Bakasura of Ekachakra

After the forest, after Hidimba, the family came at last to a town called Ekachakra, the town of a single wheel. Here they did what fugitives must do: they made themselves small. Disguised as wandering Brahmins, with matted hair and begging bowls, the five mighty sons of Pandu went out each day to beg alms in the streets, and brought home what they collected to their mother. Kunti would divide it in two. Half went to Bhima, whose hunger was the hunger of the wind itself and could never quite be filled. The other half was shared among the remaining five. So they lived, hidden in plain sight, the heirs of Hastinapura passing for poor priests.

They lodged in the home of a Brahmin, a good and gentle man with a wife, a young daughter, and an infant son. The family had opened its doors to the strangers and asked nothing. It was a poor house, but it was a kind one, and for a while the arrangement held. The brothers begged; the household shared what little it had; and Kunti, watchful as ever, kept her sons unknown and waited for the day they could reclaim their lives.

One day, while the brothers were out begging, Kunti heard sounds of grief from within the house. The whole family was weeping, and arguing in the way that families argue only over something unbearable. Kunti listened. The father was offering to go and die. The mother said no, she would go in his place. The young daughter begged to be the one sent, saying a daughter must be given away to another house in any case, so let her death at least save the others. And the infant in the corner, too small to understand, laughed and reached for a blade of straw, and at that the whole family wept harder.

Kunti went in and asked what sorrow had fallen on the house that had sheltered her. The Brahmin told her. Outside the town lived a rakshasa named Baka, a man-eater of monstrous strength, and long ago the helpless townspeople had struck a bargain with him to keep him from destroying them all. Each week one household, in its turn, must send him a cartload of food, two buffaloes, and the man who drove the cart. Baka ate the buffaloes, the food, and the man. In exchange he guarded the town from other demons and did not raze it. The town had no king strong enough to oppose him, and so it paid.

Now the turn had come to this house. The father saw no way out but to go himself and be eaten, and the family was tearing itself apart over which of them should die instead.

Kunti made an astonishing offer. "You have one son, an infant, and a daughter not yet given in marriage," she said. "You cannot spare any of yourselves; this family must not be broken. But I have five sons. Let one of them take the cart to the demon in your place."

The Brahmin was horrified. A guest, a priest, sent to die for his host? It would be the worst sin a householder could commit, to save his own life at the cost of a Brahmin who had eaten at his table. He refused outright.

But Kunti calmed him. She knew what he did not. "Do not fear for my son," she said. "I have seen him drive off demons before. He is strong with a strength you have not guessed, and he knows the spells to come away unharmed. Only tell no one in the town who did it, or curious crowds will trouble him for the secret."

When the brothers returned, Kunti told Bhima what she had pledged him to. Bhima's face lit up; he asked for nothing better than a giant to break. But Yudhishthira, the eldest, was alarmed. "What recklessness is this, mother?" he said. "We sleep each night with our heads on Bhima's strength. He is the arm that will one day win back our kingdom and avenge us. To gamble him on a stranger's quarrel, in the dark, against a man-eater - this is not wisdom."

Kunti answered him steadily. "It is not recklessness. It is the debt. This family took us in when we were nothing and asked no questions. We have eaten their bread and slept under their roof. If we let them be destroyed and saved ourselves, what would our kingdom be worth, won by men who abandon the people who shelter them? And I have no fear for Bhima. I have watched him. Let him go."

Yudhishthira looked at his brother, who was already grinning, and yielded.

At dawn Bhima loaded the cart with the food meant for the demon - and, being Bhima, he ate a good deal of it on the road, because the smell was too much and the journey long. He drove the buffaloes out to the edge of the forest where Baka took his meals, and there, in no hurry at all, he sat down and began to eat the demon's dinner himself, calling out the rakshasa's name between mouthfuls as though summoning a servant.

Baka came crashing out of the trees, enormous, red-eyed, expecting a terrified man tied to a cart. Instead he found a Brahmin sprawled on the grass, eating Baka's own tribute with evident pleasure and not even looking up. The demon roared and struck him from behind with both fists. Bhima went on eating. He finished his meal at leisure, washed, and only then turned to fight, as a man turns to a chore he has been putting off.

They tore into each other. Baka uprooted trees; Bhima uprooted larger ones. They wrestled across the forest floor until the ground was churned to mud and the demon, for all his weekly feasts of human flesh, began to fail against the son of the wind. Bhima forced him down, set a knee in his back, took him by the body, and broke his spine across, bending him until the great frame snapped. The man-eater of Ekachakra was dead.

Bhima dragged the corpse to the town gate and left it there, propped where everyone would see it at sunrise, and walked back to his lodging in the half-light without a word, as his mother had told him. In the morning the townspeople found the monster who had terrorized them for years lying dead and broken at their own gate, and no one could say who had done it. They marveled, and questioned the household whose turn it had been, and the Brahmin, keeping his promise, said only that a mighty stranger, a master of spells, had taken pity and gone in his place and would not be named.

So a poor family that had opened its door to five hungry beggars discovered that it had been sheltering the very arm that would one day overturn an empire. The debt was paid in the only coin that matters: the willingness to send a beloved son into the dark against a monster, for the sake of a host who had asked for nothing. The town of one wheel was free, and the Pandavas remained hidden a while longer. But word of a strange, mighty Brahmin would travel, and soon enough another rumor would reach Ekachakra - that in the land of Panchala, a king was holding a swayamvara for his fire-born daughter, and Brahmins from every quarter were walking that way.