Chapter 43
Maitreyi sat alone and listless in the courtyard of the cottage. There was no one to talk to.The afternoon was heavy with the sultry silence of summer. She missed Katyayani’s all-pervading presence. How would this hermitage have survived without her tenacious striving and alert eye? All these years she had worked relentlessly to keep the things moving. If she was hard on everyone, she was no less hard on herself. Never for a moment did she pause to think of what they were missing. Life was an interminable journey without rest. And Maitreyi and Katyayani were everything to everybody. The home-fires were kept burning, pupils received knowledge, and Yajnyawalkya's son had grown to be a fine, strong, and happy lad.
And still Katyayani was driven to go and beseech Yajnyawalkya to leave Videha for good, come back home and take charge of the hermitage. Why? Because Maitreyi found her strength ebbing away; because Maitreyi caved in, giving way to a momentary despondency! Maitreyi had driven Katyayani to act against her pride, when Maitreyi knew all along that that it was Katyayani's pride which had sustained her all along. It was a precious pride, exemplary in its own way. And what did Maitreyi do to that precious asset? How could she break it?
Maitreyi reproached herself for not being able to stay in support of Katyayani and share the burden of their lonely responsibility. It pained her to imagine that majestic woman declaring herself defeated.
As she sat there watching the noon taking on a milder hue, there was a knock at the gate. Maitreyi got up to see who it was. The man seemed to be a weary wayfarer, a mendicant perhaps! But a closer look suggested that he was a Vedic scholar in search of some place to rest his head.
Maitreyi looked at him inquiringly. The man seemed to know her. He greeted her deferentially and introduced himself as Artabhaga from the family of Jaratkaravas. Maitreyi had heard the name before, though she could not recollect when and where. However, she did not feel it proper to keep him standing there. She held the gate open to let him in.
Artabhaga looked around. This was Yajnyawalkya's abode and his hermitage. Even in his absence the place seemed to bask in the light of sanctity and serenity, as if its Master was keeping a watchful eye on it from afar. The Master seemed to be present everywhere. What was absent was fear and doubt. God seemed to have withdrawn there to rest in Himself, and Artabhaga longed to be with the God living there.
He watched Maitreyi as she moved in and out to make arrangements for his stay. She came with some food for him which she served on a plantain leaf.
Artabhaga sat down to eat, clean and refreshed by now. She was silent and unobtrusive while he ate. He seemed to relish the food and ate quietly, having made an offering of the first morsel to god.
Maitreyi was silently wondering about the purpose of his visit. Usually Vedic scholars announced themselves with great ceremony. He had no following. His inwardness reflected in the sound of his voice. But there was something about him which made her feel restful.
When he looked at her directly, she did not in fact know that he had already absorbed her presence watchfully. He hesitated for a moment before addressing her.
“May I call you sister?”
“You may. I am Yajnyawalkya's wife!”
There was no suggestion of a self-conscious pride and no suggestion of forced humility either. She waited then for him to continue. He did not know what to say or where to begin. Should he tell her how his path had crossed that of Yajnyawalkya years ago in Videha at the conference of scholars? Should he tell her how Yajnyawalkya and Shakalya had crossed words with each other in a fateful encounter? Should he tell her how he had wandered without peace and understanding thereafter all these years?
He looked at her uncritically. He wondered whether a self-revelation would not hurt her. He turned back the tide of his thoughts. There was not much time to lose. He had to say something to melt her silence.
What could he say? He relived the moment from the distant past when he had met Shakala, the father of Shakalya, in his lonely cottage, to deliver the news of his son's death.
What did he have to say to this blameless woman? Could he confess that he hated her husband? Could he say that her husband held the key to a gateway to the past?
What if she said that her husband owed no explanation to anyone except his own God?
Artabhaga cowered under the weight of his own questions. The sun had begun to cast long shadows now. Suddenly from nowhere, a boy came running and went straight to Maitreyi. Finding her engaged in conversation with a stranger, he stood near her and started watching Artabhaga curiously.
‘Yajnyawalkya’s son', Artabhaga thought to himself. The boy had his father's looks, but had eyes that were different. He seemed to get deep inside the person he was looking at with those eyes. Yajnyawalkya never looked 'at' a person. He always seemed to be looking at something invisible, something beyond the person.
Artabhaga found the boy looking at him intently. Then the boy went behind Maitreyi and continued to look at Artabhaga, this time with a friendly look to suggest that he had taken a fancy for him and that they could be friends. There was a glint in his eyes now which betokened a secret understanding that he wanted to share with Artabhaga. Artabhaga liked the boy instantly.
Maitreyi felt something going across between the two and turned around to look at the boy. The boy put on an expressionless face and started telling her something about the day's events.
.Artabhaga was amused. After so many years he felt lighthearted and calm. He swept aside for the time being the thoughts that had troubled him and brought him here to seek peace and understanding.
But still, he could not ignore the question in Maitreyi's eyes.
Maitreyi sent the boy away on some errand and turned to Artabhaga.
“It seems, you are not at peace with yourself. Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked rather hesitantly.
Artabhaga made no response. Maitreyi was intrigued by his silence.
Artabhaga mumbled something under his breath. Maitreyi felt, she heard him say 'Yajnyawalkya'. She repeated the word aloud to make sure that she had heard him right. Artabhaga nodded dumbly, unable to say anything further.
Maitreyi felt something amiss. “What is it about Yajnyawalkya?” she asked in a trembling voice.
“Is everything all right?” she asked, unable to control her fear.
Artabhaga realized how unspecific he had made himself. He looked beseechingly at Maitreyi, as if wanting her to help him out. Then he blurted out, “ I have some questions to which he alone holds the answer.”
Maitreyi did not know what to say. She looked into his eyes, trying to read him. Could he be one of those wounded souls from Yajnyawalkya's past, asking to be healed? She was scared to open up the dark vaults of memory. She felt as if she heard the gorge of the sea rushing up from the distant horizons in the dark. She did not know what the tide was going to throw up or take back with it.
