Thinking about this, Vasiṣṭha became extremely gloomy. What had driven him so determinedly to seek his own death if not his desperation at the death of his hundred children? And who had brought about that slaughter if not the horrendous Viśvāmitra, now glaring at him from that small white patch on the opposite bank of the river?
Suddenly Viśvāmitra broke off shouting insults and ordered the river to snatch Vasiṣṭha in her waves and hand him over. Terrified, Sarasvatī obeyed. She tossed up Vasiṣṭha on Viśvámitra’s bank, while the latter hurried off to his āśrama. He was looking for a knife to cut his rival’s throat. Then Sarasvatī once again snatched Vasiṣṭha up in her waves, for she was afraid the ṛṣi might curse her. The river was seen to leave her banks behind and swallow up trees and meadows like a freakish snake. Then suddenly she went back to her bed, flowing coolly by, while the two ṛṣis once more crouched down on opposite banks and obstinately went on insulting each other. Vasiṣtha shouted to Viśvāmitra that he would never be able get beyond his dumb warrior mentality. True, it had served to terrify the gods. But it wasn’t enough to terrify Vasiṣṭha. He was not so ingenuous as the gods.
Indra was handsome, strong, and not without a dose of cowardice. The pressure of the missions assigned to him was making him uneasy. A hundred horses to sacrifice— and any number of monsters to slay. All over his skin, a thousand vulvas surfaced in delicate tattoos, each opening just a fraction, like a sleepy eyelid. They were a sign of servitude, the indelible signature of a priestly sarcasm’s response to his adulterous crimes. Those vulvas — or butterflies? — would ever remind him of a disastrous adventure.
One day, Indra began to buzz around the ancient hermitage of the ṛṣi Gotama. The sage had gone down to the river for his morning ablutions. His gloriously beautiful wife Ahalyā was sitting in a flowery clearing, rapt in thought, playing with some twigs. Disguising himself as Gotama, Indra went up to her. Mimicking the ascetic’s voice, he said: “Woman of admirable calm and slender waist, I wish to unite myself with you, for the pure pleasure of it.” Ahalyā looked up and immediately saw through the clumsy disguise, in which, rather than the solid build of Gotama, a bull among his fellow seers, Indra’s slimmer, adolescent body was all too evident. Bored with her life in the forest, she consented to the false husband’s proposal, but in such a way that the god would appreciate that she had immediately recognized whom she was dealing with and meant to be possessed by him, not her husband. She headed for the hut. Looking up at the sun, she worked out how long they had before Gotama came back, then concentrated on her pleasure. It was an angry, exhilarating coitus. The climax was scarcely over when, with one eye steadily measuring the progress of the sun, Ahalyā coldly pushed Indra away from her and steered him toward the door with her foot. “Go, my lord,” she said. “Protect me — and yourself.” Hair still tousled, Indra rushed out of the twig hut. But coming toward him with calm and heavy step was Gotama. He was shaking the water of his sacred bath from his polished skin, a bunch of herbs in his hand, and his penetrating eye quickly took in the god’s nervous gesturing. “O evil being,” said Gotama, shaking with anger, “this gross disguise deserves a solemn punishment.” Indra was petrified. Accustomed though he was to fighting monsters, cutting off their numerous heads and hurling lightning at their scaly backs, he felt lost before this massive man with his deep voice, weaponless and fearless, transfixing him with piercing eyes. Gotama walked up to Indra. One hand went down between the god’s thighs, closed around his testicles, tore them off, and tossed them on the grass. “Henceforth you shall eat the wind and sleep on ashes,” said Gotama. Then he turned to Ahalyā, who was watching, motionless. “Many an epic cycle shall pass before someone comes one day to free you,” he told her. Then Gotama went off alone, in search of a peak no woman had ever trod.
Indra writhed in pain on the ground and told himself that never had any god been so humiliated. His confused mind boiled with rancor against the other gods: “As always, I undertook this adventure on their behalf. And, as always, I alone must suffer the consequences. The gods are snoops, always scanning the earth, anxious and apprehensive, tormented by their one fear that some ṛṣi’s tapas will grow stronger than their own. Then they always resort to the cheap trick of ruining the seer with the help of some Apsaras or courtesan. Or they get a god to seduce his wife. And who better than I, Indra, the woman thief? I was acting on behalf of the gods — and all the evil has befallen me alone. Meanwhile the anger I aroused in Gotama has destroyed his reserves of tapas. So the gods are safe again. But they won’t remember me.”
When the thirty-three gods heard these words, they decided they had better get together and see to the matter. Agni spoke first. His right hand rested on the neck of a large ram. “Look here,” he said. “This ram has got testicles. Indra, who is king of the gods, has lost his. I propose that we give Indra the ram’s testicles.” Solemnly, the other gods agreed. Gripping the ram’s neck with one hand, Agni tore off his testicles with the other. Then he went down to Indra, still on his back by Gotama’s abandoned hut, and attached those dark testicles to the god’s bright body.
“Ascetic” (“he who exercises himself” is the Greek sense of the word) offers us a sober definition of those wise men, the ṛṣis, who spent their lives kindling tapas, expanding a nucleus of heat. Were the ascetics to succeed in absorbing the world into themselves, nothing would ever happen. Nature would gradually spread its leaves and weeds over the many scattered rocks that nurse incandescence in their depths. Not only would there be no history, but there would be no stories either. Or at least no visible stories. The landscape would be swept bare and refashioned by the wind. But that is not the case. The ascetic — be it Śiva himself, greatest of all ascetics — cannot stop the world’s existing and flourishing. Deep down, he wants the world to exist and flourish. How do we know that? Beside the ascetic there is always a woman. It might be the beautiful Anasūyā, wife of Atri, devourer of meditation, who is busying herself with the housework when all of a sudden the three supreme beings — Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva — turn up like a bunch of rogues and grab hold of her. Or it might be the wives of the ṛṣis in the Forest of Cedars, who one day see a stranger approaching, his clothes ragged, his eyes feverish, his body smeared with ashes, and suddenly they are following him, swaying their hips as if to the sound of cymbals. Or it might be the magnificent courtesan whom the ascetic Rśyaśṛnga meets in the forest and mistakes for a young man, an aspirant to spiritual ascent with whom he can exercise his tapas. Or the celestial Nymphs, the Apsaras, to whom any malevolent god may entrust the task of leading another ascetic astray. Wherever we find the ascetic, there is also the most beautiful of women, at once tempted and tempting, moving in circles around him. This figure is the first concretion of tapas, a ghost who weaves herself a body, which is then used to protect her origin — the ascetic — or recklessly to attack and destroy it. The ascetic becomes the only lover she ever knows: or alternatively he will be ridiculed and humiliated by this woman, will spill his seed without touching her; or he may ignore the Nymph. But a female figure will ever revolve around him, in her circle of fire.