BOOK ONE
AUM, I bow down to Narayana, the most exalted Nara and to the Devi Saraswathi and say
Jaya!
1. See Appendix for a note on the beginning of the original text.
ONE
Shantanu, fourteenth king of the Kurus in the august line of Manu and Bharata, was a keen hunter. Since his earliest years, the monarch of the race of the Moon was a solitary; and he hunted alone as well. He did not like to share the passion of careful tracking, the breathless chase, or the humming arrow. He did not care to diffuse the excitement and danger of the hunt by surrounding himself with courtiers or trackers. Hunting was rather like worship to him, a thing just between himself and the wilderness.
Shantanu was a young king at the time of which we speak. But he had not married and the kingdom did not have an heir. It seemed he would never take a wife, for he had refused the most beautiful, most gifted princesses in all Bharatavarsha. Shantanu had always known that one day he would indeed marry and the Kurus would have their crown prince. Only when the woman for whom he was waiting, the one who appeared so clearly to him in his dreams, came into his waking life.
Twilight and the blue sky was dying in dark crimson and turquoise when Shantanu rode to the banks of the sacred Ganga. His horse frothed at the mouth, its flanks steamed. Shantanu had almost ridden him into the ground today, as if the king was possessed by a demon. He had come much farther than he had intended and though he had set out at dawn he had killed nothing yet. Once a leopard had eluded him and twice a fine stag. The last arrow missed its mark by a hand's width. An archer like him should have turned home in disgust, on this luckless day when the gods of the hunt mocked him.
But Shantanu did not turn back. He pressed on, more determined than ever that he would not return empty-handed, not if he had to sleep out under the stars. He did not know it yet, but fate drew him on.
The sun was sinking at the crest of the western hills, when he arrived exhausted on the banks of the shimmering river.
"Ganga!" breathed Shantanu when he saw her: she who had fallen from the sky in pristine times. She was as wide as a sea and he could hardly make out her far bank. He dismounted and led his horse to the susurrant water's edge, where the river lapped at banks of green moss.
He knelt beside his beast and, bending down to the crystal flow, drank deeply, splashing his arms and face with the sweet water. Suddenly, the king became aware that he was not alone.
He turned and saw her: a vision swathed in the last rays of the saffron sun, her skin like soft gold. She appeared perfect of face and body. Her eyes were luminous, her black hair fell to her waist in a cascade, as she stood staring at him and made his blood quicken as no other woman ever had. And she was no stranger: she had visited his dreams since he was a boy.
They stood transfixed for an interminable moment, before Shantanu went softly toward her. Words failed him, but he held out his hands, wanting to say everything with that gesture.
She stood there, playing nervously with her black tresses. Her face mirrored the river uncannily; it seemed the water flowed across her sculpted features, as if the Ganga and she were one being, their rhythms the same, their souls.
Next moment, he drew her to him in the deepening darkness. He whispered, "I am Shantanu, king in Hastinapura. I cannot live without you, I want you to be my queen."
Her eyes wild, she said, "Oh I love you, my lord! But I must bind you with a condition, if I am to be your wife."
"Anything, anything at all; my life if you want it."
"You must never ask me who I am, nor question what I do, however terrible it may seem."
His hands parted the flowing garment she wore, which seemed made of river-moss and he knelt before her to slake all the thirst of his young manhood, for the king was still a virgin. She breathed, "I will be your wife until you question me. But the day you do, I will leave you for ever."
"Never. I swear I will never question you, whatever you do."
Now her hands were peeling off his clothes and the river swelled around them in a tide of flames. It seemed their bodies turned to water and fire and they were lost in an ancient dream of love.
Shantanu brought her home to Hastinapura, the city of elephants and she became his queen. For where he had found her, he called her Ganga. She was peerless: a perfect companion who knew his every whim, wise and just, modest and charming and knowing how to keep her own counsel. Most of all, she was his love; and when they were alone together, Shantanu and Ganga slipped beyond time's confines and became other, magical beings.
A year passed and one summer's evening Ganga told Shantanu that she was pregnant. There was celebration in Hastinapura, which lasted a month: that an heir would be born in the royal House of the Moon. It seemed to the king that he was hardly mortal any more. In his joy Shantanu chose to ignore the strange anxiety that gripped his wife during her pregnancy. He attributed her moody silences and her refusal to see anyone for days, to just the fact that a woman is subject to many changes at such a time.
Winter was near its end and there was spring in the air, when on a fine morning a messenger arrived breathless in his king's court. He came with the news that a fine son had been born to queen Ganga. Shantanu sprang up from his throne and ran to his wife's apartment. Ignoring the guards, who were trying to convey something urgently to him, he burst into the room of labor, only to find it deserted.
He turned back to the guards and the somber women of the harem.
"Where is she?" he cried. "Where is my son?"
The captain of the guards said, "My lord, the queen had hardly given birth when she snatched up the child in her arms and ran out. She said she was going to the river and forbade any of us to follow her, on pain of death."
Shantanu ordered his swiftest horse saddled. She had an hour's start, but she had gone by chariot. It was twilight again when the Kuru king came flying to the river's bank, to the very place where his love had first appeared.
The sun was sinking over the western hills. In that last light, he saw her standing at the candescent water's edge, her infant in her arms. She was speaking earnestly to the river in an old and fluid tongue. He couldn't understand a word she said, but suddenly he remembered some other words she had once said to him: "You must never question me, whatever I do, or I will leave you for ever."
Even as he leapt off his horse, she chanted a resonant mantra, lifted their baby high above her head and cast him into the swirling flow. Her cry echoed there as if she had torn her heart from her body and flung it from her.
She turned in the golden ghost-light and, as long as he lived, Shantanu would never forget the look on her face. Before he could roar the searing protest that rose in him, she ran to him and flung her arms around his neck. Her eyes raged at him, 'Remember your oath!'
She pulled him down onto the emerald moss and enfolded him in her currents. She made him forget everything in the velvet tide to her sea.