Chapter 42 - (Interlude) Born of Rage

A Brahmin prays three times a day. Once in the morning - Pratah Sandhyavandanam. Once at noon - Madhyanikam. Once at night - Sayam Sandhyavandanam.

Atri prayed twice that.

It wasn't out of necessity, or duty. It was out of desperation.

A living creature is driven by many base instincts. They seek food to survive and shelter to feel safe, yet the deepest and most undeniable urge is the need to leave a piece of themself behind.

For a Brahmin to advance as a sage, they must learn to overcome these base instincts and desires. And as one of the Seven Great Sages - the Saptarishi - of the era as ordained unanimously by the gods, Atri was supposedly untethered from these shakles.

Yet every day, as he arrived home following his prayers, he saw his wife's quiet depression and observed the silence of a home without children, and the urge would rise up from within.

It wasn't due to a lack of trying. For he and his wife Anasuya did try regularly. But it never stuck. Losing a child before it could even form a heartbeat was painful. Experiencing it three times in succession was traumatic.

After the third loss, neither had the heart to keep trying. And ultimately, the desire had to be forcefully suppressed.

Neither husband nor wife wanted to go through the pain and disappointment again, but they did not want to lose hope either.

And so, Atri decided to leave it to the heavens. If he was meant to sire a child, it would happen eventually. Maybe in this life - hopefully within this life - or the next one. Which is why Atri prayed. Desperately.

Every day felt the same when it was all painted with the same two shades of colours. And on a day like yesterday and the day before, Atri was just about finishing his morning prayers, when he realised that he'd forgotten to bring a change of clothes. He could not wear the same attire that he'd worn to bed, after all.

Not willing to abandon his prayers midway, Atri cupped his palms and brought them towards his lips. He twitched his fingers as he blowed through the impromptu air-chamber formed in his palms and let out a melodious whistle that was eerily reminescent of a sparrow's song.

The wind carried this song into the forest nearby, and from its depth, a single sparrow fluttered out. It circled Atri before perching atop his extended finger.

Atri brought his lips close to the bird and spoke in a low whisper. The instruction was passed on, and the bird flew away with a singular purpose.

Atri waited patiently by the banks for his wife. He knew her well. Mentally, he calcuated the time as he traced her actions. He could see walking towards their bedroom, reaching into the wicker basket where she would keep the washed and folded clothes, and picking out a fresh set from the bottom. He calculated the seconds it took for her to fetch a fresh banana leaf and wrapping the set carefully within, and then tying it up tight with a length of cotton rope. He measured her steps from the room to the exit, and the time it would take for her to put on her sandals. He knew the distance between his home and the river, and he already knew his wife's pace.

He turned his head towards the path from his home, and he saw his wife walking out calmly with the package in hand.

"Husband," she said as she extended the package towards him. "I received your instructions."

Atri nodded in gratitude and reached forward. But then, from his peripheral vision, he noticed a bright spot off in the distant sky. His hands paused, and his gaze narrowed. He could immediately surmise that the bright spot wasn't a celestial body because one, it was visible in the morning blue-sky, and second, it was growing larger by the passing second, which meant that it was hurtling towards them!

Atri had barely a moment to process the event. Before he could utter a word or incantation, the brightly swirling, red object the size of a large pumpkin was alreayd upon him. Correction, it was upon his wife!

He swiftly reached out towards her and pulled her behind him. Unfortunately, the laws of physics were absolute, in that upon moving her away he found himself in the object's trajectory.

As they were standing by the river's bank, his wife lost balance upon her sudden reorientation and fell into the river's currents with a loud splash.

Atri braced himself for impact. Which did arrive, but not in the way he expected. There was a push, large enough to also displace him into the river. But that was it. The after effects of the impact, he observed, seemed to be wholly internal.

A sudden surge of heat started to course through him. But strangely, this did not feel like a fever, or the body's reaction to a malicious invader like poison or disease.

As he burst out of the river and took in a large gulp of air, Atri's eyes landed on his wife standing before him. She was wringing her wet hair with an annoyed frown on her face.

"Husband! Why did you do that?" She complained.

Atri's eyes were locked on to her lips as the grumble escaped her. As her voice graced his ears, something within him stirred. Something that he'd crushed down over the years.

His eyes traced a string of water droplets as they streamed out of her soaked hair and traced her figure. They rolled through her rosy cheeks, sultry troughs of her neck, the peaks of her breast that were faintly visible through her soaked clothes, down her exposed waist and gently over her hips-

Atri found himself reaching forward and grabbing her by her waist. He pulled her close, and his wife's eyes burst wide open with flustered surprise.

