Indra had done something terrible: he had killed Vritra, who was a brahmin, and the killing of a brahmin is the gravest sin in the tradition. Never mind that Vritra was a demon and was terrorizing the worlds — the sin was the sin, and Indra, crushed by the weight of what he had done, fled from his heaven and hid in a tiny lotus pond, inside a lotus blossom, concealed from his own kingdom in the manner of the genuinely ashamed.
Heaven without a king is not a comfortable situation. The gods looked at each other and at the empty throne and at the three worlds which continued to require administration. They needed a temporary king.
They chose Nahusha, a human king of extraordinary virtue and accomplishment. He had lived righteously, he had performed the correct rituals, he had accumulated merit sufficient to rule the three worlds. The gods brought him to Indra’s throne.
For a while, Nahusha was an excellent king of heaven. He administered well. He was just. He had the qualities that had earned him the position.
And then, gradually, something shifted. Power is a test that reveals what is actually present in a person. Nahusha had accumulated virtue but he had also accumulated pride, and the pride had been resting comfortably beneath the virtue and not causing much trouble until he had Indra’s throne to amplify it.
The gods noticed the change. He was making demands that exceeded his authority. He was treating the celestial court as his own by right rather than by temporary appointment. And then he sent word to Indra’s wife Shachi: come to me, for I am the king of heaven.
Shachi, who was entirely faithful to Indra and had no intention of going anywhere near this development, played for time. She said she would come, but the king must travel to her in a manner appropriate to the king of heaven. A palanquin. Carried by — she said this as the ultimate test of how far the pride had gone — the seven great sages.
Nahusha accepted. The seven rishis — Vishvamitra, Jamadagni, Bharadvaja, Gautama, Atri, Vasishtha, Kashyapa — found themselves, by divine arrangement and the king’s demand, carrying a palanquin with Nahusha in it.
Nahusha, impatient, kicked Vasishtha. ‘Faster,’ he said.
Vasishtha pronounced the curse: ‘Fall. Become a python. Remain a python until a worthy person releases you.’
Nahusha fell from the palanquin and from heaven simultaneously, becoming a great serpent and falling to the earth, where he would remain for thousands of years. Eventually Yudhishthira, the eldest Pandava, encountered the serpent and answered the questions it posed with such wisdom and truth that the curse was lifted and Nahusha was restored.
Indra was forgiven in the meantime, purified of his sin through appropriate atonement, and returned to his throne. The temporary vacancy in heaven ended.
The story is told as a warning about power and the pride it enables. Nahusha was not a bad man. He was a good man given too much power before his virtue had been tested at that scale. The virtue held for a while. The pride beneath it found the space that power created and moved into it.
The sage’s foot, kicked in impatience on the way to something the king had no right to, is the moment where the whole edifice cracks. Impatience with the wise. The demand for more speed, more service, more than what was offered freely. This is how it always goes, the tradition suggests. Watch the small moments. That is where the test is.