by Ruskin Bond
How should these things accord: the antelope vestment of one who gives all his life to pious endeavour, and a garment stained by contact with a public woman?
You split wood for the sacrifices in your childhood; whence came this art to you of tearing mistress’ lips?
You practised unwavering obedience to the priest; whence have you learnt this conquering manner over loose women?
Your perfect pronunciation in reciting the syllables of the sacred text became a by-word; whence have you such virtuosity in speech with raging girls?
I have recalled your family to you, now I go pray.’
Sundarasena took note of the contents of this letter, and then fell into a hesitation as to what he should do. Then it was that someone sang these most appropriate lines in the metre Arya:
For him whose eyes are drowned in lust
Until they miss the way you must
Compound a salve of syllables
The pious mouth of a priest tells.
Harsh duty and that bitter root
Self-Knowledge should be added to it;
For then the unguent shall sear
And cleanse, and both the eyes see clear.
As soon as Sundarasena’s friend, Gunapalita, heard these words, he seized the occasion to say to his companion: ‘An upright man is never disparaged because he pays attention to the salutary discourse of dear mouths.
‘You have not listened to the counsels of your comrade; your body is plunged into the great deep of evil passions; your surest hope of salvation is in words of an angry father.
‘Your Father, the light of his race, who wears his irreproachable conduct as a garment, your father, a man of high-placed heart, is now brought low, Sundara, by the trespass of an evil son.
‘Never to have had a son is better than to give the light to evil.
‘Virtue cannot hold the hand of happiness. The son by whose transgression a mother is led to cry: “Would that I had not borne him!” is an evil son.
‘If violent feeling lead us but once from the road, a knowledge of the arts shall stay without fruit, and years passed in the house a master all be barren.
‘He at whom people point the finger from afar off, looking upon him and making faces, is dead in life.
‘This thing is true, that sensuality cannot be killed. A man of perfect understanding will avoid occasion even of unjust reproach.
‘He who cannot waver on that path which the righteous follow, who is the jewel of his family, alone finds happiness. His perfections go out from him into all the world; the upright accord him high consideration; he is sought by the people; he is the throne of good.
‘That man who perpetually satisfies his ear with the instructive discourse of his ancestors, the same shall become a treasury of education, knowing the suitable from the unsuitable.
‘When a youth attaches himself to vile women, it is the ripening of the fruit of evil works in a past existence. A noble wife is an abiding joy.
‘When he is vexed, she is vexed also; when he is joyful, she rejoices; when he is uneasy, she betrays uneasiness; she is his mirror. But when he is angry, she is afraid, and is careful not to become angry also.
‘She allows him as much as he wishes of the amorous gymnastic; she does not forbid his pleasures upon her; she is adroit to slip into his thoughts; she is the inheritance of a treasure of merits in a former existence.’
It was after this that Sundarasena resolved to make his father’s house at one again by breaking with his mistress; therefore he said to her, by way of beginning:
‘O child of beautiful teeth, you must think no more upon any wounding words which I may have spoken, either in amorous anger or ill-considered pleasantry, or through misunderstanding.
‘My heart is laid in yours, as it were a pledge; and to keep a pledge is a very serious matter. Bend all your cares that my pledge shall not lessen in value because of the place of its deposit.’
When her lover had finished speaking, Haralata answered with difficulty, in a hesitant voice, mingling a wave of tears into her words:
‘How should these things accord: a woman born of an impure race, who gains her food by giving up her body, whose conduct is deceit, who sells her beauty, and you whose life is one perfection?
‘Desire urged you to see the land of lust, and you have stayed here many days. This was because I acquired merit in some other life . . .
‘All those sweet pleasantries, those fine double meanings, those hours consumed in loving conversation . . . you must not keep silence about them in your heart if you would live at peace . . .
‘I beg you to pardon me all the harm I have done you, either by negligence or through excess of love, and also all annoyance.
‘The roads are hard to go over; you will sleep far from here tonight; no heart is steady. Gunapalita, as he travels beside you, must not be light-hearted.
‘When two young folk, whose hearts have at any time been one, know separation, that is the opportunity of a third party to carry them comfort.
‘The man who is bound by a tender inclination, a discreet rapture, can abide parting through death or the judgement of the wise alone.’
Sundarasena had listened to her conversation with manifest coldness, and now he said: ‘I must depart, my dear.’
With that he turned his head and went away.
