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 lasted twelve years. Twelve. Not twelve 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."

News of them reached King Vrishadarbhi, the son of Shibi. He had gone to those sages once before, in a good year, wanting their blessing on a sacrifice, and they had refused to take anything from his hand, and he had never forgotten it.

Now he sent servants after them with cattle, with grain out of the royal store, with gold, with the deeds of villages.

"We do not take," said Vashishtha, and the ten walked on.

He sent again, doubling everything, with a letter in his own hand saying the country would think ill of a king who let sages starve on his roads.

"Then let it think so," said Atri. "That is between the country and the king."

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 the basket came back unopened, 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 tall and beautiful and entirely wrong, the way a painted thing is wrong: 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 dark and dusty, with 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 a woman came out of the trees toward them, smiling, with her hands out in greeting.

"Holy ones," she said, "I have looked for you a long time. Tell me your names, so that I may honour each of you properly."

Not one of the seven had opened his mouth when Shunahsakha stepped in front of them and hit her across the head with his staff, once, the way a man kills a snake in a doorway. She went down into the leaves and did not move again, and what lay there was not a woman.

"Names are handles," said Shunahsakha, shouldering his staff again. "Shall we walk on? There is water ahead."

The water ahead was a lake, wide and still, thick with lotus, and after twelve years of dust the sight of it 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 eleven neat bundles on the bank, one for each. 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 eleven 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.

Vashishtha went first. "Let the man who took them study the Veda without keeping a single vow, and let kings send chariots to fetch him."

Atri said, "Let him carry a staff of office instead of a staff of wood, and stand first on every list read out."

Bharadvaja said, "Let him own a hundred cows and lie awake over the hundred and first."

Gautama said, "Let him hold land with a boundary, and spend the rest of his life defending it."

Vishvamitra said, slowly, as a man who has done it, "Let him wait at the door of a king, and be envied by everyone waiting behind him."

Jamadagni said, "Let him take gifts, and give alms out of the gifts, and be praised for his generosity."

Kashyapa said, "Let him sell what should only be given - a fee to teach, a fee to bless - and let him grow rich on it and die respected."

Arundhati said, "Let him eat before his guests have eaten, and grow fat, and be called a good householder."

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 have the whole Veda by heart, and keep every vow he takes. Let him have sons and see them grown and good. Let him make his offerings in season, and let the gods come down to his fire. And at the end let him go where the righteous go."

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 success. Cattle. Office. The doors of kings. Fees. Fame. We wished on him what the world runs after, and you wished on him what we run after. Friend, you have told us who took the stalks."

"I took them," said Shunahsakha. "I have listened to men swear oaths a very long time, and any fool is honest on a full stomach. I wanted to know what seven men who had not eaten in eleven days would reach for when naming a punishment. Every one of you reached for a throne."

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 twelve years. The king filled fruit with gold and you weighed it in your palm and put it down. The Kritya came for your names and you gave her nothing. And tonight, hungry enough to eat mud, you cursed a thief with everything my heaven is full of. Come up. The chariot is on the bank."

They went up in their own bodies, all eleven 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. "They were not made great by refusing gold; a starving man may take bread from a king. They were made great by what they could not help thinking of as a punishment. Watch what a man curses with, Yudhishthira. That, and not what he preaches, is what he believes is worth having."