The Fire That Resigned

Markandeya had just finished a long discourse on righteousness, and the Kamyaka woods were quiet with that particular quiet that follows a good answer. Yudhishthira had listened to all of it. Then he asked about something else entirely, which was his habit when a subject had been closed too neatly.

"Worshipful sir, why did the fire-god hide himself in water in olden times?"

Markandeya looked up.

"And why is it," Yudhishthira went on, "that Angiras of great splendour, officiating as fire-god, used to convey oblations during his dissolution? There is but one fire. Yet according to the nature of its action it is seen to divide itself into many, and every household fire and every altar fire has its own name and its own portion. I should like to be enlightened on all these points. How the Kumara was born, how he came to be known as the son of Agni, how he was begotten by Rudra, or by Ganga and Krittika. O noble scion of Bhrigu's race, I desire to learn all this accurately, as it happened. I am filled with great curiosity."

"You have asked four questions," said Markandeya, "and you have asked them in the wrong order, which is not your fault, because everyone does. The birth of the Kumara comes later and I will give it to you entire. But you cannot understand how one fire becomes many until you understand the day there were briefly two, and neither of them wanted the office.

"In this connection the learned cite an old story. How the carrier of oblations, in a fit of rage, sought the waters of the sea in order to perform a penance. And how the adorable Angiras, transforming himself into the fire-god, destroyed darkness and distressed the world with his scorching rays.

"It begins with a man in a hut on a hillside, sitting still."

Angiras was the third son of Brahma, and he had a wife named Subha, and he lived in a hermitage the way all such men lived: a floor of swept earth, a fire kept alive in a shallow pit, water within walking distance, and time.

In olden times, said Markandeya, that great one performed a wonderful penance there. Not a penance of a season, nor of a year. He sat in it as a man sits down in a house he does not intend to leave.

What happens to a man in that state is not a thing anyone chooses. Heat gathers in him. It is the same heat that is in the sun and in the altar and in the belly that digests food, and it does not know the difference between a god and an ascetic; it goes where it is called and stays where it is fed. Angiras fed it for a very long time without asking what it would grow into.

And at some point that no one afterward could fix exactly, it came out of him.

He excelled the fire-god, the carrier of oblations, in splendour. That is the sentence the learned use, and it is careful, and it is worth taking slowly. It does not say that Angiras became powerful. It says that a man sitting in a hut on the slope of a hill put out more light than the god whose entire office is light, and did not stop when he had matched him, and went on past him.

And in that state he illumined the whole universe.

He did not stand up and announce it. He had no plan for it and no use for it. He was simply, from that day, the brightest thing in creation, and the brightest thing in creation had until that morning been somebody else.

The trouble with a universe that is already lit is that nothing in it looks like it is shining.

Agni was at that time also performing a penance. This is the part of the story people forget: the two of them were doing the same thing in the same age, and one of them was a god doing it and one of them was a sage doing it, and the sage had gone further.

And Agni was greatly distressed by that effulgence.

Not burned. Nothing burns Agni. What reached him was worse and quieter. He looked at his own flame and could not see it. He looked at the altars where his flame stood and the flame was there and it was doing nothing, because the light it was supposed to make against the dark was already made, by somebody else, everywhere, at once. A fire in full noon is a warm nothing. Agni had become a warm nothing across the three worlds.

He was greatly depressed, and he did not know what to do. That is the phrase, and it is not the phrase anyone uses about gods.

He thought about it in the way an official thinks about a letter that has not come. And what he arrived at was reasonable, and orderly, and entirely wrong, and it was this:

"Brahma has created another fire-god for this universe.

"As I have been practising austerities, my services as the presiding deity of fire have been dispensed with."

Nobody had told him so. No decree had been issued. No god had come to take his seat. He had simply looked at the evidence, which was that there was a second and greater fire in the world and that he had been absent at his devotions when it appeared, and drawn the only conclusion an orderly mind could draw: he had been replaced while his back was turned.

And then he began to consider how he could re-establish himself as the god of fire.

He did not go to Brahma and ask. That would have ended it in a sentence.