"H-Husban-" She could not even start, because Atri captured her lips with his own. As they separated, he looked at his breathless wife and said, "Call me by my name once more."

"T-That isn't proper," she said as she tried to hurriedly separate herself from his embrace. Her eyes darted around like a child afraid of being caught doing something outrageous and forbidden. "We should go, what if someone sees us!"

Atri let out a hearty laugh, "If I don't want someone to catch us, noone will."

Anasuya let out an exhausted sigh, "We aren't the same youngsters we used to be, husband."

Atri swiftly bit her lip and chastised her, "While we are here, now. Just the two of us. Call me by my name, Anasuya."

"A-Atri," She mumbled as she averted her gaze in embarrassment.

A single syllable was all it took for Atri to lose himself. His consciousness blurred and his body moved as though it wasn't his own to control anymore. The sun had set by the time his consciousness had settled, and as he turned to his side, he saw his wife nestled in his embrace.

"What was that, Atri?" His wife murmured as she felt his body stirring. "You were like a completely different man!"

"I don't know," Atri responded, equally confused. "I didn't feel different, though. I think it was always there inside me."

"I..." she started. There was a pause as Atri felt his wife struggling against herself in trying to spill out the subsequent words. "I wouldn't mind seeing more of that."

Atri chuckled and his palm moved over his wife's body slowly. Anasuya trembled as his fingers danced across her tighs. His palm rubbed over her exposed belly, but before it could move any higher, he froze.

His eyes burst out in shock, and partly in fear.

"Oh no..." he exclaimed.

The days following the couple's affair at the river were infinitely more stressful for Atri. Not so much for Anasuya, though.

"I don't know, Husband," she said calmly while her palm caressed her bulging belly. "This feels... different."

Atri ignored her and collected cloth satchel filled with various paraphernelia for praying.

He'd increased his daily prayers from three two four times. It was wholly unecessary, but he just could not sit by himself without letting the fear take over. Even his sleep was unfulfilling and filled with nightmares. His appetite had tanked, and his already lean figure was growing increasingly scrawny.

Though his wife slept and ate well though. Which he was thankful for, but also slightly jealous.

"I don't know where your confidence is coming from?" He grumbled. "But I don't know what else to do."

"You could stay with me and relax," Anasuya responded.

Atri halted in his steps. His gaze honed in on her belly and fists crumpled. "I did that the last three times, and that did absolutely nothing."

"I feel powerless," he said with a defeated sigh. "I can turn mountains to dust, and turn frozen lakes into a mass of bubbling magma, but I don't know why I cannot assure the safety of my own baby!"

"This may be the cruel equity of this universe. That a man alone cannot have full control of his own life," he shouted.

"I know this is cruel of me, Anasuya. I know that the pain and suffering you have gone through are a hundred- no a thousand times my own. I can barely fathom the pain a woman must go through after seeing a part of herself leaving her body and stealing away her chance of becoming a mother," he said to Anasuya with eyes burning with pain and despair.

Atri looked away and expressed in a low tone. "I cannot take another hit, Anasuya. And I cannot bear to see you take one either. To that end, I am willing to do everything that is within my power to ensure that this child is born safe and healthy."

With that declaration he walked away swiftly into the forest.

Anasuya traced her husband's trembling figure as it disappeared behind the trees. His back was rigid, but she could see the uncertainty and pain hidden beneath.

She knew that she should be feeling the same, but for some weird reason the hopelessness just didn't materialise.

"I don't know where my confidence is stemming from either," she muttered while rubbing her belly.

With every passing month, Atri's desperation just kept growing. His wife's gestational period was marked with three dreaded milestones. Each demarcated the instance where the couple had lost a child.

The couple had lost their first on the second month. The baby was barely the size of a grape when it was cruelly dislodged from Anasuya's uterus.

The day that milestone passed, a small weight lifted off of Atri's shoulders.

Their second loss had come at the turn of the fourth month. By then, the child had begun to take recognisable form. The soft curve of the skull and the faint impression of features had started to to set beneath transparent skin. It had not been merely a clot of tissue; it had possessed the clear shape of a human head. The fragile promise crushed before it could ever take a breath.

As the fourth month neared in this pregnancy, Atri's hyper-vigilance turned into an obsession. He found himself unable to complete his Sandhyavandanam without his eyes constantly darting back toward their small dwelling. He monitored her posture when she sat, calculated the incline of her spine, and insisted on preparing every meal himself, terrified that the slightest imbalance in her diet or routine might trigger her body to reject the life inside her. Whenever she winced from a simple cramp, blood would drain from his face.

