Mahabharata · Chapter 19 · Part 3 of 5 · Two warning tales: Matali, and Galava and Madhavi

About 110 minutes · in 4 sittings

Kanva rises: Matali’s daughter Gunakeshi, for whom no husband could be found in three worlds, and the first tour of Varuna’s realm

Rama Jamadagnya sat down, and the silence he left behind him in the Kuru assembly had barely settled before another of the sages rose to fill it. This was Kanva, and he too turned his face toward Duryodhana. Brahman, the Grandsire of the universe, is indestructible and eternal, he began. The two illustrious rishis Nara and Narayana share that nature. Of all the sons of Aditi, Vishnu alone is eternal, he alone is unconquerable and beyond destruction, existing forever, the Lord of all, the possessor of every divine attribute. Everything else is subject to ruin. The sun and the moon, earth and water, wind, fire and sky, the planets and the stars, all of them take their leave of the three worlds when the end of the universe arrives, and they are destroyed and made again, over and over. As for men and animals and birds and every other order of living creature that moves across this world, their lives are short. And kings, Kanva said, letting the word sit for a moment in a hall full of them, kings enjoy great prosperity and then reach the hour of their destruction, every one of them, and are born again to taste the fruit of what they did, good and evil alike. It is fitting, then, that you make peace with Yudhishthira. Let the Pandavas and the Kauravas rule this earth together. And do not think, Suyodhana, in these terms: I am strong. It has been seen again and again that there are men stronger than the ones everyone calls strong. Those who are truly strong scarcely count bodily strength as strength at all. The Pandavas, whose prowess equals that of the celestials, are counted among the strong by anyone who is keeping count. On this subject an old story is told by way of example, the story of Matali searching for a bridegroom on whom to bestow his daughter.

The king of the three worlds, Kanva said, had a charioteer named Matali whom he dearly loved. To this charioteer a daughter was born whose beauty became famous across the world. She carried celestial loveliness in her, this daughter of Matali, and she was known by the name Gunakeshi, and in grace of feature and symmetry of form she stood far above every other woman of her kind. When Matali understood that the time had come to give her away, he and his wife fell into deep anxiety over what he should do next. He turned the problem over in private. The birth of a daughter, he thought, in a family that is well conducted and highborn, with a reputation and a habit of humility, always brings trouble with it. A daughter born into a respectable house puts the honor of three houses at hazard at once: her mother’s, her father’s, and the one she enters by marriage. With his mind’s eye Matali had already looked through the worlds of gods and men, had searched both of them thoroughly, and had found no eligible bridegroom anywhere. Among the gods, among the Daityas and the Gandharvas, among men and among the countless rishis, there was no one Matali would accept as a fit husband for his daughter. So one night he took counsel with his wife Sudharma, and at the end of it he set his heart on a journey to the world of the Nagas. Among gods and men, he reasoned, I have found no husband to match my Gunakeshi in beauty. Surely one may be found among the Nagas. He took his wife’s leave, bent to breathe in the scent of his daughter’s hair, and went down into the regions beneath the earth.

He had not gone far when he saw the great rishi Narada traveling at his own pleasure, on his way to pay a call on Varuna, the lord of the waters. Narada saw him too and hailed him. Where are you going, charioteer? Is this journey on some business of your own, or is it Shatakratu who has sent you? Matali told him the whole of his errand, there on the road, and the rishi, once he had heard it, made a decision on the spot. We will go together, he said. I myself am on my way to see the Lord of the waters. I have left the heavens to search the nether regions, and as we go I will tell you everything about them, and when we have searched them well we will choose a bridegroom together, Matali. So the two of them, a shining pair, went down and came before the Regent of the world, the Lord of the waters. Narada was received there with the honors due to a celestial rishi, and Matali with honors equal to those offered to the great Indra himself. Both of them knew how to conduct business. They laid their purpose before Varuna, obtained his leave, and set out to wander through the realm of the Nagas, and Narada, who knew every resident of the regions below, began to describe to his companion in detail everyone who lived there.

You have seen Varuna, Narada said, surrounded by his sons and his grandsons. Now look at the dominions of the Lord of the waters, delightful on every side and full of wealth. That son of his, the wise one, is distinguished above others for his conduct, his disposition and his holiness. He has eyes like lotus petals, this Pushkara, and he is Varuna’s dearly loved son, very beautiful, a pleasure to look at. Soma’s daughter has chosen him for her husband. She is called Jyotsnakali, that daughter of Soma, and in beauty she equals a second Shri. Once before, people say, she chose the eldest and foremost of Aditi’s sons for her lord. Now look, companion of the Lord of the celestials, at that mansion made entirely of gold and filled with the wine called Varuni. It was by obtaining that wine that the gods acquired their godhood. And these blazing weapons of every kind that you see, Matali, belonged to the Daityas who have been stripped of their sovereignty. They never deteriorate, and when they are hurled at an enemy they return to the hand that threw them. The gods took them as the spoils of war, and it takes considerable strength of mind to use them against a foe. In days gone by many tribes of Rakshasas and Daityas lived here, possessing celestial weapons of many kinds, and the gods defeated all of them. Look there, in Varuna’s lake: that fire of blazing flames, and that discus of Vishnu wrapped in the radiance of a tremendous heat. And there lies the knotted bow that was created for the destruction of the world. The gods guard it with great vigilance at all times, and it is from this bow that the one Arjuna wields has taken its name. It carries the strength of a hundred thousand bows, and the power it takes on at the hour of battle cannot be described. It punishes every wicked king who deserves punishment, every king with the nature of a Rakshasa. Brahman, the utterer of the Vedas, first created this fierce weapon. The great preceptor Shukra has said that it is a terrible weapon in respect of all kings. Charged with great energy, it is held by the sons of the Lord of the waters. And look, in the umbrella room, at the umbrella of the Lord of the waters. It drops refreshing showers the way clouds do, and the water that falls from it, pure as the moon, is nevertheless wrapped in such darkness that no one can see it. The wonders to be seen in these regions are beyond counting, Matali. But your business will suffer if we spend more time here. We will leave this region soon.

Consider the shape of what Kanva is doing. He has stood up in a hall of kings to tell a story about a marriage negotiation among serpents, and the hall has to sit through it, because the man telling it arrived through the sky and the king on the throne has asked him to speak. The first sentence of the tale carries its whole point: the man everyone calls strong will meet someone stronger. Matali is the driver of Indra’s chariot, and even Indra’s driver has to comb three worlds and go down into the earth to settle his daughter. Nothing in the tour is idle. When Narada points out the bow in Varuna’s lake and remarks that Arjuna’s bow took its name from it, every Kaurava in the hall knows exactly whose hand holds Gandiva, and against whom it will be drawn.

A key to reading this (who is speaking to whom): Kanva is one of the rishis who arrived in the assembly with Narada and Parashurama in the previous scenes. Everything from here to the end of Garuda’s humbling is his speech to Duryodhana, and inside it Narada speaks to Matali, so the reader is two frames deep. Shatakratu, Shakra, Vasava and Purandara are all names of Indra. Vinata’s son and Suparna are Garuda. Shri is Lakshmi. The nether regions here are a whole layered country, and Narada will take Matali through it province by province: Varuna’s realm first, then Patala, Hiranyapura, the region of the birds, Rasatala, and the Naga city Bhogavati.

The gist: After Parashurama, the rishi Kanva addresses Duryodhana: apart from Brahman, Nara and Narayana, and Vishnu, everything perishes, kings included, so make peace and never think “I am strong,” since there is always someone stronger. He illustrates with the story of Matali. Indra’s beloved charioteer can find no husband for his peerless daughter Gunakeshi among gods, Daityas, Gandharvas, men or rishis, and after consulting his wife Sudharma he descends toward the world of the Nagas. Narada meets him on the way and joins him; they obtain Varuna’s leave and begin a tour of the regions beneath the earth. Narada shows him Varuna’s realm: the son Pushkara and his wife Jyotsnakali, the golden mansion full of Varuni wine, the weapons taken from the Daityas, the fire and Vishnu’s discus in the lake, the world-destroying bow from which Gandiva took its name, and Varuna’s umbrella.

The egg in the waters of Patala and the jeweled mansions of Hiranyapura: Narada shows two realms and Matali turns away from both

Here, Narada went on, in the very center of the Naga world, lies the city called Patala. It is celebrated across the whole universe, and the Daityas and the Danavas worship it. If creatures from the surface of the earth are carried down here by the force of the water’s current, they shriek aloud in their terror. Here the fire called the Asura fire burns without ceasing, and it is fed by water. The flat of the celestials’ hand holds it down, so that it does not move, and it thinks of itself as bound and confined. It was here that the gods, having first defeated and slain their enemies, drank the Amrita and set aside what remained. It is from here that the waning and the waxing of the moon are seen. It is here that the Horse-headed one, Aditi’s son Vishnu, rises at the return of every auspicious occasion, and at those times he fills this universe, which is also called Suvarna, with the sound of Vedic hymns and mantras. Because the moon and every other watery form pours its water down on this region, this excellent region has been given the name Patala. From here the celestial elephant Airavata draws up cool water for the good of the universe and hands it to the clouds, and that is the water Indra sends down as rain. Aquatic animals of many kinds live here, the Timi and others, in every shape, and they live on the rays of the moon. There are many kinds of creatures here, charioteer, that die during the day, pierced by the rays of the sun, and all of them come back to life at night, and the reason is this: the moon rises here every day, and with the rays that are his arms he lays Amrita on those dead creatures and revives them by his touch. Many sinful Danavas, stripped of their prosperity by Vasava, live here in confinement, defeated by him and worn down by Time. It was here that Mahadeva, the lord of creatures and the great master of everything made, practiced the severest austerities for the good of all beings. Here live many great twice-born rishis who keep the vow called Go, lean from the recitation and study of the Vedas, who have held back the breath called Prana and reached heaven by the force of their austerity. A man is said to keep the Go vow when he sleeps wherever he pleases, lives on whatever others set in front of him, and wears whatever robes others may give. Here, in the line of the celebrated elephant Supratika, were born those finest of elephants named Airavata, Vamana, Kumuda and Anjana, and the first of them is the king of his tribe. Look, Matali, whether there is any bridegroom here distinguished by superior merit, for if there is I will go to him and respectfully ask him to accept your daughter. And look at that: an egg lies here in these waters, blazing with beauty. It has been here since the beginning of creation. It does not move and it does not burst. I have never heard anyone speak of its birth or its nature. Nobody knows who its father or its mother is. It is said, Matali, that when the end of the world comes, a mighty fire will break out from inside it, spread, and consume the three worlds with everything in them that moves and everything that stands still. Matali heard him out and answered: no one here seems eligible to me. Let us go on from here without delay.

Narada led him on. This, he said, is the spacious and celebrated city of cities called Hiranyapura, belonging to the Daityas and the Danavas, and it possesses a hundred different kinds of illusion. Here in these regions called Patala it was built with great care by the divine artificer, and the Danava Maya drew its plan. In old days many Danavas of great energy and heroism lived here, having obtained boons from Brahman, and they displayed a thousand different kinds of illusion. Shakra could not conquer them, and neither could any other celestial, whether Yama or Varuna or Kuvera the lord of treasures. Here dwell, Matali, the Asuras called Kalakhanjas, who sprang from Vishnu, and the Rakshasas called Yatudhanas, who sprang from the feet of Brahman. All of them have frightful teeth, terrible momentum, the speed and the prowess of the wind, and great energy that rests on their powers of illusion. Besides these, another class of Danavas lives here, called the Nivatakavachas, who are invincible in battle. You know yourself how Shakra is unable to defeat them. Many times, Matali, you and your son Gomukha, and the chief of the celestials, the lord of Shachi, along with his son, have had to retreat before them. Look at their homes, all made of silver and gold and finished with decorations done according to the rules of the art. Every one of these mansions is set with lapis lazuli and coral, and made brilliant with the luster of the Arkasphatika and the radiance of the gem called Vajrasara. Many of these palaces look as if they were built out of the shine of the gems called Padmaragas, or out of bright marble, or out of excellent wood. They have the radiance of the sun about them, or of blazing fire. All these buildings, studded with gems and jewels, are very high and stand close against one another. Of vast proportions and great architectural beauty, they are such that it is impossible to say what material they are built of or to describe their style. They are exceedingly beautiful because of their ornament. Look at the Daityas’ retreats for recreation and sport, at these beds of theirs for sleeping, at these costly vessels of theirs set with precious stones, and at these seats made for their use. Look at their hills, which resemble clouds, at those fountains of water, and at these trees that move where they will and yield whatever fruit and flower a person asks of them. See, Matali, whether any bridegroom acceptable to you may be found here. If no one can be found, we will go from here to some other part of the world, if that is what you wish.