She looked at Artabhaga in mute anguish. Artabhaga felt a dark cloud descend upon her. She had the look of a child bracing up for a punishment it did not understand fully yet.
After all, by what right was he confronting her with the doubt in his mind? Was it not enough to have carried its burden on his own shoulders? Did he expect to unload the past at her door and walk away in relief? Was he going to be a free soul thereafter?
Artabhaga felt something breaking inside him. He felt he owed something to this woman. He would gladly have done anything to make her happy without letting her know it. If he had no power to bring smiles to her, he had no right to give her pain.
He was woken up by Maitreyi’s low voice coming as if from a deep interior.
“Are you one of the sages who were present long back at Janaka's assembly in Videha?”
Artabhaga perforce said, “Yes”.
“Were you then witness to what happened there?”
“What do you mean?”
There was silence again. Artabhaga saw the knowledge of the past clearly reflected on her face. There was no evasion.
She was present in a different dimension. Artabhaga did not know where to place her in his perspective of the past. She existed to herself, oblivious of Artabhaga's presence.
When she looked at him, it was as if she was wielding a power to weave a secret encasement around her husband. He felt, she knew his question and possessed the answer too. But it seemed she waited, like an oracle, for him to ask the right question.
Artabhaga looked inside his heart for the question. What could he say? ----“Why did Yajnyawalkya curse Shakalya? Why did he not leave him to his fate? Why didn't Yajnyawalkya change the course of events? Who was Yajnyawalkya? A god in human form? Why did he: Artabhaga: love Shakalya despite his foolhardiness? Why couldn't Artabhaga be Yajnyawalkya or Yajnyawalkya Artabhaga?
These questions had reverberated in his mind over time without answers.
Possibly, Maitreyi had not seen or known Shakalya. Shakalya was no angel; he was a misguided soul. He went the way of his own karma. Then why did Artabhaga grieve for him?
Artabhaga's mind swayed in diverse directions as he searched for the only right question that would yield answers to all. It was like asking Yajnyawalkya why he was Yajnyawalkya and asking Artabhaga why he was Artabhaga.
Maitreyi was somehow able to divine the question raging in the mind of this ascetic. He too knew it; but refused to divulge what he knew. There was no way she could help him. He also knew that he had no specific, outward justification for coming here. He had landed here on an impulse.
He was inwardly soaking in Maitreyi's presence and the serenity around her. He regretted the incomplete articulation of his undefined feelings for Yajnyawalkya, in a clumsy effort to make her aware of the turmoil in his mind. He was standing at a point from where he could neither go back nor go ahead. He could see from her silence that his presence irked her. It was as if he had desecrated her inner sanctuary. Outwardly she gave him no sign of offence. But it was there. An unnameable bonding was taking place between them, though not a very happy one.
Artabhaga closed his eyes to lock inside the images and memories from the past. With his eyes still closed, he spoke, almost to himself, “Shakalya is gone, but he has left behind a legacy of unresolved questions for me.”
Maitreyi remembered the day when Yajnyawalkya's disciple had fearfully described to her the tempestuous wordy battle between Yajnyawalkya and Shakalya, and its grim outcome. She could not establish a cause and effect relation between the words uttered by Yajnyawalkya and the
manner of Shakalya's death. She was a mute witness to the invisible forces at work which had trampled their lives underneath their march. Yajnyawalkya had steadily withdrawn from their world since then. He was lost to them after his return from Videha.
But Maitreyi could feel it with certainty that the cause of that transformation was Gargi, not Shakalya. Gargi's presence in Yajnyawalkya's life had brought them to this pass.
.What could she say to this man who seemed to have brought with him a shadow that had no body?
Artabhaga and Maitreyi had moved into remote worlds which they could not connect. Each carried a burden that was irredeemable. Maitreyi felt she could not take any more of the residue from the past. She knew, she had no power over the past and therefore no answer to Artabhaga's inarticulate question. She was forever at the still point of the wheel of time. Fate had ordained it that she should neither accept nor reject anything without gaining a complete insight. She had learnt that understanding is not a moment in time. It dawns upon you unannounced, after all your striving ends. She had sought nothing and found nothing.
“You cannot name the question that is going to fetch you the answer,” she said at last. It was like throwing a rope across from the bank of a river to rescue the one who is drowning.
“Or is it that you do not want to name it to me?” she said after a moment of reflection.
Artabhaga hung his head in defeat. There was no wall behind which he could hide himself from her. They seemed to be communicating ahead of words.
He simply nodded.
'You seem to be troubled by Shakalya's death, or perhaps intrigued by the forces which led him to it. I am no sage who can explain the working of fate. We have come a long way from that point in time. Does your life depend upon the answer to your question? Life in itself is a question, and in itself an answer. Will it cease and stop around the corner till you come back to it with the answer? Try to see the one inside you who is asking the question. That one alone has the answer to your question.”
Maitreyi paused. She felt she had spoken too much. Artabhaga looked at her in amazement. It was not easy to accept what she was saying. But he did not want to argue or refute her. It was soothing to let her speak, though she held no answer. He had kept Shakalya alive in himself all these years. Should he not release him and find peace for himself? Or was Shakalya alive to seek revenge through him?
Artabhaga felt that as he was pondering over what she was saying, she expected him to say something. He kept looking at her feet. Her toes twiddled uneasily as if they felt his gaze.
“I shall certainly think over what you are saying,” said he, without looking at her. Then realizing how shallow his words sounded, he looked up at her. She was looking at him as if she was an
invisible entity.
The flow of the conversation ended there. Maitreyi felt the flutter of a little bird called hope in the dark corner of her heart. She silenced that bird. All these years she had caged that bird called hope in her heart. It was time to release it now and let it find its home in the open sky. It may come back if it wished, on stronger wings, with the vision of the sky in its little eyes.
This stranger may find his answers, or continue to wander wherever his heart led him. She had no light for him. She was afraid to tread again the ground she had left behind. Yajnyawalkya had chosen his destiny. Let him go ahead on his path. She did not want to be tied down to the questions he had created in his past.
