Ruru gives away half his life for Pramadvara

A child left by a river

Pramadvara did not start out as anyone's daughter. Her mother was Menaka, the apsara who moves through the Mahabharata leaving children behind the way other women leave footprints, and her father was a gandharva named Vishvavasu, who wanted no more part in raising her than Menaka did. Menaka set the infant down on a riverbank near the ashram of a sage called Sthulakesha and left. Whatever calculation goes into an apsara's choice of where to abandon a child, this one turned out kinder than most abandonments in these stories tend to be. Sthulakesha heard crying, went looking, and found a baby girl glowing with an unclaimed beauty that seemed too much for the forest around her. He carried her home and raised her as his own, and gave her a name that means, roughly, an excess of splendor, because that was the plain truth of how she looked even as a child.

She grew up in that ashram the way a rare thing grows up somewhere quiet, admired by everyone who saw her and belonging fully to no one, until Ruru saw her too.

A wedding fixed and a wedding undone

Ruru was the son of the sage Pramati, grandson of the great Bhrigu, born of a line of ascetics with more austerity behind them than most kingdoms have soldiers. He met Pramadvara somewhere in that stretch of forest where the ashrams sat close enough together that their young people grew up half aware of each other, and whatever happened in his mind when he actually looked at her was final. He asked Sthulakesha for her, Sthulakesha agreed, and a day was fixed. Forest weddings in these stories move fast once the fathers are satisfied, and this one was no exception.

It was in the days just before the wedding, with the arrangements already half made, that Pramadvara was walking with her companions and put her foot down on a snake coiled in the grass, hidden the way snakes are always hidden until the exact moment they are not. The bite was not the kind anyone recovers from. She went down where she stood, and by the time anyone reached her she was already gone, and the wedding that had been fixed for a specific day became instead a body laid out for mourning on that same day.

What the gods offered him

Ruru's grief did not stay inside him the way grief is supposed to, quietly, privately, worn down over months. He went out into the forest and made noise with it, wailing in the way the old tellers describe as filling the whole wood, until a messenger from the higher worlds, a deva-duta, came to find him specifically because his sorrow had reached somewhere it was not meant to reach.

The messenger told him the truth plainly. She could be restored. It was possible. It was not, however, free. The gods who governed such returns had one price, and the price was that Ruru would have to give up half of whatever years remained to him and hand them over to her, so that her second life would be paid for out of the length of his own.

Ruru did not ask how many years that was, or bargain for a smaller share, or take a night to think about whether a life spent on someone who might now die again some other way was a life well spent. He agreed on the spot, without the pause a more careful man might have allowed himself, and the gods did what they had offered to do. Pramadvara opened her eyes on the ground where she had been laid out for the dead, breathing, restored, exactly herself, carrying a second life bought entirely out of the first one belonging to the man about to marry her.

What he did with what was left

They were married. That part of the story closes cleanly, the way a wedding is supposed to close a story, except this one is only half told at that point, and the tellers know it.

Ruru could not put down what the snake had done to him. He had gotten Pramadvara back, at a cost he had paid without complaint, but the fact of losing her once sat in him and turned, over time, into something closer to a mission than a grief. He took up a staff and began going out into the forest specifically to find snakes and kill them. Not the one snake, since that one was long gone and unidentifiable among a thousand others just like it, but any snake, every snake, anything that moved the way the thing in the grass had moved. He ranged through the wild places with the staff raised, and for a long stretch of the years he had left, that hunt was what his days were built around.

The lizard that spoke

He came, in the course of this, on a dundubha, a large harmless creature that only resembles a snake to someone who has stopped bothering to tell the difference, lying in the grass ahead of him. Ruru raised the staff to bring it down the way he had brought it down on so many others by then.

The dundubha spoke. "I have done nothing to you. Why are you about to kill me?"

Ruru told him what had happened to Pramadvara, and what he had sworn afterward, and the dundubha listened and then made an argument Ruru had apparently never had put to him directly in all his time swinging that staff. A dundubha is not the snake that bit her. Most of what he had already killed was not the snake that bit her either, because that single culprit was one creature among an entire class of creatures he had decided, without much examining the decision, to hold collectively guilty. A brahmin's whole training, the dundubha said, points him toward gentleness, toward not causing fear in things that have not caused him any, and a man swinging a staff at every snake-shaped animal in the forest had stopped practicing anything that could still be called that.

What the lizard had been

Then the dundubha told him why he happened to be able to say any of this at all. He had once been a man, a rishi named Sahasrapat, and he had a friend, another ascetic named Khagama, whom he had frightened as a joke by building a fake snake out of kusha grass and setting it in his path. Khagama, terrified and then furious when he discovered the trick, cursed him on the spot to become an actual serpent. Sahasrapat begged forgiveness fast enough that Khagama softened the curse rather than lifting it outright, and set a term on it: he would live as a dundubha until the day Ruru, of the line of Bhrigu, came to find him. Ruru finding him and hearing him out was not a chance meeting in the story's own accounting. It was the end of a sentence that had been waiting for exactly this conversation to happen.

Whatever weight that recognition carried, it worked. Ruru put the staff down. He did not go back out looking for snakes again, and the vow that had eaten years of the life he had already halved for her sake was over.

What Shaunaka was telling his listener

This account survives because a descendant of Ruru's, the sage Shaunaka, told it to the storyteller Sauti in the middle of a much larger telling, the one about King Janamejaya's sacrifice meant to wipe out every snake alive in revenge for his father's death. Shaunaka was not filling time. He was explaining, through his own ancestor, that the question of whether an entire kind of creature can be punished for what one of them did is not new, and that his family had already been talked out of the same reasoning once. The dundubha's argument to Ruru is the same argument that will be needed again, on a much larger scale, when a boy named Astika walks into that sacrifice and tries to stop it before every snake in the story dies for the sin of one.

The tellings do not all agree on the terms of what Ruru gave. Some versions have him hand over a flat half of the years he had left, exactly as told here. Others describe the gods, or a single deity such as Dhatri, splitting the offer differently, or leave the arithmetic vague and simply say he gave up a portion of his own life so that hers could resume. What none of the versions disagree on is the order of events: he said yes before anyone finished explaining the cost, and it took a talking lizard to make him think, afterward, about who else was paying for what he had lost.