Matali’s answer came quickly, and it carried an edge. Celestial rishi, he said, it would not be right for me to do anything disagreeable to the dwellers in heaven. The gods and the Danavas are brothers, and they have been at war with each other forever. How can I make an alliance with those who are our enemies? Let us go somewhere else. It is not fitting for me to search among the Danavas. As for you, I know perfectly well that your heart is always set on stirring up quarrels.

Two provinces, and two refusals, and the second refusal tells the reader who Matali is. In Patala he has been shown fire that feeds on water, the leftover Amrita of the gods, an egg older than the world with the end of the world inside it, and he passes through all of it looking only for a face. In Hiranyapura he is shown wealth that no palace in heaven can match, and he declines it in a sentence, because the people who own it are on the wrong side of a war that has never ended. Indra’s charioteer will not buy his daughter a golden house from Indra’s enemies. And his last remark to Narada, delivered with a straight face, is the oldest joke in the three worlds: the wandering rishi who turns up wherever there is trouble, and who has just offered to marry Indra’s charioteer’s daughter into the Danava nobility, is known by everyone, Matali included, as a man who enjoys a quarrel.

A key to reading this (the geography, and a joke at Narada’s expense): Patala is used in two senses in this stretch, for the whole of the nether world and for one city at its center, and Narada supplies the etymology himself: it is the region on which the moon and every other watery body pours its water down. The Horse-headed Vishnu is Hayagriva, who returns in the Shanti Parva in the story of the recovery of the Vedas. The Nivatakavachas of Hiranyapura are the same Danavas Arjuna destroyed on Indra’s behalf in the Vana Parva, so Narada’s remark that Shakra cannot defeat them belongs to a time before that story. Matali’s parting shot about Narada’s fondness for quarrels is in the source, and it is meant as light teasing between old acquaintances.

The gist: Narada shows Matali the city of Patala: the Asura fire fed by water, the gods’ leftover Amrita, the moon’s waxing and waning, the rising of Hayagriva, Airavata handing water to the clouds, creatures that die by day and revive under moonlight, the imprisoned Danavas, Mahadeva’s place of austerity, the rishis of the Go vow, the four elephants of Supratika’s line, and the egg lying in the waters since creation began, from which the fire of the world’s end will burst. Matali sees no one eligible. Then Hiranyapura, the Danava city planned by Maya, home of the Kalakhanjas, the Yatudhanas and the invincible Nivatakavachas, its mansions of gold, silver, lapis, coral and Padmaraga. Matali turns away from that too: he will make no alliance with the enemies of the gods, and he teases Narada that his heart is always set on starting a quarrel.

The bird realm of Garuda’s six sons, and in Rasatala, the seventh layer down, Surabhi’s four daughters whose milk made the Ocean of Milk

This region belongs to the birds, Narada said, and every one of them has excellent feathers. All of them live on snakes. They never feel fatigue, whether they are putting forth their strength, or making a journey, or carrying a load. This race, charioteer, has multiplied from the six sons of Garuda, who are Sumukha, Sunama, Sunetra, Suvarchas, Suruch, and that prince of birds called Suvala. Born in Kashyapa’s line and adding to the glory of Vinata’s race, many winged creatures, each the foremost of its species, have begotten children and founded and increased a thousand dynasties of birds, all of them noble in blood. All these creatures enjoy great prosperity, all bear the auspicious mark called Shrivatsa, all possess great wealth, and all are filled with great might. By their deeds one might say they belong to the Kshatriya order, but there is no compassion in them, since they live by eating snakes. They never reach spiritual enlightenment, because they prey on their own kin. I will now name the chiefs among them one by one. Listen, Matali. This race is held in high regard because of the favor Vishnu shows it. They all worship Vishnu, and Vishnu is their protector. Vishnu dwells in their hearts at all times, and Vishnu is their great refuge. These are their names: Suvarnachuda, Nagashi, Daruna, Chandatundaka, Anala, Vaishalaksha, Kundali, Pankajit, Vajravishkambha, Vainateya, Vamana, Vatavega, Dishachakshu, Nimisha, Animisha, Trirava, Saptarava, Valmiki, Dipaka, Daityadvipa, Saridvipa, Sarasa, Padmaketana, Sumukha, Chitraketu, Chitravara, Anagha, Meshahrit, Kumuda, Daksha, Sarpanta, Somabhojana, Gurubhara, Kapota, Suryanetra, Chirantaka, Vishnudharma, Kumara, Parivarha, Hari, Susvara, Madhuparka, Hemavarna, Malaya, Matarishvan, Nishakara and Divakara. These sons of Garuda whom I have named live in only a single province of this region. I have mentioned only those who have won distinction by might, by fame and by achievement. If none of them pleases you, come, we will go on from here, Matali. I will take you to another region where you may find an eligible husband for your daughter.

They went down again, and the ground changed under them, and Narada spoke. The region where we now stand is called Rasatala, and it is the seventh layer beneath the earth. Here lives Surabhi, the mother of all cattle, who was born of the Amrita. She always yields a milk that is the essence of all the best things on earth, a milk that is of one taste and yet springs from the essence of the six kinds of taste that men speak of. The faultless Surabhi herself sprang in days of old from the mouth of the Grandsire, when he had drunk the Amrita to his satisfaction and brought up the best of things. A single jet of her milk fell on the earth and created what is known as the sacred and excellent Ocean of Milk. The rim of that ocean is covered all round and at all times with white foam, like a belt of flowers. Around that ocean live the finest of ascetics, the ones called the Foam-drinkers, and they live on that foam alone. They are called Foam-drinkers, Matali, because they live on nothing else whatever. Engaged in the severest austerities, they are men the very gods are known to fear. From Surabhi, Matali, four other cows were born, and they support the four quarters, which is why they are called the supporters of the quarters, the Dikpalis. The one born of Surabhi who supports the eastern quarter is called Surupa. The one who supports the southern quarter is called Hansika. That illustrious cow of universal form who supports the western quarter, ruled by Varuna, is known by the name Subhadra. And the northern quarter, the region of virtue, called after Kuvera the lord of treasures, is supported by the cow named Sarvakamadugha. The gods, joining with the Asuras and making Mount Mandara their churning rod, churned the waters of the ocean and obtained from them the wine called Varuni, and Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity and grace, and the Amrita, and that prince of horses called Uchchaihshravas, and that best of gems called Kaustubha. And those waters, Matali, which yielded such precious things, had all been mixed with the milk of these four cows. As for Surabhi herself, the milk she yields becomes Svaha to those who live on Svaha, Svadha to those who live on Svadha, and Amrita to those who live on Amrita. The verse that the dwellers in Rasatala sang in old days is still heard recited in the world by men of learning, and the verse is this: neither in the region of the Nagas, nor in Svarga, nor in Vimana, nor in Tripishtapa is there a dwelling as happy as Rasatala.

Notice what kind of guide Narada is. He has been asked to find one young man, and he cannot pass a province without giving its full census. In the bird country he names forty-seven chiefs in a single breath, and then admits that these live in one province only and that he has mentioned only the famous ones. In Rasatala he stops at a cow and explains the cosmos from her: the Ocean of Milk poured from a single jet of her udder, four daughters holding up the four directions, the water that the gods and Asuras churned already thickened with their milk before Mandara ever turned in it. Matali says nothing in either place. He is looking for a face, and the faces here are beaks and muzzles, and he has the patience of a man who drives the chariot of the king of the gods through battle and has learned to wait for the moment that matters.

There is a barb in the bird country that a Kaurava listener might have felt. These birds, Narada says, would count as Kshatriyas by their deeds, and they will never reach enlightenment, because they prey on their own kin. The snakes and the birds are cousins: Kashyapa fathered the Nagas on his wife Kadru and Garuda on her sister Vinata, so every serpent a bird eats is family. A sage standing in a hall where cousins are about to eat cousins did not choose that detail by accident.

A key to reading this (why the roll is kept whole, and one name that recurs): Every chief Narada names among the birds is kept here in his order, because the source keeps them in that order and Narada himself says these are only the distinguished ones. The name Sumukha appears in this list as a bird, and again as the first of Garuda’s six sons, but the Sumukha who matters in the scenes that follow is a Naga, grandson of Aryaka in the line of Airavata. All three are different beings. The origin of the Ocean of Milk from one jet of Surabhi’s udder, and the mixing of the four Dikpali cows’ milk into the water of the great churning, are details that belong to this passage and were not brought in from any Purana. Svaha and Svadha are the offering-calls for the gods and for the ancestors respectively, so the sentence about Surabhi’s milk means that it becomes whatever food each order of beings lives on.

The gist: Narada shows Matali the region of the birds, a snake-eating race sprung from Garuda’s six sons, bearing the Shrivatsa mark and devoted to Vishnu, and names its forty-seven distinguished chiefs, adding that because they prey on their own kin they never attain enlightenment. Then Rasatala, the seventh layer beneath the earth, home of Surabhi, born of the Amrita from Brahma’s mouth: a single jet of her milk made the Ocean of Milk, the Foam-drinkers live on its foam, and her four daughters Surupa, Hansika, Subhadra and Sarvakamadugha hold up the four quarters. The water the gods and Asuras churned was mixed with their milk, and from it came Varuni, Lakshmi, Amrita, Uchchaihshravas and Kaustubha. An old verse of Rasatala’s dwellers says that no residence, in the Naga world, in Svarga, in Vimana or in Tripishtapa, is as happy as Rasatala.

The roll of the Nagas in Bhogavati, the radiant youth Sumukha standing before Aryaka with one month left to live, and the boon Indra gives in place of Amrita

This foremost of cities that you see before you, Narada said, the one that resembles the Amaravati of the chief of the celestials himself, is known by the name Bhogavati. Vasuki, the king of the Nagas, rules it. Shesha lives here, the one who by the force of his austerities, the highest of their kind, is able to hold up this earth in all her vastness. His body is like a white mountain. He is decked in celestial ornaments. He has a thousand heads, his tongues blaze like flames of fire, and he is filled with great strength. Innumerable Nagas live here in happiness, the sons of Surasa, of many forms, wearing ornaments of many kinds, bearing on their bodies the signs of gems, of the Svastika, of circles and of drinking vessels. All of them are immensely strong and fierce by nature. Some have a thousand heads, some five hundred, some three. Some have two heads, some five, and some have seven faces. All of them have enormous bodies like the mountains that stretch across the earth. They number in the millions and the tens of millions, in truth beyond counting, even those who belong to a single race. Still, listen while I name a few of the more famous among them. They are Vasuki, Takshaka, Karkotaka, Dhananjaya, Kaliya, Nahusha, Ashvatara, Vakyakunda, Mani, Apurana, Khaga, Vamana, Elapatra, Kukura, Kukuna, Aryaka, Nandaka, Kalasha, Potaka, Kalilasaka, Pinjaraka, Airavata, Sumanmukha, Dadhimukha, Shankha, Nanda, Upanandaka, Apta, Kotaraka, Shikhi, Nishthuraka, Tittiri, Hastibhadra, Kumuda, Malyapindaka, the two Padmas, Pundarika, Pushpa, Mudgaraparnaka, Karavira, Pitharaka, Samvritta, Vritta, Pindara, Bilvapatra, Mushikada, Shirishaka, Dilipa, Shankhashirsha, Jyotishka, Aparajita, Kauravya, Dhritarashtra, Kuhara, Krishaka, Virajas, Dharana, Subahu, Mukhara, Jaya, Vidhira, Andha, Vishundi, Virasa and Sarasa. These and many others are among the sons of Kashyapa. See, Matali, whether there is anyone here you can choose.

Matali had stopped listening some time before the list ended. His eyes had settled on a figure standing nearby, and he had been studying him with growing attention while Narada recited. When the rishi fell silent, the celestial charioteer turned to him with a gladness he did not trouble to hide. That handsome young man of great radiance, he said, the one standing in front of Aryaka of Kauravya’s line: whose family does he delight? Who is his father, and who is his mother? Of what Naga race is he, and of what house does he stand like a tall flagstaff? His intelligence, his composure, his beauty and his youth have drawn my heart to him, celestial rishi. That young man will make the best of husbands for my Gunakeshi. Narada saw how pleased Matali was at the sight of the Naga called Sumukha, and he told him the nobility of the young man’s parentage and what he had done. This prince of Nagas, born in the line of Airavata, is named Sumukha, he said. He is the favorite grandson of Aryaka, and the son of Vamana’s daughter. His father, Matali, was the Naga called Chikura. Not long ago Vinata’s son killed him. Matali heard this and his pleasure only grew. Sir, he said to Narada, this best of Nagas is very acceptable to me as a son-in-law. Make an effort to secure him, for the thought of giving my dear daughter to this Naga fills me with joy.

