Ka

IV

It takes millions of years for the gods to pass from one aeon to the next. A few centuries for mankind. The gods change their names and do the same things as before, with subtle variations. So subtle as to look like pure repetition. Or again: so subtle as to look like stories that have nothing to do with those that came before them. For men, what change are the names, and likewise the literary genres in which deed and variation are accomplished. Thus Prajāpati became Brahmā. Thus Rudra became Śiva. Thus, from the allusive cipher of the Ṛg Veda and the abrupt, broken narratives of the Brāhmanas, stories picked up only to be hurriedly dropped, one passed to the ruthless redundance of the Purānas, their incessant dilution, their indulgence in hypnotic and hypertrophic detail. Narration once again became the receptacle of every form, every calculation, every duty. A huge and divine novel unfolded, slowly. And the demands on the listener changed too. There was a time when he’d been obliged to solve abrupt enigmas, or find his head bursting. Now he could heap up rewards merely by listening to the stories as they proliferated. The shift had to do with a growing weariness: the era of the bhakti had begun, the era of obscure and pervasive devotion, where the pathos of abandoning oneself to a belief prevailed over the transparent perception of the bandhus, of the connections woven into all that is.

There came a moment when Brahmā believed his work on earth was done. He had created everything out of his mind: the entire inventory of beings, from microbe to mountain, stretched away before him. But there was a false note. It all looked like an enameled court painting. Everything moved, everything looked normal. But nothing decayed. Nor grew. Was all to remain intact forever? Was this the earth it behooved Brahmā to create? The god smiled a sad smile of solitary soliloquy. He knew it was not.

Brahmā’s creation suffered from this weakness: all were born exclusively of the mind, and worse still, no one died. Faced with such a world, at once rowdy and inert, a stifled, menacing anger slowly brewed up in its creator, an anger that seemed eager to unleash itself in a final conflagration. Brahmā sat apart from it all, his legs crossed, gazing at the world with the contempt of a father reflecting on the mediocrity of his son. In each separate element he recognized a sense of all-pervading fatuity. So Śiva was doing no more than showing mercy when he suggested to Brahmā what was missing, that figure who alone could save the world from a brusque and spiteful end: Mṛtyu, Death.

“Anger rushes out at the world from the orifices of your body, sets it ablaze, scorches its mane. Thus it is flat and arid once again. But still inhabited by these multitudes of men who don’t know what to do with themselves. Why reduce the life you have invented to such pettiness? Let men die. And, since among ourselves everything happens many times, they can die many times and live many times. That way they need no longer be humiliated by this endless life, which only oppresses the earth with its weight.” Thus spoke Śiva to Brahmā one day when his benevolent side was uppermost.

Grimly, Brahmā agreed. The earth was spared his flames. There was a moment of suspension, as if everything had stopped breathing. Then a girl appeared, a dark girl, dressed in red with large earrings. Crouched on the ground, the two gods gazed at her. Then Brahmā spoke: “Ṃrtyu, Death, come here. You must go forth into the world. You must kill my creatures, the scholars and the muddlers. You must have but one rule: that there be no exceptions.” The girl gazed at the god in silence, her fingers nervously twisting a garland of lotus flowers. Then she said: “Progenitor, why have you chosen me to do something that is against every law? And why should I do this and nothing but this? I shall burn on an everlasting pyre of tears.” Brahmā said: “No prevaricating. You are without stain and your body blameless. Go…” Death stood before Brahmā in silence, her shoulders slumped.

Death was stubborn and refused to obey Brahmā’s order for some time. In Dhenuka, surrounded by asceties she should already have slaughtered, she stood on one foot for fifteen million years. No one took any notice. She was one of the many who went there in retreat. Puzzled, Mṛtyu meditated.

Brahmā reminded her of her duty. But Death just changed the foot she was standing on — and went on meditating for another twenty million years. Then for another few million she lived with the wild beasts, are nothing but air, sank under the waters. Then she lay on Mount Meru for a long time, like a log. More millions of years passed. One day Brahmā went to see her: “My daughter, what is going on? A few moments or a few million years won’t change anything. We’re always back where we started. And I’ll say it again: ‘Do your duty.’” As if those millions of years hadn’t gone by and she were resuming the conversation after no more than a moment or two. Mṛtyu said: “I’m afraid of breaking the law.” “Don’t be afraid,” said Brahmā. “No judge could ever be as impartial as yourself. And I can’t see why you should cry as much as you do either: your tears will gouge ulcers in the bodies you must kill. Better kill them quickly, without dragging it out so long.” Then Death lowered her eyes and went forth silently into the world. She tried to keep the tears from her eyes, as a last sign of benevolence toward the creatures she was slaying.

