Roberto Calasso - Ka

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 India. “And why must Arjuna of all people, your son, help the world to cousume 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 Khāṇḍava 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, 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 Pāṇḍavas 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 Pāṇdavas 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.