So Narada turned to the grandfather. This is the charioteer named Matali, he told Aryaka, and he is a dear friend of Shakra besides. His conduct is pure, his disposition excellent, his virtues many. He has strength of mind, great energy and great might. He is Shakra’s friend, his counselor and his charioteer. In every battle it has been seen that between him and Vasava the difference in prowess and strength is small. In all the wars between the gods and the Asuras it is this Matali who drives, by his mind alone, that ever-victorious chariot of Indra’s, the best of chariots, drawn by a thousand horses. Beaten first by his handling of the horses, the enemies of the gods are then brought down by Vasava’s hands. Defeated beforehand by Matali, the Asuras are afterward slain by Indra. Matali has an excellent daughter whose beauty has no rival in the world. Truthful and accomplished in everything, she is known by the name Gunakeshi. He has been searching the three worlds for an eligible bridegroom, and your grandson Sumukha, you who shine like a celestial, has become acceptable to him as a husband for his daughter. If his proposal is acceptable to you, best of serpents, then make up your mind quickly, Aryaka, and take his daughter as a gift for your grandson. As Lakshmi is in the house of Vishnu, as Svaha is in the house of Agni, so let the slender-waisted Gunakeshi be a wife in your line. Accept Gunakeshi for your grandson as Shachi was accepted for Vasava, who deserved her. This youth has lost his father, and even so we choose him for his virtues and for the standing of Airavata and of yourself. It is because of Sumukha’s merit, his disposition, his purity, his self-restraint and his other qualifications that Matali himself has come to wish to give his daughter to him. It is right, then, that you honor Matali.

Aryaka listened, and two things happened in him at once. He saw his grandson chosen as a bridegroom, and he remembered the death of his son, and joy and grief filled him together. How, celestial rishi, he said, can I wish for Gunakeshi as a daughter-in-law? It cannot be, great rishi, that I hold your words in anything less than the highest honor, for who would refuse an alliance with the friend of Indra? And yet I hesitate, great sage, because the very thing this alliance would rest on is unstable. The father of this youth, my son, has been devoured by Garuda, radiant one. That grief sits on us. But there is worse. When Vinata’s son left these regions he said, after one month I will devour this Sumukha as well. It will surely happen as he said, for we know whom we are dealing with. Suparna’s words have taken the heart out of us. Matali had his answer ready. I have formed a plan, he told Aryaka. I have chosen this grandson of yours as my son-in-law. Let this Naga come with me and with Narada to the Lord of heaven, the chief of the celestials, best of Nagas. There I will try to put obstacles in Suparna’s way, and as a last resort we will find out how long a life has been allotted to Sumukha. A blessing on you, Naga. Let Sumukha come with me into the presence of the Lord of the celestials. They took Sumukha with them, and the four of them, each of them radiant, came up into heaven and saw Shakra, the chief of the gods, seated in all his glory. And as it happened, the illustrious four-armed Vishnu was present there as well. Narada laid out the whole story of Matali and his choice.

Vishnu heard all that Narada said, and he gave a direction to Purandara, the Lord of the universe. Let Amrita be given to this youth, he said, and let him be made immortal like the gods themselves. Let Matali and Narada and Sumukha all obtain their cherished wish through your grace, Vasava. Purandara, however, was thinking about the prowess of Vinata’s son, and he turned the gift back to the giver. Let the Amrita be given to him by you, he said to Vishnu. Vishnu answered: you are the Lord of all creatures, those that move and those that stand still. Who is there, Lord, who would refuse a gift that you might make? At those words Shakra granted the Naga length of days. The slayer of Bala and Vritra did not make him a drinker of Amrita. Sumukha, having received that boon, became Sumukha in truth, for his face was covered with the marks of joy. He married Matali’s daughter and returned home cheerful. Narada and Aryaka, full of delight at the success of their business, worshiped the glorious chief of the celestials and went their way.

Watch the exchange between the two gods, because everything that follows hangs on it. Vishnu says: give the boy Amrita, make him immortal. Indra, with Garuda in his mind, says: you give it. Vishnu says: who refuses what you give? And Indra gives something less: length of days, a gift with an end built into it, where immortality would have had none. Indra has just spent an hour of celestial time being told by Narada that his own charioteer is nearly his equal in battle, and he has an eagle in his household who is stronger than both of them, and he has decided, with a politician’s instinct, to give the Naga enough to save him and not enough to provoke the bird beyond repair. He is about to find out that he has provoked him anyway.

A key to reading this (two startling names on the roll, and Amrita against years): Among the Nagas Narada names are Kauravya and Dhritarashtra. These are serpent names, and they appear in the same form in the Adi Parva; they have nothing to do with the blind king seated in the Kuru hall, but Kanva is reciting this list in that hall and his listeners cannot fail to hear them. Sumukha means good-faced, and the source plays on this: once he has his boon his face is truly bright with joy. Vishnu proposed Amrita; Indra, mindful of Garuda’s strength, gave only long life and withheld the Amrita. The distinction matters for the next scene, because Garuda’s fury breaks out over exactly this gift.

The gist: Narada shows the last stop, Bhogavati, Vasuki’s city, where thousand-headed Shesha holds up the earth, and names the famous Nagas. Matali’s eye rests on a young man standing before Aryaka: he is Sumukha, grandson of Aryaka in Airavata’s line, daughter’s son of Vamana, and son of Chikura, whom Garuda has just devoured. Narada asks Aryaka to accept Matali’s daughter for him. Aryaka is torn: Garuda has announced that in one month he will eat Sumukha too. Matali proposes a plan, and the four of them go to Indra, where Vishnu also sits. Vishnu says Sumukha should be given Amrita; Indra, weighing Garuda’s power, grants him long life instead of Amrita. Sumukha marries Gunakeshi.

Garuda’s fury and the weight of one arm of Vishnu: pride is broken, Sumukha is tossed onto Garuda’s breast, and Kanva brings the story home to Duryodhana

Meanwhile, Kanva said, the mighty Garuda heard what had been done, that Shakra had granted length of days to the Naga Sumukha. Anger went through him like fire through dry grass. Suparna, the ranger of the sky, came fast to Vasava, and the hurricane raised by the beating of his wings struck all three worlds as he came. Illustrious one, Garuda said, why have you set me aside and interfered with my food? You granted me a boon of your own free will. Why do you now take it back? The Supreme Lord of all creatures ordained from the beginning what my food was to be. Why do you stand in the way of that divine decree? I had chosen this great Naga and fixed the time, god, because I meant to give the flesh of his body to my numberless offspring as their sustenance. Now that he has a boon from you and cannot be destroyed by me, how can I dare from this day forward to kill another of his kind? Do you amuse yourself like this, Vasava, as the whim takes you? I, however, will have to die, and so will the members of my family, and so will the servants I keep in my house. That will gratify you, I suppose. And in truth, slayer of Bala and Vritra, I deserve all this and more, since I, who am lord of the three worlds in might, consented to become the servant of another. Vishnu is not the sole cause of my low standing, monarch of the three worlds, for though I am fully your equal, Vasava, the sovereignty of the three worlds rests on you, chief of the celestials. Like you, I have a daughter of Daksha for my mother and Kashyapa for my father. Like you, I can carry the weight of the three worlds without fatigue. My strength is immeasurable, and no creature can withstand it. In the war with the Daityas I too achieved great things. Shrutashri and Shrutasena and Vivasvat, Rochanamukha and Prasrura and Kalakaksha, sons of Diti every one, were slain by me. Perching on the flagstaff of your younger brother’s chariot I guard it carefully in battle, and sometimes I carry that brother of yours on my back. Perhaps that is why you disregard me. Who else in the universe can bear such heavy loads? Who is stronger than I am? Superior though I am, I still carry this younger brother of yours on my back with all his friends. And now, by disregarding me and interfering with my food, Vasava, you have laid a disgrace on me, just as this younger brother of yours has been disgracing me all along by making me carry him. As for you, Vishnu: among all the beings of prowess and strength born from Aditi’s womb, you are the strongest. And yet I carry you without any fatigue, on a single one of my feathers. Think it over coolly then, brother. Which of us is the stronger?

The bearer of the discus heard the bird’s proud words, and he heard the danger in them, and he chose to provoke Tarkshya further rather than soothe him. Weak as you are, Garuda, he said, why do you consider yourself strong? Creature born from an egg, it ill becomes you to boast like this in our presence. The three worlds together could not bear the weight of my body. I carry my own weight, and yours besides. Come now: bear the weight of this one right arm of mine. If you can bear even that, your boast will be counted reasonable. And saying this, the holy one laid his arm on Garuda’s shoulders. Garuda went down under it. The weight crushed him, and he lay confounded and senseless, and what he felt was that the weight of that single arm of Vishnu’s equaled the weight of the whole earth with all her mountains on her. Vishnu’s might was infinitely greater than what he had let fall, and he did not afflict Garuda much. Achyuta did not take his life. But the ranger of the sky, pinned under that immense weight, gasped for breath and began to shed his feathers. Every limb weakened, wholly confounded, Garuda was almost out of his senses. Then the winged son of Vinata, bewildered, nearly unconscious, utterly helpless, bowed his head to Vishnu and spoke faintly. Illustrious Lord, the essence of the strength that sustains the universe dwells in this body of yours. What wonder, then, that I should be crushed to the earth by a single arm of yours, stretched out at your pleasure? Forgive this winged creature that perches on your flagstaff, divine Lord, this fool drunk on the pride of his strength and now made entirely helpless. Your great strength was never known to me before, divine Lord. That is why I thought my own might had no equal. Vishnu was pleased by this, and he spoke to Garuda with affection: let your behavior never be like this again. Then Upendra took Sumukha with the toe of his foot and tossed him onto Garuda’s breast. From that time on, king, Garuda has lived in friendship with that serpent. That is how the mighty and illustrious Garuda, the son of Vinata, pressed down by the might of Vishnu, was cured of his pride.

Kanva let the story stand a moment, and then he turned it on the man he had told it to. In the same way, son of Gandhari, you live, my son, only as long as you do not go near the heroic sons of Pandu in battle. Bhima, the foremost of smiters, the mighty son of Vayu, and Dhananjaya, the son of Indra: who is there whom they cannot kill in battle? Vishnu himself, and Vayu, and Dharma, and the twin Ashvins, these gods are your enemies. Leave aside meeting them in combat; you are not fit even to look at them on the field. So do not set your heart on war, prince. Let peace be made through the agency of Vasudeva. That is how you should save your race. This great ascetic Narada saw with his own eyes the event I have related to you, the one that shows the greatness of Vishnu. And know this: this Krishna is that same bearer of the discus and the mace.

Duryodhana heard the rishi out, and his brows drew together, and his breathing grew heavy. Then he turned his eyes toward Radha’s son, and he burst out laughing. Setting the rishi’s words at nothing, that wicked man began to slap his thigh, a thigh like the trunk of an elephant, and he answered the sage. I am, great rishi, exactly what the Creator made me. What is to be, must be. What has been ordained in my case must happen; I cannot act otherwise. What use, then, are these senseless speeches?

Consider the room at that moment. A rishi who came down out of the sky has just told the crown prince of the Kurus that the quiet man seated among the envoys is the being whose single arm flattened Garuda. Every argument made in that hall since morning has been an argument about strength, who has it, who is counting wrong. Kanva has answered it with a story whose whole shape is a hierarchy: Matali under Indra, Garuda under Vishnu, and at the bottom of the chain a serpent with a month to live who was saved because someone above him chose to save him. Duryodhana’s reply refuses the hierarchy entirely. He is what he was made, the future is fixed, and speeches change nothing. He laughs, and he looks at Karna while he laughs, and he strikes his own thigh, and a reader who remembers Bhima’s vow from the dicing hall will feel that gesture land in a way Duryodhana cannot.

A key to reading this (Garuda’s argument, and Kanva’s last sentence): The bitterness in Garuda’s speech is the source’s own: he calls Vishnu his equal and his brother, calls Indra his equal, and calls his own service a disgrace. He speaks of Vishnu as Indra’s younger brother because of their birth order among the sons of Aditi, which the name Upendra itself records. Vishnu answers by taunting him as egg-born, brings him down with one arm, spares his life, and speaks kindly at the end. Tossing Sumukha onto Garuda’s breast with a toe is the sign of pardon, and the friendship of the two dates from that instant. Kanva’s closing line is the key to the entire tale: the Krishna seated in this assembly is the discus-bearer whose one arm Garuda could not lift. Duryodhana’s thigh-slapping, his laughter directed at Karna, and his appeal to destiny are all in the source, and the gesture of the thigh speaks for itself to any reader who knows Bhima’s vow.

