Nala and Damayanti

In the early months of the exile, while the wound of the dice game was still raw, Yudhishthira sat in the Kamyaka forest eating the bread of self-reproach. The fire had burned low, and his brothers slept fitfully on beds of leaves, far from the silk and lamplight of Indraprastha that they had lost in a single night.

"Look at what I have done," he said to the sage Brihadashva, who had come to the Pandava camp on his wanderings. "I have gambled away a kingdom, beggared my brothers, and dragged my wife into the wilderness. The board was crooked, the dice were Shakuni's, and yet it was my hand that threw them. Is there, in all the long history of kings, a man more wretched than I am? Tell me truthfully, holy one, for I think there is not."

The old sage settled himself comfortably by the fire, in the manner of physicians who carry their medicine in story form. He had heard such grief before, and he knew that a king will not be argued out of his despair - he must be carried out of it.

"There was one," he said at last. "A king who lost everything you lost, and more. For you, at least, kept your brothers and your wife beside you in your fall. He lost his kingdom to the dice exactly as you did - but he lost it alone, and worse, he abandoned the wife who refused to abandon him, leaving her sleeping in a forest darker than this one. And yet he won everything back: kingdom, wife, name, children, and peace. His name was Nala, king of Nishadha."

Yudhishthira lifted his head. "Then tell me his story, Brihadashva. If a man fell further than I have fallen and rose again, I would hear how it was done."

"Listen, then," said the sage, "and learn that the dice are not the end of any story. They are only its ugliest chapter." Draupadi and the brothers, half-waking, drew close, for the Pandavas had learned that the sages' tales were never idle - each was a mirror angled at their own lives.

Nala of Nishadha (the sage began) was everything a king should be: beautiful as the god of love, truthful in word, generous in gift, master of horses beyond any man alive, learned in the Vedas - and skilled, too skilled, with the dice, which in those days was the sport of kings and not yet their ruin.

Far to the south, in Kundinapura of the Vidarbha country, ruled King Bhima - not the Pandava, but a different Bhima of an older age - and his daughter Damayanti was the wonder of the world. Her beauty was such that bards sang of her in courts a thousand leagues away, and she was Nala's equal in everything except the dice, which she never once touched. Slender and bright, she walked among her handmaidens like the moon among stars.

They came to love one another before they ever met, in the oldest way of all: by report and longing. In the courtiers' talk Nala heard endless praise of Damayanti, and in her father's halls Damayanti heard endless praise of Nala, until each carried in the heart an image of the other, and grew restless and far away.

One day Nala, wandering in his pleasure garden, caught a golden swan, a bird with wings of gold and a voice like a man's. "Spare me, king," the swan said, "and I will fly to Vidarbha and so praise you to Damayanti that she will desire no other husband in the world." Nala, marvelling, opened his hands.

True to its word, the flock of golden swans flew south and alighted in the gardens of Kundinapura. When Damayanti reached out for the lovely birds, the one she chased spoke to her: "Princess, in Nishadha there lives a king named Nala, beautiful as the twin Ashvins, before whom no man can stand for splendor. Were you to wed him, your beauty would not be wasted, for like alone is fit for like." And it praised Nala until Damayanti's heart was wholly given.

"Speak so to Nala of me," she whispered, and the swan flew back and did, so that two hearts, fed by one golden messenger, beat now for each other across half of Bharatavarsha.

Damayanti, pining and pale, would eat little and sleep less, and her maids told the king her father that his daughter's heart had flown north to Nishadha. Wise Bhima of Vidarbha proclaimed a swayamvara, that gathering where a princess garlands the husband of her own choosing, and he summoned every king and prince of the earth to Kundinapura.

The rumor of Damayanti's beauty had climbed higher than the courts of men. It reached the heaven of Indra, and four of the great guardians of the worlds desired her: Indra, lord of the gods; Agni, the fire; Varuna, master of the waters; and Yama, the keeper of the dead. Together these four descended to the earth to attend the choosing, and on the road they met Nala, journeying to the swayamvara, radiant with hope.

