Uchchaihshravasउच्चैःश्रवा

Uchchaihshravas (उच्चैःश्रवा) — the name suggests 'loud-neighing' or 'long-eared' — is the king of horses: a seven-headed stallion of unblemished white that rose from the churning of the ocean of milk, among the wonders yielded alongside the nectar itself. Indra took him for heaven's stables, and he is sometimes counted the mount or chariot-horse of the king of the gods. In the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna names the supreme of every class of being, he declares: among horses, I am Uchchaihshravas.

The wager on his tail

The horse's one great narrative role is oblique but consequential. In the Mahabharata, the sisters Kadru and Vinata — mothers, respectively, of the serpents and of Garuda — wagered on the colour of Uchchaihshravas' tail, slavery the stake. Vinata said white, truly; Kadru said black, and made it so by ordering her serpent sons to coil, black and hair-fine, over the tail. The fraud enslaved Vinata and her son, and Garuda's ransom — the theft of the nectar of immortality — along with his undying enmity toward serpents, all flow from the tail of the white horse. Uchchaihshravas himself remains above the quarrel: a prize, a standard of perfection, the animal by which all horses are measured.