chapter46    Yajnyawalkya’s discourse being over, the listeners began to disperse,
when he noticed Gargi. She was watching him as though she was trying
to place him in her memory. He met her eye probingly, and finding no
clue, started to leave. Gargi accosted him on his way out.
“I have something to say,” she said in a wounded tone.
“Not here, Gargi, follow me!”
Gargi was prepared to go anywhere he led her at that moment. They
walked silently to a solitary spot by the river-side.
Gargi was impatient to talk. She began abruptly, “I want to know what
it all means, -----I mean, your growing silence and withdrawal from
me!”
Yajnyawalkya was startled by her question. A decade ago, Katyayani
had accosted him with the same question. Gargi now threw the same
question at him, filled with reproach.
Yajnyawalkya held himself back.
“If I am unfit to be your disciple, let me know,” Gargi demanded
insistently.
“It’s not you who are unfit; perhaps I am unfit to be your mentor,” he
said.
Gargi looked at him with disbelief. Here was the man she had sought in
her life, because she knew, he was capable of unlocking the greatest
mysteries of life. She would not let him go without opening up to her
the secret of life.
The thought of Katyayani, the time she and Katyayani had spent
together, Katyayani talking about Yajnyawalkya---everything arose in
her mind like a surging tide and broke upon her like a moment of
reckoning.
“Your words scare me when you speak; your silence scares when you
cease talking,” said Gargi. She shuddered as she said this.
“Neither my words nor my silence should scare you once you accept
the reality,” he said with disaffection.
“Your abstractions of reality and illusion scare me,” she said.
“They won’t, once you begin to live by them,”said he.
“Have you begun to live by abstractions?” she asked.
“I don’t know; I must make a beginning,” said he.
“Will those abstractions be the same to me as they will be to you?”
“They should be the same for everyone.”
“When will that be----our living by abstractions?”
“If I were to know that, I would not be here!”
“But I want to be with you when you realize it!” Her voice was
breaking into a tremor.
“It won’t be a moment in Time,” he said without appearing to take note
of the tremor in her voice.
“Oh, how ruthlessly male your concept of Time is!”
“Time is neither male nor female; it just ‘is’!”
“And that’s the way Death is too; neither male nor female.”

“True”, said Yajnyawalkya, “Though there are different ways of dying,
Death: the ultimate: is the same for everyone.”
“It isn’t. The way I go to my death is my way of dying and that is what
makes me different from you, and makes me what I am! But you
haven’t answered my question yet. Tell me what I am to you, life or
death?”
“Gargi, why must you measure yourself by another person’s awareness
of you?”
“I can’t help doing so when I relate myself to you.”
“Try to relate to yourself.”
Gargi stared at him, dumb with fury. How coldly he was able to say it,
that too to her, to Gargi! If he can’t belong to Gargi, he will not belong
to anyone else again.
Yajnyawalkya, who had refused to look at her all along, turned to her
resolutely. Nothing that she said or did could hold him. A time was
when he had offered himself to her as to a deity. That moment had
vanished. It was not to be
When Yajnyawalkya reached his cottage, Katyayani was gone. Her
departure was as unannounced as her visit. She had left no trace or
signs behind. The cottage was silent except for the twitter of sparrows
in the courtyard. True to her words, she had released him.
……………………
Gargi kept staring hard in the growing dusk at the path which took
Yajnyawalkya away from her. The abysmal void grew and swallowed
the twilight. But Gargi had no strength to move. Life suddenly vanished
in the onset of night. The sun that was casting shadows in her life had
vanished. Gargi had to wait till daybreak to recognize the new worldthat was yet to emerge.

Throughout the night she waited for Yajnyawalkya’s voice to call her
back. There was no voice; there was no presence of Yajnyawalkya.
There was only eternal recurrence of what happened in the past.
Gargi looked at the time past----half truth, half illusion. Truth and
illusion were sliding into one another before her eyes so speedily that it
was impossible to grasp the reality.
The night was amazingly still, leaving open for Gargi the gateway that
took her back to the time before she met Yajnyawalkya. The path did
not lead back. Gargi wondered if all that happened, did really happen!
She had sought a rainbow standing at the foot of a waterfall. Many
must have sought it standing there, and many must have seen it too, and
each must have walked back with a rainbow in heart, an image of an
illusion! And yet, real for the one who carried it in heart!
It was real for Gargi because she---Gargi--- created it! No one had the
right to take away from Gargi her own creation, not even Time! She
would not let Time laugh in her face and tell her, “It was an illusion!”
…………….
The twin birds perched on the branch of Time. Gargi looked at Gargi;
and Gargi saw Gargi. The eternal seer watched the relentless flight of
the other half. The other half was beating its wings against Time. It
yearned to join the seer.
The seer said, “You are welcome. Whenever you need me, I am there,
waiting in acceptance.”
But the other half was not ready. It still wanted to wing the sky.

She remembered the words of Yajnyawalkya addressed to her in the
past:
“Time past, time present and the time not yet known to us are all there
in the Time that is ever present. Everything attains its true nature in that
eternity where everything is seen and everything felt. Yet it casts no
shadows; ‘It’ is alone; yet ‘It’ is you; ‘It’ is me; ‘It’ is beyond you and
me. It just is! Isn’t it wonderful Gargi, that the Sun and the Moon
follow the path laid down by ‘It’? Our moments, our tryst with time,
our days and nights, fortnights, months, seasons and years as we know
them, are all a part of that great wheel of Time. The snow-capped white
peaks of Himalayas witness the beginnings of rivers that follow their
destined paths towards the east and the west, the north and the south!”
The image of the rivers following their destined paths! What message
did it hold for Gargi? Gargi knew, but refused to accept it. She was a
tree with her roots deep in earth now. She could neither fly, nor flow.
What were those roots to her---support, or chains holding her back?
And the sky above her, which was always there—sometimes grey and
gloomy, sometimes pouring down incessantly, scorching in the
summer-noon, and at night ending all appearances—which of that was
true?
……………….
The night went by. It had to! That night showed eternity to Gargi. In
that one night Gargi was one and Gargi was all. She was a hermit,
wandering in the deep forests, looking for fire-wood, sometimes
herself, in pursuit of a mirage in vast sand-dunes, sometimes a refugee
asking back her motherland, sometimes a serf taking lashes on her
back, and then a lone way-farer looking for a star on the horizon!
The dawn came with the sound of bells ringing in temples, like the
sound of destiny. Gargi loosened her moorings and decided to flow
towards light which the day brought to her, and was going to bring to
her again and again and ever again.