Artabhaga got up and turned his back on her. Maitreyi thought her harshness was rather out of place. She was pained to see him turn away. She was about to go inside to start the home-fire when Katyayani's son came running in again. He saw Maitreyi going in and the stranger standing by himself, gazing at the sky. There was something in their silence which he could not understand. He lingered there till his mother was out of sight. Then he went close to the stranger and tugged at his shawl.
Artabhaga turned around to find the boy looking at him curiously. The boy smiled, as if he did not like to see him sad.
“Did my mother scold you over something?” he asked.“She is very gentle to everyone .Why was she angry with you?”
Artabhaga held his hand in a gesture of acknowledgment and said, “Why do you think she was angry? She wasn't. I was sad because I hurt her.”
Artabhaga realized what a foolish confession it was! The boy gave him a look of incomprehension .Artabhaga felt the distance that time had created between Yajnyawalkya and his son..
He was Yajnyawalkya's son. Artabhaga had longed to see the world Yajnyawalkya had left behind. He patted the boy playfully. The touch of his hand reminded Artabhaga of the only time when Yajnyawalkya had held his hand in Janaka's assembly.
The boy held his hand and pulled him along, saying, “Come, I'll show you our stable-yard and my pony!”
As they were walking towards the stable-yard, Maitreyi came out and said, “You will stay in the hermitage tonight. I have made arrangements for your stay.”
Before Artabhaga could say anything, the boy said,” Yes, you will stay with us; I won't let you go.”
…....................
Artabhaga was to leave the hermitage today. But the boy was reluctant to let him go. The boy was quiet and reflective. In the midst of the exuberance natural to his age, he would suddenly have his moments of introversion; but his joy was always spontaneous and infectious.
As Artabhaga was getting ready to leave, the boy lingered around him on some pretext or the other. He was determined somehow to make Artabhaga a part of his world. He was of an age when the world beckons you with a treasure-house of untold mysteries. Artabhaga wondered if the boy didn’t miss his father. However, he preferred to watch him from a distance and liked to enter his world only to share his joy. But he could feel Maitreyi's watchful eye follow them everywhere, as if she was anxiously guarding a valued treasure. The boy was silently and patiently stealing moments of closeness with Artabhaga whenever she got busy with her chores. In one such moment he said, “I know, my mother does not want me to talk to you. She is afraid I may ask you about my father.”
Artabhaga was startled to hear the truth so plainly out of the boy's mouth. There was a sudden grown-up look on the boy's face as he said this.
“Before you go, tell me the truth. Do you know my father? Have you seen him, talked to him?”
Artabhaga looked at the boy—half child, half adult! What could he say to him? Did he know his father?
The boy watched him with innocent expectancy. Artabhaga stroked his head gently and said, “Yes, I know your father.”
“Are you likely to meet him anytime, anywhere? Tell me, what is he like?”
“Your father is a good soul. He is known to many, but there are very few who really know him.”
“I know what you mean!”
Artabhaga was surprised at this unexpected recognition from Yajnyawalkya's son.
“One day I hope to know him in the real sense,” said the boy. Artabhaga silently agreed. His own agony dissolved in the earnestness of the boy's dream. He added his own will to that of the boy and prayed to god that not his will, but that of the boy be granted
In the afternoon Artabhaga left the hermitage and set off on a journey to Videha..

Chapter 42
Years had gone by. Yajnyawalkya did not know whether he had conquered fate or was himself conquered. Janaka had been away on the battlefield. But he had seen to it that Yajnyawalkya's hermitage back home would be cared for and Yajnyawalkya would live in Videha free of all material worries, and be able to devote himself to Metaphysics. Gargi continued to be Yajnyawalkya's disciple.
Janaka returned to Videha, weary and forlorn with the scenes of carnage. No philosophy could as yet assuage the distaste caused by war. A profound weariness had set in. At night the moon seemed beautiful but annihilating, grieving at the world below. At daytime the moon looked ridiculous like Janaka looking around for a source from which to borrow light. Could he look to Yajnyawalkya for light? And how long could the Self shine with borrowed light? For several days Janaka remained cut off from the world around in his chamber with curtains drawn. He had distaste for the light of the sun. Even during the day his dark chamber was engulfed by the light of oil lamps.
Janaka looked at the light in the lamp. It was a steady little flame soaking up whatever oil was left there. Janaka watched it listlessly and then decided to call for Yajnyawalkya.
….......................
Yajnyawalkya had just returned from his bath when he received the royal summons.
Janaka looked up as he felt the presence of someone standing by his bedside. It was Yajnyawalkya watching him vigilantly. Janaka saw anxiety in his eyes, but made no visible response. There was an impenetrable silence between them. Two weary warriors were unable to communicate across the barrier, and gods in heaven were eager to see what was to grow out of that silence.
“Yajnyawalkya, we are strangers to each other. You are not looking at Janaka, the king, nor am I Janaka, your friend of yore. You are looking at a stranger. I do not know who I am, a king or a beggar!I do not know where I will be after this life! Help me, Yajnyawalkya; help me my friend, to cross the final bridge.”
Yajnyawalkya was pained to hear his friend uttering the words with such finality. He realized everything in a moment of clarity and yet was unable to find the words to describe the change that had occurred. But the change was there, undeniably and painfully there.
Yajnyawalkya stared at this magnanimous being. He was there before his eyes and yet far away, his mind devoid of emotions. But what did Yajnyawalkya see in those unstaring eyes? Fear? Yes, it was fear of the void, and the infinity that may lie behind the void, inaccessible yet and still there eternally. Yajnyawalkya could see the aloneness of humanity when confronted by that void.
Janaka spoke, but his voice sounded like a gong from an unseen world.
“I have seen life and I have seen death, O Yajnyawalkya. Tell me O sage, what happens to the vitality of this body when the breath ceases.”
