The Blind Sage on the River

Hastinapura had no king. Vichitravirya was dead of a wasting sickness, childless, and his two young widows sat in the palace with nobody to carry on the line of Shantanu. Satyavati, his mother, had begged Bhishma to take the widows himself and raise heirs, and Bhishma had refused, because he had sworn never to take a wife or father a child, and his vow did not bend for grief.

'Then tell me what can be done,' she said. 'The line of your fathers is ending in front of us.'

Bhishma answered her with precedent. When Jamadagni's son Rama had emptied the earth of Kshatriyas one and twenty times, he said, the women of the warrior order had raised sons through Brahmanas, and the Veda itself said such a son belonged to the man who had married the mother. That was how the Kshatriyas had come back into the world. And there was another old story, of one blind man on a raft and the royal line he saved.

'A blind man,' said Satyavati.

'A sage,' said Bhishma, 'who was blinded before he was born, for the offence of speaking from inside his mother. Understand at the start, mother, that this is not a gentle story. A brother wrongs a brother. A wife and her sons throw a helpless man into the Ganga. A queen insults the sage her husband begged for help. And out of all of it comes a royal son, and a country that still carries his name.'

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

'Royal lines 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 for two,' he said. 'I was here first. Stop.'

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, and stayed blind for a long time, 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 husband is named for supporting and protecting his wife, and you have been neither to me. I have supported you and your children, and I will not do it any longer.

'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 keep to one husband all her life. Whether he is living or dead, she shall not go to another man, and the one who does shall be counted fallen.'

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 throw him into the Ganga, and the sons obeyed. 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.

'He is blind and old,' they said. 'Why should we keep him?' And they went home without looking back.

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 learned in every part of dharma, devoted to truth, and without a son, 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 Queen Sudeshna to the sage. She did not go. She knew he was an old man, blind, still marked from the river, and she decided that whatever her husband had promised was not going to be paid by her. She sent her nurse, a Shudra woman, in her place, and said nothing to anyone.

'And the sage?' Satyavati asked.

'He kept his word,' said Bhishma. '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 Shudra woman, your queen's nurse. Your queen saw that I was old and blind, and insulted me by sending her in her own place. Kakshivat and his brothers are a fine line, but they are not yours. You asked me for heirs and your own house cheated you, not I.'

Bali did not argue with the sage. He made his peace with him, and sent Sudeshna to him again, herself this time, without any substitution in her mind, and she went.

Dirghatamas touched her limbs, and read her, in the way a blind man reads, and told her what she would carry.

'You shall bear a son,' he said, 'powerful, and devoted to the truth.'

It happened as he said. The royal sage Anga was born to Sudeshna, and Bali's line did not end with him, and the name of that son stayed on the eastern country ever after. The Kshatriyas who had come back into the world after Rama's slaughter had come back in the same way, he said: great archers and great car-warriors, learned in dharma, valorous and strong, born to the wives of kings from the seed of Brahmanas.

'That is the story,' Bhishma said. 'Having heard it, mother, do as you think right.'

Satyavati was quiet for a while.

'A curse in a womb,' she said, 'and a wife who would not stay, and a queen who sent her servant. And a king's line saved out of it.'

'Saved out of it,' said Bhishma. 'Nobody plans a lineage. Lineages are the leftovers of what people do to each other in one house.'