The gods stopped him. "Nala," they said, "you are renowned for truth. Be our messenger, and we will reward you." Before he understood the snare, Nala had given his word - and a king of his line did not break it, even to his own ruin. Then they told him their errand: he must go before Damayanti and persuade her to choose one of them, a god, in place of himself, a man.

Nala's heart broke, but his word held. By the gods' power he passed unseen through the guarded palace and stood before Damayanti. She started up in wonder at the sight of him, knowing him at once, and he, sick with what he had sworn to say, delivered his cruel embassy: "The four world-guardians ask for you. Choose one of them, princess, for what is a mortal man beside the gods?"

Damayanti heard him to the end. Then, calmly, she answered: "Bow to the gods, I will - but I have already chosen you, in my heart, before all of them. Come to the swayamvara among the kings. There, before gods and men, I will garland you, and no blame can touch you, for the choice is mine and not yours." Nala carried her answer back to the four guardians, and bowed, and waited, helpless, for the morning.

On the day of the swayamvara, the great hall of Kundinapura blazed with the assembled kings of the earth, each adorned and hopeful, each turning toward the door through which Damayanti would come. She entered with the garland in her hands, lovely past the telling, and her eyes moved along the rows of suitors searching for one face only - the face the swan had given her.

Then she stopped, and her heart turned cold. For where she had expected one Nala, there stood five. The four gods had each taken Nala's exact form: the same shoulders, the same grave eyes, the same gentle mouth. Five identical kings sat side by side, and any one of them might be the man she loved, or none.

Damayanti did not weep, and she did not guess. She prayed. "If it is true that I have served the truth, if my love for Nala is real and unwavering, let the gods who took his form now reveal themselves and let me know my lord." And to the four she said aloud, in a voice that shook but did not fail: "You are the guardians of the worlds. You would not wish your suppliant to be deceived. Show me, in your mercy, which of these is the mortal Nala."

The gods, moved by her steadfastness, let their true natures shine through. Damayanti looked, and now she saw what no god can ever counterfeit. Four of the figures cast no shadow on the bright floor. Their garlands did not wilt. Their eyes did not blink, and no dust clung to their unsweating bodies, and their feet hovered a hair's breadth above the ground. Only the fifth was flawed and dear: he blinked, he sweated, the dust of the road was on his feet, his garland had begun to fade, and beneath him lay a shadow.

With a glad cry Damayanti stepped forward and laid her garland upon the neck of the king who cast a shadow - the mortal, the true Nala. A murmur of awe ran through the hall, for she had chosen a man over four gods and had not been deceived.

The four world-guardians were not angered. They were delighted by Damayanti's faith and her discernment, for the gods love truth wherever they find it, and they had found it shining in this mortal girl. Each of the four came forward and granted Nala a boon as a wedding gift.

Indra promised that wherever Nala performed a sacrifice, the god himself would be present and visible to him. Agni granted that Nala might summon fire at his mere wish, and gave him worlds of light. Varuna gave him water wherever he desired it, and garlands of unfading fragrance. Yama, lord of righteousness, granted him an unfailing taste for justice and the highest skill in cooking, so that no man's hand at the fire would ever equal his. Then, blessing the pair, the four gods rose into the sky and returned to their heavens.

Nala and Damayanti were married with great rejoicing, and he carried her home to Nishadha, where they reigned in such happiness that the country bloomed under them. In time Damayanti bore him a son, Indrasena, and a daughter, Indrasena, twins as fair as their parents, and it seemed no shadow could ever reach so blessed a house.

But on that same road home, the four returning gods had met a fifth traveler going the other way - down, toward the world of men. It was Kali, the dark spirit of the losing age and of the gambler's dice, with the demon Dvapara following at his heel. Kali, too, had desired Damayanti, and he was journeying to the swayamvara, ignorant that it was already over. When Indra told him, laughing, that the girl had chosen a mortal over the gods themselves, Kali's face went black with fury.

