The Curse on Fire

In the forest of Naimisharanya the rishis had settled in for a sacrificial session that would run twelve years, and into that clearing came Ugrashrava the bard with the whole of the great epic in his mouth. Shaunaka, who held the session, did not ask him for the war.

'Begin with my own line,' he said. 'Begin with Bhrigu. I have heard that fire was cursed once, and in all my years no one has told me why.'

So the bard began, and the beginning of the epic is not a battle. It is a household.

Bhrigu, born of the will of Brahma, kept a hermitage on the bank of a quiet river far to the north, and his wife was Puloma, of whom it was said that no ornament could improve her and that none was ever wasted on her. She kept the sacred fire on the hearth as a wife keeps it, feeding it at dawn and at dusk with her own hands, and in that house it had never once been allowed to go out.

There was a thing in her past the household did not discuss. Before Bhrigu, her father had promised her to a rakshasa named Puloman. Promised her in words only, in the loose and flattered way of a man who finds a powerful suitor at his door and does not want to say no that afternoon. Nothing was completed. No mantra was spoken over it. Then Bhrigu came, and her father gave her to Bhrigu properly, with the fire and the seven steps and the whole weight of the rites, and that was the end of the matter, in the way things end among people who intend to be reasonable.

Puloman had not been reasonable about it for a very long time.

She was carrying a child now, far along, moving about the hermitage in the heavy patience of the last months. One morning Bhrigu went down to the river to bathe and to make his offerings, as he did every morning of his life, and the hermitage was left empty of everyone but a pregnant woman and a fire.

That was the morning the rakshasa came.

He came in the shape of a man and stood in the doorway, and Puloma, who had been raised to feed anyone who came to the door of a hermitage, rose and set out fruit and roots and water.

He looked at her a long while before he touched any of it.

Puloman had known her the instant he crossed the threshold. He had travelled a great distance on a rumor and the rumor stood in front of him with one hand at the small of her back. But rakshasas are cunning, and cunning creatures do not trust their own certainty. He wanted it out of a mouth that could not lie, so that afterward, when he did what he had come to do, he could tell himself it had been proved.

There was only one other presence in the room.

'Fire,' he said, turning to the hearth. 'You sit in every house and hear everything said in it. You are the mouth of the whole world, and no one has ever caught you in a false word. Tell me now. Is this woman the one who was promised to me first, before ever Bhrigu came? Answer truthfully.'

The flame on the hearth sank down into the coals.

Agni knew precisely what was being asked of him. He knew what stood in the room and what it wanted, and he knew that this woman had fed him at dawn with her own hands. He also knew what he was.

'You should not have asked me,' he said at last, and his voice was small in the ash. 'A witness who knows and speaks falsely goes down into the dark and drags his fathers down after him. I am the tongue of the gods. I have carried every true word ever spoken over a hearth, and I cannot begin today to carry a false one.

'She is Puloma. Her father named her yours in speech. Her father gave her to Bhrigu with mantras. Both of those things are true, and you have asked me for only the first of them.'

The rakshasa began to laugh.

He did not argue the second half. He took the form of a boar, huge and black and low to the ground, seized her, and went out of that hermitage with the speed of wind, over the tops of the trees and away.

Puloma wept as she was carried. She wept for the fire she had fed that morning and the husband at the river, and most of all because there was a child in her who had no part in any promise made by any father.

The child did not consent to be carried either.

What happened next takes one line of the old telling and a long time to believe. The unborn son, unable to endure it, came out of his mother's womb in the middle of the sky. He fell, and as he fell he blazed with the whole gathered heat of the Bhrigu line in him, like the sun at the end of an age, and the rakshasa who looked back to see what the light was did not have time to finish looking. Puloman was ash before he struck the ground.

Because the child fell, he was named Chyavana, the fallen one. He was named for the manner of his arrival and carried it through a very long life.

