The Cloud's Gift

The camp at Kurukshetra had grown quiet with evening, and the small fires of the Pandava host were being lit one by one across the plain when Yudhishthira came again to sit at Bhishma's side. He had spent the day among petitioners, farmers and widows and men who had lost everything in the war, and more than one of them had asked him, with the particular bitterness of the desperate, why the gods let a good man's prayers go unanswered while a wicked man prospered without asking for anything at all. He put the question to his grandfather plainly. Does devotion ever go answered, he asked, in a shape the devotee cannot recognize as an answer at all?

Bhishma's laugh, when it came, was faint and dry, more breath than sound, but Yudhishthira had learned by now to listen for it, since it meant a story was coming that Bhishma found, in some private way, quietly amusing. Nearly every prayer is answered in a shape its owner cannot recognize, he said. That is very often the whole of the joke hidden inside devotion. Let me tell you of a poor man who prayed to a cloud, and of the cloud spirit who heard him, a being named Kundadhara, and of the strange thing that passed between them, which neither the man nor, for a long while, the man's neighbors, understood to be wealth at all. It is, I think, my favorite kind of story, for it turns out to have no villain in it whatsoever, only a spirit who cared for a man enough to ask for him something other than what he asked.

There lived, in a certain province, a brahmana of no fortune at all, who owned a single field too thin to feed him through every season and a house with more gaps in its thatch than thatch. He was, by every account that survives him, an honest and gentle man, quick to share what little he had and slow to complain of what he lacked, and it was this very evenness of temper that made his poverty seem, to those who knew him, a kind of standing injustice.

He had worshipped the gods long and devoutly and got no riches from them, and so he had taken to worshiping a follower of the gods named Kundadhara, a spirit in the form of a rain cloud whom no man had worshipped before, reasoning that such a one might be pleased quickly, and also because the clouds passed low and close over his field each monsoon and he had grown, in the long hours of watching them for signs of rain, into something like a friendship with the shapes they made. He offered incense and fragrances and the best garlands he could find, and many other offerings, and he spoke to them, half in jest and half in earnest, as a man speaks to a neighbor he sees every day.

His prayer, when he finally worked up the courage to make it plain instead of leaving it implied in his daily offerings, was simple and unashamed. Grant me wealth, he said one evening, kneeling in his doorway as the clouds gathered dark over the western hills. Not for pride's sake, spirit, but because I wish to perform the sacrifices that dharma asks of me, and a poor man cannot. He made this prayer with such devotion that the cloud was pleased with him before long, and that devotion was, though he did not know it, the part of his worship that traveled furthest.

Kundadhara was, among the ranks of nature's minor powers, not a being of great authority. He could gather himself into rain and rest himself into stillness, and this office he performed faithfully across a hundred provinces, but he had no granary of gold hidden behind the clouds, no treasury from which to draw a poor man's fortune, whatever poets liked to imagine of spirits who lived in the sky.

A good man's unbroken devotion, however, is not a small thing even to a minor power, and Kundadhara found himself unable to simply let the prayer pass unanswered. That night, as the brahmana lay on a bed of kusha grass, the cloud's energy entered him and he saw in a dream the court of the gods, where the radiant Manibhadra stood among them giving orders, and kingdoms and riches were granted to men for good deeds and taken away for bad ones. And there, in the midst of the yakshas, he saw Kundadhara lay himself flat on the ground before the gods, asking that some favour be shown to a man he had come, in his slow cloud-patient way, to think of as something more than a supplicant.

The answer came quickly, and it was generous. Rise, Kundadhara, Manibhadra told him at the command of the gods. Your suit has succeeded. Whatever riches this friend of yours desires, I will give him, untold wealth if he wants it.

But Kundadhara, thinking how fickle the hearts of men are, did something that changed the shape of his errand entirely. I do not ask wealth for him, he said, not mountains of gems, not the whole earth with its riches. Let him follow dharma. Let him delight in dharma. Let dharma be the foremost thing in his life. Manibhadra reminded him that the fruits of dharma are kingdoms and happiness, but Kundadhara asked again and again for dharma alone, and the gods, well pleased, granted it. It took courage to give a man something other than what he had asked for.

The poor man woke the next morning to find many fine cloths scattered around his sleeping mat, and found that he did not care for them in the least. Beyond the cloths there was no chest of gold, no sudden softness in the thatch roof he had cursed through every monsoon, no difference at all that he could see in the thin grey light of his single room. What he felt, rather than saw, took him the better part of the day to notice and the better part of a week to understand.

Where he had once thought first, on waking, of the field's yield and the debts still owed on it, he found himself thinking instead of a small act of restraint he might practice that day, a fast half-kept the week before that he now wished to keep in full, a truth he had once bent slightly in the marketplace that now sat in him like a stone he wanted out. He did not choose this shift in appetite any more than a man chooses to be hungry. He simply woke, morning after morning, wanting merit the way he had once wanted gold, with the same steady, uncomplicated hunger.

Yet one thought stung him still. If the one I worshipped sets no value on my good deeds, he said to himself, who else will? I had better go to the forest and live by dharma. His neighbors, watching him leave, decided among themselves that poverty had finally turned his mind, and some pitied him for it while others laughed behind their hands. He let them laugh, and in the forest he took up one austerity after another. He fasted when he had once merely gone hungry from want, and found the fasting had a different taste entirely. He gave away the little he had left over, and found that the giving, unlike every gift he had ever received, never once left him poorer than before.

He lived on the fruits and roots left over after serving gods and guests, then on leaves alone, then on water, then for many years on air, and his strength did not fail. After a long time he gained divine sight, and with it a power that made him smile: if he were pleased with any man and wished to give him riches, or even a kingdom, his word would make it so. He had grown wealthy in a coin no drought could touch and no thief could carry off.

Then Kundadhara showed himself to him again, and told him to turn his divine sight on the ends that kings come to. The brahmana looked, and saw thousands of kings sunk in hell, and men everywhere bound by desire, anger, greed, fear, pride, sleep and sloth. Had you worshipped me faithfully and gained only the misery these men carry, the cloud asked, what favour would I have done you?

Seeing this, the brahmana bowed to the cloud and asked pardon for having served him out of desire and greed. Kundadhara forgave him, embraced him and vanished, and the brahmana roamed through all the worlds by the power of his austerities. His boon had never once been touched by flood, fraud, war, or the turning of a market, because it was not the kind of wealth that could be carried off, and it had gone on quietly compounding, as such wealth does, across every year of practice that added to the year before it.

Bhishma stopped there, and Yudhishthira, waiting for the moral he assumed must follow, found that his grandfather seemed content to let the story simply sit. Do you see the joke in it, Bhishma asked finally. He prayed with his whole heart for wealth, and never once took a single coin of it. And yet I do not think, if you asked him at the end of his life, that he would call his prayer unanswered. Some gifts arrive wearing the shape of a refusal, Yudhishthira, and a man who has not learned to look twice at what he is given will spend his whole life resenting the cloud that loved him enough to give him something better than what he asked for.