The Second Theft of the Syamantaka

The Syamantaka had been through one whole career already. Its first arc is told elsewhere: Prasena dead in the forest, the lion, the bear-king Jambavan in his cave, and a false charge against Krishna answered by the patient tracing of the truth. That story ends with a name cleared and a jewel handed back to the man who owned it.

This is what happened next, and it is a darker tale, because the jewel had learned nothing and neither had Dwaraka.

Satrajit kept the gem. He was Satyabhama's father now as well as its keeper, which in a city of proud houses made him twice worth resenting. There had been men who expected Satyabhama for themselves before Krishna married her, and they had never entirely put the expectation down. The tradition is careful here, and so should any teller be: it names Akrura and Kritavarma among those in whose circles the grievance was nursed, and it does not always say the same thing twice about how far each of them went. What all the accounts agree on is that the resentment was real, that it was old, and that it found a young man willing to act on it.

His name was Shatadhanva, and he was a Yadava of good family, the son of Hridika. Someone put the thought into his head. The versions differ on whose voice it was and how plainly it spoke, and they agree that it said, in effect, that Satrajit was an old man with a jewel he did not deserve and a daughter he had disposed of badly, and that these things could be corrected in a single night by a man with nerve.

Shatadhanva had nerve. He went into Satrajit's house in the dark, past servants who knew him and let him by because they knew him, and he killed the old man where he lay sleeping, and took the Syamantaka off him, and was out of the city before the household woke.

He did not fight Satrajit. That detail is never softened in any telling. He killed a sleeping man for a stone.

Satyabhama found her father in the morning.

The Harivamsa does not spend long on what she said in that room, but it is very exact about what she did afterward, and the sequence is the character. She did not collapse. She did not send a servant. She had her father's body preserved in oil so that it should not be given to the fire before it had been seen and answered for, and then she called for a chariot, and she drove east out of Dwaraka herself, because Krishna and Balarama were away at Hastinapura and she was not going to wait for a messenger to find them.

She came into that court with the dust still on her, and she told it plainly, and then her control went.

"He came in as a guest," she said. "The doormen let him through. They let him through because they knew his face. My father did not wake."

Krishna heard her out without a word. When she had finished he said only, "Whose face?"

"Shatadhanva."

"Alone?"

And Satyabhama, who had had a hard ride to think about it, said what she thought, which was that Shatadhanva had not thought of it alone and had not had the standing to want it alone, and that there were older men in Dwaraka who had wanted her married elsewhere and had never forgiven the jewel for going where it went.

"Then he has done two murders," Krishna said. "My uncle's, and his own."

He stood up and told Balarama they were going home, and they went the same day. It is worth marking that neither brother asked, in that hour, where the Syamantaka was. That question would come later, and when it came it would cost them more than the killing did.

Shatadhanva discovered, in the few days he had left, how little a friend is worth who advises a crime and declines to be near it.

He went to Kritavarma and asked for help, and Kritavarma told him that he was not going to lift a hand against Krishna and Balarama, and said it in the flat voice of a man who has already worked out how he will describe his part later. He went to Akrura and got a lecture about the strength of the two brothers and an equally polite refusal. Every door he had counted on opened, said something reasonable, and shut.

So he did the only thing left, which was to hand the jewel to Akrura for keeping - a detail nobody in Dwaraka would learn for a long time - and run.

He had a mare called Hridaya, which means heart, and she was the fastest animal in the city. He put her at the eastern road and did not spare her. Krishna followed in the chariot with Garuda on its flag and Balarama beside him, and there was no cleverness in that pursuit at all: it was simply two men who would not stop, behind one man who could not.

The mare ran a hundred yojanas. Near Mithila, in the country of the Videhas, her heart burst under him and she went down in the road, and Shatadhanva got up out of the dust and ran on foot, which is the last picture the story gives of him with any dignity left.

Krishna went after him on foot as well - Balarama stayed with the chariot and the fallen mare - and caught him, and the discus took his head off in the open field.

Then Krishna searched the body. He searched it carefully, and it was not there. He came back down the road to where his brother was waiting and said the plain thing.

"He was not carrying it."

And Balarama looked at him for a moment too long.

It is the hardest scene between those two in all the tellings, and none of the tellers hurry it.

"Not carrying it," Balarama repeated.

"No."

"He killed a sleeping man for it and then ran a hundred yojanas without it."

"So it seems."

Balarama said, slowly, that a jewel does not leave a fleeing man's neck by itself; that they two had been alone at the body, and one of them had searched it; and that there was a great deal of money in the world, and the Syamantaka was a great deal of it in a stone the size of a thumb.

"Say it," Krishna said.

"I have said it."

"Say it as an accusation, brother, or take it back. I will not stand here being suspected in hints."

And Balarama would not take it back. That is the thing that has kept the episode alive. He did not shout and did not draw; he simply did not believe his brother, and could not make himself believe him, and knew that he could not, and would not pretend. He said that Dwaraka had become a city where men were murdered for property and their kinsmen lied about it, and that he had no appetite for the place, and he turned the chariot east instead of west.

He went to Videha. The king of Mithila received him with honor and asked no questions, and Balarama stayed there a long season - the tellers say years, and it is in that time, some of them add, that he taught the mace to a prince of the Kurus who came to him for it. He did not send word home. Krishna went back to Dwaraka alone, and buried Satrajit, and comforted Satyabhama, and carried the second accusation of his life without answering it, because there was nothing to answer with until the jewel came out of hiding.

The Syamantaka had now been the occasion for two suspicions of Krishna, one murder, one dead mare and one broken brotherhood, and it was still producing gold every day, exactly as promised.

The truth came out slowly, and it came out through prosperity, which is the way such things usually surface.

Akrura had left Dwaraka not long after the killing, and Akrura, abroad, was suddenly and conspicuously rich. He performed sacrifice after sacrifice, year upon year, on a scale that no man's estates could pay for; the fires never went out; the fees to the priests were the kind that get talked about in other kingdoms. And Dwaraka, meanwhile, in the years its senior kinsman was away, had drought and portents and the ordinary run of bad luck, which the elders read exactly as their fathers had taught them to read it: the jewel was out of the land, and the land knew.

Krishna sent for him, and he came, and Krishna did not confront him in a private room. He waited for the full assembly, with Ugrasena in the seat and the heads of every Yadava house present, and then he said, courteously, that his kinsman had held a certain thing in trust for a long time, and that the time had come to show it.

There was a silence of the kind that has a whole city in it. Then Akrura took out the cloth bundle from his robe and unwrapped the Syamantaka, and it lit the hall.

Balarama was there by then, brought home. Krishna held the jewel up so that every man in the assembly saw where it had been and where it had not been, and he named plainly what had been thought of him and by whom, and he did not make a speech about it. The name was cleared for the second time. That is the jewel's entire career: it arrives, it accuses somebody, it is cleared of nothing itself and is handed on.

And then Krishna gave it back to Akrura. He said the man had kept it well, that the sacrifices had been real whatever else was, and that the gem should stay where its gold was already doing good; and he asked only that it stay in the land.

Some treasures are tests wearing the shape of wealth. The Syamantaka enriched every keeper it ever had and poisoned every hand that closed on it, and the only man it never harmed was the one who twice refused to keep it.