The gist: Hearing that Sumukha has been granted long life, Garuda storms to Indra and delivers a long protest: Brahma ordained his food, Indra has revoked his own boon, he is Indra’s equal and carries Vishnu on a single feather, so who is the stronger? Vishnu calls him a weak egg-born creature and lays one right arm on his shoulders. Garuda collapses as if under the weight of the whole earth, sheds his feathers, and begs forgiveness, saying he never knew Vishnu’s strength. Vishnu tells him gently never to behave so again and tosses Sumukha onto his breast with a toe; the two have been friends ever since. Kanva draws the lesson: Duryodhana lives only as long as he stays clear of Bhima and Arjuna, Vishnu, Vayu, Dharma and the Ashvins are his enemies, and this Krishna is that same bearer of the discus. Duryodhana frowns, laughs toward Karna, slaps his thigh, and says he is what the Creator made him, and what must be, will be.

A hundred years with a pot on his head, and the fee that ruined the man who insisted on paying it

Janamejaya had been listening to the story of a court that could not stop its own king, and the question broke out of him. Here was a man wedded to evil without interruption, blinded by greed, walking a road that led nowhere except down, a man who put grief into the hearts of his own kinsmen and multiplied the troubles of his friends and gave his enemies something to be glad about. Why did nobody hold him back? Where were his friends? And the great friend of the Kuru house, the holy one with the quiet mind, and the grandsire Bhishma, could neither of them say one word to him out of plain affection? Vaishampayana answered that they had all spoken. Krishna had spoken. Bhishma had said what was good for him. And Narada had said a great deal, and what Narada said is worth hearing in full.

What Narada said began with an observation about friendship that has the flavor of a man who has watched a long time. People who will listen to the counsel of a friend are rare, he said. Friends who will offer counsel worth listening to are rarer still, and the two are almost never in the same room, because where there is a friend willing to advise there is seldom a friend willing to be advised. His conclusion for Duryodhana was simple enough to be insulting: listen to your friends, and give up obstinacy, because obstinacy is the root from which enormous harm grows. Then, in the manner of the epic, he did not argue the point. He told a story instead, and the story was about a man who was obstinate in the most harmless way imaginable, about a man who insisted on being generous, and about what that insistence cost him.

It starts with a test that has nothing to do with Galava at all. In ancient times Vishvamitra was deep in austerities, and Dharma himself decided to find out what the austerities were worth. He took the shape of Vasishtha, one of the seven Rishis, and arrived at the hermitage of Kaushika as a hungry guest who wanted a meal. Vishvamitra was struck with awe at who had come to his door, and he set about cooking charu for him, the rice boiled in milk that is made for gods and for guests. He took enormous care over it. He took so much care over it, in fact, that he was slow, and while he labored over the perfect offering his guest grew tired of waiting and ate what the other hermits put in front of him. By the time Vishvamitra came out carrying his dish, still steaming, the meal was over. I have already dined, the holy one said. Wait here. And with that he walked away.

So Vishvamitra waited. This is the detail on which the whole story turns, and the text gives it without any fuss: he set that hot dish on his head, held it steady with both arms, and stood in his own hermitage as still as a post, eating nothing, living on air. He did not put the food down. He had been told to wait, and he waited. And while he stood there a young ascetic named Galava began to look after him, out of respect for what he was seeing, out of reverence, out of simple affection, and out of the wish to do something that would please the man. A hundred years went by that way. The Rishi standing with a dish on his head and living on air, and the boy at his side attending to him, year after year, for a century.

Then Dharma came back. He wore the shape of Vasishtha again, and again he was hungry. He found Vishvamitra exactly where he had left him, the food still balanced on his head, the man still alive on nothing but air, and he took the dish down and ate from it. The food was still warm. After a hundred years it was still warm and fresh, as though it had come off the fire that morning. Dharma ate, and said, I am gratified, holy one, and went away. Those few words did something that a century of standing had been building toward: Vishvamitra, who had been born a Kshatriya and had spent his life trying to become something else, lost his Kshatriyahood in that moment and was given the standing of a Brahmana, and he was filled with delight. He turned to the young man who had served him through all of it, pleased with his devotion, and gave him his freedom. Go, Galava, he said. You have my leave. Go wherever you like.

Galava should have gone. Instead he asked a question, and asked it sweetly, because he meant nothing but good by it. What final gift shall I bring you for your teaching? It is the closing fee that makes a sacrifice complete, he said. The man who gives such a gift wins release. Such gifts are the fruit a man enjoys in heaven; they are peace itself, tranquility with a shape. So tell me what to bring for my teacher. Now, Vishvamitra understood something that Galava did not. He understood that a hundred years of service had already beaten him, that the boy had given more than any fee could match, and that there was nothing left to ask for. So he tried to send him away. Go, he said. Go. He said it again and again, and each time he said it, Galava answered with the same words, What shall I give? What shall I give? He would not be dismissed. He would not accept a debt he could not discharge. He had decided to pay, and no amount of being told to leave could move him off it.

Something in the old man’s patience gave way. It was not rage, and the text is careful about that; it was the small rise of irritation that comes when a kindness will not stop being offered. Very well, Vishvamitra said. Bring me eight hundred horses. Every one of them white as the rays of the moon, and every one of them with a single black ear. Go now, and do not linger. And that, Narada told the silent prince in front of him, is where obstinacy takes a man. Not a wicked man; a grateful one, who could not be persuaded to leave well enough alone.

A key to reading this (who is speaking, and why): The whole tale is Narada’s, told aloud in the Kuru court while Krishna’s peace embassy is still on the table, and aimed squarely at Duryodhana. Kaushika is Vishvamitra, called after his descent from Kushika. Charu is rice boiled in milk, cooked for a god or an honored guest. The dakshina Galava insists on is the closing fee a student owes his teacher when the teaching is finished, and without it the training is held to be incomplete, which is why he will not let the matter drop. Vishvamitra was born into the warrior order, and the moment Dharma pronounces himself satisfied is the moment his long campaign to become a Brahmana finally succeeds.

The gist: Asked why nobody could stop Duryodhana, Narada answers with a story about obstinacy in its most innocent form. Dharma, disguised as Vasishtha, tests Vishvamitra by leaving him holding a dish of food; Vishvamitra stands with it on his head for a hundred years, living on air, while the young Galava waits on him. The test is passed, Vishvamitra becomes a Brahmana, and Galava is released with his teacher’s blessing. But Galava insists on paying a closing fee, refuses to be dismissed, and keeps asking until his teacher, mildly exasperated, names something impossible: eight hundred horses white as moonlight, each with one black ear.

A Brahmana worn down to a skeleton, and a friend with wings: Garuda arrives and begins with the east

What the demand did to Galava was physical. He could not sit down. He could not lie down. He could not put food in his mouth. Anxiety and regret took him over completely, and he spent his hours in bitter lamentation, burning with a remorse that had no object except himself, until the color went out of his face and the flesh went off his bones and there was very little left of him except a frame with a voice. Narada named the prince he was speaking to while he described it, so that nobody in the hall could pretend the story was about somebody far away. Smitten with grief, Suyodhana, this is what the man said to himself.

Where am I to find rich friends? Where am I to find money? Have I anything at all put by? Where in the world are there eight hundred horses the color of the moon? What pleasure is there left for me in eating, what happiness in any object of enjoyment? Even the love of life has gone out in me. What do I need life for? I will go to the far shore of the great ocean, or to the last edge of the earth, and there I will put this life down. What use is it to me now?

Then the lament turned into an argument, and the argument is the reason the story is being told at all. What happiness can a man have without hard effort, Galava asked, when he is poor, and unsuccessful, and stripped of every good thing, and carrying debt? For a man who has enjoyed his friends’ wealth on the strength of their friendship and cannot return the favor, death is better than living. The religious acts of a man who promises to do a thing and then fails to do it lose their power, because he is stained with falsehood, and a man stained with falsehood gets no beauty, no children, no power, no influence, so how is he to reach any happy state at all? What ungrateful man ever earned a reputation? Where is his place in the world, where is his happiness? An ungrateful person never wins esteem or love, and salvation is closed to him. A man with no wealth can barely be called alive, because he cannot support his kinsmen or his friends, and a man who takes a benefit and cannot repay it is destroyed. And I am that man, Galava said. Ungrateful, without resources, stained with falsehood, because I took everything I have from my teacher and I cannot do the one thing he asked. So I will exhaust every effort first, and then I will lay my life down. And he added one more thing, which reads like a man counting the only coin he has left: in my whole life I have never begged anything from the gods themselves, and it is for that reason the gods respect me at the sacrificial ground. Now I will go and take refuge with Vishnu, the lord of the three worlds, with Krishna, the great shelter of everyone who is sheltered. I will bow to him and ask to see that highest of all ascetics, the eternal Krishna, out of whom flows everything that gods and Asuras alike possess and enjoy.

He was still saying it when the light in front of him changed, and his friend was standing there. Garuda, the son of Vinata, had come, and he was cheerful about it, the way a man is cheerful who has already solved a problem and is about to say so. You are a dear friend of mine, he said. A friend who is prospering has a duty, and the duty is to see that his friends get what they want. And this prosperity of mine, Brahmana, is Vishnu himself, the younger brother of Vasava. I have already spoken to him about you, and he has been pleased to grant what I asked. So come. We go together. I will carry you in comfort to the far shore of the ocean or to the last edge of the earth, wherever you want to go. Come, Galava, and do not linger.

Then Garuda asked the question that turns the story into a journey. I have my orders, he said, from the God who is the cause of all knowledge. So tell me which way to take you first, to see what is there. East, south, west, north, which of them, best of the twice-born? And before Galava could answer, Garuda began to describe the east, which was the one he wanted to describe. That is the quarter where the sun that lights the universe rises first, where the Sadhyas settle into their austerities at evening, where the Intelligence that fills the whole universe first came into being, and where Dharma himself is stationed along with both of his eyes, and where the clarified butter poured into the first sacrifice ran out and flowed in every direction. That quarter, he said, is the gate of Day and of Time.

He kept going, and the list has the quality of a man showing a friend around his own house. In the first age the daughters of Daksha gave birth to their children there. The sons of Kashyapa first multiplied there. It is the source of every good thing the gods have, because Shakra was anointed king of the celestials there, and Indra and the gods performed their penances there. That is why it is called Purva, the first; and it is called Purva also because in the oldest time the Suras spread themselves across it. The gods who wanted prosperity performed all their ceremonies in that quarter. The divine Creator of the universe sang the Vedas there for the first time. Surya preached the Gayatri there to the reciters of that hymn, and delivered the Yajurvedas there. The Soma juice, sanctified with boons, was first drunk in sacrifice there by the Suras, and the Homa fires there first drank the offerings that share their own origin. Varuna went down to the lower regions from there and came into all his wealth. The ancient Vasishtha was born there, grew there, and died there. The hundred separate branches of Om first grew there. The Munis who eat smoke ate the smoke of sacrificial fires there. In that region Shakra killed boars and other animals past counting and offered them to the gods as their portions.

And then, at the end of the catalogue of everything good, Garuda said one more thing about the east. It is there that the sun of a thousand rays, rising, burns up in its anger every man and every Asura who is wicked and ungrateful. He went straight on without pausing over it. This is the gate of the three worlds, he said, and the road to heaven and to happiness, and this quarter is called the east. We will go that way if it pleases you, because whatever pleases my friend is what I will always do. And if some other quarter appeals to you, say so, and we will go there. Now listen to what I have to say about another one.

A key to reading this (names, and one thing left unsaid): Garuda is the son of Vinata and the mount of Vishnu, which is why he can describe his own prosperity as being Vishnu. Vasava is Indra, and the younger brother spoken of is Vishnu, born after Indra as the son of Aditi. Shakra is another name for Indra. The Sadhyas are a class of divine beings. Garuda gives both derivations of Purva himself, the quarter that is first and the quarter the Suras covered first. Worth noticing and left entirely without comment in the original: the praise of the east finishes with a sun that burns the ungrateful, and Galava has just spent a whole speech calling himself ungrateful.

The gist: The impossible fee reduces Galava to a skeleton, and he argues himself step by step to the conclusion that a man who cannot repay what he owes is better off dead, ending with a decision to throw his life away after one last effort and to take refuge with Krishna. At that moment Garuda arrives, tells him that a prospering friend has a duty to his friends, and reveals he has already secured Vishnu’s permission. He offers to carry Galava anywhere on earth, asks which quarter to try first, and begins describing the east, the gate of Day and Time, finishing with the detail that its sun burns the ungrateful.

