The Line of Yadu

The fire of the snake sacrifice had sunk to a bed of coals, and the eighteen books were finished.

For many days Vaishampayana had recited them: the birth of the sons of Pandu, the hall of dice, the twelve years in the forest and the thirteenth in disguise, the eighteen days upon the field at Kurukshetra, the old man lying on his bed of arrows, the crowning, and the last walk into the mountains. When he came to the end he folded his hands and said nothing more, and the sages who had listened did not move.

King Janamejaya, for whose sake the whole recitation had been made, sat looking into the coals.

"You have told me the war," he said at last.

"I have told you everything," said Vaishampayana.

"You have told me everything except one thing," said the king. "Through all of it there was a man in a chariot who never took up a weapon. He drove for Arjuna. He counted the days and the omens. He said what was to be done, and it was done, and afterwards nobody could say whether it had been done by men or through them. My fathers called him cousin. The rishis sitting here call him something else, and they lower their eyes when they say it. Twice in your telling the whole world stopped to look at him, and twice you went on with the battle. Tell me now what you passed over. Whose son is he, and whose grandson, and out of what house? Give me the line."

The sages leaned forward together, for this was the thing they had waited through eighteen books to hear. They had not come for the arrows. They had come for the charioteer.

"You are asking for the vamsha of Hari," said Vaishampayana, "the lineage of the one who carries sorrow away. Very well. But I shall not begin at Mathura, and I shall not begin with his mother. A river is never understood at its mouth. I shall begin with the moon, and I shall come down to him through a thousand names, and when I set him at the end of that line you will see something that the war never showed you."

"What shall I see?" said Janamejaya.

"What he chose to be born into," said Vaishampayana.

That telling is the Harivamsa, the supplement, the book that comes after the ending because the ending was not enough. It is not another war. It is a genealogy, patient and enormous, and the god is waiting at the end of it.

"From Atri came Soma, the moon," said Vaishampayana, "and the moon is the beginning of this house. It is a cold light and a borrowed one, it wastes away and it returns, and no kingdom founded under it has ever been able to hold still.

"Of Soma came Budha, and of Budha and Ila came Pururavas, who loved the apsara Urvashi, and kept her by a condition, and broke the condition, and spent the rest of his reign walking beside lakes looking for a woman made of light. Of his house came Ayus, and of Ayus came Nahusha, who governed the earth so well that the gods lent him the throne of heaven, and sat on it so badly that they took it back and left him crawling on his belly through the forest. And of Nahusha came Yayati."

"I have heard the name," said Janamejaya.

"Everything in this line hangs from it," said Vaishampayana.

Yayati was emperor of the whole earth to the four seas. He married Devayani, the daughter of Shukra, priest of the asuras, and by her he had two sons, Yadu the eldest and Turvasu. And he took also Sharmishtha, a king's daughter serving in Devayani's house, and by her he had three: Druhyu, Anu, and Puru the youngest.

For long ages he ruled and gave and sacrificed, and he was never once satisfied. He had the earth and he wanted the years. He drank pleasure the way a fire drinks butter, and like a fire he grew larger and hungrier at once.

Shukra learned at last how his daughter had been slighted, and the curse of a father-in-law who is also the priest of the demons is not a small weather. "Old age," he said. "Now. Since you have used your youth as a man uses a stolen horse, you will be old before the sun sets."

And it came down on him between one breath and the next. The hands that had held the reins of the world shook. The hair went white to the roots. His teeth loosened in his head, and his sight thinned, and the strength ran out of his thighs like water out of a cracked jar.

"You are merciful," said Yayati bitterly, "you have left me my desire and taken everything I had to meet it with."

"That is old age," said Shukra. "But I will leave you one door. If any man will take this decrepitude from you and give you his youth in exchange, the trade will hold, and you may have it back again when you are done."

So Yayati went home, an old man in an emperor's chariot, and sent for his five sons.

He called Yadu first, because Yadu was the eldest and the strongest, and because a father asks his best son first.

"You see what has been done to me," said Yayati. "Take this old age from me and wear it a thousand years, and give me your youth in its place. When the thousand years are finished I will take it back and return your years to you, and you shall have the kingdom and the earth after me."

Yadu looked at his father for a long moment.

"No," he said.

"Say that again."

"No," said Yadu. "I will not. An old man cannot eat what he wants nor hold what he lifts. He is spoken to gently, which is another way of being spoken past. Young men make way for him in the road and laugh behind him. I will not go into that for you, father, and I will not tell you a lie about why. It is not that I cannot bear it. It is that I will not bear it so that you can go on drinking. Your thirst is not a debt I owe."

There was a silence in the hall.

"There is truth in what you say," said Yayati, "which is why I shall curse you and not merely disown you. Hear it. You refused the kingdom when it was offered with a price on it. Then you shall never have it without one. Neither you, Yadu, nor any son of your body, nor any son of theirs, to the end of your line, shall be a crowned and sovereign king. You will be lords. You will be many. You will be feared on every road you ride. And you will never sit under the white umbrella."

