Durvasaदुर्वासा

Durvasa (दुर्वासा) is the most feared guest in Hindu literature. A son of the sage Atri and Anasuya, held by tradition to be born of Shiva's portion — of his anger, in the common telling — he wanders the three worlds with a retinue of disciples, exacting perfect hospitality and repaying the slightest lapse with a curse. His name is glossed as one who is difficult to live with. Yet the tradition's interest in him is not simple: his curses, however disproportionate, repeatedly prove to be the hinge on which providence turns, and his boons are as extravagant as his rages.

The curses

The most consequential of his curses falls in the story of Shakuntala, as told in Kalidasa's play: absorbed in thoughts of her absent lover, Shakuntala fails to notice the sage at her door, and he condemns her to be forgotten by the very man she dreams of — the forgetting softened, on appeal, by the proviso that a token will restore memory. From this single outburst the drama's whole action flows. Equally momentous is his curse of Indra, whose elephant trampled a garland the sage had bestowed; stripped of fortune, the gods were driven to churn the ocean of milk for the nectar of immortality — the central cosmogonic event of Puranic myth, set off by an insulted guest.

The boons and the humbling

Durvasa's favour is as potent as his wrath. It is he who grants the young Kunti the mantra by which she may summon any god to give her a son — the boon from which Karna and the Pandavas are born, and thus the whole Mahabharata. In the epic's forest books he descends on the exiled Pandavas with thousands of disciples after Draupadi's inexhaustible vessel is empty for the day; Krishna averts the catastrophe by eating a single remaining grain, whose satisfaction fills the sages' stomachs. And the Bhagavata Purana tells of his humbling: having conjured a demon against the saintly king Ambarisha, Durvasa is pursued through the three worlds by Vishnu's discus, and finds refuge nowhere until he begs pardon of the king himself. The story places even the mightiest ascetic below the humble devotee — a moral the tradition evidently relished delivering through its angriest sage.