The second door of Yama, and the quarter that belongs to Varuna: Garuda shows Galava the south and the west

Galava had come for horses. What he was getting was a tour of the world, and the bird who carried him seemed in no hurry to notice the difference. Garuda spoke as they flew, and his voice had the evenness of someone who has seen all of this many times and still finds it worth describing. Listen to another quarter, he said. Long ago Vivasvat performed a sacrifice and gave this region away to his teacher as the fee, and because the word for that fee is dakshina, the region has been called the south ever since. The fathers of all three worlds live down there. So does a class of gods who take no food at all and live on smoke. The Vishvedevas keep house there alongside the fathers, worshiped in sacrifices everywhere, and when offerings are made the fathers and the Vishvedevas divide them share for share. This is the second door of Yama. Here the span allotted to a man is counted out in trutis and lavas, the smallest pieces time can be cut into. Here the sages of heaven and the sages of the world of the fathers and the sages who were kings all live in great contentment. Religion is here and truth is here. Here is the one place where what a man has done finally shows what it was worth.

Then Garuda said the thing that must have landed on a ruined Brahmana harder than he intended. This region, best of the twice-born, is where the deeds of the dead arrive, and every one of us has to come here. Creatures are covered over with darkness, and that is why they cannot arrive here in any comfort. There are thousands of malevolent Rakshasas in the south, placed so that the sinful will see them. On the slopes of Mandara, in the hermitages of the sages, the Gandharvas sing the Saman chants so sweetly that a listener loses his heart and his understanding together. A Daitya named Raivata heard that singing once and walked away from his wife, his friends and his kingdom into the woods, and never came back out. In the south, Manu and the son of Yavakrita between them fixed a boundary that Surya has never once crossed. In the south, Ravana of the line of Pulastya stood in his austerities and asked the gods to make him deathless. In the south, Vritra earned the hatred of Shakra by the way he behaved. Every kind of living shape comes to this region and is taken apart into the five elements it was assembled from. Men who have done evil rot here in their torments. The river Vaitarani runs here, carrying the bodies of the condemned. Whoever arrives finds the far edge of happiness and the far edge of misery waiting in the same place. The sun comes here and lets down sweet water, and then moves on toward the quarter that carries Vasishtha’s name and lets down dew.

Garuda’s account turned personal for a moment, the way a traveler’s does. It was here, he said, that I once found a meal: an enormous elephant locked in a fight with an enormous tortoise. Surya fathered the great sage Chakradhanu in this region, and Chakradhanu came to be called Kapila, and Kapila is the one who brought ruin on the sixty thousand sons of Sagara. In the south the Brahmanas called the Sivas mastered every Veda, won the success that austerity gives, and at the close of all their reading went free forever. In this region stands the city called Bhogavati, and Vasuki rules it, and the serpent Takshaka, and Airavata. Those who have to travel here after dying meet a darkness on the way so thick that neither the sun nor Agni can get through it. You are a man worthy of worship, Garuda said to him, and even you will have to go down that road one day. Tell me if you would like to travel this way. If not, hear about the west.

The west, Garuda said, is the quarter king Varuna loves, the lord of the ocean, who had his beginning there and whose sovereignty rests there. When the day closes, at the hour called paschat, the sun lets go of his rays in that quarter, and from that the west takes its name, paschima. Kashyapa installed Varuna there to rule everything that lives in water and to protect the waters themselves. The moon, who drives off darkness, drinks the six juices of Varuna and comes back young again at the start of every bright fortnight. In the west the wind god broke the Daityas and tied them fast, and they ran from him gasping in that enormous storm until they lay down in the west and went into the sleep that has no waking on the other side of it. The mountain called Asta stands there, which is the reason there is any evening at all, and every day the sun turns toward it with something like affection and comes down into it. When the day closes, Night and Sleep come out of that quarter and spread across the world as though they had been sent to take half of every creature’s life away. There, Shakra found his stepmother Diti asleep and pregnant, and cut what she carried into forty-nine pieces, and the forty-nine Maruts are those pieces.

The roots of Himavat run west toward Mandara, which stands forever under the sea, and a man could travel a thousand years along those roots and never come to their ending. Surabhi, the mother of all cows, goes down to the shore of a wide lake covered with golden lotuses in that quarter and pours out her milk there. Out in the middle of the ocean you can see the headless trunk of Svarbhanu, who has never given up wanting to swallow the sun and the moon. You can hear Suvarnashiras reciting the Vedas aloud, a being no one has defeated, whose energy cannot be measured, whose hair stays green forever. The daughter of the sage Harimedhas is still standing in the sky over the west, exactly where she was when Surya said to her, stop, stop. In that quarter wind and fire and earth and water are all released, day and night, from the pain they carry elsewhere. It is from the west that the sun’s path begins to bend off the straight line, and there that the bright bodies of the sky enter the sun’s own circle, travel twenty-eight nights in his company, and then come out of his course to go on with the moon. Every river that keeps the ocean full rises in that quarter. In Varuna’s house the waters of all three worlds are kept. Anarta, prince of the snakes, has his hall there, and Vishnu, who has no beginning and no end, has a dwelling there that nothing else resembles, and Kashyapa, the son of Marichi, has his hermitage there. That is the west, Galava. Tell me now which way we go.

A key to reading this (the geography): These four quarters are made of story rather than of distance. Each direction is identified by what happened in it, so Garuda’s tour reads as a catalogue of the world’s memory. Vivasvat is a name of the sun, and dakshina means both “south” and the fee a student pays his teacher, which is the pun the passage turns on. Trutis and lavas are the smallest measures of time the tradition names. Shakra is Indra. Svarbhanu is the older name of Rahu, the demon whose severed head chases the sun and moon at eclipses, and the trunk left in the sea is the rest of him. Chakradhanu and Kapila are the same sage, and the sons of Sagara he destroyed belong to the story of how the Ganga was brought down, told on this site in chapter 13a.

The gist: Garuda describes the south, which belongs to the fathers and to Yama, where the Vaitarani runs and a darkness waits that neither sun nor fire can enter, and he reminds Galava that this is a road every man travels in the end. Then he describes the west, Varuna’s quarter, where the sun puts down his rays, where the forty-nine Maruts were cut out of Diti’s womb, and where every river that feeds the ocean begins. After each one he asks the same question, and Galava still has no horses.

The quarter that carries you across: the north, the sages who guard the source of the Ganga, and the question Garuda has been building toward

Brahmanas, Garuda said, this quarter carries a man across out of his sin, and a man wins his freedom here, and it is from that carrying across, that uttarana, that the north takes its name, uttara. And because everything the north keeps stored lies in a line running east and west, the north is sometimes called the middle region instead. It is the best of the four, and so nothing unkind can live in it, and nothing with its appetites off the leash, and nothing unrighteous. In the hermitage called Badari, Krishna who is Narayana himself lives without ending, and Jishnu, the most exalted of all male beings, and Brahman who made the world. On the breast of Himavat, Maheshvara is always present, burning with the brightness of the fire that comes at the end of an age, and there, as Purusha, he plays with Prakriti who is the mother of everything. Nara and Narayana can look at him. No one else can: not the many orders of sages, not the gods with Vasava at their head, not the Gandharvas, not the Yakshas, not the Siddhas. He is wrapped in Maya, and the only other eyes that reach him are the eyes of the eternal Vishnu, who has a thousand heads and a thousand feet.

Galava was listening to a list of things he could not use. Garuda went on anyway, and the north kept getting larger. It was in this region that the moon was installed as lord over the whole order of the twice-born. It was here that Mahadeva took the Ganga on his head first, and only then let her down out of the sky into the world of men. It was here that the goddess Uma performed her austerities because she wanted Maheshvara for her husband. It was here that desire, and the anger of Shiva, and Himavat, and Uma all blazed together at one moment. On the slope of Kailasa, Kuvera was installed as lord of the Rakshasas and the Yakshas and the Gandharvas. Kuvera’s pleasure gardens called Chitraratha are in the north, and so is the hermitage of the sages called Vaikhanasas. The celestial river Mandakini is visible there, and the mountain Mandara. The gardens called Saugandhi-kanaka are there, with Rakshasas standing guard over them at all hours. There are plains under deep grass, and a forest of plantains, and the heavenly trees called Sautanakas. The Siddhas keep their houses in the north, men whose minds have been under their own control so long that they go wherever they please, and nothing any of them could want is missing from the place. Galava had spent his adult life inside one obligation, and he was being shown, mile after mile, a country organized entirely around the absence of obligation.

The seven sages can be seen in the north with Arundhati beside them. The star Svati can be seen there, and it is there that it first comes up over the edge of the world. The Grandsire has his dwelling there, close to Sacrifice, who walks about in that region with a body of his own. Sun and moon and all the other lights wheel through their rounds overhead in good order. And in that region, Garuda said, the sages called Dharma, truthful and full of light, stand guard over the place where the Ganga begins. Where those sages came from, what they look like, what austerities they have performed: not everyone knows these things. The thousand vessels they set out when a guest arrives, and the food they bring into being simply by wishing for it, are a mystery nobody has solved. And a man who goes past the point those sages are guarding, Galava, is certain to be destroyed. Nobody has ever gone beyond that line and lived, except the divine Narayana and the eternal Nara, who is also called Jishnu.

The mountains of Kailasa are in the north, the home of Ailavila. The ten Apsaras called Vidyutprabha were born there. When Vishnu covered the three worlds in three strides at the sacrifice of the Asura king Vali, one of those strides came down across the whole northern region, and there is a place there called Vishnupada, named after the footprint he left. At a place called Usiravija, beside the golden lake, king Marutta performed his sacrifice. It was there that the bright gold seams of Himavat opened themselves to the sage Jimuta, who gave every piece of that wealth away to Brahmanas and then asked only that they call it by his name, which is why it has been called Jaimuta gold ever since. And in the north, every morning and every evening, the guardians of the worlds call out the same question: whose business shall we do today? For these reasons and others, Garuda said, the north stands above the rest. It is the highest of the four, and because it is the highest, uttara, it is called the north.

Then he stopped. The four quarters have been described to you one after another, in detail, he said. Which one do you want to go to? I am ready to show you every quarter of the earth. The whole tour had been building toward exactly this, and it landed on a man who had been given eight hundred horses to find and had just been shown the entire world without seeing one of them. Whatever Galava answered next would decide the rest of his life, and Garuda, who had carried him through the fathers’ country and Varuna’s country and the country where the Ganga starts, waited for it with the patience of a friend who already suspects what the answer will be. A man in his position could have asked to be set down in the north, among the Siddhas and the gardens, and stayed there. The horses would have gone unpaid and the teacher unanswered, and no one in that quarter would have thought less of him for it. What Galava had instead was a promise he had made out of pride while his teacher was telling him to go away, and a friend generous enough to fly him anywhere on earth except out of the reach of his own word.

A key to reading this (names and the pun): The passage plays on two senses of uttara at once: the thing that carries you across, from uttarana, and the thing that stands highest. Badari is Badarikashrama, the hermitage in the Himalaya where Nara and Narayana perform their austerities; Jishnu is a name of Nara, and later of Arjuna. Ailavila is a name of Kuvera, and Vasava is Indra. The three strides at Vali’s sacrifice refer to Vishnu’s dwarf form, who asked the Asura king for as much ground as he could cover in three steps and then covered the worlds. Notice that the praise of the north ends in a warning: past the sages who guard the source of the Ganga, only Nara and Narayana have ever gone and come back.

The gist: The description of the north is the longest and the highest in pitch: Narayana at Badari, Maheshvara on Himavat, Kuvera on Kailasa, the Ganga coming down onto Mahadeva’s head, the seven sages with Arundhati, and the guarded place where the river begins and beyond which nobody returns. Having shown Galava all four quarters of the world, Garuda puts the question that starts everything that follows: which way shall we go?

East, into the quarter where the eyes of Dharma first opened: what Galava saw from Garuda’s back, and the wings that fell off on Mount Rishabha

Of all four quarters Galava chose the east, and he chose it for a reason that had nothing to do with horses. Carry me east, he said to the bird, where the two eyes of Dharma were first opened. Take me to the quarter you described before all the others, the one where you said the gods are always present, where truth and virtue both keep their residence. I want to see the gods. Take me there, younger brother of Aruna, so that I may look at them. He piled up the names as a man does when he is asking for something large: son of Vinata, Tarkshya, eater of serpents, lord of the beautiful feathers. Garuda heard all of it and answered with four words. Get on my back. And the sage Galava, who had never in his life traveled faster than a man can walk, climbed onto the back of the fastest thing in creation.

What followed was the most frightened speech in the story, and Galava delivered it at altitude, in pieces, while holding on. Your beauty as you go, he said, is the beauty of the sun in the morning, the maker of the day with his thousand rays. The wind of your wings breaks the trees below us and they seem to come tumbling after you in the chase. You seem to be dragging the earth herself along behind you, the waters of her oceans, her mountains, her woods and forests, all of it pulled out of place by the storm your wings are making. That storm keeps lifting the sea into the middle air, and everything the sea holds goes up with it. I can see the fish, all of them with the same faces. I can see the Timis and the Timingilas. I can see serpents with human faces, and every one of them is being ground to pieces in the wind coming off your wings. The roar of the deep has deafened me. I am so stunned that I can neither hear nor see. And here is the worst of it. I have forgotten my own errand. Slow down, ranger of the sky, and remember that a Brahmana’s life is riding on your back.

