The Ape on the Banner

Years before the armies gathered at Kurukshetra, on the pine-scented slopes of Gandhamadana, Bhima had gone searching for a flower for Draupadi and found his path blocked by an old monkey who would not move his tail from the road. The monkey had been Hanuman, elder son of the wind, and before he let Bhima pass he had made a promise: when Bhima roared like a lion in the enemy's ranks, he would add his own roar to it, seated on Arjuna's flagstaff, and his roars would rob their enemies of their lives.

That day had come. When the armies were drawn up on the first morning of the war, the standard was raised over Arjuna's chariot, the tall banner the divine artisans had made, bearing the ape, and the ape upon it let out a terrible roar. Soldiers on both sides looked up at it, and could not tell whether what they saw was a painted device or a living thing.

'Brother,' Bhima said, looking across the field toward his brother's chariot, 'you have not forgotten us.'

Arjuna heard the roar above his head and glanced up at the banner-pole, as if a mountain had decided to travel with him into battle.

'An old friend of your brother's,' Krishna said, smiling without turning around. 'Let him roar. Keep your mind on your bow.'

Around them the war-conches sounded, one after another down the long lines, and eighteen days of ruin began. But from that first note, the ape-banner of Arjuna's chariot carried something more than cloth and gold. It carried a promise made on a mountain, now walking onto a battlefield to be kept.

Again and again in that war, often before Arjuna's arrows had begun to fly, a roar broke from the top of his chariot-banner that no soldier standing before it ever forgot. It was not the cry of a man, nor quite of a beast; tradition says it was the same roar Hanuman had once given on the shore of the ocean before he leaped for Lanka, a sound that had emptied forests then and now emptied ranks of an army before a single arrow had struck anyone at all.

Warriors who had stood unflinching against maces and axes felt something in their chests fail when that roar came. Horses reared and would not be driven forward. Elephants, trained through years of war-drill, turned and crashed back into their own lines. Chariot-fighters famous through half of Bharata found their hands shaking on the reins, unable to say why.

Arjuna noticed the pattern before he understood it. Again and again some enemy champion who should have met him with skill and nerve instead broke early, loosed a wild shot, or turned his chariot half around before the fight had properly begun. 'They are afraid of me,' he said once to Krishna, not quite believing his own words.

'They are afraid of what rides above you,' Krishna answered. 'You have only to finish what the roar begins.'

Day after day it went this way: the cry from the banner-top, and only after it the falling away of an enemy's nerve, and only after that Arjuna's bow doing its ordinary, terrible work. Bhima, fighting his own bloody road through the Kaurava ranks, could hear that roar above the din, and knew each time that his brother's banner was answering him, as it had been promised on the mountain. No one but Krishna, and perhaps Hanuman himself, understood how much of the eighteen days had been decided this way, invisibly, before the fighting properly began.

There was a second labor no one on either side of the field could see, and it was not the ape's.

Through eighteen days, celestial weapons were loosed at Arjuna's chariot that no chariot built by human hands could have survived. Drona, who had taught Arjuna himself, turned divine weapons on it, and Karna in his fury did the same, and the brahmastras of those two great warriors struck the car and burned into it, one clause of a duel far larger than the one being openly fought (karna_vadha). By every law of wood and iron it should have fallen to pieces then and there. It did not so much as splinter.

Krishna alone knew why. He sat where he always sat, the reins in his hands, and said nothing about it, and Arjuna, absorbed in his own fighting, rarely noticed that the blows which should have broken the car beneath him never finished their work.

'How is it still standing?' Arjuna asked once, mid-battle, staring at the chariot's undamaged wheel after a strike that should have shattered it to splinters.

'Do not ask now,' Krishna said. 'Fight.'

What Arjuna could not see was that the chariot had already been burnt through by those weapons, and that it held together for one reason only: Krishna was seated on it. It was not a warrior's work, glorious and visible, the kind sung about in victory. It was closer to a mountain absorbing a flood: patient, silent, thanklessly necessary, and utterly without reward. Through eighteen days he gave the war nothing anyone could point to and call heroism, and everything that let Arjuna's bow continue at all, day after day, without once failing.

When the last of the fighting on the eighteenth day had ended and Duryodhana lay with his thighs broken, the Pandavas drove to his camp. It stood empty of its lord, like a city with the life gone out of it, with only women, eunuchs and old counsellors left in it. There the great chariot-warriors drew up and began to descend from their cars.

'Take down Gandiva,' Krishna told Arjuna, 'and your two quivers that are never empty. Get down first. I will come down after you. It is for your own good.'

Arjuna, exhausted past questioning, took down his bow and quivers and climbed down, though he could see no reason for the order. Only then did Krishna let fall the reins of the horses and step down, unhurried, from the chariot they had ridden together for eighteen days.

Krishna said nothing more. He stood a little apart and looked at the chariot, and waited.

For a moment nothing happened, and Arjuna, glancing back, saw only the familiar shape of his own war-worn car, the ape on its banner faded with dust and blood. Then the chariot seemed to change, the way stone changes at evening when the heat lifts off it, as if whatever had been holding it together all this time had only now let go.

'What have you done?' Arjuna asked, though some part of him had already begun to understand what he was seeing.

Krishna did not answer directly. 'Watch,' he said.

Then the celestial ape on the banner-staff, which had roared above so many days of that war, was simply no longer there. It had vanished, the way a promise vanishes once it has been kept.

In the same moment the chariot, which had carried Arjuna unbroken through eighteen days of the fiercest weapons two worlds could produce, blazed up though no one could see any fire, and burned to ashes where it stood, yoke and harness and shaft and all, as if struck by every one of those blows at once and only now, released, allowed itself to fall.

The sons of Pandu stared at it in wonder. Arjuna joined his hands and bowed to Krishna. 'Govinda,' he said, 'why has the chariot burned? What is this wonder? If you think I should hear it, tell me.'

'It was burned long ago,' Krishna said, 'by many kinds of weapons, by the brahmastras of Drona and Karna. It did not fall to pieces in the battle only because I was seated on it. Now that you have done what you set out to do, I have left it.' And he smiled a little, with some pride.

Then he embraced Yudhishthira and told him that the promise he had made at Upaplavya, to protect Arjuna in every danger, had been kept. Yudhishthira's hair stood on end. 'Who but you,' he said, 'or Indra himself with the thunderbolt, could have withstood the brahmastras of Drona and Karna?'

The chariot's ash settled slowly over the ground. What had looked, for eighteen days, like the ordinary survival of one very fortunate warrior was revealed, in the single moment of its ending, to have been grace all along: the ape's roar that everyone had heard, and the quiet presence on the chariot that almost no one had thought to wonder about, known at last only by what gave way the instant it withdrew.