The Ghosha Yatra

News came to Hastinapura, in the Pandavas' eleventh year of exile, that the brothers were living by the lake at Dvaitavana - thin, bark-clad, eating forest fare, the emperor of the Rajasuya now sleeping on grass. The spies told it plainly, and the telling went round the court like a sweet passed hand to hand.

To Duryodhana the news was wine, but wine at a distance. "What is the use of their misery," he asked his circle frankly, "if I cannot see it? Prosperity is only half-sweet until the man who envies you has watched you enjoy it. I want Draupadi to see my queens in their silks. I want Yudhishthira to receive me as a forest householder receives a sovereign. Until then their fall is a rumor, and a rumor warms no one."

He leaned forward in the lamplight, and the old hunger was on him. He had won the dice. He had won the kingdom. He had even won the eleven years of forest that lay between him and the war he could not see coming. And still he was not satisfied, because satisfaction for Duryodhana was never a thing he possessed; it was a thing he had to watch another man lose. "They are starving within a few days' ride of my chariots," he said. "And I sit here and only hear of it. That is no victory. That is patience pretending to be victory."

Karna heard it and understood it at once, for Karna nursed his own old wound and knew how the thing worked - how a slight could not be paid off with gold, only with the sight of the slighter brought low. Shakuni heard it and smiled his thin smile, because for Shakuni every grievance was simply raw material. Between the two of them they would find a way to take the prince to the forest wearing the face of duty, so that even the blind king could not forbid it.

It was Karna who found the respectable shape for the desire, and Shakuni who polished it. The royal cattle stations - the ghoshas - lay scattered through the very forests where the Pandavas wandered. Thousands of the crown's cows grazed near Dvaitavana, tended by cowherds who paid their tax in milk and calves. And was it not the plain, dull, unglamorous duty of the crown to inspect those herds, to count the calves born that season, to brand the three-year-olds and mark the breeding stock? Kings had ridden out on such tours since kings began. Who could object to a ghosha-yatra, a simple cattle expedition?

"You will go to look at cows," Shakuni said, spreading his hands as though the innocence of it pained him. "It is written in no law that a man on his way to count his cattle must close his eyes if he happens to pass his cousins. If the road bends toward the lake, the road bends. You did not bend it."

Karna took up the thread. "And there is sport in those woods - deer, boar, the hunt your heart has been starved of in the city. Take the ladies; let them see the wild country. Take the musicians. Let it be a festival of the herds. No one can say a word against a man who goes to do his duty to his own cattle."

Duryodhana laughed for the pure pleasure of it. The thing was perfect: a cruelty wrapped in a chore, an insult he could carry into the forest under the banner of administration. He would arrive at the edge of his cousins' poverty draped in everything they had lost, and if Yudhishthira's dharma forbade him to complain, so much the better. He would not even have to speak the insult. He would only have to be seen.

The plan needed the king's leave, and that was the one wall in its path. So Karna and Duryodhana went together to Dhritarashtra and spoke only of cows. The herds, they said, were untended and the counts were old; a king's son should go and see to the crown's wealth with his own eyes; it had been too long since the cattle stations had felt the weight of royal attention.

Dhritarashtra was blind, but he had been blind a long time, and a man who cannot see learns to hear what is under a voice. He smelled the truth beneath the cattle at once. "Those forests hold the Pandavas as well as the herds," he said slowly. "The cattle can wait. The Pandavas in adversity are more dangerous than they ever were in power, my son. A man who has lost everything has nothing left to be cautious for. And Bhima's memory is long - longer than yours, and he has not forgiven a single one of the hundred things you have done to him. Count the cattle if you must. But go nowhere near your cousins. Send a herdsman; stay in the city."

"It is only cattle, father," Duryodhana said, and Karna echoed it, and the lie was smooth because half of it was true. The herdsmen, they explained, had themselves begged that the prince come, for the counts could not be settled without royal authority; this was the cowherds' wish, not the prince's whim. Even Sanjaya, who knew the prince, added a word that the journey was no more than it claimed.

So the old king, weary and outargued and never able for long to refuse the son he both feared and loved, gave way. "Go, then," he said. "But if you find your cousins, give them no cause. Remember that you go to look at cows." Duryodhana bowed and promised, and went out already composing in his mind the procession that would crush his cousins' hearts.