It grew worse as they climbed. I cannot find the sun, Galava said. I cannot find the quarters of the sky. I cannot find the sky. There is a thick darkness all around me and my own body has gone out of it. Of you I can see two eyes and nothing else, two eyes like burning gems. Your body is invisible to me and so is mine. At every stride of yours I watch sparks of fire come off your frame. Put out those sparks. Put out that blaze in your eyes. Slacken this speed of yours, son of Vinata, because I have no business traveling with you any longer and I cannot bear it. And then, because a frightened man tells the truth, the whole of it came out at once. I promised my teacher eight hundred white horses with the light of the moon in them, each one with a single black ear. I can see no way in the world of keeping that promise. There is one way I can see and it is to put down my own life. I have no wealth. I have no wealthy friend. And an object like this one is not procured by wealth however great it may be.

Garuda did not slow down. He laughed, at altitude, with a sage weeping on his back, and the laugh was affectionate. There is very little wisdom in you, twice-born one, if you want to make an end of your own life. Death does not come at anybody’s summons. Death is God himself. Why did you keep your purpose from me all this time? There are excellent ways of accomplishing all this. And there, he said, is the mountain called Rishabha standing by the sea. We will rest on it a while, we will eat something, and then I will bring you back. It is the first practical sentence anyone has spoken since the fee was named, and it comes from the bird.

They came down on the peak of Rishabha and found a woman there, a Brahmana lady named Shandili, seated in austerities. Both of them bent their heads to her and did her worship. She asked after their welfare and gave them seats, and when they were seated she gave them cooked food, which they offered first to the gods with the proper mantras and then ate. Afterward they stretched out on the ground and fell into a deep sleep. It was Garuda who woke first, wanting to be off, and what he discovered on waking was that his wings were gone. They had simply fallen away from him. He had become a ball of flesh with a head at one end and legs at the other. Galava looked at him and asked the question in real distress. What is this that has come on you from stopping here? How long are we going to have to stay? Was there some wicked thought in your mind? I am certain this is no small sin.

Garuda’s answer is the reason the episode exists. Yes, he said. The thought came to me that I should pick this lady up, crowned as she is with the success of her austerities, and carry her away from this rock to the place where the Creator lives, and Mahadeva, and the eternal Vishnu, and Virtue and Sacrifice in their own persons, because it seemed to me that this was where a woman like her ought to be living. He had not touched her. He had not spoken a word of it aloud. He had thought it, once, in kindness, and his wings had come off in his sleep. Now, he said, for my own good I will lie down in front of this holy lady and I will say to her that it was pity that put the thought in me, that whether I did right or wrong this was my wish, that it plainly went against her own wish, and that it rose in me out of respect for her. Let her forgive me out of the largeness of her heart.

The lady was satisfied with the prince of birds and the bull among Brahmanas both. Do not be afraid, she said to Garuda. Take your wings again and put your fear down. You held me in contempt, and you should know that contempt is the one thing I do not pardon. Whoever carries contempt for me in his mind falls quickly out of every happy region. There is not one inauspicious mark on me and I am entirely blameless, and it is by the purity of my conduct that I have come to this height of ascetic success. Purity of conduct has virtue for its fruit. Purity of conduct has wealth for its fruit. Purity of conduct brings prosperity, and purity of conduct drives away every inauspicious sign. Go wherever you wish from here. Never hold me in contempt again, and take care that you hold no woman in contempt, even a woman who truly deserves blame. You will have your strength and your energy back as you had them before.

The wings came back as she spoke, and they came back stronger than the pair he had lost. Garuda took his leave of Shandili, put Galava on his back again, and went on. They did not find the horses. What they found on the road was Vishvamitra, who stopped them, and who spoke to Galava in the bird’s hearing, which was its own kind of pressure. The time has come when you should give me the wealth you promised me of your own accord, he said. I do not know what you intend. I have waited a long while. I will wait a while longer. Find the way by which you can succeed. Then he went on, and Garuda turned to a man who had gone gray with grief and said the plain thing. What he told you before he has now repeated in front of me. Come, best of Brahmanas, we will think this through together. Until your teacher has the whole of what you promised him, you cannot so much as sit down.

A key to reading this (names and sea creatures): Tarkshya, son of Vinata, Suparna and the oviparous one are all names for Garuda; Aruna, his elder brother, is the charioteer of the sun, which is why Galava calls him the younger brother of Aruna. Timi and Timingila are the enormous sea creatures of the epic’s ocean, named here among the things the wind tears out of the water. Shandili appears only here, and the text tells us nothing about her beyond this rock and this lesson. The point of the episode is the size of the offense: Garuda did nothing and said nothing, and losing his wings was the price of a single thought.

The gist: Galava picks the east because he wants to see the gods, climbs onto Garuda’s back, and is immediately terrified out of his purpose by the speed, the darkness and the sparks coming off the bird’s body, until he blurts out the whole hopeless business of the eight hundred horses and says he will kill himself. Garuda laughs, refuses to slow down, and puts them on Mount Rishabha to rest. There the ascetic Shandili feeds them, and Garuda wakes from his nap with his wings fallen off, because while he slept he had entertained the thought of carrying her away. He apologizes, she restores the wings stronger than before with a warning about contempt, and they fly on. There are still no horses, and Vishvamitra meets them on the road to say that he is still waiting.

What wealth is and where it is buried, a king at Pratishthana whose treasury had thinned, and a daughter handed over as alms

Garuda began with a lecture on money, which is a strange thing to find in the middle of a rescue, and it turns out to be the hinge of the whole story. Wealth is called Hiranya, he told the cheerless Galava, because Agni creates it in the bowels of the earth and Vayu increases it there, and because the earth herself is called Hiranmayi, the golden one. It is called Dhana because it holds up the world and keeps life going. That is the work it does, and for the doing of that work it has existed in the three worlds from the beginning. On the Friday when either Purvabhadrapada or Uttarabhadrapada stands in the ascendant, Agni makes wealth by an act of will and gives it to mankind, and the giving increases the store of Kuvera. What lies buried in the earth is guarded by the gods called Ajaikapat and Ahirbudhnya, and by Kuvera as well. It is very hard to come by, best of Brahmanas, and few men come by it.

Then the practical conclusion. Without wealth there is no chance of your getting those horses. So go and ask a king, one born in a line of royal sages, a man who can grant what we are asking without grinding his subjects to pay for it. There is such a king in the lunar race and he is a friend of mine, and of everyone on earth he is the one with real wealth: the royal sage Yayati, son of Nahusha, whose prowess has never once been turned aside. If you ask him in person and I press the request, he will give us what we want, because what he has is the equal of Kuvera’s hoard. Take the gift, learned one, and pay off your teacher with it. Talking it over as they went, and turning over what would be best to do, the bird and the Brahmana came to Pratishthana, where Yayati was keeping his capital. The king received them with hospitality, gave them excellent arghya and water for their feet, and asked what had brought them.

Garuda answered for them both, and the speech is a careful piece of advocacy. This ocean of asceticism, he said, this man called Galava, is my friend. He was a student of Vishvamitra for many thousands of years, and when his teacher finally told him he might go wherever he liked, he asked to give a fee first. Vishvamitra knew the young man’s means were small and asked for nothing. But the offer was repeated and repeated, and at last the teacher, in a small access of anger, said: give me eight hundred white horses of good breeding with the light of the moon in them, each one with a single ear black, and if you want to give your teacher anything, let that be the thing you give. That is what Vishvamitra, who is rich in austerities, said to him in his anger, and it is why this bull among Brahmanas is scorched with grief. He cannot carry out the order. He has come to take shelter with you.

Then the part aimed at a king’s sense of his own account. Take this as alms from him, Garuda said, and he will be cheerful again, and once the debt to his teacher is discharged he will go back to his austerities. You are a royal sage, so you have a wealth of austerities of your own, and this Brahmana will hand you a portion of his, which will make you richer in exactly that currency. As many hairs as there are on the body of a horse, lord of men, so many regions of bliss belong to the man who gives a horse away. He is as fit to take a gift as you are to make one. Let what you give here be like milk poured into a conch shell.

Yayati turned the words over and thought about them coolly. He looked at his dear friend Tarkshya in front of him, and at Galava beside the bird, and he read the request itself as a mark of the Brahmana’s ascetic merit, which is a generous way to read a man asking you for eight hundred horses. What decided him was a detail of routing: the two of them had passed over every king of the solar race to come to him. Blessed is my life today, he said, and blessed is the family I was born into, and this province of mine is blessed too by your coming, sinless Tarkshya. But there is a thing I have to tell you, my friend, and it is this. I am not as rich as you take me to be. My wealth has suffered a great diminution. And yet I am not going to let your arrival here come to nothing, and I will not risk breaking the hope this twice-born sage has fixed on me. I will give him the thing that accomplishes his purpose.

He explained why, and the explanation is a piece of household theology with teeth in it. A man who comes for alms and goes away disappointed can burn up the family he came to. There is no act more sinful, son of Vinata, than saying the words I have nothing, and killing in that way the hope of a man who has come to you saying give. The man whose hope is killed and whose object fails can destroy the sons and the grandsons of whoever failed to do him good. So, Galava, take this daughter of mine, who will carry four families forward. In beauty she is like a daughter of the gods. She can prompt any virtue there is. Gods, men and Asuras have all asked me for her because of that beauty. Let alone twice four hundred horses with one black ear apiece, the kings of the earth will hand over their whole kingdoms as her bride price. Take her, this daughter of mine, whose name is Madhavi. My one desire in this is that I should have a daughter’s son.

Galava accepted the girl as a gift. He and Garuda said they would see the king again, and they took the maiden away with them. The means of getting those horses, the bird told his friend, has finally been found, and having said it he asked Galava’s leave and flew home to his own place. So the Brahmana was left standing on a road with a king’s daughter beside him, working out which king could pay a proper price for her. The first one he thought of was Haryashva of Ikshvaku’s line, who ruled at Ayodhya: a man of great energy, with an army of all four kinds, a full treasury, grain in abundance, the love of his subjects and a real affection for Brahmanas. He wanted children. He was living quietly, at peace, in excellent austerities. Galava went to him and put it plainly. This girl, king of kings, will increase her husband’s family by bearing children. Accept her from me as your wife and give me a bride price for her. I will tell you what the price is to be. When you have heard it, decide what you will do.

A key to reading this (terms, and one oddity in the text): Garuda supplies the derivations of Hiranya and Dhana himself, so they need no gloss here. Ajaikapat and Ahirbudhnya are counted among the Rudras and appear here as the guardians of buried treasure. The phrase about Madhavi carrying four families forward is the epithet the rest of the story pays out. One textual oddity: at this point Ganguli’s text also calls Yayati the liberal ruler of all the Kasis, though his capital in this same passage is Pratishthana; he is kept here as the king of Pratishthana. The passage should also be read for what it leaves out. Madhavi is present throughout, she is described, she is valued in horses, and she is never asked.

The gist: Garuda explains where wealth comes from and who guards it, concludes that the horses cannot be had without a rich man, and takes Galava to the royal sage Yayati at Pratishthana. Garuda lays out the whole case, including the flattery that a gift of horses buys a man regions of bliss. Yayati admits his treasury has thinned, then argues that sending away an empty-handed suppliant can destroy a family, and settles the matter by giving Galava his daughter Madhavi, whose bride price, he says, will be whole kingdoms, and whose sons will carry four families forward. He asks only for a grandson by her. Garuda goes home, and Galava takes the girl to Ayodhya to offer her to king Haryashva.

Ayodhya and Kashi: one son for two hundred horses, and the boon that made Madhavi a girl again

Narada said: Haryashva did not answer quickly when the offer was put to him. He looked at the girl for a long while, thinking about sons, and at the end of that looking he let out a long hot breath, the kind that comes from far down. Then he spoke like a man reading an inventory, because that is how his age read a woman it wanted. Of the six limbs in her that ought to stand high, he said, every one stands high. Of the seven that ought to be slender, every one is slender. Of the three that ought to be deep, all three are deep. Of the five that ought to be red, all five are red. She is worth the eyes of gods and of Asuras, and she is accomplished in every art and every science. Every auspicious mark is on her, and she will certainly bear many children. She may even bear a son who becomes an emperor. Then, having priced her in his own mind, he asked for the number. Consider what I own, best of Brahmanas, and tell me her dower. Eight hundred horses, Galava said, foaled in a good country, white as the moon, each one with a single black ear. Give me those and this large-eyed girl will be the mother of your sons, as the fire-stick is the mother of fire.

