Sanjaya's Divine Eye

The night before the armies moved, Vyasa came into the inner rooms of Hastinapura without waiting to be announced. Dhritarashtra knew him by the smell that travelled with him, woodsmoke and river water and old bark, and rose from his couch and reached out until he found the sage's hands.

"Son of Vichitravirya," Vyasa said, "tomorrow the earth begins to be emptied of kshatriyas. I have counted the days and I cannot shorten them. Your hundred sons and my daughters' grandsons have arranged this between them, and no word of mine will now unarrange it. But I can give you one thing, and I have walked here to give it. I will open your eyes. For eighteen days you will see."

The blind king stood very still.

He had wanted sight for sixty years. He had wanted it in the marriage hall, when a woman he had never looked at tied a cloth over her own eyes and took his hand. He had wanted it every time a son was born to him and laid in his arms as a weight and a voice. He had bargained for it in prayers he never confessed to anybody.

"I would see the field," he said.

"You would see all of it. Nothing on that plain would be hidden from you."

"Then I do not want it."

Vyasa said nothing, so the king went on, and his voice came apart while he spoke.

"I have been blind since the hour I was born and I have never once called it a mercy until tonight. Do not make me watch my children die. Duryodhana. Dushasana. All of them, one after another, and my eyes learning what my sons look like only in the moment they stop looking like anything. I cannot see that. Tell me instead. Hearing it will be as much as this body can hold."

"Very well," Vyasa said at last. "What you refuse, another man will carry for your sake."

And he turned toward the doorway, where somebody had been standing all this while with the king's staff in his hands, saying nothing at all.

Sanjaya, son of Gavalgana, was a suta by birth, which meant that he drove chariots and kept counsel and was permitted to tell the king the truth precisely because he could never inherit anything by telling it. He had read to Dhritarashtra for thirty years. He had ridden ahead of him on every road. When the court lied to the old man, and the court lied to him daily, Sanjaya was the one who came afterwards and quietly corrected the arithmetic.

"Come here," Vyasa said.

He came, and bent, and the sage put a hand on his head and held it there.

"You will see the war. Not from a hill and not from behind a shield. You will stand at every point of that field at once. Distance will not dim it and night will not stop it. You will hear what is said in the two camps and in the tents behind the camps, and you will know what is thought and not said, which is worse. No weapon on that plain will touch you. No man will be able to kill you, and no hour of it will tire you. You will see the past standing behind each face like a shadow, so that you will know why every man strikes as he strikes. And you will bring all of it back into this room and set it down before this king exactly as it happened."

Sanjaya kept his head bowed a little longer than he needed to.

"Great one," he said, "will I be able to close them?"

"No."

"Then may I look away when it is my own people?"

"They are all your own people," Vyasa said. "That is the whole point of the gift. A witness who is allowed the mercy of distance is not a witness. Anyone can carry news. You are being asked to carry the thing itself."

He lifted his hand away. Sanjaya straightened. The room he had known for thirty years was still exactly the room he had known, the same lamp, the same cold floor under his feet. And beyond it, ninety leagues off in the dark, he could already see the watchfires of eighteen armies burning on the plain of the Kurus, and hear a boy in the Panchala camp being sick with fear behind a tent.

So the greatest war the world ever had is remembered, in the end, as a conversation between two men sitting indoors.

While eighteen akshauhinis tore each other apart under the sun, the war existed for Dhritarashtra as a voice in an unlit hall. He never asked for a lamp; there was no use in one. Gandhari sat in the corner on some evenings with the cloth still bound over her eyes, and the two blind people and the one man who could see everything went through each day together.

The first question of the whole recital is the king's, and it is the question of a man who already knows the answer.

"Sanjaya. Tell me. Gathered on the field of dharma, the field of the Kurus, eager to fight, what did my people and the sons of Pandu do?"

Everything the world keeps from that war comes through the answer. The song Krishna sang to a man who had dropped his bow between two armies reaches us because Sanjaya was standing in the gap and heard it and repeated it in a dark room. The fall of the grandsire, the burning wheel of Drona's chariot, the last words of Karna, the sound Duryodhana made when the thigh broke: all of it arrives by one road, and the road is a servant's mouth.

The king interrupted constantly. He could not help himself.

"They held, though. Say that they held."

"They did not hold, king."

"Duryodhana was not in that part of the line."

"He was in the front of it. He fought well. He is alive tonight."

And when the old man settled into the long habit of his grief, blaming fate, blaming time, blaming the sons of Pandu for being so difficult to kill, Sanjaya would wait until he had finished and then say the same thing in the same level tone.

"This is your doing. You were asked four times to stop it and four times you did not. Now listen to the rest of the day."

No other man in that palace spoke to Dhritarashtra like that. It was not cruelty. It was the only shape his loyalty knew how to take.

Three times the telling nearly broke the teller.

On the tenth evening Sanjaya came back through a camp that had gone silent in a way that camps do not go silent, and he did not wait to be asked. He came into the hall and said it standing.

"King. The grandsire is down."

The old man made a sound and put both hands out into the air where nobody was. Sanjaya had to stand there and give him the rest of it: that Bhishma had fallen on a bed of his enemies' arrows and had not touched the ground; that he was alive, and would stay alive by his own choosing for weeks yet; that both armies had put down their weapons at the same moment and walked out together and stood around him in the dusk without one word passing between them. He was allowed no softening. He described the pillow of three shafts. He described the water Arjuna brought up out of the earth. He said, because it was true, that the old man had gone into that morning looking for exactly this.

On the thirteenth night he had to describe six men and a boy.

"How many, Sanjaya?"

"Six, king."

"Six of the first warriors of the age, against one child of sixteen. Say their names."

He said their names, in order, and three of them were the king's own blood and one was the king's own teacher. The boy's father was not there to hear it and would hear it from another mouth. The grandfather of the men who did it heard it in full, in a dark room, and then asked to have it said again.

And on the eighteenth evening the report was the shortest of the entire war.

"There is almost nothing left to describe. The field is quiet. Of the eleven armies that went out for you, three men are alive. Of the seven against them, seven men and Krishna. Your sons are all dead, king. I was standing at the place where the last of them fell, and I saw it."

That one he was not asked to repeat.

The eye ended the way it had begun, without consulting him.

Sanjaya was standing at the edge of the water at Dvaipayana when the mace came down and the thigh broke and Duryodhana went into the mud, and the noise that a war makes simply stopped. He turned to carry it to the king, and it was gone. The plain was a plain. The men in it were shapes, and the shapes at the far end were too far away to make out, and he could not hear the camp behind him at all. He noticed that his legs were tired, which they had not been for eighteen days, and that he was thirsty.

Satyaki caught him on the road out and would have killed him for being a Kaurava man walking away from a Kaurava defeat. Vyasa came and took the sword out of the air.

"Let him go. He is finished here." And then, to Sanjaya, gently: "Your sight is done. Go and speak to the king."

So he walked the last of it as an ordinary man, which is the only way anyone has ever walked anywhere, and arrived, and told a father that he had no sons.

What remains of Sanjaya afterwards is not a hero's portion. He is a man who remembers everything. He served the blind king through the years of ashes that followed, went with him and Gandhari and Kunti when the three of them at last walked into the forest, came back alone from the fire that took them, and then turned north to the mountains and out of the story.

He had held the highest office the epic gives to anybody who never lifts a weapon. He had been made to look at the worst thing his people ever did and to describe it accurately to the man most responsible for it, in that man's own house, night after night, for eighteen days, without shading a single sentence kinder than it was.

He never lied to the king. That is the whole of his austerity, and in that war it is more than most men managed.