"She has chosen a man over us," he hissed, "so that man will pay. I will enter into Nala, I will cast him from his kingdom, and I will part him from the wife he has stolen from me. Mark it, gods - he is mine." The guardians warned him of the sin he courted and passed on. But Kali turned south and went down into Nishadha to wait.

Kali could not touch Nala while the king walked in purity, and so for twelve long years the spirit lurked at the edges of his life, watching, hungry, finding no crack to enter by. Twelve years of perfect kingship: the granaries full, the gods honored, the people adoring, the twins growing tall, Damayanti glad at his side. Wherever Nala kept the rites unbroken, Kali could not come near him.

Then, one evening, the king performed his rites with a single small lapse - he touched water and prayed without first washing his feet, a trifling impurity, the kind any tired man might commit. But it was the crack the watcher had waited twelve years to find, and Kali poured into Nala like ink into clear water.

From that hour the king was no longer wholly himself. Kali went also to Nala's younger brother Pushkara and whispered in his ear: "Challenge your brother to dice. The spirit of the game is in him now; he cannot win and he cannot stop. Throw, and the kingdom is yours." Pushkara, greedy and emboldened, came before the king and challenged him to play.

Nala, the spirit riding his blood, could not refuse and could not rise from the board. He staked gold and lost it; staked his chariots, his elephants, his treasure, his lands, and lost them throw after throw, month after month, while his ministers stood at the door wringing their hands. They came to plead with him; he could not hear them. Damayanti came and stood before him; he could not see her. The citizens gathered weeping outside the palace, but the king played on, blind and deaf, his own hands no longer entirely his own, while everything he had built slid across the board into his brother's keeping.

Damayanti, watching her husband gamble away the world with eyes that did not see her, kept the one clear head in the palace. She understood that the kingdom was lost and that the end was near. So she did the single act of foresight that would save the dynasty: she summoned the faithful charioteer Varshneya, set her two small children in his chariot, and sent them away to her father's house in Vidarbha, beyond Kali's reach. The twins, at least, would be safe. Then she returned to her husband's side and would not leave it.

When there was nothing left of all Nala's wealth, Pushkara, grinning, leaned across the board and said: "One stake remains worth playing for. Stake Damayanti. Wager the queen, and let us throw for her."

And here, in the very pit of his fall, the possessed king found one fiber of himself that even Kali could not reach. Nala said nothing. He laid down the dice. He stripped the last ornaments from his body, took off his royal robes, and stood up from the board in a single unstitched cloth, a beggar where a king had sat. He would lose the kingdom, the gold, the throne, the very crown - but he would not wager his wife. Wordless, he turned and walked out of his own city.

Damayanti, in a single cloth of her own, followed him. At the gates Pushkara's heralds went through the streets proclaiming that whoever sheltered or fed the fallen Nala would themselves be put to death, so that no door in Nishadha opened to its rightful king. For three nights the two of them ate only water and slept beneath the open sky outside the walls of the city that had been theirs.

Yudhishthira, listening by the dying fire, had gone very still, for he heard in this the echo of his own dawn-cold morning at the dicing hall of Hastinapura.

Nala and Damayanti wandered into the great forest, hungry and ragged, and the spirit within the king worked at him without rest, gnawing at the last of his pride. In the forest Nala saw a flock of birds with feathers that gleamed like gold, and thinking to catch them for food, he flung his one cloth over them as a net. The birds rose into the air, carrying the cloth away with them, and circling above the naked king they cried down in human voices: "We are the dice, O fool. We have come to take from you even this last rag, for it grieved us that you walked away from the board still clothed." And they flew off, leaving him with nothing.

Now shamed past bearing, naked and starving, with Kali driving him toward despair, Nala turned to Damayanti and tried to send her away. "This road forks here," he said, pointing. "That way lies Vidarbha and your father's house, where there is warmth and food and your children. Go to them. Why should you share the curse that hunts me?"

