The Parijata Tree

Narada came into Dwaraka the way he always came, unannounced, at an hour nobody expected, past guards who had given up years ago on the idea of announcing him. He carried his vina slung at one shoulder and, cupped in his left hand with the care a man gives to a live coal, a single flower.

It was not a flower of the earth. The petals were white at their edges and deepened toward the stem into a coral that seemed lit rather than colored, and the fragrance came off it the way heat comes off a fire, in slow waves, reaching the far end of the hall before the sage had crossed half of it. Courtiers turned in the middle of sentences. Conversation thinned and stopped. Somebody's hand went to his sword out of pure animal confusion and then fell away again.

"Parijata," Narada said into the silence. "It rose out of the churning of the ocean along with the moon and the nectar, and it grows in one garden in all the worlds, and that garden is Indra's. The blossom does not wilt. It will outlast the woman who wears it, and it is given, by custom, to a wife a man would choose a second time."

He held it out. Krishna took it, turned it once between two fingers, and smiled the particular smile his household had long ago learned to be wary of.

Rukmini was seated at his left hand. He leaned across and set the flower into her braid with the unhurried certainty of a man doing something entirely ordinary, and the coral light of it lay against her dark hair, and the fragrance of Indra's garden settled over her like a second garment. The court made the sound a court makes.

Narada watched all of this with great attention. He was a sage of immense holiness and an appetite for consequences that no austerity had ever cured. He rose, blessed the assembly, took his leave - and then, because the road out of the palace ran past several courtyards and he chose the longest of them, walked home through the garden of Satyabhama.

He found her among her roses, and he did not have to work hard.

"You look radiant this morning," he said. "Though it is a fortunate day in this house in any case. Indra's own garden has sent a gift down to Dwaraka, and the queen it was given to will wear it in her hair until the world ends, since parijata does not fade." He paused with the timing of one who has had many lifetimes to learn it. "You had not heard?"

By evening the whole city had heard, chiefly from the noise.

Krishna found her in the sulking chamber with the lamps unlit, her ornaments stripped off and scattered across the floor like the leavings of a battle, lying on the bare ground with her face turned to the wall. He sat down on the floor beside her, because the floor was where she was.

"Satya."

"Do not."

"Tell me what has been done to you and I will punish the man responsible."

"You are the man responsible." She sat up. Her eyes were bright and furious and swimming. "One flower comes into this city out of heaven itself, and you do not pause. Not a breath's thought. Straight into her hair, in open court, so that every merchant and charioteer in Dwaraka may go home tonight knowing exactly how the queens of this house are ranked."

"It was one flower."

"It was in front of everyone."

He did not argue, which was worse. He sat with her in the dark and let her be angry, and then he began, very quietly, to laugh - not at her, she could hear the difference, but at something further off that he could see and she could not.

"A flower," he said at last. "Beloved, I am not going to bring you a flower. Any man on any road can carry a flower. I am going to go up and take the tree, the whole tree, roots and blossom and the earth of heaven still hanging off it, and I am going to plant it in this courtyard, and it will bloom outside your window for as long as Dwaraka stands."

She stared at him. "Indra's tree."

"Indra," said Krishna, "is an old friend. He will understand it. Eventually."

It was not for the flower's sake alone that the chariot went up, in the end; the war against Narakasura had already carried Krishna and Satyabhama into the celestial regions, and with the demon dead and the plundered treasures of the gods loaded to be handed back, the road home ran conveniently past heaven.

Amaravati received them as a city receives the man who has just saved it. Aditi, mother of the gods, whose own earrings had been among the stolen things, came out to take them from Krishna's hand and would not allow Satyabhama to bow to her; she raised her up instead and blessed her with beauty that would not thin with the years, so long as she stood at her husband's side. Indra came down from his seat to embrace Krishna, gave him a place higher than his own, and called for the feasting to begin, and for a while there was nothing in Amaravati but music and the honest gladness of gods who had got their property back.

Afterwards the two of them walked in the garden of Nandana, where the light does not come from any one direction.

Satyabhama stopped walking.

