The Snake Who Was a Sage

Ruru was of the line of Bhrigu, son of Pramati, grandson of that Chyavana who had fallen blazing out of the sky, and he was young when the worst of it happened. His bride Pramadvara died of a snakebite on the eve of their wedding, and he bought her back with half of his own remaining years. That is told in its own place, and the tellers usually stop there, because a story that ends with the girl breathing again is one people are willing to carry home.

What the tellers leave off is what he did the following season.

He made a vow. Not in a hall, not before witnesses, not in the formal manner with fire and water. He made it walking, out loud, to nobody.

'Every snake,' he said. 'Wherever I find one. As long as I live.'

Then he cut a stick.

It is easy to call this a rage and be done with it, but a rage burns out in a month and this did not. It settled. It became a habit of the eye. He learned where they lie in the heat of the day and where they come out after rain, learned the sound of a body moving through dry leaf litter, learned the stillness of a length of shadow that is not a shadow. He carried the stick the way another man carries a water pot, and when he found what he was always looking for he did the work quickly and walked on.

He did not distinguish. Hooded ones and the small brown ones that live in the thatch. The banded water snakes that eat frogs and could not have harmed a child. Some had venom. Most did not. It made no difference to the stick.

At home, Pramadvara was alive. That was the strange part, and the part he never spoke about. He had won. He had gotten her back, which almost nobody in any age has managed, and he came in at evening with dust on his feet and blood on the wood and sat down to eat with a woman who had been dead. The next morning he went out again.

Years of it. He was very good at it by the end.

One afternoon in a dry stretch of forest he came on a dundubha lying across the path.

A dundubha is a snake the way a stone is a jewel. It has the shape and none of the substance. No fangs worth the name, no venom at all, a thick sluggish body that lives on frogs and eggs and gets stepped on by cattle. This one was old. It lay in the last of the sun with its skin gone dull, and it had heard him coming and had not troubled itself to move, because at that age moving is a decision.

Ruru saw it and raised the stick over his shoulder without breaking stride.

'Put that down,' said the snake.

He did not put it down. He stood with his arm up in the air and his heart going like a drum, because a great many strange things happen in a forest but very few of them are grammatical.

'You are going to kill me,' the dundubha said, 'and I want to know for what. I have not bitten you. I could not bite you if I gave my whole mind to it. I have never in my life had anything in my mouth larger than a frog. Whose death am I paying for?'

Ruru lowered the stick very slowly.

'A girl,' he said. 'On the day before I married her. She stepped in the grass. There was a snake in the grass.'

'Was it me?'

'No.'

'Was it one of mine?'

'I do not know what is one of yours.'

'That,' said the dundubha, 'is the entire matter, and we will come back to it. But answer me first, because I have been waiting a long time and I would like to be sure. What is your name?'

'Ruru. Son of Pramati.'

The old creature let its head down into the dust, and Ruru would have sworn afterward that it was the movement of a man setting down a burden he has carried so far that his shoulders have shaped themselves around it.

'Then this is the day,' it said. 'Sit down, Ruru. I am not what you think I am, and neither, if you will let me finish, are you.'

'My name is Sahasrapat,' the dundubha said. 'It was. I was a rishi, and I studied where you studied and recited what you recite, and I have been lying in the dirt of this forest for longer than you have been alive.

'I had a friend. Khagama, an ascetic, very strict, the sort of man who is at his fire before the birds are up. We grew up at the same teacher's feet, and I was the other kind of boy. Quick, clever, always in need of an audience.

'One morning he was seated at his agnihotra. Alone, the offering in his hand, everything correct. And I took some blades of grass and twisted them into a snake, a straw thing, a child's toy, and I came up behind him and threw it into his lap.

'I meant him to shout. I wanted the shout, and then the laughing afterward.

'He did not shout. He fainted. He went over sideways into his own sacred ground with his eyes rolled back and the ladle still in his hand, and I stood there with my joke lying in the ashes.

