The Mortal Who Sat on Indra's Throne

Shalya of Madra had set out for Upaplavya with an army raised for his sister's sons, and he arrived instead in Duryodhana's tent. The road had done it. At every halt there was a rest house newly built, tanks of cool water, garlands, singers, meat and wine set out as though a god were expected, until the old king, warmed and flattered past his caution, called for the host to come and take whatever he wished as a gift. The man who stepped forward was not Yudhishthira.

So he came to the Pandava camp to say it himself, and he said it standing, without softening it. "I am your uncle by blood and his by my own word," he told Yudhishthira. "I will ride in his line. Ask me for what is left."

"There is one thing," Yudhishthira said. "When the hour comes, Karna will want a charioteer worthy of him, and he will ask for you, and Duryodhana will not refuse him. On that day praise Arjuna in his hearing. Speak coldly to him when he is highest in his own mind. Take the fire out of him with words."

"That is a hard thing to ask of a guest," Shalya said, "and I will do it."

Then he looked at Yudhishthira's face for a while and did not like what he found there. "You have the look of a man counting what he is about to lose," he said. "Sit down. There is an old story that belongs to men who are about to win, and you had better have it now, before the winning."

"Indra killed Vritra," Shalya began, "and you know how that was done and what came after it." The sin of that killing rose behind the lord of the gods like a shadow with a will of its own, and he ran from it. He made himself small, smaller than a seed, smaller than a thought, and slipped into the fibre of a lotus stalk in the lake called Manasa, and lay hidden there in cold water while the flowers moved above him. In Amaravati the white halls stood open and the throne at the centre of them stood empty, and there was no king in heaven.

An empty throne is not a quiet thing. Without a king in heaven the rains came late and then not at all, the rivers ran thin, the seasons wandered out of their order, and on earth the fires of sacrifice burned without anyone on the other side to receive what was offered. The danavas, who count such things carefully, began to come up out of their places and look around. The gods and the great rishis went together to Brahma and stood before him and asked for a king.

"Then choose one," Brahma said. "Choose the man whose merit is highest, and let his own austerities hold up the sky."

They did not have to argue long. There was a king on earth named Nahusha, son of Ayu, of the line that would come down through his son Yayati to the Bharatas themselves. He had performed a hundred sacrifices. He had ruled so evenly that men in his country had forgotten what a bad judgement felt like. The sages themselves named him, and messengers went down to the earth and told him what heaven wanted.

Nahusha was not eager. "Indra is alive somewhere," he said. "He will come back, and the gods and the danavas and the rishis are all stronger than I am. How shall a man hold that seat?"

So they gave him what he asked for. "Whomever you look upon with anger," the gods promised, "be he god or danava or rakshasa or rishi, his strength will leave him and pass into you while your eyes are on him." It was meant as armour. It was the first stone taken out of the wall.

They brought him to Amaravati and set him on the throne, and for a time he was what he had always been. He heard cases. He honoured the sages. He kept the old habits of a careful man in a place where no habit was necessary. Then heaven began, patiently, to work on him.

It took less than a year. Heaven does not argue with a man; it simply agrees with him about everything, and waits.

There were gardens that flowered whichever way he walked, and rivers of nectar, and the apsaras with their music, and the whole company of the gandharvas standing ready before he had finished wanting them. He learned to be carried. He learned to be praised at length and to hear nothing strange in it. Then he began to think that the offerings poured into the fires below were poured for him personally, and from there it was a short step to laying his hand on the sages. He took shares of their sacrifices as a levy. He set them tasks. Men who had bent to nothing in a thousand years of penance found themselves standing in a corridor waiting to be called.

And then he saw Shachi, the daughter of Puloman, who was Indra's queen, and everything in him that had been a king on earth went out like a lamp.

"I have his throne," Nahusha said. "I have his gardens, his elephant, his cup and his crown. Whoever is Indra has Indra's wife. Bring her."

The gods stood in front of him and tried words. She is another man's wife, they said. It is not done. The husband lives.

"Your own king," Nahusha said, "was not always so nice about other men's wives, and you did not lecture him. Bring her, or I will look at you until you have nothing left to bring her with."

They went away. Shachi fled to Brihaspati, the teacher of the gods, and he sheltered her in his house and would not give her up, and Nahusha raged at his door and the sky over Amaravati went the colour of old bronze. In one year the most just man on earth had become a thing the gods stepped around.

There is a moment in these stories when the trap is not sprung by strength, because no strength is left, and it is sprung by patience instead.

Brihaspati counselled delay, and Shachi went out by night with a goddess of omens to guide her, Upashruti, who walks where prayers go and knows where everything hidden is kept. They crossed the mountains and came at last to the Manasa lake, cold and unbroken under the stars, and Upashruti pointed at a lotus stem standing in the shallows. Shachi knelt in the water. Inside the fibre lay the lord of the gods, thin as a thread, wearing his exile the way a beaten man wears a blanket.

"He has your throne," she said, "and now he asks for me, and the gods bring him his answer like servants."

"Do not refuse him," Indra said. "A refusal only tells him he is powerful. Agree, and then ask for something. He has been given more than he can carry and he will want to show you all of it. Ask him for a vehicle no god has ever ridden. Tell him that Indra came to you on the great elephant and on the wind, and that you will not be less honoured than you were. Tell him to be carried to your door in a palanquin, and that the bearers must be the brahmarshis themselves, the seers, the men who hold up the world with their vows. He will not hear a trap in it. He will hear a compliment."

Shachi went back and stood before Nahusha with her eyes down and asked for exactly that, and asked for a little time as well, and the new king of heaven laughed like a boy given a horse. Not one of the gods around him said a word. They had all seen what he had become, and they had all learned to wait, and they knew that a man who cannot be refused will build his own scaffold if you hand him the wood.

So the sages were yoked. They came at his summons because he could take their strength with a look, and the great seers of the three worlds put their shoulders under the poles of a palanquin and lifted a man off the floor of heaven and carried him toward another man's wife.

He was not a heavy weight. He was an impatient one. He wanted to arrive. He leaned out and told them to go faster, and they went as fast as old men carrying a king can go, and it was not fast enough for him.

At the forward pole walked Agastya, small, ancient, the sage who had drunk an ocean once and thought little of it. He set his pace and kept it. Nahusha put out his foot and pushed at the sage's head and shoulder as a driver pushes at a slow bullock, and cried, "Sarpa, sarpa!" - move, move, get on.

Agastya stopped, and the palanquin stopped with him, and heaven was very quiet.

"That word has two meanings," Agastya said, "and you have chosen the second one with your own mouth. You said serpent. Be a serpent. Go down."

He went down. He fell out of the sky he had never earned, and where he struck the forest there was a snake of enormous length lying in the leaves with a king's memory inside it. Even then he begged, and Agastya, who cursed like a sage and not like an enemy, told him that one day a man of his own house would come through that forest and answer his questions and set him free. The lotus stalk in the Manasa lake opened, and Indra came out of it thin and shivering and went home.

"The throne did that," Shalya said. "Not a demon and not a war. The throne found the flaw in the best man on earth and made it big enough to see from below. You are about to win a kingdom, son of Kunti. Remember what heaven did to Nahusha in one year."

Yudhishthira looked into the fire a long while. "I have met him," he said. "In the forest a python took Bhima in its coils, and I answered its questions, and it went away a man."