Ch. 2: Ashes, Bones, and the Open Road

“On the bank of the Yamuna,” said the vetala, “there was once a place called Brahmasthala, a village given over to Brahmins and to learning. The river ran slow and brown past its bathing steps, and in the mornings you could hear, from every courtyard, the sound of boys chanting their lessons after their teachers, line by line, as their fathers had chanted before them.

”In that village lived a Brahmin named Agnisvamin. He had mastered the Vedas as few men ever do. Students came to him from far away, and he taught them at dawn beneath a neem tree in his courtyard, and in the evenings he tended the sacred fire that gave him his name. He was a careful man, a just man, and a man of some pride, as learned men often are.

“Agnisvamin had a daughter, and her name was Mandaravati.”

The vetala paused, and the king felt the cold head on his shoulder turn a little, as though the dead man were looking up at the starless sky.

“I will not trouble you with long praises of her beauty, King. You have heard poets enough. I will say only this: when she went down to the river with her water jar, the old women on the steps stopped talking. When she passed the schoolroom, the boys lost their places in the verses. It was said in Brahmasthala that the Creator, having made her, could make nothing else so fine, and had to rest. She was gentle, too, and dutiful, and she helped her mother with the household offerings and lit the lamps at dusk. There was nothing in her that anyone could find to blame.

” Such a girl is not hidden for long. Word of her travelled up the river roads, and in time it reached the great city of Kanyakubja, and there three young Brahmins heard it.

“They were all of the same age and much of the same kind: well-born, well-taught, clever, proud, and full of the certainty of youth. Each of them set out for Brahmasthala on his own, without telling the others. And each of them, arriving at Agnisvamin‘s door, bowed low and said the same thing: ’Give me your daughter in marriage. '

” Agnisvamin looked at the first, and the second, and the third. He found nothing wrong with any of them. That was precisely his trouble.

“‘If I give her to one,’ he said to his wife that night, ‘the other two will not bear it. You have seen their faces. They are not the sort who go home quietly and marry someone else. One of them will throw himself in the river, or starve himself at my door, or worse. I will not have a Brahmin’s death on my house for the sake of a wedding. '

” So he gave her to none of them. He told them, courteously, that the matter needed more thought. And the three young men, rather than going home, stayed. They found lodgings in the village. They watched the house. They learned which hour she went to the river and which hour she lit the lamps, and they stood in the street at those hours, each pretending not to see the others. Days went by like this, and then months. It is a strange thing, King, but each of them seemed to grow thinner and brighter at the same time, like a lamp-wick burning down. “

”Then, in the hot season, a fever came to Brahmasthala.

“It came the way such fevers do, without warning and without reason. One evening Mandaravati said her head ached. By midnight she was burning. Her mother sat with her and laid wet cloths on her forehead and sang to her the songs she had sung when the girl was small. Agnisvamin poured offerings into the fire and recited every verse he knew that was meant to turn away sickness. The village physician came, and went, and came again, and would not meet their eyes.

” Before the sun was high the next day, Mandaravati was dead.

“Her mother's cry went out of the house and up the street. The three young men heard it where they stood, and each of them knew at once what it meant, and none of them could move.”

The king walked on through the smoke. A jackal crossed the path ahead of him and did not hurry.

“Grief in that house was very great,” said the vetala, more quietly. “But grief does not excuse a family from its duties to the dead; rather, it is the duties that carry the grieving through the first days, when they cannot carry themselves. The women washed Mandaravati's body and wrapped her in a new cloth. They laid flowers on her and marked her forehead. The men of the family raised her on a bier of green bamboo, and they carried her out of the village to the burning ground beside the river, calling on the name of God as they went, as is the custom, so that the departing soul should hear that name and not be afraid.

”And behind the bier, without being asked and without being sent away, walked three young Brahmins from Kanyakubja.

“At the burning ground the pyre was built. Her father, with his own hands, gave her to the fire. The flames rose up, and the smoke went straight into the white sky, and the priests chanted, and in time it was finished. The family bathed in the river, as mourners must, and went home to their emptied house.

” The three suitors did not go home. “

”Each of them, King, chose a different road out of that day. Listen carefully to what they chose, for it is the whole of my question.

“The first of them could not leave the place where she had burned. When the ashes had cooled, he gathered them together into a heap. Over that heap he built himself a little hut of branches and leaves. And there, in the cremation ground, among the smoke of other people's pyres and the cries of jackals, he made his home. He lay down each night upon her ashes, as though he could keep her company. Each morning he went into the village and begged his food, and each evening he came back to her. He let his hair grow matted. He grew thin as a reed. People shook their heads at him and left a little extra rice in his bowl.

” The second suitor did something else. Before the ashes were scattered, he took up the bones that the fire had left, as the family of a dead person will do, and he wrapped them carefully in cloth. ‘She shall not lie forgotten by a village stream,’ he said. ‘She shall go to the Ganges.’ For you know, King, as every child knows, that the bones of one who is laid in Mother Ganga's waters are carried toward heaven, and the soul is helped across. So he set out on the long road east, on foot, carrying her bones against his heart, toward the holy river.

“And the third suitor,” said the vetala, “the third suitor simply walked away.

”He did not build a hut. He did not carry anything. He took the staff and bowl of a wandering ascetic and turned his face to the road, and he went from village to village and from country to country, with no plan and no home, as a man goes who no longer cares where he sleeps. He had not forgotten her. He could think of nothing else. But he did not know what a man was supposed to do with such a grief, and so he walked, and walked, as if somewhere at the end of the world there might be an answer waiting.

“And, King,” said the vetala, and the king could hear that it was smiling again, “as it happens, there was.”