THE MAHABHARATA: A Modern Rendering, Vol 1 (38 page)

His hands shaking for joy—what greater prize could any kshatriya have than this bow?—Arjuna gingerly strung the Gandiva. As soon as he stretched the string from one tip to the other, the weapon rumbled like a cloud full of spring thunder. The Pandava’s heart sang to hear that sound. When he had fastened the string, he pulled on it and the tremendous twanging made the earth quake under their feet. Arjuna threw back his head and laughed in absolute delight.

Now Agni came up to Krishna. Something terribly bright lay in his flame-like hands: an irradiant disk. Agni said, “This belongs to you, I have only fetched it into the world: the Sudarshana Chakra, my lord.”

Krishna held out his hands and Arjuna saw the disk spin out of Agni’s palms and into the Dark One’s. Krishna raised his right hand, with his forefinger pointing at the sky. The Chakra was so fine it might have had no thickness at all, but only one side, if such a thing could be! Now it flashed up and poised itself, a blinding wafer of light, above Krishna’s finger.

Krishna bowed to Agni and, when he folded his hands to the God of fire, the Chakra disappeared from sight. Yet, it was with the Avatara now, in the world and he could summon it when he chose. Krishna said, “Now we shall surely contain even Indra.”

Arjuna climbed into the white chariot. Krishna climbed in beside him and took the reins. Arjuna cried, “We are ready, O Deva, burn the forest as you will!”

Agni roared and the brahmana was transformed into an immense figure of flames.

SIXTY-SEVEN
 

THE BURNING OF THE KHANDAVA VANA
 

Roaring from his mouth of flames, Agni began to consume the Khandava vana. Flashing between tree and tree, setting them ablaze like tinder-sticks, in no time the calescent Deva set half that forest alight. His hands were fire, his body, his hair and his face. His breath spewed a yojana of white flames.

He cried to Arjuna and Krishna, “Follow me! Not a bird, beast or plant must escape. They are all evil spawn.”

They flashed along beside him in the supernal chariot, the white horses keeping up effortlessly with Agni’s coruscating pace. They saw he had a careful plan how he would burn the forest, so no creature escaped from it. First, the Fire God flew round the hem of the vana in a vast circle, setting alight all the outermost trees. The flames then licked in, toward the heart of the Khandava in an ever-thickening ring.

Agni roared his joy as the jungle caught and burned and Krishna drove his chariot quick as thinking: round and round the conflagration, to make sure no beast escaped. But the birds of the forest flew up into the air to flee the inferno. Among them were vampire bats big as wolves and bigger pterodactyls, survivors from another age. No avian of those raucous swarms escaped. Like rays of light, Arjuna’s arrows brought every one down and they perished with the other vile denizens of the Khandava, shrieking as they burned.

Having joined the ends of his ring of fire, Agni moved into the deeper forest. Flames of many colors—green, blue, red and every shade of orange—licked at the trees and the grasses, setting the brooding darkness aglow. The roof of the jungle collapsed to the onslaught of walls of fire and the sun broke in with a vengeance and the wind, fanning the flames.

Agni blazed on and the screams of the creatures of darkness rang above his roars: screams of not only of thousands of animals, but rakshasas, pisachas, bhutas, yakshas and nagas, as the flames found them. Slavering demon faces, revealed briefly in the sheet-flames, dissolved with chilling howls and shrieks, as succubus and incubus, ghoul and goblin burned. For the rest, all the living fled deeper into the jungle. There was a stampede of evil species, flying in panic, with no hope of escape.

The stagnant pools and slime-covered lakes, across which no breath of air had stirred a ripple for centuries, began to bubble and evaporate in viscid fumes that rose into Devaloka. All their creatures, fish, crabs and tortoises, perished. On high, there was soon a commotion. The Devas flew to Indra their king and cried, “Is the world ending, that Agni consumes the Khandava vana?”

Indra peered down and saw the forest burning. He growled in annoyance, but this was not the first time Agni had tried to burn the Khandava. Indra summoned his storm troopers of the air. Black clouds amassed in towering legions above the burning forest. As far as the eye could see, rumbling thunderheads filled the sky and it grew dark as night.

Agni cried, “Indra knows the forest is burning. Here comes his storm!”

The sky was riven by a terrific streak of lightning. A clap of thunder shook heaven and earth. A terrific gale sprang up and howled through the trees. The throbbing clouds opened and an impossible rain fell out of them.

Agni howled. The rain was thick as arrows, each battering drop the size of a fist. At first, the blaze in the forest was so intense that Indra’s downpour never reached the burning trees, but turned to steam in the white heat.

