The Serpent Who Holds the Earth

Kadru had a thousand sons, and they were all serpents, and the first of them to be born was Shesha.

His brothers were quarrelsome. They hated Vinata, their mother's sister, and her son Garuda, and they spent their days plotting against them. Shesha could not stand it.

"I will not live with them," he said, and left.

He went to the mountain Gandhamadana and did penance there, eating nothing, living on air. He went on to Badari in the Himalayas, to Gokarna on the western sea, to the forests of Pushkara, to the foot of the Himalayas, and at every holy place he stayed and starved himself and prayed. His skin dried, his flesh wasted, and his body became nothing but sinew.

Brahma, the grandfather of the worlds, came to see him.

"What are you doing, Shesha?" he asked. "Your penance troubles the world. Tell me what you want."

"My brothers are wicked," said Shesha. "They are always quarrelling with Vinata and her son, who is our brother too, though they will not see it. I do not want to live with them. I want to put off this body, so that I need not be with them even after death."

"I know your brothers," said Brahma. "But you have chosen well. Ask me for a boon."

"Only this," said Shesha. "Let my heart always take delight in what is right, and in peace, and in penance."

"So be it," said Brahma. "And now I will ask something of you, for the good of all creatures."

"Ask."

"The earth is unsteady," said Brahma. "She shakes, with all her mountains and forests and seas and cities. Hold her for me, Shesha, so that she will be still."

"I will hold her," said Shesha. "Put her on my head."

"Go beneath her, then," said Brahma. "She will make a way for you."

The earth opened a crack, and Shesha went down through it into the depths, and from below he lifted the whole earth on his head and held it there. And it was still.

Brahma was very pleased.

"You are Dharma himself," he told him. "You do alone, below, what I and Indra do above."

He gave him Garuda, the son of Vinata, to be his friend. And ever since, the serpent the Mahabharata calls the lord Ananta, the endless one, has lived beneath the earth and carried it.

The Mahabharata does not say that Shesha came to earth. It lets us find out.

At the very end, when the Yadavas had destroyed each other in a drunken brawl by the sea, Krishna was left almost alone. He sent his charioteer Daruka to Hastinapura to fetch Arjuna. He told his old father Vasudeva to guard the women of Dvaraka until Arjuna came. Then he went looking for his elder brother, Balarama. He found him in a lonely place at the edge of the forest, sitting under a tree, his eyes closed, deep in yoga.

As Krishna watched, something came out of Balarama's mouth. It was a serpent, white as a mountain of snow, with a thousand heads and red eyes. It slid out of his body, which sat empty, and went away across the shore and into the ocean.

The sea itself received it. And all the great nagas came out of the water to welcome it home: Vasuki and Takshaka, Karkotaka and the rest, and the rivers in their forms, and Varuna, the lord of the waters.

Krishna watched it go. He knew then what his brother had been all along, and he knew that his own time had come too. He wandered for a while in the empty forest, thinking of everything that had happened, and then he lay down on the ground and went into yoga himself. A hunter called Jara, seeing the sole of his foot through the leaves, took it for a deer and let fly an arrow. That was how Krishna left the world, a little way off from the place where the serpent had gone home to the sea.