The Watch Under the Banian

As the mighty Bhima proceeded (said Vaishampayana) the whole forest with its trees and its branches seemed to tremble, because they were striking against his chest.

There was no road out of Varanavata. The tunnel had come up in a thicket on the far side of the town, and behind them the house of lac was still burning, and in the morning there would be six bodies in the ashes that were not theirs and a town in mourning for a family that was walking away from it. They could not use a road. Roads have travellers on them, and travellers have eyes, and Duryodhana's riders would be on every one of them by noon.

So Bhima made the path himself.

The motion of his thighs raised a wind like the wind that blows in Jyaishtha and Ashadha, when the year is at its hottest and the air comes across the plain in one solid push. He went straight, and what stood in front of him he trod down: creepers, brush, the young trees, and the large trees too, with their flowers and their fruits still on them, snapped off and laid flat in his wake. So passes through the woods, breaking down mighty trees, the leader of a herd of elephants at sixty years of age, angry, endued with excess of energy, in the season of rut when the juice trickles down from the three parts of his body.

He had the speed of Garuda in him that night, or of Marut who is the wind, and it was so great a force that the other Pandavas seemed to faint away in consequence of it.

That is the correct order of the sentence, O king. Not that they were tired. That the speed of their brother was itself the thing that emptied them out.

Because he could not slow down and they could not keep up, he carried them.

He took his mother on his shoulder. Kunti, of delicate sensibilities, who had never in her life walked further than the length of a garden, rode on the shoulder of her second son along the uneven banks of rivers, over shale and root and the broken ground that a flooded bank leaves behind it, and Bhima went carefully there and nowhere else. His four brothers he carried on his back. The eldest, the archer, and the twins, distributed across him like baggage, and none of them said much about it then or afterwards.

They came to streams that could not be crossed and he swam them, frequently, with the five of them holding on. He would go in at a slant against the current, feeling for the bottom with one foot until there was no bottom, and then swim with his head up and his mother's weight riding above the water, and come out on a bank of mud and go on walking without stopping to shake himself, because stopping was how you were caught.

And all the way they were disguising themselves. That detail is in the account and it is the coldest thing in it: on their way, from fear of the sons of Dhritarashtra, the Pandavas altered their appearance. The heir apparent of the Kuru kingdom put dirt on his face. They were a family group of no particular caste moving at night, and if they had been stopped and known, the men who stopped them would not have been arresting them, and everyone in that party understood it, including the woman on Bhima's shoulder.

The fire at Varanavata had been meant to be the end of the story. As far as Hastinapura knew, it was. There was no one now to look for them and no one to appeal to, and the only thing between the six of them and the finish of Duryodhana's plan was the endurance of one man's legs.

Towards evening, bearing his brothers and his mother, Bhima reached a forest more terrible than the one they had left.

Fruits were scarce in it. Roots were scarce in it. Water was scarce in it. It resounded, from every side and at every hour, with the cries of birds and of beasts, and as the twilight came down those cries became fiercer, the way they do when the hunting begins.

Then darkness shrouded everything from view. And untimely winds began to blow, out of season and out of any pattern, and they broke and laid low many a tree, large and small, and tore down creepers with their dry leaves and dry fruit still clinging, so that all around the six of them the wood was coming apart in the dark and they could hear it and could see none of it.

The Kaurava princes, afflicted with fatigue and thirst, and heavy with sleep, were unable to proceed any further.

They sat down there in that forest, without food and without drink. That is the whole of the account of it. Five sons of a king and a king's widow sitting on the ground in the dark with nothing, having eaten nothing since the wedding-feast their enemy had given them the night before, in a wood with no water in it, some hours' walk from a town that believed it had buried them that morning.

And out of that silence Kunti spoke.

"I am the mother of the five Pandavas," she said. "I am now in their midst. Yet I am burning with thirst."

She said it again. And then again. The account says so plainly: Kunti repeatedly said this unto her sons.

