Counting The Days And Hours

The central family plot of the Mahabharata —the horizontal and fraternal fission between the Pandava and Kaurava cousins—is preceded in genealogical time by

the vertical fission between King Yayati and his sons. For breaking his marriage vow and taking his wife's servant and rival to bed, Yayati is cursed by his Brahman father-in-law Ushanas with premature decrepitude. Ushanas, in cursing Yayati, is portrayed as the archetypical angry rishi: "So it befell that Usanas in anger cursed Yayati Nahusa. And he lost his previous youth and fell instantly to senility."

Senility is here the generalized decrepitude of the body. Ushanas curses out of the quick anger of the sage, and afterward attempts to mitigate his harsh words: "Such things I do not say idly. You have reached old age, king of the earth. But if you wish, you may pass on your old age to another. . . . The son who will give you his youth shall become the king, long-lived, famous, and rich in offspring." The play of generations is extended: Old Ushanas gives his son-in-law old age for disobeying him. But if Yayati's son will take on his father's old age in turn, Yayati can remain youthful, sattha ta pattha . The reward to Yayati's obedient son is the opposite of Yayati's punishment for disobedience: the son who takes on the father's old age will receive long life and the ultimate deferment of his own old age. The young who act young get old, the young who act old get young: again the logic of Geri-forte.

All but one of Yayati's sons, however, resist his request to exchange ages. They graphically cite the indignities and miseries of old age: their primary concern is the powerlessness of the old man. Only the youngest son, Puru, who stands farthest from the succession and therefore has the least to lose by deferring his youthful prerogative, is willing to take on Yayati's burden. Sons, the story suggests, do not willingly defer to the father, unless they have little to gain otherwise. Youngest sons, therefore, bear their father's old age more commonly than do their older brothers. Conflict, not deferral, is more likely to characterize the exchange of weakness between father and son.

Stricken with old age, Yayati repaired to his castle and addressed his eldest and dearest son Yadu: "Son, old age and wrinkles and gray hairs have all laid hold of me, because of a curse of Usanas Kavya, and I am not yet sated of youth. You, Yadu, must take over my guilt with my old age, and with your own youth I shall slake my senses. When the millennium is full, I shall give your youth back to you, and take over theguilt and old age.

Yadu said:

Gray of head and beard, wretched, loosened by senility, the body wrinkled, ugly weak, thin, incapable of achieving anything, and set upon by younger men and allthe people that live off you? I do not crave old age.

yayati said:

You were born from my heart, but will not render your youth to me. Therefore, son, your offspring shah have no share in the kingdom!

Turvasu, take over my guilt with my old age, and with your youth I shall slake my senses, my son. When the millennium is full, I shah give your youth back to you and take over my own, guilt with my old age.

Turvasu said:

I do not crave old age, father, which destroys all pleasure and joy, finishes strength and beauty, and puts an end to spirit and breath.

Yayati said:

You were born from my heart but will not render your youth to me. Therefore, Turvasu, your offspring will face distinction. Fool, you shall rule over people whose customs and laws are corrupt and whose walks of life run counter to decency, the lowest ones who feed on meat. They will lust after the wives of their gurus and couple with beasts; evil barbarians that follow the law of cattle are they whom you will rule!

Yayati's third son, Druhyu, rejects old age as well, drawing attention to the peculiar voice of the old person: "an old man enjoys neither elephant nor chariot nor horse nor woman, and speech fails him. I do not crave such old age." Anu, the fourth son, evokes the pathos of second childhood:

An old man eats his food like a baby, unclean, drooling, and at any time of the day. And he never offers to the fire in time. Such old age I do not crave.

Yayati said:

You were born from my heart, but will not render your youth to me. You have spoken of the ills of old age, therefore you shall inherit them.

Only Puru, the youngest, accepts and is offered the inheritance of the kingdom. He trusts that his father will only hold on to power as long as is proper, and, the epic narrative relates, so Yayati does.

When he judged that the millennium was full, after having counted days and hours, being expert in Time, the mighty king spoke to his son Puru: "I have sought pleasure, as I wished and could and had leisure, with your youth, my son, tamer of enemies. Puru, I am pleased, I bless you. Now take back your own youth and likewise take the kingdom, for you are the son who did my pleasure." Whereupon the king Yayati Nahusa took on his old age and Puru took on his youth.^[31]

The text asserts that fathers are expert in Time and that their counting of days and hours is impartial. Yayati's sons demur; for them, his request is an overstepping of his hours and days and an appropriation of theirs. Old men, they suggest, claim mastery of Time but have lost the ability to know it: they eat at random hours, they cannot sacrifice in time. The narrative does not allow them to claim their prerogatives, but hints at a world of contest in which sons do not wait for but overthrow fathers.

Unlike to the unsuccessful filial rebellion against Yayati's demand, the story of Shravan Kumar in the Ramayana offers the idealized image of filial devotion and deferral. Shravan's devotion, however, presumes the powerless bodies of his parents and points us to a far more nuanced understanding of generational deferral. The story is popular in Varanasi. Baidyanath Sarasvati, in a book on emblematic practices of Varanasi culture, includes a photograph of Shravan being portrayed by a young man during the Ram Lila celebration.^[32] In bazaars throughout the city, sellers of calendar art posters offer the image of the strong and youthful body of a young ascetic bearing his aged parents in baskets suspended from a yoke resting on his broad shoulders (see image on p. 152). The pair are calmly absorbed in reli-

gious devotion, counting their prayers on their rudraksas , rosaries of the same type that becomes a leash in the Ghar Kali tableau. Around this image are pictorial vignettes of the story of Shravan's accidental death at the hands of Dasharath, the man who will be the father of the hero and divine incarnation Ram.

