The Brothers and the Apsara

When the five Pandava brothers had won the princess Draupadi and taken her, by a strange turn of fate, as the shared wife of all five, the divine sage Narada came one day to visit them in their new home. He found them living together in harmony, and he was glad of it - but being wise, he foresaw a danger that the brothers in their happiness could not yet see.

"You are five brothers who love one another," Narada said, "and you share one wife among you. This is a thing that has never been before, and it can stand only if you are careful. For nothing in the world so easily turns brother against brother as a woman desired by more than one. Let me tell you a story of two brothers who loved each other more dearly than any I have known - so dearly that they were inseparable in everything - and of how a single beautiful woman set them to slaying each other. Hear it, and make a rule among yourselves before such a thing can grow between you."

And the brothers, with Draupadi beside them, listened as Narada told the tale of Sunda and Upasunda.

There were once (said Narada) two asura brothers named Sunda and Upasunda, sons of a mighty daitya. From their earliest days they were bound to one another by a love deeper than any common bond of brothers. They shared everything - the same food, the same bed, the same thoughts, the same purposes. Neither would act without the other; neither desired anything the other did not desire. They were like a single soul housed in two bodies, and it was said that nothing in all the three worlds could come between them.

Together they grew into warriors of terrible strength and ambition. And together they conceived a great design: to make themselves invincible, to conquer the three worlds, and to rule them side by side forever. For such a purpose ordinary might was not enough. So the two brothers went up into the lonely heights of the Vindhya mountains, and there, as one, they began a penance of the most fearful severity, to compel the Grandfather of the worlds himself to grant them their desire.

On the slopes of the Vindhya the two brothers gave themselves to austerities such as the world had rarely witnessed. They stood with arms upraised under the blazing sun; they fasted until their bodies were wasted to little more than skin and bone; they endured heat and cold and hunger without complaint, their minds fixed on a single purpose, holding to their discipline with the iron will that their love and ambition gave them.

So intense did their penance grow that its heat began to trouble the very heavens. The mountains smoked; the worlds grew uneasy; the gods themselves felt the power the two asuras were gathering, and were afraid. They sent temptations to break the brothers' concentration - illusions, fears, beautiful visions, false alarms - but Sunda and Upasunda could not be moved. Nothing the gods devised could shake two minds so perfectly united and so utterly resolved.

At last the Grandfather Brahma, the creator of the worlds, knew that such penance could not be denied, and he came down before the two brothers to grant them the boon they had earned.

"You have done enough," said Brahma. "Your penance has pleased me. Ask now the boon you desire."

The two brothers, with one voice, made their request. "Grant us mastery of all weapons and all magic," they said, "and the power to take any shape at will. And above all, Grandfather, grant us this: that we may be immortal - that no being in all the three worlds, neither god nor demon nor man nor beast, shall ever be able to kill us."

Brahma considered, for true immortality could not be given to any creature. "Everything else I grant you," he said. "But deathlessness from all beings I cannot bestow, for all that is born must die. Choose some single exception - name one way by which death may come to you - and against all else you shall be safe."

The brothers laughed in their hearts, for they were so certain of their love that the answer seemed to make them invincible in truth. Sure that no force on earth or in heaven could ever divide them, they said: "Then let it be this. Let us be unslayable by every being in all the worlds - save only by each other. Let it be that nothing can kill us but our own two hands turned against one another." And being so wholly devoted, they believed they had chosen a death that could never, ever come. Brahma granted the boon exactly as they asked, and departed.

Now believing themselves immortal, for they could imagine no power that would ever set them against each other, the two brothers came down from the mountain and fell upon the worlds. With their mastery of weapons and their power to change shape at will, and with no one able to slay them, they were unstoppable.

They conquered the kingdoms of the earth one after another, casting down kings and seizing their thrones. They drove out the gods from heaven and took the celestial realms for their own. They slew or scattered all who resisted. They hunted the sages in their forest hermitages, for the penances and sacrifices of the holy men gave strength to the gods, and the brothers wished the gods weakened; and so the rites were broken and the altars overturned and the hermitages burned, and a great cruelty spread across the three worlds.

There was none who could stand against them, for the boon held: no being in all the worlds could kill Sunda and Upasunda. They ruled together over everything, side by side, exactly as they had dreamed, and the worlds groaned under them.

