When the Kauravas, set up the lacquer house trap, hoping their cousins would be burned alive there, the Pāṇḍavas were not surprised. “And now,” thought Arjuna as the Forest of Khāṇḍava was burning, “another fire. To kill hundreds of desperate animals, I’ve had to fight against my father, Indra. In return for a deed that many will think dishonorable, I have been given Gāṇḍīva, the bow I always desired. To create a desert of ash, I have for the first time done something together with my lifelong friend Kṛṣṇa. If all that seems senseless, it must be because it makes too much sense.”
Seen from afar, the imminent war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas might have looked very like the massacre of those animals fleeing the Forest of Khāṇḍava. It would overwhelm rank and rancor in flight and death. Kāla, Time, was in a hurry to put an end to an aeon. The war was mainly a pretext to make things easier for him. Not so much that day, as he tirelessly drew his bow before a forest of flame, but later, years later, Arjuna would be constantly asking himself why that slaughter had come about. And in what sense it had come about “for the good of the worlds.” In the end, killing one’s relatives was much easier to justify. But those animals fleeing the burning forest? Why? Arjuna never got an answer. Time and again he would see Kṛṣṇa, ruthlessly wielding his lethal disk and mace. Then he would remember how Indra, his father, had appeared, humiliated by his son’s arrows, and magnanimously offered to grant Kṛṣṇa a boon. A sovereign god, albeit of obsolete sovereignty, offering a boon to a king, who was also a sovereign god reigning over sovereigns. At the time Arjuna hadn’t even noticed the oddity and irony of what was going on. What he did remember, though, and very clearly, was the boon Kṛṣṇa had asked for: Arjuna’s friendship, forever.
It was Draupadī, princess of the Pañcālas, the people of the figure Five and of the Dolls, who first brought Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna together. Born from the sacrificial fire, Draupadī had the dark, almost black skin of charred logs (which was why they also called her Kṛṣṇa). She smelled like blue lotuses. Her father, King Drupada, proclaimed for her a svayaṃvara: this was the ceremony during which a bride selected her husband. The suitors were to compete with their bows. Disguised as brahmans, guests at a potter’s house, the Pāṇdavas braced themselves for the challenge. There were fifteen days of sumptuous and exhausting festivities. No one had seen Draupadī yet. The sixteenth day the princess appeared in the arena, adorned with a golden garland that shone out between dark skin and bright white robe. The suitors all got to their feet, shouting: “Draupadī will be mine.” Hundreds of earrings flashed in the sun. Among the guests who had come to watch was Kṛṣṇa, at the head of the Vṛṣṇis. He was the only one in the crowd who immediately recognized the Pāṇḍavas among the brahmans. And, of the Pāṇḍavas, it was Arjuna who attracted his attention. For how long had they perched on opposite branches of the aśvattha tree that spans the worlds, for how long had they drifted together over the endless waters, for how long (a thousand years?) had they sat together in that niche of rock in Badarī, one with his right leg crossed, the other with his left, the roaring of a river in the distance? Now they would meet as men lost in a throng of men. Meanwhile, the other princes had missed the target. Kṛṣṇa saw Arjuna’s left arm slowly drawing back his bow. He thought: “Not the forest, but the tree. Not the tree, but the bird. Not the bird, but the head. Now…” There was a mighty shout. The target: pierced through. Draupadī turned radiant eyes on Arjuna. She had already chosen the man who had won her. She went toward him with a chaplet of white flowers.
Draupadī didn’t have long to enjoy feeling that she was wife to the man she had chosen: Arjuna. She knew she was marrying into an unusual family, with those five brothers as different and interlinked as the fingers of a hand. She found them all extremely charming, but, when she looked at Arjuna, she needed no more. And at once the others were right there beside him: Yudhiṣṭhira, solemn and authoritative, something dark in the background; Bhīma, whom the others called Wolf’s Belly and who looked like a tower; Nakula and Sahadeva, the twins, two thoroughbreds. “Who keeps them together? Their mother, Kuntī,” thought Draupadī. She feared the moment she would have to meet her.
They left the city. Draupadī walked in Arjuna’s footsteps, dreaming of her new life. Little did she know that she was never to recover that lightness and euphoria again. There was a tangle of cane. Their feet sank in the mud. Those who met them on the way thought they were a group of pilgrims. Arjuna was up front. He wanted to be the first to go to his mother. He came out of the forest in front of a low house surrounded by jars. They went into a huge, dark room and sensed a presence. “Mother, look what we’ve brought for you…” Without even looking up to where the door was filled with light, Kuntī said. “Share it out among yourselves.” She meant whatever offering they had brought. But a mother’s word is finaclass="underline" thus, Draupadī became the bride of all five brothers, shared equally among them. An inexhaustible bowl of rice. When night came, she lay at the feet of those five men she hardly knew, like a cushion.
They decided for how long and in what order Draupadī was to live with each of the brothers. Then they added just one rule: if one of the Pāṇḍavas disturbed Draupadī when she was alone with another of them, he would have to go off into the forest for twelve months. It happened to Arjuna.
He burst into the room to get the weapons beside the bed and interrupted Yudhiṣṭhira and Draupadī as they were making love. It was a conscious violation. If he hadn’t done it, he wouldn’t have been able to defend an unarmed brahman who was asking for his help. Yudhiṣṭhira tried to keep his brother from leaving, citing possible cavils that would have allowed him to get around the punishment. It was Arjuna who insisted on going. He wanted to find out what it meant to be alone in the world. To get away from brothers, cousins, mother. And even from that wonderful wife, whom he could hardly get near. He was looking for something exotic and out of the ordinary: experience, any experience, exposing himself to chance.
The spiteful said that no one had visited so many holy places and so many pretty women on the Island of the Jambū as Arjuna in the months of his travels. He wandered around like one of the many brahmacārins, students of brahman, devoted to purity and chastity. He bathed in the waters of the Utpalinī, the Alakanandā, the Kauśikī, the Gayā and the Gaṅgā, where Ulūpī, daughter of the King of the Nāgas, drew him underwater in a delirium of desire. Arjuna overcame his scruples when Ulūpī convinced him that the only thing that could save her was sex with himself. But then he immediately felt reassured when he saw that even on the bed of the great river, in the palace of the Nāgas, rites were being celebrated before the brahmanic fire. He didn’t say, but he thought that the dharma could not survive unless allied to the Nāgas. Behind the visible hostility between spirit and serpent, the most ancient of pacts holds good. Then it was intriguing to spend a night of liquid love with a snake-girl. And he was to have another watery adventure too. One day in the swamps of the deep south, he found himself locked in a fight to the death with a crocodile. Then he saw the horrifying creature clutched in his arms turn into an Apsaras, who immediately spoke to him: “There are five of us. We are proud and beautiful, irreverent and cursed by an ascetic. My name is Vargā. We have been waiting for you to pay our ransom…” “Even a crocodile turns into a girl in his arms,” the spiteful were quick to mock once more, as soon as word of this story began to make the rounds.