Bhima at Kubera's Lake

The wind that came down from the higher slopes of Gandhamadana that day carried something Draupadi had never smelled before: a fragrance so pure and so unfamiliar that she rose from where she sat and followed it to its source, a single golden lotus, the saugandhika, resting where the breeze had dropped it at her feet. She had seen such flowers only in stories. Holding it, she felt for a moment that exile itself had lightened.

It was Bhima who first went in search of more such flowers, once before, and came back with a story he told only briefly: how the path had led him to a narrow ravine blocked by an old monkey who would not move, how the monkey turned out to be Hanuman himself, testing his brother's pride before revealing his true and enormous form, how the meeting ended in blessing rather than blows. Bhima did not dwell on the tale when he told it. He had brought back what flowers he could reach, Draupadi had been delighted, and the matter had seemed finished.

But one lotus, however lovely, does not last, and Draupadi, watching it wilt, could not help wishing aloud that she had more, enough to carry with them, enough to remember this strange mountain by once they had left it behind. She did not ask Bhima to fetch them. She only wondered aloud, the way she sometimes wondered aloud about small comforts denied to a queen who had once had everything.

Bhima heard the wish the way he heard every wish of hers: as an instruction he could not set aside. He took up his mace without another word and started up the slope toward wherever such flowers grew wild enough to be carried on the wind.

The climb this time led higher and further than the ravine where he had met Hanuman, up past the tree line onto the bare shoulder of Mount Kailasa itself, where the god of wealth Kubera kept a private lake so beautiful that even the stories struggled to describe it honestly. Golden lotuses covered its surface in such numbers that the whole lake seemed to burn gently in the mountain light, and the air above it carried the same fragrance that had drifted down to Draupadi's feet.

The lake was not unguarded. It belonged to Kubera's own pleasure garden, tended and watched by yakshas and rakshasas who served the treasure-lord as jealously as any human guard ever served a king's own treasury, and no traveler, however royal, entered there without Kubera's leave. Bhima had no such leave, and he had not come to ask for it. He had come because his wife had wished for flowers, and a wish of hers, in his accounting, outweighed whatever protocol a mountain god's servants meant to enforce.

He walked to the edge of the lake and began gathering the lotuses with the same unhurried directness he brought to every task, uninterested in the guards who had already begun to gather at the sight of an armed stranger helping himself to their master's garden. When their challenge came, he did not argue with it. He simply kept working, mace close at hand, until argument became unnecessary.

The guards called out first in warning, then in open threat, telling him plainly that no mortal, however strong, was permitted to strip Kubera's lake of its flowers without the treasure-lord's own word. Bhima heard them the way he heard most warnings meant to turn him back: as noise to be finished with rather than counsel to be weighed. He kept filling his arms with lotuses, unhurried, until the guards understood that words had already failed and moved from threat to attack.

The yakshas and rakshasas of Kubera's court fell on him in numbers meant to end the intrusion quickly, and for a time the shore of the lake became a battlefield of a kind Bhima had fought many times before: outnumbered, unhurried, his mace moving through the guards the way it moved through everything that stood between him and what his family needed.

Their champion was a yaksha named Maniman, proud of his standing at Kubera's court and unwilling to watch a mortal man scatter his fellows without answering personally. He came at Bhima with the full weight of his own strength behind him, certain that a servant of the treasure-god had nothing to fear from a wandering exile. He was wrong in a way he could not have anticipated, and wrong for a reason that had nothing to do with Bhima at all.

Long before that day, Maniman had insulted the sage Agastya, and Agastya, as sages do, had answered the insult with a curse: that the offense would find him out at an hour and by a hand not of his choosing, and that Kubera's whole court would carry the shadow of that unpaid debt until it was settled. No one at the lake that day, least of all Maniman, knew that the hour had finally arrived, or that the hand carrying it was an exiled prince's mace swinging in defense of a lotus his wife had wished for.

Maniman broke under the blow as thoroughly as anyone Bhima had ever struck down, and with his death the remaining guards fell back in confusion, sensing without understanding it that something larger than a garden skirmish had just concluded on their shore.

Kubera himself came down to the lake once the fighting had ended, and those who expected the treasure-lord to arrive in fury at the loss of his champion and the invasion of his private waters found instead a god who seemed, if anything, relieved.

He looked over the fallen guards, and over Maniman's body last of all, and told Bhima plainly what none of the combatants on either side had known while the fighting lasted: that Maniman had long ago wronged the sage Agastya, that Agastya's curse had hung over the whole court since that day like an unpaid debt awaiting its collector, and that every soul at that lake had lived under its shadow without knowing when or how it would finally be called in. Bhima's mace, wielded for no reason grander than a wife's wish for flowers, had settled an account that heaven's own patience had been waiting years to close.

Far from holding the intrusion against him, Kubera welcomed Bhima as a kind of unwitting instrument of justice, and extended to him and his family the same welcome, offering the Pandavas shelter on the heights of Gandhamadana for as long as they needed it. It was there, under that welcome, that the exiled brothers and Draupadi would wait out the remaining months of their mountain sojourn, gathering the strength and the provisions that would carry them through the rest of their long exile until Arjuna descended from the heavens to rejoin them.

Bhima carried the saugandhika lotuses back down to Draupadi that evening as though nothing more than an ordinary errand had detained him.

When the full account reached Yudhishthira, he did not share Kubera's relief. He heard of yakshas and rakshasas slain by the dozen, of a mountain god's private garden stormed without leave, of a champion killed in a fight that had begun over nothing more urgent than a flower, and he rebuked his brother in the plain terms he always used when Bhima's strength had outrun his patience: that force spent so freely, even in a good cause, courted disaster that restraint would have avoided, and that a wife's passing wish was no license to make war on heaven's own household.

Bhima accepted the rebuke as he always accepted them, without much argument and without much change in his conduct the next time Draupadi wished for something the mountain refused to yield easily. He had brought her the flowers. Kubera, of all the parties with cause to resent that fact, resented it least. Yudhishthira's caution was not wrong, exactly. It was simply aimed at a danger that heaven had already turned to its own purpose before the caution ever arrived.

That was the strange shape of the whole episode, and the reason the forest folk who told it afterward treated it less as a cautionary tale about Bhima's temper than as a story about how differently the same act can look depending on who is left to judge it. A brother saw recklessness. A grieving wife saw devotion. A god saw a debt finally collected. Bhima himself, characteristically, saw none of these interpretations and simply did what needed doing, trusting, as he always did, that the doing would eventually prove its own case. On Kailasa's shoulder that year, it did. The mace that struck down Maniman was violence, plainly and without excuse, and it was also, just as plainly, mercy arriving in the only shape that particular curse would ever let it take.