The Dharma Forest by Keerthik Sasidharan

Author:Keerthik Sasidharan [Sasidharan, Keerthik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2020-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

A Day of Valour:

The Story of Arjuna

Early in the morning, Arjuna scanned the skies intently to gauge the winter sun’s angle of incline, as if his life depended on it. A few hours later, it would be a blazingly hot noon, and before long the sun would swoop down and by evening, the world would hold him to his public vow: to kill himself if he didn’t assassinate that villain, that pig, that vile murderer Jayadratha by sundown. On any other occasion, he would have been struck by the rashness of this public conceit. But not today. He couldn’t bring himself to think of the circumstances when those promissory words spilled out of him the previous night, which now seemed as distant as the afterlife itself. Would these be the last eleven hours of his life? he wondered. He looked up again, and in the skies, vultures lurked—like servants at a banquet—in their joyless flight. Evenings were usually their hours of delight, when the dead were yet to be burned and corpses of war were strewn about in states of dismemberment. But these days, with flesh piled up in various states of decay, the birds made reconnaissance sorties in the mornings itself. Arjuna didn’t begrudge their talons or beaks that pecked away at his fallen friends for, he told himself, all bodies were merely receptacles. Or so Krishna had once told him. The body is an enclosure, like this very instance of time, Krishna had reminded him, which separates the past and prevents the future from seeping in. And then, just as that instance of time is replaced by another, the body too is born anew. To explain this in a language that Arjuna understood better, Krishna had told him that our bodies are containers brim with potentialities and actions, no different than quivers filled with arrows where meaning only lay in the arc of the arrow’s flight, in the performance of action. Be that as it may, it was the heartlessness of the vultures towards the injured that seemed cruellest to Arjuna. The birds waited and watched sceptically as the wounded soldiers scrambled to stay alive only to willingly choose death as their fear of talons and promise of desecration edged closer with each passing hour. It was at nightfall that the vultures were at their most formidable. They could finish off a fully-grown horse in a couple of hours, leaving behind only the rib cage of the animal for the rats and mice. This was common knowledge among the soldiers. Thus, during the last eighth portion of any fighting day, when the skies begin to betray the coming dusk hour, the foot soldiers on both sides often went into a defensive formation and hoped to survive the few remaining hours. But, as Krishna had always told him, those were the most treacherous parts of the day for those who guarded their lives. It’s when battles can turn quickly, if one exploits the natural instinct for self-preservation among the weak and cowardly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.