‘After a long time Kadru brought forth a thousand eggs, and Vinata, O lord of brahmins, two eggs. The joyful handmaidens placed their eggs in warm vessels [and kept them] for five hundred years. After five hundred years Kadru’s sons emerged [from the eggs], but Vinata’s pair [of sons] did not appear. Then Vinata, the ascetic woman, longing for a son and ashamed, broke [one] egg — and saw there a son with the upper half of his body fully formed but the lower half undeveloped. That son, filled with wrath, cursed her, as the tradition tells: ‘Since you, overcome by impatience, made me thus — with an incomplete body — for that you shall be a slave for five hundred years to the one you rival [Kadru]. But this [second] son will free you from servitude, O mother, provided you do not make him too, as you did me, bodiless or maimed by breaking the egg. You must patiently await the time of his birth — after [another] five hundred years, if you desire a son of surpassing strength.’ Having thus cursed Vinata, that son [rose] into the sky; and this is Aruna, who is always seen in the sky at the hour of dawn.’