The Three Fishes

The war was over and the field would not let anyone go. Kurukshetra lay under a low grey sky, picked over by birds, and in the middle of it Bhishma lay where the arrows had set him down, his body held a hand's breadth above the earth on their shafts, waiting for the sun to turn north before he would consent to die.

Yudhishthira sat by his head. He had come for days to be taught the duties of a king, and had asked about judgement, about taxation, about whom to trust with a treasury. The question he actually wanted answered he had kept for last, the way a man keeps back the tooth that hurts.

"Grandfather," he said, "how does a king know that the hour to act has come?"

"Say more."

"Every disaster of my life announced itself long before it arrived," said Yudhishthira. "Not one came out of a clear sky. I saw each of them coming and discussed each with wise men. And I did nothing, because the thing had not yet happened, and to act before it happens feels like impatience, and impatience is not a virtue in a king. So I waited, and then it was too late to do anything but suffer it well. I have become very good at suffering things well. It has cost me everyone I loved."

Bhishma turned his head on its pillow of arrows, slowly, because everything now was slow.

"Then I will tell you about three fishes," he said. "Herdsmen tell it to children by the water. Kings ought to be made to recite it every morning before they eat.

In a certain country there was a pond, lying off the elbow of a river and joined to it by a narrow channel that ran full in the rains and thinned to a trickle in the hot months. In it lived three fish who had grown large together and were friends.

One was called Anagatavidhata, Forethought: he who provides for what has not yet come. One was Pratyutpannamati, Ready-Wit, whose mind arrives at the same moment the trouble does. The third was Dirghasutra, Long-Delay, the one who draws out the thread, who was neither a fool nor a coward - which you must understand if you are to understand anything."

That summer the rains held off. The channel thinned until it ran no wider than a man's hand, and the pond drew in, day by day, from its own banks.

Forethought read it the way a scribe reads a page. He saw the wet ring on the rocks, a finger lower each morning, and herons standing where no heron had ever stood. And at noon on the third day he saw two men on the bank who did not fish. They walked the whole rim of the pond, paced its width, looked at the channel, pointed, and went away.

He called the other two into the deep water that evening.

"We must go tonight," he said. "The channel still has a finger of water in it. Tomorrow it may have none."

"Go where?" said Ready-Wit. "The river has crocodiles and currents and every big fish in the country. This pond is the best water any of us has ever had."

"There were men on the bank at noon."

"There are always men on the bank."

"Not men who do not fish," said Forethought. "A man who means to take a few fish sits down. A man who walks the whole edge and measures the width with his eyes means to take all of them at once. And the water is down by the height of my own body since the new moon. That is what makes it a warning and not a worry."

Ready-Wit laughed, not unkindly. "You have always lived in next month. I have never met a danger I could not answer when it was in front of me. Why pay the certain price of a hard journey to avoid a thing that has not happened?"

Then they both looked at Long-Delay, and Long-Delay considered it seriously, because he was a serious fish.

"You may well be right," he said. "I do not dismiss it. But this is not a small thing you propose, and there are considerations on both sides, and one should not decide such a matter at dusk when the light is bad. Tomorrow we will look at the channel together and measure it, and then we will know."

"The channel will not wait for better light," said Forethought.

He went that night, alone, scraping his belly through the last of the water, and came out into the great cold river before dawn.

The fishermen came two mornings later, and they came the way Forethought had said they would: not with lines, but with everything.

They dammed the mouth of the channel first, with stones and packed clay, so that nothing could leave. Then they set their baskets in a chain and began to bale the pond out onto the field, and the sound of it went on all morning, a steady slapping rhythm, and the water fell.

Under it the fish went mad. They ran the shrinking circle of the pond in a churning mass, hundreds of them, striking the shallows and turning back. Ready-Wit ran with them for a while, and then stopped running, because running was not thinking and he was a thinker.

