The Vasu Who Stole the Cow

King Shantanu stood on the riverbank with his eighth son in his arms, and his wife was leaving him.

She had drowned the first seven. Each time a child was born she had carried it to the river, smiling, and let it sink, and each time the king had kept silent, because on the day they married he had promised never to question anything she did. With the eighth he could not bear it. "Do not kill him!" he had cried. "Who are you? Why do you do this to your own children?"

So she told him. She was Ganga, the river herself. The children were eight gods called the Vasus, who had been cursed to be born as men, and she had only been setting them free.

"But what had they done?" asked the king. "And why must this one stay?"

Ganga told him the whole story.

On the slope of Mount Meru there was a hermitage, and the sage Vasishtha lived in it. The woods around it were full of birds and deer, and flowers of every season bloomed there together. The sage owned one thing of great value. She was a cow named Nandini, the daughter of the divine cow Surabhi, and she could grant whatever was asked of her. She wandered in those woods without fear.

One day the eight Vasus came walking there with their wives, enjoying the hills. The wife of the Vasu called Dyu saw the cow, with her large eyes and full udder and fine tail, and showed her to her husband.

"That is the sage's cow," said Dyu. "They say a mortal who drinks her milk stays young for ten thousand years."

His wife thought at once of someone else.

"I have a friend on earth," she said. "Jitavati, the daughter of King Ushinara. She is young and lovely. I want this cow for her, with the calf, so that she alone among humans may never grow old or sick. Bring it to me. There is nothing I would like better."

Dyu wished to please her. He did not stop to think whose cow it was, or what a sage's anger could do. With his brother Prithu and the others to help him, he led the cow and her calf away.

In the evening Vasishtha came home with the fruit he had gathered. The cow was not there. He searched the woods and did not find her. Then he looked with the inner sight his long discipline had given him, and he saw who had taken her.

"The Vasus have stolen my cow," he said. "Then let them be born on earth."

The Vasus heard of it and came hurrying to the hermitage to beg his pardon. He would not take back his words. But he was a just man, and he softened them.

"You will be free of the curse within a year of your birth," he told them. "All but one. Dyu, for whose deed you are cursed, must live on earth for a long time. He will be virtuous, and learned in the scriptures, and an obedient son to his father. But he will have no children, and he will not know the company of a wife."

"Then the Vasus came to me," said Ganga, "and asked me to be their mother and to throw each of them into the water the moment he was born. I did as they asked. This one is Dyu. He must stay."

She took the child with her and vanished. Years later she brought him back to his father, grown and trained in every weapon. He had learned the Vedas, she said, from Vasishtha himself. He was named Devavrata, and the world came to know him as Bhishma, the grandfather of the Kuru house, who never married.

A few chapters before Ganga's account, the Mahabharata has already told how the Vasus met her, and here the story is different.

Ganga was coming away from the court of Brahma. On the road she met eight gods walking the same way. They were the Vasus, and they looked wretched.

"Why are you so downcast?" she asked. "Is all well with you, dwellers in heaven?"

"We have been cursed, queen of rivers," they said, "and for a small fault. The sage Vasishtha was sitting at his twilight prayers. We did not see him there, and we crossed over him without knowing it. He was angry, and he said, 'Be born among men.' Nobody can undo what such a man has said."

There is no cow in this account, and no wife, and no single culprit. All eight are guilty of the same carelessness.

Then they made their request.

"We do not want to be born from a human mother. Become a woman yourself, and let us be your sons."

"Who on earth shall be your father?" asked Ganga.

"A son will be born to King Pratipa. His name will be Shantanu."

That suited her, for she had her own reasons to think well of that king. Then the Vasus asked the hard thing.

"Throw each of us into the water as soon as we are born, so that we need not stay on earth."

"I will," said Ganga. "But the king should not be left with nothing. Let one son live."

The Vasus talked it over. "Each of us will give an eighth part of his own strength," they said. "From those eight parts you shall have one son, as you and he desire. But he will have no children on earth."

Having made that arrangement with her, they went on their way.