The tree stood by itself in a clearing, and it was not large, and the ground beneath it lay ankle deep in fallen coral blossom that had not browned or curled, so that the whole clearing smelled the way one flower in Rukmini's braid had smelled, multiplied past bearing. Bees the color of beaten gold worked the lower branches. She said nothing at all.

"That one," Krishna said.

"That one."

He walked up to it, set his hand flat against the bark, and pulled. There was a sound like a heavy rope parting under strain. The parijata came up entire, its roots trailing the black soil of heaven, and he swung it across Garuda's back and made it fast the way a farmer lashes a load.

Down the path a gardener began to scream. Others came running, and one of them, braver than the rest, planted himself in front of the chariot. "Lord, that tree does not leave this garden. It is not Indra's ornament to give away. It is a treasure of heaven, and he is under oath to keep it here."

"I know," said Krishna. "Go and tell him."

He came fast, and he came in full state, which was its own kind of courtesy: Airavata with the storm walking under his feet, the Maruts behind in ranks, the whole host of heaven drawn up in the air above one chariot and one bird.

Indra did not begin with the weapon. "Give it back, Govinda," he said, and there was more misery in it than anger. "Ask me for anything else in the three worlds and it is already yours. I am the keeper of this garden. If the parijata goes out of it, I have failed at the one thing I am."

"I know what you are," Krishna said. "Take it back from me, then, and no one in any world will say you did less than your duty."

So they fought, the two of them, and it was the strangest war ever waged over a flowering tree. Heaven's archers loosed and the chariot came on through the arrow-fall unmarked. Satyabhama, who had not been raised to stand quietly behind anybody, put a shaft through the standard of the god of rain and then shouted at Indra across the open air that he ought to be ashamed of himself, quarreling with a guest over a plant. The gods laughed aloud in the middle of their own charge, which is not how battles are ordinarily conducted.

Then Indra took up the vajra, and the laughing stopped, because there is nothing in creation that the thunderbolt has been thrown at and survived. He drew his arm back. Sudarshana rose off Krishna's finger and turned once, unhurried, and the light of it fell across Indra's face.

The arm did not come forward.

Indra stood a long moment with the thunderbolt lifted over an old friend who was watching him with something very close to tenderness, and then he lowered it, and let his breath out, and began, helplessly, to laugh at himself.

"What am I doing," he said. "The ocean was churned by your will. The tree came up out of your churning. I have spent an age guarding a thing that was never mine for a single day, and guarding it from the one it belonged to all along." He came forward and put both hands on Krishna's shoulders. "Take it. And come back sometimes when you do not want anything."

They planted it in Satyabhama's courtyard at Dwaraka, and for a season she was the happiest woman on that coast.

She would not have said so aloud, but she arranged to be found in that courtyard whenever visitors came. Nobles from the mainland who had heard the story invented business in the city simply to stand under the branches. Cowherds' children were let in at the side gate in twos and threes and given a blossom each. The tree bloomed at night in the manner of its kind, and every morning the ground beneath it lay ankle deep in coral, and Satyabhama would walk out barefoot into that fall before anyone else in the palace was awake and think about the one flower that had gone into another woman's hair.

It took her the better part of a month to notice about the wind.

Dwaraka's evening wind comes off the sea and crosses her courtyard and goes on over the low wall into the next, which is Rukmini's, and it does not stop at walls, and it carries the smell of parijata as faithfully as it carries salt. There was more to it than that. The tree had been set close enough to the wall that its longest branch reached across, and the blossoms off that branch fell, every one of them, on the far side, into the elder queen's garden, where Rukmini gathered them up each morning without a word and laid them at the feet of the household's images.

Satyabhama stood at her window one evening and worked out that this could not possibly be an accident, and that she had been outmaneuvered by her own husband with the full cooperation of the wind.

Krishna was behind her, saying nothing, in the manner of a man who knows exactly when he has been caught.

"You planted it there on purpose."

"I planted it in your courtyard," he said, "precisely as I promised. It is yours. Every root of it."

She stood a while longer. Down below, the last light was going out of the coral, and over the wall she could hear Rukmini's women laughing at something, and the scent lay across both gardens equally, indivisible, belonging to nobody.

She found, to her considerable annoyance, that she was not angry any more.