Arjuna and the Mountain God

Arjuna went up into the Himalaya and gave himself to penance with the same total appetite he had once given to the bow in the dark — eating less and less, standing longer and longer, until the heat of his austerity reached the gods and they began to take notice of a man making himself into a question they would have to answer.

The first to answer came disguised as a hunter. As Arjuna tracked a great boar, another arrow struck it at the same instant as his own, and a wild mountain man — broad, matted, terrible — claimed the kill as his. They argued, then they fought, and the fight did not go the way Arjuna’s fights went. His arrows ran out and did nothing; his bow, Gandiva, was taken from his hands; his strength, the wonder of two courts, was simply not enough. Beaten down to nothing, he made a small earthen image of Shiva, as Ekalavya had once made one of Drona, and offered his worship to it — and the garland he laid on the clay appeared around the neck of the hunter standing over him. The wild man was Shiva, who fights the people he means to gift, and will not give a weapon to a man he has not first reduced to the truth of his own limits.

Arjuna had passed by losing well. Shiva gave him the Pashupata, the weapon that ordinary war does not survive, with the discipline folded into the gift: it was not to be loosed at any lesser provocation, not to be spent on pride, not to be used against one who could not match it. The greatest arms in this story always arrive leashed to a restraint, and the warriors who matter are the ones who keep the leash on.

Then the guardians of the directions came, the great gods of the quarters, and each gave Arjuna a weapon of his own — fire and water and wind and death answering to a man who had made himself worthy of being answered. And last, Indra, his own divine father, sent his charioteer Matali down with a celestial car and took Arjuna up into the heaven of the gods.

He lived there a long while as Indra’s son, learning to wield what he had been given, learning from the gods’ own teachers the use of weapons that no forest could have taught him. The heaven offered him its pleasures, and one of them refused, the apsara Urvashi, laid a curse on him for the refusal — that he would spend a year as a eunuch, neither man nor warrior. Indra softened it to a single year of Arjuna’s choosing, and the story files the curse away with its usual patience: it will be drawn out, exactly when it is needed, to hide the greatest archer alive inside a dancing-master’s anklets in the thirteenth year.

While Arjuna gathered an arsenal in heaven, the family in the forest had only his absence, and it sat heavily on them. Years were passing. The weapons were being won, but the man who would wield them was not at the fireside, and the others marked the seasons by stories told to fill the place where he should have been. One of those stories was about a king who had lost everything at dice and walked into a forest with his wife — which is to say, it was about them, told slant, so that they could bear to hear it.