The Night Among the Danavas

The expedition had gone out to count cattle and to be seen counting them within sight of the exiles' huts; it ended with the Kaurava prince a prisoner of the gandharvas and freed at Arjuna's hand on Yudhishthira's order, and that is a story told in its own place.

What remained was the road home. The army marched, and its commander did not. Duryodhana walked a stage behind his own banner with his eyes on the ground, and at the edge of Dvaitavana, where the sal trees give way to open country, he stopped walking altogether.

They pitched a camp for him because he would not go on. He sat under an awning and would not eat, and would not speak to the officers who came to report, and looked out at the forest he had entered as a spectator and left as a rescued man.

"I cannot go into Hastinapura," he said at last, to no one in particular. "Consider what waits there. My father will be told, and my father will be relieved, and he will not be able to keep it out of his face. Bhishma will say nothing, which is worse. Drona will look at Arjuna's name in the report and be glad. The women of the household will say among themselves that the man who came to laugh at the exiles was carried past them in ropes and handed back like a lost child."

Dushasana knelt beside him and said the kingdom needed him. Duryodhana did not seem to hear it.

"I have eaten from a hand I hate," he said. "There is no washing that off. A man may lose a battle. A man cannot be given his life by his enemy and then go on being a king in front of him."

That night he asked for kusha grass to be brought, and the servants brought it without understanding, and he spread it himself on the bare ground, facing east.

He sat down upon the grass in the vow of one who will neither rise nor eat again, and touched water, and said the words aloud so that they could not be unsaid.

"Dushasana, the crown is yours. Rule with Karna and with our uncle. I am finished. Say over me that I did not survive on charity."

Dushasana began to weep and could not stop. "I will not take it. If you sit here I will sit beside you. Do you think there is a kingdom for me on the other side of your body?"

Karna came and stood over him and spoke in the voice he used before battle. "Get up. What was done to you was done by gandharvas, not men, and what Arjuna did he did because Yudhishthira told him that the Kauravas' shame is the family's shame. Weigh that as a kinsman's duty and it is worth nothing. This is not grief; it is the sulk of a man who has never been beaten and has not learned the trick of it. Rise, and I will bring you the earth. Kings who have never sent you tribute will send it. Then let anyone remember a rope in the forest."

Shakuni, who never raised his voice, crouched down and put it plainly. "Nephew, use your head, which is the only weapon in this camp that has never failed. You won everything at the dice and you have kept it. They are in the forest eating what they can find, for twelve years and one more. And your plan for this is to starve so that Yudhishthira may say for the rest of his life that he gave you your death as well as your life? Live, and take the gift back from him. A dead man cannot repay anything."

"I have decided," said Duryodhana, and closed his eyes, and would answer nothing further.

So the three of them sat down around him in the dark, and the camp fires burned low, and the news of it began to travel where none of them could follow.

Under the earth, in the halls of the daityas and danavas, the news arrived the way weather arrives.

They were the old defeated: the gods' enemies, beaten out of heaven in an age before this one, waiting through the long patience of the netherworld for a hand in the upper world that would do their work for them. They had one. They had watched him for years, and now their hand was sitting on kusha grass proposing to stop existing.

"If he dies," they said, "the whole design dies with him. There is no second Duryodhana. Bring him to us."

They kindled a fire in a place where no rain falls, and brahmanas of their own kind, versed in the mantras of summoning, fed it and chanted through the watches of the night. Butter went into the flames and the flames stood up straight without wind. Out of the fire, when the chant reached its height, rose a kritya, a woman shaped thing of terrible aspect, made of the rite itself and belonging to no world.

"Go up," they told her. "Bring the son of Dhritarashtra down alive, and do not be seen."

She went up through rock and root and river bed, and came into the camp at the hour when even the sentries' eyes slide shut. The fires were embers. Karna slept sitting. Shakuni had gone to his tent at last. Dushasana lay across his brother's feet like a dog.

None of them saw her. She took Duryodhana up out of his vow, body and all, without waking him, and the grass where he had been sat undisturbed, and she carried him down the way she had come.

He opened his eyes in a light the colour of old copper, in a hall whose ceiling he could not find, and the air smelled of iron and of flowers left too long in water.

The hall was full. Thousands of them stood up as he was set down, and they did not look at him the way men look at a king. They looked at him the way owners look at a thing long promised and finally delivered.

"Welcome, hero of the danavas," said their spokesman. "You have been strange to yourself all your life. Learn what you are. You were not born as other men are born. We stood in the fire and did austerities without end, and the boon we asked for was you. The upper half of your body was wrought of the substance of the thunderbolt, so that no weapon in the hands of gods or men can bite it. The lower half the goddess made of flowers, and that is why you are beautiful, and that is your only softness."

"Then I am not to be a suicide," said Duryodhana slowly.

"You are not permitted to be. Listen. The great ones you fear will not oppose you as you fear. Spirits of our kind will enter into Bhishma, into Drona, into Kripa and the rest, and where there was affection there will be a stone. They will fight for you against the sons of Pandu with all their skill and none of their mercy, and afterward they will not be able to explain to themselves why. Karna carries the soul of an old destroyer of ours. Warriors are being born even now out of our sacrifices who will take a vow to kill Arjuna or die, and they will be counted in thousands. Kings who were asuras in that lost age are already crowned in this one and will bring their armies to your banner. Nothing waits for you but victory. Go back and take your food."

And the whole hall roared his name, the sound rolling under the roots of the world, and for the first time since the ropes came off his arms Duryodhana felt the weight lift off his chest and something warm move in under it.

The kritya carried him back before light and set him on his grass, and went down again, and the ashes of the rite were cold before the sun came.

He woke with the taste of that hall still in his mouth. Karna was there, and Dushasana, and Shakuni watching him with an expert's eyes.

"A strange night," Duryodhana said, and laughed a little, and rubbed his face. "A starving man dreams. I was taken under the earth and told I was the answer to somebody's prayers."

But he stood up as he said it. He asked for water, and then for food, and he ate, and the vow was over without anyone needing to argue him out of it. Karna embraced him and swore on the spot that he would ride out and bring the kings of the four directions under his friend's feet, and that campaign has its own telling.

The change was not in the fasting. It was in what had replaced it. Before that night Duryodhana had been a man with a grievance, and a grievance can be settled, argued down, outgrown. He came back from the danavas with a doctrine. He was no longer a prince who wanted his cousins' land; he was an instrument, made of thunderbolt above and flowers below, whose enemies were scheduled to lose, whose elders would be emptied out and used, and to whom the ordinary questions therefore did not apply.

Everything after this becomes easier for him. Krishna's embassy, the last offer of five villages, the counsel of Bhishma and Vidura and his own mother: he hears them all with the patience of a man who already knows the ending and is waiting politely for others to catch up.

He was still saying it at the end, lying broken beside the lake with his thighs shattered, telling the sky that he had lived as a kshatriya and lost nothing that mattered.

He had been offered the truth about himself that night on the grass, and he had traded it for a prophecy, because pride will take a prophecy from any mouth that offers one.