Brahmā, god of sva-, of whatever functions from itself and in itself, self-created and self-generating as he was, constrained to concern himself only with himself, encountered, from his autistic existence beyond the cosmos (with respect to which the cosmos is but a toy), no small number of difficulties in his dealings with the earth. He would generate sons, observe their exultant youth, their erect phalluses — and so invite them to procreate. But at this point his sons would disappear. They retreated into the forest to meditate, like coy young maidens, as if, even before existing, the world had wanted nothing better than to be reabsorbed into the mind. Then Brahmā was seized by an awesome rage. What was this? Was the machine of creation that had produced billions of worlds to break down before the laughable little labor that was coitus? What were those strapping lads of his so frightened of (what was he, the self-created god, frightened of?), what was stopping them from approaching a woman’s vulva?

Brahmā was sometimes an inept and hesitant creator. More than any other god, he suffered the consequences of his origin. Male reduction of the immense neuter, of the brahman that embraces all, nourishes all, and is the sense of all, Brahmā was forced to have a story, and hence a pitiful limitation. But at the same time, something of the amorphous still clung to him, and left him awkward: he would make an effort, stir something up, but they were only attempts at action, so that when he remembered the boundless vastness from which he had sprung, he was ashamed of them. What chiefly remained to him of the self-sufficient mental power of his origin, antecedent to every existence, was a certain reluctance, sometimes a repugnance for creation. And in particular for that creation which was irremediable: sexual creation. Yet, paradoxically, he was adored as a creator god. If it was a question of creating from the mind, on the other hand, that was a game he loved to play. Or rather, that was what he normally did, and never tired of. Thus appeared the plants and the ghosts, the shadows and the dusk, the Snakes and the Genies who drink down words. But Brahmā still knew nothing of the creation that is born of “coupling and emotion.”

He felt he wasn’t the right god to take it on, and thus delegated the task to thousands of his born-of-the-mind sons, mānasaputras. But he soon realized that something held them back from touching the matter of the world. The words of Nārada, the most indiscreet and subtle of the ṛṣis, were enough to deter them. Nārada said: “How can you create when you know nothing as yet? First travel around the earth, get the measure of it, then you will be able to create with discernment.” Brahmā’s sons agreed and, as though relieved of a silent torment, set off on their way. No one has seen them since.

“Having created his born-of-the-mind sons, the Lord Brahmā was not satisfied with his work.” Something was missing, an essential flavor. Brahmā began to invoke a name (Gāyatrī? Śatarūpā? Sāvitrī? Sarasvatī?—it was hard to make it out from that vague murmuring), until his breast opened and a female being slithered out onto the ground. Already disapproving of their progenitor’s absorption, his torpid delirium, his sons stood in a circle around him and watched. When they saw the girl, they immediately thought her their sister. Meanwhile Brahmā’s voice had grown clearer. He stared at the girl as if nothing else existed, and said: “What beauty! What beauty!” Brahmā’s sons watched him with contempt. Why was their father being so undignified? The girl, in the meantime, greeted the father and began to circle around him with ceremonial step. It was the first circumambulation, pradakṣiṇa, something practiced ever since in every temple in India. Sátarūpā’s step was slow, but to follow her Brahmā would have to turn his head. He could not bear to lose sight of her even for an instant. At the same time, he felt the malevolent eyes of his sons converging on him like so many pinpricks. So Brahmā sprouted a new head on each side, as Śatarūpā made her circumambulation around him. When she had finished, two brothers came to her sides, their faces grim and severe. Śatarūpā understood that she must obey. They took her wrists and told her to climb up to the sky with them. When they were already in flight, a fifth head sprouted from Brahmā’s skull, looking up toward Satarupa, until the girl was no more than a small, dark speck in the blue. When even that speck had gone, Brahmā felt lonely and quite worn out. He closed his eyes, ten of them now, and once again was aware of the hateful presence of his disapproving sons. “Go… Go…,” he said in a hiss. He heard a muddled shuffling, and hoped he would never have to see them again.

For a long time Brahmā stood motionless, eyes still closed. He felt his body emptied of the awesome tapas that until now had brought forth his creatures. As for the outside world, he knew that only one of his born-of-the-mind sons was still wandering around out there, a troublesome presence in the desert. That was Kāma, Desire, with his blossoming arrows. Suddenly Brahmā opened his eyes so that they poured forth rage. Kāma was before him, careless, and for that reason alone, mocking. Brahmā told him: “Now you’re satisfied, because thanks to your arrows you have made me ridiculous in the eyes of your brothers. And you mocked me, because Śatarūpā slipped away. You take pleasure in destroying me. But now the time has come for me to curse you. One day you will meet someone who will answer your arrows, and reduce you to ashes.”

