The Song of Manki

Bhishma lay on his bed of arrows with the two armies seated around him in the dust, and Yudhishthira, having asked about the duties of kings and the duties of calamity, asked at last about the final thing: the moksha-dharma, the dharma of liberation, the road a man walks when he is finished with getting.

"Then hear the song of Manki," said Bhishma. "He was no sage. He was no king. He was a man who failed at everything he put his hand to, and he is remembered for the manner of his last failure."

Manki was born poor in a poor district, and he had the one quality that keeps a poor man poor the longest, which is not laziness but hope. He tried trade, and the caravan he had bought a share in was taken on the road. He tried land, and the rains failed him two years together, and in the third year they came so hard that the field went into the river. He took service with a wealthy man and was dismissed in the second season for a fault that belonged to somebody else. He married, and his wife's people ate what was left.

"Watch him closely," said Bhishma, "because he is every man in this camp. He was not bitter. Bitterness is at least a kind of knowledge. Manki explained. It had been a bad year. It had been a bad partner. The road was unsafe that season. Next time the thing would hold. Each disaster he wrapped in a reason and set down, and walked on lighter for the wrapping, and reached out for the next thing with the same open hand.

"And at the end of it he had a very little left, scraped together out of the wreck of a whole life. So he did what such men do. He put all of it into one hope. He went down to the market and bought two bull-calves."

They were fine animals, and Manki loved them the moment the rope was in his hand. He gave them names. He fed them better than he fed himself, and he lay awake at night arranging the future they were going to build for him: break them to the yoke this season, hire them out for the ploughing, buy a cart with the ploughing money, then a second cart, then a house with a wall around it, then the quiet old age of a man who has finally got something to stand on.

To train a pair of young bullocks you couple them. You run a rope from the neck of one to the neck of the other so that they learn to keep step, to turn together, to pull as a single animal. Manki knotted his rope at first light and took them out along the village road.

A little beyond the last house a camel lay resting at the roadside, one of the tall pack camels of the desert traders, folded down at the knees with its long neck stretched out flat along the ground in the way that camels sleep.

The calves, young and sidling and shy of the smell, went by it one on the right and one on the left.

The rope between them came down across the camel's throat.

Then the camel woke.

It rose the way a camel rises, hindquarters first, hauling that neck up off the ground in one great ugly heave, and the rope ran up the throat and caught fast under the jaw, and the beast discovered that it was wearing two struggling bull-calves like a garland. It did the only thing that terror knows how to do. It ran.

Manki ran after it. He ran shouting the names he had given them that morning. The camel went up the road and then off the road and out across the open ground toward the horizon at that long swinging gallop, and on either side of its neck, rising and falling, swinging out and swinging in, went everything that Manki had earned in forty years.

They went over the rise. The dust closed behind them. The sound stopped.

Manki stood in the road for a while with his mouth open. Then he sat down in the middle of it, in the dust, and began to laugh.

It began as the noise grief makes when it has been surprised, and then it turned into laughing in earnest. Men came out from the village and stood around him, and one of them said to another that the poor fellow's mind had gone. It had gone, but not in the direction they supposed.

"Consider the arrangement," Manki said to them, when he could speak. "Only consider it. Fire would have been enough. Thieves would have been enough. A sickness in the herd, a bad season, any of the ordinary ruins. But no. For me it required a camel."

And then he stopped talking to the villagers.

For forty years he had said bad luck, and had meant by it that the world had merely slipped, and would presently be persuaded to hand over what was owed. This morning the world had not slipped. It had answered him, plainly and at some trouble to itself, in a form that no man could go on mishearing. It had taken his last hope and hung it around the neck of a camel and sent it over the hill in front of his eyes.

"I have been asking the world for a thing that the world does not keep in stock," he said. "I did not ask it for a kingdom. I asked it for enough. And it has been telling me for forty years, in every language it has, that enough is not a quantity of anything. It is not four bullocks instead of two. There is no number of carts at the end of which a man stops wanting a cart."

He looked at the frayed end of the rope he was still holding, which had parted somewhere out on the plain, and he lifted it up like a man holding up evidence in a court.

"So it is not the calves," he said. "It was never the calves. I know your name."

And there in the road, in the dust, with the villagers watching him, Manki began to speak to desire as though it were a person standing in front of him.

"Kama," he said, "desire. I know your root at last. I have hunted you all my life in things, in the caravan and the field and the two calves, and you were never once inside any of them. You are not in the object. You are born of resolve. You live in the thought that one more thing, only one more, and then I shall be whole. Kill the thought and you are dead, and no thing on earth can raise you.

"Hope is the great fever. It is the sickness that feels like health. A man in hope is never in the hour he is standing in; he is out ahead, in a season that has not come, spending money he has not got, being thanked by people who have not yet met him. He eats and does not taste it, because he is thinking of a better meal. He sleeps and does not rest, because he is arranging tomorrow behind his eyes. This morning I was shown what a rope tied between two hopes does to the man who is holding the end of it.

"I renounce you. Not by getting you satisfied, for that is feeding you, and you grow with the feeding as a fire grows with the fuel. I shall starve you instead. I shall stop asking. I shall stop explaining my failures, which was only my way of keeping you alive.

"Hear the thing I have learned, all of you standing there. What the man of desire chases, the man without desire walks past. The same road, the same hour, the same field lying beside it. One of them is running and does not arrive; the other is walking and is already there.

"And this. The man who has dropped desire sleeps richer than the man who owns the world, because the owner of the world lies awake guarding it and adding to it and grieving over the corner of it he has not got yet, while the other man has laid the whole burden down and has nothing left to guard. That contentment is a wealth that cannot be carried off by thieves, or by kinsmen, or by camels."

Then he got up out of the dust with nothing at all and went home; and that night, for the first night in forty years, Manki slept without an arrangement for the morning.

Bhishma let the silence sit for a moment on the field.

"Now you will tell me that this does not touch you," he said, "because Manki was a greedy man and you are not. You never wanted the wealth, Yudhishthira. You have said so at every hour since the fire took your kin. You want your sons back, and Abhimanyu, and Karna alive and named as your brother in time for it to matter. That is a purer wanting, you think, and therefore a different animal.

"It is the same animal. It has only turned around. Desire is the demand that a thing should come. Grief is the demand that a thing should come back. Both of them are a man standing in the road refusing the hour he is in because he has a better one in his head. You are not mourning, child. You are bargaining, and the party you are bargaining with is a road with dust settling on it.

"Understand what you are doing. You are Manki running after the camel. Your kingdom is the camel. It has your whole hope hung about its neck and it is going where it is going, and your running is not shortening the distance by the width of a finger; it is only using up the last of your breath.

"Sit down in the road. Laugh if you can, and if you cannot laugh then at least stop running. Then look at what is actually in your hands, which is a torn rope and a living city full of people who have nobody else.

"Manki was ruined and became rich in an afternoon, and nothing came into his possession while it happened. Only something went out. That going out is the whole of the moksha-dharma, and every teaching I shall give you after this is a commentary upon it."

Yudhishthira sat with his hands on his knees for a long time. Then he said, "The trouble, grandfather, is that I can see it is true, and I am still holding the rope."

"Yes," said Bhishma. "Seeing is not letting go. But no man has ever let go of anything he could not see. Keep looking."