In Valmiki's Ramayana , the young ascetic is unnamed. Dasharath, when still "an intemperate youth," was eager to use his skills as an archer to go hunting at night. Like young Yayati, Dasharath seeks forbidden pleasures, here encompassed in his desire for his arrow to hit home in the darkness. But Dasharath, mistaking the young ascetic for an animal, mortally wounds him as he goes down to the river to fetch water. Not yet knowing his attacker, the ascetic speaks:

It is not for the loss of my own life that I am grieving so. It is for two others I grieve that [I] am slain, my mother and father.

For they are an aged couple anti have long been dependent on me. When I am dead what sort of existence are they to lead?

My aged mother and father and I all slain by a single arrow!

The son bids Dasharath to find his parents, and dies. Dasharath leads the pair, both blind, to their son's body.

The wretched couple drew close, they touched their son and collapsed upon his body. And his father cried out:

"My son, don't you love me any more? At least have regard for your mother then, righteous child. Why don't you embrace me, my son? Speak to me, my tender child.

"Whom shall I hear late at night—how it used to touch my heart—so sweetly reciting the sacred texts or other works?

"And after the twilight worship, the ritual bath, and offerings to the sacred fire, who will sit down beside me, my son, to allay the grief and fear that anguish me?

"Who will bring me tubers and fruit and roots, and feed me like a welcome guest—me an invalid, without leader or guide?

"And how, my son, shall I support your poor mother, blind and aged as she is, wretched and yearning for her son?"^[33]

The desolate father curses Dasharath to die yearning for his own son; Dasharath recalls his deed when Ram has been exiled to the forest by his own unintended decree.

Shravan Kumar, as he is known to many who buy his calendar image, the son as perfect ascetic devoted to his parents, has become old not in bodily terms like Yayati's son Puru but in a deeper sense, of asramadharma . He is called a forest dweller and ascetic: in his devotion to his parents, he has assumed the appropriate dharma, or duty of old age. But Shravan's enactment of old age—the ability to take on the burden that most of Yayati's sons refuse—presumes the powerful body of youth. Shravan is the source of solace that he is in his father's lament because he can carry both his parents. The image of the poster is far different than the generational embodiment of the Kesari Jivan ad. Shravan is upright and strong,

and carries his parents easily. Their bodies, seated in the two baskets, are tiny in relation to his, almost doll-like. They are focused inward; the only sound the image suggests we can hear is the clicking of their rosaries.

Shravan is the epitome of Seva , devoted service, to one's parents. Far from a position of submission, the fantasied Seva of the Shravan Kumar image is represented as originating from a position of power that assumes the static, reduced, and silent bodies of the old parents. Seva , as embodied in Shravan Kumar, his parents, and the king, is the impossible gift by grown children of their body to aged parents while their superior position and the parents' passive and voiceless disengagement are maintained . Impossible, as parents are not the reduced and almost weightless bodies of the narrative. Like Yayati, parents not only want and need Seva , they want to control the family, embodied as the youthful body contested by Yayati, his father-in-law, and his children. The transfer of such authority emerges through an extended process of conflict and negotiation. Children have powerful bodies, and parents have voices. Old age is seldom silent; as parents grow increasingly dependent upon their children, they are perceived by the latter more and more as a singular voice: the request. Yayati asks the same impossible question again and again and again: let me be you . Sylvia Vatuk has noted how the elderly with whom she worked near Delhi combined a sense of self as an ascetic with strong expectations of and worries over maintaining their comforts and prerogatives and over the substance of their children's seva^[34] Siranji, in challenging her children's gift of the tonic, suggested that their Seva was but a performance. Her children, in protesting that they were doing all that they could for her, suggested that the performance may be generated not by callousness but love. The voice of parents, even those who perceive themselves as ascetics, grows ever louder as they age. Children can never be Shravan, whose success is framed by his parents' minimally transacting interiority. Like Ram and Dasharath, they are cursed never to be able to offer complete Seva nor to enjoy its fruits.

Old fathers cannot claim their sons' hot bodies for long. Their cooling and weak physiologies prevent them from exercising adequate control, and their demands for continued authority become empty and inappropriate, bakbak —so much nonsense or hot air. Sixtyishness points to the contested authority between generations, embodied as a disjunction between a cooling body and a will or brain that cannot recognize the process. From this perspective, the heat of old brains is a reaction to the reality of old and cold; it is the proverbial rope of Indian philosophy, mistaken for a snake along the road at dusk, the symptom of false consciousness.

Yet sons are no better counters of the hours than fathers. Parents resist handing over control of Time, knowing like the patriarch of the film Apne Begane that most children, despite the assertions of Carstairs and Kakar, are not Shravan. Sixty,, an age simultaneously old enough to convey the same inappropriate and hot-brained behavior as seventy-two and young enough to convey the powerful body of the paterfamilias, reflects neither only the reality of. the Bombay bus man

and Devi Lal nor that of Shravan's parents, but alludes to their superimposition and the contest, within families, involved in marking the body in time.