He looked at the situation squarely. The channel was stopped. The mud was too thin to bury him. The water would be gone by afternoon. There was no way out of this pond. Therefore, he decided, he would have to leave it in their hands.

So Ready-Wit did the most frightening thing any creature can do. He swam toward the net.

They took him in the second haul. And the instant the mesh closed on him he stopped fighting - completely, all at once, in a way no living fish ever does. He went slack. He let his mouth hang open and his gills lie flat, he let his tail trail like a rag, and he made his one good eye go dull and flat and unfocused, staring at nothing, and he held it, while hands lifted him into the air and the world became noise and light and the terrible dryness of a man's palm.

"This one's been dead a while," said the fisherman, and he was disgusted, because a dead fish is worth nothing, and he strung Ready-Wit through the gill onto the long cord with the other spoiled ones and let him hang.

It is easy to say that he pretended to be dead. Consider what it cost. He hung on that cord in the sun for the length of a morning with his mouth open, unable to breathe, unable to twitch, hearing his own kind thrashing and dying in the baskets beside him, and he did not move a fin, because the whole plan was one single thing: not to be interesting.

At noon they carried the cords down to the river's edge to wash the catch before the walk to market, and they laid them in the shallows, and the water came over Ready-Wit's gills.

He did not move at first. He let them turn away. He let the man beside him stand up and stretch his back. Then he gave one convulsion of his whole body, tore the gill free of the cord, and was gone into the brown current before either fisherman had finished shouting.

He was bleeding and half-blind and he would carry that torn gill for the rest of his life, and a long way downstream a large fish came out from under the bank to meet him and said, "You are late."

"You were right," said Ready-Wit.

"I usually am," said Forethought. "It is a joyless gift. Where is he?"

Long-Delay was still in the pond.

He had not been idle. On the first morning, when the baling began, he had understood at once what was happening - he was not slow of mind, this must be said again, he was never slow of mind. He had gone straight to the channel and found it dammed. He had come back and considered the mud, and concluded that the mud was too thin to hide in, which was correct. He had considered the reeds on the eastern side and concluded that they might serve if the water held above them, and had begun working out how long that would be.

He was still working it out, in the last shallow puddle at the deepest point of the pond, with the whole surface of the bare mud steaming around him, when the men waded in.

He had heard the warning. He had believed it. He had agreed with every word of it and had been on his way to act on it for two days. He died in the gap between agreeing and moving, which is where most men die, and they clubbed him on the bank and threw him in a basket with the rest.

Bhishma let the silence sit a moment over the grey field.

"There are three kinds of men in a council chamber," he said. "The first sees the shape of the coming thing while it is still only a shape, and moves while moving is still cheap. Nobody thanks him. He looks anxious, and he is always leaving good ponds. The second sees nothing coming at all, but when the net closes he is never at a loss - he will do the frightening, unheard-of thing at the instant it is required. The third sees, understands, agrees, and asks for the morning.

Of the three, only the last is certainly lost. Ignorance can be mended with honest spies. A slow eye can be taught. But a man who knows and waits has already decided; he has decided in favour of the disaster and merely spared himself the discomfort of saying so aloud. Delay is not the absence of a choice, Yudhishthira. It is a choice that flatters the man who makes it."

Yudhishthira said nothing.

"I sat in a hall," said Bhishma, "while a woman was dragged in by the hair, and I knew exactly what was happening, and I waited for a better hour to speak of it - and there was no better hour, and there never is one. Do not think I tell you this from above."

"So my sons died of my patience," Yudhishthira said at last.

"They died of many things," said Bhishma. "Your patience was one. Mine was another and older. That is why you are taught by a man on a bed of arrows and not by a man in a chair.

Learn to be the first fish. Read the water line on the rock, count the men on the bank who are not fishing, and go while the channel is still wet, and let them call you fearful. If you cannot manage that, be the second: when the net has you, be capable of the strange and terrible act. But never, on any single day of your reign, be the third. Never know a thing and wait for better light. The light does not get better. The water only goes down."