Upamanyu and the Ocean of Milk

Bhishma lay on the bed of arrows in the last of the winter light, and Yudhishthira sat near his head with a question that seemed too small to carry to a dying man. Where does love of God begin, he asked, in a heart that nobody has taught it?

"It begins in hunger far more often than in wisdom," said Bhishma. "I will tell you of a child called Upamanyu, and I will first keep him clear of his neighbors, for that name has gathered other stories around it. You have heard how a disciple of that name served Ayoda-Dhaumya, ate the bitter leaves of the arka tree at his teacher's word, went blind and was healed by the Ashvins at the bottom of a well. You may hear one day how Krishna himself climbed into the Himalaya to perform austerity at the ashram of the sage Upamanyu and to receive the thousand names of Shiva there. This is neither of those tales. This is the boyhood that made that sage, before any ashram was his, when he was a thin boy in a poor hut who wanted milk."

The father of that boy was a rishi rich in hymns and in nothing else. Their hut stood where the forest thinned into scrub, and they lived on what the forest gave: wild rice gleaned a handful at a time, roots boiled soft, fruit when the season allowed it. They kept no cow. There was no field to feed one and no fence to keep one, and so the boy had grown to the height of his mother's waist without ever tasting what other children were raised on.

Then his mother took him one morning to the house of a kinsman better placed than they were, a man with a byre and four milking cows in it, and there, because a child had come, a bowl was set in front of him.

He drank. It was warm and thick and faintly sweet, and it coated the mouth and stayed there, and it was nothing whatever like water. He finished it and looked into the empty bowl for a while.

He said nothing on the road home, which should have warned her. That evening he set his bowl down in front of his mother and asked for milk.

She had no milk. She had a little flour of wild grain, ground on a stone that morning, and she had water, and she had the desperate ingenuity of women who have been poor a long time. She stirred the flour into the water until the water went white, and she poured it into his bowl, and she said, "Here. Drink."

The boy drank one mouthful and set the bowl down.

"Mother," he said, "this is not milk."

"It is white," she said.

"It is white and it is wet, and it is not milk." He was not accusing her. He was reporting a fact, in the flat and merciless way of a child who has not yet learned that some facts are kindnesses when left unsaid. "Milk is not white water. Milk is thick. It stays in the mouth after you swallow it. This goes away."

She sat down beside him then, and she did not try a second time, and after a while she told him the truth, because he had already found it out.

"We are poor," she said. "There is no cow in this house, and there is no field in which to keep one, and there is no coin with which to buy one. Milk is not a thing I can make out of flour and water and love. Milk is fortune, my child. It is Sri herself, standing in the byre in the shape of an animal, and fortune is not made in a kitchen. It is given."

"Then who gives it?"

"Mahadeva," she said. "There is no wealth in the three worlds that is not his to give, and there is no giver but him. The people whose byres are full got them from him, whether they know it or not. Kings hold their kingdoms from him. Indra holds heaven from him. And I will tell you the last part of it, which is the part that matters: there is no wealth worth having except his grace, which is the only wealth that nobody can be robbed of."

The boy considered this for a long moment in the smoky dark of the hut.

"Then I will ask him myself," he said.

His mother laughed, and then stopped laughing, because he had not been joking. She said what any mother would say: that austerity is the work of grown sages with beards to their chests, that the forest is cold, that he was a child, that he could not.

He went anyway, north and up, to where the land tilts toward Himavat and the pines give way to rock, and he found a clear place and stood in it and began.

He was a child among ascetics. That is the part the tellers of this tale always pause over. There were sages on that mountain who had been standing in their places since before his father was born, men whose hair had matted into ropes and whose bodies had gone to bone and sinew and will, and among them stood a small boy with a child's soft face, one arm raised, reciting the syllables of praise to Shankara in a voice that had not yet broken.

He fasted. When the fasting became total he lived, the story says, on air and on the powdered dust of the earth, and later on nothing at all. Winter came over that mountain and went, and the sages who passed him looked once and then looked again and then went by in silence, for there is a kind of resolve that even the practiced find it improper to comment on.

He did not stop wanting milk. It is important to say that, because it is the hinge of the whole tale. He had begun this for a bowl of something thick and sweet, and for a long while that was honestly what he stood there for. But a boy cannot say a god's name ten thousand times a day for a year without the name working on him. Somewhere in those months the wanting quietly changed its object, and he did not notice the change, and he went on standing.

The gods noticed. Heat had begun to come off that child the way heat comes off a fire, and the worlds felt it.

So a god came down to him, and it was Indra: white elephant, thunderbolt in his fist, the light of heaven pouring off him and flattening the grass for a hundred paces around.

"Boy," said the lord of the gods, "your austerity has shaken my seat. I am pleased with you. Ask."

Upamanyu opened his eyes.

"Ask," said Indra again, and began to lay out what he had brought, in the manner of a king emptying a treasury onto a floor. Cattle beyond counting, and every one of them in milk. Herds that would darken a valley. A kingdom with rivers in it. Sons, long life, a body that would not sicken, a place in heaven at the end of it all. "Take any of it. Take all of it. It is yours from my hand."

"I will not," said the boy.

"You have starved a year on a rock for want of milk, and I am offering you an ocean of cattle."

"I did not stand here for you," said Upamanyu. "I will take nothing at all, not even the thing I want, except from the hand of Shankara. If he gives me nothing, I will have nothing, and it will still be more than this."

The god's face changed, and what came out of him then was contempt. Who is this Shankara you are dying for, he said. A beggar smeared with the ash of burning grounds. A wanderer with a skull for a bowl and snakes for ornament, who keeps company with ghosts and haunts the places men carry their dead to. He owns nothing. He has nothing to give you. I have heaven in my hand, and you are refusing it for a naked mendicant on a hill.

The boy did not argue. He put his hands over his ears, and then he took them away and spoke, and his voice was a child's voice and did not shake.

"I have heard you slander my Lord," he said, "and I would rather be ash on his body than a king in your heaven. Go. Or stay and watch. But do not speak of him to me again."

The elephant was not there. The thunderbolt was not there. Where Indra had stood there was a white bull, and on the bull sat the god the boy had been calling, with the crescent in his hair and the mountain's daughter beside him, and the light that came off him was not the loud light of heaven but something older and quieter that made the rock seem provisional.

"I was Indra," said Mahadeva. "I was the offer and I was the insult, and you refused both. Child, I am pleased with you as I have rarely been pleased with anyone."

Upamanyu could not stand. He went down on the stone and stayed there.

"You came here for milk," said the god, and there was amusement in it, and no mockery at all. "Then take milk. Let there be an ocean of it for you, and for your line after you, and let it never fail, so that no child of your house ever cries for it again as you cried. And take what you did not come for, which is the better of the two: let devotion to me be unshakable in you, birth after birth, and let it be the one thing in your life that nothing can take away."

They say the ocean was there before the words were finished, white to the horizon where the rock had been, and that the boy drank at last.

"He had waited a year for that taste," said Bhishma, "and when he had it, it did not taste of milk. It tasted of the one who gave it, and he understood, kneeling in it, that he had been given the milk only so that he would have something to hold the grace in.

"So do not despise the appetite that starts a man walking, Yudhishthira. Desire is not the enemy of devotion. It is the first shape devotion takes before it knows its own name. A child cried for milk, would not be fooled by flour, would not be bought by Indra, and by the end was not asking for milk at all. That is how it goes with most of us. We come to God for a bowl of something sweet, and if we are honest about the wanting and stubborn about the door we knock at, we are still standing there when the wanting turns into love."