The afflicted gods and sages went at last to Brahma and begged him to find some remedy, for the two asuras were destroying the worlds and could not be killed by any being. Brahma had foreseen this hour. He remembered the single flaw the brothers had left in their own boon: that they could die by each other's hand. The only weapon that could destroy them was their own love turned to rivalry.

So Brahma summoned the celestial architect, the divine craftsman of the gods, and gave him a strange commission: to fashion a woman more beautiful than any being who had ever existed - so perfectly, so overwhelmingly lovely that no one who looked upon her could fail to desire her. The craftsman gathered the most beautiful particles of everything in all creation, every gem and flower and lovely thing, and from them he shaped a maiden of flawless and bewitching beauty. Because she was made of the finest sesame-seed measure of every excellent thing, she was named Tilottama.

When she was complete, Brahma gave her her task. "Go to the two asura brothers, Sunda and Upasunda," he said. "Show yourself to them. And let their own hearts do the rest."

Tilottama went to where the two brothers were resting at their ease in a pleasant place, flushed with their conquests, drinking and making merry on a hilltop in the season of flowers. She walked among the blossoming trees, gathering flowers, and let herself be seen.

The moment the two brothers looked upon her, the boon's hidden flaw began its work. Each of them, in the same instant, was seized by a violent and overpowering desire for the beautiful stranger - and each, for the first time in their lives, felt that desire as a thing he would not share, not even with the brother he loved more than himself.

Sunda seized Tilottama's right hand and cried, "She is mine! I saw her first; she shall be my wife." And in the very same breath Upasunda seized her left hand and cried, "No - she is mine! I will have her, and no other." Each held one of her hands and glared at the other, and the love of a lifetime, the bond that nothing in the three worlds had ever been able to break, cracked in a single moment over a woman made of gems.

"She is my elder brother's by right!" - "No, she is mine, I claimed her!" The two who had never in their lives wanted different things now wanted the same thing and could not both have it, and neither would yield. Their wine inflamed them; their pride hardened them; the desire burned in them like a fever. Sharp words turned to threats, and threats to fury.

"How dare you claim her over me?" cried Sunda. "How dare you?" answered Upasunda. They forgot, in that madness, all that they had been to each other - the shared bed and the shared bread and the single soul in two bodies, the years of perfect love, the worlds they had conquered side by side. They forgot everything but the woman and their rage.

They snatched up their terrible maces, the very weapons with which they had conquered heaven and earth. "She is mine!" each roared, and they fell upon each other. And Tilottama slipped quietly away, her task done, for she had only ever needed to be seen.

The two brothers struck at each other with all the monstrous strength that had laid low the three worlds, and now at last that strength found a target it could harm. For the boon had made them deathless against every being in creation - except one another. Mace crashed against mace, and blow against blow, until both brothers, streaming blood, struck home in the same instant, and the two who had loved each other above all things fell dead together upon the flowery hilltop, each slain by the only hand in all the worlds that could slay him - his brother's.

So died Sunda and Upasunda, undone not by the gods they had defeated nor by any weapon of heaven, but by their own love turned to rivalry over a woman. The boon they had thought made them immortal had carried their deaths inside it all along, sewn into the single exception they had been so sure could never come to pass.

The gods rejoiced; the sages returned to their hermitages; the kings took back their thrones; and heaven was restored to its rightful lords. The terror of the worlds had been ended without a single blow from any god - by nothing but a beautiful woman and the brothers' own divided desire.

Narada looked gravely at the five Pandavas. "There is my tale. Two brothers who loved each other beyond anything the world had seen, destroyed in a single afternoon because one beautiful woman stood between them and neither would yield. I have not told it to frighten you, but to make you wise. You also are brothers who love one another, and you share one wife. Take care that what undid Sunda and Upasunda never finds a foothold among you."

The Pandavas took the warning to heart, and there and then they made a firm and lasting rule among themselves: that Draupadi would dwell with each of the brothers in turn for an appointed time, and that during that time no other brother would intrude upon them; and that whoever broke this rule, even by accident, would accept a penance and a period of exile. By this rule, made in answer to Narada's story, the five brothers guarded their unity, and the thing that had slain the inseparable asuras never came between the sons of Pandu.

"Thus," Narada said, well pleased, "you have turned an old tragedy into your own safeguard. Remember always: the bond between brothers is a treasure, and the surest way to keep it is to set wise limits upon desire before desire can set brother against brother." And the sage blessed them and went his way.