Roberto Calasso - Ka

Lying on a bed of arrows that passed right through his body and stuck deep in the ground, his head resting on yet more arrows that Arjuna had shot out of a sense of pity; tortured by hundreds of mortal wounds, which would not kill him until he himself decided to die, until, that is, fifty-six days had passed and the sun began its journey northward, Bhīṣma talked. He talked for hours and days. Around him, in a circle, were his Pāṇḍava nephews, Kṛṣṇa, a few princes, a few brahmans. Worn out, they took turns listening. Bhīṣma talked and talked. Nothing was too big, nothing too small to be named. The encyclopedia of encyclopedias flowed calmly from the mouth of the venerable warrior.

Bhīṣma talked without looking at his listeners. He kept his eyes fixed on the sky, on its blessed neutrality, which mirrored his own. He let the rains wash his bloody scabs. He exposed his old and withered skin to constant sunshine. The doctrines he had to set forth before dying were many and complex. They would be of service to those who had beaten and shot him: the Pāṇḍavas. And above all the greatest of them, Yudhiṣṭhira, who was overcome by anguish and kept saying: “This victory feels like a defeat.” But the only essential thing was this: that the doctrines be set forth for a last time in every detail. Bhīṣma didn’t expect that they would be understood in every detail. He knew that his function was first and foremost that of recapitulating an interminable sequence of truths and precepts that was already melting away in much the same manner as his life, the last hours of which were now trickling from his body. He was perfectly aware of being at the origin of everything that had happened at Kurukṣetra. For if his nephews had fought each other to the death, luring whole tribes and peoples to their deaths with them, if from now on all claims to legitimacy would forever be accompanied by the mocking shadow of doubt, then this was simply because one day he, Bhīṣma, fruit of King Śāṃtanu’s love of a goddess, Gaṅgā, and hence legitimate and indisputable heir to the kingdom, had agreed to renounce not only his birthright but likewise the right to procreate, in order to allow his father to keep by his side that obscure ferry-girl Satyavatī, with her subtle odor of fish and musk, who had usurped the role of his mother and, obedient to the inflexible will of the king of the fishermen who had adopted her, was to become the mother of Śāṃtanu’s successor. At the time Bhīṣma was called Devavrata. But when he made a public declaration to the effect that he was simultaneously renouncing both sovereignty and offspring, after uttering this denial at once so unnatural and unreasonable, depriving him as it did of what almost everyone yearns for, power and women, while nevertheless leaving him in the midst of power and women insofar as he was to continue to carry out his work as chief counselor — after uttering this denial Bhīṣma heard a sigh and a word: “This man is terrible, bhīṣma ’yam! ” And from then on, he was simply called Bhīṣma, the Terrible. Why did he do it? Was it just an excess of filial devotion? If so, why was he so determined later on to ensure that the heirs of Satyavatī should in their turn have descendants? Why did he go so far as to abduct the three princesses of Kāśī with their enchanting and childish names — Ambā, Ambikā, Ambālikā—to marry them to one of those heirs? And how was it that he attracted the savage hatred of one of those girls. Ambā, who thought him the most vile of rapists, when on the contrary he observed a strict vow of chastity? And why, finally, when Vicitravīrya, Satyavatī’s last son, died, worn out by his pleasures but childless all the same, did Bhīṣma, again obedient to his vow, refuse to take the place of his half brother, agreeing instead that the queens should accept the repellent embrace of Vyāsa, Satyavatī’s illegitimate and neglected son, to bring forth their offspring with his seed?

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.