Born from the Side

This hymn is not a story told from beginning to end. It is a set of voices, and the poet does not say who is speaking. You have to listen for it.

The first voice is talking to a child who has not yet been born.

"This is the old road," it says. "The road everyone knows. All the gods came into the world this way. Be born this way, even you, strong as you already are. Do not be the death of your mother."

The child answers from inside.

"I will not go out that way. It is a hard, narrow passage. I will come out sideways, through the side. I have a great deal to do that nobody has done yet. There is one I must fight, and one I must question."

His mother had carried him, the hymn says, for a thousand months and many autumns. No one like him had been born before, and no one like him would be born again.

Then he was born, and his mother did not hold him up for the world to see. She thought of him as something to be ashamed of, and she hid him.

It made no difference. He stood up by himself. He put on his own clothing. He was only just born, and he filled the earth and the sky.

Another hymn tells what he wanted first. It was not milk. On the day of his birth he was thirsty for Soma, the drink pressed from a mountain plant, and he drank it in the house of Tvashtri the craftsman, a hundred measures of it.

His mother speaks next, and she seems to be standing beside running water.

"Listen to these rivers, how they shout together as they go. Ask them what they are saying. Ask them what wall of rock they broke through. It was my son who did that. With his great thunderbolt he killed Vritra and let these rivers run."

And then, more quietly, as if to him:

"I threw you away, I, your young mother. But the waters were kind to my baby. My son stood up in his strength."

The poet puts it in one line. The heifer bore a bull that no one could master, and then she left her calf unlicked, to go and find his own path.

Later she comes back to him. He is grown and about to go against the dragon.

"My son," she says, "these gods are leaving you."

Indra does not answer her. He turns to the one friend he names.

"Vishnu, my friend," he says, "stride out. Stride as wide as you can."

The hymn does not describe the fight. It has been told elsewhere. Instead, a voice puts three hard questions to Indra.

"Who made your mother a widow? Who tried to kill you, whether you lay still or moved? And when you caught your own father by the foot and destroyed him, which god was there to comfort you?"

Nobody answers. The hymn does not name the father or say what he had done.

The last voice is Indra's own, looking back.

"I was in such need that I cooked a dog's entrails to eat. Among the gods I found no one to comfort me. I saw my wife dishonoured. Then the falcon came, and he brought me the sweet Soma."

That is where the hymn stops. A god who was hidden at birth and deserted before his greatest fight, who once had nothing to eat, is brought the drink of the gods by a bird.