Chandrahasa

Two men stood over a boy in a forest clearing outside Kuntalapura with their swords already drawn, and the boy was not weeping. He looked at the blades the way another child might look at storm clouds gathering on the horizon, with interest rather than terror, and when the executioners told him plainly why they had brought him there, he answered with a single request. Only this, he said: when he lifted his hand and gave the sign, let their swords fall, and not one moment before. Then he reached inside his garment, drew out a small dark stone no larger than a plum, and asked only for water and a few wild flowers, so that he might worship before he died.

That stone was a Shaligram, and the child holding it was Chandrahasa, prince of a small kingdom in Kerala. The Bhaktamal names his father Medhavi; other tellings of this very old story give the name Sudharmika instead, and there is no way now to be certain which the poets meant, so both names deserve to be remembered rather than one erased in favor of the other. While Chandrahasa was still an infant, his father fell in battle against a rival king, and his mother, unable to imagine continuing without her husband, walked into the funeral fire after him. A nurse who loved the orphaned child more than she feared for her own safety fled with him out of Kerala entirely, crossing into the kingdom of Kuntala, where she placed him, his true birth unknown to anyone, in the household of Dhrishtabuddhi, the kingdom's chief minister, and raised him there as though he were her own grandson. When Chandrahasa turned five, that nurse died as well, leaving the boy in a stranger's house with no one left alive who could say who he truly was.

It was in that same year, the old commentary says, that the sage Narada came upon him in a quiet hour and, moved by simple compassion for an orphan nobody else was watching over, gave him two things that would shape everything that followed: a small Shaligram murti, and the whispered instruction to keep the Holy Name of Bhagavan on his tongue always. Narada showed him how to bathe the little stone, how to garland it with whatever flowers grew wild nearby, and told him never to eat a meal without first offering the food to the god cupped in his own palm. Then the sage went on his way, as sages in these stories always do, and Chandrahasa simply did as he had been told. He grew up in the minister's house playing the ordinary games of childhood alongside the other boys there, but he kept the little murti tucked at his cheek the way another child might keep a favorite stone, and while his playmates chose games of kings and soldiers, his own delight, the commentary insists, was singing of Krishna.

The trouble began, as it so often does in these stories, at a feast. Dhrishtabuddhi had invited Brahmins to his house for a ceremonial meal, and the children of the household, Chandrahasa among them, came in to bow before the assembled guests. When the boy touched the feet of the presiding pandit, the old man studied him for a long moment, then turned to his host with an announcement he plainly had not planned to make. Dhrishtabuddhi, it happened, had just asked the Brahmins what sort of husband fate held in store for his daughter Vishaya. Here, the pandit said, pointing straight at the child kneeling before them, was the very man. This future is already settled, he told the stunned minister. There is nothing left to decide.

The minister said nothing aloud to his guests, but the words hollowed him out from the inside. He was a proud man, trusted by his king, and the thought that his daughter's whole future had already been fixed in favor of a foundling of unknown birth felt to him like an unbearable disgrace. He turned the humiliation over for days until it curdled into something far uglier than pride, and at last he summoned men skilled in killing and gave them their instructions in a single sentence: take the boy into the forest, and do not bring him back alive. It was these same men who now stood over Chandrahasa in the clearing, swords raised, waiting only for the signal he had asked them to wait for.

Chandrahasa knelt, set the little Shaligram on his open palm, and simply looked at it. Whatever came to him in that moment, the old telling insists it was no ordinary stone he saw but the Lord himself, luminous and wholly present, and the boy was so completely swallowed by that joy that he forgot, for those few minutes, that he was kneeling in a clearing waiting to be killed. The executioners, watching a child on the edge of death radiate nothing but happiness, felt something shift in their own chests. Their hands would not obey the order they had been given. They lowered their swords, ashamed of the work sent them to do, and let him go, taking with them only the false proof their master would demand: Chandrahasa had been born, as the old omen-readers would have noted with alarm, with six toes on one foot, and it was that extra toe alone which they cut away and carried back to Dhrishtabuddhi as evidence of a murder that had never happened.

Alone now in the wilderness, the boy might easily have vanished from the story altogether, except that a small kingdom nearby was ruled by a man named Kalinda who possessed everything a king could want except an heir. Hunting in that same forest, Kalinda came upon Chandrahasa surrounded, of all things, by a herd of deer that had not scattered at his approach, and shaded by a great bird holding its wings spread like a canopy over the child's head, the kind of sign that court astrologers of the age read as marking a man for kingship. Kalinda, who had prayed for a son far more fervently than he had prayed for anything else in his life, gathered the child up as if he had stumbled on a fortune he had long since stopped hoping for, carried him home to Chandanavati, and raised him as his own. In time, watching this foundling grow into a young man of unmistakable character, Kalinda placed the crown of Chandanavati on his head with his own hands.

As king, Chandrahasa spent his treasury so freely on sadhus, pilgrims, and the poor of his land that little was ever left over for the yearly tribute owed to the greater Maharaja of Kuntalapura, his overlord. When the payments stopped arriving, the Maharaja sent his most trusted minister, with soldiers at his back, to collect what was owed. That minister, inevitably, was Dhrishtabuddhi. He rode into Chandanavati expecting to browbeat a careless young vassal, and instead found himself face to face, after all those years, with the very foundling he believed his men had murdered in a forest. Recognition went through him like fire meeting oil.

