The Chariot at Raivataka

A vow of his own making had put Arjuna on the road, twelve years of wandering accepted without argument for a rule he had broken to recover a brahmin's stolen cattle, and those years had carried him the length of the country before it brought him west at last to the sea.

He came to the shore at Prabhasa after all the holy fords of the western ocean, a pilgrim among pilgrims, dusty from the road and long-haired with travel. Nothing about him announced the archer of Indraprastha. Pilgrims stepped around him on the sand without troubling to look twice, and he let them.

Word of it reached Dwaraka before nightfall, because Krishna kept the kind of household where such reports arrived ahead of the traveller. He came out along the coast road himself and found his friend before Arjuna knew he was near. They embraced there on the sand and asked after each other's welfare, and then sat down together in the woods above the shore, the two of them like Nara and Narayana of old.

'Tell me,' Krishna said, 'why the son of Pandu walks from one holy ford to the next.' Arjuna told him everything exactly as it had happened, and Krishna heard it through and approved. 'Whatever your vow requires,' he said, 'it does not forbid you a roof.'

They took their pleasure at Prabhasa for a while and then went up Raivataka, the hill near Dwaraka with the sea laid out grey and enormous beneath it, which Krishna's men had already decked out and stocked with food. They watched the actors and dancers there, and afterwards Arjuna lay on a fine bed and told Krishna of the fords and mountains and rivers and forests he had seen, talking the way men talk who have not seen one another in years, until sleep crept up on him. He woke in the morning to singing and the sound of the veena.

Then Krishna drove him to Dwaraka in a golden chariot. The city had decked out even its huts for him, and Bhojas, Vrishnis and Andhakas turned out on the road in their thousands, the women watching, the young men paying their respects, and those of his own age embracing him again and again.

With Krishna he spent many nights in that house, a house so full of jewels and every object of pleasure that a man who had slept beside a hundred holy fords hardly knew where to set his feet. Arjuna was lodged as a brother of the family, and the Yadavas, who had honoured him on the road for Krishna's sake, went on honouring him in the city.

Balarama took to the guest easily, the way a big-hearted man does with anyone his younger brother loves. The elder Yadava was generous with anyone who let him talk, and Arjuna listened well, to long stories told to their end and to opinions on the handling of a mace offered on slow afternoons, and Balarama took the guest's presence as a compliment paid to Dwaraka.

The days went by in that way, easy and unmarked, the friend of the house at Krishna's side wherever Krishna went. Then word went round the city that the great festival of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas was to be held on Raivataka, and Dwaraka began to make ready to empty itself onto the hill.

A few days later the festival was held, and the whole clan went up to it. The warriors gave gifts to brahmanas by the thousand. Palaces full of jewels stood all about the mountain and every tree was hung with lamps, and the musicians played and the dancers danced and the singers sang, while the Vrishni youths rode about in bright golden chariots. Balarama was there with Revati, drunk and happy, with gandharvas at his heels; old Ugrasena came with his thousand wives; Pradyumna and Samba went about garlanded and intoxicated like young gods. The hill was a second Dwaraka pitched among the trees.

Krishna wandered through it all with Arjuna beside him, and as they walked they came upon Krishna's sister Subhadra among her friends, dressed in all her ornaments. Arjuna saw her, and the god of love struck him where he stood, and he forgot, for the length of that looking, that he was a man with a vow on the road.

Krishna saw every sign of it, and smiled.

'How is it,' he said, 'that the mind of a man who lives in the forest is so stirred by desire? She is my sister, Partha, born of the same mother as Sarana. If your heart is set on her, I will speak to our father myself.'

'She is Vasudeva's daughter and your sister,' Arjuna said, 'and she is beautiful. How could I not be taken? If she becomes my wife, I must have done nothing but good in my life. Tell me how I can win her, Janardana. I will do anything a man can do.'

'Then hear the shape of the thing,' Krishna said. 'For kshatriyas the proper road is a swayamvara. And a swayamvara is a lottery. I have watched a hall of kings and I cannot tell you beforehand what a woman standing in front of them will do, and neither can you. You would be staking her on a public throw. Who knows what she might do in a swayamvara?

