Charvaka the False Brahmin

The war was won and it had emptied the winner. Yudhishthira came to Hastinapura at the head of a procession, with the blind old king and Gandhari in the first chariot as he had insisted, and the citizens came out to see the Pandavas enter the capital that was finally, ruinously theirs. But the man they cheered rode through the gates like a mourner at his own triumph. Ninety days of slaughter hung on him: Bhishma, Drona, Karna his own brother, Abhimanyu, the boys of Draupadi, the uncounted dead of eighteen armies. He had already tried once to renounce the crown and walk to the forest, and had been argued back by every voice he honored. He entered his city obedient to duty and sick at heart, which is to say: defenseless.

At the palace gates the Brahmins of the city came forward by the thousand to bless the new king, as was the immemorial custom, filling the courtyard with the sound of benediction, praise, and Vedic recitation. It was the world saying to Yudhishthira the thing he could not say to himself: the war was dharma's, the throne is yours, be at peace. The king stood folded-handed in that sea of consecration, and for a moment the weight on him seemed to shift.

Then one Brahmin stepped out ahead of all the others and raised his staff, and his voice carried across the courtyard and silenced it.

"These Brahmins have appointed me their voice," he cried, "and this is their word: shame on you, Yudhishthira. You are a kin-slayer. You have butchered your elders, your teachers, your cousins, your friends, and you have climbed over their bodies to a throne. What is this kingship worth, won by the extermination of your own blood? Your gurus lie unburned in your memory and you accept garlands. It would be better for you to die than to reign." And to the crowd: "We curse this king!"

He was called Charvaka. He wore the robes, the topknot, the staff of a renunciate, and he had waited years for this exact morning.

The words went into Yudhishthira like a spear into an open wound, because they were his own words, the ones he said to himself before dawn. He bowed his head before the whole assembly. "The Brahmin speaks the truth," he said, so quietly men strained to hear. "I am what he says. What use is this kingdom to me, what use is this body? Favor me, all of you, and let me end it." The new-crowned king of the world stood at his own gates asking permission to die, and his brothers were frozen, and for the length of a breath the fraud had won.

Then the courtyard erupted, and it was the Brahmins themselves who erupted. "We never said this!" they cried, pressing forward in fury. "He does not speak for us! No one appointed him!" And their collective sight, sharpened by austerity, tore the disguise off the figure with the staff: this was no Brahmin. This was Charvaka, a rakshasa, an old and intimate friend of Duryodhana, who had practiced austerities in a former age and won from Brahma a boon of safety from all beings, with one exception: he would be destroyed in the moment he showed contempt to Brahmins. Disguised in a renunciate's robes, he had come to do for his dead friend the one thing armies had failed to do - break Yudhishthira - and to do it he had put words of contempt in the mouths of the very beings his boon forbade him to insult.

The real Brahmins did not reach for weapons; they were the weapon. Together, in one voice, the thousands of them uttered the syllable of their anger, the sound "hum," charged with the whole accumulated fire of their austerity. The sound crossed the courtyard like heat crossing a threshold, and Charvaka the rakshasa burned where he stood, without torch or flame, and fell in a small heap of ash at the feet of the crowd he had impersonated, like a tree struck by lightning to the root. His boon was fulfilled to the letter: he had shown contempt to Brahmins, and it had cost him precisely everything.

Into the stunned silence Krishna spoke, explaining to the shaking king what had just been unmasked: the old friendship with Duryodhana, the boon, the long-planned revenge aimed not at Yudhishthira's body but at his broken heart. "The Brahmins of this city bless you, king," Krishna said. "The curse was one demon's, and it is ash. Grieve for the dead; do not let the enemy's last soldier, despair, take the city the living died to give you. Rise and rule."

And Yudhishthira, who had bent under one false voice, was held up by ten thousand true ones. He was enthroned with full rites, honored the Brahmins, and took up the burden of the world he had won. The war's last casualty had been intended to be the king's will to live; instead it was a rakshasa in a stolen robe, and the reign of dharma began at the price of one heap of ash on the palace steps.