Arjuna had been given a divine eye, and with it he could see what no ordinary person had ever seen. Krishna was no longer the friend holding the reins of the chariot. He had become the whole universe, a being with countless faces and countless arms, taller than the sky, brighter than a thousand suns. And in His enormous faces were enormous mouths, open and burning.

Arjuna's hands shook on the chariot rail. He searched his memory for something, anything, that looked like what he was seeing. And one small picture came to him from his childhood.

He remembered summer nights in the palace, when the oil lamps were lit in the long hallways. He remembered lying near a lamp on a hot evening, watching the moths arrive. They came out of the darkness, dozens of them, their soft wings whirring. And every single one flew straight toward the flame. The little boy Arjuna had tried to wave them away. "Stop," he had whispered. "It will burn you." But they would not stop. Faster and faster they spun toward the fire, as if the light were pulling them in, until one by one they vanished into it.

Now, standing before the cosmic form, Arjuna understood that the lamp had been showing him something true all along. The flame in the hallway and the burning mouths of God were the same kind of thing — a fire so bright that everything is drawn into it and nothing comes back out.

"Yathā pradīptaṁ jvalanaṁ pataṅgāḥ," he said aloud, his voice trembling. "Just as moths rush into a blazing flame to their death — so do all these worlds rush into Your mouths."

He was watching kings, armies, whole peoples being carried forward, the way the moths had been carried, faster than they could choose. He was a moth too, he realised. So was everyone he had ever loved. The lamp of his childhood had grown until it filled the entire sky, and now he could not look away.