The Revival of Parikshit

The war had ended twice. Once on the eighteenth day, and once in the night after, when Ashwatthama crept into the sleeping Pandava camp and butchered the sons of Draupadi and every remaining warrior of the line. Hunted down at dawn, cornered, he had loosed the brahmastra, and when commanded to withdraw it he could not, and so he had turned it, in his defeat and malice, at the one target that would make his revenge total: the wombs of the Pandava women, and above all the unborn child of dead Abhimanyu carried by the girl-widow Uttara. The last hope of the dynasty was cursed before it had a heartbeat.

Krishna had answered him then, before witnesses, with a counter-vow: "The child you have struck will live. I will revive him, and he will reign for sixty years, and you will carry your crime on your skin for three thousand." The weapon could not be recalled, but the promise was loosed after it like a second arrow, and the two flew toward the same unborn mark.

Then came the slow part of the prophecy, the part with no weapons in it: months. The court came home to Hastinapura; Yudhishthira was crowned; the pyres burned out on Kurukshetra. And in the women's quarters the whole surviving family arranged itself around one girl's body. Uttara, Virata's daughter, who had been given in marriage at Virata with dancing and was widowed within the year at sixteen, carried the only heir of both houses. Kunti, Draupadi, and Subhadra, three generations of bereaved queens, watched over her as misers watch a last coin. Every future - the throne's, the lineage's, the epic's own - had narrowed to the circumference of one young widow's waist.

The birth came, and the palace held its breath, and then the breath became a scream. The child, a boy, was born perfect, beautiful - and dead. The brahmastra had kept its nature: what it strikes, it kills, and it had struck him months before in the womb. The midwives fell silent; the lamps seemed to. In one room, on one square of silk, lay the entire posterity of Bharata's line, still as a doll, and the women who had survived Kurukshetra found there was one more grief past all the others.

Uttara took the small body and broke over it. Her lament tore even hearts scarred by the war: she called to the child to breathe, called to dead Abhimanyu that his son would not look at her, begged forgiveness of the grandmothers for failing the whole waiting world at the last step. Kunti and Draupadi and Subhadra wept around her, and then Subhadra, Krishna's own sister, lifted her head and said the only sentence that was still a plan and not a grief: "Call my brother. He gave his word on the field. Bring Krishna."

Krishna came at once, and the wailing quarter of the palace parted for him. Kunti met him first, and the woman who had buried a hundred griefs put this one at his feet: "You promised, son. On the field, before witnesses, you promised this child life. The dead are dead and we do not ask for them; we ask for the one who was never allowed to live. Redeem your word." He looked past her to the girl on the floor with the still infant in her arms, looking up at him without any words left, and Krishna said: "Give me the child."

He took the small body in his two hands, and there in the birth chamber, before the women and the midwives and the gods who attend on such rooms, he performed the oldest rite there is, older than any liturgy: satyakriya, the act of truth, in which a soul lays its whole record on the scale.

"If it is true that I have never spoken an untruth, even in jest - let this child live. If it is true that I have never turned my back in battle - let this child live. If truth and dharma have been dear to me always, if I slew Kamsa only for righteousness' sake, by that truth: let this child live." He spoke, and the brahmastra's old fire met the entire weighed life of Krishna, and gave way. In his hands the child grew warm. A tremor, a flush of color, and then the sound that the whole scene, the whole palace, the whole epic had been waiting for: the child cried, and the women's wailing turned in a single instant into the other thing.

They passed the living boy from arms to arms like a rescued treasure, Uttara laughing and weeping into his hair, and the elders blessed him through their tears. And those present said afterward that as the child took hold of life he seemed to look around him, searching the faces, as one who had seen someone luminous in the darkness of the womb - for the tradition holds that while the brahmastra burned toward him, a shining presence no larger than a thumb had stood between the weapon and the unborn, bearing the fire away. He had been examined by death before birth and was looking for his examiner. So they named him Parikshit: the one who was tested, and the one who seeks.

On that single restored breath the rest of the story stands. Parikshit grew into the last great king of the age, reigned after the Pandavas walked away north, and ruled the world alone as the Kali age came in. His death by the serpent Takshaka, long years later, would summon his son Janamejaya's snake sacrifice, and at that sacrifice a sage would first recite, to the assembled kings, a poem about a war between cousins - the very epic in which this story is told. Every syllable of the Mahabharata reaches its hearers across the bridge of that one infant's heartbeat. Ashwatthama's arrow was aimed at the future itself, and Krishna's kept promise is the reason there was one.