I hardly believe it happened right here—all that fire and violence— where now is stillness. So many decades have passed since then; scarcely a sign remains to stir our memories—no remnants of what we built, no residue of what we believed or practiced. Our fields lay fallow and our monasteries abandoned, while the jungle swallowed up all that remained of our civilization. It’s humbling to witness how quickly, how deftly the forest has wrecked every town and village, sunk every roadway, invaded every field and reclaimed the landscape it had taken us five generations to clear and domesticate, to crown with our pious art and temples. However mighty we believed we were, in the end, the wriggling toes of burgeoning trees tumbled every fence of wood or piled stone like children at play; aspiring grasses, shrubs and insects took minutest hold of every brick and beam, serenely dismantling their structures, particle by particle, returning them to the mud from which they’d been wrought; majestic banyans groped great sections of our fortress wall, reaching out along the ramparts and cascading down the sides in a crushing embrace.
Make no mistake: In our day we were strong and prosperous and populous. Dandavrut, our capital city, my home, was the greatest town of the land, larger and more civilized than the seaport of Dindora on the western coast. Dindora may be the largest town in the region today, but it is—as it was then—a wretched, lawless place, existing only for trade and acquisition. Dindora is a place without vision or poetry. But Dandavrut was a home for ideas, for music and theatre. Monks and nuns, sages, poets, adventurers all passed through our country; the most knowledgeable and enchanting were honoured as guests in our court. Merchants brought their wares upriver from the seaport of Dindora and stayed awhile among us to say they’d relished our good life. We once hosted an entourage of visiting dignitaries from Rome, who remained with us for more than a year. It was through an elder scribe among them that Guruji and I tasted of their Zeno and learned also of Epicurus, whose views resonated with Lokayatan thought in placing emphasis upon the world of the here and now.
Dandavrut stood at the base of the Iglava Escarpment, where my people said Great Mother Nriyalli had broken the land by stomping her mighty foot when she discovered her husband Behra consorting with her younger sister Dara. But the bond to one’s sister is unbreakable, and that’s why the Dara River still flows into her sister river, and together they flow onward towards the western sea. Our country, Virinara, began below the escarpment and ranged for several yojanas along the Nriyalli River. It was a long morning’s journey by boat from Dandavrut, at the eastern end of the country, to Port Behrut in midcountry, and then half again as far to our westernmost frontier. Dindora seaport, even then an independent town built upon delta islands, where the Nriyalli River finds the sea, was more than a full day’s journey beyond our western frontier.
I was the last of the royals to leave, first travelling westward by small boat to Dindora. Thereafter, I took up a life of wandering, traversing the land from forest to mountain to sea, just as I’d dreamed of doing as a girl, though the circumstances weren’t what I’d wished for. And though I longed for a chance to cross the ocean, I never did manage it. Once a ship’s captain promised to take me on board as his lover, but in the end, he said my crooked hips and unsteady gait made me a liability at sea. So he left me.
‘Shall I write that?’ Bhikku Laxman interrupted, his fingers holding the stylus trembling above the palm leaf. He sat across from Shanti, both of them on clean straw mats under a thatched awning. Beyond their spot of shade, the morning sky was creamy blue.
‘Write what? Of course, write it all down. That’s what we agreed,’ Shanti said with mild impatience. ‘If my old hands weren’t too cramped and pained to hold the stylus, I should write it down myself exactly as I tell it—the whole story, as I lived it.’
‘But why would you include such sullying details? It’s unbecoming of a rajkumari. How can I put down that you offered yourself wantonly to a sailor!—who then refused you!’ The monk made a bitter face and shook his head.
‘Ah, dear Bhikku, after all we’ve lost and all we’ve become, you will still hold onto facile judgements of this kind?’ The monk stared severely at the ground between them as Shanti continued. ‘Yes, I’ve exercised my lust, as a woman might do. I’ve enjoyed the fullness of my heart and even of my body. For a time, I went with a sect who practised carnal meditations to achieve union with divinity. Another time, I stayed celibate for many years. All of these things belong to my life. All of these lives I’ve lived have been my gurus.’
‘Great Lady,’ the monk said quietly, pausing to inhale, to still his nerves, ‘I understand as well as you the magnitude of what we’ve
lost. I understand you might’ve started down a winding path, drunk with your grief. But why would you wish to be remembered that way? I fear people will misunderstand, Great Lady. You were a supreme rajkumari of a great people.’