Yajnyawalkya took a deep pause. He tried to remember when and how he and Janaka were brought together by the unseen hand of the providence. It was not an event in time. It was always there, with no beginning and no end. He remembered how this man was passionately engaged in holding a converse with him at all levels, how he raged with fury whenever hr failed to draw out every secret of Yajnyawalkya's mind because he believed, it held open a gateway to knowledge. Now as Yajnyawalkya gazed at him, there was no trace of the former passion. Suddenly Yajnyawalkya found himself in the presence of a disembodied spirit, no longer possessed by the desire to know, no longer driven by the will to accomplish and conquer, no longer in need to see and be seen.
Yajnyawalkya did not address Janaka as he looked deep into the void to find a language for his thoughts.
“There is light in the innermost chamber of one's being even as one closes the eyes that see light. There is light on the path ahead. That's the light of your being. Why the fear? Is it because you will not see the light? You are in the light. I can see you in it my friend!”

Chapter 41
Artabhaga and Videha! What brought Artabhaga to Videha time and again, he did not know. Decades had gone by since Shakalya's death. Artabhaga had come to Videha several times, but never had the heart to see Yajnyawalkya. Artabhaga was not able to erase the memory of Shakalya from his mind, nor could he dissociate Yajnyawalkya from Shakalya.
Ages ago fate had invited him to be a spectator to a mysterious unfolding of Karma at the assembly of sages in Janaka's court. Mighty egos had clashed and locked horns with each other. Shakalya and Gargi! All these years he had thought of Gargi as of no consequence. But today, somehow, the image of Gargi stood behind Shakalya like a shadow whose presence was not perhaps recognized. But now he saw it with clarity that Gargi's image had silently devoured Shakalya. Shakalya was a ghost of himself.
Artabhaga remembered Gargi distinctly now, and was surprised by the clarity and vivacity of the image as he recalled it. Gargi was radiating an energy which stirred everyone to the deepest roots of the being. Artabhaga remembered her as she emitted fire on that day.
Shakalya had returned to his seat, grievously wounded in the heart, utterly mortified by the way Yajnyawalkya had addressed him: “You ghost!”
All the souls in that assembly who had gathered there to show off their vain scholarship had missed a heartbeat in terror of what was to follow. The lewd sniggers and laughter vanished instantly.
As the memories came back to him riding the crest of time, he recalled that he had noticed a secret link between Gargi and Shakalya. He could not sweep aside a feeling that Shakalya was goaded on by a power not his own. The edifice of Shakalya's questions was his own, but as Artabhaga looked back at the whole incident he felt, it was Gargi who had breathed life into it. It was Gargi who was stung most quickly by Yajnyawalkya's judgmental evaluation of Shakalya when Yajnyawalkya pronounced him to be a mindless instrument in the hands of those who dared not confront truth. At that moment then, a dark cloud had gathered around Gargi's visage and hidden its luminosity. She had looked like a pool of turbid water. But she had lost no time in regaining her composure. She had cast a dismayed glance, first at Shakalya and then at Yajnyawalkya. Like a goddess furious to see her protege devastated by enemy, she had hurled a question after a question like poisoned barbs at Yajnyawalkya. Artabhaga could see that her questions were propelled by more of a vengeance than by a desire for knowledge. He remembered having seen a shadow of dismay on Janaka's face as he sat there watching everything dispassionately.
After ages, Artabhaga recollected everything as vividly as if it was all enacted before his eyes only yesterday. On the contrary, he recollected the nuances which he had not caught then.
He remembered how he was driven by some impulse to interrogate Yajnyawalkya as if he was an oracle who had materialized in the assembly with the knowledge of the past, present and the future.
The other brahmins were satisfied with Yajnyawalkya's exposition of the ritual of sacrifice as postulated in the Vedas. But Artabhaga was distressed by this ludicrous waste of the intellect over matters of childish knowledge.
After Yajnyawalkya had answered questions on the significance and efficacy of rituals with a concealed disdain, he looked around aimlessly until his eye caught Artabhaga watching him with puzzled curiosity. For a moment they looked at each other. There was a look of recognition in Yajnyawalkya's eyes like someone who had spotted a fellow-traveler in a crowd. Artabhaga's innate shyness had held him back from coming forward with questions. Yajnyawalkya looked at him with a reassuring and knowing smile, trying to elicit his questios out of him. Artabhaga did not know what was really on his mind. But after asking a few questions of pedantic interest, he suddenly found himself asking:
“Where does our soul go after the body is reduced to elements after death?”
Yajnyawalkya had looked at Artabhaga with a godly compassion. There was nothing of the disdain and contempt he had exhibited towards the learned brahmins all along. He was silent.
Artabhaga felt, they saw the souls of each other in that silence. Yajnyawalkya left his place and came over to Artabhaga. In a tone that was meant only for Artabhaga, as if there was none else there apart from the two of them in that assembly, he spoke:
“Artabhaga, that's your name, isn't it? Well, Artabhaga, hold my hand. Let us walk out of this assembly and speak to each other because no one here is capable of grasping what you and I alone can understand.”
Yajnyawalkya had led Artabhaga out in the open as the learned scholars gaped at them in amazement and envy.
Yajnyawalkya had taken him in the shade of a tree and after they had sat there, feeling the breeze caressing them, Yajnyawalkya had asked him, “Are you afraid of death? You have not to fear death. Neither life nor death will be unkind to you. Trust your true self, your light within. That light will make you do only the right things. You will walk through life with the blessings of all living beings. Fear no more. I can clearly see that light on your path.”
When they had come back to the assembly all eyes were directed at them reproachfully. The animosity in the hearts of the brahmins was palpable. And thereafter everything happened with the tragic certainty of a boulder falling off a precipice.
Artabhaga looked back at the road traversed. It brought him again and again, like a maze, to the same deadlock.
He felt, he could not break free of it all unless he made an effort. Where was the way out of it? Where did it go? At every turn there was Yajnyawalkya. Why could he not confront him?

Chapter 40
Far away, in a little village were two women, withdrawn from the life around them, huddled in silence and naturalizing the language of fear and endurance. Suddenly one of them stirred. It was Maitreyi. She turned around, and raising herself on her elbow, bent over the face of her companion.
Katyayani felt the touch of her breath and woke up.
“What? Are you awake still? What hour of the night is it?”
