Shri Yayati Ji

A king out hunting hears a voice rising from the ground itself. He follows it to the mouth of a dry well, deep and narrow, and finds inside it a young woman, drenched and shivering, who has been there long enough to give up shouting and start merely weeping. He lowers his own upper cloth into the darkness and pulls her up by it, hand over hand, and only once she stands before him, gasping and furious rather than grateful, does he learn her name: Devayani, daughter of Shukracharya, the guru of the asuras. She had gone to bathe in a forest stream with a friend, Sharmishtha, daughter of the asura king Vrishaparva, and a gust of wind, some say Indra's own mischief, had scattered their clothes on the bank so that in the scramble to dress they put on each other's garments. A quarrel over whose clothing belonged to whom turned, as such quarrels do, into a quarrel over whose father outranked whose, and Sharmishtha, stung by a jab from a mere brahmana's daughter dressed in a king's dependent's silk, shoved Devayani into the well and walked away believing she had left her for dead. That is how Yayati, son of Nahusha, sovereign of the lunar line descended from Chandra through Pururavas and Ayu, first came into this story: not as a bridegroom or a philosopher-king but as a man who happened to be riding past a well.

Devayani would not go home. Weeping before her father, she declared she would set foot in the asura capital again only after Sharmishtha herself came to serve her, and Vrishaparva, unwilling to provoke the guru on whom the fortunes of his entire people rested, persuaded his own daughter to accept the humiliation of becoming Devayani's attendant. It was in the course of arranging this that Devayani met her rescuer again and asked Shukracharya for Yayati's hand. The old sage agreed, on one binding condition, spoken aloud in front of the whole court: Sharmishtha would go with Devayani into the king's household, but Yayati was never, under any circumstance, to bring her to his bed. Yayati promised. For a while he kept the promise.

Sharmishtha, however, had her own dharma to weigh against her promise to a rival. When her fertile season came, she went to Yayati privately and reminded him of an older rule than any oath sworn to a father-in-law: that a king who turns away a woman approaching him in her season, especially a woman of royal blood herself, incurs a fault as grave as the one he is trying to avoid by refusing her. Caught between two claims on his conduct, Yayati chose to satisfy the one made in secret, and over the following years Sharmishtha bore him three sons, whom she raised quietly among her own attendants while Devayani, absorbed in her own two boys, noticed nothing. It could not last. Devayani found three children who bore Yayati's unmistakable stamp playing where they had no business being, forced the truth out of Sharmishtha, and rode straight to her father's court, betrayed twice over now, once by her husband and once by the woman she had made her servant precisely so this could never happen.

Shukracharya did not argue the fine points of dharma that had moved his own daughter's rival. He simply cursed Yayati, there and then, to be seized by the decrepitude of extreme old age in the very prime of his life. When Yayati came before him, half his hair already white, his limbs already failing, and begged for some mercy, Shukracharya told him what every telling of this story remembers: that a curse once spoken cannot be recalled, only redirected. If Yayati could persuade one of his own sons to take on his old age in exchange for his youth, the exchange would hold, and Yayati would be young again.

He asked the eldest first. Yadu, Devayani's firstborn, refused a decrepitude he had done nothing to earn, and for the refusal his father told him that his descendants, however numerous and however glorious, would never sit on a throne as sovereigns in their own right. Turvasu, the second son, refused in turn and heard an equally hard word. Druhyu and Anu, Sharmishtha's elder boys, refused as well, each drawing his father's anger down on the fortunes of his line. Only Puru, Sharmishtha's youngest and the least likely by rank of birth to inherit anything, said yes without conditions. He took his father's ruined body into his own young limbs and gave Yayati back the vigor of youth, asking nothing in return but to have done right by the man who had given him life.

With a young man's body restored to him, Yayati kept it for what the old storytellers call a thousand years, and he spent that time exactly as a man freed from the fear of dying old might be expected to spend it: in the company of beautiful women, in feasting, in hunting, in every pleasure a chakravartin's court could supply. And at the end of that immense stretch of indulgence, worn down not in body now but in something harder to name, he arrived at a recognition he later tried to hand to Puru along with the youth he was returning: that desire does not go out when it is fed. It grows, the way fire grows when ghee is poured on it, higher and hungrier with every offering rather than nearer to being satisfied. He had heard this taught since boyhood, he told his son, and had read it in the sacred books besides, but only now, after a thousand years spent trying to prove the teaching wrong, did he actually know it was true.

He called Puru back, returned his youth to him exactly as it had been lent, resumed his own old age without complaint, and then did something that mattered as much as the confession itself: he crowned Puru his heir, passing over four elder sons in favor of the one who had shown character rather than the one whose birth order entitled him to the throne. Then Yayati walked into the forest, took up the bark garments and the begging bowl of a renunciate, and spent his remaining years in tapasya fierce enough, tradition holds, to burn away what a thousand years of pleasure had only fed. That discipline earned him, in time, a place in Swarga among the gods.

Heaven did not hold him. Asked by Indra, or by the sages of that court, to account for the merit that had brought him there, Yayati is remembered as having answered with pride rather than humility, boasting of sacrifices beyond counting and holiness beyond comparison, and pride was enough to have him hurled back down toward the earth headfirst. It was not the first time this particular fault had struck this particular family: his own father Nahusha, once elevated to Indra's own seat during a period when heaven's rightful king was in hiding, had grown so intoxicated by the position that he forced sages to carry his palanquin and kicked the great rishi Agastya for being too slow, earning a curse that turned him into a serpent on the earth below. Falling now himself, Yayati passed through the middle air and was met, before he could strike the ground, by four kings of surpassing virtue: Vasumanas, Pratardana, Shibi, and Ashtaka. Tradition traces these four to his own daughter Madhavi, who had been given by Yayati years earlier to the sage Galava in place of an impossible bride price of eight hundred rare horses, and who bore each of the four a son by a different father while a boon kept her ever able to return to her original state, so that in a strange and moving way it was Yayati's own daughter's long-ago sacrifice that produced the very grandsons now positioned to catch him as he fell.

The four questioned him with real curiosity rather than judgment, asking what he had seen of the heavenly worlds, how merit is spent and lost, what happens to a soul between one body and the next. Yayati answered as honestly falling men tend to, and moved by both his answers and their own reverence for an ancestor who had, after all, once given away everything including his own youth for a son's sake, the four grandsons offered their accumulated merit to him freely, enough between them to lift his fall into an ascent, and five golden chariots are said to have carried the whole company back up into the heaven he had briefly lost.

The verse fragment that survives from the Bhaktamal's own telling of this story is almost nothing: a bare note that his sons were Shri Yadu ji and Shri Puru ji. But that thin thread is doing heavy work. It was through Yadu's line, the very line his father had sworn would never wear a crown as sovereign right, that Bhagavan Krishna would one day be born into this world, a king in every sense that matters even though the old curse about the throne held true to the letter. And it was through Puru's line, given to the youngest son not because custom demanded it but because love and courage had earned it, that the Kuru and Pandava houses of the Mahabharata would descend. Nabhadas set Yayati among his gallery of devotees not because a king who spent a thousand years chasing pleasure looks like a saint by any ordinary measure, but because his story ends exactly where every bhakta's story has to end: in the admission that indulgence cannot fill the hole it promises to fill, in the willingness to hand over one's crown to the child who deserves it rather than the child who expects it, and in the humbling discovery that even a fall earned by one's own pride can be answered, unearned, by the love of those who come after.