Indra, master of rainclouds, roared in the sky in a battery of thunder. At once, the clouds in the firmament were twice as dense: Pushkara and Avartaka joined the fray, their lightning fiercer than anything so far. Now the rain from those clouds was as if a sea fell out of the heavens. Across the jungle the leaping flames hissed and sputtered and began to die, doused by the flash flood from the sky. It was as if the apocalypse, Badava, which ends the world, had encountered the deluge, Pralaya, in which time drowns.

Agni hissed and screeched in frustration. The sky filled with billowing black smoke, cracked through with jagged lightning. Agni wailed, “Help me, Krishna! Arjuna, help me now!”

Arjuna raised the Gandiva and it was an arc of golden light in his hands. Krishna drove his white horses in a dream of perfect chariotry; standing tall in the ratha, Arjuna loosed a river of arrows at Indra’s storm. The shining river held up the storm, so not a single drop of rain fell to the earth! Again Agni’s fire crackled and blazed; flames leapt up in exuberance, devouring tree and darkness. The Khandava burned like the fire from Siva’s third eye.

The canny storm now tried to fall elliptically, to bend its way around the shield of arrows in the sky. Arjuna turned his aim lower and in a moment enveloped all the vana, top and sides, in an impenetrable dome. Agni’s flames licked at this cupola.

Indra’s friend Takshaka, the serpent-king, for whose sake the Deva protected the Khandava, was not in that jungle at all; but Takshaka’s son Aswasena was and so was Aswasena’s mother. They slithered here and there in terror, seeing no way of escape. From above, Indra watched their plight. As the flames closed on them and the heat grew unbearable, Aswasena’s mother cried to her son, “I will divert Arjuna and Indra will help you get away.”1

Before Aswasena could protest, his emerald mother, Takshaka’s queen of winged serpents, flew up as if to breach Arjuna’s dome of arrows. In a flash, Arjuna brought her down with three livid shafts, her cry ringing in the burning air. At that moment, Indra loosed a deluge that breached the roof of the dome directly above Arjuna’s chariot. The water fell on him like a stone and Arjuna fainted. Before Krishna could revive him, Aswasena had streaked out of the Khandava. He was the only creature of the forest to escape.

Arjuna cursed Aswasena. “You have escaped your destiny like a coward! Your name shall be reviled through the ages.”

Agni and Krishna cursed that serpent as well. Furious that Indra had tricked him, Arjuna now carried the battle into the sky. His astras came flaring into Devaloka. Torn between pride that this kshatriya was his son and anger that a mortal dared attack him, Indra loosed a vayavyastra from above, a weapon of winds. A hundred hurricanes came screaming down on Agni’s forest-fire.

They blew out the tallest pillars of flame, as the vayavyastra whistled around the Khandava, snuffing Agni’s furnace. Arjuna loosed a torrid agneyastra at the vayavya. The screaming winds took fire themselves and lit the trees again. Agni sprang up joyfully and now he paid tribute to his warriors: some of his loftiest flames looked like Arjuna and some, like Krishna, were deep blue.

Krishna drove the white chariot like light through the blazing forest. He held the reins in one hand and with the other, he hunted the creatures of darkness: the bhutas, pretas, pisachas, rakshasas and yakshas that infested the Khandava. He hunted them with his spectral Chakra, which desiccated spirits, goblins and demons and their cries echoed among tree-tall flames.

Arjuna shot three more fiery astras straight into Devaloka. Beside himself, Indra seized up his Vajra, the thousand-jointed thunderbolt and started down from Amravati. He would teach these mortals a lesson! The other Devas went before him: Yama with his glowing staff, Kubera with his

1. In another version, the mother snake swallows Aswasena to protect him. But Arjuna decapitates her as she tries to fly out of the burning forest. Aswasena escapes, vowing to take revenge someday.

dreadful mace, Skanda with his lance of fire, Twastha with his mountain, Surya with his flaming dart and Mrityu with his gleaming axe.

A river of arrows from the Gandiva greeted them in the ethereal akasa between heaven and earth. Then there was Krishna’s Chakra, wheeling everywhere, nitid and inexorable, barring their way down. The Devas fled back to Indra, crying, “There is no way past the mortals’ weapons.”

“These kshatriyas are terrible!”

“Who are they? They strike fear in us!”

Indra smiled inwardly; but he must take battle down to the upstart humans that dared put the Devas of heaven to flight. Indra knew who Krishna was, that there was no standing against the Avatara. Once, years ago in Vrindavana, he had suffered a humiliating defeat at the Blue One’s hands.

But Arjuna’s mettle was yet to be tested. Roaring above the storm, Indra plucked a jagged peak from Mount Mandara with hands of light. Carrying it aloft—perhaps to show Krishna it was not just he who could bear mountains in the sky!—the Deva king appeared above the Khandava vana and hurled his missile down at the human warriors like a bolt of lightning.

