The Wife Who Cooled a Naga's Anger

Bhishma lay on the bed of arrows and went on with the history of the Naga, and Yudhishthira sat where he had been sitting all morning and let him tell it in his own order.

The Naga's name was Padmanabha, and his work was the sun's. The great serpents take their turns at the car of Surya as other creatures take their turns at other labours, and Padmanabha had just finished a term of full fifteen days dragging that car across the sky. When the term expired he obtained the permission of Surya and came back to his own house.

His wife saw him coming and went out quickly to wash his feet and to discharge the other duties of a similar nature, and when those were done she took her seat by his side. The Naga, refreshed from his fatigue, asked her what a man asks who has been away from his own roof for a fortnight. Had the deities been worshipped in his absence, according to the instructions he had given her and the ordinances laid down in the scriptures? Had she been firm in the observance of the duties of hospitality? Had she stayed inside the barriers of duty and righteousness while he was in the sky?

She told him that nothing had fallen off. The adorations to the deities had been made in every respect. The duties of hospitality towards persons arrived as guests in his abode had been attended to without the slightest negligence.

And then she gave him the one piece of news the house had.

"Fifteen days ago a Brahmana has come here," she said. "He has not disclosed his object to me. He desires to have an interview with thee. Dwelling the while on the banks of the Gomati he is anxiously expecting thy return. Of rigid vows, that Brahmana is sitting there, engaged in the recitation of the Vedas. O chief of the Nagas, I have made a promise to him to the effect that I would despatch thee to him as soon as thou wouldst come back to thy abode."

A man had come to the house of a serpent, had been asked to wait, and had waited fifteen days on a riverbank without saying what he wanted.

The Naga did not go. He asked a question first, and the question had his whole nature in it.

"O thou of sweet smiles," said the Naga, "for whom hast thou taken that Brahmana? Is he really a human being, or is he some deity that has come hither in the disguise of a Brahmana?"

It is worth noticing what part of the message had stung him. Not the waiting. Not the fifteen days. What he could not get past was the direction of the traffic. Somebody had left word at his door that he was to go out to a riverbank and present himself.

"O thou of great fame, who is there among human beings that would be desirous of seeing me, or that would be competent for the purpose? Can a human being, desiring to see me, leave such a command with thee about dispatching me to him for paying him a visit at the place where he is dwelling?"

Then he told his wife what a Naga is, which is the sort of thing a man only explains to his wife when he is angry, since she has known it for years.

"Amongst the deities and Asuras and celestial Rishis, O amiable lady, the Nagas are endued with great energy. Possessed of great speed, they are endued again with excellent fragrance. They deserve to be worshipped. They are capable of granting boons. Indeed, we too deserve to be followed by others in our train. I tell thee, O lady, that we are incapable of being seen by human beings."

Every clause of that is true. The Nagas are swift, they are fragrant, they are worshipped, they do grant boons, and the eye of a man does not ordinarily fall on them at all. He had not overstated a single item. He had simply arranged a list of true things into a reason for leaving a guest sitting on a riverbank until the guest gave up or died there.

He was a righteous serpent in a house where the rites had been kept and the guests had been fed, and he had come home from the service of the sun, and he was on the edge of doing the one discourteous thing of his life because a Brahmana had presumed to expect him.

His wife did not tell him he was wrong about the Nagas. She began somewhere else.

"Judging by his simplicity and candour," she said, "I know that that Brahmana is not any deity who subsists on air."

She had watched him for fifteen days and she gave her evidence first, before she gave her argument. There was no disguise in the man. Whatever a god pretending to be a Brahmana looks like, it is not what she had been looking at from her door every morning while he sat by the Gomati reciting.

"O thou of great wrath, I also know this, viz., that he reveres thee with all his heart. His heart is set upon the accomplishment of some object that depends upon thy aid. As the bird called Chataka, which is fond of rain, waits in earnest expectation of a shower, even so is that Brahmana waiting in expectation of a meeting with thee."

That is the image she chose, and she chose it exactly. The chataka is the bird that will not drink from the ground. It waits with its beak open for the cloud, and what falls from the cloud is the only water it will take, and if the cloud withholds it there is nothing else in the world that will serve. She was telling her husband that he was the cloud. The man on the bank was not asking him for one favour among many available favours. He was thirsty in the one direction where only a Naga could pour.

"Let no calamity betake him in consequence of his inability to obtain a sight of thee," she said. "No person born like thee in a respectable family can be regarded to remain respectable by neglecting a guest arrived at his house."

There is the sentence that turned him, and it turned him by using his own pride against his own pride. He had been arguing from his birth. Very well, she said, argue from your birth. A house is respectable because of what it does at its door, not because of what it is descended from, and a man born in such a house stops being what he was born as on the day he lets a guest sit outside it.

"Casting off that wrath which is natural to thee, it behoveth thee to go and see that Brahmana. It behoveth thee not to suffer thyself to be consumed by disappointing that Brahmana."

Having said what the guest was, she said what a refusal costs, and then she set out, in order, what the alternatives earn. This is the short catalogue she gave her husband, and it is worth having in its own words rather than in a summary of them.

