The Outcast and the River

The seers were holding a long sacrifice on the bank of the Sarasvati.

It was a Soma sacrifice, the kind that goes on for many days, and every man who sat down to it had first been made ready by the proper rites. One of them was named Kavasha, the son of Ilusha. He had been made ready like the rest. Then, in the middle of the sacrifice, the others turned on him.

"He is the child of a slave woman," they said.

"He is a cheat. He is no Brahman."

"How was a man like this ever admitted among us?"

They would not let him near the Soma. They did more than that. They drove him out of the camp, away from the river, into the dry country where nothing grows.

"Let thirst kill him there," they said. "He shall not drink the water of the Sarasvati."

Kavasha walked into the wilderness with nothing.

There was no water anywhere. Behind him lay the river he had been forbidden. Thirst took hold of him, as the seers had meant it to.

And there, says the Brahmana, he saw a hymn.

That is how the old books speak of it. A hymn is not made up. It is seen by the one who is ready to see it. The hymn Kavasha saw is in the Rigveda still, in the tenth book. It is a hymn to the Waters and to the Child of the Waters, the god who shines in the deep without fuel.

He began to recite it aloud, in the desert, with a dry mouth.

"Let the song go out to the gods. Let the priest hurry to the Waters of heaven."

"Child of the Waters, you who shine in the floods with no wood to feed you, give us waters rich in sweetness."

"Waters, you are queens. You are the mothers of the world. You live together and you grow together."

"You wealthy Waters, hear my call. Sarasvati, give the singer his full life."

By that hymn, the Brahmana says, Kavasha came to the dear home of the Waters.

The Waters came out after him. They welled up behind him as he went. And Sarasvati herself hurried to him and ran all around him on every side, so that the man who had been sent away to die of thirst stood with the river in a ring about him.

The place had a name ever afterwards. People called it Parisaraka, the place where she ran around.

Back at the sacrifice the seers saw what had happened, and they understood it.

"The gods know this man," they said to one another. "Let us call him back."

"Let it be so."

They sent for Kavasha and brought him in among them again. Then they took up his hymn and performed it themselves, the hymn of the Child of the Waters, and by it they too came to the dear home of the Waters and of the gods.

From that day it has been the hymn the priest recites when water is fetched for the Soma. He is to recite it without a break, the Brahmana adds, and then the rain will fall without a break as well.

The other Brahmana of the Rigveda tells of Kavasha too, in fewer words, and it remembers him for two things.

The first is older than the quarrel. In early days, it says, the Rakshasas used to lie in wait at the fords. They wanted to ruin the sacrifice, and a sacrifice cannot be held without water. Whoever came down to the Waters, they killed. Then Kavasha saw the hymn of fifteen verses and recited it, and it struck the Rakshasas away from the fords. Since then the priests go down to the water and come back unhurt.

The second is the day at the river. A group of seers, whom this text calls the Madhyamas, were holding a sacrificial session on the Sarasvati. Kavasha came and sat down in the middle of them.

"You are the son of a slave woman," they said. "We will not eat with you."

Nobody drove him anywhere. He got up of his own accord and rushed away in anger, and as he went he praised the Sarasvati with his hymn.

The river followed him.

The seers watched her go after the man they had refused to eat beside, and all their heat left them. They ran after him.

"Seer, we bow to you," they said. "Do us no harm. You are the best of us all, for she follows after you."

So they told him what they now knew, and they took his anger away. This, says the Brahmana, is the greatness of Kavasha, and he is the one who first saw the hymn.