Passing the fourth month brought no relief - only a mounting and suffocating dread. For beyond the second milestone lay the darkest memory of their lives.

Their third child had survived well into the sixth month. It had been a fully formed babe. Its tiny arms and legs were complete, and its little fingers and toes were already shaped in tender perfection. The nursery of his mind had been fully built. They had even begun choosing names. But all it took was a mundane accident to shatter everything.

During a sudden torrential downpour years ago, a mudslide had threatened to collapse the shrine wall behind their ashram. Anasuya, seeing the sacred altar about to be buried under torrents of wet earth, had rushed out into the driving rain to shore up the wooden supports. In her haste, her foot had slipped on the slick, waterlogged clay at the edge of the terrace. She had fallen heavily down the rocky slope, taking the full brunt of the impact against her abdomen. The hemorrhage had been instant and catastrophic. Despite all of Atri's formidable ascetical powers he had been utterly helpless to stop the rapid fading of that tiny, fully limbed life as it slipped away in a pool of blood.

Now, as the sixth month approached and blurred into the seventh, Atri was a man possessed by terror.

He used his spiritual aura to flatten every path around their cottage. He disintegrated every loose pebble, smoothened over exposed roots, and turned the surrounding soil as soft as powdered sand. He forbade Anasuya from stepping anywhere near the riverbank. He hauled every bucket of water himself and carried her across even the smallest threshold. He barely slept and sat at the edge of their bed in the dark, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest, and listening intently to the double pulse of two heartbeats in the room.

His scrawny frame grew even more gaunt, his eyes hollowed with dark circles, his hands trembled whenever he reached out to touch her. The contrast between them was stark. While Atri frayed at the edges, consumed by the ghosts of their past failures, Anasuya bloomed with a quiet, otherworldly warmth. Her belly grew firm and glowed with an uncanny, restless vitality.

And then, quietly, without dramatic fanfare or divine signs, the seventh month drew to a close.

The third milestone was behind them.

For the first time in their long, painful history, they had stepped into uncharted ground.

When Atri realized the date had passed and the child was still there - vibrant and kicking fiercely against the wall of her womb - he should have felt relief. He should have felt joy. But entering this uncharted territory only deepened his despair.

Hope was like a bone broken one too many times. Shattered repeatedly at the exact same seam, it had not healed stronger; it had decayed, leaving behind no solid structure to lean on. Standing past the boundary of their past griefs, Atri found he had no hope left to hold onto - only the suffocating dread of falling from a height they had never reached before.

Yet again, Anasuya only felt excitement and anticipation. Atri did not have the heart to quell that emotion, since he hadn't seen her like this in a very long time.

On the day of his wife's delivery, Atri could not bear to stand outside their home, pacing helplessly while awaiting news. Instead, he sought refuge deeper in the woods, choosing to perform an intense Yajna in a desperate bid to secure a safe delivery.

As the labor progressed, the agonising sound of Anasuya's screams echoed through the quiet forest. Each wail struck Atri, but he pressed on and chanted his prayers out loud, straining his voice to drown out her pain with sacred verses. As her contractions reached their violent peak, Atri's chanting reached a fever pitch - until suddenly, the sacred fire bloomed outward with a roaring spark.

Atri was tossed backward by the force and crashed hard onto the dirt floor of the shrine.

He sat up and brushed the dust from his robes. His eyes instinctively darted back toward the hearth. The flames had died down to a bed of glowing coals, but staring straight back at him from the heat were three eyes, two wide open and one closed.

Recognising the divine presence, Atri immediately prostrated himself and pressed his forehead flat against the earth before Lord Shiva.

From deep within the embers, a gravelly voice echoed with a dry rasp.

"Why are you wasting everyone's time with this pointless prayer?"

The words shattered Atri's composure. All his accumulated terror, his sleepless nights, the ghost of three lost children, and the crushing weight of his own powerlessness came pouring out as he offloaded all his struggles and fear to the fire.

The ember let out a low, gravelly chuckle.

"Didn't you hear your wife this entire time? Did you ever wonder where her confidence came from? It came from me!"

Stunned, Atri lifted his head and asked why the Lord had granted him this wish.

The ember flickered and sputtered, dimming into cold ash after uttering a single word:

"Coincidence."

Atri scrambled to his feet and leapt into action, running frantically back toward his home.

He reached the cottage right as the midwife opened the door and let him inside.

