The Argument in the Forest

By the second year they had moved to the lake at Dvaitavana, and the camp there had settled into the shape it would keep: huts of thatch and leaf under the great trees, the brahmins who had insisted on following them ranged along the water, deer that had grown used to people and no longer ran, and a king sitting most evenings with his back against a trunk, listening to whoever wanted to talk about the old stories.

It looked, to a visitor, almost peaceful. That was the trouble with it.

Draupadi had already made her case, more than once and with a cold precision that left nothing standing, and her husband had already given her his answer, and everyone in the camp knew both by heart. That argument belongs to her and is told where it belongs. This was a different one, and it came from a different direction, and it had been building in Bhima since the first week.

He had held it in for the reason he always held things in, which was that his eldest brother had asked him to. But he had spent the day watching Yudhishthira sit at the water's edge with a mendicant, discussing the merits of forbearance, and something in him came loose.

He came up the bank and stood over him and waited until the mendicant found somewhere else to be. Arjuna, cleaning a bowstring on the far side of the fire, did not look up but stopped what he was doing. Draupadi came and sat down where she could see both their faces.

'I want to say a thing once,' Bhima said. 'Then I will not say it again, and I will do whatever you tell me for eleven more years. But you are going to hear it first.'

Yudhishthira said that he had been expecting it for two years and that he would rather hear it than go on being managed.

'Start with what we are actually obeying,' Bhima said. 'We are in this forest because of a rule. Not because we were beaten in the field. Not because a stronger man took the kingdom off us. Because of a rule, in a room, agreed to at a table where the dice were not ours and the hand throwing them was Shakuni's.

'He had those dice all his life. Everyone in that hall knew it, including you. You went on throwing anyway, and when you had nothing left you staked us, and when we were gone you staked her. And at the end of it the same man who cheated you out of a kingdom stood up and read out the terms of the forfeit, and we have been keeping those terms ever since as though they were handed down by the gods.

'A promise given to a cheat inside a cheated game is not a promise. It is the last move of the cheat. Every teacher who ever taught us law would say so. A contract made in fraud binds nobody, and the man arguing hardest that it binds us is the one it was played on.'

'And who wrote the terms?' he went on. 'Twelve years in the woods and a thirteenth in disguise, and if we are recognised in the thirteenth, twelve more. Does that read to you like a penalty? It reads like a trap with a second trap inside it. Duryodhana did not put that clause in because he expects to lose the kingdom in the fourteenth year. He put it in because he expects to find us in the thirteenth.

'We are guarding our honesty on the terms of a document written by a man who has none. Nobody outside this forest will ever admire us for it. They will only ever say that the Pandavas were cheated once and then held themselves to the receipt.'

'Now count the years the way a soldier counts them,' Bhima said, 'because that is the part nobody in this camp will say out loud.

'Thirteen years is not a wait. It is a transfer. Every one of them is a year Duryodhana spends holding the wealthiest kingdom in the world with nobody to argue with him. He is buying alliances with our revenue. He is feeding Karna and arming him and putting a crown on him. He is marrying his people into Sindhu and Kamboja and Pragjyotisha, and every one of those weddings is an army we will have to break later with the same hands we have now.

'And what are we buying with the same years? Nothing. We are eating fruit. Arjuna is thirty and will not be thirty at the end of it. I am at my full strength this season and I can feel exactly where the top of it is. The years we are handing over are the best years either of us will ever have, and we are handing them over to a man who is using his.

'Then there is what it costs today. Drupada is our father-in-law and has troops. The Yadavas would come if Krishna crooked a finger. Kashi and Chedi and Magadha owe us from the sacrifice. Every one of those debts is worth less the longer it sits, because a debt to a king in a forest is a debt everyone hopes to forget.

'And there is the other cost, which you know better than I do. Do you think Bhishma and Drona and Kripa are on that side because they want to be? They are on it because they are bound to the throne, and every year we leave the throne with him is another year those three spend making his army the thing we will have to walk into. We are not preserving anything by sitting here. We are financing him.'

'And what would you have me do?' Yudhishthira said. He had not raised his voice at any point and did not raise it now.

'Go tonight,' Bhima said. 'Call in what we are owed. Take Hastinapura in a month with Arjuna in front and me behind him, and be sitting in that hall before the rains.'

'I do not doubt that you could take it. I doubt what would be sitting in the hall afterwards.

'Look at what the dice actually took from us. The kingdom. The wealth. The city Maya built for us. Our standing in front of every king who came to the sacrifice. Her honour, in public, while I sat and watched. All of it is gone and none of it is coming back by wanting it.

'One thing was not taken, because it was not on the table. I said a sentence in that hall in front of the whole assembly, and every man there heard me say it, and they are all still alive. If I break it, then everything we say afterwards is worth what Duryodhana's word is worth, and the only difference between us and him becomes the number of soldiers. I would rather go into that war with the smaller army and the larger claim, because the claim is the only reason anyone will fight for us at all.

'You are not wrong about the years. You are not wrong about Karna, and I know what the thirteenth year is for. I am telling you that I will pay all of it and go to the end of the term, and on the day the term ends I will ask for our five villages, and when they refuse me, and they will refuse me, there will not be one king on earth who can call it our war.'

Bhima said that a man could starve to death holding a receipt.

'He could,' Yudhishthira said. 'I have decided to.'

Arjuna, who had not spoken, said quietly that he stood with the eldest, and that he wished he did not have to, and Draupadi said nothing at all, which was worse than anything she could have said.

The camp went to sleep with the thing unsettled, which is how camps split. By morning the brahmins were taking sides in low voices and the younger twins had stopped speaking to each other about it, and the quarrel had begun to look less like a disagreement between brothers and more like two households sharing one fire.

Vyasa walked in out of the trees that day, as he did, without announcement.

He listened to both of them without appearing to, and he did not rule on either. What he said instead was that a man with a grievance and nothing to do with it will turn on his own house within a season, and that both of them were right about a fact and wrong about the same thing, which was that this was a matter to be decided by argument at all.

Then he took Yudhishthira aside and gave him the pratismriti, the knowledge that recalls what has been, a vidya of the kind that passes in a whisper between two people and is not written down. He told him to transmit it to Arjuna and to send Arjuna north, to the mountains, to the high solitudes above the Ganga, and not to expect him back quickly.

'You cannot shorten the term,' he said. 'You have decided that and I will not argue you out of it. But nothing in the term forbids you to be ready when it ends. He will go and get weapons from the gods themselves, and Bhima will spend the years knowing that something is being built, and a house with an errand in it does not eat itself.'

He told them also to leave the lake and go back to Kamyaka, where the game was better and the water cleaner and the roads out were shorter.

Arjuna left within days. Bhima walked with him to the edge of the forest and gave him no advice, only stood in the road watching until his brother was out of sight, which was the nearest thing to agreement he had offered anyone that month. The argument was not answered. It had simply been given somewhere to go.