Dhruva

The Second Lap

Dhruva steps back from the throne and runs crying to his mother’s rooms. Suniti lifts him into her arms, and the women of the palace have already carried Suruchi’s words to her, every syllable. The child’s sobs keep breaking against her chest and she has no way to quiet them; she has been set aside herself in this house, and what place can she promise him. At last she draws a long breath and says the thing on which the whole story turns. “Lala, never wish harm on anyone, whatever they have done to you.” “And what Suruchi said was no lie.” “You will find no seat in that lap, my son.” And then: “There is one more lap in this world.” “In that one, nobody asks whose womb carried you.” “There, a single cry is enough to win you a place.” His great-grandfather Brahma, she tells him, earned his high seat by serving the feet of Shri Hari, and his grandfather Manu won the earth and heaven the same way. “Call on him.”

Dhruva looks up at his mother. The crying has stopped somewhere in the middle of her words, and something has settled in his eyes, poured metal already keeping its shape. He bends and touches her feet, the way a child asks an elder’s blessing, and says, “I will go.” “Where?” “There. Where you said. To find him.” And the five-year-old goes, out of his father’s capital, alone, toward the forest.

Narada on the Road

On the road the sage Narada finds him. He passes his purifying hand over the boy’s head and marvels to himself at the warrior blood awake this early. Aloud, he tries to turn the child around. “Son, you are a child still.” “This is the age for games.” Yogis lose the Lord’s road through whole births of discipline. “Go home.” The boy honors the sage and does not obey him. Chapter 8 gives his answer: a stepmother’s taunts have cut his heart open, the counsel of equanimity finds no place in him yet, and he asks the son of Brahma to show him a road to a place higher than anything in the three worlds, a place no forefather of his line has ever reached.

Narada stops arguing, and then he gives the child the whole of it. “The path your mother showed you is the path of your highest good.” “Go to Madhuvana, on the sacred bank of the Yamuna near Mathura.” “He is present there always.” Bathe three times a day in the Kalindi, spread a seat of kusha grass, slow the breath until it obeys, then build the Lord inside the heart piece by piece, the four arms with conch and discus, mace and lotus. Then he bends down and gives the child the mantra of twelve syllables, Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya. With that Narada leaves the story. He returns to it once, in the king’s hall, where Uttanapada sits gray with self-reproach, able to talk of nothing except a five-year-old asleep on forest ground among the wolves; the sage leaves him a promise that the Lord himself is guarding the child and that the boy will come back soon.

Five Months

Dhruva walks until the trees of Madhuvana close over him, chooses a spot on the bank of the Yamuna, and sits down, and chapter 9 turns his sitting into a staircase of months. The first month he eats only wood apples and jujube fruit, one small meal every third night. The second month, withered grass and fallen leaves, once every six days. The third month, water alone, once every nine days. The fourth month, a mouthful of air, once every twelve days. In the fifth month even that ends; with the breath mastered, Dhruva rises onto one leg and stands like a post driven into the riverbank, his mind fixed on the one form standing in his heart. Then the three worlds begin to shake. And when his mind sinks so completely into the Soul of the universe that his single small breath merges with the one breath moving through all things, the breathing of every creature in creation stops.

The gods choke in their own heavens and run with the guardians of the worlds to Shri Hari. “Lord, the breath of every being has stopped at once.” “You are the refuge of everyone who comes to you; free us.” The Lord calms them: no power will break that penance from outside, and he will go himself and end it with his presence. So Vishnu comes, riding Garuda, down to Madhuvana. At that instant the form Dhruva has built inside his heart, brilliant as standing lightning, dissolves. His eyes fly open in alarm, and the same form is in front of him on the riverbank, complete, out in the world. The boy drops flat to the earth like a felled log, and when he rises he stands gazing as though he means to drink the Lord in through his eyes. A hymn is swelling in the child with no words to carry it. Shri Hari sees the joined palms and the open mouth and the praise with nowhere to go, so he raises his conch, which is the Veda gathered into a shape a hand can hold, and touches it gently to Dhruva’s cheek. Speech wakes in the boy like a house lit at every lamp at once, and the five-year-old praises the Lord in the Veda’s own words, a hymn the Bhagavatam keeps entire.

When the hymn ends, Vishnu smiles and asks, “What do you want?” Dhruva has starved five months and shaken three worlds to ask for a throne higher than his brother’s, and that is what he asks for. “Lord, I came to ask you for a royal seat.” Vishnu laughs, tenderly. “You will have what you came for.” “When your father hands you the earth and walks into the forest, you will rule it in dharma for thirty-six thousand years, and your strength will stay whole to the last day of them.” “And I am giving you something you never asked for.” “There is a station in the sky that does not move.” Around it the planets, the lunar mansions, and the whole host of stars wheel and keep wheeling, the way oxen tread their circle around the center post of a threshing floor, and it outlasts those who live a full day of Brahma. “That is Dhruvaloka, and I give it to you; no one has held it before you.” The Lord tells him the rest of his life as well: that his brother will ride into the mountains one day hunting and never ride home, that grief will lead the boy’s mother into fire, and that when age comes Dhruva will rise past the seven seers to the place from which no one returns. Then he rises on Garuda and is gone.