What Agni did instead was leave. In a fit of rage, which was mostly shame wearing the only clothes it had, the carrier of oblations went down and sought the waters of the sea, and hid himself in them, and there began a penance of his own.

Think about what a fire has to be to do that. Water is the one thing in creation with a standing quarrel against him. He went into it and let it close over him and sat on the floor of the ocean in the dark, in the cold, where nothing he was could be seen by anybody, and he stayed.

And above him the world went on being lit.

That is the strangest part of the whole account, and it is the part your question was actually about, son of Kunti. When the fire-god dissolved himself into the sea, the sacrifices did not stop. Men went on pouring clarified butter into their altars morning and evening, and the oblations went up and arrived, because Angiras, who had not asked for the work, found the work in his hands and did it. Transforming himself into the fire-god, he destroyed darkness. He carried what was offered. He kept the road to heaven open on behalf of a god who was sitting under the sea because his feelings had been hurt.

And he did it badly, in one respect, and could not help it.

He distressed the world with his scorching rays. He was an ascetic, not an office. He had no practice in being merciful with light. There was no night worth the name and no shade anywhere and the rivers went down and the leaves cooked on the branch, and the creatures of the earth endured a brilliance that had never learned how to be gentle, because the thing that knew how had gone to sea.

How long he sat there the account does not say. Long enough for the world to change shape above him.

What brought him up at last was not a summons. He beheld the great muni giving heat to the whole universe like fire, and he saw what it was doing, and something in him that was still the presiding deity of the altar could not go on watching it from underneath.

So the fire-god came out of the sea and went to the hermitage of Angiras.

He approached him slowly, with fear.

That is a small line and there is a great deal folded inside it. The eldest of the gods, first created, the mouth of the sacrifice, walking up a hillside toward a thin man sitting on the ground, going slowly because he did not know whether he was walking toward a rival or a successor or a court, and afraid, because he had been away and had no idea what had been decided in his absence.

Angiras opened his eyes and saw him, and did not let him get as far as the first sentence.

"Do thou quickly re-establish thyself as the fire animating the universe."

Agni stopped where he was.

"Thou art well known in the three stable worlds," said Angiras, "and thou wast first created by Brahma to dispel darkness. Do thou, O destroyer of darkness, quickly occupy thine own proper place."

It was not offered as a kindness and it was not a negotiation. It was said the way a man says it when he has been holding something heavy for a long time and the owner has finally come back into the room.

And Agni would not take it.

"My reputation has been injured now in this world," he said. "And thou art become the fire-god, and people will know thee, and not me, as fire."

They were standing on a hillside arguing about which of them had to be the most necessary thing in creation, and each was arguing that it was the other, and neither would give way. Markandeya said that there is no other quarrel like it in all the accounts he knows.

"I have relinquished my godhood of fire," said Agni. "Do thou become the primeval fire, and I shall officiate as the second, or Prajapatyaka fire."

Understand what he was proposing. He was not sulking. He had thought it through with the same orderly mind that had got him into the sea. There is a first fire, the one that stands at the beginning and dispels the original dark. There is a second fire, the fire of Prajapati, which serves and is honoured and comes after. Agni was proposing to step down one rank in the only hierarchy there was, formally, in front of the man who had displaced him, and to spend the rest of the world's duration as the assistant of an ascetic who had never wanted the post.

He would rather have been demoted by his own hand than restored by another's, because a restoration would have meant that somebody had noticed he had lost the place.

Angiras heard the whole offer out.

And then he refused it, and he refused it by asking for something, which is the only way that particular refusal can ever be made to work.

"Do thou become the fire-god and the destroyer of darkness," said Angiras, "and do thou attend to thy sacred duty of clearing people's way to heaven."

That was the first half, and it was the same thing he had already said, and it would have failed again.

"And do thou, O lord, make me speedily thy first child."

There it was.

Markandeya said: consider what a different man would have done standing on that hillside. He had proved, in front of the only witness whose opinion mattered, that he could do the work. The office had been offered to him twice by the god who held it. He had the light. He had carried the oblations for however long it had been and not one sacrifice had failed. He had every argument, and the incumbent had already conceded.

And what he asked for was to be counted as a son.

