I have recently finished part two and I have so many thoughts about this book. So here is the one about the vasus, the curse and Bishma's relationship with Ganga:

So far, whenever I talked or thought about "Godess of the river" it was always about how awful, foreign, and violating Ganga's experience has been through it all. I mean come on, she never gets a break! If you think something awful is happening to her right now, you just have to wait a few more pages for something worse to happen!

But she wasn't the only one cursed and I never thought about how violating the experience would be for the Vasus too. Since part one focuses solely on Ganga, I didn't spare much thought about her seven children at all, except for how useful they would be for the plot, and I think this was a mistake.

While thinking like this, I couldn't help myself but judge Ganga silently for her decision. What could push a woman to kill her babies as soon as they were born? Clearly, she loved them. Was humanity truly so horrible that just living with them for one singular human life would truly taint them so?

I understood that despair and fear were what led her to that particular decision but I didn't truly understand why. And I didn't until well into part two.

As I truly immersed myself in Devavrata's POV, I finally understood why that curse was so cruel to the Vasus. By taking away their godly essence, their memory, their being and giving them a human body, all the while plotting and placing them as a king's children, the sage were forcing them to go against their very nature.

As the boy grow up, we can see how humanity influenced Bishma for the worst. Each flashback and character we meet, making it more obvious. Like with Amba, who seeks Ganga to ask her for revenge. And Ganga agrees!

She agrees to giver her the means to have her revenge against Bishma. Ganga's own son! This just shows how disappointed she is! And also how devoted she is to justice.

The irony of it all is that, in part 1 of "Godess of the river", Ganga thinks:

"humans, uniting against evil, showing their faith. It did not harm anybody, but rather reminded them every year that goodness required action."

Later on while following Bishma's POV, we learn how he tries to follow both his father’s and his mother's teachings. So he took an oath: an oath to serve his kingdom and his king. He thought that, in this way, he could stop himself from being tainted by humanity as his mother so feared.

In chapter 16, he explains :

"His mother had once told him he needed to protect himself from corruption, to make himself more righteous than those around him. And this was how. He would rather die than break his word."

And then later in chapter 19, while a truly horrible situation happens to the Pandava's wife, this will be said:

"He looked down to Bishma, as if expecting aid, but Bishma could not openly contravene the ruler of his kingdom. It was wrong, he knew it. [...] But if the choice was between defying his own oath and saving a single person he knew the anwser."

The answer here being his oath. When called out on this by Draupadi, he will justify himself with:

"To keep my oath is to satisfy dharma." and "It is true that dharma forbids harming the powerless but if every man chose to judge this meaning for himself, the world would be in chaos. That is why we have a society built carefully for each man to have a place, and to know who they may look to for guidance."

He truly believes he is not "letting [himself] be corrupted by [his] own wishes"

I find it interesting then that, in the end, his decision so far goes against his mother's belief: "That goodness required action." Because time and time again, when it mattered, he didn't choose action; he chose inaction.

Is this then one of the many ways Ganga feared humanity would taint her precious son? By entangling him in human rules and belief? I can't help but think so.

That is why I found the sage curse to be so horrible to him too, because he didn't just curse them to be transformed in body alone, but also in soul by their experience and the way they would have been raised while being a human child. I don't know how impactful this would all be on their divine being but Ganga's seems to think the impact to be a very real and important threat.

It's a whole debate of nature vs. nurture, really!

I can’t imagine how I would have acted in her shoes, but considering it this way, I can now empathize with her decisions to some extent. She truly was protecting them by drowning them as babies.

It was an awful choice in an awful situation made more complex by the whole divine thing.