He turns toward home, and with every step his heart grows heavier. In six months this child has crossed a distance that costs perfected sages whole chains of lifetimes, and has spent the moment ordering a throne. Suruchi’s words were still lodged in him when the Lord said ask, and face to face with the untier of every knot in the world he never once thought to ask to be untied. Now there is room in him for regret. “Look at my foolishness.” “A pauper wins the favor of an emperor who owns the whole earth and asks him for a fistful of unhusked rice; that pauper is me.” “From the giver of the soul’s own bliss I begged for seats that feed nothing except pride.” “From the breaker of the world’s bonds I asked for the world.” The news runs ahead of him to the capital. Uttanapada drives out through the gates with conches crying, his two queens following in a palanquin with prince Uttama, and when he sees a small figure on the road he comes down off the chariot at a jump and runs; then he has his son against his chest, smelling the boy’s head again and again. Dhruva bends low before both his mothers, both of them, and Suruchi lifts the child from her feet, presses him to her breast, and gets out through a closing throat, “Live long.” Milk runs from Suniti’s breasts and mixes with the tears falling on his hair, and the king sets both boys on a royal she-elephant and enters Barhismati.

Alakapuri

When he comes of age the king does what the Lord foretold: he crowns his son sovereign of the whole earth and walks out toward the woods. Chapter 10 builds Dhruva’s household, a wife, Bhrami, daughter of the Prajapati Shishumara, who bears him two sons, Kalpa and Vatsara, and a second wife, Ila, daughter of the wind god Vayu, who bears him a son, Utkala, and a daughter. Then the day the Lord spoke of arrives. Uttama, still unmarried, rides into the Himalaya on a hunt and is killed there by a Yaksha mightier than himself, and Suruchi goes into the forest after her son until a wildfire takes her. When the news reaches Dhruva, grief, rage, and turmoil rise in him as one tide. He mounts his war chariot, drives north into a valley of the Himalaya to Alakapuri, the city of the Yakshas, and blows his conch, one long blast that rebounds off the sky. The warriors pour out of the gates, and the whole host of them, one hundred thirty thousand by the Bhagavatam’s own count, rain clubs and swords and lances on a single chariot until Dhruva and his charioteer vanish under the storm the way a mountain vanishes under a cloudburst. And then the chariot comes back into the light the way the sun comes out of mist, and soon the field lies strewn with crowned heads and gold-braceleted arms.

The Yakshas still able to run, run, and Dhruva looks across the emptied ground at the open city and holds his chariot back. “No one can guess,” he tells his charioteer, “what enchanters keep in reserve.” The words are still in the air when a sound comes from everywhere at once, an ocean roaring where no ocean is. Rain comes down, and the rain is blood; a mountain condenses overhead and pours down maces and boulders; serpents come on hissing with fire in their eyes, and behind them the sea itself, vast as it looks on the day the worlds dissolve, climbing the valley from every side. In the middle of that apocalypse Dhruva does one small, exact thing. He cups river water in his palm and sips it, and sets to his bow the missile of the sage Narayana. The moment it touches the string the conjured world goes out, all of it at once, the way night and everything hiding in it goes when the lamp of wisdom is lit. And the strangest mercy of the whole battle follows: every Yaksha who falls to those golden arrows rises past the sphere of the sun into the high realm that renunciates spend austere lifetimes earning.

Before the bow can speak again, his grandfather is standing on the field. Svayambhuva Manu has come down with a company of sages, and he begins, gently, to take the war out of his grandson. “Enough, child.” “Put this rage down; it is a gateway, and hell is on the far side of it.” Most of the dead never touched Uttama; a nation has been punished for the deed of one man. “No Yaksha ended Uttama.” “Time ends everyone.” “So put the anger down, Dhruva.” “Last of all: the Yakshas you have cut down belong to Kubera, the friend of Shiva.” “Go to him.” “Bow.” Dhruva lays the enmity down, the enmity the wise call hardest of all things to lay down, at one word from his grandfather. Almost at once Kubera himself stands on the field, keeper of all the treasure in the world. “Kshatriya prince,” he says, well pleased, “you dropped a hatred that men carry into their graves, and you dropped it because one elder asked.” “You never killed the Yakshas, and the Yakshas never killed your brother.” “So ask.” Dhruva stands before the one being who could put anything in the world into his hands, and asks for the one thing no treasury holds: that his remembrance of Shri Hari never break. Kubera grants it gladly and vanishes where he stands.

