Urvashi and Pururavas

Urvashi was an Apsaras, one of the nymphs who live among the Gandharvas. Pururavas was a king on earth, the son of Ila. She loved him, and she came to be his wife.

She set her terms first.

"One thing above all," she said. "I must never see you unclothed. That is the way with us."

He agreed, and she stayed. She stayed so long that she was carrying his child.

The Gandharvas grew restless.

"Urvashi has lived among men for a long time," they said to one another. "Find some way to bring her back to us."

They knew her rule. They knew also that a ewe with two lambs was tied beside her bed. One night they carried off a lamb.

"They are taking my darling!" Urvashi cried. "As if there were no hero here, and no man!"

They carried off the second lamb, and she cried out the same words.

Pururavas heard her. How can there be no hero where I am, he thought. He sprang up after the thieves just as he was, because putting on his robe seemed to take too long. The Gandharvas made a flash of lightning, and for an instant the night was as bright as day. Urvashi saw him.

"Here I am, back again," he said. But she had vanished.

The king wandered all over Kurukshetra, wailing with sorrow. He came to a lotus lake called Anyatahplaksha and walked along its bank. Water birds were swimming there. They were Apsarases in the shape of birds, and one of them knew him.

"This is the man I lived with," said Urvashi.

"Let us show ourselves to him," said her friends, and they did.

Here the oldest part of the story begins. The Rigveda has a hymn of these two voices, and the Brahmana quotes it.

"Wife, stay!" said Pururavas. "Hard-hearted as you are, let us talk. If these things between us stay unsaid, they will bring us no joy in the days to come."

"What use is talking to you now?" said Urvashi. "I have gone from you like the first of the dawns. Go home, Pururavas. I am as hard to catch as the wind."

"Then your friend will rush away today and never return. He will lie in the lap of ruin, and the fierce wolves will eat him."

"Do not die, Pururavas. Do not rush away. Do not let the wolves have you." Then she said a hard thing. "There is no friendship with women. Their hearts are the hearts of hyenas."

The Brahmana explains what she meant by it: do not take this to heart, and go home.

In the Rigveda that is almost all. The gods tell him that his children will make offerings to them, and that he himself will be glad in heaven. He does not win her back.

The Brahmana goes on. Her heart took pity on him, it says.

"Come here on the last night of the year from now," Urvashi said. "You shall have one night with me, and by then your son will have been born."

He came on that night, and a golden palace stood there. "Enter," they told him, and they sent her to him.

"Tomorrow the Gandharvas will offer you a boon," she said.

"Choose it for me."

"Say this: let me be one of you."

In the morning he said it. The Gandharvas answered that no fire among men was holy enough for such a thing. They put fire in a pan and gave it to him.

He took the fire and his boy and set off home. He left the fire in the forest and went into the village with the boy. When he came back the fire was gone. Where it had been, an ashvattha tree was standing. Where the pan had been, there was a sami tree.

He went back to the Gandharvas. "Make an upper fire-stick of ashvattha wood and a lower one of ashvattha wood. The fire that comes from them will be that very fire."

He made the sticks and kindled the fire. He made his offering in it, and he became one of the Gandharvas.

The Purana begins with a curse. Urvashi had fallen under the displeasure of the gods Mitra and Varuna, and so she came down to live in the world of mortals. There she saw Pururavas, the son of Budha and Ila, a king known for truth and generosity, and she forgot heaven.

"I love you," said the king. "Have pity on me."

"I will stay," said Urvashi, "if you keep my conditions. I have two rams that I love as my children. They must stay by my bed and never be carried away. I must never see you undressed. And my only food is to be ghee."

He agreed. They lived among the groves and lotus lakes of Alaka for sixty-one thousand years, and she never once thought of the sky.

The sky thought of her. Heaven was dull without Urvashi, and the Gandharvas sent one of their own, Vishvavasu, to break the agreement. He came at night and took a ram.

"Who has stolen my child?" Urvashi cried. "If I had a husband this would not have happened."

The king heard, and he did not move. He remembered that he was undressed. Then the second ram was taken, and she cried that her husband was a coward. That he could not bear. Trusting the darkness, he took his sword and ran after the thieves. The Gandharvas lit the room with lightning. She saw him, and she was gone.

He searched the world like a madman. At Kurukshetra he found her bathing in a lotus lake with four other nymphs.

"Do nothing wild, great king," she said. "I am with child. Come back in a year. I will give you your son and stay one night."

So it went, year after year, until she had borne him five sons. Then the Gandharvas offered him a boon, and he asked only to live where Urvashi lived. They gave him a vessel of fire. He left it in a wood, thinking himself a fool for carrying home a pot instead of his wife. When he went back for it, a young ashvattha was growing out of a sami plant on the spot.

He took the wood home and cut sticks as many inches long as the Gayatri verse has syllables. He rubbed fire from them, made it into three fires and offered into them with Urvashi in his mind. So he reached the world of the Gandharvas and was not parted from her again.

Kalidasa made the story into a play in five acts, and he began it with a rescue.

A company of nymphs is crying for help on a mountain. A demon has carried off Urvashi and her friend Chitralekha. King Pururavas hears them, drives his chariot through the air after the demon and brings both nymphs back. When Urvashi opens her eyes she sees the king. Before the nymphs are called home, the two have looked at each other too long.

Back in his palace the king can think of nothing else. Urvashi slips down from heaven, invisible, to listen. When she has heard enough she writes a verse on a birch leaf and lets it fall at his feet. The leaf blows away and the queen's maid finds it. The queen is hurt, and says so. Later she comes back with quiet dignity.

"Whoever my lord truly loves, and who truly loves him," she says, "I will welcome her."

In heaven, meanwhile, Urvashi is acting in a play before the gods. Someone on stage asks her character, "On whom is your heart set?" She should name a god. She says, "On Pururavas."

The master of heaven's stage curses her to fall from heaven. The curse is softened: she may live with the king until he sees the child she bears him, and then she must come back.

There is no lamb and no lightning here. The parting comes in a mountain forest, where Urvashi, in a jealous mood, walks into a grove that no woman may enter and is turned into a vine. The king wanders through the trees and asks a peacock, a cuckoo, a swan, an elephant and a river where she has gone. He finds a red jewel, the gem of reunion, and embraces a vine that reminds him of her. She is in his arms again.

Years pass. One day an arrow brings down a vulture that has stolen the gem, and the name on the arrow is Ayus, son of Pururavas and Urvashi. She had hidden the boy with a hermit woman so that the king would never see him. Now he has. As the king prepares to give up his throne, a messenger arrives from heaven: Urvashi may stay with him for as long as he lives.