It flew down the sky, darkening the day, taking fire as it came like a comet. Quicker than seeing, Arjuna turned his arrows at the peak of rock and ice. He smashed it into dust and scattered the dust everywhere in a fine rain.

The planets wobbled in their orbits at Indra’s roar. The king of the Devas raised his thunderbolt, made in forgotten times from a rishi’s bones of adamant. He drew back his arm to cast the Vajra at Arjuna, when an asariri spoke from the sky, “Takshaka is not in the Khandava vana and the jungle is fated to burn today. It was written among the stars before the earth was made and nothing can save it. You have helped Aswasena escape; you can do no more.

Arjuna and Krishna are Nara Narayana. No one can vanquish them. It is not natural for a father to fight his son; stay your hand, Deva. Salvage some honor before they humiliate you completely.”

Indra lowered his Vajra. For a moment, he sat very still on his white elephant, Airavata treading air. Then he came down to the Khandava and stood before Arjuna and Krishna in a scintillating form. The kshatriyas climbed down from their chariot and folded their hands to him.

Indra said, “Not all the Devas together could have done what you both have. Ask me for any boon.”

Arjuna quivered with excitement to see his father. He stood staring at the God of light. Indra said again, “Ask me for any boon, Kshatriyas and it will be yours.”

He looked at Krishna, who shook his head. Indra turned to Arjuna, who fell at his father’s feet for his blessing. Indra laid his palm on his son’s head, then raised him up and embraced him. Yet again, the Deva said, “I am proud of you, Arjuna, ask me for any boon.”

Arjuna hesitated; he glanced at Krishna, who nodded at him. The Pandava cried, “Bless me with every astra you have power over!”

Indra threw back his illustrious head and laughed. “You will have all the astras you want! But not yet, my son. When Siva gives you his own Paasupatastra, you will have my astras from me. So it is written, I believe and so it shall be.”

He turned to the inscrutable Krishna. “Krishna, is there nothing you want from me today?”

And Krishna said, “Let Arjuna always be my friend, through eternity.”

“So be it.”

Indra raised his hand over them once more and vanished as if he had been an illusion. Just then, they heard a cry. A noble Asura—none they expected to find in this vile Khandava, but a great Demon of the ancient race, tall as two men—came flying through the clearing where Arjuna and Krishna stood beside the white chariot. He ran with huge strides, his face twisted in a grimace, his dark eyes full of fear. Roaring after him, flew Agni, man-shaped again, but gigantic, flaming arms outstretched to clasp the Asura and make him ashes.

That Asura was Mayaa, demon builder and awesome genius, who once made the Tripura in the sky. He had come to visit his friend Takshaka. Agni had burned down the serpent-king’s cave palace and Mayaa fled through a back door with the Fire God in pursuit.

When Krishna saw the fleeing Asura, he raised his Chakra to take off the fugitive’s head. Mayaa ran to Arjuna and cried, “Arjuna, save my life!”

Strangely taken with that dark and magnificent being, Arjuna said, “No one shall harm you.”

Krishna gave a shout of surprise, but he lowered his hand and the Chakra vanished. Agni also turned away from Mayaa, sparing his life because Arjuna had given him sanctuary. In a wink, the Asura escaped from the burning forest.

Some say Agni burned in the jungle for a fortnight before the Khandava was razed; others claim the Fire God raged so fiercely he consumed the vana before the sun set that same evening. Perhaps, the truth was that the burning of the Khandava occurred in a subtler dimension of time and event, a transcendent zone.

Anyway, all that was left of the evil forest was ashes, which the wind scattered across Bharatavarsha. The earth was exorcised of the sinister vana and its evil creatures and spirits. Arjuna now had the white chariot, the Gandiva and the magic quivers that fate meant him to have: for the war on the crack of the ages, which he must fight one day.

His hunger appeased—with boundless animal flesh, to him nectarine rivers of blood, marrow and fat—Agni came back to Krishna and Arjuna as the bright brahmana once more. He glowed now with the satisfaction of the ample meal: like a contented guest after a wedding banquet! He laid his hands, cool flames, in blessing on the warriors’ heads.

Agni said, “Today’s feast would never have been but for you both. Krishna and Arjuna, I bless you: may your most cherished dreams come true!”

They bowed to him with folded hands and he, too, vanished before their eyes like mist before the sun. Arjuna and Krishna were alone together. Exhausted by their adventure, they walked slowly to the river, dark now with twilight. The last rays of the setting sun lit the few clouds that straggled in the sky: like lamps at evening puja. Behind them in the jungle, livid embers still smoldered here and there; but otherwise, all that day was like some dream. A breeze sprang up over the Yamuna, full of the scents of night-blooming lotuses and it blew the last wisps of smoke out of the razed forest. It blew soft calm into the two kshatriyas’ tired limbs.