Getting no reply from Maitreyi, Katyayani got up in bed and clasped Maitreyi's hand resolutely. Maitreyi was motionless, as though hit by some force that made her immobile. She continued to stare in the darkness. Katyayani shook her up to bring her back to her senses. There was no response, only a dead silence. Katyayani shook her up violently and then cried in distress, “What's wrong with you? I just can't handle you. Why don't you speak? Don't you understand how exasperating it is to have you the lying beside me like a haunted creature?”
Wisdom and restraint had never been Katyayani's strong points. In her lack of discretion, she always identified the unnameable. The effect of her surcharged words was unexpectedly scathing. Maitreyi broke down like a river in torrent. There was nothing else for Katyayani to do except stare at her in stunned silence. She had never known Maitreyi in such a state before. She had always taken it for granted that it was her prerogative to give vent to emotions and it was Maitreyi's duty to bear the burden of her sorrow.
Language failed her. What was she supposed to do and say? What words, what gesture would communicate a message of fortitude to this woman who was never known to have grieved before?
She just stayed by, awe-struck, as though watching a child in the deadly grip of a carnivorous beast.
When the tide abetted, Katyayani knew, it was she who must speak. She knew how Maitreyi needed to be supported and consoled. But she refrained from all physical contact. Holding herself away, she spoke:
“Do I not understand what's happening to all of us? But I don't fool myself like you!”
Maitreyi did not seem to hear anything. In the surrounding darkness Katyayani's words sounded like the voice of an oracle.
“I am not going to be forced to lead a life of spirituality because there is no other option left. What does your marriage and mine amount to? A passive surrender in the name of piety? Prostitutes are more virtuous than you and I because they do it in compassion sometimes, and when they do, their recipients reward them gratefully. What sin did we commit that we are
required to atone it in this abject manner? Do you realize what state we have been reduced to? I tell you; before you can get out of your misery you must tell yourself, you are miserable. Don't fool yourself thinking you are strong and unaffected. I know it hurts. Let it hurt! Which physician has been able to heal wounds that have never been exposed? Healing is a cruel process, my child! It takes away your self-hood sometimes when you are required to say that you are in need of healing!”
Without intending or knowing what she was doing, Katyayani was leading Maitreyi to light. Katyayani continued with an abetted and unsought for strength.
“You must disown Yajnyawalkya.”
At this Maitreyi made a feeble response. “I have never been able to own him.”
Katyayani shot back like a tigress under attack.
“Don't quibble with words and the rhetoric of spirituality. It is knocking you down in prostration. Face up to the reality!”
“I have known it all along. I've never been able to get away from it.”
“Then I am asking you to articulate it.”
“I can't. I feel my strength ebbing out”.
At this Katyayani pounced on her. The violence and the suddenness of her impulse were amazing. She gripped Maitreyi by her shoulders and forced her to sit up and then shook her up as though she was going to batter her soul out of her body.
“Say that, say that again, and I will see to it that your strength really leaves you and you drop dead. 'I can't---' Indeed you can't! You can't quit and leave me in desolation to face it all alone. Tomorrow, as soon as the sun rises, I will set off on my journey.”
Maitreyi was taken aback.
“Where will you go?” she asked, thinking that it was one of Katyayani's not too infrequent outbursts of fury.
“I am going to Videha,” Katyayani spoke each word with a resolute emphasis.
Then she lay back, not in exhaustion, but in peace. Turning her back on Maitreyi, she lay in silence.

Chapter 39
Artabhaga gazed at the moon and the sky. Lying beneath the vastness of the sky, he forgot that he too was a part of it. It was the twelfth night of the bright fortnight and the moon had yet to attain its full glory. At a slightly slanting angle, a little farther down, was a star that seemed to be shy of its own luster. It seemed to draw into itself its magnificent eloquence and radiance. Artabhaga stared at it, trying to fathom the music that refused to fall on earth. It had a sound that vibrated with every atom of its being until he felt his whole body singing like a finely tuned, strung instrument. What language did that music speak? Was it a moment such as this that led the ancient sages to create hymns to eternity? When perception fails we invoke inference, when inference fails we invoke memory, and when memory fails, we give up the effort at reasoning. Eternity seizes such a moment to manifest itself.
Artabhaga watched the sky as a delicate veil formed over and around the moon. Its texture thickened, lost its transparency, and became opaque enough, until right before his eyes the evanescent beauty of the magical moment ceased as if it had never existed. A massive cloud invaded the space of the sky, leaving no visible trace of the moon behind it.
Artabhaga came back to himself. He was back in Videha. The change of season seemed to tell a different story life. He was curious to know if Yajnyawalkya had responded to the changed rhythm of life. He wondered whether it was his own weariness that made it seem to him as though an epoch had come to an end. He realized with a frightening certainty that he was losing his will to choose a language to express himself. And with the loss of the will to choose he was losing the link that connected him with the world of society. He had been living off the map so long that there was nothing he could share with those who lived inside it. He felt that he had created an inviolable language of his own which made him unavailable for any kind of discourse with the world outside.
What did he live on and live for? It seemed to him so long ago- all enacted behind a veil of mist, here in Videha- a city without a body! A wandering ascetic like him had no reason to be drawn into the vortex of its seductive spell. Never in his life had he felt so lost and forsaken as he did now. The city bore no sign of the past. Everything was erased past recovery. Space and time stared back at him vacantly. He wanted to laugh, loudly and unashamedly. Laughter can be creative in its purity. Uncritical, undifferentiated, it can be yet stubborn in its refusal to integrate with the world of men which demands a reason and a justification for every human act of the mind.
He discovered that he could not laugh. It asked for a defiance that was of a godly stature. He could not rise above the sadness that threatened to submerge him.
'Yajnyawalkya': the name and its sound invoked no feeling. Instead, he saw a luminous cloud melting in the moonlight.
