Saraswati, the Vanishing River

Of all the waters in the epic, the Saraswati is the one the sages speak of with the most care. The Ganga is greater. The Saraswati is holier. She came down out of the northern hills and ran west and south across the plain with seven names in seven channels, and the country she watered was called Brahmavarta, the land the gods marked out first for sacrifice, where the rites were performed correctly before men anywhere else had learned to perform them at all.

Kurukshetra lay in her lap. The boundary was given in a single line that every pilgrim could recite: the tract that lies south of the Saraswati and north of the Drishadvati is the field of Kuru, and it is the altar of the Grandsire. The dust of that ground, the brahmanas said, is enough by itself. Let the wind lift it and carry it onto a man who has lived badly, and he will still go upward.

So the river was a border before she was anything else, and the war that ends the age was fought inside a line she drew.

But she was never only a line on the land. Along her banks, in every bend where the current slowed and left a shelf of clean sand, somebody had built a hermitage. There were fire altars under the trees for a hundred yojanas together. There were fords named after men who had done something at them, and the naming was the whole of the memory: this is where such a one bathed, this is where such a one gave away everything he owned, this is where such a one sat down and did not get up again. Pilgrims walked from ford to ford with a staff and a water pot, and the walking was itself the offering.

She is a mother to the ascetics, the old texts say of her, and they mean it plainly. Wherever the Saraswati went, men who wanted nothing from the world followed her and sat down.

The feud that marked her worst was between two men who had already spent lifetimes at it. Vishvamitra had been born a king and had given up a kingdom to become a brahmana by sheer force of penance, and Vasishtha, who was a brahmana without effort, was the measure he could never quite reach. Both of them kept hermitages on the Saraswati, within sight of each other across the water.

One evening Vishvamitra sat down on his own bank and called the river by name.

"Bring him to me," he said. "Bring Vasishtha across on your current, and set him down here, where I am sitting."

The Saraswati understood exactly what was wanted of her. She was a river and she was a woman, and she was afraid of both of them, and she stood a long while in her own bed considering the shape of the ruin either could make of her. Then she did as she was told. She swelled under the far bank and undercut it, and the ground where Vasishtha sat at his fire broke away entire, and she carried him down toward the man waiting for him.

Vasishtha came on the flood praising her. "You are blameless," he said. "You have done what you were commanded to do, and the world lives by you."

She heard him say it. Then she looked at Vishvamitra standing on her bank with his hand already going out for a weapon, and she changed her mind. She turned her current, and instead of setting Vasishtha down she carried him east, past the ford, out of reach, and put him ashore alive.

Vishvamitra went white.

"Then run with blood," he said, "and let the eaters of flesh drink you."

She ran red for a year. Rakshasas came down to her fords and drank there and danced, the ascetics fled her banks, and the river carried the shame of it in the open where anyone could see. It took a company of sages sitting through a month of rites at that place to wash her clean. They called the ford Vasishthapavaha, the carrying away of Vasishtha, and pilgrims stop at it still.

Walk the Saraswati from her mouth upward and the fords come one after another, each with a story folded into its name.

At Prithudaka the first of kings poured out water for his father and the offering was accepted, and the epic says that a man who bathes there and speaks her name aloud is cleansed even of the killing of a brahmana. At Sapta Saraswata her seven channels are said to gather back into one, and beside it the ascetic Mankanaka kept his fire.

Mankanaka is the one the pilgrims tell about longest. He was cutting kusha grass at the water's edge, and a blade of it opened his hand, and what ran out of the cut was not blood. It was sap, clear and green, the juice of a plant.

He looked at it a long moment. Then he stood up in the shallows and began to dance.

He had lived on air for so many years that his body had stopped being flesh, and here was the proof of it running down his wrist, and the joy of that took him off his feet. He danced, and because of what he was, everything around him began to dance with him. The trees on the bank went first, then the animals, then the hills behind them, and the gods came out to look and were frightened, because a world that has started dancing does not stop of its own accord.

They went to Shiva, and Shiva came down and stood on the sand in the shape of an ordinary brahmana and asked, mildly, what the trouble was.

"Look at my hand," said Mankanaka, still moving. "Sap. Not blood. Sap."

Shiva pressed the tip of one finger against his own thumb, and out of it came ash, white and fine as new snow, without a drop of anything else.

Mankanaka stopped dancing. He put his hand down and stood still in the water and was ashamed of himself, and then he understood who had come, and he bowed and asked instead for something worth asking for. The ford by the seven channels carries his name to this day.

Follow her far enough west and the country changes underfoot. The green goes out of it. The trees stand further and further apart, and then there are no trees, and the sand begins.

At a place called Vinashana, which means the Disappearance, the Saraswati stops.

She does not dry up in the ordinary way, a little less water each year until there is a bed with nothing in it. The epic is specific. She goes down. The water enters the sand and is gone, and a man standing at the edge of it can walk from wet ground to dry ground in the space of a few steps, and behind him is a river and in front of him is desert.

The sages who compiled the pilgrimage gave a reason for it, and the reason is a hard one. She went under, they said, because of what lived in that country. She would not carry her water through the lands of the Abhiras and the Nishadas. Rather than run through them she chose to run beneath them, hiding herself, refusing to be used.

The pilgrims did not accept that she had ended. They walked on into the sand and found her again where she came back up: at Chamasodbheda, at Shivodbheda, at Nagodbheda, three places where the ground opens and water stands clear, and they bathed at all three and counted every one of them the same river.

And beyond that they held to something larger. She had gone under the earth, they said, and she was still travelling east beneath it, and at Prayaga, where the Ganga and the Yamuna come together in the open where anyone can watch, the Saraswati rises between them without being seen. Three rivers meeting, two of them visible. The one you cannot see is the one that makes the confluence worth walking to.

It is the most exact thing the epic ever says about holiness: that the part of it which counts is generally underground.

When the summons went out for Kurukshetra, one man in the world refused both sides and gave his reason in public.

"Duryodhana learned the mace from me," said Balarama, "and so did Bhima. I taught them with the same hands. I will not stand behind either of them, and I will not stand and watch."

Krishna went with the Pandavas. His elder brother took a staff and a water pot and went to the Saraswati.

He began at Prabhasa, where she meets the sea, and walked upstream against her current for forty-two days, and the account of that walk is one of the longest pieces of geography in the epic. He bathed at every ford. He heard the story of each one from the ascetics who kept it, gave away cattle and gold at the altars, ate what pilgrims eat and slept on the sand. Far behind him to the east the field he had refused was filling with the dead at the rate of an army a day, and he did not turn back for any of it.

He came up out of his pilgrimage on the eighteenth morning, and the war had outlasted him by exactly one duel.

They were waiting on the plain when he arrived, Bhima with his mace and Duryodhana with his, the last of eleven armies facing the last of seven. Balarama looked at his two students and made the only ruling he had left in him.

"Not here," he said. "Take it to Samantapanchaka, on the Saraswati. Whoever dies in that ground goes upward, whatever he has been. Let them fight where the river runs."

So they went, and the last fight of the war was fought on her bank, and what happened there, and what Balarama said afterward about the blow that ended it, belongs to another telling.

The river had bounded the field at the beginning and she bounded it at the end. The armies came and were spent inside a line drawn by water, and the water went on afterward toward the sand, and went under, and was not seen again until Prayaga.