Roberto Calasso - Ka

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 Gaṅgā, 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.