Amrita — The Rope
Chapter 1 — The Rope
A storyteller arrived in the Naimisha forest bringing word of a fire that had once been kindled to burn every serpent in the world.
His name was Ugrashrava. His feet were dusty, and he pressed his palms together before his chest to greet the sages sitting beneath the trees. They were in the midst of a sacrifice that lasted twelve years. Thin smoke rose from their fires among the branches, and the scent of burnt clarified butter clung to their robes.
They knew him. His father too had been a storyteller and had once sat in that very place. After he had rested, one of the sages asked where he had come from.
“From the snake sacrifice of a young king,” Ugrashrava answered. “His name is Janamejaya. There, between the rites, I heard the story of his ancestors told from beginning to end.”
A young sage paused in the act of pouring butter into the fire.
“A snake sacrifice?” asked the oldest of the sages. “Why would a king wish to burn snakes? And if all the snakes were burned, why are there still snakes in this forest?”
Ugrashrava drank water from the pitcher held out to him, then smiled faintly. “Because that sacrifice was stopped,” he said. “By a boy. I learned the story long ago from my father, word for word. Yet that king is not the beginning of the tale. Its beginning lies long before that king was born, when the world was still young, and the gods needed a rope strong enough to turn a mountain. That rope was a serpent. Here is how it happened.”
Long before that king was born, there were two sisters married to the same sage.
Kadru and Vinata, daughters of a divine ancestor, became the wives of the sage Kashyapa. They lived in one courtyard, ate from one kitchen, and served one husband. One day Kashyapa called both of them before him and offered them a boon, whatever they might ask.
Kadru answered first. She asked for a thousand sons, serpents all equal in splendor.
Vinata listened until her sister had finished. Then she asked for two sons only. “Two sons surpassing Kadru’s thousand,” she said, “in strength, in stature, and in courage.”
“So let it be,” Kashyapa said to them both. “Guard the children you carry with care.” Then he went into the forest to practice austerity, and did not return for a very long time.
Kadru laid a thousand eggs. Vinata laid two. Attendants placed the eggs inside warm earthen jars, kept apart for each sister, tending their heat day and night. A thousand jars stood in rows on Kadru’s side of the courtyard. Two jars stood on Vinata’s side.
For five hundred years they waited.
Then Kadru’s jars began to tremble. One after another the shells cracked open, and out of every crack slid a small serpent, wet and gleaming. Kadru knelt among them and counted up to a thousand. The first to hatch was named Shesha. The second was named Vasuki. That small snake coiled itself around his mother’s wrist at once and would not let go.
Vinata’s two jars remained still.
Vinata sat before her two eggs every day. She pressed her ear against the clay of the jars and heard nothing at all. Across the courtyard, her sister’s thousand sons crawled over Kadru’s feet and slept coiled in her lap. One morning Vinata lifted one of her eggs and broke it open.
Inside lay a child. The upper half of his body was fully formed, his shoulders and face radiant. The lower half of his body was not yet finished.
The child opened his eyes and looked at his mother.
“You broke my shell before my time,” he said. “Because of that greed, you shall become a slave, the slave of the very woman you wished to rival. Do not break the other egg. Wait five hundred years more with patience, and the child inside it will set you free. If you want him to be strong, guard that egg well.”
Having spoken those words, he rose into the sky with his half-formed body. His name was Aruna. From that day forth he became the charioteer of the sun, the red glow seen briefly on the eastern horizon every morning before the sun itself appears.
Vinata covered the remaining jar with both hands, and never opened it again.
Vasuki grew into the strongest serpent among his brothers. His brothers raised him up as their king, and the gods called him their friend. That was why, when the gods needed a rope long enough and strong enough to turn a mountain, they came to him.
For ages the gods had desired amrita, the water of immortality. They had practiced austerities and sworn vows for the sake of that water, and still it had never come. At last Vishnu declared before them all that amrita lay hidden in the depths of the ocean. The ocean would have to be churned by the gods together with the asuras, their enemies, for neither side could accomplish the task alone.
The churning rod was Mount Mandara. Its peak pierced the clouds, and its roots reached down as deep as its summit rose high. The gods tried to uproot it, and the mountain did not budge a finger’s breadth. So Shesha, Vasuki’s elder brother, was called upon. Shesha coiled himself around the base of the mountain and tore it up out of the earth, complete with its forests, its lions, and the birds in its branches.
The mountain was carried to the shore of the ocean. The ocean consented to have its waters churned so long as it received a share. The King of Tortoises agreed to serve as the pivot beneath it. Indra set Mandara upon the tortoise’s back in the middle of the sea.
Then Vasuki was wound around the body of the mountain.
He felt the rough stone pressing against his scales from the crown of his head to the tip of his tail. Tree roots dug into his belly. On one side of the ocean, the asuras seized his head, their nails sinking between the scales of his neck. On the other side, the gods took hold of his tail. Shesha stood on the side of the gods, and his body was long enough to reach across. Every so often he stretched himself over the mountain, lifted his younger brother’s head high out of the hands of the asuras, and dropped it down again so the turning of the mountain would not stall.
