The King Who Atoned

The great war was over, and the plain of Kurukshetra had gone quiet in a way that was worse than noise. Bhishma still lay on the bed of arrows that Arjuna had made for him, waiting for the sun to turn northward, and every day the sons of Pandu came and sat in the dust beside him and asked their questions.

Yudhishthira sat nearest. He had won the earth and could not bring himself to look at it. "Grandsire," he said, "men come to me with garlands and call me king. I have killed my teacher. I have killed the sons of my father's brother, and a brother I did not know was my brother, and boys who had no beard yet. At night I hear the women in the camp. Tell me plainly, and do not comfort me. Is there any water anywhere in the world that washes such a stain out of a man, or must he carry it with him into the fire?"

Bhishma's eyes moved slowly toward him. "You have asked a good question badly," he said. "You want me to tell you that you are innocent. I cannot, and if I could it would do you no good. But there is a thing better than innocence, and it has a name: prayaschitta, the making of amends. A man who does not know he has sinned is past helping, for he has nothing in his hands to work with. A man who knows and hides it is worse off still, because the thing feeds in the dark. But a man who owns what he has done and repents it has already turned his face the other way. The road from there is long. It has an end."

"Has anyone walked it?" Yudhishthira asked.

"One of our own house," said Bhishma. "There was a king of the Kurus in days of old called Janamejaya, the son of Parikshit - not the child who will one day carry those names in your line, but a king of our house long before us, when an older Parikshit had sat on the throne. Listen."

He was, for a while, a good king. He kept the borders, he kept the fires, he fed brahmanas at his gate and heard the cases of poor men without making them wait a second day. The bards had begun to make songs about him.

Then came the moment, and the old tellers never trouble to make it large, because such moments never are. Through some heedless act of the king's, a brahmana died. The tellers do not even record what the act was; they say only that he did it without judgment, not knowing what he did.

He had not meant to kill. That was the whole of it, and it changed nothing, because a brahmana was dead by a kshatriya's hand, and the sin of brahmahatya does not ask what was intended.

It came upon him the way the tellers describe it, as a shape that walks behind a man and is not there when he turns. His own priest set down the ladle in the middle of a rite and walked out of the fire-house without speaking. The offerings would not take. The ghee sat on the flame and refused to burn. His counsellors found reasons to be in other provinces. His kinsmen sent word that they were ill. And then the people, who had loved him, began to go: first the households near the palace, then the market streets, then whole quarters, until the city stood with its doors open and its lamps unlit and nobody in it but a king.

He rode out of his own capital in the morning. Wherever he went the story had arrived before him. Gates that had been opened to him for years closed while he was still in sight of them. He would say, "I am Janamejaya of the Kurus," and the name that had once been a passport was now only another way of saying: go somewhere else.

He wandered a long while, thin, sun-blackened, sleeping where cattle slept. At last, in the course of his wanderings, he came to Indrota, the son of Shunaka, a sage of rigid vows, sitting among his disciples.

Janamejaya walked in among them and put his forehead on the sage's feet.

Indrota stood up as though something unclean had touched him. "Away," he said. "Do not lay a hand on me. Why have you come here? What do you want with us? I know your name and I know your act. You have done a great sin, like one who kills a child in the womb."

The disciples sat still. Kings had burned hermitages for less.

"You were born of a line that has held the earth," the sage said, and his voice went through the clearing like a whip drawn slowly. "You have burnt that birth to ash. Your ancestors turn their faces from the water you offer. The gods do not eat what you cook. What is your umbrella worth now, and your chariots, and your drums? There is a smell of blood on you. You walk about like a corpse that has not yet been told it is dead. Do you imagine you may come here and stand in the smoke a while and go home clean? Take yourself where no righteous man has to see you. Even the deer will not drink downstream of you. Go."

He stopped. The fire snapped. Everyone in the clearing waited to see the king remember that he was a king.

Janamejaya did not rise. He stayed in the dust with his hands together.

"Every word is true," he said, "and you have said less than the truth, because you did not see his face and I did. I have no defence. I did not intend it - and I have learned what that is worth, and it is worth nothing, since the man is equally dead either way. I did not come here to be told I am innocent. I came because I am guilty and I have carried it from one end of this country to the other and I cannot carry it any further. I do not ask for my kingdom. I do not ask for heaven. I ask whether there is a way for a man like me to be made clean. If there is not, say so, and I will go and lie down somewhere quiet and be finished."

Indrota looked at him for a long time, and the anger went out of his face the way heat goes out of iron.

"Rise," he said. "You have put away your arrogance and your pride, and so I will be your friend, though the whole world will blame me for it. Repentance has already begun its work in you. Now hear the work, for it is work and not a word.

"Repent what you did, and a quarter of it falls from you. Resolve never to do it again, and a second quarter falls. Hold to dharma from now on, and a third falls. Go to the sacred waters, Kurukshetra and Prithudaka on the Sarasvati, Pushkara and Prabhasa, and bathe there. Put off the ornaments and the umbrella. Live rough, eat once a day, sleep on the ground, and keep the austerities I set you for their full term without shortening them by a day. Give: land, cattle, gold, grain, to brahmanas and to the hungry - not to buy pardon, for pardon is not sold, but because you owe the world more than you took from it. Roam the earth and win back the brahmanas you wronged. Then go back and rule. Guard the weak. Hear the cases yourself. And swear to me now that you will never again injure a brahmana, in word or thought or deed. A king's expiation is the safety of his subjects.

"And when all that is done, loose the horse. Perform the ashvamedha, and I will stand as your priest."

He did all of it, and it took years.

He went to the sacred waters and bathed in them, and roamed the earth seeking out the brahmanas he had wronged. He kept the austerities. He gave away herds, and wells, and whole villages of revenue, and when the granaries were opened in a bad season he stood at the door himself and counted out grain until his arms shook. Slowly, one by one, the brahmanas he had wronged were won back.

At last Indrota, as he had promised, performed the horse sacrifice for him with all the prescribed rites. On the day of the sacrifice the ground was full: kings, brahmanas, herdsmen. Indrota stood by the fire as priest.

Janamejaya stood before them with nothing hidden. Every man there knew what he had done, and knew too that he had sworn at the sage's feet never again to injure a brahmana in word or thought or deed.

Then the fire was lit, and it took the offering, and it burned clean and upward. When the rite was finished the thing that had walked behind him for so many years was not behind him any more. He entered his kingdom again shining like a fire, like the full moon rising, and he never again harmed a brahmana.

On the field of Kurukshetra, Bhishma stopped speaking.

"You asked for water," he said. "There is no water. There is only the whole of the rest of a life, offered up."

Yudhishthira was quiet for a while. "Then what is my horse sacrifice, grandsire?"

"Rule," said Bhishma. "Feed people. Hear the cases yourself, and hear the ones you will not enjoy hearing. And when the poets come to ask what happened on this field, tell them the truth, and do not make yourself smaller in it than you were."

Yudhishthira lifted his head. What came into his face was not comfort. It was the look of a man who has been given something to do.