For a long time Brahmā was alone, motionless. His only care was to hide his fifth head under his thick, black hair, twisting it into a bun on the top of his head. None of his born-of-the-mind sons had reappeared. Nor did Brahmā want them back. One memory obsessed him — and every so often he would still say to himself: “What beauty! What beauty!” When one day he found himself once again face-to-face with Śatarūpā, he thought it must be another of the mental images that tormented him. Without realizing, he had stretched out a hand, while Śatarūpā made the same gesture toward him. Their fingertips touched. In that instant, and it was like a shock, a revelation, Brahmā understood what contact is. So he got to his feet and without a word began to walk beside her. He was looking for a delightful, hidden place, where the intrusive gaze of his sons could never find him. They reached a pond. Brahmā asked Śatarūpā to lie down on a lotus petal. Then he lay beside her. Slowly the petal closed around them. There they stayed, for a hundred years of the gods, loving each other the way common people do. Thus they conceived Manu, who founded the society of men.

Brahmā’s fifth head would not always be hidden under a bun of raven hair. Sometimes people would catch a glimpse of something white, shiny even, behind those thick locks. And there were those who thought they had seen a horse’s head. Soon Śiva was to cut that head off. The reason for his anger is still a matter of controversy. Was it Brahmā’s desire for his daughter — or for the wives and daughters of the gods, or just in general for the first female creature he saw, who must have seemed irresistible to him if he couldn’t take his eyes off her, if he spent his seed without even touching her? Alternatively, some said that that fifth head unleashed a thirst-quenching energy, tejas, that shook the world. Or again it seems that the fifth head may have directed some arrogant remarks at Śiva, who already had five heads himself and perhaps didn’t appreciate the idea of another being’s diminishing his uniqueness and usurping his sacred number five. In order to maim Brahmā, Śiva took the form of the Tremendous, Bhairava. Using the nail of his left thumb, he severed the fifth head. So precise and so sharp was the cut that Brahmā stiffened, amazed, heads gazing in all four directions, as if nothing had happened. Śiva immediately tried to hurl Brahmā’s fifth head far away. Then he realized that it had stuck to the palm of his hand. Meanwhile the contents of the head poured out, leaving just the bony top of the skull, like a bowl, firmly stuck to his hand. Síva saw what was coming: to expiate his crime, the first and most serious of crimes, for in striking Brahmā he had struck at every future brahman, he would have to wander about for years, gathering food in that bowl, the kapāla, which would constantly and inescapably remind him of what he had done. That’s why they called him Kapālin. He-who-holds-the-bowl.

Brahmā was gloomy, oppressed. Those sons born-of-the-mind seemed such vacuous and cowardly beings. They would never understand, what it means, what it might mean, to exist—the gamble of it, the incongruity, the elusiveness, the muddle, the folly. They were born of the mind, they had lightness and mobility, but no more consistency than a will-o’-the-wisp. The danger was that the world would never be any more than, as it were, a strip of light cloth, flimsy and fluttering in the wind, offering no resistance.

But what else could he contrive? Brahmā plunged into himself and sensed that melancholy that comes of understanding too much and not knowing whom to say it to. And it was precisely his awareness of this that dazzled him. That was what was missing: someone who would understand. Then from the thumb of his right hand gushed forth Dakṣa. He sat in front of Brahmā and gazed at him with a grave, composed expression, at once knowing and taciturn. One day Dakṣa’s enemies would say that he had a face for every occasion. Brahmā looked on him with affection, as if they were old friends. His eyes rested on his long, thin, nimble fingers. In those fine bones, all ready to fashion an invisible object, he recognized the nervatural of the mind. Intelligence could now undertake its first unnatural mission: to create through sex.

Aware of his own unsuitability for and incommensurability with the affairs of the world, and at the same time of the need to create it according to an order, Brahmā decided to delegate the more delicate and revelatory episodes, those that would bear witness to his presence as far as mankind was concerned, to a priest, to the priest, Dakṣa the brahman, since it was in him that Brahmā once again gave way to brahman and hence also, in freeing himself from the awkwardness of his divine person, became once again rightness itself: Dakṣa, “he who is skillful,” dexter. The ongoing quarrel with Śiva, the burden of sexual creation, the orthodox practice of sacrifice: all these responsibilities fell on Dakṣa’s shoulders. A long, emaciated figure, eyes sunk in deep hollows, long veins in wiry arms, a bony wrist but steady, a white tunic that fell stainless to his ankles — such was Dakṣa when he appeared in the world, and as such he has never left it.

Still callow, but loyal, Dakṣa began his work as Brahmā’s substitute by procreating male children. He used his bed as a workshop. He paid no attention to pleasure, because it would have slowed him down. A thousand sons the first time, a thousand the next, always from the same wife, the robust Vīrinī, strong enough to hold up the three worlds. The sons looked like young heroes, but then they would disappear. They followed the wind, to gain knowledge (they said), they hid in the forest to meditate, they set out in their brothers’ footsteps. Any direction was fine, so long as they didn’t have to mate. Then Dakṣa saw that history could only be born from women, and he generated sixty daughters.