Turvasu he asked next, and Druhyu, and Anu, and each of them refused him, and each of them he cursed. Only Puru, the youngest, bowed and said, "Give it to me," and took the old age onto his shoulders as a man takes a load of firewood, and stood there suddenly grey while his father walked out young into the garden.

A thousand years later Yayati came back, having learned the one thing that a thousand years teaches: that desire is not put out by feeding it, any more than a fire is. He returned Puru his youth, gave Puru the throne, portioned the rest of the earth among the four he had cursed, and went into the forest.

So the crown went down the line of Puru, and out of Puru in time came Bharata, and the Kurus, and the men who fought at Kurukshetra.

And the eldest son, the one who would not lie to his father, walked south and west with a curse on his house: strength without sovereignty, greatness with no throne at the end of it. His people took his name. They were called the Yadavas.

"Now hear the river," said Vaishampayana, "and do not try to hold every name of it, for no man holds a river. Let them go past you and watch which way the water bends."

Of Yadu came four sons, and of them the line ran strongest through Kroshtu. Out of Kroshtu, generation upon generation: fathers who conquered nothing and lost nothing, sons who moved their cattle and their wagons a little further west when the grazing failed, kings in every way except the one way their grandfather had been refused. They took the great river valleys. They multiplied like the reeds along the Yamuna.

Out of that stream came Madhu, and the Madhu forest that carries his name. Out of it came Satvata, and after Satvata the water divided as a river divides in flat country, into three channels that would run side by side for a thousand years and never quite become one water: the Vrishnis, the Andhakas, the Bhojas. Vrishni, whose name the greatest of them would carry to the end. Andhaka, whose sons held the assembly. Bhoja, whose house ruled in the city.

They were a strange nation. They had no king, because they were forbidden a king; so instead they had a council, and every clan in it had a voice, and the voices did not agree, and the arguing of the Yadavas became a thing that other peoples made jokes about. They were also the finest cavalry in the world and had never lost a war. A curse worked out over a thousand years is not a curse that anyone still remembers as a curse. It becomes simply the shape of a people.

"And the city?" said Janamejaya.

"Mathura," said Vaishampayana, "on the Yamuna, in the Surasena country, and by then the water had come down to two houses that lived a street apart.

"In the Bhoja house sat old Ugrasena, and his brother Devaka beside him, and Ugrasena had a son named Kamsa whom the whole city was already afraid of.

"And in the Vrishni house was Shurasena, lord of that country, and Shurasena had a son.

"His name was Vasudeva, and he was the mildest man in Mathura, and nothing in the world had ever suggested that the line of Yadu was travelling ten thousand years to arrive at him."

Devaka's daughter was Devaki, and Kamsa had grown up calling her sister, and when she was given in marriage to Vasudeva of the Vrishnis the two houses came out into the street together.

It was Kamsa himself who took the reins of the bridal chariot. He did it for love, or for the look of the thing, or because a strong man enjoys being seen doing a small service. He stood in front of the couple with the horses in his hands and drove them through Mathura, and the city threw flowers, and the drums went ahead of them, and Devaki sat behind her cousin laughing.

Then a voice spoke out of the empty sky above the chariot, and it was heard by everyone in that street at once.

"Fool," it said. "You are driving your own death to her husband's door. The eighth child of this woman you are carrying will kill you."

The drums stopped. Kamsa dropped the reins, and had Devaki by the hair, and a sword out of the chariot in his other hand before anyone had understood the words. It was Vasudeva who stood up and bargained for her life, quietly, the way a mild man does when there is nothing else left to try: not her, take the children, every one of them, I will carry them to you myself. And Kamsa, who was cruel but not deaf, agreed, and put them both in prison instead.

What was done in that prison, and how the eighth child went out of it across a river in the rain, are told in their own place. This telling ends before them. This telling was only ever the line.

"Do you see it now?" said Vaishampayana. "The kingdoms of the earth were open to him. He could have come as a Kuru, or as a son of Ikshvaku in Ayodhya where his own foot had walked before, into a house with a throne standing empty at the end of the hall. He came instead into the one great line in the world that had been forbidden a crown."

"He was never a king in Mathura," said Janamejaya slowly. "Not once, in all your eighteen books. He set old Ugrasena back on that seat. He made Yudhishthira an emperor. He crowned other men his whole life."

"He held the reins and never the sceptre," said Vaishampayana. "The lord of everything, born under a curse of no sovereignty, and he kept it faithfully to the last day. Yadu would not buy a throne with a lie, and ten thousand years later God came down into Yadu's house and would not wear one at all."

The coals had gone dark. The snake sacrifice was over, the epic was over, and the sages sat on in the ash, and nobody got up. This is why the eighteen books could not be the end. Without the Harivamsa the Mahabharata tells you the war. With it, the war turns out to have been the smaller half of the story.