The Blind Sage on the River

The sacrifice at Janamejaya's court had been running long enough that the king had begun to ask questions the recitation had not offered him, and one day, between adhyayas, he asked about the east.

'You have given me the kings of my own line back to the beginning,' he said. 'Tell me instead about the countries on the far side of the river. Anga, whose throne my ancestors gave away. Vanga at the water's edge. Kalinga on the sea road, Pundra, Suhma. They come into your account fully made, with kings and armies and names, as though they had grown out of the ground. Where do those names come from?'

Vaishampayana, who had learned the whole of it from Vyasa and had a scrupulous habit of never shortening an origin, said that all five names came from five brothers, and all five brothers from one blind man on a raft.

'A blind man,' said Janamejaya.

'A sage,' said Vaishampayana, 'who was blinded before he was born, for the offence of speaking from inside his mother. Understand at the start, O king, that this is not a story with a virtuous man in it who is rewarded. Nobody in it behaves well. A brother wrongs a brother. A wife and her sons throw a helpless man into the Ganga. A queen deceives the sage her husband begged for help. And out of every one of those failures comes a kingdom that your grandfathers had to reckon with in war and marriage, and that Karna ruled a piece of within living memory.'

He settled back, the way a reciter does when the thread he is about to pull is a long one.

'Countries do not begin in councils,' he said. 'They begin in households. This one began in a very bad household indeed.'

There were two brothers of the priestly line, Utathya the elder and Brihaspati the younger, and Brihaspati was the preceptor of the gods and accustomed to being told no by nobody. Utathya's wife was Mamata, and she was carrying a child.

Brihaspati came to her and would not be refused. Mamata told him what he already knew: that she was pregnant by his own brother, and that the child inside her had already learned the Veda in all its branches from what he had overheard, and that there was, in the plainest sense, no room in her for two.

Brihaspati did not stop. And the unborn child spoke, from where he was, in a voice they both heard.

'There is no room here,' he said. 'You are my father's brother. What you are doing is not done.'

A man of Brihaspati's standing does not take instruction from a womb. He cursed the child on the spot: since you have spoken out of darkness to me, you shall go into long darkness, and stay there.

The boy was born blind, and the curse gave him his name. Dirghatamas, long darkness. He was blind from the first hour of his life to the last one, and he grew up inside a family that had every reason not to talk about how it had happened.

Blindness did not stop him. He took the whole of the learning that was owed to his birth, the four Vedas and their limbs, and he was counted among the great among the reciters, and his mind was clear and hard and entirely without the softness that people expect from a man who needs help crossing a room. He married. He fathered sons. And he formed, out of what had been done to his mother and to him before he had a face, opinions about marriage that he was not willing to keep to himself.

The quarrel, when it came, was about the law between a husband and a wife, and it was fought in his own house.

Dirghatamas had taken up practices that the ascetics of his time reproached him for, and when they reproached him he did not yield. His wife was Pradveshi, and she had been keeping a blind man and a houseful of his sons for years, and she had come to the end of it. She told him so directly: a wife supports her husband, and I have supported you, and there is no more support in me. I am done.

'Then hear the law,' he said, and he laid it down as a sage lays down a rule, meaning it to hold after him. 'From this day a woman shall have one husband while she lives, and shall not leave him when he is poor, or old, or blind, or fallen from fortune. The one who abandons him falls.'

It was, of course, a ruling made by the man it protected, in his own house, in the middle of his own quarrel, and his wife heard it exactly that way. She was not persuaded. She was enraged.

So she told her sons to be rid of him, and the sons agreed. They were not a mob and this was not done in the dark. They took their father, who could not see them coming, tied him onto a raft, carried him to the Ganga, and pushed him out into the current.

'Let the river keep him,' they said, 'since he is so certain about who owes whom.'

The raft went down the great river past kingdom after kingdom. He drifted for a long distance and a long time, blind, bound, and alive. Nobody on any of those banks put out a boat.

It was Bali who saw the raft. He was a king of the eastern country, a man of great virtue and no heir, and he was at the water when a bound sage came past on the current, and he went in and pulled him out and cut the ropes himself.

He knew who he had, because the blind man told him without embarrassment. And Bali, who had been praying about one thing for years, asked for that thing.

'I have no sons,' he said. 'Not one. Give me sons on my queen, endued with virtue and with learning, and my line does not end with me.'

Dirghatamas agreed.

Bali sent word to Queen Sudeshna to go to the sage. She went as far as the door. What she found there was an old man, blind, still marked from a river, smelling of the raft, and she decided in that moment that whatever her husband had promised was not going to be paid by her. She went back, dressed her nurse in a queen's ornaments, and sent the nurse in her place, and said nothing to anyone.

'Did the sage not know?' Janamejaya asked.

'He knew at once,' said Vaishampayana. 'He was blind, not deceived. But he said nothing either, and he begot on that woman eleven sons, Kakshivat the eldest among them, and they were learned men, every one.'

Bali came later and saw the eleven reciting the Veda, and his heart lifted, and he said, 'These are mine.'

'They are not,' said Dirghatamas. 'They are mine, born of a servant woman your queen sent to me wearing her jewellery. Kakshivat and his brothers are a fine line and they will be a line of servants to yours. You asked me for heirs and your own house cheated you, not I.'

Bali did not curse his wife, and he did not argue with the sage. He went to Sudeshna and told her to go herself this time, bathed and adorned and without any substitution in her mind, and she went.

Dirghatamas put his hands on her, and read her, in the way a blind man reads, and told her what she would carry.

'You shall bear five sons,' he said, 'and they will be like the sun for splendour, and they will be kings. Anga. Vanga. Kalinga. Pundra. Suhma. And the countries they rule shall be called after them, so that as long as men speak of the east they will be repeating the names of five children of this house.'

It happened as he said. The five were born, they divided the eastern country among themselves, and their names stopped being names and became places. Anga, where a chariot-driver's son would one day be crowned king by Duryodhana in front of an entire arena. Vanga at the delta. Kalinga on the sea road south. Pundra and Suhma between them. Every one of those five sent troops to Kurukshetra, and their kings died there, and none of the men who fell knew that the borders they were dying for had been drawn by a quarrel over who owed hospitality to a blind man.

'That is where the names come from,' Vaishampayana said. 'And note the woman, O king, and do not confuse her with the other Sudeshna your fathers knew, the queen of Virata in whose service Draupadi hid out her thirteenth year. This one is older by ages, and she gave the east its map by trying not to keep a promise.'

Janamejaya was quiet for a while.

'A curse in a womb,' he said, 'and a wife who would not stay, and a queen who sent her servant. And five kingdoms out of it.'

'Five kingdoms,' said Vaishampayana. 'Nobody plans a country. Countries are the leftovers of what people do to each other in one house.'