Bhagavad Gita and Asuri Sampada: “Who on Earth is my Equal?”

The Bhagavad Gita classifies people into two groups – those born with daivi sampada and those born with asuri sampada. Daivi sampada are positive virtues like fearlessness, purity of mind, and so on, twenty-nine of which the Gita lists. And then it moves on to the asuri sampada – negative qualities like pride, haughtiness, anger and so on, the list of which is small but which is discussed in greater details.

Krishna states here that people are born either with daivi sampada or with asuri sampada. Though Krishna does not expressly state this, since none of us is entirely positive or negative and all of us are grey, we must assume that he is speaking of our basic dispositions – some of us are basically disposed towards negativity and others towards positive virtues, just as in terms of modern psychology some of us are basically optimists and others are basically pessimists. Even the darkest people like Duryodhana in the Mahabharata, for instance, shows some good qualities and even the most positive ones, like Yudhishthira shows some negative qualities.

Krishna knows, as the whole east knows, that life does not begin at birth or conception – we all have had innumerable past lives and every time we take a new birth, we are born with our past gunas, karmas, vasanas and samskaras. We are all born with memories of our past lives lying buried just beneath the surface of our consciousness, becoming visible sometimes on their own and at other times when we peep beneath the surface, as during past life regression or deep meditation. It is these memories, gunas, karmas, vasanas and samskaras that make us daivi or asuri.

Describing people with asuri sampada, negative qualities, Krishna says each one of them thinks:

“I am the lord of all. I am a great bhogi who enjoys the best things in life. I am a siddha, a man of great power and achievements; balavan, a man of immense strength; sukhee, living a life of contentment and bliss. Of noble birth am I, master of heaps of wealth, famous everywhere. I conduct grand sacrificial rituals where wealth flows endlessly, I give in charity boundlessly, I revel in pleasures, I make merry, feast and celebrate.  Tell me, who on earth is my equal? Self-centered, willful, filled with all the insolence of wealth and bloated with the adulation they receive, arrogant, haughty, full of rage and lust, these people cling to their mighty egos, and lord it over everyone.”  BG Ch. 16

When I think of such people, a person who used to stay close to my house some years ago comes to my mind. Every word he spoke, every step he took, every breath of his, the way he sat and stood, the way he treated all except those who were his superiors, spoke of his boundless arrogance. The poor and the powerless were no better than worms that crawled in the gutter for him and he crushed them under his foot every chance he had. He owned a fairly big house in an affluent locality and walked as though he was the master of everything under the sun.

In his case it was money that made them so arrogant. Power can give us the same arrogance, fame can give us the same arrogance, victories can give us the same arrogance.

Most people get bloated up with pride even when their achievements are puny. The wisdom of ancient India understood that arrogance is unhealthy for us even when our achievements are big because they feed the ego and starve the soul. Healthy living requires that you feed your ego and starve the soul. That is wisdom in the truest sense of the term. 

Hell is the destiny of people with asuri sampada – hell not only for themselves, but for everyone around them too. One Hitler created hell for the six million Jews he killed in the concentration camps and the millions of soldiers and civilians killed in WW II. It is for this reason that their asuri sampada has to be destroyed and if that proves impossible, then they themselves have to destroyed, so that they could be saved from themselves and others could be saved from them.   

The Brahmavaivarta Purana tells us an amazing story of how a god of great achievements was taught humility and the asuri sampada in him was destroyed.

O0O

The story begins with Indra slaying the mighty serpent dragon Vritra lying crouched on the high mountains in the shapeless shape of a massive cloud. Indra frees the waters Vritra had blocked making the world parch for want of water. With the monster’s death, the freed waters burst forth from the mountains joyously, nourishing the earth and quenching the thirst of all living creatures making them sing in delight and praise Indra as the mightiest hero ever. Much of the Rig Veda is the rapturous praises thus sung by the inspired poets of the ancient world. Here is one Vedic poet singing of Indra: 

I will declare the manly deeds of Indra,

the first that he achieved, the Thunder-wielder.
He slew the Dragon, then disclosed the waters,

and cleft the channels of the mountain torrents.
He slew the Dragon lying on the mountain:

his heavenly bolt of thunder Tvaṣṭar-fashioned.
Like lowing kine in rapid flow descending

the waters glided downward to the ocean

[From Rig Veda Mandala 1, Hymn XXXII. Griffith trans.] 