So the expedition went out in a splendor never before wasted on cattle. It was no herdsman's errand; it was a court on the march. Thousands of chariots rolled out of Hastinapura with their banners snapping. The court ladies rode in covered carriages hung with bells, their maids and their wardrobes behind them. Musicians came, and dancers, and cooks, and wine in great sealed jars. Hunting cheetahs strained at their leashes. Eight thousand soldiers walked in the dust of it all, more an army than an escort, and behind the army came merchants and players and all the loud followers a prince's pleasure draws after it.

They reached the cattle stations and the show of duty was performed with care, for the pretext had to be honored before it could be abandoned. The cows were gathered in their thousands and counted; the calves of the season were tallied; the three-year-olds were thrown and branded; the herdsmen made their reports and received their orders. For some days Duryodhana played the diligent prince of the herds, riding among the lowing cattle, watching the branding-irons heat, and growing more bored and more eager with each hour, because none of it was the thing he had come for.

The cows were only the door. Beyond the cattle stations, perhaps a half day's easy ride, lay the lake of Dvaitavana, blue and broad, ringed with flowering trees - and on its far shore, in their bark and their hunger, the five brothers and their queen. Duryodhana had counted enough calves. "The hunting is better toward the water," someone said, exactly on cue. "And the camp would be pleasanter by the lake." The whole gaudy procession turned its face toward Dvaitavana, toward the one shore in all the world the prince most wished to be seen upon.

But the lake, when the Kaurava vanguard reached it, was already taken.

Chitrasena, king of the Gandharvas - the celestial musicians and warriors of Indra's heaven, beings of music and illusion and weapons of light - had come down out of the sky with his host and his harems to sport in those very waters. The shore was hung with their pavilions; the air above the lake shimmered with their presence; their songs drifted across the water. And when the prince's servants came to clear the ground for the royal camp, the Gandharva guards turned them back from the shore with the bland, unbothered insolence of beings who do not consider the kings of the earth to be persons of any importance.

The servants returned to Duryodhana with the refusal, and a worse thing they could not have brought him. He had ridden all this way precisely to enjoy rank, to be the highest creature on that shore; and here, on the spot, was someone who outranked him and did not even trouble to be rude about it. "Clear the lake," he ordered, and the words came out tight. "I am the heir of Hastinapura, lord of these forests and these waters. Tell the sky-people to take their singing somewhere else. This shore is the camp of the Kuru prince."

The soldiers carried the command to the Gandharvas. The Gandharvas laughed. They sent the soldiers back to say that the lord of these waters was Chitrasena, friend of Indra, and that the affairs of the Kurus were of no interest to the residents of heaven; the prince might camp where he pleased so long as it was elsewhere. The laughter, when it was reported, did to Duryodhana what laughter always did. He sent his army to the shore.

For one bright hour the fight even went well. The Kaurava host came down to the water in good order, eight thousand strong, chariots and elephants and the prince at their head, and they drove the first ranks of the Gandharvas back from the shore. Arrows flew. Trumpets brayed. Duryodhana, for all his faults, was no coward in a fight, and he led from the front with Karna at his side, and the men cheered, and for a little while it looked as though the heir of Hastinapura would have his shore after all.

Then Chitrasena rose from the water in earnest, annoyed now, and the air itself joined his army. This was no human battle of iron against iron; this was Gandharva war, which is illusion and music and weapons of light. The sky filled with shapes. Single Gandharvas became a hundred and the hundred became a thousand; arrows came from nowhere and from everywhere; the ground heaved with sorceries that made men strike at phantoms and turn their swords on the empty air. The Kaurava host, that great gaudy army, broke like a clay pot dropped on stone.

Karna fought. Karna of all of them fought longest and best, the great archer holding a corner of the ruin together by main force, until the Gandharvas cut his chariot to pieces beneath him - horses, axle, wheels, charioteer, all of it shattered under the rain of light - and Karna, the unconquerable Karna, climbed onto another man's chariot and fled the field, a thing the court poets were ever afterward forbidden to remember. Shakuni ran. The captains ran. The eight thousand, what was left of them, threw down their banners and ran into the trees, and behind them the lake-shore that the prince had come to seize was a field of broken chariots and crying men.