Dakṣa gave twenty-seven daughters to Soma; he gave thirteen daughters to Kaśyapa; he gave Smṛti to Aṅgiras; he gave Khyāti to BhṚgu; he gave Anasūyā to Atri; he gave Ūrjā to Vasiṣṭha; he gave Prīti to Pulastya; he gave Kṣamā to Pulaha; he gave Sannati to Kratu. All seers, ṛṣis of the first or second list, as they say, according to the age of the tradition that concerned them. All eminent practitioners of tapas, all theoreticians of sacrifice, all counselors of the king. His daughters well settled. Dakṣa’s mission was accomplished. Now history’s wheel could start to turn. But that, in the end, was of no interest to him.

Much time had been dedicated to studying his future sons-in-law, much time had gone into gathering information about them. What was essential, for Dakṣa, was that each of his sixty daughters should marry someone of their father’s own level, someone with whom he, Dakṣa, could talk for long hours, sitting by the fire, of ritual-related inexactitudes. That was what mattered. Then, one day, from the bellies of his daughters, all kinds of different creatures would be born, parrots and snakes, the four-legged and the fish. But all would be able to boast an irreproachable ancestry.

The wives of Soma took their place in the sky as the dancing troop of the twenty-seven Nakṣatras, the houses of the moon; the descendants of Kaśyapa alone accounted for the entire gamut of gods and demons; from Aditi, the Boundless, were born the twelve Ādityas, the gods of whom one immediately thinks when one thinks of the gods: Viṣṇu, Indra, Vivasvat, Mitra, Varuṇa, Pūṣan, Tvaṣṭṛ, Bhaga, Aryaman, Dhātṛ, Savitṛ, Aṃśa: but from Diti, likewise one of Dakṣa’s daughters and Kaśyapa’s wives, would be born the Daityas, while from Danu, another of Dakṣa’s daughters and Kaśyapa’s wives, would be born the Dānavas; all demons, the most obdurate enemies of the gods, half brothers who would hound each other for thousands of years. Dakṣa contemplated them all with pleasure: this was creation, these the flavors with which it would be composed, on which it must feed, this the stock to which all must be traced back: his own, the branch of Dakṣa, the perfect priest, executor of those works that Brahmā was reluctant to perform himself.

Thus recounted Kaśyapa: “The gods dctached themselves from the mind, not the mind from the gods. What happened before the birth of the gods, before we ṛṣis were charged by Brahmā to set in motion sexual creation (and there was something incongruous about this: our all turning up together as suitors in one huge palace, its corridors shrill with female voices: and then our becoming, we of all people, the first fathers of families, distracted, capricious, and refractory as we sometimes were, we who were better suited to niceties ceremonial than to matters domestic), was no more than a war within the mind, something that, however many names there may already have been, was fought out ever and only between two actors: the mind and everything without.

“Nothing enchants the mind more than the existence of the outside world, of something that resists it and will not obey. Pampered by its own omnipotence, its own capacity to connect and identify everything with everything, the mind needs an obstacle, at least as big as the world — and desires it. To pursue that obstacle and penetrate it: here was a challenge that could thrill and uplift, the riskiest challenge of all. It was the pursuit of the antelope. It has never stopped.”

Thus recounted Atri: “Why does sex exist? In the beginning we didn’t even know what it was. Born-of-the-mind of Brahmā, accustomed to the multiplication of fleeting images, we were bewildered when Brahmā announced that it would be our task to initiate a new mode of creation. And he said something about the female body. The wedding feast was drawing to a close, and we still hadn’t touched Dakṣa’s daughters. Soon we found ourselves lying in our beds, and for the first time we were not alone. With great naturalness and gravity, we discovered — and they too discovered — what it was we must do. Brahmā hadn’t even mentioned the pleasure. It took us by surprise.

“A few thousand years went by. We had become masters of pleasure. One day when he had called us all together, we asked Brahmā: ‘What’s this pleasure for?’ Brahmā smiled a somewhat embarrassed smile, as when he had called us to Dakṣa’s house. He answered: ‘To preserve the world’s gloss.’ We asked no more, because the gods love whatever is secret. But we began to go around and around those words in our minds. ‘Pleasure is tapas of the without,’ said Vasiṣṭha, the most authoritative among us. ‘The world is like a cloak we must put on, otherwise it would grow dusty. If tapas always drew us back, to the formless place from whence we came, the world would wither too soon. It is well that our wives trouble us, it is well that kings put their daughters in our beds, it is even well that the Apsaras come and make fools of us, play those tricks of theirs, at once so infantile and so effective… Every time we give in to them, we help the world to refresh its gloss.’”