The Lake and the Yaksha's Questions

At the very end of the twelve years, the forest set the Pandavas its plainest test, and it had nothing to do with strength.

A brahmin came to them in distress: a deer had carried off, tangled in its antlers, the fire-sticks he needed for his rites, and without them his sacrifices would fail. The Pandavas, who helped anyone who asked because by now that was simply who the forest had made them, went after the deer and could not catch it — it drew them deep and scattered them and vanished. They came apart from each other, thirsty and beaten, in unfamiliar country.

Nakula went to find water and came to a clear lake. As he bent to drink, a voice from the lake stopped him: answer my questions first, then drink. Thirst argued louder than a disembodied voice; he drank, and fell dead at the water’s edge. Sahadeva came looking for him, found him, grieved, bent to drink, was warned, ignored the warning, and fell. Then Arjuna — Arjuna, who had beaten a god on a mountain — came, and answered the voice with his bow, firing into the water at nothing, and drank, and died too. Then Bhima, the strongest man alive, who could not be reasoned with by a lake any more than by anyone else. Four brothers lay dead around the still water, and the story has made its point before a single question is asked: against this, the Pandava arsenal is worth nothing at all.

Yudhishthira came last, and saw his four brothers dead with no wound on them, and did not drink. When the voice spoke he answered it. It was a yaksha, a spirit, and it asked him questions — not riddles for cleverness but examinations of what a man has actually understood about living. What makes the sun rise? Who is the friend of one about to die? What is the road? What is the greatest wonder in all the world? And Yudhishthira answered, without hurry, out of the years the forest had spent teaching him: that duty makes the sun rise; that the friend of the dying is the conduct one carries out; that the road is the one the great have walked, for argument never settles dharma and reasoning has no fixed end; and that the greatest wonder is this — that men see others die around them every day and still each believes, in his own case, that he will not. The voice asked many such things, and to each the answer was not knowledge but judgement, the slow yield of having been broken and having stayed exact while broken.

Satisfied, the yaksha offered him the life of one brother back. Yudhishthira chose Nakula. The spirit, surprised — not Bhima, not Arjuna, on whom your war depends? — asked why. Because, Yudhishthira said, his father Pandu had two wives; he himself was Kunti’s son and alive; let Madri not be left with none. He chose fairness over advantage when advantage was free and fairness cost him. That answer, not any of the others, was the examination. The yaksha was Dharma, his own divine father, who had set the whole test — the deer, the lake, the deaths — to weigh his son one last time before the hardest year, and finding the weighing true, restored all four brothers and blessed them: that in the thirteenth year they would move through the world unrecognised, however near their enemies looked.

The forest was over. They had gone in with grievance and weapons and come out with something the hall had not been able to give them — an answer, in the eldest, to the questions the hall could not answer. Now they had to disappear: five of the most famous men alive, and the most famous woman, walking into one more year, this time as no one at all.