Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna were not much in evidence. They had asked to be away from the group and were sitting on two inlaid chairs at the edge of the forest. Left alone, they said nothing, suddenly solemn expressions set on their faces. All at once Kṛṣṇa turned to the women in the distance: all he could see there was a swarm of colored points, milling madly. Voices and sounds came faintly through the air, a quivering in the background. He would never see anything so delightful again in all his life. Indeed he would hardly see anything delightful at all in the time that remained. Arjuna didn’t know that, couldn’t know it, but he was beginning to feel it. There was no need to speak to him. In the silence he was preparing himself for an immense catastrophe, albeit without knowing exactly what would happen.
Then they saw a tall figure emerge from the dense forest, upright, emaciated, with a red beard and skin of molten gold glimmering beneath a black robe. A brahman. He seemed exhausted and irate. He said: “I know who you are. I am a voracious brahman. Give me food I can eat.” Kṛṣṇa asked him what food would satisfy him. “I’m Agni,” said the brahman. “Only this whole forest can satisfy me. I can’t burn it because I haven’t the strength and Indra protects the place.” Kṛṣṇa looked up: he saw heavy clouds gathering darkly. They would have to fight together against Arjuna’s father, king of the gods. Secretly, Kṛṣṇa was pleased. “How can it be that Agni is unable to burn?” he asked. “I could, but only if you help me. It’s a sad story. A mad sacrifice. A rash and arrogant king fed me on melted butter for twelve years. He hoped his sacrifice would help him scale the sky. He wore me out with that butter. Now I want plants and meat. My mouth is sick of butter. Now I want nothing but wild food. I look at this forest, and I can’t make any impression on it. Seven times I’ve set it alight, and seven times elephants and Nāga have put it out. Indra poured down cataracts from the clouds. But I can offer you weapons that are invincible. And you’ll soon be needing them,” Agni finished with a chuckle. The bow called Gāṇḍīva was surrendered to the grip of Arjuna’s hands. The disk and the mace appeared in Kṛṣṇa’s.
Then the brahman turned back to fire again, creeping through the grass toward the forest. Suddenly there was a huge blaze, a whirlwind and a crash. Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa took up positions at either end of the clearing and stood motionless. Together with the crackle of fire came the piercing shrieks of wild beasts. The animals swarmed toward the clearing with desperation in their eyes. Elephants, antelopes, monkeys, buffalo, butterflies, tigers, moles, demons, goats, snakes, squirrels, colored birds. Arjuna brought them down one by one, the fiercest and the most harmless, the gigantic and the tiny, pulling out arrows from his two inexhaustible quivers. As every arrow whistled off, he felt at once and with equal intensity both the pointlessness and the necessity of what he was doing. How many more times would he have to kill? And at bottom every other killing, even the most justifiable and irreproachable, would be like the massacre of those beasts fleeing from one death to another. The pointlessness was glaring, the necessity just a thread, but the toughest thread of all, the one that tied him to Kṛṣṇa, that friend in whom he so deeply confided that it sometimes seemed Kṛṣṇa was at work inside him, ensconced there in a cell that just occasionally would open. Even now, as he drew out his arrows, Arjuna’s hand was a glove with the steady hand of Kṛṣṇa flexing inside. Meanwhile, from the opposite side of the clearing, Kṛṣṇa hit out incessantly like some automaton. Few were the animals who escaped the razor disk that flew from his hand and then immediately returned. And even those fled in vain: the mace brought them down at once. Toward the forest, nothing but devouring flame.