It is not an order and it is not a complaint, and it is the most exactly weighted thing anyone says in this whole flight. She did not ask for water. She did not say fetch me water, which would have sent one of them out into a black forest full of noises for her sake, and she would not do that. She stated three facts in the order they occurred to her: who she was, where she was, and what was happening to her body. She left the rest of the sentence for whichever of her sons chose to finish it.

And Bhima's heart, from affection for his mother, was warmed by compassion.

He did not answer her out loud. He simply resolved to go on as he had been going on all night, because that had been his position since the tunnel: the others made the decisions and he carried the weight, and this was a weight.

Proceeding through that terrible and extensive forest without a living soul in it, he saw ahead of him in the dark a beautiful banian tree with wide-spreading branches, and he made for it.

Under the banian he set them down, his brothers and his mother, and for the first time in a night and a day his hands were empty.

"Rest here," he said, "while I go in quest of water. I hear the sweet cries of aquatic fowls. I think there must be a large pool somewhere near."

Nobody else had heard anything. They were half asleep and the forest was loud with a hundred kinds of screaming, and out of all of it he had picked the one sound that meant water, the particular note that ducks and cranes make when they settle. It is worth remembering, when men speak of Bhima as though he were only a large animal with a club, that he found the lake by listening.

He did not go until he was told to go. He stood there and waited, and his elder brother, who had been given the whole authority of the family the day their father died, said the single word: "Go."

Then Bhima proceeded in the direction from which the cries of those water birds were coming, and left the five of them under the tree in the dark, with nothing, and no weapon among them worth the name, and went away into the wood alone.

A banian is the right tree for it. It is the tree a village sits under. Its branches come down and go back into the ground and stand up again as trunks until one tree is a grove and a grove is a roof, and travellers have slept dry under them since there were travellers. Of all the trees in that terrible wood he had put his family under the one that most resembled a house.

He soon came upon a lake, and he bathed in it, and slaked his own thirst.

The account permits him that, and it is the last thing he takes for himself for the rest of the night. Then, affectionate unto his brothers, he brought water for them the only way a man with no vessel can bring it: he took off his upper garment and soaked it through and gathered it up dripping in his arms.

Think about carrying water four miles in a wet cloth, O king. It goes the whole way. It runs out over your forearms and down your ribs and off your elbows, and every step you take is a step of it lost, and there is no way to hurry that does not lose more, and no way to go slowly that does not lose more either. There is nothing at the end of eight miles of that except whatever is still in the folds when you get there.

And he had run four miles out. Now he was hastily retracing his way over those four miles, in the dark, through a wood with no path, carrying a wet sheet as gently as he had carried his mother.

He came at last to where he had left them.

And beholding her, he was afflicted with sorrow, and began to sigh like a snake.

They were all asleep. Every one of them, on the bare ground, exactly where he had put them down.

He stood over them with the water he had gone eight miles for and could not give it to anybody, and distressed with grief at the sight, Vrikodara began to weep.

"Oh, wretch that I am, who behold my brothers asleep on the bare ground. What can befall me more painful than this? They who formerly at Varanavata could not sleep on the softest and costliest beds are now asleep on the ground."

And then he began to name his mother, and he named her the way a herald names a queen at a gate, going through every title she had, one after another, standing over her in the dark.

"Kunti, the sister of Vasudeva, that grinder of hostile hosts. The daughter of Kuntiraja. Herself decked with every auspicious mark. The daughter-in-law of Vichitravirya. The wife of the illustrious Pandu. The mother of us five brothers. Resplendent as the filaments of the lotus, and delicate, and tender, and fit to sleep on the costliest bed - lying thus asleep, as she should never be, on the bare ground.

"She who has brought forth these sons by Dharma and by Indra and by Maruta. She who has ever slept within palaces. She sleeps now, fatigued, on the bare ground."

He was not making a speech. There was no one awake to hear it. He was going through the list because the list was the whole argument: every single thing that was true of that woman made the sight in front of him more impossible, and he could not stop reciting them, and none of them changed the ground she was lying on.

Then he went along the row of them.

