Bhagavatam · Kunti’s Prayer

The Ganga moved slowly that morning. Parikshit looked at the sage Shukadeva, held his silence a while, and then spoke.

“Bhagavan, I have only a few days left. And I have noticed something. When this hour was not yet standing in front of me, I never called on the Lord the way I call on him now. Is it sorrow, then, that carries us to him? Does the memory of him slip away when we are happy?”

A faint wetness rose in Shukadeva’s eyes. “Rajan, this very question your great-grandmother settled with her own life, in the hour when Shri Krishna stood ready to leave for Dwarka. Listen to what Kunti asked of him.”

The war of the Mahabharata was over. The Pandavas had won. The house that waited on the far side of the victory stood empty.

The Pandavas went down to the Ganga with Shri Krishna, poured the water of parting for their dead, and grieved a long while over all that those men had been. Abhimanyu was gone. The five sons of Draupadi were gone. One after another, every one of them.

Dhritarashtra sat broken over his sons, and Gandhari was sunk in mourning for her hundred. Shri Krishna, with Dhaumya and the other sages, gave what comfort could be given, and reminded them that every creature that breathes lives under the hand of time, and that no one can hold another back from death.

Then Shri Krishna gave back to Yudhishthira the kingdom the dice players had stolen from him. This was a king to whom no enemy was ever born, for he was too large of heart to count any man an enemy. The kings who had cut their own lives short the day they laid hands on Draupadi’s hair were dead now, and the throne stood clear. Krishna had him crowned at Hastinapura and made him perform three Ashvamedha sacrifices, each with the finest offerings and the ablest priests, until his name traveled in every direction, the way the name of Indra travels after his hundred. The court was full, and inside it was empty.

Now Krishna made ready to return to Dwarka, to his own people and his own kingdom. He took his leave of the Pandavas, paid his respects to Vyasa and the other brahmins, who bowed to him in return, and with Satyaki and Uddhava beside him he climbed into his chariot.

He was on the point of starting when Uttara came running, wild with fear. Abhimanyu’s young widow was carrying his child, and something was hunting the child. “Save me, great yogi. Save me, Lord of the universe,” she cried. “There is no shelter anywhere in a world where every creature is death to the next. A shaft of burning iron is chasing me. Let it burn me if it must, but do not let it kill the child in my womb.”

Krishna knew the weapon at once. Ashvatthama had loosed a brahmastra to wipe out the line of Pandu, and five points of fire were already streaking toward the brothers, who reached for their own arrows. He met it with his discus, the Sudarshana, then threw his own maya like a shield around Uttara’s womb and sealed the last thread of the Kuru line inside it. The weapon of Brahma cannot fail and cannot be turned aside, and yet it broke against the light of the Lord and went out.

The danger had barely passed.

Kunti was Vasudeva’s sister, which made her Krishna’s aunt. The tie was old. Through these years, though, through the war and all the war had taken from her, she had come to know him as something much larger than a nephew.

His foot was already on the chariot when Kunti folded her hands and stopped him. Her five sons stood close by, and Draupadi with them, the daughter-in-law who had long since become a daughter.

She lacked for nothing now. Her five sons had kept her name safe, and Draupadi was hers. And still she carried one thing inside her that no one else could see.

Every time disaster had come, Krishna had come with it. Every single time. The poison Duryodhana had served them. The great fire in the lacquer house at Varanavata. The man-eating eyes of Hidimba and the demons that came after him. The hall of wicked men where Duryodhana and his circle worked their spite. The long dangers of the forest years. The weapons of Bhishma and Drona and Karna and every other great fighter, in battle after battle. And only a breath ago, Ashvatthama’s arrow of Brahma turned back from Uttara’s womb. Each time it had been Krishna who lifted them out.

Every disaster had brought him. Now the disasters were behind them, and he was leaving.

Kunti folded her hands and began to praise him.

“You are the first Person, beyond all nature, the highest Lord. You stand within every living thing and outside it at once, one unbroken presence, and still no sense and no thought can catch sight of you. A clouded eye misses you the way a fool in the audience misses the man inside the costume on the stage. How is an unlearned woman to know you? You came down to plant your own love in the hearts of the paramahamsas, the pure and steady ones who are free while they still breathe. What chance, then, do women of small understanding have of knowing you?”

“You are Shri Krishna, Vasudeva’s son, the joy of Devaki, the darling of Nanda the cowherd, Govinda. I bow to you and bow again. From your navel opened the lotus that became Brahma’s birthplace. You wear a garland of lovely lotuses. Your eyes are wide as lotuses. The mark of the lotus is on your feet. To you, again and again, I bow.”

“Hrishikesha, you guarded Devaki through her long sorrow in the prison of the cruel Kamsa, and in the same way you have guarded me and my sons through one disaster after another. The poison, the fire in the lacquer house, the demons, the hall of wicked men, the years in the forest, the weapons of the great warriors on the field, and just now the arrow of Ashvatthama. Every time, it was you who pulled us clear.”

