Markandeya had already done the impossible once. As a boy destined to die at sixteen, he had clung to a Shiva linga with such ferocity that when Yama himself arrived to claim him, Shiva kicked death away and granted the boy eternal youth. That story made him famous. But it was not, as it turned out, the strangest thing that would ever happen to him.
Centuries later — because eternal youth means centuries pass differently for you than for everyone else — Markandeya asked Vishnu for something few sages had ever dared to request: he wanted to witness maya, the illusion by which the god sustains and dissolves the universe, with his own eyes. Vishnu, amused and perhaps a little wary, granted it.
What Markandeya got was pralaya, the dissolution that ends an age. The world he knew simply stopped being. Mountains dissolved back into the substance they were made of. Rivers lost their banks and became one indistinguishable water reaching in every direction, no horizon, no shore, no sun overhead to mark a direction as up. The gods themselves had gone quiet, folded back into whatever they had come from. Markandeya, still a sage in a mortal-shaped body, found himself swimming — not toward anything, because there was nothing to swim toward, only endless dark water under an endless dark sky, for what felt like an age within the age.
Then he saw the leaf. A single banyan leaf, floating and somehow not sinking, and on it lay an infant — plump, radiant, utterly unbothered by the ocean that had erased everything else in existence. The baby was sucking his own toe with the total absorption of any ordinary infant, except that his skin held the color of a monsoon cloud and there was a stillness around him that had nothing to do with childhood. Markandeya recognized him before he understood how: this was Vishnu, styled here as Bala Mukunda, the infant form that exists in the gap between one universe ending and the next one being permitted to begin.
Drawn by something he couldn’t resist, the sage drifted closer, and as he did, the child inhaled him — not violently, but as naturally as breathing. Markandeya passed through the infant’s mouth and found himself, impossibly, standing inside a body that contained everything. Mountains he remembered. Rivers he had bathed in. Cities, forests, entire kingdoms he thought had dissolved along with everything else, all still intact, all still turning, held inside the belly of a baby floating alone on a leaf in a dead ocean. He wandered there long enough to lose track of what wandering even meant, before the child exhaled him back out into the water, and the vision, mercifully, ended.
Vishnu, restored to his familiar form, asked the trembling sage what he had learned. Markandeya had no answer that language could hold properly. He had gone looking for a demonstration of illusion and instead found the one thing untouched by it — the quiet, patient consciousness that survives every dissolution and holds the next universe ready in reserve, the way a child holds a toe in his mouth without a single worry about what has just ended or what is about to begin again.
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If this story stayed with you, read next: Dhruva’s Unshakeable Star, Parashurama and Renuka: The Axe-God Who Beheaded His Own Mother, and Kartikeya’s Two Wives: The God of War Who Married North and South Separately.