Indra killed the monster who had misappropriated what belonged to all and freed living water to benefit the plants and trees, the birds, beasts and humans, making mother earth throb with life once again. Earth turned green once again, birds soared up into the skies, animals roamed the jungles that sprang up everywhere and man was happy.  Clouds started raining from the skies again.

Indra destroyed the ninety-nine cities that belonged to Vritra, cities of repression and oppression. Saviour, savior, everyone called him. Truly, he had made life and light possible by destroying darkness and bondage. Now he wanted to rebuild the cities of the gods, cities of freedom and light, of joyfulness and celebration and a palace for himself.   

Indra instructed Vishwakarma to build the magnificent palace for himself. The palatial gardens should have streams running through it, Indra told him, and lakes teeming with waterfowl, divine trees everywhere, and everything else he could imagine. Vishwakarma was making great progress and as the first year neared its end and work was nearing completion, Indra started making frequent visits to see the work in progress. Which was fine with Vishwakarma, but every time he made a visit, he would ask the celestial architect to modify something or the other, micromanaging things and interfering the Vishwakarma’s work, making progress slow, putting him in unendurable stress, making sleep impossible to him, driving him nuts.

Indra had ceased to be the mighty hero and liberating leader he was earlier. Instead, with his own importance gone to his head, he had become an intolerable boss, always grumpy, always complaining, always looking for faults, insisting that his way alone was right, constantly insulting the intelligence and imagination of Vishwakarma in his attempt to show he was superior. It was possible that he was jealous of the miraculous powers of Vishwakarma as an architect. Frequently when a boss becomes jealous of his subordinate, he tries to ‘show him his place’ by trying to show he has better ideas about everything, even in subjects about which he has no knowledge. He refuses to see people as people, and instead sees them as his subordinates whom he can order about. And as an architect there was no equal to Vishwakarma who turned everything he touched into pure wonder, whose creations were beauty solidified. But Indra wanted him to do things Indra’s way. Life became hell for the celestial architect.

Vishwakarma just did not know what to do. He was the most creative architect, but, as it often happens, he did not know how to play games to outsmart his boss. That was not his area of expertise – he was a simple creative genius and not a politician. He decided to seek help and secretly went to Brahma, the Creator. Brahma listened to him patiently, assured him his troubles would soon come to an end and sent him back a relaxed man, or rather a relaxed god. 

Brahma informed Vishnu of the whole affair who instantly made a plan to solve the problem. Such things should not happen in the celestial world, Vishnu knew. Time had come for the lord of the gods to be shown his place.

India has always loved telling human stories in the name of the gods. Or let’s say, stories of gods as though they were human beings, subject to the same anger that men are subject to, the same jealousy and greed, the same intolerance and hostility, the same ignorance and narrow-mindedness, the same lust and illusions and delusions. These are teaching stories, stories told to teach men and women wisdom, to teach us that whoever we are, however powerful we are, we are all subject to the games the mind plays with us.

O0O

It is a Purana that tells us this story – the Brahmavaivarta Purana. Indra in Vedic literature is different from Indra in the Puranas. In Vedic literature, Indra is the symbol of the enlightened mind, mind that has become still and empty, the yogic mind, the meditator’s mind, the free mind, the ‘mindless mind’, what Zen calls the no-mind, mushin, mind that is one with pure consciousness, mind that soars in the limitless skies of consciousness like Garutman, the eagle of the Vedas on whom Vishnu, the all-pervading being, travels. Whereas in the Puranas, he is the symbol of the ordinary human mind, the mind about which Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita complaints to Krishna: chanchalam hi manah krishna, pramaathi balavad drdham tasyaaham nigraham manye vayor iva sudushkaram – “The mind, Krishna, is restless, turbulent, strong and stubborn. I consider that it is as difficult to control as the wind itself.”

In the modern spiritual classic The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche speaks of the two completely different minds, or aspects of the mind: sem and rigpa. Sem, says Rinpoche, “is the mind that thinks, plots, desires, manipulates, that flares up in anger, that creates and indulges in waves of negative emotions and thoughts, that has to go on and on asserting, validating, and confirming its "existence" by fragmenting, conceptualizing, and solidifying experience. The ordinary mind is the ceaselessly shifting and shiftless prey of external influences, habitual tendencies, and conditioning. The masters liken sem to a candle flame in an open doorway, vulnerable to all the winds of circumstance.”

