The Rider on the White Horse

The Pandavas were in the forest, in the long years of their exile, and the old sage Markandeya had come to sit with them. He had lived through more ages of the world than anyone could count, and Yudhishthira asked him the question that troubled him most.

"You have seen the ages begin and end," he said. "Tell me how this one will end."

Markandeya told him. It was not a pleasant telling.

"At the end of this age," he said, "kings will rob their own people. Men will lie and be believed. The young will be old in their ways, and the old will behave like children. Sons will strike their fathers. Wives will leave their husbands, and the seasons will forget themselves. Rain will fall in the wrong months, and the crops will fail where they should flourish. The cows will give little milk, and the trees few fruits."

"And then?" said Yudhishthira.

"And then," said Markandeya, "commissioned by Time, a brahmin named Kalki will be born, in a town called Sambhala, in a good family. He will be strong and wise and full of energy."

He told them how it would go. Whatever weapons Kalki thought of would come to his hand. Armour would come, and a horse, and soldiers, the moment he wished for them. He would be king of kings, always victorious through the strength of what was right.

"He will set the world in order," said the sage. "He will clear the earth of the thieves who rule it. Then he will hold a great horse sacrifice, and give the whole earth to the brahmins, and go away into the forest to live there in peace."

"And the age?"

"The age of truth will come back," said Markandeya. "The Krita. People will be honest again. The rains will come in season and the harvests will be full. The trees will bear fruit and the cows will give milk. And men will live long and keep their word."

Yudhishthira was quiet for a while.

"How far away is it?" he asked.

"Far," said the old man. "But it will come, as surely as night comes after day."

The brothers, sitting in their forest hut with nothing of their own, listened as if he had told them something good.

The Puranas give Kalki a house, a father and a horse.

He will be born, the Bhagavata says, in the home of Vishnuyasha, the best of the brahmins of the village of Shambhala. It will be a time when the men who call themselves kings are only robbers in royal clothes.

The Vishnu Purana says it plainly. A portion of the god who is the beginning of all things will come down, and be born in that family, as Kalki.

When he is grown he will mount his swift horse, Devadatta, white as milk, and take up his sword. He will ride across the earth faster than thought, and wherever he finds those thieves, he will cut them down, by the hundreds and the thousands.

The few who are left will change. Their minds, the Vishnu Purana says, will become as clear as crystal, and they will be the seed of a new humanity. The Bhagavata says they will be made pure by the fragrance of the god, carried on the wind.

The new age will begin on a particular night. When the sun and the moon and Jupiter come together in the house of the star Pushya, the age of truth will begin again.

And somewhere in the Himalayas, in a village called Kalapa, two kings have been waiting since the old lines ended, so that the Bhagavata can name them: Devapi of the lunar line and Maru of the solar. They have kept themselves alive through yoga all this time. When Kalki's work is done, they will come down from the mountains and begin the royal families again.