Hidimba and Baka

They went deep into the forest, dressed as wandering brahmins — the queen and her five sons, walking by night, sleeping by turns through the day, Bhima taking the long watches because the others tired and he, it seemed, never did.

The wood they crossed belonged to a man-eating rakshasa named Hidimba, and he caught their scent on the air and sent his sister Hidimbi to bring the meal in. She found Bhima awake in a clearing under the moon while his family slept, and she did not want to deliver him to her brother; she wanted to keep him for herself. She took a beautiful human form and told him plainly who she was, what she had been sent to do, and that she would not do it. When Hidimba came raging through the trees for the dinner that had not arrived, Bhima would not wake the others over so small a matter — he met the rakshasa empty-handed and broke him in the clearing while his mother and brothers slept on undisturbed a few feet away.

Hidimbi asked to go with Bhima as his wife. Yudhishthira, who weighed even this, allowed it on a single condition fitted to their situation: that she return Bhima to them by each nightfall, since they were fugitives and could not be anchored anywhere by a household. She bore him a son who grew, as her people grew, to a warrior’s full strength within a day — vast, bald, fierce-eyed, and bound to his father’s family by a devotion that asked nothing back. They named him Ghatotkacha, and when he left them for his mother’s country he left a promise behind him: that he would come the instant any of them thought of him in need. The story takes the promise and keeps it, far down its length, in the worst dark of the war, where his coming will buy Arjuna’s life with his own.

The Pandavas walked on and came to the town of Ekachakra, where they took a single room in the house of a poor brahmin and lived, as their disguise required, by begging through the day — Bhima eating half of whatever the five brought back and rising still hungry. One day they found the household in tears and learned why. The town lived under the protection, if it can be called that, of a rakshasa named Baka, who let its people survive only because they sent him in turn a cartload of food and the human being who drove the cart. The lot had fallen now on the family that had sheltered them, and the household was not weeping in despair but arguing — each member demanding to be the one to go and die — because love, cornered, does not plead; it competes to be spent.

Kunti ended the argument. We have eaten your bread under your roof, she said. My son will drive the cart. Bhima went, and went gladly, hungry as he always was. On the road he ate the rakshasa’s tribute himself, the whole of it, which drove Baka past reason; and then, unhurried, he killed the creature with his hands, dragged the body to the town gate, and left it there for the morning to find. Ekachakra woke delivered and never learned the name of the beggar who had delivered it. The Pandavas were learning the exact shape of their exile: to save people who would never know to thank them, while wearing names that were not their own.

Then a company of travelling brahmins passed through the town carrying news of the wider world — that in Panchala, King Drupada was holding a swayamvara for his daughter, a trial of the bow, and that the kings and princes of every country were going to it. The Pandavas, who were brahmins now in everything but the blood beneath the disguise, decided to go as well. Only to see it, they told one another. So they said, and so they set out, and the story let them believe it for as long as the road to Panchala lasted.