No one knew. Least of all Bhīṣma himself, despite the fact that everybody bowed down before his knowledge, elusive as it was. “The moment comes,” thought Bhīṣma, “when the sky no longer touches the earth, just as my head and back, resting on these arrows, are not touching it now. It is a terrible moment, it is Bhīṣma’s moment. The words of the sky are still there, but they no longer touch the grass. Then the sky may seem empty. Yet its power is intact and unappeased. But it is no longer recognized. And, unrecognized, it becomes even more cruel. That is why no war was ever so bloody and treacherous as the war fought between my noble nephews. And I lived here and walked this earth so that all this could be prepared, so that it might come to pass.” He thought this in the last watch of the night, with the sky graying in a first hint of dawn and the group around him much thinned out. Weary with standing still, those remaining looked on with solemn faces, while Bhīṣma stared at the sky and his mind wandered far away to where no one wished to follow, nor he himself wished to be followed.
An invocation may one day become a person. “Ambā! Ambikāa! Ambālikā!” groaned the mahiṣī, thighs tightly pressed to those of the sacrificed horse. That tortured cry to “mother,” ambā, to her diminutives, ambikā, ambālikā, and to the waters as surging wave, ambhas, was embodied, thrice embodied, in the princesses of Kāśī abducted by Bhīṣma to become the queens of a king who secretly tormented women’s hearts but did not procreate: Vicitravīrya. One night, after Ambikā and Ambālikā had been widowed, they saw a shaggy, smelly man coming to their bed. Stiff and silent, they suffered his embrace. They could no longer groan, calling out to a lost mother, because they themselves were that mother. The world had shrunk: there was no other to call out to anymore.
Ambika closed her eyes in coitus — and conceived a blind boy: Dhṛtarāṣtṛa. Ambālikā turned white when Vyāsa penetrated her — and conceived a disturbingly pale child: Pāṇḍu. Neither of the women recognized the dead horse or the compiler of the Vedas, in Vyāsa. This outrageous expedient was the method the dharma had chosen for avoiding extinction. More and more, paradox, trickery, and horror had to be treated with prudence, and even delicacy. They might always turn out to be the last resource for saving the dharma.
More than love or war, what really set stories going were curses, and, though these were of secondary importance, the vows and boons that often served to ease a curse. It wasn’t only men’s lives that teemed with curses but the gods’ too. Destiny’s turning points, a little attention shows, occur at the moment when a great caster of curses — and they are generally brahmans, and in particular seers — pronounces the fatal words. Whether anybody realizes a curse has been cast or not makes no difference at all. Śakuntalā suffered the pains of lost love for many years as a result of a curse she was quite unaware of. For those who told these stories — Vyāsa, for example, who was himself in a position to pronounce terrible curses — cursing was obviousness itself, life’s bedrock, and above all precious, the most precious formal artifice for rendering life complex in a way consonant with its nature. The same texts that spend pages over every single action, describing everything down to the last detail, have nothing at all to say about the curse that prompted it, as if this were self-evident. And it is not just individual destinies that depend on curses but likewise the destiny of the world. More often than not a cosmic cataclysm is unleashed by some futile gesture that nobody has noticed.
Despite their ability to resort to metamorphosis when, for all their overwhelming powers, they find themselves in trouble, the gods can do little or nothing against a curse. Before they can free themselves, they must suffer like the merest of mortals. And when they appear among men, it is usually not to come to their aid but to free themselves from a curse. Even Viṣṇu’s various avatāras, generally presented as those great deeds that periodically saved the world, were, as some saw it, first and foremost something he was condemned to by a curse.
The defining characteristic of the curse, or so it seemed, was this: that it always worked. As one approaches the realm of the curse, one comes up against the invisible wall of certainty. But what is invulnerable certainty? The supremacy and pervasiveness of the mind. The curse is a purely mental act. And while one day this kind of act would be considered by definition ineffective, in those days it was precisely its mental character that made it seem efficacy itself. That is why the custodians of the curse are mostly brahmans, creatures of the mind. They owe their authority, their power, and even their name to their contact with brahman—and to nothing else. Brahman strikes more swiftly than the sword. So the brahman has no need of the sword. For a word articulated in his mind already conceals “a sharp-bladed razor.” More than their internal quarrels or their perpetual war with the Asuras, what most frightened the gods were certain encounters, above all with solitary old men who might very well appear to be the merest beggars or pilgrims, but would then all at once start darting flames from their eyes if something should irritate them. More terrifying and impenetrable than all the others was the brahman Durvāsas.
Durvāsas was a “portion,” aṃśa, a splinter, a glowing coal of Śiva. He too was a ṛṣi, but not a master of mind and gesture, like Yājñavalkya, or one of those who saw the hymns, like Viśvāmitra, or a weaver of plots and poetry, like Vyāsa. Durvāsas’s realm lay beyond the word, in the fury and excess that lie behind the many-colored curtain of the world of appearance. Curses and boons were the only ways he showed himself, as if in him the world were reduced to but two elements: prodigy and punishment. Everything was a source of offense for Durvāsas. There was nothing that might not spark his retaliation. Once he met Indra and offered his elephant, Airāvata, a garland of flowers. But the garland bothered the animal. Slowly, using his trunk while Indra looked on, Airāvata got the garland to slither to the ground. Immediately Śrī, the Splendor of the World, plunged into the ocean. Indra sensed that he was about to be stripped of his power. He looked around and saw nature desolate, buckling under some obscure burden. The garland rejected by the sluggish elephant had been consigned to Durvāsas directly from heaven. That garland was Śrī. Now the world would be bereft of splendor. It went back to being an arid wasteland. It was because of this petty incident that the gods had to undertake the toughest of all their labors, the enterprise that was supremely theirs: the churning of the ocean.