'There is another road, and the law of kshatriyas does not blush at it. Those learned in dharma say that for a warrior, carrying off a bride by force is permitted. So carry her off. Take my sister.'

They settled it between them there, and sent swift messengers east to Indraprastha to tell Yudhishthira everything. The messengers came back with the eldest Pandava's consent.

Arjuna learnt that Subhadra had gone up to worship on Raivataka. With his brother's consent in hand and Krishna's leave, he went over the plan with Krishna one last time and made ready.

The chariot he mounted was a golden one, built in the proper fashion and hung with nets of little bells, with Krishna's own horses Sainya and Sugriva in the traces. It was stocked with every weapon, it blazed like fire, and when it rolled its roar was like thunder in the clouds. Arjuna armed himself, a sword at his side and guards on his elbows and fingers, and set out as if he were going hunting.

On the hill, Subhadra worshipped Raivata, king of the mountains, received the blessings of the gods and of all the brahmanas, walked around the mountain in reverence, and turned for Dwaraka with her attendants around her, the festival loud on the slope above and the sea flat and bright below.

Arjuna rushed at her. He took her and put her up onto the chariot by force, and before the people around her had understood what they were seeing, the sweet-smiling daughter of the Vrishnis was gone down the road, and that tiger among men was driving for his own city as though the horses ran on air.

The armed men of her escort raised the alarm. They shouted after the chariot, and then turned and ran for Dwaraka to tell what they had seen, while its dust still hung over the hill road behind them.

The escort came into Dwaraka at a run and burst into the Sudharma hall, and there they told the keeper of the assembly the whole story of Partha's daring. He sounded the war drum, the great one worked with gold, and at its terrible roar the Bhojas, Vrishnis and Andhakas left their food and their drink and poured into the hall. They took their golden thrones, the keeper told them what Arjuna had done, and the warriors, their eyes red with wine, came up off their seats in fury. 'Yoke the chariots! Bring our lances, the best bows, the heavy armour!' Some shouted for their charioteers; some ran to harness the horses themselves, and the hall filled with the clamour of men arming.

It was Balarama who stopped them, tall as Kailasha, dressed in blue, flushed with wine. 'Fools,' he said, 'what are you doing while Janardana sits silent? You roar without knowing his mind. Let him speak, and do whatever he says.' They cried out that he was right, and sat down again.

Then Balarama turned on his brother himself. 'Why do you sit there looking on without a word, Krishna? It was for your sake that we honoured Arjuna, and he has shown he never deserved it. Does a man of good birth break the plate he has eaten from? He has insulted us, disregarded you, and carried Subhadra off by force, and called his own death down on himself. Shall I bear a man who has set his foot on my head? Today I will rid the earth of the Kauravas by myself.' And the whole hall roared with him.

Krishna let it roar until it began to run down of its own weight, and then he spoke, in the voice of a man raising a matter of accounts.

'Arjuna has not dishonoured our house. He has added to it. He knows the Satvatas do not lust after riches, so he would not insult us with a bride price. He knows the outcome of a swayamvara is uncertain. And who would give away a daughter as if she were an animal, or sell her? He saw the flaws in every other road, and so, in accordance with dharma, he took her. The match is fitting. Subhadra is illustrious and so is he. Who would not want Arjuna? He is born of the line of Bharata and of great-souled Shantanu, the son of Kuntibhoja's daughter.

'And think what you are proposing. In all the worlds, with their Indras and their Rudras, I see no one who can defeat Partha in battle, not in that chariot, with my own horses yoked to it. If he beats us and drives on to his own city, our fame is finished. There is no defeat in making peace. Go after him gladly, speak to him gently, and bring him back.'

The hall went quiet. The Yadavas did as Krishna said. Arjuna came back, not as a prisoner but as a kinsman, married Subhadra in Dwaraka, and lived there a year before the last of his wandering. And when at last the Yadavas came to Indraprastha, Balarama among them and glad of the match, the gifts Krishna brought for his sister poured into the Pandava treasury like a river into the sea.