The king’s face changed. He was a truthful man and what he had to say next was humiliating, and he said it anyway, sorrow all through him while desire kept his eyes where they were. Of the kind you name I have two hundred, he said. Of other kinds, fit for sacrifice, I have thousands grazing across my country. I want one son from this girl, only one. Grant me that much. And here, for the first time in the whole affair, the girl herself spoke, and what she said rearranged everything. A reciter of Brahma once gave me a boon, she told Galava, that after every delivery I would be a maiden again. So give me to this king and take his excellent horses. In that way four kings in succession will yield you the full eight hundred, and I shall have four sons. Gather your teacher’s fee like that. This is what I think. What you do is yours to decide, Brahmana. It was her plan, worked out in her head while two men bargained over her, and she handed it to Galava and then handed him the decision as well. Galava turned to the king. Take her for a fourth part of the price I set, he said, and beget one son upon her, and no more.

So the king took her, and bowed to Galava, and in the fullness of time and in the proper place she bore him the son he had wanted. They called the boy Vasumanas. He grew richer than any wealthy king on earth, like one of the Vasus come down, and he became a ruler and a giver of enormous gifts. After a while Galava came back and found Haryashva happy. You have your son, he said. The child has the sun in him. And now the hour has come for me to go begging to some other king. Haryashva was truthful in speech and steady in his conduct, and he made the calculation Galava had already made, that the remaining six hundred were beyond him. So he gave Madhavi back. She walked out of that blazing royal fortune, and the boon took hold, and she was a girl again walking behind a Brahmana on a road. Let the horses stay with you, Galava said over his shoulder, and took her toward the country of Divodasa.

On the road he told her where they were going. The lord of the Kashis is a famous king named Divodasa, he said, son of Bhimasena, a man of great prowess and a mighty sovereign. We are going to him now. Follow slowly and do not grieve. He is righteous, he holds to truth, and his passions are under his own hand. Divodasa received the sage with every honor, and when Galava began to press him about begetting a child the king cut him short, in the friendliest way. I heard all of this before you came, he said. There is no need to say much. The moment the matter reached my ears my heart was set on it. And it honors me that you passed over every other king to come here. Your purpose will be accomplished, have no doubt. As for horses, Galava, my wealth is exactly Haryashva’s wealth. So I too will beget one royal son upon her, and one only. Galava gave the girl, and the king married her by the rites, and that royal sage took his pleasure with her as Surya with Prabhavati, Agni with Svaha, Vasava with Shachi, Chandra with Rohini, Yama with Urmila, Varuna with Gauri, Kubera with Riddhi, Narayana with Lakshmi, Sagara with Jahnavi, Rudra with Rudrani, the Grandsire with Sarasvati, Vasishtha’s son Shakti with Adrishyanti, Vasishtha with Arundhati who is also called Akshamala, Chyavana with Sukanya, Pulastya with Sandhya, Agastya with Lopamudra the princess of Vidarbha, Satyavan with Savitri, Bhrigu with Puloma, Kashyapa with Aditi, Richika’s son Jamadagni with Renuka, Kushika’s son Vishvamitra with Himavati, Brihaspati with Tara, Shukra with Shataprava, Bhumipati with Bhumi, Pururavas with Urvashi, Richika with Satyavati, Manu with Sarasvati, Dushyanta with Shakuntala, the eternal Dharma with Dhriti, Nala with Damayanti, Narada with Satyavati, Jaratkaru with Jaratkaru, Pulastya with Pratichya, Urnayu with Menaka, Tumburu with Rambha, Vasuki with Shatashirsha, Dhananjaya with Kamari, Rama with Sita the princess of Videha, and Janardana with Rukmini. She bore Divodasa a son, and they named him Pratardana. When the appointed time came Galava returned and asked for her back. Let the girl come with me, he said, and let the horses you owe me stay where they are, because I mean to go elsewhere for her price. And Divodasa, who held to truth, gave her back on the day he had promised.

A key to reading this (what the text says and what it withholds): The six, seven, three and five that Haryashva counts belong to a conventional list of auspicious marks on a body; the original gives the numbers and never the items, so the reader is left with the shape of the inventory and none of its contents. The boon of renewed maidenhood comes from a reciter of Brahma whom the text declines to name. Notice who speaks and who does not: the four-king plan is Madhavi’s own, worked out while two men negotiate over her, and she ends it by handing the decision back to Galava. Nobody asks her whether she agrees, and after this she does not speak again for a long stretch of the story. Divodasa’s father Bhimasena is a king of Kashi and has nothing to do with the Pandava of that name. The long chain of divine couples is a standard ornament of Sanskrit narrative; inside it Pulastya appears twice, with Sandhya and with Pratichya, the sage Jaratkaru and the serpent maiden Jaratkaru share one name, and the Dhananjaya who follows just after Vasuki carries a name that Arjuna also carries, though the text identifies him no further.

The gist: No single king owns eight hundred moon-white horses. Haryashva of Ayodhya has two hundred and wants one son, and at that impasse Madhavi speaks for the first time, revealing a boon that returns her to maidenhood after every birth and proposing that four kings be used in turn. Vasumanas is born at Ayodhya and Pratardana at Kashi, and each time Madhavi steps out of a throne, becomes a girl again, and follows Galava down the road to the next king.

Ushinara of the Bhojas, and Garuda’s news that the last two hundred horses do not exist

Narada said: She kept her word. Madhavi walked out of a second royal fortune, the boon closed over her again, and the king’s wife who had borne Pratardana was a girl on a road behind a Brahmana. Galava’s mind was on his own business and on nothing else, and while he walked he worked out the next move. He turned toward the city of the Bhojas, to wait on king Ushinara, whose prowess had never been beaten. When he stood in front of that king he made his pitch, and he made it larger this time, because he was running out of kings. This girl will give you two royal sons, he said. Beget two upon her, one like the sun and one like the moon, and you will have everything you want in this world and in the next. As her price, since you are a man who knows every duty, you will give me four hundred horses with the moon’s light on them, each with one black ear. Understand that I am doing this only for my teacher, and that for myself I want nothing to do with horses at all. If you can meet my terms, do it and do not hesitate. You are childless as you stand here, royal sage. Beget a pair of children. Make a raft of the offspring and carry your fathers across on it, and yourself as well. A man with the fruit that is offspring never falls out of heaven, and he never has to go down into that terrible hell that is kept for the childless.

Ushinara had heard the argument and was not moved by the threat inside it, though he answered gently. I have heard you, Galava, he said, and my heart is willing to do what you ask. The Ordainer, though, is stronger than any of us. Of the kind of horse you describe I own two hundred. Of other kinds I have thousands wandering in my country. So I will beget one son upon her, walking the same road that Haryashva and Divodasa walked before me, and in the matter of her price I will do exactly what they did. Then he said the thing that makes him worth remembering. My wealth exists for the people in my city and in my countryside, and it does not exist for my own comfort or my own pleasure. A king who gives away for his own enjoyment the wealth that belongs to other people earns neither merit nor a good name. Give me this girl, who shines like a daughter of the gods, and I will take her for one child. Galava heard him out, praised him, handed the girl over, and went away into the forest. And Ushinara, like a righteous man spending a fortune he has honestly earned, took his pleasure with her in mountain valleys and mountain hollows, beside springs and beside waterfalls, in palaces and in beautiful chambers, in painted gardens, in forests and groves and every pleasant place, and on the terraces of his houses. In time she bore him a son with the light of the morning sun on him, who grew up to be the excellent king remembered by the name Shibi. When the boy was born Galava came back, took the girl from Ushinara, and went to find the son of Vinata.

Garuda saw him coming and smiled, and the smile was the wrong one. Good fortune, Brahmana, he said. I see you successful. Galava had to tell him that a fourth of the task was still standing. And then Garuda, who was the best speaker among them, told Galava to stop. Make no further effort for those last two hundred, he said. It will not work. Long ago Richika went to Kanyakubja and asked Gadhi for his daughter Satyavati, wanting her for his wife, and Gadhi told him to bring a thousand horses bright as the moon, each with one black ear. Richika said, so be it, and went to the great horse market in Varuna’s country, the place they call Ashvatirtha, and got what he was after and gave the thousand to the king. Gadhi then performed the sacrifice called Pundarika and gave every one of those horses away to Brahmanas as the fee. The three kings you have just been to bought their horses from those Brahmanas, two hundred apiece. The remaining four hundred were being ferried across a river, and the Vitasta took them. So there it is, Galava. What does not exist you will never obtain.

Then he gave the advice that finished the story. Offer Vishvamitra this girl in place of the last two hundred, he said, along with the six hundred you already hold. Do that, and your grief ends and your work is done. So be it, said Galava, and he took the girl and the horses and went with Garuda beside him to Vishvamitra. He laid it all out plainly when he got there. Here are six hundred horses of the kind you demanded, he said, and this girl stands in place of the remaining two hundred. Accept the whole of it. Three royal sages have already begotten three righteous sons upon her. Let the fourth, and the best of them, be begotten by you. Count the eight hundred as full, and release me from your debt, and let me go and practice whatever austerities I please. Vishvamitra looked at the Brahmana, and at the bird standing with him, and at the girl, who was very beautiful. Why did you not give her to me at the beginning, Galava, he said. All four sons, and all four sanctifying my line, would have been mine alone. He said it as a complaint about lost property. I accept her for the begetting of one son. As for the horses, let them graze in my hermitage.

So Vishvamitra spent his time happily with her, and Madhavi bore him a son named Ashtaka. The moment the boy was born the great sage instructed him in duty and in the getting of wealth, and handed him the six hundred horses, and Ashtaka went off to a city as bright as the city of Soma. Then Vishvamitra made the girl over to his pupil and walked into the woods himself. And Galava, with his friend Suparna at his side, having at last paid his teacher the fee that had been demanded of him, turned to Madhavi with a light heart and made his farewell. You have borne one son who gives without stopping, he said, and another who is fearless, and a third who holds to truth and righteousness, and a fourth who performs the great sacrifices. By these sons, beautiful one, you have carried across not only your own father, but four kings, and me as well. Go now, slender one. With that he sent away Garuda, the eater of snakes, returned the girl to her father, and went into the forest himself.

A key to reading this (the arithmetic, and the names): The sum closes like this: two hundred horses from each of three kings, which is six hundred, and Madhavi herself standing in for the last two hundred. That substitution is the knot the whole story is tied around. Garuda’s revelation is that the eight hundred were never available in the first place: Richika obtained a thousand for Gadhi, Gadhi gave every one of them away at a sacrifice, three kings bought back two hundred each from the Brahmanas who received them, and the other four hundred drowned in the Vitasta, the river now called the Jhelum, while being ferried across. Suparna is another name for Garuda, and Vinata is his mother. The four qualities Galava recites at the end are never matched to particular sons in the original, so any pairing a reader makes is a guess. Note also that nobody asks Madhavi anything here either, and that Vishvamitra’s only complaint is that all four sons were not his.

The gist: Ushinara of the Bhojas can also manage only two hundred horses, and he gives them with a speech about a king’s wealth belonging to his people rather than to his own pleasure; Shibi is born from that. Then Garuda explains that the last two hundred are unobtainable, because four hundred of the original thousand were lost in a river long ago. The unpaid balance is made up with Madhavi herself, Vishvamitra begets Ashtaka upon her, and Galava, free of his teacher at last, gives her back to her father and walks into the forest.

The bride who walked past every suitor and chose the forest, and the king who fell out of heaven because nobody could remember his face

There was one thing left that Yayati could still give his daughter, and he gave it. He decided that Madhavi would choose her own husband. He had her dressed and garlanded, put her on a chariot, and drove her to a hermitage that stood where the Ganga meets the Yamuna, which is the most auspicious ground in the world for a thing of that kind. Her two brothers, Puru and Yadu, came behind the chariot the whole way. Word had gone out, and the crowd that gathered was the sort the old poems like to count: Nagas and Yakshas, men and Gandharvas, animals and birds, the people who live on mountains and the people who live in trees and the people who live in forests, and most of the population of that province besides. The woods around the hermitage filled up with sages until it looked as though the Grandsire himself had been reproduced several hundred times over and seated in the shade. Every king who thought he had a chance was there, groomed and waiting in a line, and each of them knew what her sons became.

The choosing began. Madhavi came down the line of them and did not stop. She passed the whole assembly, every crown and every hopeful face, and she chose the forest as her husband. Then she stepped down from the chariot, made her salutations to her friends and her family one by one, and walked away into the woods, which are sacred always, and gave herself to austerity. What she did there she did thoroughly. She thinned her body with fasts of every kind, with observances, with vows that left no room in a day, and she took up the manner of life of a deer. She lived on the soft green blades of grass that look like sprouts of lapis lazuli and taste bitter and sweet at once. She drank from mountain streams, water that was sweet and clean and cold and clear as crystal. She went where the deer went, in forests that held no lions and no tigers, in empty country that fire never reached, in thickets nobody entered. Living in that way, like a wild doe, she earned an enormous quantity of religious merit, and the story sets her down there and leaves her for a while.

