The Brother Who Was Blamed

The Pandavas had not gone far from the hermitage where they first heard how young Yavakri died at the hands of the demons his father's rival had sent against him, before the sages there offered them a second story, one that grew directly out of the first. Yudhishthira and his brothers had made camp again in the forest near Kamyaka, and the sages who kept the fires there seemed unwilling to let the tale of that old feud rest with only one death in it.

'You have heard already what befell Bharadvaja's son,' the eldest among them said, settling onto a mat of kusha grass while the evening fire caught. 'What you have not heard is what befell the sage who sent the demons after him, Raibhya, and what his own two sons did to each other in the years that followed. It is not a story anyone here tells lightly, for it asks what a man owes his brother when the truth would ruin them both.'

Yudhishthira drew closer to the fire, and beside him Bhima and Arjuna settled onto the same worn ground, their weapons laid aside for the evening as they always were within a hermitage's bounds. 'Tell it,' Yudhishthira said. 'We have had little enough in this forest but stories of grief answered by worse grief. I would hear one where the ending is not only sorrow.'

'This one is not only sorrow,' the sage said, drawing his shawl closer against the coming night. 'Though it begins, as these things do, with a mistake in the dark, and a household bound so tightly to its own sacrifice that even a father's death could not be allowed to interrupt it. You will see, before the end, why we do not tell it in the same breath as Yavakri's, though the two griefs share a root.'

'Raibhya had two sons, Paravasu and Arvavasu, both learned in the Veda, and both were called by a king to serve as priests at a sacrifice that would run for many long months without pause, the kind of rite that binds its officiants to the sacrificial ground almost as tightly as a vow binds a bride. Paravasu, the elder, left the sacrifice only once in all that time, slipping away by night to see his wife, and it was on his way back before dawn that the mistake happened that undid his family.

'His father Raibhya, an ascetic of the old kind, had taken to wearing the skin of a black antelope as he wandered near the hermitage at night, the way forest sages sometimes did, and in the dark before sunrise, hurrying back to the sacrifice with his mind still full of the rites he had left unfinished, Paravasu saw a shape moving low among the trees, dressed in a hide, and took it for a deer. He loosed an arrow without stopping to look twice. It found his father's heart.

'He did not know what he had done until he came close enough to see the old man's face in death, and by then there was nothing to be undone. A son who kills his father, even by accident, even in the dark, has committed one of the gravest sins the Veda names, and Paravasu understood at once that he could not go back to the sacrifice carrying that on him, not without atonement, and he could not delay the atonement without abandoning the rite he had sworn to complete.'

'So Paravasu went to his younger brother,' the sage went on, 'and told him plainly what had happened, and asked a favor no brother should have to ask another. Perform the funeral rites for our father, he said, and undergo the penance for his death in my place, so that I need not leave the sacrifice unfinished. You are the younger, your name is not yet bound to this rite the way mine is. Let it fall to you.

'Arvavasu did not hesitate. He loved his father and he loved his brother, and he saw a way to serve both griefs at once, whatever it cost him. He performed the last rites himself, out in the forest, alone, and then undertook the harsh penance that the scriptures prescribe for the killing of a father, fasting and mortification that would have broken a lesser will. When it was done, he washed himself clean of it and returned to the sacrificial ground to rejoin his brother, expecting nothing but grief shared and work resumed.

'What he found instead was Paravasu standing before the king and the assembled priests, telling them that a brahmin-killer had come to defile their sacrifice. His own brother, before the whole gathering, denounced Arvavasu as his father's murderer and demanded he be driven from the grounds before his presence ruined the rite. No one there knew the truth well enough to contradict it. Arvavasu, who had buried his father and borne another man's penance besides, was cast out of the sacrifice in disgrace, and walked back into the forest with no one's blessing and everyone's suspicion following him.'

'A lesser man would have spent his grief on hatred,' the sage said. 'Arvavasu went instead into the deep forest and turned his sorrow into worship. He fixed his mind on Surya, lord of the sun, whose light touches the guilty and the innocent with the same impartial warmth, and gave himself to austerities so fierce and so sustained that the sky itself could not look away from them. He ate nothing but air for days at a stretch. He stood in the sun's full glare from dawn to dusk without moving, his eyes fixed on the very source of the heat that scorched him.

'Surya was moved, and came to him, and with Surya came Indra and the company of the gods who watch when a man's devotion grows too great for heaven to ignore. They stood before Arvavasu in their own forms, radiant enough that the forest around him seemed to dim by comparison, and Surya told him plainly that his suffering had been noticed, that his innocence was known in the courts of heaven even where it had been denied on earth, and that he might ask for anything and it would be granted.

'Think, before you answer,' Indra told him, for the gods knew what such a man might ask, and knew also that grief and anger together can make even a righteous man ask for something smaller than his own goodness deserves. Any king's fortune. His brother's ruin. The restoration of his own good name alone, and nothing more. Arvavasu stood before them a long moment, weighing what a man who has lost everything is owed against what he might still choose to give.'

'He did not ask for his brother's ruin,' the sage said, and let the fire crack and settle before he went on. 'He asked for his father back. Let Raibhya live again, he said, as though the arrow that killed him had never flown. Surya granted it, and Raibhya rose from the dead into the same evening light he had walked in on the night he died.

'Then Arvavasu asked for a second life besides his father's, for the boy who had begun this whole chain of grief before he himself had any part in it. Let Yavakri live again too, he said, so that Bharadvaja need not carry his son's murder for the rest of his years. Surya granted that as well, and somewhere else in the forest a father who had buried his only son found him breathing again.

'And for the third asking, the one that mattered most, Arvavasu did not name a punishment for Paravasu at all. He asked instead that the sin of his brother's false accusation, the guilt of denouncing an innocent man before a king and a sacrificial assembly, be lifted from Paravasu entirely, so that the brother who had wronged him would not have to carry that particular weight into whatever life came after this one. Three wishes, and not one of them spent on himself, and not one of them spent on revenge.'

The sage fell silent, and for a while only the fire spoke. Yudhishthira sat with his hands loose on his knees, thinking of his own brothers, of Karna whose parentage he did not yet know, of every grievance a family can grow without meaning to.

'He had the gods themselves in front of him,' Yudhishthira said finally, 'and he spent it all on other people.'

'That,' the sage said, 'is why the story is still told at this hermitage, and not at his brother's.'