Bhagavatam · The Previous Birth of Narada

The Ganga moved slowly that morning, and at the mention of Narada’s name Parikshit lifted his head.

“Bhagavan,” he said, “this Narada, who finds his way into every story somewhere, tanpura in hand and Narayana’s name on his lips, what was he before? No one is born a devarshi. I have only a handful of days left, muni, and I want to know where a thirst like his first begins inside a person.”

A faint smile crossed Shukadeva’s eyes.

“Rajan, Narada told this himself, to Vyasa ji. Hear it in his own words.”

Shukadeva stayed silent a few moments, as if the smell of a rain-season hut from some far-off time were reaching him. Then he spoke.

“That day a doubt still lingered in Vyasa ji’s mind, and to settle it Narada opened his own story.”

“Vyasa ji,” Narada had said, “I was not always Narada.”

“My last birth fell in the Kalpa now gone. I was the son of a serving-woman.”

“My mother was a maid in the house of some brahmins learned in the Vedas. She cooked their food, washed their clothes, did everything. Of my father I knew nothing.”

“I lived with my mother. In a hut. I was very small. Five years old.”

“Then one day something extraordinary happened.”

“Some sadhus came to stay in the home of those very brahmins my mother worked for. For four months. It was the season of rains. Sadhus keep a tradition for those months: stay in one place, wander nowhere.”

“Those brahmins were good people. They gave the sadhus room in their house. They fed them.”

“My mother was given the work of serving them. And she took me along.”

“I spent those four months in front of them.”

“And what did those sadhus do? They took the Lord’s name all day. Sometimes they listened to hari-katha, sometimes they told it. The smoke of the yajna incense hung over the courtyard. As evening fell, the sound of their kirtan drifted all the way to our hut.”

“And when they ate, I would watch.”

“After their meals, whatever ucchishta remained, the leavings, my mother would clear away. I did not run and play the way small children do. I spoke little, kept away from toys, and did whatever small service those men needed. They looked on everyone with the same even eye, and still they grew especially fond of me, this quiet child.”

“One day the brahmins gave their consent. After that, once each day, when the sadhus rose from their meal, I ate the little that was left clinging to their vessels.”

“That daily portion of leavings washed every old stain out of me. My body felt clean in a way I had no words for, and my mind went quiet, the way a dark room settles when someone sets a lamp down in it.”

“Something in me had begun to lean toward the very Lord those men named from morning to night.”

“Those sadhus spent the whole day singing and telling the enchanting stories of Shri Krishna. By their grace I too began to hear those stories, three times over each day, morning and noon and evening, their voices carrying the Lord’s praises across the courtyard while I listened with everything in me.”

“Line after line, taken in with faith, my taste for the Lord’s glory grew deeper and deeper. All through the rains and on into the autumn that came after, a devotion took root in me that burns off restlessness and dullness alike.”

“When the four months were over and it was time for those men to move on, they did one last thing for me. Out of plain kindness to a servant’s child, these sadhus who felt for every suffering creature handed me their most guarded possession, the secret knowledge the Lord himself had once revealed to them.”

“Through it I came to see the maya of Vasudeva, the veiling power by which he brings these worlds into being and hides himself within them, and I understood that whoever truly grasps this reaches the Lord’s own home. A child of five, and the mahatmas had put the highest wisdom of all into my hands as they left.”

“The four months ended. The sadhus left. I stayed where I was.”

“But I was no longer the same. My heart had been made pure. Like a bhakta’s. At five years old.”

“Those stories kept sounding inside me. All day. Even while I worked beside my mother.”

“I was my mother’s only child, and she had wound her whole heart around me. She was an unlettered woman, a servant in another man’s house, and much as she longed to keep me safe and lay something by for my future, she could not. A bondswoman lays nothing by. The world turns at the Lord’s will the way a wooden puppet turns on its strings, and her strings had never been in her own hands.”

“For her sake I stayed on in that settlement of brahmins. I was five. I had no idea yet of north or south, no sense of where one place ended and the next began.”

“Then one night she went out into the dark to milk a cow. Her foot came down on a snake lying across the path. It struck her, and she died there, on the bare earth.”

“I was alone.”

“I had no one left. And I did a strange thing with that grief. I took it as a gift. The Lord looks to the good of those who lean on him, and it seemed to me he had quietly cut the last cord that held me in one place and set me free to go looking for him.”