But Damayanti would not go. Weeping, she divided her own single garment, and gave half to her husband to cover himself, and wrapped herself in the other half, and they walked on together, two halves of two ruined people, under the trees.

That night, exhausted, they lay down in an abandoned wayfarers' hut on the bare ground. Damayanti, worn past endurance, fell at once into a deep sleep. But Nala could not sleep, for Kali had whispered to him through the whole long day a single poisoned thought: she is bound to you and so she suffers; cut the bond and she is free; she will go home to comfort and to her children, and live, while you go on to your doom alone. The thought turned and turned in him until it wore the shape of love.

In the deepest part of the night, Nala rose. He looked down at Damayanti sleeping on the earth, her face calm at last, the half-garment wrapped about her, and he loved her so terribly that the spirit's lie seemed almost like mercy. He had no knife. So he found a fallen blade or a sharp edge in the hut, and with shaking hands he cut their one shared cloth in two: half he drew gently away to cover his own nakedness, and half he left wrapped around her sleeping body.

Then he walked a few steps into the dark, and came back, and looked at her, and walked away, and came back again, a dozen times, torn between the love that was his own and the spirit that was not. "How can I leave her," he said to himself, "asleep and alone in a forest full of beasts?" And then Kali turned his heart, and he answered himself: "How can I keep her, only to watch her starve at my side?" At last the possession won, and weeping aloud, hating himself, Nala fled into the forest and left his wife sleeping behind him.

Damayanti woke to an empty hut and a half a garment and a silence that told her everything before her mind would accept it. She ran from tree to tree calling his name, raging, pleading, cursing the spirit she could feel but not see. "Whatever creature has done this to my lord," she cried into the dark, "may it suffer a grief greater than mine."

Then began her long and terrible wandering. A python seized her in its coils, and a passing hunter cut her free - only to turn on her himself, so that she had to call down a curse that struck him dead. She joined a great caravan of merchants crossing the forest, and in the night a herd of wild elephants stampeded through the camp and trampled it, and the survivors, half-mad, blamed the strange ragged woman for the calamity and drove her off. Alone again, gaunt, half-clothed, she walked on, and her bearing was so plainly noble even in her ruin that when at last she reached the city of Chedi, the queen-mother took her in as a maidservant, never guessing she sheltered a queen.

Nala's road through the forest was stranger still. Deep among the trees he came upon a wildfire, and out of the heart of the flames a voice called to him by name. It was Karkotaka, king of serpents, trapped in a coil he could not break, bound there by a sage's curse until a man should carry him out. "Step in and bear me clear, O Nala," the serpent cried, "and I will repay you." Nala walked into the fire, lifted the serpent, and carried him to safety, counting his paces aloud - and at the tenth step, as the serpent had asked, Karkotaka bit him.

The venom ran through Nala, and his beautiful body shrank and twisted: his back hunched, his arms grew short, his face became coarse and strange, until no one in the world would know the king of Nishadha in this small misshapen man. "Do not grieve," said the serpent. "I have not harmed you - I have hidden you, and the venom torments Kali within you far more than it touches you. Wear this disguise and call yourself Bahuka. Go to the city of Ayodhya, in the Kosala country, and take service as a charioteer with King Rituparna, who is the master of the secret of dice and of numbers, the one knowledge that can undo your ruin. Trade him your matchless skill with horses for his skill with the dice, and when your fortune turns, think of me and put on this garment I give you, and your own form will return."

So the greatest of kings became the humblest of servants. As Bahuka the crooked charioteer, Nala drove another man's horses through the streets of Ayodhya, tended another man's stables, and cooked at another man's fire - though the food he set down was so wondrous that men marveled, never knowing they ate the cooking that the god Yama had blessed. In the evenings, alone, he would sing softly a verse of his own making, about a faithful wife abandoned in a forest by a husband who loved her, and none in Ayodhya understood the song or the grief beneath it.

