The Insult of Shishupala

The Rajasuya was performed at Indraprastha with every king of consequence present, the Kauravas among them. Bhishma came, and Drona, and Dhritarashtra’s sons; Duryodhana was given charge of the treasury, where he sat day after day watching wealth he believed should have been his flow into his cousins’ house. The story sets him there deliberately, counting another family’s gold, long before it lets him act.

At the climax of such a sacrifice, custom required that the assembly honour one man above all others present — the agrya-puja, the first worship — and the choice of whom fell to be debated. Bhishma named Krishna, and Yudhishthira, agreeing, offered the first honour to him before all the assembled kings. Most of the hall accepted it as plainly right. One man did not.

Shishupala, king of Chedi, rose in fury. He was Krishna’s cousin, and his enemy, and he had nursed the enmity for years into a practised public contempt. He denounced the choice with everything he had: that Krishna was no anointed king, that there were elders and sovereigns in the room more fitly first-honoured, that the Pandavas shamed the assembly by setting a cowherd above crowned men. He did not stop at argument. He turned the denunciation into abuse, raking up every old slander against Krishna and his people, and worked the room hard, hoping to split the kings and turn the sacrifice into a brawl — and he had, in Duryodhana and others, a quiet audience that wished him well.

Krishna let it run. There was, the story explains, an old account between them with a fixed term: Shishupala’s mother had once been promised that her son’s offences against Krishna would be borne without answer until they numbered one hundred, and not one past it. Krishna sat and counted in silence while the king of Chedi spent his hundred, and then spent the hundred and first, and the term Krishna had honoured exactly to its limit expired in the middle of a sentence. The discus left Krishna’s hand and took Shishupala’s head, and the man who had built a life out of insulting Krishna ended inside the precise tally of the insults. The hall steadied. The sacrifice went on. But the kings had now seen, at a consecration meant to display order, how thin the floor was between a ceremony and a killing — and Duryodhana had seen something more particular: that there is a man at the Pandavas’ side who keeps an account to its last entry and then settles it without hurry, and that this man is not on his.

Duryodhana left Indraprastha carrying two wounds and no way to speak the larger one. The smaller was the wealth, which he had been made to sit and tally. The larger was the hall itself. Crossing Maya’s floor of illusion he had taken polished crystal for water and gathered up his robes to wade, and then stepped where his eyes promised pavement and gone into a pool to his waist. Bhima had laughed. Draupadi, by the account most often told, had laughed with the others, and her laugh — the blind king’s son is as sightless as his father — went into Duryodhana and did not come back out. He rode home from his cousins’ triumph having decided that the seeming of their greatness would be undone, and that the man who could see how to do it was already waiting for him at home.