The Theft of the Lotus Stalks

"Grandsire," said Yudhishthira, "you have told me all day who should give. Tell me who should take. A brahmana starves at my gate and I am a king with full granaries. Why is it ever wrong for him to hold out his hand?"

"There is no rule that will answer that," said Bhishma from his bed of arrows. "Rules are for ordinary weather. Let me tell you instead what seven hungry men did, and you can work the rule out backwards from them.

"There was a drought once that went on for years. Years. Not months. The rivers went down to a thread of warm water between stones, and then to stones. The wells were dug deeper and found nothing but a smell. Sacrifices stopped over half the country, not from impiety but because a man will not put an empty ladle over a fire. Villages emptied. The old sat down under the trees and stayed there.

"There were seven rishis on the roads in those years: Vashishtha, Atri, Gautama, Bharadvaja, Vishvamitra, Jamadagni, and Kashyapa. With them went Arundhati, who was Vashishtha's wife, and a maidservant named Ganda, and Ganda's husband, whose name was Pashusakha. Ten people walking.

"They lived by unchha. That is the hardest of the vows and the least admired, because there is nothing to look at: you follow the reapers at a distance and you pick up the single grains that fell and were left, and you eat what the harvest did not want. You beg from nobody. You go to no door. They had sworn to live that way and never by pratigraha, the accepting of gifts.

"They held to it while there were fields being reaped. Then the fields stopped being reaped, and there were no grains behind the reapers because there were no reapers, and the ten of them went on walking anyway - thinner every month, chewing leaves, boiling bark, saying the evening prayers on time."

King Vrishadarbhi, Vrishadarbha's son, of the line of Shibi, came upon them on the road, so starved that they were about to cook the body of a prince who had died of hunger. He offered them mules and a thousand cows each, bulls, villages rich in grain, jewels, anything, only not that food.

"A gift from a king is sweet at first and poison at the end," the sages told him. "It burns up the merit of our austerities as fire burns a forest. Give to those who ask you, and be happy." And they left the uncooked flesh and walked on.

So Vrishadarbhi thought about it, and found his door. He sent one basket. In it were figs, ripe and sweet-smelling, and the servant who carried it had been taught his words carefully.

"This is not the treasury," he said. "It is fruit. It grew on a tree. Your vow was against gifts, holy ones, and nobody's vow is against fruit."

And the argument was sound, and they had not eaten anything worth the name in eleven days, and every one of them looked at the basket.

Atri reached in and took one up and did not put it in his mouth. He turned it over in his palm and weighed it.

"Fruit does not weigh like this," he said. "We are old and we are thin, but we are not fools. There is metal inside them. Every one of these has been hollowed and filled and closed again."

He broke it open, and the gold sat in the pulp, catching the light.

"Gold in a fig is still gold," said Vashishtha. "Whoever eats that will be the king's man before he has finished swallowing it, and after that he will never tell the king a true thing again. Poison served in honey is poison. It is only harder to refuse."

They laid the basket down carefully in the grass and walked away empty-handed. Vishvamitra, who had been a king himself and knew exactly what was being purchased and at what price, laughed once, without joy, and said nothing for a mile.

When word came back that the basket lay untouched in the grass, Vrishadarbhi stopped being a disappointed patron and became something else. Twice offered, twice refused: to a certain kind of man that is not a refusal of gold but a verdict on him, delivered in public, by men whose verdicts stick.

He built a fire. He poured into it what should not be poured, and said over it what should not be said, and out of the flames stood up a woman.

She was terrible to look at, like the night at the end of the world: a Kritya, made for one purpose and containing nothing else.

"Yatudhani is your name," the king told her. "Now take these, and keep them." And he gave her the names one at a time, slowly, the way a man hands over knives: Vashishtha. Atri. Gautama. Bharadvaja. Vishvamitra. Jamadagni. Kashyapa. "Go into the forests and kill them. You will know them because they will tell you who they are. Holy men are proud of their names. Ask, and they will hand them to you."

Meanwhile, on a cart track under the sal trees, the ten had met an eleventh.

He was broad and dusty and plainly well fed, with a dog at his heels and a staff over his shoulder, and he fell into step beside them as though it had been arranged.

"What are you called?" Gautama asked him.