‘Listen, I am no longer a rajkumari—that part of me was buried long ago. By the time I travelled alone to Dindora, I was without family, without title, without hope. I lived only for the life I made as I went. And after having spent my youth in such a circumscribed role, I wished to know all the rest of life. I wished to find its limits.’
‘And did you?—find its limits?’ the Bhikku looked up at her.
‘I did.’
At this, the old scribe tipped his head and closed his eyes with self-satisfaction.
Seeing this, Shanti hastened to add, ‘But everything I lived, all that I tasted, dear old friend, are what made me. I lived and I ate full, when I was still young enough and there were delights to be had. When I held back, it was by my own choice, not imposed by my station. I tell you, I moved this way and that, touching everything, trying everything, to discover for myself the shape of my own dharma! I tumbled and rose up and walked on. I moved among all types of people, and I don’t regret one moment of it. Let others judge me as they might, but it won’t diminish the fullness of what I’ve done. Now, when my life is nearing its close, I do not run from what I’ve been. No, I will continue to examine my life—whatever it was and whatever is left of it.’
After a moment’s consideration, the monk resettled his writing board upon his lap and turned his wrist to loosen it. He said, ‘I don’t judge you, Great Lady. I know you well and respect you highly. Even the Buddha travelled the most extreme paths to arrive at his wisdom.’
‘Shall we continue, then?’
It was only some twenty years ago that I finally returned here to my ancestral lands, called back by the need to remember, to gather up the fragments, to reconstruct the cracked vessel of my life and pour from it my own story. I don’t know if any good will come from this exercise, whether there’s any wisdom to be had from it, but I feel compelled to put down my tale. Who knows why one feels this human urge to preserve and perpetuate ourselves, our visions and desires? Who knows why this need for art, this brazen denial of death and emptiness?
When I returned here, I searched for days through the tangled wilderness, until I found this selfsame banyan tree where my Guruji’s ashram had been, where I used to sit with him and study. And here I built my own ashram. By cutting and training the hanging roots of the banyan, as he’d taught me, I’ve fashioned small hollows within the spread of this great tree’s loose girth and constructed simple huts of bamboo, vetiver and thatch. In the earliest years, I kept but two or three students, young wanderers and seekers from as far away as Dindora.
But then, some years ago, new farmers started moving into the area, clearing out small circles of the forest to till ever- widening plots of lentils and to graze their cows. Some have grown curious about my ashram. Today, there are two handfuls of villages scattered within three yojanas of my ashram, and students come to me in a steady stream. To them, I’m a kindly but curious old lady, a teller of gaudy tales, thinker of esoteric philosophies, a long-toothed sage with wiry hair. But they don’t know how we lived here before. They eat the fruit from our old mango trees and gather the herbs that flowered out from our gardens into the wild, but they don’t wonder how this wilderness came to be filled with ready food. When they dig to plant their gardens, unearthing fragments of the past—I’ve seen old coins and broken medallions dangling among the beads around their necks or tied into their hair—they make up their own stories about the artefacts they find. They say that these bits of metal are the glimmering tears of a jilted goddess, that the broken potsherds and arrowheads fell from a tussle between gods and demons. I always laugh when I hear this, for in some way what they tell is also a kind of truth, metaphorically—though it’s not clear who among us were the gods and who the demons.
‘—Ah, but you are telling the end of the story,’ interrupted the monk, lifting his stylus to look at her, his eyes curious and eager. ‘You should begin at the beginning.’
Shanti nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’re right, Bhikku.’ She paused, sweeping the stray wisps of hair from her face and smoothing them to join the strands of her topknot, though they slipped down again. Bhikku Laxman often thought that when its gloss reflected the sun, her hair glowed like burnished silver above the blackbrown of her forehead, adding to the regal bearing she still projected in such thoughtful moments.
In the shade of the forest across the small clearing that surrounded them, two girls milked a cow. Other youths sat around a small cooking fire, boiling water, their occasional laughter drifting across the yard. Apart from that, the only other sounds were of the morning birdsong and the ceaseless drone of the forest insects. After a moment, Shanti said, ‘Beginnings are very tricky, you see. Any true story has many beginnings, like many streams leading into the same river. Which stream to follow, which to privilege above all the others?’
The monk smiled. ‘Great Lady, your story is also in part my story, and I wish to hear it in full, so far as fullness can be captured or spoken in the words of mortals. Tell me all the beginnings as you know them, and I shall write them out. Let the river of your story flow in full measure.’
© Usha Sri Charyulu Alexander 2020