Pururava

The two lambs would not stop crying. Somewhere beyond the silk hangings of the royal bedchamber, in the dark of a storm-loud night, small hooves scraped against stone and small throats bleated in terror, and the woman lying beside King Pururava sat up and said, in a voice suddenly gone cold, that he had failed her. Those lambs were hers, fed on nothing but ghee, guarded as the one condition on which she had agreed to remain his wife at all, and now they were being dragged off into the rain while their guardian lay wrapped around her, forgetting the world. Stung by her tone, Pururava did what a man stung by the woman he loves beyond reason will do: he leapt up without thinking, without even reaching for a garment, and ran out into the storm to save them. At that exact moment, timed by hands not his own, the sky cracked open in lightning, and for one unguarded instant Urvashi saw her husband exactly as she had sworn, on the day she consented to marry him, that she would never see him. When he came back inside, lambs safe under each arm, triumphant, there was no one in the bed to greet him. Urvashi, the apsara he had loved for years beyond ordinary counting, was gone, and no search of the palace, the gardens, or the kingdom would find her.

To understand how a mortal king came to be married to a woman of heaven in the first place, and bound to her by conditions as delicate as two ghee-fed lambs, one has to go back a generation, to a birth the old chroniclers themselves call vichitra, strange beyond ordinary telling. Pururava's mother was Ila, daughter of the great progenitor Manu, who as an adult trespassed, quite by accident, a goddess's sacred grove, a place under a spell that turned every male creature entering it female. Where the god of that grove would have let the curse stand as it was, his consort took pity and softened it into something stranger still: Ila would live one month as a woman, remembering nothing of her months as a man, and the next month as a man, a king named Sudyumna, remembering nothing of her months as a woman. It was in one of her months as a woman that Ila met and loved Budha, the shining son of the moon, and in time bore a son who carried both his mother's mystery and his father's light in his blood: Pururava, whom the entire line descending from Ila would ever after be called by her name, the Ailas. He grew into the first king of the Chandravamsha, the lunar dynasty, ruling from Pratishthana on the banks of the Ganga at Prayaga, and in time performed a hundred great Ashvamedha sacrifices and held, the old texts say, sovereignty over the whole earth. But no kingdom he governed with his hands would ever matter to him as much as the one he could not govern at all, which was his own heart the moment it fell in love with a woman who did not belong to the world of men.

Urvashi was no ordinary woman. She was an apsara, one of the dancers of Indra's own court, lovelier, the poets insist, than anything born of flesh, and bound to earth for a season by a curse whose exact origin different tellings remember differently. What every telling agrees on is this: drawn to Pururava's beauty and his valor, she consented to become his wife on conditions so exact that they read less like a marriage vow than a spell that could be broken by a single careless act. He must never let her see him unclothed except in the act of love. He must keep two pet lambs, always near her bed, that had never known any food but ghee, and guard them as he would guard his own life. For years, an unusually long and radiant span of years by every account, these terms held. They lived together in the pleasure groves of Chaitraratha and Nandana and on the slopes of fragrant Gandhamadana, an emperor of Prayaga and a woman of Indra's court, and whatever ached in him at loving someone who could vanish at any moment, he did not let it show. He simply loved her, completely, for as long as he was given to.

But heaven does not easily give up its own. Indra's court missed its brightest dancer, and the Gandharva chieftain Vishvavasu was sent to bring her back by whatever means could be found. He found the one thread by which the marriage could be unpicked: those two lambs. Under cover of the very storm that broke over the palace that night, the Gandharvas stole them from beside the bed, and Urvashi's own cry of alarm, sharpened by fear into an accusation the king could not bear to hear, was the thing that undid him. He forgot, in his hurry to prove himself no false guardian, the one law that had let him keep her at all. The lightning the Gandharvas struck was almost an afterthought; Pururava had already broken the vow the moment he stood up in the dark with nothing in his head but her lambs and her anger. By the time he returned carrying both animals safe in his arms, there was nothing left to protect. Urvashi, and every apsara who had come disguised in the storm to help her, had already gone.

What followed is remembered, across the many hands that have retold this story, as one of the great portraits of grief in the whole of Sanskrit literature. Pururava, this same king who had commanded the horizon in every direction and offered a hundred sacrifices to prove it, walked out of his own capital half out of his mind and searched for Urvashi the way a man searches who no longer entirely believes the world will give back what it has taken. Centuries later the poet Kalidasa would give this wandering its most famous shape in his play Vikramorvashiyam, picturing a king so undone that he interrogates a peacock about the color of his beloved's eyes, begs a cuckoo to repeat, in her own voice, the last thing Urvashi ever said to him, mistakes a swaying blue lotus for the curve of her throat and a red stone glinting on a riverbank for the print of her foot. Whether or not every gesture of that celebrated scene happened exactly so, the truth underneath it is the same in every version of the story: a king who ruled the earth discovered that none of it, not the throne, not the sacrifices, not a lifetime's accumulated merit, could command the one thing he actually wanted, which was for a woman who belonged to heaven to choose, freely, to stay.