His eyes landed on his wife. She was exhausted, sweat gleaming on her skin, yet glowing with an unmistakable maternal serenity. Atri walked up to her, and they exchanged a warm, lingering gaze - a silent acknowledgment of everything they had survived.

His eyes then moved over to his child resting beside her. His son. To Atri's surprise, the baby was glaring straight back at him with a heavily furrowed brow. He extended his finger toward the infant, but instead of grabbing it, the boy raised his tiny hand and forcefully slapped it away.

Atri let out a startled chuckle. "So angry?!"

"Even in my tummy, he was difficult to live with. He would never let me do anything in peace," Anasuya commented in a low voice, her tired face breaking into a soft smile.

"Difficult to live with..." Atri repeated softly, looking down at his fierce son. "Durvasa."

He looked toward his wife, who laughed softly. "How apt."

Not many people tend to live up to their name. Durvasa wasn't amongst those. He was certainly not a pleasant person to live with.

Quick to anger and irascible, calling Durvasa difficult would be an understatement.

Atri and Anasuya realised very early that their son, to put it pleasantly, would be lacking in friends and a social life.

He was exceedingly opinionated and inflexible. He did not wish for the world to adapt to his will, but if things didn't go his way he would get very, very cross.

They found that this trait was ingrained bone-deep, and nothing they did could change it. Luckily, this was their son's only shortcoming, because he excelled in everything else.

At the tender age of five, where most children barely grasped the alphabets, Durvasa recited entire scriptures without a single stumble in pitch or cadence. His mind was like an iron vault - once a shloka entered, it was etched there forever.

Where other Brahmins spent decades struggling to master true meditation, Durvasa's single-minded inflexibility - the very trait that made him intolerable in mundane company - became his greatest instrument as a sage. In his vows, he was unyielding. In his tapasya, he was terrifyingly absolute. No distraction could sway him; no hardship could force his posture to bend.

Humans, like animals, instinctively crave movement, distraction, and constant change. Their minds naturally flutter from one impulse to the next. Meditation, at its core, was an act of profound deprivation - the deliberate choice to become entirely static. To freeze the self until the world fell silent. Those who could commit to such absolute stasis gained strength far transcending ordinary humanity.

Others sought power externally, bowing before the heavens to channel the authority of Gods, Devas, or Asuras.

Yet neither static meditation nor divine allegiance yielded the highest tier of power. The most formidable force in existence stemmed from a self-imposed law - an unbreakable, unyielding boundary forged within one's own soul so absolute that reality itself was forced to bend around it.

But this couldn't be something trivial. The self-imposed law had to be, in essence, a great sacrifice.

For example, a ruler of a large dynasty without heirs or descendents declaring an unbreakable vow of celibacy and bachelorhood. Or a merchant declaring, that he would not pocket a single penny of his profits and would donate it all towards charity. It had to be resolute. Unbending.

Durvasa's extreme inflexibility was his self-imposed law. He was well aware of his own unyielding nature; he knew it severed him from ordinary human warmth and locked him in deep isolation. Yet that very rigidity became a pillar of unmatched spiritual weight. Because his spirit was an immovable monolith that could never be shaken or compromised, his spoken word carried the weight of cosmic decree - bestowing upon him the terrifying ability to dole out invincible boons or pronounce devastating, inescapable curses upon mortals and immortals alike.

One particular day, Durvasa arrived at Bhasmodbhavapur - a large and sprawling independent city that had aligned itself with the Kunti Kingdom.

He wished to stay overnight, but struggled to find a place to lodge. He had no intention of camping out in the forests or open fields; a Brahmin of his stature expected proper hospitality. Yet as he sought shelter throughout the city, he was repeatedly turned away by townsfolk intimidated by his fiery presence.

With every rejection, Durvasa's irritability grew. Standing in the thoroughfare, his anger reached a boiling point. He was just about to curse out the entire city, when a woman came running up to him in a huff, bowing deeply to greet him.

Durvasa quickly figured out that she was a servant by the way she looked - her plain attire and dusty hem giving her role away.

Before he could open his mouth, the woman quickly said, "Princess Kunti profoundly apologises for the poor hospitality of a city under her father's purview towards the Sage."

Durvasa raised a brow, preparing to sneer and admonish the girl for her mistress sending a mere servant to fetch him. But before he could speak, the servant quickly added, "Princess Kunti is preparing room and board suitable for the Sage and wished that I escort the exalted one."

Durvasa did not say more. The thunderous glare on his face softened into a satisfied snort. He turned and followed the trembling servant through the city streets.