Looking all around the deserted, moonlit disembodied city where a few years ago he had been living other's lives, he suddenly felt deprived. It was like standing on a stage alone like the last
actor, crippled, motionless, and unable to make an exit. He was no longer a man who could affirm his existence. If this is what the world means by submitting to fate, whose fate was being enacted now? For he had divested himself of all illusions of choice. It is reassuring to tell yourself that what you call your life was all there in time and yet out of time, and therefore eternal, ever present and irredeemable. How reassuring to tell yourself that you have dreamed the whole journey, before in fact you have made it!
He stood up. But before he could realize what he wanted to do, he threw himself face down, on the moist grass and wept like a child. For the first time he found himself uttering a name: the name of a man who would not let him go.
'Yajnyawalkya' : he whispered softly first, and then he cried aloud : “ Yajnyawalkya”, I hateyou!”
….....................
Far away in the heart of the city the huts, cottages, mansions and the palaces were silent. Yajnyawalkya lay awake. His field of perception had congealed around the body. The body never thinks. Or did it? What were those age-old affirmations that he had inherited from his ancestors, saying to him?
'Worship the Sun', he was told: 'Worship the Sun, the source of infinite life and never-ceasing light; for that light is the light of the purest intellect within ourselves. Let that ray of intellect penetrate the dark, and you will need no other light. There will be no darkness even in your nights.'
Here he was, invoking the light, but unable to recognize its sign. He felt implicated in a game with no routes of escape in sight. He remembered his own discourses at the congregations of disciples. Questions demanding answers, leading to still more questions and heterogeneous combinations of possible words! It was a discourse duplicating the functions of the body but hopelessly circumventing the voice and the language of the body: shrouding what was transparent, in the opacity of language!
What was it that the several generations of his ancestors had held as a mystery not to be touched for the fear of destroying themselves? Or was it that by a strange, uncanny conspiracy he was kept out of its knowledge and fooled into walking away from it?
Voices from the past suddenly began to take on an ever-present reality. Each voice seemed to be in communion with the other, sharing some knowledge that eluded him. He was at the centre of those speaking voices. But was this too an illusion like everything else: his being at the center of it all?
The surge of voices and images was arrested unexpectedly at this point. He recalled his confrontation with Maitreyi as she stood holding his eye before stepping out of his way. She seemed to acknowledge his absence from her life and wanted him to acknowledge it too. He had offered no apologies and moved away from her in disdain.
What was he to her? The answer did not emerge at that point in time in the past because he had not given a thought to the question then. But here, away from her in space and time, the answer stared at him, clear as the sunlight in her eyes: he was a central presence that had never been there; never been itself. It was just a space that was being filled by an exile.
“You are free,” she had said, and her words had stung him like a scorpion. But there was no malice in her tone. She had uttered those words as though she was allowing another being to speak through her.
But why did he remember her? Now? She appeared before his eyes fully presenting herself in her absence, and her absence spoke. It was her silence that had been listening to the choric voices surrounding him. That ever listening silence seemed to say: “Yes, you are at the center. It is no illusion”
But how could those voices be real? Was he dreaming them into existence? Her silence could be heard above the voices. It said, “Come over to this side of the fence. You will see it all, the shapes and the faces of those voices!”
Was she saying it with bitterness? No, because hers was a voice whose meaning could never be mistaken.
But the voices continued to surge around him in waves. He heard infinite echoes of anguished fury, restlessly beating against an invisible screen and turning back on themselves with diminished intensity.
He lay on his back, awake till the small hours of the dawn. The half-light on the horizon chased away the phantoms of the night. He left his cottage before anyone could see where he was going and headed for Gargi's abode.
The silence around her cottage was warm, pulsating with a life of its own. He paused and knocked softly.
…......................
“ Yajnyawalkya, do I believe my eyes?”
“Gargi, I have come to seek myself.”
“........, A solitary god, seeking expression in a woman?” said Gargi.
“No, a human, seeking completion!”
“In the act of love? An act of the body when the mind is absent?”
“No, in the full presence of my inmost Self!”
“Then I, Gargi, this mortal woman, want to see that Self, feel it, and carry it within me. Can you promise that you will never abdicate your seat in the shrine?”
“Gargi, my Self knows no shrine.”
“What do you want, a home, or a shrine?'
“By whatever name you may call it, I need a resting place!”
“A resting place or a sojourn for the dark night of your soul?”
“Gargi, we are both groping in the dark.”
“ Yajnyawalkya, you who claim to know the Absolute, the soul of all living beings? I can't believe your words.”
“I don't believe them myself!”
“Your soul has fled from your words, Yajnyawalkya!”
“I have come to make an offering of myself, my heart, my mind, my words; my whole being that is made of elements. Take it and extinguish it. Leave nothing behind. My eyes, my skin, my breath, my flesh; take everything and liberate me.”
“Yajnyawalkya, the fire is elsewhere. Ask your own Self.”
“I cannot hear, I cannot see that Self except in you!”
“What am I, Yajnyawalkya, a body of flesh and blood? Do not demean me. I am here for you in the body only for this moment. The next moment you will claim your soul back and hate this body!”
“.....................!”
“Yajnyawalkya, you and I have trodden different paths to reach the same destination. Do you still think that you need me to see your Self, or that I need you to see mine? No, we don't need each other.”
“It takes courage to say that, Gargi. Do you have it in you?”
“Yes, I do...I know you cannot belong to a mortal being; that will be the end of you and the end of your seeking!”
“I don't know what I am seeking!”
“Yajnyawalkya ?!”
“Yes, Gargi, the path ahead is not for the mortals”.
“ Yajnyawalkya, I have accepted that long back, ever since I came to Videha. I have stopped at this point in my journey. Maybe, it's the death of my spirit. But you, Yajnyawalkya, you cannot stop evn if you want to! The powers above are not going to let you...Look at the sky above. It's for all; we know it. But at this moment it is there only for you and me! Infinite, and yet finite for everyone because we take as much of it as we can touch. I am enriched, Yajnyawalkya, because I have touched it and I am going to take that small patch with me to make a quilt out of it.”
There was nothing more to say. Yajnyawalkya walked out of Gargi's abode, a different man.

