The Song of Vritra

"You have heard how Vritra died," said Bhishma from the bed of arrows. "Everyone has. The drought that would not break, the bones of Dadhichi given up while the sage still lived, the thunderbolt forged out of them, and Indra bringing down the greatest of the asuras at last with the foam of the sea. That is a tale about a weapon, and it is told elsewhere and told well.

"This is not that tale. Before the end came, the same demon whose fall the bards sing had a wisdom in him that few of the gods ever matched, and nobody sings that, because there is no thunder in it. I will tell it to you now, because you are a man who has just won everything and does not yet know how to hold it."

It happened this way.

Vritra had ruled the three worlds, and that is not a figure of speech. The sun had gone where he permitted. The rain had fallen where he allowed. The gods had kept to their own country and been careful. Then the war turned, as wars do, and it turned completely. His hosts were broken and scattered, his cities taken. The tribute stopped, the messengers stopped, the flattery stopped, and one morning the lord of the three worlds was a defeated person sitting in a place that no longer belonged to him, with nothing before him but the certainty of an ending.

To him came Ushanas, called Shukra, his own preceptor, teacher of the asuras, who had counselled him in his greatness and had come now to sit with him in his ruin.

Shukra had buried many kings. He knew the look of a man who has lost an empire: the eye that keeps going back to the door, the hands that will not be still, the talk that circles and circles the one hour in which it might have gone otherwise.

Vritra had none of it. He sat as a man sits at the end of an ordinary day. He greeted his teacher courteously, asked after the journey, and waited.

And Shukra, who had come prepared with consolation, found that there was nothing to console.

"I must ask you something," said Shukra at last, "and it is not the question I brought with me.

"I have stood beside the fall of many great ones. I have seen kings claw the ground with their hands. I once saw the lord of a single small country lose one province and go grey inside a season. You held the three worlds. The sun ran on your sufferance. And they are gone, all of them, not one stone of them left to you, and you sit there and ask me whether the road was hard.

"So I want to know which of three things this is.

"Is it numbness? That happens. A blow lands so heavily that the man does not feel it for a month and then feels the whole of it at once, and if that is what this is, I would rather be beside you when it arrives.

"Is it pride? Are you holding your face still for my benefit, so that the account which goes out shall be the account of a king who did not flinch? If that is it, put it down. There is nobody here but your teacher, and I knew you when you were small.

"Or do you not yet understand what has happened? Vritra, they are dividing your dominions this morning. Somebody else is being handed the rain. Your name is being struck off the lists as we sit here. Before long there will be men alive who do not know that anyone ever sat in your seat."

"I know all of it," said Vritra.

"Then why are you not grieving?"

"Because I cannot find the loss you are describing," said Vritra. "I have looked for it, honestly and more than once. Show me where to put my hand upon it and I will grieve as loudly as you like."

Shukra sat down, which he had not meant to do. He was old, and he had taught for a long age, and he recognised the particular silence that follows a student's answer when the answer has gone past the teacher.

"Explain it to me," he said, "as though I were the student and you the master. I find that today I am."

"All meetings end in partings," said Vritra. "There is no exception anywhere. Every gathering that ever came together has come apart. Every rising has had its fall waiting at the far end of it. Everything accumulated has been scattered and everything born has died. This is not a misfortune that has befallen the world. It is the shape of the world. You taught me the words when I was a boy, teacher, and I said them back to you and did not know them. I know them now, sitting here, and knowing them is a wholly different possession.

"Consider what I am supposed to be mourning. An empire. Now, when exactly did it become mine? There was a time when it was not. There was a time when it belonged to another, and he thought about it as I did. It came to me in a season, it stayed with me a while, it has gone on to somebody else, and it will leave him too, and today he believes that no more than I did.

"Time gives and time takes back, and it does neither out of malice. It is a wheel. When the rim is at the top the spoke rides high, and when the wheel has turned a little that same spoke is in the mud, and neither the height nor the mud was the spoke's doing or the spoke's property.

"I have been mighty before this. I have also been small: a creature in the dark, a thing in the water, a beast that did not know its own name. I shall be both again. The one who rides in me has worn many stations and many bodies, has been a lord and has been a worm, will be a lord and will be a worm, and not one of those was ever him.

"What men call ruin is only the turning of a wheel too large for them to stand back from. They watch the spoke go down and they think the world has broken.

"Grief, teacher, is the tax paid by those who mistake a station for a self. I held the three worlds. I was never the holding of them. So there is nothing here to weep over, and I will not counterfeit tears in order to make my downfall the proper shape."

"Vritra did not invent that on the day of his fall," said Bhishma. "Nobody does. What a man says at the bottom is only what he practised at the top.

"Long before, while he was still lord of everything, the sage Sanatkumara had come to him, for the great asuras kept teachers and a few of them listened, and had told him where the journey goes. Vritra kept the teaching by him the way another king keeps a treasury."

This was the teaching. The one within is not born when the body is born and is not extinguished when the body is burned. He goes out of a used frame as a man goes out of a house whose roof has failed, and he is lodged again according to what he has done and what he has become. Where the mind was fixed at the end, there he arrives. He who spent his years in appetite is drawn toward bodies made for appetite. He who spent them in cruelty is drawn toward the receiving of it. He who kept truth and restraint and study rises into worlds of light, and remains there while that earning lasts, and comes down again when it is spent, for even heaven is a station and not a self.

Only the one who has stopped identifying with any station at all goes where there is no coming back.

"So the ladder runs both ways," said Bhishma, "and no rung upon it is home. Understand that, and the whole apparatus of fear falls off a man like an old coat. He does not dread the loss of place, because place was never where he lived. He does not dread death, because death is a change of lodging, and he has changed lodgings before and remembers the road.

"That is why Shukra could find no grief in his student. There was nothing in Vritra for the disaster to fasten upon. You may break every hold a man has upon the world and you will not have touched him, if he was never holding with himself."

"Now hear what this is for," said Bhishma, "because I am not telling you a demon's philosophy to comfort you in some ruin twenty years off. I am telling it on the morning of your coronation, which is the only hour in which it can be learned.

"A king who has understood Vritra fears no reversal, and a king who fears no reversal is a different kind of king altogether. Fear is what makes rulers cruel. The man who believes his crown is his self will kill to keep it, and he will kill early, upon suspicion, because the loss of it looks to him like annihilation, and there is nothing a man will not do to escape annihilation. Half the wickedness in the chronicles was done by frightened men defending their own idea of themselves.

"Take the fear out and what remains is a man who can afford to be just. He can hear bad news without rage. He can pardon a rival, since a rival is no threat to what he actually is. He can lose a province and still sleep, and a king who sleeps decides better in the morning than one who does not.

"So hold the crown as a traveller holds a room for the night. He uses it fully. He does not lie on the floor out of some vanity of detachment. He takes the bed, he trims the lamp, he shuts the door against the weather, and he leaves the room in better order than he found it. Then, when morning comes, he walks out of it without a backward look, because he never once believed the room was him.

"Rule that way, son of Kunti. Mend the roads, feed the poor, hear the cases yourself, punish where you must, and do every part of it as a man does the work of a house he is passing through. Then, when the wheel turns, and it will turn, they will not find you clawing the ground. They will find you as Shukra found Vritra: courteous, unsurprised, and asking after the journey."