Bhima and Hidimbi

They had walked out of the fire alive. The lac house at Varanavata, built to be their funeral pyre, had collapsed into glowing ruin behind them, and the world believed the five sons of Pandu and their mother Kunti were ashes in the wreckage. That was the only gift the fire had given them - the gift of being thought dead. A free man can be hunted. A dead man is left alone.

So they fled south through country with no roads, away from the towns where Duryodhana's spies waited for news. By the second night Kunti could not walk. Her feet were torn, her throat was a dry stick, and the great Sala forest had closed over them like a second darkness. They stopped at the foot of a banyan tree. Bhima, the strongest of them, who had carried his mother on his hip and his four brothers across his shoulders through the worst of the flight, set them down to rest and went to find water.

The forest belonged to a rakshasa named Hidimba. He was a creature of the night woods, tall as two men, with a mane of red hair, teeth like a row of knives, and a hunger that the forest could never fill. From a high branch he had smelled the sleeping humans on the wind, and his mouth ran with water at the thought of warm flesh. But Hidimba was lazy in the way of strong predators. He did not hunt for himself. He called his sister.

Her name was Hidimbi. She was of the same blood, able to take any shape she pleased, and her brother sent her down to drive the humans into the open and bring them back to be eaten. "Kill them and carry them here," he told her. "We will share the feast."

Hidimbi went down through the trees, and then she saw Bhima.

He sat awake by his sleeping family, broad-shouldered in the moonlight, a club of forest wood across his knees, keeping watch while the others slept. He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The hunger her brother had sent her to satisfy turned, in an instant, into a different hunger entirely. She put off her terrible shape and took the form of a woman of the forest, lovely, shy, hung with wildflowers, and stepped softly into the clearing.

"You should not be here," she said. "This is my brother's wood, and he eats men. He sent me to kill you. But I cannot. I have looked at you, and I would rather die than harm you. Wake your family. Flee, or let me carry you to safety - I have the strength for it. I want you for my husband."

Bhima did not flee. He never had in his life. He looked at the trembling woman and answered her gently, but he would not abandon his sleeping mother and brothers to run, and he would not be carried off like a prize. "I do not leave my family for any danger," he said. "Your brother can come."

He came. Hidimba had waited too long for his meal, and now he descended in fury, having seen his sister standing in human shape and speaking softly to the very food he had sent her to fetch. He turned on her first, raising his hand to kill her for her betrayal. Bhima was between them before the blow could fall.

"Be quiet," Bhima said, so as not to wake the others. "Why kill a woman for the crime of mercy? Fight me instead, demon. I am awake. Come."

The two of them locked together, and the Sala forest came apart around them. They tore great trees out of the earth to use as clubs, and when the trees shattered they fought with bare hands, dragging each other across the ground, each trying to crush the breath from the other. The noise woke the sleepers at last, and Kunti opened her eyes to see the strange beautiful woman standing guard over them and her son wrestling a giant in the dark.

Hidimba was strong with the old strength of the night-roaming kind. But Bhima was the son of Vayu, the wind, and he had been raised on poison and survived it, thrown in the Ganga bound and come back stronger. He felt the demon begin to tire. Mindful that his brothers' true enemies in Hastinapura must not learn they lived, he chose to end it quickly and without an army's worth of noise. He lifted Hidimba whirling over his head, bent the great spine across his knee, and broke him, and the forest went silent.

Now there was the matter of the sister.

Yudhishthira, the eldest, looked at Hidimbi and his hand went toward a weapon, for she was of the blood of the thing they had just killed. But she fell at Kunti's feet, not at the warriors', and spoke to the mother. "I turned against my own brother for love of your son," she said. "I have no people now. I have no home. I ask only this - let me marry Bhima. If he will not have me, I will walk into the river. I am asking you, mother, because a mother will understand."

Kunti looked at the weeping rakshasi and saw, beneath the strange blood, a woman who had chosen mercy over her own kin and now had nothing. It was a thing Kunti understood. She turned to Yudhishthira, and the eldest considered, and gave a careful judgment. Bhima would marry her. But there were conditions: he would spend his days with his family, and his nights with her, until she bore a son. When the child was grown, Bhima would return to his brothers and their unfinished work.

So Bhima married the forest woman, and for a season the fugitives knew a strange peace. Hidimbi could fly through the air and take any shape, and she carried Bhima to mountain peaks and the shores of hidden lakes, to gardens of flowering trees no king had ever seen, and brought him home to his family each dawn. She asked for nothing but the days she was given. It was, in its way, the only honeymoon any of the Pandavas would ever have, snatched in the middle of exile and dispossession, and it would be remembered.

In time she bore a son, and the manner of his birth was wondrous. He came into the world already strong, and within the day he stood as a youth, for the children of the rakshasa kind grow as soon as they are born. He was bald as a water-pot, and so they called him Ghatotkacha, the pot-headed one. He was huge, and fierce, and gentle to his father, and he loved the five uncles who had appeared out of the fire to give him a family.

When the time came for the Pandavas to move on, Ghatotkacha bowed to his father and his uncles and his grandmother. "Whenever you have need of me," he said, "think of me, and I will come." Then mother and son went their way into the wild places, and the Pandavas went theirs, toward Ekachakra and the years of hiding still ahead.

The promise was not idle. Years later, on the thirteenth night of the war at Kurukshetra, when the armies fought on past sunset by torchlight and the field had become a slaughter without rule, the Pandavas would think of Ghatotkacha, and he would come. He would rain destruction on the Kaurava host until Karna was forced to spend on him the one infallible weapon, the Shakti given by Indra - the very weapon Karna had been saving to kill Arjuna. Ghatotkacha would die that night, and in dying would save Arjuna's life, for the spear that killed him could never be thrown again.

Krishna alone would laugh with relief at the news, and the others would not understand until later. The pot-headed boy born in a forest to a demoness and the strongest of the Pandavas was, from the hour of his birth, a piece set on the board for a single saving move. His mother's mercy in a moonlit clearing had reached all the way to the war.

The story keeps a quiet question at its center. The people called Hidimba and Hidimbi demons, rakshasas, eaters of men. Yet it was a rakshasi who chose love over appetite and family, and it was royal cousins of pure Kuru blood, raised in palaces and taught by the greatest sages, who had built a house of wax to burn their own kin in their sleep. Birth had given the cousins everything and the forest woman nothing. Conduct reversed the verdict. The Mahabharata does not let us keep the comfortable line between the civilized and the monstrous. It asks, again and again, who is keeping dharma and who is only keeping appearances.