Chapter 38
Maitreyi drove the cattle back to the stable-yard. The cows joined their young ones. The hermitage and its surroundings were vibrant with the animated response of the calves to the cows. Dust flew up in columns as hundreds of cows walked briskly homeward.
Maitreyi had just finished her survey of the stable-yard when she was joined by Katyayani with the child trailing behind. The child was breathless trying to keep in step with her. On seeing Maitreyi, she picked the boy brusquely and thrust him into Maitreyi's hands.
“ Here, mind this brat. The cursed child has never known the face of his father and yet he has taken after him in every way. God alone knows what calamity has befallen that man that he has to abandon his kith and kin like a derelict ship”.
The areas around .her eyes had darkened and there were lines of cynical indifference permanently marked around her mouth.
“And these are the thousand cows that he had proudly brought here from Videha. Why? To feed us, the perpetually hungry ones, who clung to him for food, shelter and survival? He thought he had done his duty to us by leaving us this bounty, so he could walk out on us wearing his crown of ascetic glory!”
Maitreyi clasped the child and gazed blankly in the direction of Videha. She remembered clearly the day Yajnyawalkya's triumphant return was heralded by the herd of a thousand cows who walked ahead of their proud owner. She remembered too, the resplendent aura of victory around her husband.
On the night of his return, as she listened to his conversation with his disciples, she realized that the trophy he had brought home was a mark of the disdain he felt for the ruler of the land. He had brought home, not a largesse, but a trophy. He was no more interested in looking after the wealth than a king is in consummating his marriage to the numerous consorts in his harem.
A deep shadow of alienation spread over her countenance. Katyayani's despairing, agonizing utterance and Maitreyi's withdrawal into herself created a sombre presentiment in the child's heart and he wailed. The pathos in it startled Maitreyi and she hastened to pacify him. Seeing her thus engrossed in the effort, Katyayani flew into a rage and drew the child back to herself. With a devilish anger, she roughened his cheeks and shouted into his ears, “Yes, go on. Let your cry reach your deaf father. At least you might shake him out of his stupor if nothing else can!”
This new surge of remonstrance frightened the child and to escape its blast, he flew into the arms of Maitreyi. His helplessness lacerated her heart. She held him close and turned her back upon the furious woman. The child buried his face into her bosom and rested there peacefully.
She stole a rueful glance at Katyayani. Of late, Katyayani had retreated into a sullen silence. Occasionally she emerged out of it with a vehement remonstrance that left everyone reeling under the impact. Maitreyi knew that the disciples in the hermitage had begun to view her with an incomprehension that was changing into suppressed laughter.
She put the child down, bent over him, and whispered something. The child ran away, looking back a couple of times at his mother who was gesticulating in anger.. Maitreyi paused for a moment. At such times Katyayani was implacable. But after her unspent fury had mounted to a certain height, the facade of invulnerability would crumble, leaving her exposed to a tide of emotions. Maitreyi feared that moment more than this outburst of anger.
She stood there facing Katyayani for a while. Then quietly and decisively took her hand and said, “Come, let us walk to the river.”
When they reached the river-bank, the shadows were lengthening across their path. Birds had flocked on the branches of trees and those who had still not found their place in the nest were sending frantic signals to their companions. The withdrawal of the sun sent waves of fear in the animal-kingdom. Each evening brought with it the stirring of perennial fears, and every evening the animal world sank into the night with no knowledge of the morrow as it were.
Maitreyi saw that Katyayani was unknowingly absorbing the deepening tones of the evening. Her eyelashes lowered over her eyes and concealed the sadness. Maitreyi regretted for a moment their coming to this nostalgic spot this time of the day. Katyayani sensed her reluctance to linger on,and understood her eagerness to retrace their steps and hasten home. She pressed Maitreyi's hand and its grip conveyed to Maitreyi an urge to stay awhile.
They found a resting place and sat down, both of them afraid to face each other. It was Katyayani who articulated the unacknowledged, menacing fear.
“I knew, I knew it always, though he never made it known......”
Maitreyi waited in breathless silence and allowed a breathing space for Katyayani to formulate her words out of the deep void within.
“His sleepless nights told me more than what I saw of him in the day. He deluded himself, thinking that I was not capable of understanding it all. Ever since he came back from Videha, he did not belong to us.”
Maitreyi did not want her to name it. Katyayani continued heavily, each word being forced into utterance with great effort.
“You know, I pleaded with him. I said: I know, I am death to you. But I must know...
‘Tis not you who are my death', he had said once...
…...But your silence and withdrawal from me is death. It does not kill me; it's killing you; I used to say, and he thereupon used to stare in the dark. I used to kiss him on the eye-lids to force them shut. But I knew, that would not banish the image he had so carefully locked in his heart.....
Once, I could not bear the inarticulate strangeness. I insisted:'I want to know,' I had said, 'what it means to be myself and not being able to be someone else, to be so utterly unable to be another!'
'You don't need to be. Be what you are, and you will be able to be everything', he would say.
'But I want you to take me along as I am.'
On that, he lifted his head a little and stroked my forehead gently.
'That I will. But perhaps not here and now; perhaps at some other time'.
Katyayani paused suddenly, as though arrested by the burden she could carry no further. She sobbed uncontrollably. But Maitreyi felt in it the eternal loneliness woman held apart from the man she had continued to regard her own. She picked up pebbles and listlessly threw them into the water, watching the ripples come and go. Then she stopped doing that, gleaned a few sharp pebbles, and held them in her palm, as though she had picked up lumps of pain from Katyayani's speech and was waiting to see them transformed, by some miracle, into glistening pearls. When she came back to herself, Katyayani had leaned against the trunk of the tree and was gazing ahead with unseeing eyes.

Chapter 37
Videha had been besieged by flooding rivers all around. Space seemed to shrink because of the dark clouds which brought the sky low down to a palpable height. It rained ceaselessly, while Gargi's followers stirred restlessly with anxiety and impatience. Their impatience turned into indignation and indignation into cynical disparagement of Gargi.
Gargi knew that she was using them to project herself. And she knew that they clung to her nevertheless, because in her eminence they might one day find their opportunity to rise. Her loneliness increased.
