Ch. 4: Which One Is Her Husband?

“Daughter, stop! Do nothing rash.”

The voice filled the courtyard, though there was no one there. It was deep and gentle at once, like thunder heard from far away, and the leaves of the asoka tree trembled at the sound of it. Madanasundari let the creeper fall from her hands.

“I am pleased with you, child,” said the voice of the goddess, “for though you are young, your love is steadfast, and you came to my door to die rather than abandon those you love. Now listen. Go back into the shrine. Join the heads of these two men to their bodies, and they shall rise up alive and whole. This I grant you.”

For one moment Madanasundari stood without moving, unable to believe what she had heard. Then joy rushed through her like a flood through a dry riverbed, and she ran.

She ran back across the courtyard, back between the pillars, back into the dim shrine where the lamps were burning low. Her heart was pounding so hard she could scarcely see. Her hands were shaking. All she could think was hurry, hurry, before the goddess changes her mind, before the lamps go out, before the night comes down.

The light was poor, and her eyes were full of tears, and she did not stop to look. She did as the goddess had told her, quickly, so quickly, with trembling hands and a prayer on her lips.

And the goddess kept her word. Breath came back into the shrine. The two young men stirred, and sat up, and looked about them like sleepers waking from a long dream.

Madanasundari gave a cry of joy and reached for her husband.

Then she stopped.

The man before her had her husband‘s face, his dark eyes, the little scar above his brow from a fall on the riverbank when he was a boy. But the shoulders below that face were her brother’s shoulders, and the hands were her brother‘s hands. And the other man, who was looking at her in bewilderment, had her brother’s face, his quick grin already returning, upon the strong, rough-handed body of Dhavala the washerman.

In her haste, in the dimness, she had set each head upon the wrong body.

The two men looked at one another, and then down at themselves, and then at one another again. Nobody said anything for a long time. A lamp guttered and went out.

They gave thanks to the goddess, all three of them, for whatever else had happened, they were alive. Then they went out together into the dusk and took the road to her father's house. But all the way there, Madanasundari walked behind them in silence, looking from one to the other, and she could not for the life of her decide which of the two was her husband.

The lamps were lit in her father's courtyard when they arrived, just as she had said they would be. Her mother came out with a tray of sweets and a little brass lamp to welcome them, and stopped on the threshold, and looked from one young man to the other, and opened her mouth, and closed it again. Suddhapata came behind her, rubbing his eyes as though the dusk were playing tricks on them.

There was a festival that night in honour of Durga, and drums, and singing, and a great deal of food. The neighbours ate and praised the cooking. But in the middle of it all, the washerman‘s daughter sat quite still on the edge of the firelight with her hands in her lap. When the man with her husband’s face spoke to her, she heard her husband‘s voice. When the man with her husband’s body moved, she knew the set of those shoulders, the way those rough hands rested on his knees. Each of them was half of what she had lost, and each of them, it seemed to her, was half a stranger.

“Mother,” she whispered at last, too low for anyone else to hear, “you gave them back to me. Tell me now which one is mine.”

But the goddess, who had spoken once, did not speak again.

There the Vetala stopped.

The king walked on through the cremation ground with the corpse upon his shoulder. The pyres had burned lower while the tale was told, and their light was redder now, and the shadows longer. The banyan tree was still some way off.

“Well, king?” said the Vetala, its voice soft and mocking in his ear. “Here is my question. The husband‘s head is on the brother’s body. The brother‘s head is on the husband’s body. Which of the two, thus mixed together, was her husband? Think carefully. You know my rule. If you know the answer and keep it to yourself, your head will split into a hundred pieces.”

Trivikramasena said nothing for a few steps. He knew well enough what would happen if he spoke. He would lose his burden again, and the long walk back to the asoka tree would begin again. But he knew the answer too, and he was not a king who could leave a true judgement unspoken, whatever it might cost him.

“Listen, then,” he said. “That one of the two, on whom her husband's head was fixed, was her husband, for the head is the chief of the limbs, and personal identity depends upon it.”

“Is that so?” murmured the Vetala.

“It is so,” said the king. “A body is a good servant. It carries cloth to the river and beats it on the stones. But it is the head that remembers the festival at the lake, and the face in the water, and the vows spoken before the fire. It was her husband‘s head that loved her, and it is her husband’s head that knows her now. Whatever shoulders it may stand upon, that man is Dhavala.”

For a moment the corpse lay quiet on his shoulder, and the king thought he heard, far off, something like a sigh, or a laugh, or both.

Then the weight was gone.

Trivikramasena turned. Through the smoke of the pyres, he saw a pale shape go flitting away over the bones and the long grass, swift and soundless as an owl, back toward the south. He did not need to follow it with his eyes to know where it was going. It was going home to the blackened asoka tree, to hang once more from its branch and wait for him.

The king stood still for a moment in the darkness. The jackals had begun to cry again. Far behind him, under the banyan tree, the ascetic Kshantisila sat waiting inside his circle, and the night was not yet half over.

Trivikramasena tightened the dark cloth about his head and settled his sword at his side. Then, without a word of complaint, he turned his back on the banyan tree and set off south once more, through the smoke and the firelight, to fetch the Vetala again.