Matsya and the Great Flood | The Tiny Fish That Towed a Boat Through the End of the World

Transcript of the episode audio. Speaker labels: Neev and his co-host.

Neev: Welcome back to Mythical Masala. Last time we met Tulsi, the princess who became a plant, and we promised you a fish.

Co-host: A tiny fish that won’t stop growing. So how tiny are we starting?

Neev: Fits in your hands, and by the end of today, it’s towing a boat through the end of the world.

Co-host: Towing a boat? Sounds like a superhero fish.

Neev: This is Matsya, the first avatar on Vishnu’s famous list of 10. And it’s a flood story, the kind almost every culture in the world tells.

Co-host: Everybody grab a life jacket.

Neev: Our story starts by a quiet river in the south of India, just as the sun is coming up. A king named Satyavrata is standing knee-deep in the water.

Co-host: A king standing in the river. Where are his servants? His umbrella guy?

Neev: Back at the palace. Satyavrata was a king, but he was also a rishi, a royal wise man. He left the comfort of the palace to live simply and pray. Every morning, he’d scoop up river water in his cupped hands and offer it back to the river as a prayer to Vishnu.

Co-host: You know, lots of people still do that at sunrise, a little water poured from your hands like a thank you note.

Neev: So he scoops up the water and something wiggles. He looks down. There’s a fish in his hands, a tiny silver fish smaller than your little finger.

Co-host: Aw. Okay, put it back.

Neev: That’s exactly what he was about to do, and then the fish spoke.

Co-host: Of course it did. We have all kinds of animals talking.

Neev: So the fish says, “Please, King, don’t throw me back. The river is full of big fish, and big fish eat little fish. I’m scared. Protect me.”

Co-host: Well, how can you say no to that? That’s like a puppy in the rain.

Neev: Satyavrata couldn’t either. He carried the fish home and dropped it into his kamandalu, the little clay water pot that wise men carry around.

Co-host: The one with the handle, basically like an ancient water bottle. No fish bowl here.

Neev: Then he went to sleep. The next morning, he went to check in on his little fish, and the pot was full of fish.

Co-host: Like babies?

Neev: No, one fish. It had grown so much overnight it filled the whole pot, tail squished, water sloshing over the side, and it said, “King, this pot is too small. Give me more room.”

Co-host: Rude, but fair.

Neev: So, he moved it to a big water jar. By lunch, it was too big for the jar. He moved it into a well. The next morning it filled the well. So he carried it to a lake.

Co-host: How does one person carry a fish the size of a well?

Neev: Carefully, with a lot of help.

Co-host: The palace guards are writing very interesting letters home tonight.

Neev: And the fish filled the lake, so they moved into the river, and they filled the river bank to bank like a golden bridge you could walk across.

Co-host: Okay. At this point, I would stop calling it a pet.

Neev: Finally, Satyavrata had carried it all the way to the ocean. And as they lowered it into the waves, the fish said, “Don’t leave me here, King. There are sharks out there bigger than me.”

Co-host: It’s the size of a river and it’s scared of sharks?

Neev: And that’s when Satyavrata stopped. He looked at this fish, a fish that grew 100 miles long in a few days, and he understood. “No ordinary fish talks. No ordinary fish grows like this. Who are you?” The fish began to glow. Its scales shone like the morning sun. And out of the water came a voice the king knew from every prayer he’d ever said.

Co-host: Vishnu.

Neev: “Satyavrata, you cared for me without asking for anything back. So listen. In seven days, the whole world is going to drown.”

Co-host: Seven days?

Neev: “Not a storm, not a flood like after the monsoon. The ocean will rise and swallow everything: earth, sky, all three worlds.”

Co-host: Okay, wait. Why? Did somebody make Vishnu angry?

Neev: Nobody did anything wrong. It’s just time. In these stories, Brahma, the creator, has days and nights just like us. When his day ends and he goes to sleep, the world he made dissolves into water, and when he wakes up, a new one begins.

Co-host: And one day for Brahma is about four billion years. So nobody alive had ever seen one of these.

Neev: Which is why Vishnu wasn’t stopping the flood. He was making sure something survived it. “Build a boat, King, a big one. Fill it with seeds from every plant. Bring every kind of creature, and bring the seven sages, the Saptarishi.”

