Ch. 3: The Offering at the Temple

Some time after the wedding, a visitor came to the house in Brahmasthala. It was Madanasundari's brother, dusty from the road and grinning, with a bundle of sweets from his mother tied up in a cloth.

Madanasundari ran out to meet him and scolded him for not sending word, and then scolded him again for bringing so few sweets, and then hugged him. Dhavala welcomed him with water for his feet and a seat in the shade.

“I have come to carry you both off,” said the brother. “Our father is holding a festival in honour of the goddess Durga, and he will not hear of it unless his daughter and his new son-in-law are there. You must come. My mother has been cooking for a week.”

Dhavala's parents gave their blessing, and the three of them set out the next morning: Dhavala and the brother walking ahead, talking of this and that, and Madanasundari a little behind, with her best cloth folded in a bundle and her bangles chiming at every step.

The road was long and the day was hot. Toward afternoon, they came within sight of Sobhavati, and above its roofs Dhavala saw the tall spire of the temple of Gauri, shining in the sun.

He stopped in the road.

“That is her temple,” he said. “The goddess who gave me my wife. I have bowed toward it every morning, and never once stood at her door. We are passing so close. Let me go in and pay my respects.”

The brother shrugged good-naturedly. “Go, then. We will wait for you here in the shade.”

“Do not be long,” said Madanasundari. “My mother will have the lamps lit before we arrive.”

Dhavala smiled at her and went up the long stone steps alone.

Inside, the temple was cool and dim after the glare of the road. The noise of the city fell away behind him. Lamps flickered in their niches, and the air was heavy with the smell of camphor and crushed flowers. Dhavala walked between the great carved pillars until he came to the inner shrine, and there he stood before the goddess.

She was more terrible and more beautiful than he had imagined. Eighteen arms rose about her like the spokes of a wheel, each hand holding a weapon or a sign of blessing. Beneath her foot lay the buffalo demon Mahisha, broken at last. Her eyes, wide and dark, looked straight down into his.

Dhavala fell to the ground before her. He thought of all that she had given him: the festival at the lake, the face in the bright water, his father‘s kindness, the wedding fire, the quiet evenings on the step. He thought of how little he had to give in return. A washerman’s offerings were small things, a handful of flowers, a lamp, a few grains of rice. They seemed to him, in that moment, like nothing at all.

A great wave of devotion rose in him, so strong that it swept all other thoughts away. He forgot the road outside. He forgot his wife waiting in the shade. He remembered only the goddess, and how much he owed her, and that there was one gift greater than any other that a man could give.

In the old days, men sometimes made such offerings to the Mother, and the tellers speak of them with awe. Dhavala rose to his feet. An ancient sword lay among the offerings in the shrine, left there by some pilgrim long ago. He took it in his hands, and bowed once more, and spoke the goddess's name.

The lamps flickered. The bell at the door gave a single note, though no one had touched it. And then the shrine was very still.

Outside, in the shade at the foot of the steps, the brother and Madanasundari waited. The shadows grew longer. The brother whistled, and threw pebbles at a crow, and finally stood up and stretched.

“What can he be doing in there? Does he mean to stay the night?”

“He is very devout,” said Madanasundari, but she too was frowning now, and looking up at the dark doorway. “Go and fetch him, brother. Tell him my mother is waiting.”

The brother went up the steps two at a time and disappeared into the temple.

He did not come out again.

Madanasundari waited. The sun touched the rooftops of Sobhavati. A cool wind began to blow from the direction of the lake, and the people of the town went past her on their way home, and none of them was her husband, and none of them was her brother. At last she could bear it no longer. She gathered up her bundle and went up the steps herself.

The temple was darker now. She called her husband‘s name, and then her brother’s, and her voice came back to her from the pillars. She went on toward the inner shrine, toward the lamps.

There, before the goddess, she found them both. Her husband had made his offering, and her brother, finding him, had followed him in grief and devotion with the same old sword. The two men lay side by side before the goddess, and they did not answer when she called.

The tellers do not dwell on that sight, and neither shall we.

Madanasundari sank down on the floor of the shrine. For a long time she could not weep, and then she could not stop. She cried out to the goddess with her hands pressed together.

“Mother! What have I done, that you should take everything from me at once? You gave me my husband at your own festival, and now you have taken him back. And my brother, who only came to bring us home. How can I go to my father's house alone? How can I tell my mother? What life is left for me?”

The goddess looked down on her in silence.

At last Madanasundari rose. Her face was calm now, with the dreadful calm of someone who has decided. In the courtyard outside the shrine stood an asoka tree, its branches spreading over the temple wall. She went out to it and loosened the long creeper that twined about its trunk, and she made it ready.

Then she turned once more toward the shrine and folded her hands.

“Great goddess,” she said, “you who bear half of Siva's body, you who trampled Mahisha into the dust, hear me. I go now to follow them. Only grant me this, in whatever birth I come to next: let these same two men be my husband and my brother again.”

She lifted her hands to the creeper.

And a voice spoke out of the sky.