"Shunahsakha," the man said cheerfully. "Friend of a dog. Let me walk with you."

They let him. He carried the maidservant's bundle without being asked, did not talk about himself, and after two days nobody thought about him any more.

On the fourth day they came to a lake, and on its bank stood a woman of terrible aspect who said she guarded it. It was Yatudhani.

"You may take the lotus stalks," she said, "but first each of you must tell me your name and what it means."

One by one the seven, and Arundhati, Ganda and Pashusakha after them, told her their names and what each name meant, and each time she said she could not follow it and let them pass down to the water. Shunahsakha only gave his name. When she demanded it again, he hit her across the head with his triple staff, once, the way a man kills a snake in a doorway, and she fell and was ash.

"Names are handles," said Shunahsakha, and he planted his staff and sat down on the grass. "Go and gather your stalks."

The lake was wide and still, thick with lotus, and after the long years of dust the sight of it had stopped them where they stood.

Lotus stalks are food. Not good food, but food that does not belong to anybody. They went in up to their chests and pulled the long white bisa stalks and carried them ashore in armfuls, and made neat bundles on the bank. Then, because it was the hour for it and because they were the kind of men they were, they went back into the water to bathe and say the evening prayers before eating - holding hunger off one more hour with ritual, as they had held it off eleven days with argument.

They came up out of the lake in the last of the light.

The bank was bare. Not a stalk on it. Not a leaf out of place, not a footprint in the mud, and no sound anywhere but the water running off ten bodies.

Nobody spoke for a while. Then Vashishtha spoke.

"There were only us here. Let each of us swear."

Mark the oaths, said Bhishma, because the oaths are the whole story.

Atri went first. "Let the man who took them touch cows with his foot, make water facing the sun, and study the Veda on forbidden days."

Vashishtha said, "Let him give up study, live off the sale of his daughter, betray those who come to him for shelter, and beg riches from the vile."

Kashyapa said, "Let him bear false witness, eat flesh not offered in sacrifice, and give his gifts to the wrong men at the wrong times."

Bharadvaja said, "Let him be cruel to women and kin and cattle, defy his teacher, and pour his offerings on a fire of straw."

Jamadagni said, "Let him foul the water, live on his wife's earnings, and have no friends and many enemies."

Gautama said, "Let him throw away the Veda after learning it, abandon his three fires, and sell the soma."

Vishvamitra said, slowly, as a man who has done it, "Let him be proud of his wealth, till the soil, serve a king for pay, and be priest to men not fit to sacrifice."

Arundhati said, "Let the woman who took them torment her mother-in-law, quarrel with her husband, and eat the good food alone."

And Ganda swore, and Pashusakha swore, in their own plain words, and neither of them stole anything either.

Ten had sworn. They turned to the eleventh.

Shunahsakha leaned on his staff.

"Let the man who took your stalks give his daughter in marriage to a brahmana who knows the Vedas and keeps his vows. And let him finish the Atharva Veda and take the bath of a student whose learning is complete."

The lake went on lapping. Nobody said anything.

"That is not a curse," said Vashishtha. "That is what every man here has prayed for since he could hold water in his hands."

"And every one of us," said Vishvamitra, "cursed the thief with the worst we know. You wished on him what we pray for. Friend, you have told us who took the stalks."

"I took them," said Shunahsakha. "I made them vanish while you were in the water, to test you. Any fool is honest on a full stomach. And I came to guard you, for the woman who lies there in ashes was sent by the king to kill you all."

And as he spoke the dust went off his feet, and his feet came off the grass; the garland at his throat was unwithered, his eyes stopped blinking, and a thunderbolt lay in the hand that had held the staff.

"I am Indra," he said. "I have walked with you four days and watched you all through the famine. The king filled fruit with gold and you weighed it in your palm and put it down. And tonight, hungry enough to eat mud, you still would not let greed in. You have won worlds that never end. Come up."

They went up with him to heaven, all ten of them, and the lake below closed over the place where the stalks had been.

"You asked me who may take a gift," said Bhishma. "A gift from an unrighteous giver sinks the one who takes it, and they knew it. But they were made great because hunger itself could not make them greedy. Cast off greed, Yudhishthira, in every circumstance. That is the highest duty."