Co-host: The seven wise men who became the Big Dipper. We talked about them in the Dhruva star episode.

Neev: Those seven. “When the waters rise, I’ll come back for you. Wait for me.” And then the fish was gone, back into the deep.

Co-host: So it’s a lifeboat for everything that will ever grow back.

Neev: So the king, who had never built anything in his life, started building a boat.

Co-host: The king is doing this on his own? By himself?

Neev: He had help. People came from everywhere. They cut tall trees, bent the planks, tied them tight with rope, and the boat grew. A high curved front, a big roof of woven reeds in the middle, and then the loading started.

Co-host: You know, this is the part I would be bad at. It’s like packing for a trip, except you can never come back for anything you forgot.

Neev: Sacks of rice and barley, seeds of mango, banyan, and lotus, baskets of herbs, and the animals: cows, deer, peacocks, little rabbits, all walking up the plank.

Co-host: Hold on. A boat, a flood, every kind of animal, one good man warned by God. Hey, that sounds like a story I know.

Neev: Noah.

Co-host: Yes, Noah’s Ark.

Neev: We’ll get there, I promise. But there’s one big difference, and it’s coming. First, something else was happening far away, up in Brahma’s world. Brahma the creator had been working for a very, very long day. Four billion years of making mountains and oceans and every bug and bird.

Co-host: No wonder he’s tired.

Neev: And as his day came to an end, he got sleepy. And he yawned a huge, enormous yawn.

Co-host: The yawn of a guy who’s been awake for four billion years.

Neev: Now, Brahma has four heads, and out of his four mouths come the Vedas.

Co-host: The four oldest holy books in India. All the songs and the prayers and the knowledge of how the world works. And Brahma doesn’t read them. He knows them by heart.

Neev: They live in his breath. So when he yawned, out they slipped. The Vedas floated out of Brahma’s mouths like glowing ribbons of light.

Co-host: Oh, no. That’s like sneezing out your homework.

Neev: And hiding in the shadows nearby was a demon, a sneaky, greedy asura named Hayagriva.

Co-host: Wait, Hayagriva, isn’t that the name of one of Vishnu’s other forms, the one with the horse head?

Neev: It is. Same name, two totally different guys.

Co-host: Again, first two Sudamas and now two Hayagrivas. Somebody in ancient India needed a new baby name.

Neev: So Hayagriva grabbed the Vedas, all four of them, and ran straight down into the deepest, darkest part of the ocean, and he hid them there.

Co-host: Why would a demon even want them? He’s not going to read them.

Neev: Because without the Vedas, nobody would remember the prayers, the rules of the world, how to begin again. When Brahma woke up to make a new world, he’d have nothing to make it with. Whoever held the Vedas held the future.

Co-host: So he stole the instruction manual for the universe.

Neev: I guess that’s why people are supposed to cover their mouth while yawning. Anyways, Brahma closed his eyes, and the long night began. On the seventh day, the sky over Satyavrata’s boat went black. Not cloudy, black. Then the rain started. It rained like you’ve never seen rain. The rivers jumped their banks. The ocean rose, first over the beaches, then the fields, then the villages, then the hills.

Co-host: And everybody’s on the boat?

Neev: The king, the seven sages, the animals, the seeds. The door shut and the water lifted the boat right off the ground.

Co-host: That must have been the scariest moment, your whole world gone out from under you.

Neev: And it kept rising, over the trees, over the mountains, until there was nothing. No land in any direction, just gray water and wind and waves taller than palaces.

Co-host: How does a boat survive that?

Neev: It almost didn’t. The waves threw it side to side. The roof shook. The animals were crying. The sages held onto the beams. And Satyavrata stood out at the front, soaking wet, staring out at the storm, saying the only thing he could, “You promised. You said you’d come.” And then, out of the dark water, something rose, something gold, bigger than the boat, bigger than 10 boats.

Co-host: The fish.

Neev: The fish, shining like a lamp in the storm. And on top of its head was a single enormous horn curving up into the rain.

Co-host: A fish with a horn? Like a unicorn, but wet?

Neev: Kind of. And Vishnu said, “Tie your boat to my horn.”

Co-host: With what? You need a rope the size of a river.

Neev: Exactly the rope they used. Up out of the waves came a giant serpent, Vasuki.

Co-host: Vasuki. He was the rope in the churning of the ocean, too.