Yayati meanwhile did what kings before him had done and submitted to Time, after living for some thousands of years. The line of Puru and the line of Yadu multiplied and went on multiplying, and the son of Nahusha was honored for it in this world and in the next one. In heaven he was treated as a great sage is treated. He had the best of those regions and he enjoyed them, and several more thousands of years went by very pleasantly. Then one day he was sitting among royal sages and great rishis, and out of foolishness, out of ignorance, out of pride, he despised every one of them. He did not say it. He thought it, and he thought it about the gods as well, and about all human beings, and the whole of it took no longer than a thought takes. Indra, who was sitting there, read his heart at once. The royal sages said, all together, the two syllables that mean shame. And then the questions started, which is where the punishment actually lay. Who is this person? Whose son is he? Why is he in heaven at all? What did he do to get here? Where did he earn his austerities? What is he known for? Does anyone know him? They asked heaven’s charioteers, hundreds of them. They asked the doorkeepers and the men who had charge of the seats. Every one of them gave the same answer, which was that they had never seen him before. A cloud came down over the memory of that entire place, and while Yayati sat in the middle of it his splendor went out of him like a lamp being carried out of a room.

What followed was quick and public. They moved him off his place and pushed him off his seat. His heart shook, remorse burned in him, the garlands around his neck lost their light, his knowledge fogged over, the crown came off his head and the bracelets off his arms, his head swam, every limb loosened, the ornaments and the robes went, and with them went the last thing by which anyone might have named him. Sometimes he could not even see the other residents of heaven. His understanding emptied out completely, and he began to fall head first toward the earth. One question went with him on the way down: what was the wicked thought I had, that I am being thrown out of my own place for it? Behind him the kings and the Siddhas and the Apsaras laughed at the sight of a man losing his grip. Then Indra sent the officer whose entire employment is to push out those whose merit has run dry, and that person came and put it plainly. You are drunk on pride. There is nobody here you have not looked down on. Because of that pride, heaven is not yours. You do not deserve a place here, son of a king. Nobody recognizes you. Go and fall. Yayati heard him out, and then said one thing three times over, which was the only request he had left: if I must fall, let me fall among the righteous.

A man who has won high regions by his own deeds gets to aim. Falling, Yayati looked for the ground he wanted, and he found it. Four great kings were together in the woods of Naimisha: Pratardana, Vasumanas, Shibi the son of Ushinara, and Ashtaka. They were in the middle of a Vajapeya sacrifice, offered to please the lord of the celestials, and the smoke from their altar was going up so straight and so far that it was reaching the gates of heaven. It looked like a river laid between the earth and the sky. It looked like the Ganga coming down. Yayati caught the smell of that smoke and steered himself down the length of it, and so came to earth among those four lions of men, who were beautiful, who were the foremost performers of sacrifices anywhere, who were his own blood, and who sat around their fires like the four guardians of the four directions. They looked up at a man blazing with beauty who had arrived out of the air, and asked him what anyone would ask. Who are you? What race, what country, what city? Are you a Yaksha, a god, a Gandharva, a Rakshasa? You do not look like a human being. What do you want here? He told them the truth. I am the royal sage Yayati. My virtue ran out and I have fallen from heaven. I wanted to fall among the righteous, and I have fallen among you. Then may that wish of yours be granted, they said, and offered him everything they had, the merit of their conduct and the fruit of all their sacrifices, on the spot. He refused it. I am no Brahmana, he said, competent to accept a gift. I am a Kshatriya. And my heart does not incline toward reducing what other men have earned.

It was at that moment, wandering without any purpose the way she had wandered for years, that Madhavi came into the clearing. The four kings saw her and bowed to her, and what they said explains the whole shape of the story. Why have you come? What command of yours may we carry out? You have every right to command us, lady, rich as you are in austerity, because all of us are your sons. Madhavi was delighted. She went to her father and saluted him with full respect, and then she laid her hand on the head of each of those four kings in turn, and spoke. These are my sons, and so they are your daughter’s sons, king of kings. They are not strangers to you. These will save you. The practice is not a new one; it goes back as far as anything goes back. I am your daughter Madhavi, and I live in the woods now in the manner of a deer, and I too have earned merit. Take half of it. Every man has a right to a share of the merit his children earn, and that is why men want daughters’ sons at all. The same was true of you, she said, when you handed me over to Galava. Her sons bowed to her, and bowed to their grandfather, and repeated what she had said in one voice, loud and sweet and beyond comparison, until the earth rang with it, and their only object was to pull this fallen man back up. And Galava arrived too, at that moment, and made his own offer: take an eighth part of my austerities, and climb.

A key to reading this (a daughter’s sons, and what Madhavi says): The machinery of the ending is an old belief that a man is entitled to a share of the merit his children accumulate, which is why a daughter’s sons could pull a grandfather out of a fall. Madhavi states the rule to her father herself. The four kings in the clearing are her four sons by four different men: Pratardana, Vasumanas, Shibi and Ashtaka. Vajapeya is one of the great public sacrifices, and Naimisha is the forest where sages held their long sessions. Worth noticing: the svayamvara is the first time in this whole story that anyone asks Madhavi what she wants, and her answer is to take no husband at all. The text never tells us what the four earlier givings were like for her. The single sentence she speaks on the subject is the one here, reminding her father that he handed her to Galava.

The gist: Yayati holds a bride-choosing for Madhavi, and in front of the largest crowd in the story she walks the whole line of kings and chooses the forest, then lives in it like a doe. Thousands of years later, seated in heaven, one moment of private contempt costs him everything: the memory of heaven closes over him, nobody can name him, and he falls. He is allowed one condition on the way down, that he land among good men, and he lands in his own grandsons’ sacrifice at Naimisha. Madhavi walks in, gives her father half her merit, and Galava offers an eighth of his.

Four grandsons hand up their merit one at a time, the Grandsire names the single fault that ate a lifetime of it, and Narada turns and looks at Duryodhana

Recognition was the whole of it. The instant those good men knew who he was, Yayati began to rise, and he never had to touch the surface of the earth at all. His celestial form came back to him. The anxiety went out of him as though it had been lifted off by hand. He came up again garlanded and robed as heaven robes its own, scented, ornamented, carrying every attribute of that place, and his feet stayed clear of the ground the entire time. It was Vasumanas who spoke first, a man whose liberality was a byword everywhere on earth, and he said it loudly, so that everyone present would be a witness. Whatever merit I have won down here by conduct that no one could fault, toward men of every order, I give to you. Let all of it be yours, king. Whatever merit comes of giving and of forgiving, and whatever is mine from the sacrifices I have performed, let that be yours as well.

Then Pratardana, a bull among Kshatriyas, gave what a Kshatriya has. I have been devoted to virtue and to war all my life, he said, and the fame that has come to me here as a Kshatriya, the reason men call me a hero, let the merit of that be yours. Then Shibi, the intelligent son of Ushinara, spoke, and what he chose to offer says everything about the kind of king he was. To children and to women, in jest, in danger, in calamity, in distress, and at dice, I have never once spoken a falsehood. By that truth, climb. I can give up every object of desire and enjoyment I have, my kingdom, my life itself, and truth is the one thing I cannot give up. By that truth, climb. By that same truth Dharma has been pleased with me, and Agni has been pleased with me, and the god of a hundred sacrifices has been pleased with me. By that truth, climb to heaven. Last of them came Ashtaka, the son of Kushika’s son Vishvamitra and of Madhavi, speaking to a man who had himself performed sacrifices by the hundred. I have performed hundreds of the Pundarika, the Gosava and the Vajapeya, he said. Take the merit of all of them. For the sake of those sacrifices I held back no wealth, no gems, no robes. By that truth, climb. And as each of those daughter’s sons said his piece, one after another, the king left the earth further behind and went higher, and higher again, until the four of them had lifted him the whole way by nothing more than their own good conduct. Four men, born into four royal lines, each of them the multiplier of his own race, put their virtues and their sacrifices and their gifts under their grandfather and pushed. Then they said it together. We are your daughter’s sons, king, endowed with everything a king should have and every virtue besides. Climb.

So they sent him back, those righteous kings whose sacrificial gifts had made them famous, and Yayati took his leave of them and came again into the regions of the gods. The eternal region he had won by his own deeds was waiting for him, and now it had been bought back for him by his daughter’s sons, and he arrived in it under a shower of fragrant flowers with perfumed breezes closing around him, blazing. Cymbals sounded to welcome him. Gandharvas and Asuras entertained him with songs and with dancing. Celestial sages, royal sages and Charanas came to pay him their respects, and the gods themselves honored him with the arghya and with every other courtesy they had. When he had settled, when heaven was around him again and his mind was quiet and the fear had left him, the Grandsire came to him and gave him the account plainly, which was a kindness of its own. You had earned the full measure of virtue by what you did on earth, and this region is as lasting as those deeds of yours are. What you then did was destroy your own acquisition, and you did it with vanity and nothing else. Vanity of yours put darkness over the hearts of everyone living here, so that not one of them was able to recognize you, and because you could not be recognized you were thrown out. The love of your daughter’s sons has saved you a second time, and here you are, holding again the region you won by your own deeds, which is unchangeable and eternal and sacred and excellent and stable and indestructible.

Yayati had carried a question down and back up again, and he asked it now. Holy one, there is a doubt in me that you are the one to clear, and it would not be proper for me to put it to anyone else, Grandsire of all the worlds. My merit was great. I ruled my subjects by dharma for many thousands of years and I added to it with sacrifices and gifts beyond counting. How was so much exhausted so quickly that I was thrown out of here for it? You know that the regions made for me were all of them eternal. Why were they destroyed? And the Grandsire answered him without softening anything. That merit of yours, he said, built up over thousands of years of righteous rule and by uncountable sacrifices and gifts, was exhausted by exactly one fault, and for that fault you were hurled down. The fault was your vanity, and it made you contemptible in the eyes of every resident of this place. Understand this, royal sage. No one has ever made this region permanent by vanity, or by pride in his own strength, or by malice, or by deceit, or by deception. Never look down on the man below you, or the man above you, or the man beside you. There is no greater sinner anywhere than the one the fire of vanity is eating. And then he added the line that turns the whole episode into something usable: those who tell the story of your fall and your climb will be protected, even when calamity has already caught them.

Narada let that sit for a moment, in the hall at Hastinapura, in front of the man he had been aiming at from the beginning. This, king, was the trouble vanity brought on Yayati, he said, and that was the trouble obstinacy brought on Galava. Men who want their own good listen to friends who want it for them. Obstinacy is a thing to keep out of the mind altogether, because obstinacy is the root of ruin every time. For that reason, son of Gandhari, put down your vanity and your anger. Make peace with the sons of Pandu, hero. Stay away from wrath, king. What is given away, what is done, the austerity that is practiced, the libations poured into the fire: none of these is ever destroyed, and none of them is ever diminished, and no one enjoys their fruit except the man who performed them. And whoever understands this history rightly, which the greatly learned approve and which men free of anger and desire approve, and which stands on scripture and on reason both, comes into the knowledge of virtue and profit and desire, and holds the sovereignty of the whole earth.

A key to reading this (what each man gives): The four grandsons do not offer the same thing. Each hands over the merit of the quality he is famous for: Vasumanas gives liberality, Pratardana gives the fame of a Kshatriya, Shibi gives truthfulness, and Ashtaka gives his sacrifices. Pundarika, Gosava and Vajapeya are names of great public sacrifices. The god of a hundred sacrifices is Indra. All four are Madhavi’s sons by four different men: Vasumanas by Haryashva, Pratardana by Divodasa, Shibi by Ushinara, and Ashtaka by Vishvamitra. That is what makes every one of them Yayati’s daughter’s son. The arghya is the offering of welcome given to an honored guest.

The gist: Being recognized is enough to start Yayati rising, and his four grandsons lift him the rest of the way by giving him their merit one at a time, so that he returns to heaven without his feet touching the ground. There the Grandsire tells him what it cost him: thousands of years of accumulated virtue spent by a single fault, and the fault was vanity. Narada then turns the whole story on the man in front of him. Yayati fell through pride and Galava was ruined by obstinacy, so put both down, son of Gandhari, and make peace with the sons of Pandu.

Source: the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Udyoga Parva, Bhagavat-yana sub-book. This chapter follows K. M. Ganguli, sections LXXII-CXXXIX (72-139); the Gita Press Hindi edition numbers these chapters differently. Names, order, and events were checked against Ganguli’s complete translation. Dialogue and commentary are adapted, not a verbatim translation. About the sources.