Puloma gathered him up. There was nowhere to walk except back, and she went back weeping, and the tears ran off her and along behind her and did not stop when she stopped, and by the time the hermitage came in sight there was a stream following her through the grass.

The grandsire came to her there. Brahma, from whom Bhrigu had come and therefore this child also, stood in the path of the new water and looked at the burnt-smelling infant in her arms.

'You have lost nothing,' he said, 'though you will be a long time believing it.'

He blessed the child, and then considered the little river that had come out of her grief and would not go back into it.

'Let it stay,' Brahma said. 'Vadhusara it is called, the stream of the bride's weeping, and it will run past this hermitage as long as the hermitage stands, so that no one can say afterward that nothing happened here.'

Bhrigu came up from the river and found his wife in the doorway with a newborn in her arms and a new river at her feet, and he was not a calm man on his calmest day.

She told it through plainly, the way people tell things when the shaking has stopped and the anger has not yet started. The stranger at the door. The food. The question.

Bhrigu heard the last part twice.

'He came on a rumor,' he said. 'He could not have been sure. Who made him sure?'

'The fire,' said Puloma. 'He asked, and the fire answered him.'

Bhrigu turned to the hearth, and every ascetic year he had ever stored up came into his mouth at once.

'Eater of all things,' he said. 'That is what you will be. You who are so careful of the truth, and could not bear one merciful silence for the woman who fed you at dawn. From this day you devour everything without distinction. The clean and the unclean, the offering and the offal, the sandalwood and the corpse. Sarvabhaksha. Let nothing be too foul for you, since nothing was too cruel.'

The fire came up off the hearth and stood in the room in its own shape, and its anger was the older of the two.

'What is this?' said Agni. 'I was asked a question and I answered correctly. Should I have lied? A witness who lies destroys seven generations behind him and seven ahead. I did not carry her off. I did not take the shape of a beast. I said what was so.

'And consider what I am. The ghee that goes to the gods goes through me. The offering that reaches your own fathers goes out of my mouth. I am the road every rite in the world travels on, and you have cursed the road because you did not like the news it carried.'

Bhrigu said nothing. A curse spoken by such a man is not taken back by such a man.

'Very well,' said Agni. 'Then I will not be present at the mouth of anything.'

And he went out. Out of the hearths and the altars, the forges and the lamps and the wombs of the stones. He withdrew himself from the three worlds and sat down somewhere with no name and did not burn.

The world found out quickly what it had been resting on.

Without fire there was no cooking and no forging, but that was the least of it. Nothing could be offered. The morning oblation had nowhere to go. The full moon rites stopped, and the new moon rites, and the rites for the dead. The gods went unfed. The fathers went unfed. Men stood at cold altars holding ghee with no idea what to do with it, and the ordering of the year came loose, because a year is measured by its sacrifices and there were none.

The gods and the rishis went together to Brahma, which is what is done when a thing is broken that no one is willing to call broken.

Brahma sent for fire, and fire came, and would not sit down.

'A curse from Bhrigu cannot be unspoken,' Brahma said. 'Not by me, not by him. What was said will happen. But a thing said is not the same as a thing understood, and I will tell you what it means.

'You will eat everything. That is granted. And nothing you eat will stain you. You were the purifier before Bhrigu was angry. Whatever is thrown into you is not made foul by being in you. It is made clean by being in you. Let the world bring you what it cannot bear to keep, and it will come out as ash and heat and nothing more.

'And of every offering in every rite performed from now on, the purified portion is yours before anyone else's. You said you were the road. You are the road, and now you are also the toll.'

Agni considered it a long while. Then he divided himself again among the hearths and the altars, the smoke went up, and the sacrifices resumed in the middle of the sentence where they had stopped.

So the epic opens, not with a battle but with a witness who told the truth and was punished, and a world talked back into working afterward. As for the infant who burned a rakshasa out of the sky, he grew into the sage Chyavana, who far down his own long life would sit still so long that an anthill closed over him and a king's daughter named Sukanya found him there. That is a different story, an old man's, told in its own place.