Roberto Calasso: Ka

Garuḍa had watched the scene unfold with overwhelming anxiety. Now he felt moved. Long after the last of the Vālakhilyas had disappeared in the vegetation, he said: “Father, you saved me.” Without looking up. Kaśyapa answered: “I saved you because I saved myself. Listen to the story. One day I had to celebrate a sacrifice. I had told Indra and the other gods to find me some wood. Indra was coming back from the forest, loaded with logs. He was feeling proud of his strength, and he knew he would be back first. As he was walking along, his eyes fell on a puddle. Something was moving in it: the Vālakhilyas. They were trying to ford it, which was hard going for them. Moving in single file, they held a blade of grass on their shoulders, like a log, and at the same time were struggling to get out of the mud. Indra stopped to watch and was seized with laughter. He was drunk with himself. Just as they were about to get out, he pushed those Vālakhilyas back in the puddle with his heel. And laughed.

“The following day I got a visit from the Valākhilyas. They said: ‘We’ve come to give you half our tapas , the heat that has baked our minds since times long past. It’s the purest tapas , never corroded by the world, never poured out into the world. Now we want to pour some into you so that you can pour out your seed and generate a being who will be a new Indra, who will be the scourge of Indra, the arrogant, the uncivilized, the cowardly Indra. Such a one shall be your son.’ ‘Indra was brought into the world by the will of Brahmā. He cannot be ousted by another Indra,’ I objected. ‘Then he shall be an Indra of the birds. And he shall be the scourge of Indra.’ I agreed.

“That night I felt the Vālakhilyas tapas flowing into me. I became transparent and manifold, a veil and a bundle of burning arrows. Your mother, Vinatā, took fright when I came to her bed. The following morning she told me how, while pleasure had been invading her pores and curling her nails, something dark had raised her to a mattress of leaves, on the top of a huge tree — and she had seen a glow flare up from beneath. Down the trunk ran drop after drop of a clear liquid. She felt sure that that liquid came from an inexhaustible reserve.”

Engrossed in his father’s tale, Garuḍa had almost forgotten that he was still hovering in the air, claws sinking ever deeper into the elephant and the turtle, who had long been waiting to be eaten. Not to mention that cumbersome branch, still clenched in his beak. Garuḍa didn’t dare do anything further on his own account. If he dropped the branch on one of the nearby mountains, even the most barren, and crushed so much as a single brahman, hidden in the vegetation, what then? “Thinking paralyzes,” thought Garuḍa, motionless in the sky. Kaśyapa was eager to put an end to his son’s wretched predicament. He would have plenty of time, billions of passing moments, to reflect on his crime: that broken branch. Now his father could help him. “Fly away, Garuḍa,” he said. “Go north. When you find a mountain covered with nothing but ice and riddled with caves like dark eye sockets, you can leave the branch there. That’s the only place where there’s no risk of killing a brahman. And there you can finally eat up the elephant and the turtle.” Garuḍa flew off at once.

“So many things happening, so many stories one inside the other, with every link hiding yet more stories… And I’ve hardly hatched from my egg,” thought an exultant Garuḍa, heading north. At last a place with no living creatures. He would stop and think things over there. “No one has taught me anything. Everything has been shown to me. It will take me all my life to begin to understand what I’ve been through. To understand, for example, what it means to say that I am made of syllables…” He was even happier, drenched in joy, when a barrier of pale blue ice and snow filled his field of vision, a sight that would have blinded any other eye. The branch of the tree Ranhiṇa fell with a thud, then down plunged the elephant and the turtle just a moment before Garuḍa’s beak forced a way into flesh already wrapped in a gleaming sepulchre.

“And now the theft, the deed…,” said Garuḍa. Around him on an endless white carpet lay the stripped remains of the elephant and the turtle. He rose in flight, off to win the soma.

At that very moment one of the gods noticed something odd in the celestial stasis: the garlands had lost their fragrance, a thin layer of dust had settled on the buds. “The heavens are wearing out like the earth…” was the silent fear of more than one god. It was a moment of pure terror. What came after was no more than a superfluous demonstration. The rains of fire, the meteors, the whirlwinds, the thunder. Indra burled his lightning bolt as Garuḍa invaded the sky. The lightning bounced off his feathers. “How can that be?” said Indra to Bṛhaspati, chief priest of the gods. “This is the lightning that split the heart of Vṛtra. Garuḍa tosses it aside like a straw.” Sitting on a stool, Bṛhaspati had remained impassive throughout, from the moment the sky had begun to shake. “Garuḍa is made not of feathers but of meters. You cannot hurt a meter. Garuḍa is gāyatrī and triṣṭubh and jagatī. Garuḍa is the hymn. The hymn that cannot be scratched. And then: remember that puddle, those tiny beings you found so funny, with their blade of grass… Garuḍa is, in part, their child.”

Still raging though the battle was, its outcome was clear from the start. The gods knew they were going to lose. They hurried to get away. But what infuriated them most were the whirlwinds of dust unleashed in the heavens by every flap of Garuḍa’s wings. Dust in the heavens… It was the ultimate humiliation… Even the guardians of the soma were overcome. In vain they loosed their arrows. Just one of Garuḍa’s feathers spun majestic in the sky, severed by an arrow from Kṛśānu, the footless archer. Garuḍa took no notice of his enemies. The trial still before him was far harder. On the summit of the heavens he found a metal wheel, its sharp spokes spinning without cease. Behind the wheel he could just see a glow: a gold cup, or rather two cups, one turned upside down upon the other, their rims jagged and sharp. And these cups likewise were moving. They opened and closed in a rocking motion. When they closed, their rims fit perfectly together. Between the wheel and the cups hissed two Snakes. Garuḍa tossed dust in the Snakes’ eyes and concentrated. He must slip between the wheel’s blades, he would have to get his beak between the rims of the two cups, he would have to snatch the glow he had glimpsed within. Then escape. But everything had to happen in no more than the blinking of an eye. On that tiny fraction of time depended the fate of his mother, indeed of the world. Garuḍa did it. It didn’t occur to him to drink the soma that dripped from his beak as he headed back to earth. He was thinking of the Snakes, and of his mother.

Indra tried to stop Garuḍa as he flew toward the earth. He found an accommodating and contrite expression. “There’s no point in our being enemies,” said Indra. “We are too powerful to be enemies,” he added. Then he started to cajole: “Ask me anything you want. I have something I want to ask you: don’t let the Snakes get hold of the soma .” “But I have to ransom my mother,” said the obstinate Garuḍa. “To ransom your mother all you have to do is deliver the soma to the Snakes. You don’t have to do any more than that. But I don’t want the Snakes to possess the soma . I’ll tell you what to do…” “If that’s how things stand…” said Garuḍa. He was intimidated by Indra’s self-confidence, and his reasonableness too. “After all,” thought Garuḍa, “this is the king of the gods talking.”