She trusted her instinct in moments of loneliness. She had built her edifice on uncannily sure insights which her instinct brought to her. But she was one who constantly harnessed those insights to the purpose of achieving some immediate goal.
As she sat there at the entrance of her make-shift home in Videha, staring at the rains, she felt overwhelmed by a crushing sense of defeat.
She must go back. Or, perhaps she might as well put off her departure and wait for the season to change. But here in Videha, nothing seemed to change.
The banyan trees of Videha seemed to grow far above the other trees. Their trunks were enormous. The branches had overgrown, and it was amazing how the main trunk sustained their unwieldy growth. Gargi thought how ludicrous it was for the branches to grow where there was no connection, after a certain point, between them and the main trunk except for the need to derive sap and succor.
“That is what will happen to you, Gargi, if you go ahead in the forest of metaphysics and truisms. That was what had ruined your father in his mad pursuit of relevance between life and metaphysics!”
Her mind went on grinding one thought after another relentlessly until her intellect sank under the memories from the past.
She wished someone to take possession of her warring desires and lead her to clarity, simple as daylight. What did she need? A teacher? An adversary? Or a lover? She was startled to find her thoughts taking on such a naked shape. A voice rang clear in her ear: Yajnyawalkya raging at her with an inexplicable fury: “Stop asking questions for the sake of asking, or your proud head will roll off your shoulders”
True, neither the words, nor their thundering denouncing tone had frightened her. Was she such a despicable creature in his eyes because she dared to challenge him in an assembly where everyone had hung his head in a cowering silence?
At times a small question that eluded an answer in the past becomes larger than life. All other
questions fade into insignificance before a small but nagging mystery. Gargi's very existence seemed to rest upon the question. No, it was neither love nor adoration. But it was something that still overpowered her with a staggering ferocity. She recognized its power, and for that very reason she wanted to face that emotion with all her faculties alive, without succumbing to its stupefying force.
She went to the river in the shivering cold. It was not yet morning. She could have a bath at the far end of the river.
The icy cold water enveloped her from feet upward to her bare shoulders, while with her head held above the water, she tried to breathe in the warmth of the air. A part of her body offered itself to the torture inflicted on it by the fiercely cold water.
When she stepped out, clean and drenched, she was whole again. But the day seemed to dawn with a fatalistic significance for her.
The quest seemed to point in just two directions: one was to Yajnyawalkya, and the other was away from him, and both ways led to the void within her. And if it was the void which was going
to claim her, why not face it and resolve the knot that bound her to Yajnyawalkya. It was only after resolving the knot that she would be able to enter that void, whole and herself.
Clean and fragrant as a dew-drop, she sailed along the familiar path that led to Yajnyawalkya's hermitage. It was hardly daylight yet. But her instinct told her that she would find him awake and alone at this fleeting hour between night and dawn.
Not a leaf stirred in the silence of that hour as she proceeded like a stricken doe in search of water.
…............
He was shocked and unprepared. He stared at her with unbelieving eyes as she stood there confronting him with unquestioning, quiet gaze. There was no demand, no compulsion in that gaze. It was the gaze of a woman who in that moment saw her own self, unified, whole, and unassailable. She seemed utterly true and vital, with her feet firmly planted on the earth from which she seemed to grow like a seedling defying time and eternity, declaring her own self to be supreme, above time: past and present.
There was no denying her. It would have meant denying the very life within him. He quietly took her in.
…................
It was a moment of overwhelming peace and tenderness as it came and ceased as soon as it
arrived. But it left her broken and inconsolable. She had recognized that moment to be the harbinger of their parting.
Yajnyawalkya saw the signs of distress, but thought it was caused by insatiety. He stirred a little and disengaged himself. A heavy, impregnable silence separated them. They moved away, ready to face each other and the new day. The suddenness had astonished them both. In that self-same moment they had united and parted, all at once. Yajnyawalkya wished that moment had never come. It seemed to penetrate the veil only to reaffirm the illusoriness of everything. . He looked at the woman beside him to ascertain if she was the same beautiful vision transcending touch, sight and earthiness.
He shut his eyes to retreat into himself .She, whatever she was, a vision or a reality, illusion or truth, had quickened the springs of life in him. As the first rays of the morning sun lit up the sky, he remembered the incantation of Gayatri mantra. The woman beside him seemed to ask with her whole being why it was that he had failed to understand the mystery of the creative power being identified with a female form: Gayatri!
He leaned over her and whispered something she could not understand. He was whispering something, not to her who was out there and disconsolate, but to himself, to something he had abstracted from her and now appropriated to himself, while she was out there, engulfed in her own separateness, still apart, condemned to her separate existence which she had to build out of her own resource.
The abruptness with which she recognized the necessity to distance herself was astonishing to him. A moment ago, she was the one who had yielded. Now she seemed to be the conqueror.
But he was too prepossessed by the momentary vision of a beatific goddess to feel disconcerted by any sign of withdrawal from her. He did not want to be dispossessed of the secret understanding he had gained of himself through her. She was precious; she was ineffable; she was unique, because she brought him back to himself. For an eternal moment, his lacerated self had found a resting place in her. She was a channel through which he had received the restorative powers of the universe.
Gargi detached herself. A deep shadow of distress and agony darkened her face. A wave of ineffable sweetness and joy had changed imperceptibly into sorrow and deprivation. But she had given up the constant battle for supremacy, which had fatigued her. A hitherto unknown kind of fatigue spread over her now. It was the fatigue that overtakes one when a battle is brought to a finish after a determined fight and one is too weak to assess the gain and the loss!
In the silence that followed, they measured the distance that now separated them. A mute stupor followed that silence and paralyzed both for a few moments that seemed to last forever. Both found it difficult to extricate themselves from the growing sense of a new commitment that seemed to hold them together. It was neither joy nor sorrow, but a strange awareness of each other.
Yajnyawalkya looked at Gargi. A deep repose had spread over her countenance as if the act had been more of the mind than of the body. She got up as quietly as she had come in and before he could understand, she had vanished unceremoniously in the half-light of the early dawn