“So I turned north and set out. It was a long road for a small child, and I walked it alone. I passed through rich countries and crowded cities, through villages and cowherds’ camps, past mines and fields and the huts that cling to the flanks of hills and the banks of rivers. I crossed orchards and flower gardens, hills veined with colored ore, trees whose limbs the elephants had broken, still lakes of sweet water, and ponds that seemed made for the gods, loud with the calls of a hundred birds and humming with bees that went from bloom to bloom.”

“And then, still walking alone, I came to the edge of a vast and fearful forest. It ran on without end, choked with reeds and bamboo and blades of sharp kusha grass, dark and dreadful, alive with snakes and owls and jackals.”

“My body and my senses had gone slack. A great thirst was on me, and hunger with it. I found the pool of a river close by, bathed in it, drank, rinsed my mouth, and the tiredness lifted.”

“In that forest where no one lived, I sat down at the foot of a peepal tree. I closed my eyes. And just as the mahatmas had taught me, I began to hold in mind the Paramatma who sits in the heart, in the very form they had given me.”

“And as I meditated on his lotus feet with a mind that love had taken hold of, tears came to my eyes from the sheer wanting to see Sri Hari, and slowly, within my heart, the Lord took form.”

“Love broke over me and the hair on my body stood up. My heart went still and cool. I sank so far into that flood of joy that I lost all sense of myself and of the one I was beholding.”

“Then, all at once, the form was gone. That form beyond all words, the sight of which had flooded the heart and lifted every sorrow, simply vanished. I was thrown into distress. I sprang to my feet, gathered my mind back into my heart, and reached for the vision again and again. It would not come. I stood there wretched and aching, like a man whose one hunger has been left unfed.”

“And then, in that empty forest, a voice reached me. Deep and sweet, and it settled the grief in me as it spoke.”

“‘It grieves me that in this birth you will not see me again. To yogis only half made, whose old cravings have not yet burned away, the sight of me is very hard to win.’”

“‘Sinless child, I let you see this one glimpse of my form for a single reason, to wake in your heart the hunger to reach me. The seeker who carries that hunger lets go, little by little, of every craving inside him, until none is left.’”

“‘The short service you gave these saints has already fixed your mind on me for good. When you lay down this coarse and perishable body, you will come to me as one of my own attendants. This resolve of yours to reach me will never break. Even when the whole of creation dissolves, the memory of me will stay alive in you.’”

“Unmanifest as the open sky, the almighty Lord of all said this much and fell silent. I felt the rare grace of it and bowed my head to him, the greatest of the great.”

“Then I let go of all shyness and hesitation and began to sing and to hold in mind the Lord’s sweet names and his lilas. Craving, pride, and envy had already fallen from me. Content at heart, I wandered the earth and waited for my end. When the hour came and the karma that had shaped this body was spent, death reached me like a stroke of lightning, and this body of the five elements dropped away.”

“When that kalpa closed, Narayana drew the whole of creation back into himself and lay in sleep upon the waters of the dissolution. As Brahma made ready to enter the Lord’s body, I was carried in with him, on the very breath he drew. A thousand cycles of the four yugas went by. When Brahma woke and set himself to bring the worlds out once more, Marichi and the other rishis issued from him, and I came out with them. That was my next birth, the birth of Narada.”

“And I came with one work to do, to carry the story of Narayana to everyone, everywhere. The Lord placed this tanpura in my hands, and its strings sound the eternal Word itself. By his grace nothing anywhere can bar my way, within the three worlds or beyond them, and wherever I sing of what he has done, he rises again in my heart, as though I had called him home.”

“Vyasa ji, that is my story.”

Vyasa joined his hands. For a long time he said nothing.

“Narada, now I understand.”

“That is why,” Narada said with a smile, “the granth you are about to write should carry this story of mine as well. Where a servant woman’s son once set out, from that very place all of this set out.”

Narada rose. He plucked one string of the tanpura, and the note trembled out through the sunlit courtyard and spread far. Then, into that same air, with that same name of Narayana, he vanished, and Vyasa sat gazing a long while at the empty courtyard, where only a soft hum of the tanpura remained.

Having said this much, Shukadeva paused.

Parikshit sat quiet for a while. Then he said, “Bhagavan, I was born in a king’s house, I received a throne, and still I have trembled. And that boy, who had no father and no name, only the food left on a plate, he reached Narayana.”

“Rajan,” Shukadeva said softly, “the scales there weighed one thing only, the thirst that woke in that single glimpse and never again went out. They took no measure of lineage, and none of caste. That same thirst is waking in you now, and Takshaka cannot so much as touch it.”

Parikshit said nothing. The Ganga kept sliding by as before, and on the sand of the bank the morning sun spread a little further.