Badarikashrama

Dhruva goes home to Barhismati and becomes the king his boon promised. He worships the Lord with yajna after yajna, sees the same Lord seated in himself and in every creature that breathes, and his people give up telling the difference between their king and a father. He protects the earth for thirty-six thousand years, a god’s full lifespan by the Bhagavatam’s reckoning. When age comes at last, he looks at everything a long life has gathered around him, wives and sons and treasury, army and the sea-belted earth itself, and reads one small signature on all of it: already claimed by Death. He sets his son Utkala on the throne and leaves for Badarikashrama, high in the mountains.

There he bathes in the sacred water and sits down, and the boy who once climbed out of food and water and breath, month by month on a riverbank, makes the same climb one last time in an old man’s body. His breath comes under his hand. His mind fixes on the form of the Lord until the line between the one seeing and the thing seen wears thin and gives way, and at the last even the sentence “I am Dhruva” lets go of him. At that very moment a vimana descends, bright as the full moon rising, and in it stand two beings of Vishnu’s own country, four-armed, dark as rain-heavy clouds. Dhruva springs to his feet, and what stays in his head is the oldest welcome there is, joined palms and the names of the Lord on his lips. The two smile at that. “Rajan, blessings on you.” “At five years old you did the tapas that won the Lord of everything; we serve him, and he has sent his own vimana for you.” “Come, long-lived one, and live there.” Their names are Sunanda and Nanda.

Dhruva bows to the munis of Badarikashrama for their blessing, walks sunwise around the shining vimana, and his own body changes in front of them and stands there gleaming like worked gold. One more figure comes to that mountainside before he can climb: Death himself. Dhruva sets his foot on Death’s head and uses it as his step up into the vimana, and the sky breaks open with kettledrums and the singing of the Gandharvas. And then, seated, on the very edge of leaving for the Lord’s country, Dhruva thinks of his mother. Is he to go up alone to Vaikuntha, a place this hard to reach, and leave his poor mother behind on the ground? Sunanda and Nanda read the thought as it forms, and point. Ahead of them, higher already, a second vimana is climbing, and in it rides the lady Suniti, shining. The mother in whose lap this whole journey began is going on before him, leading the way up. He climbs past the three worlds and the circle of the seven rishis to the eternal abode of Vishnu, a realm that shines by its own light. Fastened to his station, the whole wheel of the stars turns to this day, oxen circling the post of a threshing floor, and the pole star has never once slipped from its place.

The Vishnu Purana tells Dhruva too, in chapters 11 and 12 of its first amsha, his departure for the forest and his meeting with Marichi and the other rishis, and the Lord’s appearance at the end of his tapas to grant him the fixed station; that account belongs to that Purana and is not folded into the Bhagavatam’s here. The Mahabharata calls him by name once more, in the Anushasana Parva, when the great rishis who come to see Bhishma lying on his bed of arrows are counted, and Dhruva stands in that list beside Vyasa, Chyavana, and Kashyapa.

His Path

The Previous Birth of Narada · A serving woman’s five-year-old son, the leavings of sadhus, and a voice in an empty forest.

Prahlada’s Rebellion · Another boy in a schoolroom, given his father’s rage where Dhruva was refused his father’s lap, calling on the same name.

Creation, the Prajapatis, and Svayambhuva Manu · The grandfather who came to Alakapuri to take the war out of his grandson, and his two sons, Priyavrata and Uttanapada.

The Lap He Was Refused

There are three askings in Dhruva’s story, and no two are alike. The first has no words; a child crosses a floor toward a lap, and a hand does not come down. The second is at Madhuvana, where after five months of tapas the same child asks for exactly what he set out for, a throne higher than his brother’s; the Bhagavatam neither hides that asking nor corrects it, and the Lord grants it in full and lays on top of it the thing that was never asked for. The third is at Alakapuri, where Kubera says ask for anything, and the king who now owns the earth asks for the one thing no treasury holds. What changes between the three is the direction of the asking, and the Bhagavatam shows the change without a sermon, through the regret on the road home where a boy calls himself a pauper who begged an emperor for a fistful of rice. Yet the story never makes the asking for a throne small. Suniti did not tell her son to give up wanting the kingdom; she told him there was one more lap in the world, and she sent him there with the wanting intact. The lap he was refused is what carried him to the lap he has never left. That is why, at the very end, the old man who was that boy thinks first of his mother and sees her already climbing ahead of him; the Bhagavatam’s picture of the lap this journey began in going on before him is the answer to his whole story.