It gave Agni the one thing that could get him back onto the altar without shame, because a god who has fathered the man who outshone him has not been beaten by him. It gave Angiras nothing that could be taken away and no duty he would have to perform badly. And it settled, in a single sentence, the question of which of them was greater, by making the question meaningless, since nobody asks that of a father and a son.

Hearing these words of Angiras, the fire-god did as desired.

He took back the office. The sea gave him up. The scorching went out of the sky and the ordinary alternation of day and night came back over the world, and the altars were his again, and men who had not known that anything had happened went on pouring butter into a flame that had been on the ocean floor a month before.

And Angiras had a son named Vrihaspati.

He was famous, and large-hearted, and of great bodily vigour, and his genius and his learning were profound, and he had a great reputation as a counsellor. In time he would be the counsellor, the one the gods themselves went to when they had made a mess of something, and there is a certain justice in that, considering the terms of his birth.

But first there was the difficulty of what he was.

Knowing him to be the first son of Angiras by Agni, the gods came and enquired about the mystery. They came in a body, and they came because the accounting did not work. A child is born to a sage and his wife in a hermitage, and the child is also, and equally, and by a formal undertaking made on a hillside, the firstborn of the fire-god. Both statements were true and the gods could not see how.

Angiras did not send them away and did not make a mystery of it. Thus asked by the gods, he enlightened them. He told them the whole of it: the penance, the light, the god who concluded he had been replaced and went into the sea without asking anyone, the years the oblations were carried by a man who had not been appointed to carry them, the meeting on the slope, the two refusals, and the price he had finally named.

And the gods accepted the explanation of Angiras.

They did not have to. They could have ruled that the boy was one thing or the other and closed the file. They accepted it because once they had heard it there was nothing in it to object to, only something to be a little ashamed of, since no one among them had gone looking for Agni when he disappeared, and no one had asked who was doing his work.

"And now," said Markandeya, "your first question answers itself, and I will give you the rest of it in order, for the fires are many and each has its use.

"There is the fire that receives the first oblation and the fire that receives the last. There is the fire honoured with clarified butter at the full moon, and the fire in whose name animals are offered at the four-monthly and the horse sacrifices. There is the fire that is the internal heat by which the food of all creatures is digested, and which is in you at this moment, and which the learned name and worship like any other. There is a fire that praises the earth only. There is a fire called relief, because it accomplishes the relief of creatures, and a fire that is the regulator of time.

"You asked how one fire divides into many. It divides according to the nature of its action, and not otherwise. Nothing was ever cut. The names are the names of things done.

"And you asked why the fire-god hid himself in water. He hid because he made an error of arithmetic about his own necessity. He saw a greater light and concluded that greatness was a seat with one place in it, and that if another was in the seat he was out of it, and he went and sat in the sea on the strength of a decree that had never been issued.

"He was wrong. But the world burned while he was wrong, and that is what a private grief costs when the man having it is holding an office."

Yudhishthira sat with it.

He had, at that time, a brother who had gone to heaven for five years to fetch weapons, and a brother who could tear up a hillside, and a wife who had been dragged by the hair into an assembly that watched it happen, and a kingdom that was being administered by a man who had taken it at dice. He had a great deal of practice in the question of what a man does when the place that is his is occupied by somebody else.

"Holy one," he said, "the fire-god comes out of it badly."

"The fire-god comes out of it exactly as any of us would," said Markandeya, "which is why the story is kept. He did nothing wicked. He did not attack Angiras, or slander him, or petition Brahma against him. He assumed he had been set aside and he removed himself, and the whole disaster came out of an assumption nobody checked.

"It is Angiras I would have you look at. A rival who wanted the title would have taken it, and it was pressed on him twice, and both times by the only person entitled to press it. He handed it back and asked for the one thing that could not be measured against it. He had proved he could do the work. What he asked for was to be somebody's son.

"Remember it when your own turn comes, son of Kunti. There will be a day when a thing that was yours is in another man's hand and he is holding it out to you, and how you take it back will matter more than the taking."

The fire had gone down again in the Kamyaka clearing. Somebody got up to feed it, and the flame stood up out of the pit, doing its work, with none of its history on it.