Duryodhana would not run, and one must give the man his due. While his army dissolved around him and his friend's chariot lay in splinters and his uncle was already a speck among the trees, the prince stood his ground and fought on, surrounded, alone in the middle of his own rout, hurling threats and arrows at an enemy made of light. There was a kind of terrible greatness in it, the same stubbornness that would one day hold the whole field of Kurukshetra together out of sheer refusal to bend.

It did him no good at all. The Gandharvas simply took him, as one takes a tired and struggling child. They closed around him, wrapped him in cords of light that no strength of arm could break, lifted him bodily out of his chariot, and threw him down in a celestial car. They were thorough about it. They gathered up his brothers too, the sons of Dhritarashtra who had fought beside him, binding each in the same shining cords. And then, for good measure and for the deeper humiliation, they took the royal ladies - the queens and the women of the court who had come to flaunt their silks at Draupadi - and bound them and set them weeping in the chariots beside their captured lord.

Then the Gandharvas rose into the air with their prize. Up they went above the flowering trees of Dvaitavana, the heir of Hastinapura dangling in their grip, still shrieking threats at the empty sky, his queens wailing around him, his brothers bound at his side, the whole gaudy expedition that had set out to display its glory to beggars now carried off like plunder over the very forest where those beggars lived. The cattle-tour had become a captivity, and it had happened in plain view of the one hermitage the prince had crossed the kingdom to impress.

The remnant of the Kaurava army did the only thing left to it. The captains and ministers who had run from the lake, finding no help in the empty forest and no way to follow their king into the sky, turned at last toward the one place in all that country where there was power enough to do something - and it was the place they least wished to go. They ran weeping to the hermitage of the very men their prince had come to mock, and they fell down at Yudhishthira's feet.

"Save our king," they cried. "Save the sons of Dhritarashtra. The Gandharvas have come down upon us at the lake; they have broken the army; they have taken Duryodhana and all his brothers, and worse - they have carried off the royal ladies into the sky. There is none but you. You alone in these forests have the strength. Save them, lord, or they are lost."

It was a strange tableau, and not lost on any who saw it: the proud servants of the proud prince, who had ridden out to gloat at exiles, now in the dust before those exiles, begging. The brothers were at their daily tasks - the fire tended, the forest food laid out - and they heard the whole story in the suppliants' broken voices: the pretext of the cattle, the march of the army, the lake, the Gandharvas, the cords of light, the queens carried weeping into the air. They heard who had been taken, and why he had come, and what he had meant to do with the day if it had gone as he planned. And then they looked to their eldest brother, to see what Yudhishthira would say.

Bhima laughed until he had to sit down.

"Saved!" he roared. "The Gandharvas have saved us the work. What I swore to do with this mace, the sky-people have done with a song, and for free. Let them keep him, brother. Let Duryodhana be a slave in heaven a while - he made our wife a slave in a hall once and laughed to see it. Let him learn the cords from the inside. This is the best day of all the exile. Someone bring fruit; I want to enjoy it."

"Bhima." Yudhishthira's voice had the tone that ended discussions. "Listen to me, all of you. Among ourselves, we are five and they are a hundred, and there is a quarrel between us that is real and will not be wished away. But this is not among ourselves. When an outsider lifts a hand against the family, we are not five against a hundred. We are a hundred and five, and the quarrel waits. He came here to gloat - yes. That is a sin, and it sits on his head and not on ours. But the women of our house are being carried weeping into the sky while we stand here arguing, and the man bound in those cords, fool though he is, is the son of our father's brother. There is no argument left after that word. He is our blood. Go, both of you, and free them."

Bhima's grin faded, for he knew that tone and knew it could not be moved. Yudhishthira softened only a little. "Ask politely first - the Gandharvas are friends of heaven, not our enemies. Beg the release as a favor between kinsmen of the upper and lower worlds. But if courtesy fails," he said, and here the king of dharma allowed himself one small dry word, "then fail to be courteous. Bring them home." So Bhima and Arjuna and the twins took up the weapons of their exile and went out to make war for Duryodhana.

