For Uttarā it was an even more tormenting time. Still barely more than a child, she was about to emerge from the cocoon of her invisible lovers. “The first to have her was Soma, then came the Gandharva. The third husband was Agni, the fourth is he who is born of man.” The female mind knows no state without lovers but only a succession of states, where the son of man can only come fourth. Without knowing it, Uttarā had lived with Soma, with the Gandharva, with Agni. Now she was waiting for a man, any man. And she found him in Arjuna, this eunuch who was teaching her to sing, who passed on his voice to her like a shiver, and withdrew from every contact. “You are more elusive than a Gandharva, more distant than all the gods, yet I am inside you, modulated in your voice…,” murmured Uttarā, sobbing with happiness.
Then Arjuna understood just how far — and it was far indeed — Urvaśī’s revenge would go. Because he had rejected her, as if she were his mother, now he must reject Uttarā, as if she were his daughter. Arjuna remembered some words Kṛṣṇa had once hurriedly spoken: “Even the curses we undergo must be of use to us.” And slowly he thought up a plan. There was something about Uttarā that went beyond beauty. Something that was the beyond itself. Her pores emanated an odor he’d never come across before, a briny smell, the secret sign that she could ferry one to another world, the world that would come after the one about to be swallowed up. So Arjuna set about getting Uttarā to marry his adolescent son, Abhimanyu. That way he and she could go on exchanging lovers’ glances without ever touching each other. Uttarā would give birth to the last of the Pāṇḍavas: Parīṣit, who was born dead but then brought back to life by Kṛṣṇa. He then fathered Janamejaya, who would be the first to hear tell the adventures of his own ancestors: the Mahābhārata.
As a king, Janamejaya went to extremes. The powers of sacrifice and storytelling were stretched to the breaking point in him. It was Janamejaya who celebrated the sacrifice of the snakes, which was more an attempt at extermination than anything else. It was Janamejaya who encouraged Vaiśampāyana to get Vyāsa to tell him the story of the Mahābhārata so that Vaiśampāyana could then tell it to Janamejaya himself and to the many brahmans who took part in the sacrifice of the snakes. The extermination of the snakes was thus to alternate with the story of the extermination of the heroes. Each explained the other. Each became the other. And if both failed, it was because in each case something, someone, was left over, a residue: Janamejaya himself, last survivor of hero stock, who fought furiously to exterminate the snakes but didn’t succeed, because once again one snake survived, the very moment it was about to fall in the fire. That snake was Janamejaya’s archenemy, Takṣaka, who had already survived the burning of the Forest of Khāṇḍava. And two survivors will suffice to ensure that the stories go on, that they mingle with further sacrifices, further wars, further exterminations, to make sure that that interwoven and sovereign couple, king and snake, will go on propagating their kind. Until such time as they launch themselves on the waters once again, one supine on the other, god and snake, Viṣṇu and Śeṣa.
Janamejaya and his three brothers were crouched down during a sattra, one of those interminable sacrifices that obliged officiants, among other things, to creep rather than walk. They got down on the soil of Kurukṣetra that three generations before had been drenched in the blood of their forefathers on every side of the family, and that many more generations before had been trodden by the gods when celebrating their own different sacrifices there before escaping to the sky. It was a sultry day, the air quite still. Oppressed, the four brothers exchanged glances. A dog came up to them, a stray. It was shy, hesitant in its approach. Not only did it not dare to go and lick the offerings at the center of circle but it was even afraid to look at them. It moved sideways, head down. All of a sudden, as if in response to a sign given among them, Janamejaya’s three brothers got up and began to beat the dog. Their long, thin sticks came down hard on its skinny flanks. The dog yelped and squealed, its only defense. Then it limped off and disappeared.
All that had happened for thousands of years in Kurukṣetra poured down on that moment, that scene, in a cataract of time. It was the moment the seer Vyāsa chose when he began to retrace the long stream, tell the story of all that had happened in Kuruksetra. He chose the most futile moment and the most obscure so that something “immeasurable, sanctifying, purifying, atoning and blessing” might spread out from it, something “at whose expense the best of poets would live, as ambitious servants live at the expense of a noble patron.”