He found her, in the end, not by conquering anything but by wandering long enough. On the banks of the Sarasvati at Kurukshetra, among a company of apsaras gliding on the water in the shape of swans, he saw her again. What passed between them there is one of the tenderest scenes in the whole cycle: Urvashi, who by the strict law of her own kind owed him nothing further, did not turn away. She told him she was carrying his child, and that grief served no one, least of all their son. She could not become his wife again in the way she once had been. But she promised him one night, on that same riverbank, every year that followed, for as long as he wished to come. It was a marriage reduced from every day to one night in three hundred and sixty, and Pururava, who a lifetime earlier had governed the horizon in every direction, accepted it, because that single night was worth more to him than the horizon.

Out of that reduced, aching arrangement came something that outlasted both of them. Their sons, Ayu foremost among them and several more besides, became the trunk from which the entire lunar dynasty branched, down through Nahusha and Yayati to Puru and Yadu, ancestor of the very clan into which, ages later, Krishna himself would be born. And on one of those yearly nights, tradition remembers, Urvashi took pity on her grieving husband and told him to ask the Gandharvas of Indra's court for one particular gift: the secret of a certain fire. Pururava did as she said, and the Gandharvas, moved by his devotion, gave him a vessel of sacred flame and taught him the rite by which a single fire could be divided into three, the household fire, the offering fire, and the southern fire, which priestly households have tended ever since as the threefold Tretagni. What began as a king's private heartbreak became, by the strange alchemy the old stories are so fond of, a gift to every family that has ever lit a fire for the sake of the gods. Pururava had wanted, more than anything, to become a Gandharva himself so as never again to be parted from Urvashi, and by some accounts of the story he did, at least for a very long age, dwelling among her own people in her own world.

But even the world of the Gandharvas, the Bhaktamal insists on reminding its listener, is not exempt from the one law that governs every heaven a soul can purchase rather than receive as grace: what merit buys, merit eventually stops paying for. Pururava's long communion with Urvashi in Gandharvaloka had itself been the fruit of accumulated punya, and punya, however vast, runs out exactly the way scripture elsewhere warns that it must, dropping the soul that spent it back down into mrityuloka, the world of death, the moment the account is empty. So it happened to the Aila. After all those years, after the storm, the madness, the yearly nights on the Sarasvati, after fire itself had been divided into three in his name, Pururava came back down to the same earth he had once run across barefoot and out of his mind. And this time, standing again on ordinary ground, everything he had lived through rose up in his memory at once: the lambs, the lightning, the wandering, the one night a year that had felt like a whole marriage folded into a single sunset. He looked at all of it clearly for what it was, a love as total as a mortal has perhaps ever been permitted to feel for someone not of this world, and he saw that even that had not been enough to keep. Nothing built on desire, however magnificent, however heaven-touched, was going to hold. A vairagya seized him then that no ordinary disappointment could have produced, because no ordinary man had loved as extravagantly, or lost as completely, as he had.

What the Bhaktamal wants its listener to notice, and what makes an old Puranic king worth including in a garland woven for saints, is what Pururava did with that vairagya once it had him. He did not let it curdle into bitterness at love itself, or at the woman he had lost, or at a heaven that had first given him everything and then quietly repossessed it. The very intensity that had once made him tear out of a warm bed into a lightning storm for the sake of two lambs, the very one-pointedness that had walked half-mad across the earth asking birds and rivers for news of a woman's face, did not vanish along with his disillusionment. It turned. All that capacity for total absorption, having discovered that no object bound by time could ever hold it, discovered Hari instead, and gave itself to him the way it had once given itself to Urvashi, without holding anything back. And where his years in Gandharvaloka had been bought with punya that was, from the very first day, always going to run out, what came to him now arrived by the opposite road entirely: not earned, not purchased with a hundred Ashvamedhas, but given, hari-kripa, the sheer grace of Hari, which is the one current a soul can never spend down to nothing. On that grace, the tradition says, the Aila crossed all the way to Vaikuntha, the imperishable world, where nothing is ever taken back.

It is worth sitting for a moment with why Nabhadas chose to place a figure this old, this entangled in the machinery of Puranic myth, near the root of his garland of devotees, a king whose own mother could not settle into a single sex long enough for the storytellers to agree on how it happened. Perhaps it is precisely because Pururava is not, for most of his story, a religious man at all. He is a lover, extravagant and reckless and finally undone, the kind of man whose whole biography could be filed under desire rather than devotion. And that is exactly the point the old commentators seem most interested in making: the raw material of bhakti and the raw material of ordinary human longing are not two different substances. They are the same fire, capable of being offered, for a season, to a woman who must leave every year at dawn, and capable, once life has burned through every illusion that any earthly beloved could ever be enough, of being offered instead to the one Beloved who never has to leave. Pururava did not arrive at Hari's feet by turning away from love. He arrived there by loving so completely, and losing so completely, that there was finally nothing left to do with all that longing except give it, entire, to God.