Then Kunti asked for the thing no one asks for.

“Teacher of all the worlds, this is my prayer. Let hardship come to us at every step, and keep coming, all our lives. Let the sorrow return. Let the trouble return.”

“Because when hardship comes, your sight is certain, and once we have had your sight the wheel of birth and death lets go of us for good. I cannot bear for you to slip out of my mind. Give me the hardship gladly, so long as your sight comes with it.”

“The man swollen with high birth and power and learning and wealth cannot so much as speak your name, because you show yourself to those who own nothing. You are the whole fortune of the poor.”

“You are past the three strands of nature. You take your joy in your own self and rest in perfect peace. You are the lord of kaivalya, of moksha itself. I bow to you and bow again.”

What Kunti was asking for was ahaituki bhakti, devotion with no motive under it, a love that keeps back no wish for reward and strikes no bargain. She wanted him, and nothing that his favor could buy.

“I take you for Time itself, the ruler of everything, with no beginning and no end, moving evenly through every creature alive. And it is you, moving through them, who become the very reason they turn on one another.”

“No one can read what you intend when you move among us wearing a man’s shape. No one is dear to you and no one hateful. It is we who carve you up into friend and stranger.”

“You are the soul of everything, and you are everything. In truth you are free of birth and free of act. Your births and your deeds, among the beasts and among men, among the sages and the creatures of the water, are only play.”

“And I keep returning to one picture of you. You had broken the pot of curds, and Yashoda took up a cord to tie you, and you stood there with your head hung low, your eyes darting, the kohl running down with your tears. Fear itself is afraid of you, and there you stood, afraid. I cannot get past the wonder of it.”

“Some say that you, who were never born, rose in the line of your beloved Yadu only to lift that house into fame, the way a sandal tree takes root on Mount Malaya and makes the mountain famous. Some say you were born from Devaki and Vasudeva to guard this world and finish the enemies of the gods, because the two of them once asked it of you. Some say you came when Brahma begged you to, to lift the weight off an earth that was sinking under it into the sea.”

“And some say you came for a single reason, so that those of us scorched by our own ignorance and craving might have your deeds to listen to and sing and repeat and turn over in the mind, and might take our joy in them, and be carried free of birth and death before long.”

“Tree that grants your devotees their wish, you feel for the ones who lean on you. Do you really mean to go today and leave us behind, when we have no shelter but your feet, and when we have set ourselves against every king on earth?”

“Without you, we Pandavas and the Yadavas are worth no more than a body’s senses once the soul that ruled them has walked out. And this land would lose the beauty it wears right now, printed all over with your footsteps and the small clear marks they carry, the lotus, the thunderbolt, the goad, the flag.”

“These fields heavy with their crops, these woods and hills, these rivers and seas, all of it is thriving under the kindness of your glance.”

“You are the ruler of the universe, its soul, and the universe itself. Be kind, and cut the strong cord of love that ties me to my own people, to the Pandavas and the Yadavas. Let my mind have nowhere else to run. As the Ganga pours its whole unbroken stream into the sea and nowhere else, let my thought run to you alone, without a pause, without once turning aside.”

“Krishna, dear friend of Arjuna, first jewel of the house of Yadu, you are the fire sent to burn the kings who put on royal dress and lie on the earth like a dead weight. Your strength has no bottom to it. Govinda, you came down for one work only, to end the suffering of the cows, the brahmins, and the gods. Master of yoga, teacher of everything that moves and everything that stands still, I bow to you.”

So Kunti, in the sweetest words she had, told over the many things the Lord had done. And Krishna, the lord of Vaikuntha, listening to all of it, began to smile, and drew her softly inside the spell of his maya.

He gave her only two words. “So be it.” He took his leave of her, and then of the other women. But as he turned to go, Yudhishthira, unable to let him leave, held him back, and Krishna turned once more into Hastinapura.

The horses stood waiting in their harness. Kunti closed her eyes. Some hardship would come again, some sorrow, surely. And she knew now what came with it. When the hardship returned, so would he.

Shukadeva sat quiet a while. The waves of the Ganga struck the bank and drew back.

“You see, Rajan. Hardship was dear to Kunti because hardship was the one thing that carried her to the hour when the Lord is remembered. For the sake of that remembrance, and the sorrow that always came folded inside it, she bowed her head and took the sorrow.”

He looked at the king for a moment. “And the child his discus sealed inside Uttara’s womb, the last thread of the Kuru line. That child was you.”

Parikshit said, very quietly, “Then this little stretch of time I have left is my hardship, Bhagavan. And it is my blessing as well.”

Shukadeva smiled and said nothing. Overhead, a bird went on across the Ganga toward the far bank.