Meanwhile the wounded, beaten dog had crept back to his mother, Saramā, she-dog of Indra, and was complaining to her. “You must have done something wrong,” said Saramā. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t lick the offerings. I didn’t even look at them. But Janamejaya’s brothers beat me.” Then Saramā thought that Janamejaya, who had only looked on, deserved punishment. She paid no attention to his brothers. Watching the crime was worse than having done it.
There is no story so complicated as the Mahābhārata. And not just because of its length: three times as long as the Bible, seven times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey put together. But why did Vyāsa choose this of all ways to tell the tale of a war fought between cousins in a plain of northwest India? Why is the frame in which the narrative is set so complicated that it alone would be enough to generate a sense of vertigo? Was it an artifice to allude to the infinite complication of existence? That would be banal — and wouldn’t have required such an enormous effort. Even a tenth of the stories would be enough to generate the same impression. And the rest? Whatever happens in the Island of the Jambū, there’s always a residue, an excess, something that overflows, goes beyond. Never the sharp profile, carved in the air, but long friezes, strips of stone bursting with action. They could have gone on forever. They are crests on the waves of a “migration,” saṃsāra. The war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas is a “knot” (and the books that make up the Mahābhārata are called parvans, “knots”), just one of the innumerable stitches in the weave of everything with everything. Going back in time to what came before it, or forward a little, after it ended, we encounter a net that brushes against us on every side — and immediately we are struck by the conviction that we will never see the edges of that net, because there are no edges. And already this is a less obvious reflection: that end and beginning, terms the mind is ever toying with, don’t, in themselves, exist at all. When the seers speak of the beginning, and push as far back as they can to where the existent and the nonexistent hadn’t as yet been separated, even this point is not a beginning but a consequence. A residue. Something happened before — a whole other world happened before — in order to bring about that lump that drifts like flotsam on the waters. The beginning is a shipwreck. Such was the unspoken premise of the seers. And likewise of the Mahābhārata.
It was as if everybody were suddenly tired of doing things that had meaning. They wanted to sit down, in the grass or around a heap of smoldering logs, and listen to stories. And often the stories described the same rites the listeners were performing. But now those rites had become episodes inside long and bloody adventures, pretexts for skirmishes and treachery. The stories were no longer a breathing space within the ritual sequence, but the rite itself became an event within the stories, in the same way as a duel or a night of passion might be. So where did meaning lie? Did the rite give meaning to the stories? Or was it only the stories that meant something — using the rites as their material? And what if both rite and stories were meaningful — but their meanings opposed to each other? There was a back-and-forth between a clutter of too many meanings that canceled each other out, to the point of paralysis. The rites — it was well known — served to conquer the sky. And the stories? What were they for? After all, the whole tale of the Mahābhārata looked forward, as though to its final consequence, to the sacrifice of the snakes, the sacrifice that Janamejaya, the only surviving heir of the poem’s heroes, had so much desired. That sacrifice was a long act of madness, not so much a ceremony as an attempt to wipe out a race — the snakes — at once more ancient than men and quite likely destined to survive them, since what are men in the end if not the dream of a god as he drifts around on a snake’s coils? So was it that the meaning of the stories could only emerge within a meaningless sacrifice? But wasn’t the meaninglessness of that sacrifice precisely the secret meaning that only someone who had followed the whole story of the Mahābhārata could grasp? And how had it come about that the fullness of ritual meaning ended up by bubbling over into meaninglessness? Whatever the answers, there was something new to come to terms with: gesture was no longer enough on its own. Now it had to be recounted too, along with other gestures — not all of them ritual. Now, as the times grew dark, as everything was turned upside down and inside out, one would have to begin — and end — with the stories of one of the many dynastic quarrels, one of the many wars that had taken place in an area that was really quite small, albeit long frequented by the gods. It was precisely this reckless profusion of random events and adventures that formed the cocoon that allowed the preceding body of knowledge, no longer able to exist alone, to be saved. Thus the Mahābhārata was called the Fifth Veda — and at its outset one reads these proud words: “A brahman who knows the Four Vedas with their branches and likewise the Upaniṣads but who does not know this poem possesses no knowledge whatsoever.”