediately returned to his more coaxing tone: “Yudhiṣṭhira, today you have become immortal like myself. The happiness of heaven is yours. Why bother about this dog? Get rid of it.” “I spent my life on earth practicing justice,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. “I cannot cross the earth’s borders by committing an act of injustice.” Indra could not conceal his impatience. “There’s no room in heaven for people who arrive with their dogs. Just leave it behind. Here and now, it’s not an act of cruelty.” “It was once said that to abandon a creature devoted to you is a crime as great as the murder of a brahman. I shall never be able to abandon someone who is frightened, who is devoted to me, who is weak and who asks for my help.” Indra made an effort to behave with a patience and politeness hardly natural to him. He explained: “Here in heaven, the fact that a dog looks at a sacrificial flame is enough to take away all value from the ceremony. Hence dogs are not allowed. Yudhiṣṭhira, you have renounced everything, lost everything, including your brothers, including Draupadī, whom you loved in earnest. Why do you not renounce this dog?” “The others are all dead, and I can do nothing to resurrect them,” said Yudhiṣṭhira. Then he added: “But this dog is alive.”
Indra fell silent. His eloquent persuader’s expression fell like a scale from his face. The dog was playing at Yudhiṣṭhira’s feet. They had nothing more to say to each other. Then they realized that another being, of sovereign authority, was standing between them, as if he had been listening to what had been said from the beginning. “I am Dharma,” he said. “I am your dog. And you, Yudhiṣṭhira, are a portion of me. I take pleasure in you. You have survived many difficult trials, but none so difficult as this. You have refused to climb on the Celestials’ chariot without your dog. Because of this, you are now one of the Celestials yourself.”