'When he came around he was not the friend I had grown up with. He looked at the grass snake and he looked at me and said: since you made a powerless snake to frighten a man at his offering, become a powerless snake yourself. Become the thing you made. The words were out of him before he had finished sitting up, which is how the worst curses always come.

'I begged. I told him it was a joke and he said he knew it was a joke, that a joke was exactly what it had been, and that this was the trouble. Then he softened, the way even furious men soften, and he set a term on it.

'He said: when Ruru, son of Pramati, comes before you, you will be released.

'So I have lain in this forest through more monsoons than I bothered to count, eating frogs, a snake in name and nothing else, waiting for a man who had not been born. And in the end you came, and the first thing you did was lift a stick over me.'

'Now,' said Sahasrapat, 'the other half.

'Look at what you have been doing, because I do not think you have looked at it once in all these years. You have a vow against snakes. There are no snakes in your vow. There is a word, and every creature the word gets attached to falls under your stick, and the word covers a hundred kinds of animal that have nothing in common but a shape. Dundubhas have no venom. We carry every misfortune of the serpents and none of their power, and you have been putting us to death for looking like something.

'And even the true ones, Ruru. Which of them held a council and voted to have your bride killed? A snake in grass is a snake in grass. It is not an assembly. There is no one in that species to punish, because there is no one in it who decided anything.'

'Then what was I supposed to do with it?' said Ruru, and his voice was not steady. 'Tell me that. She was dead in front of me. What was I supposed to do?'

'What you did do,' said the sage. 'You gave her half your years. That was the answer, and it was a greater thing than any man in this age has managed. The trouble is that you did not stop when the answer was finished. You gave her half your life, and then began spending the other half on this.

'Hear the rest, since you are a brahmin and I was one. The kshatriya is made for the strike. Vengeance is a tool out of his house and a proper tool there, in a war, under a rule, against an enemy who can answer. It is not out of ours. Sacrifice, study, teaching, giving, and abstention from injury to living things. That is our list, and the last of them is set at the top, because it is the only one that costs you when your blood is up.

'A brahmin who takes up a stick is not stronger than a brahmin without one. He is a man doing a job he was never trained to measure, with nobody in the world to tell him when he has done enough.'

'And if you think nothing is accomplished without a weapon,' Sahasrapat said, 'then let me leave you with the one story you most need.

'There is a king of your own age named Janamejaya, of the house of Bharata, whose father Parikshit was killed by Takshaka, lord of serpents. He did what you did, only he had a kingdom to do it with. He did not cut a stick. He kindled a fire and hired the finest reciters in the world and began a sacrifice whose purpose was that snakes should be called out of their holes by name and fall into it.

'And they fell. In thousands, dragged out of the air by syllables, whole lineages of them, hissing down into that flame day after day. Takshaka himself, the one guilty party in the entire affair, fled to Indra and wound himself around the god's own couch, and the mantras began drawing the couch across the sky with Indra sitting on it.

'It was stopped by a boy.

'His name is Astika, son of Jaratkaru, and his mother was a serpent, so he was half of each side of the quarrel. He walked into that hall with nothing in his hands, and he praised the sacrifice. He praised it so well, so exactly, that the king offered him any boon he asked, in front of every priest present, where it could not be taken back. And the boy asked that the sacrifice cease.

'And it ceased. One child, with a sentence, saved what was left of a species that a king with the wealth of the Bharatas could not finish killing.

'You are out here with a stick.'

Then the old dundubha rose off the path, and the dull skin was not there, and a man stood in the last of the light with his own shape given back to him, and blessed Ruru, and went up into the air and was gone.

Ruru stood in the road a while. Then he laid the stick down in the grass and left it there, and did not carry another.

He went afterward to hear the whole of the boy's story properly, in a hall of sages where such things are told in full.

Grief that arms itself will always find a species to blame. It never finds the one that did the harm.