Ch. 2: The Festival at Gauri's Lake

There was once a city called Sobhavati, ruled by a king named Yasahketu. It was a fair city, with wide streets and shaded tanks, but its greatest treasure was a temple of the goddess Gauri, she who is also called Parvati and Durga, the wife of Siva, who shares one half of her lord's own body.

The temple stood high above the roofs of the town. Its walls were carved with the deeds of the goddess: how she rode out with eighteen arms, each bearing a weapon, to destroy the Danavas who troubled the world; how she set her foot upon the buffalo demon Mahisha and crushed his pride forever. Lamps burned before her day and night, and the bell at her door was never still for long.

To the south of the city lay a lake called Gauritirtha, the Ford of Gauri. Once every year, on the fourteenth day of the bright half of the month of Ashadha, a great festival was held there in her honour. People came from every village for many leagues around. They bathed in the lake, they brought flowers and rice and lamps of clarified butter, and they sang until their voices failed them.

In one of those villages, a place called Brahmasthala, there lived a young washerman named Dhavala. His father, Vimala, was a washerman before him, and so was his father's father. It was an honest trade and a needful one. Every morning the men of the family went down to the river with great bundles on their backs, and every evening they came home with the cloth of half the village beaten clean against the stones and spread white upon the grass to dry. Dhavala was strong from the work, and his hands were rough, but his heart was gentle, and he was known among his neighbours as a pious youth who never passed a shrine without bowing his head.

That year Dhavala went with his friends to the festival at Gauritirtha. He bathed, he made his offering, and he was standing on the steps of the lake with the water still running from his hair when he saw her.

She was bathing a little way off with the women of her family, laughing at something one of them had said. She was young, with dark eyes and a quick, bright face, and when she lifted her hands to pour water over her shoulders, it seemed to Dhavala that the lake itself grew brighter. He forgot his friends. He forgot the songs. He stood there on the step until someone jostled him, and even then he hardly noticed.

“Who is that?” he asked an old woman beside him.

The old woman followed his gaze and smiled. “That is Madanasundari,” she said, “the daughter of Suddhapata the washerman. They are good people. They live not far from here.”

A washerman‘s daughter. Dhavala’s heart leapt, for that meant there was nothing in the world to keep them apart, nothing but his own courage and his father's goodwill.

He watched her until she left the water and went away with her mother and her aunts, and then he went home to Brahmasthala. But he did not eat that night, and he did not sleep. The next day he went down to the river with his bundle, and stood in the water, and forgot to beat the cloth. His father found him there at midday, staring at nothing.

“What is the matter with you, son? Are you ill?”

“I am not ill,” said Dhavala. Then, because he could not keep it in, he told his father everything: the festival, the lake, the girl, her name and her father's name. “I cannot live without her,” he said. “If I cannot have her, I would rather die.”

Vimala was an old man and a wise one, and he had been young himself. He did not laugh. He put his hand on his son's wet shoulder.

“There is no need to talk of dying,” he said. “Suddhapata is of our own community. I know of him; he is an honest man. I will go to him myself and ask for his daughter on your behalf. It is a fitting match, and I do not think he will refuse.”

Vimala went the very next day. He put on his clean white cloth, folded his shawl over his shoulder, and walked to the house of Suddhapata. The two old men sat together in the courtyard and talked a long while, of their families and their trade, of floods and droughts, of whose cloth came cleanest from which river. At last Vimala said what he had come to say.

Suddhapata listened, and stroked his chin, and looked across the courtyard to where his daughter was grinding spices with her mother and pretending not to hear a word.

“Your son is known to me by report,” he said. “They say he is hardworking and devout. I could ask for nothing better for my child.”

So it was settled. The astrologers were consulted, an auspicious day was chosen, and Dhavala and Madanasundari were married with all the proper rites. The fire was lit, the seven steps were taken, and the two families feasted together long into the night, with drums and songs and sweets heaped high on leaf plates. Madanasundari's brother, a cheerful young man who had never in his life been able to sit still, danced until the drummers begged for mercy, and then he clapped Dhavala on the back and told him that he was a lucky fellow, and that if he ever made his sister unhappy he would have her whole family to answer to. Dhavala promised solemnly that he never would.

Dhavala brought his bride home to Brahmasthala, and for a time they were as happy as any two people under heaven. Madanasundari was quick and merry and full of opinions. She teased him about his solemn face and his habit of stopping at every wayside shrine, and he teased her about the way she bargained with the oil-seller as though her life depended on it. In the evenings they sat together on the step of their little house and watched the white cloths glimmering on the grass in the dusk, and Dhavala thought that he had never known such contentment.

He did not forget whose festival it was that had brought them together. Each morning, before he went down to the river, he bowed toward the south, where the temple of Gauri stood above Sobhavati, and he whispered his thanks to the goddess.

“You are always praying,” Madanasundari said to him once, smiling. “What more can you possibly want from her?”

“Nothing,” said Dhavala. “That is why I pray. She has given me everything already.”

His wife laughed and shook her head, but she did not laugh unkindly. She thought it one of the good things about him, that he was grateful.