The Seven Days of Parikshit

When the war was over and the whole Kuru line had shrunk to one infant delivered without breath and given back to life, the child grew into a boy who studied every face he met, looking for the shining figure he remembered from the darkness of the womb, and for that searching the people named him Parikshit.

Kripa taught him the bow and the law books. Yudhishthira, before the five brothers put off their ornaments and turned north toward the mountain, set him upon the throne of Hastinapura and told him only this: "The kingdom is not a possession. It is a debt you pay every morning."

He paid it for sixty years. The roads were safe for merchants and safe for women. Brahmanas were fed before the king ate. He held the great sacrifices on the plain where his fathers had killed one another, and he ruled the earth to the sea as the sons of Pandu had ruled it, so that men who had been children during the war grew old saying that nothing had been lost.

But something had turned in the world. Krishna had laid down his body, the sea had taken Dvaraka, and the age the sages called Kali had entered the earth on the day of that departure, walking the borders of every kingdom and finding them shut.

An age cannot force a door. It waits at the edge of things for one careless hour, one flare of temper in a good man, one moment when a ruler forgets that he is being watched by his own conduct. The wise men of the court said that Parikshit's reign was a wall against the new time.

They were right, and walls are not breached where they are thick. They are breached where a single stone was set in anger.

Riding the borders of his kingdom one morning, the king came upon a strange scene at the edge of a pasture. A bull white as a conch shell stood trembling upon a single leg. Beside it a cow wept, and her tears ran down into the dust. A man in the ornaments of royalty was striking them both with a club.

Parikshit drew his bow. "Who are you, wearing a king's gold and beating the helpless? While a descendant of Arjuna holds this land no creature weeps here without an answer. Bull, who has broken your legs?"

The bull did not accuse. It only stood, and the king, looking at it, understood: austerity, purity and compassion had been struck away from the world, and truth alone was left to hold the whole weight of it. The cow beside it was the earth, mourning for what she carried.

The man in the ornaments threw down his club and fell at the king's feet. "I am Kali," he said. "The age is mine. Kill me if you wish."

"Get out of my kingdom," Parikshit said. "Falsehood and cruelty have no ground under me."

"Wherever I turn," said Kali, "I see your bow already drawn. You are the sovereign of the whole earth. Give me some place to stand, or your order cannot be obeyed."

The king considered. It seemed to him a small and manageable thing to fence a poison into corners. "Live where dice are thrown," he said, "and where liquor is drunk, and where creatures are slaughtered for sport."

Kali bowed and asked for one place more.

"Gold," the king said, carelessly, as a man names the last item on a list.

He rode home under the sun, and did not think about the crown upon his head, which was gold, and which he had just given away. The doom of Parikshit was not sent to him by heaven. He signed the lease himself, on a good morning, while doing justice.

Years later the king hunted alone in the deep forest, following a deer he had wounded. The animal ran on and vanished, and by afternoon Parikshit was far from his people, his throat burning, his horse spent, the day white and merciless above the sal trees.

He came at last upon a hermitage: a swept clearing, a cold fire pit, and one old ascetic seated on a deerskin, motionless. The sage Shamika had taken a vow of silence, and had drawn his breath and his senses inward until nothing of the world reached him. His eyes were closed. His hands lay open on his knees.

"Reverend one," said the king, "I am Parikshit, son of Abhimanyu. I have lost my way and I have had no water since dawn."

The sage did not move.

"I ask for water," said the king. "Or for the road home. Or for a word."

Nothing. Only the flies in the heat, and the great silence of a man who was not being rude and could not explain that he was not being rude.

Something rose in Parikshit that he had never felt in sixty years of governing, and it rose fast, the way heat rises off metal. Afterward he would remember that the crown was warm on his head. He saw a dead snake lying in the grass at the clearing's edge, stiff and dry. He lifted it on the tip of his bow, walked to the seated figure, and hung it across the old man's shoulder.

"If you have no words for a thirsty king," he said, "wear that instead."

The sage did not stir. The snake hung there, obscene in the swept clearing.

The king rode away, and he was ashamed before he reached the trees. In one moment he had done what sixty years had not made him capable of: he had struck a man who could not strike back, and had made the striking public, and had called it wit.

Shamika had a son named Shringi, a boy grown fierce with study and austerity, quick as a struck spark. He was playing with other boys' sons on the riverbank when a companion called out to him, laughing.

"Do not carry yourself so high, Shringi. Your father sits at home this hour with a dead snake on his shoulder, and a king put it there."

The boy's eyes reddened. He took water into his palm and spoke into it, and his voice shook. "Since Parikshit has laid a dead serpent upon an old ascetic sunk in his vow, let Takshaka, the king of serpents, burn that man with his venom within seven nights. Let my austerity be false if this fails."

He ran home and found the snake and flung it away, weeping, and shook his father until the old man opened his eyes and returned to the world.

Shamika heard him out and did not praise him. "Son," he said, "this is not the fruit of tapas. We sit unguarded in this wood and no one troubles us, and the reason is that king. He was thirsty and I did not answer, and a tired man did a small ugly thing. You have answered a small ugly thing with a death. Anger spends in one breath what a lifetime gathers."

He called a disciple, Gaurmukha, and sent him to Hastinapura at once. "Tell the king everything. Tell him to guard himself. Tell him my son is a boy and that I am sorry."

Parikshit heard the message standing, and his ministers watched his face for the anger that would have burned a forest. It did not come.

"The boy has told the truth about me," he said at last. "That is the whole of it. I did the thing, and it was done to a man who could not be defended, and no one in this hall would have told me so. Carry my reverence to his father. He has been kinder to me than my own crown."

The ministers proposed a mansion raised on a single pillar, physicians with their antidotes, reciters of the serpent mantras, and a ring of guards through which not a thread could pass. Parikshit let them speak, and then refused.

"Seven days is a gift," he said. "Most men are not told. I will not spend it hiding from an arrow I fired myself."

He called Janamejaya, still a boy, and set the crown on him before the court and the fire. "Rule as though every subject were a guest under your roof," he said. "Hear the poor first, because no one else will bring them. And when anger comes to you wearing the face of justice, wait one day. That is all I have learned, and it cost the kingdom a king."

Then he went down to the bank of the Ganga, spread kusha grass, and sat facing east in the vow of one who will neither eat nor rise. Sages came from every direction, and the river ran beside them, and for six days the old king asked questions like a student: what a man should do who knows the hour of his death, what remains when the body is set down, what a soul carries out of a life. They answered him, and he listened with his hands folded, and no one on that bank spoke of guards.

Takshaka set out to keep the curse. On the road he met Kashyapa, a physician who could call men back from venom and was going for the fee; the serpent showed his power, outbid him, and sent him home.

On the seventh day, near sunset, ascetics came bearing water, kusha and fruit. Parikshit took a fruit and broke it, and inside sat a small copper colored worm with black eyes, watching him.

The king smiled. "The sun is going down and the boy's word must not be made false. My death is small. A broken curse would be a larger wound to the world."

He set the worm on his neck. Takshaka rose in his own vast form, coiled about the king, and the fire of his venom took him while his mind stayed fixed and quiet.

Out of those ashes rose the great snake sacrifice of Janamejaya, and the boy brahmana who stopped it. Parikshit himself had already finished: one lapse, honestly owned, answered by a death that redeemed it.