But Haralata stayed where she was, leaning against the branch of a banyan, her lips withering under a hot sigh. With fixed eyes she watched her lover go, and then fell heavily to the earth, like a dead stem, straining the fingers of her hand over her broken heart. O end of gracious jesting! She was stricken to death in the innermost of her body, her soul was as empty as sand. ‘O spirits of my life,’ she murmured, ‘do not depart straight away! Remain until he has passed into the trees!’ But as she spoke, life left her.
A little later the son of Purandara questioned a traveller who overtook him on the way, saying: ‘Have you encountered a grief-stricken woman?’
‘Under a banyan tree,’ answered the man, ‘there lies one, but her beautiful limbs are quiet in death. I have not seen another.’
Wounded in the full of the heart by the shock of these words, Sundarasena fell, and to his friend who lifted him, he showed the ulceration of his heart:
‘Be satisfied, O father, and, you, very dear friend . . . . Let joy be manifest! Two things abandoned Haralata at the same moment, this wretch who is I, and her dear life.
‘Love delight, the model of constancy, is beaten down. Love’s gentle game is over. You spread a light upon me; where is it now?
‘O folly of love, depart into the woods, a penitent! The dumb signs have left her. You had sweet shame before your lover’s tenderness, you had a noble indifference under his caresses. You concealed so tender, so sweetly foolish a passion. Alas, have you fainted for ever?
‘I will return, I will see her again who has perished of our separation; I owe her the last office, I will give her body to the fire.’
He went back to the place where she was dead, and rolled upon the earth; and while his friend strove to bear him up, he cried:
‘See, we have come back. Now let your anger fall. Spare me one word, O sulky one. Rise up, my dear! Why do you stay in bed so long, for the bed is dust?
‘Why do you not answer me, why do your eyes stay shut? We are lost, and it was through my fault, because you did not wish me to go.
‘Now you have climbed into the sky, now you eclipse all women in the city of the king, now Kama is disarmed for all his arrows.
‘All over the world it is said: False as a harlot. But, with your death, my beloved, the proverb dies.
‘Only the son of Shiva, Mahasena, is worthy of our praise at all, for he is eternally chaste, his heart is intangible by love and the eyes of women.
‘O porter of the world, why have you opened the gates to my mistress? Did you not know that she was the ornament of the Earth, and that her departing has left it empty?
‘Do not burn the Earth’s
high jewel, O god of fire; it cost the Creator too much pain. Do not steal away the quintessence of the sweet sea!’
Without paying further attention to the lamentations of his friend, Gunapalita now raised a pyre and burnt the body of the courtesan.
In his despair the lover would have thrown himself among the flames, but at that moment a man felt these most appropriate lines rising within his soul, and so gave voice to them:
Only a madman follows into death
The girl who seemed more dear to him than breath,
Whose passing puts his soul into confusion;
Since, though in women such an end is meet,
Man has the fortitude to clear his feet
Of every grief, for grieving is illusion.
These words drew Sundarasena from his prostration, and he said to his friend: ‘My spirit is enlightened by this wise man, for he has shown me what is fitting.
‘What man of sense would fall into any passion because of this circle of existences? He is bound within it to the pain of losing; he is bound to birth, to age, to sickness and to death!
‘Let us go now towards Kusumapura, for I vow to find my refuge in the last stage of life which is asceticism, so that freedom from ignorance may be my portion.’ To this his noble young friend made answer: ‘Since earliest childhood you have not left me. What need is there, even for one who dreams of complete renunciation, to abandon a friend? I have not one desire which points towards the world of sense.’
‘It is well!’ cried Sundarasena, and led his friend in the direction of the forest of penitents, of resolution and abiding vows. . . .
‘The Loves of Haralata and Sundarasena’, from ‘Lessons of a Bawd’ by Damodaragupta in Eastern Love Vol. I, edited and translated by E. Powys Mathers. London, 1927.
The Queen and the Mahout
Janna
Canto Two
‘Listen, this is our story’
The Land of Avanti
shone
like the fair face of a woman,
its main city, Ujjayini,
like her nose—delicate as a bud.
Its King Yasaugha, a great
conqueror, had won renown
for personal valour, and trophies
in war. The princes of the earth
bowed at his feet, and the gems
in their crowns, as they bowed,
burned like lamps
of amethyst around the feet.
Candramati was the royal queen,
the king’s lovely woman.
The king’s eyes stood waiting
on her like bodyguards, his mind
adorned her as a jewel. The very
goddess Wealth, the royal deity,
was her maid. She was every
inch a queen. They loved each
other, shared the joys of their bed.
The moon kept watch at their door
by night; the spring, brought on
by the roll of seasons, by day.
And the love-god Mara all day long.
Presently, to the king and queen
was born a son, Yasodhara.