Neev: Same Vasuki, same job. He’s basically the universe’s favorite rope.

Co-host: Hey, somebody should pay that snake.

Neev: Vasuki wrapped one end around the boat, the other around the horn, and the fish started to swim through the waves, through the wind, pulling the boat behind it like a cart behind a bull.

Co-host: For how long?

Neev: The whole long night of Brahma. And the whole way, Satyavrata asked questions and Vishnu answered them. Who are we? Why does the world begin and end? What matters most?

Co-host: And that conversation is supposed to be a whole book, the Matsya Purana, the fish’s book.

Neev: The longest boat ride with the best tour guide ever. But one thing was still missing. Down at the bottom of the ocean, in the dark, the demon Hayagriva was sitting on the Vedas.

Co-host: The instruction manual thief.

Neev: So the fish let the boat rest on the calm water and dove down, down, past the last of the light into the deepest water there is, and it found Hayagriva. There was a flash of gold in the dark, like lightning under the sea, and when it faded, the demon was gone, and the fish was holding the Vedas, glowing and safe.

Co-host: That was the fastest fight we have had all this season.

Neev: It’s a really big fish. Slowly, the waters began to go down, and the fish pulled the boat north to the Himalayas and tied it to the top of a mountain peak. Some people still call that peak Naubandhana, where the boat was tied.

Co-host: And then what? Everyone just waits for the world to drain like a giant bathtub?

Neev: When Brahma woke up, his new day began, and the first thing waiting for him was a giant golden fish holding out the Vedas.

Co-host: Imagine waking up and someone has already found your lost homework.

Neev: Brahma took them back and started to create again. And Satyavrata stepped off the boat onto the wet, empty Earth. He planted the seeds. He let the animals go. The sages walked down into the valleys, and little green shoots started coming up everywhere. And the king who saved a tiny fish got a new name, Manu, the first father of every human being in this world.

Co-host: That’s where the word manav comes from. It means human, literally Manu’s children.

Neev: And one of Manu’s sons was a prince named Ikshvaku. He started a royal family that went on for generations and generations.

Co-host: Wait. Ikshvaku. He’s the solar dynasty. Isn’t that the same as Ram’s family from season one, the Ramayana?

Neev: The exact same family. Rama’s great-great-great, a lot of greats, grandfather was the king who saved a fish.

Co-host: Ooh, I need a minute. The Ramayana starts with a goldfish.

Neev: Okay. Now Noah.

Co-host: Oh, yes. You promised you would tell us.

Neev: Almost every culture on Earth has a flood story. In the Bible, there’s Noah. God warns him, he builds an ark, takes the animals two by two, and when the water goes down, the ark lands on a mountain.

Co-host: And there is an even older story from ancient Iraq. In the story of Gilgamesh, a man named Utnapishtim builds a boat, saves the animals, and sends out the birds to look for land.

Neev: And the Greeks have one, too. Deucalion and his wife float through the flood in a giant wooden chest, and afterwards, they make new people by throwing stones over their shoulders.

Co-host: So everyone has a boat, a flood, and a mountain. Hey, what’s the big difference you promised?

Neev: In most of these stories, the flood is a punishment. People behaved badly, and the gods got angry. In Matsya’s story, nobody’s being punished. It’s just the end of Brahma’s day. The world ends because it’s time, and begins again because it’s time.

Co-host: And God doesn’t just send a message. He shows up himself, as the fish pulling the boat with his own head.

Neev: Which is kind of Vishnu’s whole thing. When the world breaks, he doesn’t send someone, he comes.

Co-host: Even if he has to become a fish to do it.

Neev: And that’s the story of Matsya, a tiny fish, a king who couldn’t say no, a stolen set of books, and a boat towed through the end of the world.

Co-host: And a very good reason to always be nice to a fish.

Neev: Next time, we go the other way. Not the first avatar, the last one, the one that the stories say hasn’t even come yet.

Co-host: How do you tell a story that hasn’t happened?

Neev: That’s exactly what we’ll find out. A white horse, a talking parrot, and the end of the darkest age. It’s Kalki.

Co-host: A talking parrot? I am in.

Neev: Until then, if you’ve got a goldfish at home, maybe get it a bigger bowl, just in case.

Co-host: And check it for horns.

Neev: Thanks for listening to Mythical Masala. We’ll see you next time.