Amazed, the gods gathered in the sky to watch. “Why is Agni burning these creatures? Is it a sign that the world is about to end? Is the Submarine Mare raising her head?” they wondered, turning to India. “And why must Arjuna of all people, your son, help the world to cousume itself? Why are you letting them destroy this forest you have always protected?” Indra didn’t answer. Without a word, he unleashed the waters. They fell in dense, liquid sheets. But as they approached the flames, they evaporated. Arjuna’s arrows darkened the sky and wounded the drops. By now the clearing was covered in a carpet of festering corpses. Here and there they were heaped in mounds. They were the sweetmeats in Agni’s diet, the red-hot candy he loved so much. The forest went on burning for six days. The sounds of unseen death throes went on and on. Fewer and fewer animals or Dānavas made it to the clearing. Then the shrieking gradually died down. There was still the occasional thudding sound, in the distance — and the hissing whirlwind of the flames.
Agni reappeared before Arjuna, glossy and replete, having bolted down oceans of fat and bone marrow. He thanked his two accomplices and bade them farewelclass="underline" “Go where you please.” There was a moment’s sudden silence, immediately broken by a light flutter. Kṛṣṇa, Arjuna, and Agni looked up. They saw four birds flying into the sky. The only surviving creatures. They were the four Vedas.
Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa looked down again, impassive, at the charred forest. Behind them, the ground stretched dull and gray as far as the banks of the Yamunā. Standing in a line, the maidens and ladies who had come with them were watching. Together they made a ribbon, a film of ash on every face and robe. The pavilions were gone, swept away by the wind.
Thus was the war between the five Pāṇḍavas and their cousins, the Kauravas, announced. Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna lingered on the banks of the Yamunā, alone, watching the water flow by. Then they wandered back to Indraprastha like two vagrants, without so much as a word.
While the Forest of Khāṇḍava was burning, Arjuna had remembered the crackling of another pyre, not long ago, where, had his Kaurava cousins had their way, he himself would have died along with his four brothers. This was the burning of the lacquer house, an elegant, flimsy, deathtrap building where they had been staying for a long festive period, Vāraṇāvata. There too there had been melted butter. The cloying, penetrating smell mingled with the smells of hemp, cork, and cane in the four great halls. Even the narrow columns had been smeared with butter, the better to catch fire.
Hinting, enigmatic, Uncle Vidura had given the game away. The Pāṇḍavas dug themselves a mole’s burrow. At night they would sneak down into their hiding place, with their weapons, and keep watch. For months they waited for a chance to escape, while letting the others think they had died in the fire. One night, five drunken, unsuspecting Niṣādas sprawled on their cushions with their mother. They didn’t even hear the flames roaring. Their charred forms convinced the Kauravas that those execrable cousins, the Pāṇḍavas, would be in their way no more.
Together with their mother, Kuntī, the Pāṇḍavas ran through the night like hunted beasts. Slipping out of their burrow, they dashed for the forest, the glow of the fire fading behind them. The trees were shaken by angry gusts. The tension of a year of forced and harassed wakefulness was melting away. But they didn’t dare assume they were free yet. Only Bhīma, in the midst of the group, cut down every obstacle. Trunks crashed to the ground as he passed. He saw the others gasping. So he gently lifted Kuntī onto his back. He grabbed the twins, Nakula and Sahadeva, then Arjuna and Yudhiṣṭhira, holding them tight under his arms. Then he pressed on, like an animated mountain. He was the stormy gale that beat down the plants, cutting a path through darkness.
Ever since they were born, the five Pāṇḍava brothers, who were Pāṇḍu’s sons in name only, each of them boasting a “portion,” aṃśa, of a particular god, in that they had been fathered in Kuntī’s (and Mādrī’s) wombs by different gods — Yudhiṣṭhira by Dharma, Bhīma by Vāyu, Arjuna by Indra, the twins Nakula and Sahadeva by the Aśvin twins — ever since they were born, the Pāṇḍavas had been aware of a malignant tension between themselves and their Kaurava cousins. When they played games together, it was as if they were fighting to the death. So tangled was their common ancestry that there was no way of being certain which of them would one day be the legitimate king of Hastināpura. The theories offered to establish legitimacy were too contradictory, though each could claim to be reasonable up to a point.