Why the Moon Wanes

The pilgrimage had carried the Pandavas from one sacred ford to the next since Lomasa had joined them in the forest, and now it brought them to the place where the Saraswati, after its long course across the land, gave itself up to the western sea. The water here ran wide and slow, silver under the evening light, and where it met the salt tide the two currents mixed and stilled into something neither river nor ocean.

'This is Prabhasa,' said Dhaumya, standing at the edge where the sand grew wet. 'A tirtha older than most, and holier than its quiet suggests. Kings have bathed here to wash away deeds too heavy to carry home. And it is called, among those who know its history, the ford of the moon.'

Yudhishthira looked out at the water, at the white disc of the moon just rising pale over the sea before the sun had fully gone. 'The moon has a story here?'

'The moon,' Dhaumya said, 'was cursed on this ground, or near enough to it, and came here to be healed. Not fully healed. That is the part worth hearing.' He gestured for the brothers and Draupadi to sit on the bank, where the sound of the river giving itself to the sea would carry under his words. 'Sit, and I will tell you what happened to Soma, the lord of the herbs and the mind, when he made the mistake every husband with more than one wife is warned against.'

'Daksha, the great progenitor,' Dhaumya began, 'had twenty-seven daughters, and he gave every one of them in marriage to Soma, the moon, so that each night of the month would carry the name of a bride. These are the lunar houses that the priests still reckon by when they set a date for a sacrifice or a wedding. Rohini, Bharani, Krittika, and the rest, all sisters, all wives of one husband under one roof.'

'A crowded house,' Yudhishthira said.

'A house is only as crowded as its master makes it feel,' Dhaumya answered. 'And Soma did not treat his wives alike, though a husband owes each of them the same face. Rohini was lovelier than her sisters, or gentler, or simply first in his heart, and Soma began to spend his nights with her alone. He rode to her house, he lingered at her door, he forgot the other twenty-six the way a man forgets a debt he has decided not to think about. Night after night, the moon's light fell on Rohini's threshold and nowhere else.'

'The other daughters noticed,' Dhaumya went on. 'A wife knows within a season whether she is loved or merely kept. They waited first, hoping the favor would pass, the way young wives hope such things pass. It did not. Rohini grew brighter in his company and the rest grew thin with waiting, until waiting became complaint, and complaint became something they could no longer carry alone. They went, all twenty-six together, to their father.'

'Daksha heard them out,' Dhaumya said, 'and a father who has given twenty-seven daughters to one husband does not hear a complaint like that lightly. He summoned Soma and rebuked him, plainly, the way an elder is permitted to rebuke even a god who has married into his family. Give each wife her due, he said, or answer for the ones you have wronged.'

'Soma promised to amend it. He did not. The old habit of the heart proved stronger than the promise of the mouth, and within a season he was back at Rohini's door every night as before, and the twenty-six were forgotten again as before. So Daksha did what a wronged father does when persuasion has failed him twice: he cursed his son-in-law.'

'He did not ask the moon to die,' Dhaumya said, before Yudhishthira could ask it. 'He asked for something crueler and more exact. He cursed Soma with kshaya, a wasting sickness, so that the moon's own light would fail him the way he had let his wives fail for want of it. And because the whole world eats by the moon's light, because the herbs and the grain swell and ripen under it as much as under the sun, the curse did not stay in the sky. Night by night Soma grew thinner and dimmer. The plants that ripened by moonlight stopped ripening. The tide of growth that runs through every living thing, the thing the physicians still call by his name, slowed and began to fail with him. The gods who had eaten by that tide watched their own strength going out with his light, and understood that a private household quarrel had become the whole world's hunger.'

'It was the gods themselves who acted, then,' Dhaumya said, 'for a hunger that reaches every living thing is a hunger the gods cannot afford to ignore. They gathered Soma, wasted nearly to nothing, and brought him here, to this meeting of the Saraswati and the sea, and set him down in the water at this very ford to bathe and be cleansed of what his father-in-law had laid on him.'

He paused, and looked at the darkening water as if he expected to see the moon's old sickness still dissolving in it. 'Brahma came to this ford himself,' he said, 'when the gods could not undo Daksha's word on their own authority, for a curse rightly given is not a thing that any power simply cancels, not even the god who set the first law in motion. Brahma weighed the wrong Soma had done his wives against the mercy the world needed, and he did not lift the curse. He divided it.'

'Divided a curse?' Yudhishthira asked.

'Halved it into a rhythm,' Dhaumya said. 'Brahma decreed that Soma would waste, as Daksha had cursed, but only for a fortnight, night by night, until nothing of his light remained. And then, for the fortnight after, he would be restored, night by night, filling again toward fullness. Not healed once and forgiven. Sentenced to lose and regain his own light forever, so that the twenty-six wives he had slighted would never again go a full month unremembered, and Rohini would never again keep him for a full month either.'

'That is why the moon you see tonight is not the moon you will see in fifteen days,' Dhaumya said, 'and why it was not the moon you saw fifteen days past either. Every man who has ever watched it thin toward darkness and swell back toward fullness has watched Daksha's justice being carried out on schedule, forever, over the ford where you are sitting.'

Yudhishthira was quiet a moment, watching the pale shape climb clear of the sea. 'There is another story about the moon,' he said. 'A theft, not a marriage. Brihaspati's wife.'

'A different quarrel entirely,' Dhaumya said. 'That one is Soma's own crime, taking what belonged to another man outright, and it is not the story this water tells. This ford remembers only the household wrong, the wife left waiting, the father who would not let it pass, and the god who turned a sentence into a season instead of an ending.'

Draupadi, listening in silence until then, said quietly, 'He was never forgiven. Only given a shape he could survive.'

'Yes,' said Dhaumya. 'That is what this water is for. Not every wrong dissolves. Some are only made bearable, turned into something the guilty can carry and the wronged can watch being carried, month after month, so that no one forgets what was done and no one is destroyed by it either.'

Yudhishthira rose and looked once more at the moon, thin as a nail-paring above the darkening sea, already beginning, as it always had, to fill again toward Rohini's fortnight. Twelve years of exile were themselves a kind of Daksha's curse, he thought, a sentence with a shape rather than an escape, and he said nothing more, but bowed to the water before they walked on toward the next ford in the morning.