First, the price of turning a suppliant away. The king or the prince, by refusing to wipe the tears of persons that come to him from hopes of relief, incurs the sin of foeticide. That is the weight she put on it. Not discourtesy, not a lapse of manners. The killing of an unborn child, because a man who comes with a hope and is sent away with nothing has had something ended in him that had not yet been allowed to be born.

Then the earnings, which she listed one after another as the righteous list them.

By abstaining from speech one attains to wisdom. By practising gifts one acquires great fame. By adhering to truthfulness of speech, one acquires the gift of eloquence and comes to be honoured in heaven. By giving away land one attains to that high end which is ordained for Rishis leading the sacred mode of life. By earning wealth through righteous means, one succeeds in attaining to many desirable fruits. By doing in its entirety what is beneficial for oneself, one can avoid going to hell.

That is what the righteous say.

Notice the shape of the list. Silence, gifts, truth, land, honest earning, and then the last item, which is the odd one and the one she had been walking towards the whole time. Doing in its entirety what is beneficial for oneself. Not doing most of it. Not doing the parts that are pleasant, or the parts that are visible, or the parts that a Naga of good family finds consistent with his dignity. The whole of it, including the piece that is presently sitting on a riverbank waiting for a cloud.

A house where the rites are performed and the guest is left outside is a house that has done its own good in part. She did not say so. She put the item at the end of the list, and let it sit there, and stopped talking.

"I had no arrogance due to pride," the Naga said. "In consequence, however, of my birth, the measure of my arrogance was considerable."

That is as honest a sentence as anyone in the epic manages about himself. He was not a vain creature who had gone looking for reasons to think well of himself. He had simply been born into a race that is worshipped, and the arrogance had come with the birth, the way the fragrance and the speed had come with it.

"Of wrath, which is born of desire, O blessed lady, I have none. It has all been consumed by the fire of thy excellent instructions. I do not behold, O blessed dame, any darkness that is thicker than wrath."

And then he said the thing about his own people that a member of a people can say and a stranger cannot. In consequence of the Nagas having excess of wrath, they have become an object of reproach with all persons. The serpents are worshipped and the serpents are avoided, and he knew perfectly well which of their qualities had earned them the second of those.

Then he gave her the examples, because a man arguing himself out of anger reaches for the dead.

By succumbing to the influence of wrath, he said, the ten-headed Ravana of great prowess became the rival of Sakra, and was for that reason slain by Rama in battle. The ten heads had not killed him. The prowess had not killed him. It was the temper that made him decide he was the equal of the lord of heaven, and once a creature has decided that, there is only one way the account can close.

The second example was a family. The Rishi Rama of Bhrigu's race had entered the inner apartments of the palace of Kartavirya to bring away the calf of the Homa cow that belonged to his father. That was the whole of the offence: a man walking into a house after a calf that was used for sacrifices and was his father's. The sons of Kartavirya, hearing of it, yielded to wrath and took the entry as an insult to their royal house, and as the consequence thereof they met with destruction at the hands of Rama.

And their father after them. Kartavirya of great strength, resembling the Thousand-eyed Indra himself, was slain in battle by Rama of Jamadagni's race, and the cause given is not his strength and not his thousand arms. It is that he yielded to wrath.

A calf. That is what the thousand-armed king and every one of his sons were finally spent on.

"Verily, O amiable lady, at thy words I have restrained my wrath," the Naga said, "that foe of penances, that destroyer of all that is beneficial for myself."

He had come home from fifteen days at the car of the sun, had been met at the door and had his feet washed, had questioned his wife about her conduct in his absence, and had been told about a guest. Within the space of one conversation he had gone from asking whether any human being was even competent to look at him, to naming his own anger as the enemy of his own austerities. Nobody had shouted at him. Nobody had shamed him in front of the household. His wife had told him what she had seen, quoted a bird, and read him a list.

"I praise my own self greatly since, O large-eyed one, I am fortunate enough to own thee for my wife, thee that art possessed of every virtue and that hast inexhaustible merits."

That is not quite a thank you, and it is better than one. He congratulated himself on his marriage. It is the only boast he makes in the whole exchange that his wife would have let stand.

"I shall now proceed to that spot where the Brahmana is staying. I shall certainly address that Brahmana in proper words, and he shall certainly go hence, his wishes being accomplished."

And he went. He thought about the man the whole way down, wondering what business could possibly have brought a human being to the city of the Nagas, and when he came to the place where the guest was sitting he did not announce himself as the chief of a race that grants boons. He spoke first, and he spoke in sweet words, and the first thing he said was an apology for anger that had not even reached the riverbank.

"O Brahmana, do not yield to wrath. I address thee in peace. Do not be angry. After whom hast thou come hither? What is thy object?"

The Brahmana said that his name was Dharmaranya, that he had come for a sight of the Naga Padmanabha, and that he had been waiting as a chataka waits for the clouds.

He was told he had found him. He was told to command his host in whatever he wished. He was told that he was certain to return with his object fulfilled. Bhishma, who had been laid low by a man he had trained, told all of this to a king who would shortly have to hold audiences of his own, and did not underline any of it.