Itihāsa / Mahābhārata chronicle / Vana · 18 of 50
18. The hunter on the mountain
Vana (वन)
Arjuna leaves the others to obtain weapons a war will require. The page names the errand and does not become a list of weapons. On a mountain he meets a hunter over a boar, and the hunter is Śiva, and the fight goes against Arjuna until he understands whom he has been fighting. Recognition is the gift. The Pāśupata is given. What it is, here, is a sanction, not a diagram.
He goes on to his father Indra's heaven and stays, and learns, and is tested by temptations the heaven is good at. An apsaras, Urvaśī, wants him. He refuses, because she is an ancestor of his line in the way the heavenly genealogies run, and the refusal gets him a curse that will be strangely useful: a year as a eunuch, which he will spend as the dance teacher of Virāṭa's court. The forest keeps storing the disguises the thirteenth year will need.
Below, the brothers and Draupadī wait, and the waiting is its own book. Pilgrimages are walked. Stories are told to keep a dethroned king from despair. Nala's story, told in these years, is long enough to be a sitting of its own. Sāvitrī's comes later, after Arjuna is back. They are not digressions. They are the poem telling Yudhiṣṭhira that dice and death have been survived before.
नेपालीमा
अर्जुन अस्त्र लिन गए। यो पृष्ठले अस्त्रको सूची बनाउँदैन। पहाडमा एक शिकारीसँग भेट भयो; ती शिव हुनुहुन्थ्यो। अर्जुनले उहाँलाई चिनेपछि पाशुपत दिइयो। यहाँ त्यो अनुमति हो, नक्सा होइन। इन्द्रको स्वर्गमा उनले उर्वशीलाई अस्वीकार गरे, र एक वर्ष नपुंसक हुने श्राप पाए। त्यो वर्ष उनी विराटको दरबारमा नृत्य शिक्षक बन्नेछन्। तल दाजुभाइ र द्रौपदी पर्खिरहे।