“What to do in heaven?” wondered Arjuna in his rooms, his thoughts already turning to the brothers he had left behind. “Receive gifts of arms,” his father would soon explain. Indra trained him in the use of the vajru, the thunderbolt. “But that’s not everything,” he said. “Now you must learn the dances and hymns that men don’t know.” He nodded to a Gandharva who was following him. “This is Citrasena. He will be your friend and teacher. Trust him.”
Arjuna soon learned to sing and dance the way they do in Indra’s heaven, something men know nothing of. Every day he practiced along with the Gandharvas and the Apsaras. But he couldn’t relax. He kept thinking of his brothers, homeless and persecuted back on earth. Citrasena understood and was good at distracting him. “What’s the name of that Apsaras who just went by and turned to look at us?” Arjuna asked one day. “It’s Urvaśī.” answered Citrasena. Meanwhile, he was thinking: “If anyone can keep Arjuna in heaven, it’s Urvaśī.” Citrasena went straight off to talk to Indra. And he was given the task of acting as go-between and bringing Arjuna and Urvaśī together as lovers.
Urvaśī welcomed him as if she already knew the mission Indra had given him. “Citrasena, no need to waste words. I’ve seen how handsome Arjuna is. And you know I love men,” she said with a joyless smile. Then, in a lower voice, as though speaking to herself: “I’m compelled to love men…” That very evening, smelling sweetly of sandalwood paste and with a faint tinkling of anklets, a slightly tipsy Urvaśī went to Arjuna’s rooms. Far from being delighted, Arjuna was overcome by a new kind of terror. Without thinking, he lowered his eyes and whispered a few deferential words. In her contralto voice, Urvaśī said: “When you arrived and had hundreds of celestial beings all around you, you looked at me just once, with your unyielding eyes. I remembered that look. I’ve known it for hundreds of years. Then Citrasena came to visit me and said that you had remembered it too. Now I am here…” The more Urvaśī spoke, the more terrified Arjuna seemed to be. He stuffed his fingers in his ears like a child. Then he said: “It’s true that I looked at you. But then I realized: you are the mother of the lunar dynasty. And I am the last of the children of the lunar dynasty. You are my mother. How could I embrace you?” Urvaśī’s eyes were sorrowing and cold. She said: “We Apsaras know no bonds. Our realm is emotion. We abhor usefulness. Yet if you men have fire on earth, it is only because one day long ago I left the man who desired me and was your ancestor. It was my absence that unleashed fire in the world. It still burns today. It will burn forever. This time it is I who follow you. Don’t reject me.” Arjuna had grown more obdurate: “I owe you nothing but respect.” Urvaśī was livid now. “You are insulting a woman your father has offered you. You are rejecting a woman you desire. Well then, you will live like a woman among women, and you will dance with them. You are not fit for anything else.” Then Urvaśī vanished in the night.
Still pale with anger, Urvaśī undressed mechanically, scornful syllables on her lips. Then she lay on her bed and recovered that expression that many admired so much and said was hers alone: one of immense distance and sadness. She thought: “But no one looks more like Purūravas than Arjuna.” Then once again, as had happened countless times before and for hundreds of years, she withdrew into the lake of memory.
No sooner had Urvaśī gone than Arjuna felt annoyed with himself. He knew he would never see her astonishing beauty again. And why have so many scruples and be so nervous over an ancestor of fifteen generations back? Yet some powerful instinct had ordered him not to touch her. As he was thinking, he had a hand on his right thigh. Something tingled under his fingertips, like an ancient wound. With it came the fleeting vision of a scene, though he couldn’t remember when or where. Two young, almost identical men sitting on a rocky seat. Air bright, as in a mirror. In the distance, the roar of rushing waters. All around, a whirl of perfumes, of Apsaras. But the two men were unimpressed. Suddenly one of them slapped his thigh. A tiny female figure popped out, ornate and perfect. Then it grew bigger and pointed up to the sky. He recognized her, and murmured: “Urvaśī, you from the thigh, ūru… You are also my daughter…” But he wasn’t able to articulate that thought and fell fast asleep.
For a year Arjuna lived as a eunuch in the court of King Virāta. His hair hung down on his shoulders, long earrings twinkling in his curls. His wrists were circled by gold bracelets encrusted with mother-of-pearl. He kept his arms covered to hide the scars that came from using his bow. Virāta couldn’t believe it when he saw him. This strikingly feminine figure, he realized, was the warrior himself. Indeed, with senile rashness he offered to grant him his kingdom, thus cutting out his son. But Arjuna insisted: “I am a eunuch. All I want is to teach music and dance to your daughter Uttarā.”
It was a year of subtle, ceaseless rapture, and an arduous, exhausting trial. In the evenings Arjuna told stories of monsters, princesses, and warriors to a small group of girls who adored him as soldiers do their leader. The days he spent in the dance pavilion. Virāta’s kingdom was rich and troubled. Blind and deaf to the spirit, life followed physiological rhythms. The only people Arjuna saw were girls who imitated his movements. The torture was Uttarā. Arjuna immediately promised himself he would never so much as touch her. Yet both had the impression of being constantly glued together, as when Arjuna sang and Uttarā’s voice sang over his. “Uttarā, Uttarā…” Arjuna found himself murmuring in the long stillness of the afternoons, immersed in the sticky air as though in an amniotic liquid. “The Extreme, the Ultimate, She-who-comes-from-the-north, She-who-takes-us-across, Uttarā, Uttarā…” He knew that all he could do as far as his pupil princess was concerned was fantasize, feverishly. And he imagined her as a creature come down from Uttarakuru, that square land no one had ever trod but which everyone always told stories about, in the far north. His wanderings had brought him to its borders. Indeed now that he had visited both the watery depths and Indra’s heaven, and had had his fill of both of them, Uttarakuru was the only name still pregnant with the unknown for Arjuna. And then he recalled one of the many stories he had heard about the place as a child, a story that hadn’t meant much to him at the time but that now came irrepressibly back. It was the story of two lovers who are born together and die together too, in each other’s arms, after eleven thousand years — and those last thousand intrigued him. Then a flock of Bhāruṇḍa birds lifted the two bodies with their powerful beaks and laid them down in huge mountain caverns. Not a trace or memory was left of them. And it was this — not their immensely long lives — that elated him, as if for a moment he were putting down the burden of the impending war, of the dharma, of his brothers, of the reputation one was obliged to leave behind. Fascinated, he went on repeating: “Eleven thousand years and not a trace.”