"The virtuous Yudhishthira, who deserves the sovereignty of the three worlds, sleeps fatigued like an ordinary man on the bare ground. This Arjuna, of the darkish hue of blue clouds, unequalled amongst men, sleeps on the ground like an ordinary person. Oh, what can be more painful than this? The twins, who in beauty are like the twin Aswins among the celestials, are asleep like ordinary mortals on the bare ground."

And out of that, standing in the dark with a wet cloth in his hands, he began to reason about families, which is not a thing anyone expects of Bhima.

"He who has no jealous and evil-minded relatives lives happily in this world, like a single tree in a village. The tree that stands alone in a village, with its leaves and its fruits, becomes sacred from the absence of any other of its kind, and is worshipped and venerated by all.

"And they who have many relatives, who are however all heroic and virtuous, live happily in the world without sorrow of any kind. Themselves powerful, growing in prosperity, always gladdening their friends, they live depending on each other, like tall trees growing in the same forest."

The two good ways to live: alone, or among your own. He set them out carefully, one and then the other, and then he said what he and his family had instead.

"We, however, have been forced into exile by the wicked Dhritarashtra and his sons, having escaped with difficulty, from sheer good fortune, a fiery death. Having escaped from that fire, we are now resting in the shade of this tree. Having already suffered so much, where now are we to go?"

And then the grief turned, as it always turned in him, and came out the other side as something with a name and an address.

"Ye sons of Dhritarashtra of little foresight. Ye wicked fellows. Enjoy your temporary success. The gods are certainly auspicious to you."

He was speaking to men who were days behind him and asleep in their own beds, and he was speaking to them out loud, over the bodies of his own family, in a forest with no living soul in it.

"But ye wicked wretches, ye are alive yet only because Yudhishthira does not command me to take your lives. Else this very day, filled with wrath, I would send you, O Duryodhana, to the regions of Yama, with your children and your friends and your brothers, and Karna, and Sakuni the son of Suvala."

Then the whole of it broke against the one wall it could never get over, and he said it himself, in the same breath, and it is the most important sentence Bhima ever speaks.

"But what can I do? For, ye sinful wretches, the virtuous king Yudhishthira, the eldest of the Pandavas, is not yet angry with you."

Having said this, Bhima of the mighty arms, fired with wrath, began to squeeze his palms together, sighing deeply in his affliction. He could have gone back that night. He knew the road; the town would have been asleep; there was not a man in Hastinapura who could have stood in front of him in that state, and he could have finished the entire war before it started, in one night, thirteen years and eighteen days of slaughter reduced to a single walk in the dark.

And he was not permitted, and nobody was awake to stop him, and he did not go.

Excited again with wrath, like an extinguished fire blazing up all on a sudden, Vrikodara once more looked at his brothers sleeping on the ground like ordinary persons sleeping in trustfulness.

That word is the one that puts the fire out. Trustfulness. They had lain down in a wood full of beasts, without food, without water, without a watch set, and slept as soundly as children, because Bhima had gone to find water and Bhima was coming back. Nobody had asked him to keep watch. Nobody had thought about it at all. They had simply gone to sleep in the certainty that whatever came out of that forest would have to go through him first, and were correct.

And Bhima said to himself, quite calmly, three ordinary things.

"I think there is some town not far off from this forest. These are all asleep, so I will sit awake. And this will slake their thirst after they rise refreshed from sleep."

A guess about the country. A decision about the night. A note about the water in the cloth, which he set down where it would keep, so that it would be there in the morning when they woke and were thirsty.

Saying this, Bhima sat there awake, keeping watch over his sleeping mother and his sleeping brothers, until it was light.

That is the whole of the episode, O Janamejaya. No enemy came. No rakshasa was killed, no boast was made good, nothing was gained and nothing was lost between that hour and the dawn. A man who could have ended the Kuru line before sunrise fetched water instead, and then sat down beside the people who had not asked him to, and stayed awake.

Everything anyone needs to know about Bhima was settled in that hour, and none of the men who feared him for the rest of his life ever heard about it.