He said nothing of what he knew. Instead he wrote a letter, addressed it to his own son Madanasena at home, and asked the unsuspecting young king to carry it there for him as a personal favor, a request Chandrahasa, gracious as ever, agreed to without a second thought. What the letter actually instructed, in Dhrishtabuddhi's own hand, was that whoever delivered it should be given vish, poison, without a moment's delay. Worn out from the journey, Chandrahasa stopped to rest in a garden on the edge of Kuntalapura that happened to belong to Dhrishtabuddhi's own family, and fell asleep there, his fate once again resting in the hands of someone he had never met. Vishaya, the minister's daughter, wandered into that same garden with her companions, saw the sleeping stranger, and lost her heart to him at once. Circling back once her friends had moved on, she noticed a letter tucked in his clothing, drew it out, and recognized her own father's hand. What she read stopped her breath: an order that this very man, whom she had only just fallen in love with, be given poison the instant he arrived. She persuaded herself, in the space of a heartbeat, that her father's pen must have slipped in haste, that he had surely meant to write her own name rather than the word for poison, which looked so nearly the same on the page. Taking the dark kohl from around her own eyes, she added, with a steady hand, the small strokes needed to turn vish into Vishaya. Then she slipped away before anyone had seen her, murmuring her thanks to the goddess for showing her what to do.

Madanasena read the altered letter, understood it exactly as it now appeared to say, and was overjoyed. He embraced the traveler like a brother on the spot, sent at once for Brahmins, and within a single ghati of that same night had married his sister to Chandrahasa in a wedding celebrated with more open-handed generosity, the commentator insists, than kings of far greater rank could have managed. It was only when Dhrishtabuddhi himself came home expecting news of a death and instead found his own house lit up for his daughter's wedding feast that anyone understood how completely the scheme had come undone. He recognized the bridegroom at once, and the shock of it very nearly stopped his heart where he stood.

He was not finished, though. Around this same time, the childless Maharaja of Kuntalapura, growing old with no son of his own to follow him, resolved to make this able young kinsman by marriage his heir, and sent word through Madanasena that Chandrahasa should come to the palace without delay. Dhrishtabuddhi seized on the opening for one last scheme. He quietly told his hired men to strike down, without asking who it was, whoever entered the family's shrine to the Devi first the next morning, and in the same breath instructed Chandrahasa, as custom required of a new bridegroom, to visit that very shrine and pay his respects to the goddess before accepting any greater honor. But Madanasena, giddy with affection for his new brother and unwilling to see him lose even an hour on his way to a throne, offered to make the offering himself. Do not trouble yourself over the goddess's honor, he told Chandrahasa. Say your prayer to her in your heart, and go straight to the king; I will go to her temple myself and see that she is worshipped properly in your place. He went ahead into the dark shrine alone, and the men his own father had hired killed him there before he could say a word.

Chandrahasa, knowing nothing of this, went straight to the palace, where the Maharaja crowned him without delay. Word of Madanasena's death reached Dhrishtabuddhi within the hour. He ran to the temple in something close to madness, and what he found there, his own son's body lying where the killers he had hired now stood confused, undid him completely. In his grief he dashed his own head against the stone floor of the very shrine he had turned into a killing ground, and died where he fell.

When the whole chain of events reached Chandrahasa, he found that the man who had tried three times to have him murdered, together with an innocent son who had never wronged him at all, now both lay dead because of a trap meant for someone else entirely. He did not stay on his new throne to receive congratulations. He went straight to the Devi's shrine and began to pray, begging the goddess to restore both father and son to life. When no answer came, he drew his own sword and raised it to his own throat, ready to offer his life in exchange for theirs. It was then that the goddess herself appeared before him, Bhavani, consort of Mahesha, daughter of the Himalayan peak, and caught his hand before the blade could fall. Dhrishtabuddhi had been his enemy, she told him plainly, and it was she, not chance, who had struck the minister and his son down for Chandrahasa's own sake. But his readiness to give his own life for the man who had hunted him moved her, and she granted exactly what he had asked. Father and son opened their eyes again, alive, and along with their lives she gave them something more lasting still: sumati, right understanding, so that the hatred which had driven Dhrishtabuddhi to three attempts at murder would not return with him.

What is destined will surely come to pass, runs an old doha the tradition places in Chandrahasa's own mouth, however the mind races and schemes to prevent it; my mind may plan one thing, but the Maker has already planned quite another. He seems to have lived that verse more than he simply recited it. The commentary claims, in the extravagant way hagiography reaches for when it wants to say that something endured far beyond an ordinary human span, that his reign lasted three hundred years, and that in every lane of his kingdom the name of Sitarama could be heard from morning to evening, sung not out of obligation but out of plain contentment. He married a second princess in time, and it was a son of his named Makaraksha whom he eventually crowned in his own place, stepping down himself so that, an old man by then, he could ride out at the side of Krishna and Arjuna when Yudhishthira's sacrificial horse wandered into his territory during the great Ashvamedha that followed the Mahabharata war. He received the two of them not as strangers demanding tribute but as men he had been waiting his whole life to serve, opened his treasury to their campaign without being asked twice, and sent his own soldiers to march beside them. In a village called Kuknur in the Koppal district of Karnataka today, people still point to an old, half buried shrine to the goddess and speak his name when they do it, a small, stubborn thread still connecting an ordinary field to a story that has been told, in one form or another, since long before anyone thought to write it down.