Matali's Search

In the Kuru court, while Krishna stood there as envoy for peace, the sage Kanva stood before Duryodhana and looked at the young man's set jaw and unbending pride, and decided a warning wrapped in a story would land where a plain warning could not. "There is always a strength greater than the strength you have counted," Kanva said, "and I will tell you how even Garuda, who feeds on serpents and darkens the sky with a single wingbeat, learned that lesson from a hand he never saw coming." And he began.

Matali was Indra's own charioteer, the one who drove the king of the gods into every battle heaven had fought, and no one in the three worlds handled reins with a surer hand. But in his own house he faced a battle no chariot could win. His daughter Gunakeshi had grown into a woman of such grace and intelligence that every match offered to her felt, to her father's eye, unworthy - too proud, too dull, too small for what she was. Season after season passed. He searched with his mind's eye through the worlds of gods and men, among gods, daityas, gandharvas, men and rishis, and found no one fit. At last, after counsel through the night with his wife Sudharma, he resolved that a groom must be sought among the serpents, and he entered the earth. On the road he met Narada, the wanderer who knew every corner of creation, who was himself going down to see Varuna, lord of the waters.

"I have searched among gods and men and found no son worthy of her," Matali confessed. "I go now to the world of the serpents."

Narada smiled the smile of someone already planning a very long journey. "Let us travel together," he said. "I will show you everything in the regions beneath the earth, and when we have searched there, we will choose a worthy groom." And the two set out - not upward, where Matali already knew every road, but downward, into the parts of creation he had never had reason to visit.

They went first to Varuna, lord of the waters, in his realm beneath the earth, and Narada pointed out the wonders of his golden abode and the sons and grandsons of the water-lord. No son there caught Matali's eye.

From there Narada led him on into Patala, at the navel of the world of the serpents, where the waters roar down and the undersea fire blazes but keeps to its limits, and where the gods once drank the amrita and stored what remained. But no groom presented himself there either.

Next came Hiranyapura, the city of the daityas and danavas, the old rival kin of the gods, built with a splendor that unsettled Matali more than it impressed him - towers that seemed to compete with heaven's own architecture, courts where beauty and menace sat at the same table and could not always be told apart. Narada walked through it all with the ease of a man who had seen every kind of grandeur and stopped being surprised by any of it, while Matali, for all his years driving the war-god's chariot, found himself gripping his own resolve more tightly than he expected to.

They passed on through the world of the Suparnas, the serpent-slaying birds of Garuda's line, and down to Rasatala, where Surabhi the mother of cows dwells. Nothing in any of these worlds - not Varuna's halls, not Patala's roaring waters, not the daityas' unsettling splendor - held the son he was searching for. "There is one country left," Narada finally said, "stranger than all the others, and it is there, I think, we will finally find what your daughter deserves." And he led Matali into Bhogavati, the city of the nagas, the heart of the kingdom of the serpents.

Nagaloka opened beneath them like a second sky turned upside down and studded with gems instead of stars. Matali had heard of the serpent kingdom the way anyone hears of a neighboring country they have never had reason to visit - a place of hoarded treasure, jeweled palaces built from coiled architecture no mason above the earth could imitate, and a court of nagas whose hoods shimmered with colors that had no names in the language of the upper worlds. Rivers of clear water ran between halls of black stone veined with gold, and the light down there came from the gems themselves, not from any sun, so that the whole kingdom glowed faintly, day and night alike, like a lamp that never needed oil.

It was a beautiful and a fearful place in equal measure, for every splendor was mixed with the knowledge that this was a kingdom perpetually hunted - Garuda, the great devourer of serpents, took his toll on Nagaloka the way a river takes its toll on a bank, steadily, without malice, simply because it was in his nature to eat and their nature to be eaten.