In Vidarbha, King Bhima had sent Brahmins out across all the kingdoms of the earth to search for his lost daughter and her vanished husband, each carrying a riddling verse to recite in the courts and marketplaces: "O gambler, where have you gone, who cut away half your beloved's garment and left her sleeping in the wood? She waits for you still, faithful, in her half a cloth - answer her." One of these searchers found Damayanti herself, a maidservant in Chedi, and brought her home to Kundinapura and to her children at last. But of Nala there was no word - until a Brahmin returned from Ayodhya saying that a crooked little charioteer in Rituparna's service had heard the verse and wept, and had answered it in a low voice, saying that a good wife should forgive a husband whom a demon had robbed of his senses.

Damayanti heard, and her heart told her the truth that her eyes could not yet see: only Nala would have answered so, and only Nala could be so hidden. She devised a snare of pure cleverness. Through a messenger she let it be known to King Rituparna alone that Damayanti of Vidarbha, believing her husband dead, would hold a second swayamvara and choose a new lord - at sunrise on the very next morning.

No honest king could ride from Ayodhya to Kundinapura, a hundred leagues and more, between one evening and the next dawn. No honest king - and no horseman alive could do it, save one. Rituparna, mad to reach the choosing of so famed a bride, ran to his strange charioteer and begged him to attempt the impossible drive. Bahuka's heart broke at the news, for he believed his faithful wife was about to take another husband; but he bowed his crooked head, and went to yoke the horses.

Bahuka chose four lean, unpromising horses that he alone could see the worth of, yoked them, and mounted the chariot beside the king. Then he gave the team their head, and the chariot rose almost into the air and ran across the land like wind given wheels, until Rituparna's garland was torn from his head by the speed and his cloak streamed straight out behind him.

On the way they passed a great spreading tree, and Rituparna, to pass the time, boasted that he could tell, without counting, the number of leaves and fruits upon it - and named the figure exactly, then proved it true. Bahuka was astonished. "Teach me this knowledge of numbers and of dice," he said, "and in exchange I will teach you all I know of horses, for no man living drives as I do." Rituparna, who needed a horseman more than he needed a secret, agreed at once and poured the whole science of dice and number into him. And in that very moment, the spirit of the dice could bear it no longer: Kali came pouring out of Nala's body, retching and shrieking, expelled by the one knowledge he could not abide. Freed at last, the spirit begged for mercy and fled, and Nala, though still wearing the dwarf's shape, was himself again.

They reached Kundinapura by the appointed dawn, and there was no swayamvara, of course - there was never going to be one. There was only a queen on a high balcony who heard a chariot come on like thunder, a thunder that only one charioteer on earth could make, and knew her husband had come home. There were tests, gentle and certain: she sent her two children to the crooked cook, and at the sight of them he caught them up and wept; she found that his cooking was the matchless cooking of Nala, that water and fire obeyed his wish. Then Nala remembered the serpent, and put on Karkotaka's garment, and stood before her in his own true and shining form. They wept together, and she forgave him, for she had never once stopped being his.

Nala returned to Nishadha, and challenged his brother Pushkara to one last game - staking all that he had won back and all that he was, with the dice no longer crooked and no spirit in his hands. On a single throw he won back the whole kingdom. Yet he did not destroy Pushkara; he embraced him, forgave him the years of Kali's mischief, and let him go free and honored. Then Nala and Damayanti reigned over Nishadha in justice and peace for the rest of their long lives.

"So, king," said the sage Brihadashva, turning to Yudhishthira in the firelight of the Kamyaka forest, "you who still keep your brothers, your faithful wife, and your own clear wits about you - you have fallen, but not so far as Nala fell, and Nala rose again. Endure. The dice are not the end of the story." And because no man should ever be undone by a board again, the sage taught Yudhishthira, then and there, the very science of dice and of numbers, and went on his way, leaving the eldest Pandava with a little more peace in his heart than he had owned that morning.