He was comely, radiant as
the arrow of Mara who
brings it out with grace
to fit his sugarcane-bow
and the string made of flowerbuds.
The child, ruddy of limb,
of bright looks, romped about
and brought riches to the eyes that looked,
honey to the lips
that touched him
and himself
to the arms that stretched
for a caress.
Years passed. The boy grew
into a fine strapping man.
Were there eyes around, then, one
wondered, that wouldn’t tell
how he himself looked like Mara
or like a piece of moonlight
to intrigue us
or touched us with the cool
of a mountain breeze?
Soon he excelled in valour
over enemies who began to feel
the pressure of his sinewy arms.
Presently Mara came along,
this time as hunter
with a decoy to lure
the young prince. The charming
decoy was none other than Amritamati,
now the beloved of Yasodhara.
And they came together as man and wife.
King Yasaugha, as he grew older,
and greedier for conjugal pleasure,
crowned king his son Yasodhara
and freed himself from the affairs
of State—so that he could bury
himself deeper in voluptuous life.
By and by his hair turned
silver, crept out like a dove
to catch the thieving old-timer
as if with a lamp in hand—
which was an ill-omen, as the
royal custom ran, that
when a dove enters the palace
the king should leave it. Age had
seized Yasaugha, the silver hair
was hint enough for him
to put aside his palace pleasures
and take to the life of a recluse for
the rest of his days. He left his kingdom
to the care of his beloved son, and with
the pick of his men, all of the royal house,
he betook himself to the forest with
the liberty of an elephant
that breaks loose from its chains.
The realm, divorced from her
rightful master, flew into
the clasp of Yasodhara as a mistress
would when times change.
She now found in his eminence
the cool of sandal and
in his loving care her lost comforts.
The lands he conquered, the trophies
he won, all his victories
he bore about him with ease.
For victory is a clever wench
who breaks her troth with kings
and flies to any new-glossed prince
who comes to the fore by strength of sword.
Young Yasodhara was happy in
the company of Queen Amritamati,
whose looks were the very glass wherein
he dressed himself, and touched his features.
But things soon began to take
a new turn in the young prince’s life.
Once, as it happened,
the king discharged his court duties
before time, and by the end
of day, went up the staircase
to the bed-chamber
to meet his beloved queen.
From the casements
rose a tiny column of
incense smoke like the grey-
winged dove that flew out, as if
at the behest of the love-god Mara,
to carry his message to
the minds of people.
Bees came hovering
round for the scent, and
the brush of their wings raised
the musk and camphor dust.
The blue sapphires
adorning the chamber
burned and glowed.
The bed breathed passion. It was
a swing-bed and at either
end were images of swans
inlaid with nine varieties of gems.
There they lay,
the young king and the lovely queen,
in bed in each other’s arms.
their eyes, cast, bit
into each other, their bodies
melted in the clasp, like those
fabled moon-stones
when the moon’s rays fell on them.
As dolls with strings, the love-god
Mara pulled them, put them
together, and let them get
drunk with the joys of love.
They played as if possessed
by an untiring love for
each other. Tired out at last
in the night’s toil, they drowsed
and lay asleep—their bodies
still clinging together loosely, and
drops of sweat running down them.
Yet they didn’t have the heart to unclasp!
(‘listen now, my king,
what happened next’)
In the small hours
of the morning, when the noise
of the last change of guards
at the palace gate died out,
the queen heard
a faint voice, and
was awakened. Enclosed
and lost
in the prison of her love’s arms,
she heard:
the voice grew into a song,
sweet and alluring in the dark silence.
It came to her
like fallen seeds
trouble the resting waters.
A tiny ripple
stirred
and grew. Soon it touched
her, tapped her gently, and
woke her out of her drowsy
slumbers. Eyes wide open,
she stared in the dark,
and toward the direction of the song.
The voice came from the nearby
elephant stables. The song
went home to her, shook
her to the roots. Tired though
she was, her body rose again
tingling and all alive to the song.
She lost her heart to it,
to the possessor of that
divine voice. She paid him
in her mind
the tribute
of her entire body.
The mahout down in the elephant
stables was a born singer. His voice,
tremulous
and sensitive to the
minutest crease of fancy
dithered,
wavered,
and answered
to the metamorphic
variations of the tune.
Keeping time,
working
to a climax,
the song took a stance
stood poised
limned,
and limbered away to the end.
The voice came
smooth and vivid
to the queen as if
she had touched it.
Lured
and lost in the song
there now broke out within her
a cascade of feeling,
an irresistible urge to see him,