The four brothers came to the field below the lake and found the Gandharvas still in the air with their captives. Mindful of his eldest brother's word, Arjuna first sent up a courteous request: let the sky-people release the Kuru prince and his women out of regard for the friendship between the worlds; this was the wish of Yudhishthira, the son of Dharma. The Gandharvas declined. They had their orders too, they said, and the prince was theirs.

So courtesy gave way, as courtesy had been told it might. The battle that followed was brief and extraordinary, and it was strangest of all for Arjuna, who found himself drawing the Gandiva against Chitrasena, a friend he knew well from the courts of heaven, weapons of light answering the great bow shaft for shaft. The Gandharvas loosed their illusions and Arjuna unmade them; they multiplied themselves and he found the true forms among the false; they rose and circled and rained their light down, and he met it all and drove them back. Bhima broke their lines with his mace; the twins held the flanks. The host of heaven, that had scattered eight thousand men like a clay pot, found itself bound and netted in a cage of arrows it could not break.

And then Chitrasena, seeing how the thing was going and who his opponent was, set aside his weapons and revealed himself, laughing, and called the whole battle off. "Enough, Partha. Did you not know? Indra sent us. Your father in heaven heard what this fool was riding out to do to you - to flaunt his silks at your queen and his comfort at your hunger - and thought a leash and a lesson were owed him. We were going to deliver him to your brother trussed like a festival goat in any case. You have only spared us the trip." And so the captives came down out of the sky.

They brought Duryodhana, unbound now, his queens and his brothers restored to him, and set him before Yudhishthira; and the eldest Pandava committed the gentlest cruelty of his life. He reproached his cousin not at all. There was not one word of triumph in him, not one glance toward the day at the dice. He rose and embraced the man who had ruined him, asked after his bruises, told him plainly and even kindly, "Never do so rash a thing again, brother. These sky-people are touchy, and you went among them too proudly." And he sent him home with full honor, his women and his brothers about him, as one sends off an honored guest.

It was more than Duryodhana could carry. Released by the charity of the men he had crossed the kingdom to laugh at, rescued before the eyes of his own weeping queens by the arms of Bhima and Arjuna while his friend Karna lay somewhere down the road in the wreck of his chariot - he rode a little way toward Hastinapura, then dismounted, sat down on the bare earth, and would not go on. "I will fast here until I die," he told his appalled brothers. "There is no skin thick enough to wear back into that city. To be a prisoner is one thing; to be set free by the hands of those beggars, before my own wives - I cannot be looked at. Dushasana, take the crown. I am finished. Let me starve here on the road."

It took all of them to raise him from that roadside. Dushasana wept and begged; the brothers pleaded; and it was Karna, returned at last from his broken chariot and his shameful flight, who found the words. "What is this fast, king of men? A prisoner taken is a prisoner exchanged; kings are captured and kings go free again, and the wheel turns. Only women keep such accounts. Stand up. The kingdom is yours and the Pandavas have nothing - and while you sit here dying over a rescue, you let them be the ones who showed mercy. Is that the gift you want to give them?" Shakuni added his silken arguments to it, and - the old tellers say darkly - in the deep of that night an embassy of Danavas, demons who had their own dark stake in the prince's survival, rose up to summon him back to his purpose with promises and flatteries. Between the friend, the uncle, and the demons of the night, Duryodhana was talked up off the ground at last. But something had finished curing in him there by the road, and it never softened again.

He went home and would not rest until he had answered the day. He scraped together a great sacrifice of his own, a counterfeit of Yudhishthira's Rajasuya, and gave away mountains of gold to any throat that would call him emperor, buying with treasure the standing the Gandharvas had stripped from him.

And there is the bitter heart of the thing, the irony the whole episode was built to show. Duryodhana had ridden out to teach his cousins what it was to be helpless. Instead his cousins had taught him what it was to be saved. The cords of light had left no mark on his wrists; the gratitude did, and it festered. Yudhishthira had done only what dharma demanded - had defended his blood without a thought for the wrong that blood had done him - and for his trouble he had earned not a brother's thanks but a deeper, more permanent hatred. For of all the injuries Duryodhana ever hoarded, men said afterward, the deadliest was the kindness. A proud man can forgive his enemy almost anything. He cannot forgive being saved by him.