Chapter 27.

 Chapter 27

Yajnyawalkya, entered the courtyard where his followers waited for him. He came and sat on his mat-seat, closed his eyes to concentrate on what he was going to speak. He opened his eyes because he became aware of some mild stir and unrest among the listeners.

There stood before his eyes Gargi Vachaknavi as though she had materialized out of the thin air. She looked at him with a steady gaze as if measuring up an adversary. Yajnyawalkya returned it with an equally steady look at her. He was determined not to react and betray himself. He was seemingly unperturbed and no one but Gargi could catch that fleeting moment when his heart missed a beat.

He began to speak after Gargi had taken her seat among the listeners. Yajnyawalkya spoke, but his thoughts lacked lucidity. There was not the usual rapport between him and the listeners. Gargi's presence continually obstructed the flow of his thoughts and made them sound hollow. Beads of perspiration began to appear on his brow as he became aware of Gargi's scrutiny. Her eyes seemed to measure the distance between them. But strangely, she was not trying to evoke any response from him. For the first time in his life he felt he was being reduced to an object. A dissecting eye seemed to probe beneath his hard exterior to the deepest seat of his manhood. He took a deep breath and made a willed effort to repulse that gaze without looking at her. The effect was instant, though Yajnyawalkya could not see it at that moment. Gargi suddenly looked away, vanquished momentarily. Her luminous brow reddened like a moon about to be eclipsed. When she looked up, Yajnyawalkya had eluded the crucial moment and had carried on the discourse with equanimity.

She began to listen to his voice; the words made little sense to her. Voices, long since forgotten, came back to her, floating on the wings of time from the vaults memory. Those were the voices once very dear to her. Her ambitions and aspirations had drowned those voices and their sweet tenor. She had become impervious to all voices except her own. She had forgotten how to respond to the living quality of voices. Now she heard them all over again. How different her name sounded when uttered by those different voices! She recalled her mother uttering her name. It was the exasperated voice of a woman who had just realized that her daughter had grown wings; then her father uttering her name with pride, conscious of its magic potential. That was the voice which always stirred up in her mind visions of glorious conquests and unimaginable flights. It was the voice that made her want to mount a horse and ride away to unknown destinations.

Those voices from the past had become silent long since. But why should this particular voice of a man who overtly denied her, kindle such wistfulness in her? He spoke in a steady unemotional voice, cultivated to banish all traces of a personal feeling. Yet it made every one of his listeners feel he was talking to him alone. Gargi watched their involvement from the periphery. She found it detestable. She did not want to be one of them. 'Fools', she said, “They are fit to toil in the fields, consuming their energy trying to keep the home fire burning.”

But as her glance moved around, she found a vibrant intellectual reciprocation where she had expected a mindless obedience. Her disdain perforce changed into attentiveness.

Yajnyawalkya was elucidating the universal significance of Horse-sacrifice mentioned in the Vedas: the Ashwa-medha yajnya.

“We mortals, who owe our Self to Time, are performing a sacrifice ceaselessly. The Dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse; the Sun his eye, the wind his breath; his open mouth: the universal fire. And Time, measured by our human parameter as year, is the body of the sacrificial horse; the sky, his back, the atmosphere his belly, the four quarters his ribs, the seasons his limbs, the months and half months his joints, days and nights his feet, the stars his bones, the clouds his flesh.”

Gargi listened spell-bound. With an amazing sweep of imagination Yajnyawalkya had synthesized the whole of human existence into a cosmic hymn. Gargi understood why this rustic audience responded to him as one soul. Her intellect was momentarily silenced.

What was it that brought her here? What was happening to her? Anguish crept upon her soul. Her mind was involuntarily absorbing Yajnyawalkya's words. She could not see how the ritualistic practice of the Vedic horse-sacrifice could be brought to reconcile with the mystical cosmic vision that Yajnyawalkya had conjured up. Then suddenly she realized that there existed no contradiction between the symbol and the reality. The symbol was nothing but a veil cast on reality. Yajnyawalkya used words like an oracle. His words revealed as much as they concealed truth.

Yajnyawalkya's words were equivocal like an oracle. One could see in them as much as one's mind was capable of seeing. Words bring one to the threshold. It is then up to the receiver to discard the veil. Gargi was dazed by the power of words. She had begun to understand them without the aid of reason and intellect. She was not ready yet for such moments of epiphany; such moments of a sudden void inside her Self. She rallied her intellect deliberately to counter that void.

She recalled her first fateful encounter with Yajnyawalkya. She felt judged as she recalled the denunciation she had brought upon herself with her intellectual pride. She saw now, how gently, compassionately, Yajnyawalkya gave to his rustic audience that which he had withheld from the learned scholars.

Yajnyawalkya paused briefly in the middle of the discourse and resumed what he was saying. His eyes had traveled to Gargi and rested there for a moment. He saw her abstracted, almost oblivious of the surroundings. A tender, compassionate feeling arose briefly and vanished like an unknown fragrance wafted upon the breeze.

When the discourse was over he found Gargi deliberating with her companions. After some animated talk, Gargi tossed her head back in defiance, as if refusing to budge. Her companions cast an apprehensive glance at Yajnyawalkya and took leave of Gargi. Gargi refused to look at Yajnyawalkya until they were well out of sight. Then she turned to look at him. Mystified, Yajnyawalkya tried to divine her intent. He was baffled by the unconcealed admiration in her eyes.

“Would you accept me as your disciple, Yajnyawalkya? I want to learn what you know!”

It was a momentous question, stated unequivocally. Yajnyawalkya looked intently at Gargi. There was no sarcasm, but it wasn't an abject surrender either. She seemed to make a queenly offering with a certainty that the man to whom she proffered a gift would never have the heart to turn it down. Her presumptuousness irked Yajnyawalkya. But there was some magnetism in her insistence. Yajnyawalkya looked at her unwillingly, and then whispered, “Yes, I will.”

Gargi turned and walked away in majesty. Yajnyawalkya could not decide whether Gargi won or he had defeated himself.

Sushama Karnik.

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