They began to pull.
The mountain turned to the right. Vasuki’s body was dragged toward the gods, his skin scraping against rock. The mountain turned to the left. His body was dragged toward the asuras. To the right again. To the left again. Every turn stripped a little more of his scales away.
Out of Vasuki’s mouth poured black smoke and fire. He could not hold it back. The smoke rose, gathered into clouds, and from those clouds fell rain that cooled the overheated gods at his tail. Blossoms showered down from the trees on the slopes of Mandara and fell upon their shoulders.
The asuras near his head received no rain. They received smoke. They coughed, cursed, and pulled harder.
Whenever Shesha lifted his head high, Vasuki saw his elder brother’s face up close. That face was calm, its mouth shut tight. Then his head was dropped again, and he saw only the whirling water.
From the floor of the ocean came a deep roar. Sea creatures were crushed beneath the spinning mountain. Great trees tore loose from the slopes and plunged into the water along with their birds, and their grinding branches struck sparks. The fire spread across the whole mountain. Vasuki felt its heat creeping from the stone into his flesh and heard elephants and lions screaming on the slopes above his head, until Indra quenched the blaze with a downpour.
Sap from the crushed trees and the juices of medicinal herbs flowed down into the sea. Little by little the milky-white water thickened, turning into liquid butter. Its rich scent rose all the way to the shore.
Still the amrita did not appear.
The gods let go of Vasuki’s tail and sat down on the sand, gasping for breath. The asuras let go of his head. Vasuki hung slack around the body of the mountain, and for a brief while no one pulled him either way. He heard the gods go before Brahma, the Grandfather, creator of all beings, who sat upon the shore. “Our strength is spent,” they said. “There is no power left in our hands.”
Brahma’s voice was deep and calm, and Vasuki heard it clearly from where he hung wound about the rock. “Vishnu,” Brahma said, “grant them strength.”
Vishnu raised his hand. “Set the mountain in place again,” he told the gods. “Churn once more.”
They pulled Vasuki’s coils tight around the mountain and hauled again, harder than before.
This time things began to rise from the ocean that had turned to butter.
First came the moon, with its cool, gentle light. A white horse swift as thought rose from the foam and galloped onto the shore. A white elephant with four tusks followed, and Indra claimed it at once.
Then rose a radiant god carrying a white vessel in his hands. Inside that vessel was the amrita.
“It is ours!” the asuras shouted, and the hands gripping Vasuki’s neck went slack.
The mountain kept turning, because no one had given the word to stop. Out of the ocean rose one last thing, a poison that spread across the whole earth, blazing with fumes. Its stench made the three worlds reel. Vasuki held his breath and pressed his head into a crevice of the rock. At Brahma’s request, Shiva swallowed the poison and held it fast in his throat. From that day his throat remained dark blue.
The asuras saw the vessel in the god’s hands and made ready to seize it with weapons. At that instant Vishnu took the form of an enchanting woman, walked among the asuras, and smiled at them. They forgot their weapons. They placed the vessel of amrita into the woman’s hands, and she carried it away.
The gods drank the amrita from Vishnu’s hands. From where he hung coiled around the mountain, Vasuki could see them sitting in a row and tilting their heads back, one after another, waiting their turn.
An asura disguised as a god sat down in that row as well. The amrita had barely reached his throat when the Sun and the Moon recognized him and pointed him out. Vishnu’s discus severed his head before the liquid could sink any lower, and the head that had touched amrita flew up into the sky roaring.
Vishnu cast off his woman’s form. On the salt shore, battle broke out.
Vasuki was still wound around the mountain when the sand below him turned red. He heard spears whistling over his head and bodies thudding down near his tail. The asuras who had been clutching his neck just before now ran past him with drawn weapons, and many fell not far from him, struck down by Vishnu’s discus whirling above the field. When the asuras tore mountains up and hurled them from the sky, the rocks shattered in midair and rained down upon his body. He tucked his head into a cleft of Mandara and waited.
Even when the sun rose, the battle was not over. At last the asuras fled. Some plunged into the bowels of the earth, and some leapt into the sea.
The gods raised a shout of triumph. They put Mount Mandara back in its place and entrusted the vessel of amrita to Vishnu for safekeeping. Then they went home to heaven.
Vasuki was untied from the mountain last of all.
His scales had been scraped raw along the whole length of his body where the rock had ground against him. Smoke still curled from his mouth. No one offered him a single drop from the white vessel, and he did not ask for any. When he looked for his elder brother among the crowd, Shesha had already gone home ahead of him.
He swam back across an ocean whose water was still thick and smelled of crushed sap. Salt bit into every wound on his body. On the far shore he dragged himself up onto the sand and lay still for a long time until his breath no longer smoked.
When he lifted his head, his mother and his aunt were standing not far from him at the water’s edge. They did not see him. They were gazing across the ocean toward the shore he had just left.
Over there, small in the distance, the white horse born from the churning was walking alone along the waterline. Its coat was as white as sea foam, and it was moving their way.
Kadru touched her sister’s arm. “Vinata,” she said, “look at that horse. Tell me quickly, what color is it?”