Among the young nagas presented to Matali and Narada, one stood apart: Sumukha, of Airavata's line, grandson of Aryaka, a naga prince of striking beauty, quick intelligence, and a gentleness that seemed almost startling in a kingdom so accustomed to danger. Matali watched him for only a short while before he knew, in the way a father sometimes simply knows, that this was the son he had crossed so many worlds to find. Narada agreed, quietly pleased, as though the whole long search had been leading here from the start.

But Aryaka, Sumukha's grandfather, did not share their joy unmixed. When Narada asked for Sumukha on Matali's behalf, a silence fell over the jeweled hall, and at last the old naga spoke what everyone else in the room already knew and had hoped not to say aloud: Garuda had already devoured Sumukha's father Chikura, and when he left he had said, "I will devour Sumukha after a month." To marry Gunakeshi to Sumukha was to promise a bridegroom to a wedding he might not live to attend.

Matali did not withdraw his offer. He had crossed Varuna's halls, the roaring waters of Patala, and the unsettling city of the daityas to find a son worthy of his daughter, and he was not going to surrender him now to a sentence that had not yet been carried out. "My mind is made up," he said. "Sumukha will be my son-in-law. Let him come with Narada and me to Indra, lord of the gods, and I will try to counter Suparna." So they went up to Indra's court with Sumukha, and there the four-armed Vishnu happened to be present. Narada told the whole tale. Vishnu urged Indra to give the young naga amrita; Indra would not give amrita, but he granted Sumukha a long, full span of life. Sumukha's face shone at the boon, and he was wed to Gunakeshi and went home rejoicing.

But the reckoning came almost at once. Garuda, the golden-winged devourer who had already claimed Sumukha's father, heard that Indra had granted his chosen prey a long life, and considered it an insult layered on top of an appetite - his food, ordained by the creator, snatched from him as though his claim meant nothing at all. He rose from wherever he had been resting, and the sky over the three worlds darkened as his wings opened, and he flew straight to Indra's own court, halting the three worlds with the wind of his wings, to claim what he considered rightfully his.

He did not ask. He announced. Standing before the king of the gods, wings still spread wide enough to eclipse the hall's own light, Garuda declared that no one, not Indra himself, stood higher than he did in strength, and that Sumukha belonged to his hunger by the creator's own ordinance. He boasted that he could bear the burden of the worlds with ease, that he carried Vishnu himself, and that he could bear Indra on a single one of his feathers without tiring. The court fell silent. It was then that Vishnu, who had been listening without a word, answered him.

Vishnu did not raise a weapon, and did not raise his voice. "Bear my right arm alone," he said, "and your boast will be proved true." And without ceremony he laid his arm across the great bird's shoulders - lightly, without pressing down with his strength, for he did not wish to take his life.

Garuda fell to the ground, unconscious, his wings spread out and his feathers shedding under the load, for that single arm weighed as much as the whole earth with its mountains. He had claimed he could bear the king of the gods on one feather without strain, and here he could not bear the weight of a single arm laid on him without ceremony or force - not a blow, not even a grip, only a fraction of what that arm could have shown him had Vishnu chosen to press down in earnest.

Garuda, humbled in a way no battle had ever humbled him, bowed his head before Vishnu and begged forgiveness: he was a bird of little understanding, he said, and had not known Vishnu's supreme strength. Vishnu, pleased, told him affectionately never to act so again. The fury that had carried him roaring into Indra's court emptied out of him all at once, and Sumukha lived on in the long life Indra had granted him, at Gunakeshi's side.

Kanva let the silence in the Kuru hall settle before he finished. "Garuda believed he could carry the king of the gods on a feather," he said to Duryodhana, "and could not carry the weight of a single arm laid across his shoulders in truth. You count your brothers, your allies, your armies, and you believe the sum makes you unanswerable. Somewhere beyond your counting there is always a greater strength, Duryodhana, and the proud never meet it until it has already laid its hand upon them. Choose, while you still can, not to be the bird boasting in the hall when that hand arrives."