The Boon Bought With a Head

Word of what had happened in the forest reached Sindhu before Jayadratha did, and it did not arrive gently.

Draupadi had been carried off from the hermitage at Kamyaka while the Pandavas hunted at a distance, and Bhima had run him down on the road and beaten him to the edge of death for it; every rider between the two kingdoms already knew that much. What the courier from the Pandava camp brought to Sindhu was the part that stung worse. Yudhishthira, moved by Draupadi's own plea to spare her sister-in-law's husband, had let Jayadratha live, but he had not let him leave whole. Before the assembled ranks of his own soldiers, the lord of Sindhu had been shaved to five tufts of hair, the mark a defeated man wears when someone else has decided his life is worth keeping and his pride is not.

Duryodhana heard it and said nothing for a long while, which those who knew him understood to be worse than shouting. Dussala, his sister and Jayadratha's queen, wept where no one could see her do it, then stopped weeping and asked instead where her husband had gone, since he had not come home.

He had not gone home. The road to Sindhu ran west along the rivers, and Jayadratha's escort had watched him leave it at the fork, taking instead the track that followed the Ganga down toward the sea. He sent no word ahead. A man returning to his own capital with his head shaved bare would have to enter through his own gates and be seen by his own people twice over, once as he arrived, and every day after in memory. Jayadratha chose not to be seen at all until he was something other than what the Pandavas had made him.

Where the Ganga widened toward the sea, Jayadratha stopped and did not go further.

He built no palace of penance, asked no priest to guide him. He stood in the current with his arms raised until his arms would not hold themselves up any longer, then he built fires along the bank and stood between them under the full weight of the sun, and when even that stopped feeling like enough, he ate less, then almost nothing, until the flesh he had worn as a king began to fall away from him like something borrowed and returned. Kings did not usually do this. Kings sent brahmanas to pray, and kept their own strength for the throne. But strength was exactly the thing Bhima had proven, in front of witnesses, that Jayadratha did not have, and no army he could raise from Sindhu would undo what one afternoon in the forest had shown to be true.

Months went by this way, then longer. Word of it traveled the way word always does, from a merchant to a boatman to a hermit to another hermit, until it was known up and down the Ganga that the king of Sindhu was burning himself down to nothing on the riverbank, and that he meant to keep doing it until someone answered.

Someone did. The heat that rises from a penance carried far enough eventually reaches the one being addressed, whether he is named aloud or not, and Jayadratha had not stopped naming him. Mahadeva, he said, into the fire and into the water and into the empty air between them, over and over, until the saying of the name and the pain of the penance became the same act, and there was nothing left in him that was not that one word.

Shiva came as he had been asked to come, without ornament, without warning, simply present on the riverbank as though he had always been standing there and Jayadratha had only now learned to see him. Ask, the god said, and it will be granted.

Jayadratha did not hesitate over what he wanted, because he had had a great many months to decide. Grant me the strength to defeat all five sons of Pandu in battle, he said. Let this humiliation end where it began, on a field, and let it end with me standing over all of them.

Shiva's answer came without cruelty but without room for argument either. That could not be given, not even by him. Arjuna carried Krishna beside him in every fight that mattered, and against Arjuna so accompanied no boon of strength would hold; four gods together could not overturn what those two had already been promised. The thing Jayadratha was asking for did not exist to be granted.

But something narrower did. Shiva offered it plainly, the way a debt is offered in place of a gift too large to give: for one single day, and one day only, Jayadratha would be able to hold back the other four Pandavas, Yudhishthira and Bhima and Nakula and Sahadeva, all at once if it came to that, and none of them together would be able to force their way past him. Arjuna was excluded by name from the very shape of the boon, since it was Arjuna the boon existed to work around.

Jayadratha took it. A man who has been shamed once does not haggle long over the size of his revenge, and one day, used correctly, was still a day no one else on either side of the war to come would ever be given. He rose from the river with the boon folded into him like a coin swallowed rather than spent, and for the first time since the forest, he turned his face toward Sindhu.

Jayadratha ruled Sindhu for years after that with the boon inside him and told almost no one it was there.

Dussala noticed, in the way a wife notices what a husband does not say. He was not a cruel king in those years, nor a foolish one; if anything he governed more carefully than before, a man who has been humbled once and does not care to arrange the circumstances of a second humbling. But there was a stillness in him that had not been there before the forest and the river, a patience that did not look like patience so much as waiting. He did not ask after the Pandavas' fortunes with the hunger of a man nursing an old grudge for its own sake. He asked the way a creditor asks after a debtor, checking that the debt is still owed and the debtor still solvent enough to pay it.

When word came of the exile ending and the great war gathering, Jayadratha brought his own forces to Duryodhana's side as any allied king was bound to, and if his brother-in-law noticed anything unusual in how readily he came, he did not remark on it. Dussala alone understood, without being told outright, that her husband had not spent thirteen years waiting to be useful in a war. He had been waiting for one day inside that war, a day Shiva had promised him and no one else knew was owed, and he intended to know it the moment it arrived so that he would not waste on the wrong morning what he had bought with a shaved head and a burned body on the Ganga's bank.

The day came on the thirteenth of the war, when Drona set the Kaurava host into the coiling formation of the chakravyuha and only Arjuna's son Abhimanyu, among the Pandava side, knew how to break into its heart, though not how to break back out again. Yudhishthira sent him in anyway, promising that the rest of the army would follow close behind and clear a path back out before the formation closed again.

That was the promise Jayadratha had been kept alive to break.

He took his place at the mouth of the wheel formation with his own chariots drawn across it, and when Yudhishthira and Bhima and Nakula and Sahadeva came on together to force the gap open behind Abhimanyu, they found a wall where no wall should have held. Four of the finest warriors on the field, pushing as one, could not move Jayadratha aside, not for an hour, not for the whole length of that afternoon, and every part of them that knew war understood something was wrong even before any of them knew why. He was not the swordsman Bhima was or the archer Arjuna was. On any other day four of them together would have gone through him in minutes.

But this was the day, the single day, the one Shiva had folded into him on the riverbank years before, and he had carried it since like a coal kept alive under ash, waiting for exactly this morning to open his hand and let it burn. What happened to Abhimanyu inside the wheel belongs to its own telling. What matters here is only that the four Pandavas who might have reached him in time never got past the man at the gate, and that the boon, spent at last on the one day it was made for, did more damage in those few hours than the humiliation that had bought it had ever managed to inflict.