The higher mind, or the enlightened mind, the awakened mind, is the “primordial, pure, pristine awareness that is at once intelligent, cognizant, radiant, and always awake. It could be said to be the knowledge of knowledge itself.” The Vedic Indra stands for this mind, for rigpa.

The Indra of the Puranas, books written after the glorious age of the Vedas had come to an end and the worship and understanding of the Vedic gods had declined giving rise to the Pauranic gods in their place, is the symbol of sem, the ordinary mind. 

O0O

Early next morning a radiant young brahmana traveler with brilliant eyes that spoke of his serene intelligence appeared at the gate of Indra. He was immediately received in great honour and given the traditional offerings of water, honey, milk and fruits made to brahmanas on arrival. Politely enquired of the purpose of his visit, the boy said he had heard of the great palace Indra was building and had come to see it. When the young boy spoke, his voice was rich, deep and soft. Indra’s hairs stood on their ends as he listened to the traveler.

“It is great that you are building this splendorous palace,” said the boy. “How long will it take for the work to be completed?” The boy paused and a gentle smile appeared on his lips as he added, “No other Indra of the past has completed a more magnificent palace.”

Indra too smiled at the comment. How conceited of the little boy to assume he has known the Indras before him and the palaces they had built! Was the boy mocking at him, ridiculing him? Or was he just being presumptuous? With the indulgent smile of an elder towards a child the lord of the gods asked him, making sure his voice remained polite, “Have you then known other Indras? Seen the palaces they built?” 

“Yes,” the boy replied calmly with no change in his serene voice. “I have seen numerous Indras and Vishwakarms and the many palaces they built.” There was no mockery in that steady voice, no boasting. “Vatsa,” said the boy addressing Indra as though the lord of the gods was no more than a toddler, “I have known your father, Maharshi Kashyapa, and his father, Maharshi Marichi. And I also know Brahma, whose son Marichi is, and, Lord of the Gods, I know Vishnu too, from whose naval lotus Brahma was born.”

“I have known the dissolution of universes. I have seen it happening again and again, and again and again new worlds coming into being form the cosmic waters of consciousness without end. I have seen that state in which all was one. How many times have I seen this happening? No one can count that.  Universe after universe is born endlessly and every one of them dissolves into the nothingness from which they come.  And right at this moment, King of the Gods, who can count the number of universes that exist simultaneously, each with its own Indras and Vishwakarmas. Who can count the grains of sand on the beaches of world?”  

      

Indra had grown completely silent listening to what the boy was saying. There was no doubt the wandering brahmana child was speaking the truth. There was the power of authenticity to every word he spoke. The bemused smile on the face of Indra had disappeared long ago. Without blinking his eyes, he was watching the miraculous being that had appeared before him that morning in the guise of a young pilgrim and wondering who it was. All arrogance had left him and his head that he haughtily held high was now bent in humility before the speaker whose words he was listening to holding his breath. He was about to ask him who he was when he noticed a procession of ants that had appeared in the royal chamber where they were seated. Indra saw the procession was almost as wide as the large hall itself and the ants were slowly moving towards them.

The young boy’s eyes too were on the ants now, watching them with curiosity and deep interest. All on a sudden the child burst out laughing – sparkling spontaneous, mirth filled, wondrous laughter the like of which Indra had never heard before. As the laughter died out, Indra got up from his seat, stood humbly before his guest, bowed deeply to him and asked, “Bhagavan, who are you? I have never met anyone like you and I never knew someone like you existed. Your brilliance surpasses that of a thousand suns simultaneously rising up, you look like a child but seem to be more ancient than time itself. Who are you, please tell me. And also tell me why you laughed at the parade of ants. You terrify me, though you exude nothing but love.”

“Let me tell you why I laughed, Lord of the Gods,” said the boy. “When I saw the parade of the ants I couldn’t control my laughter. But why the sight of the procession of the ants made me laugh is a secret that cannot be revealed to anyone who is not ready for it. It is the great secret of secrets, which very few even among great saints know. The axe of this secret destroys at a single stroke the mighty tree with its roots above and branches below, the tree that has existed from times without beginning, the tree that the wise speak of as eternal.”

The boy had become silent after he spoke these words, so silent as though he had never spoken at all. Indra fell at his feet and begged him to reveal the secret to him and the little boy knew that the lord of the gods is ready for the highest knowledge, the highest secret.

And in a long discourse the little boy who was none other than Vishnu himself told him the secret of karma which controls us from lifetime to lifetime, the result of our karmas which cannot be escaped even in a million lifetimes, and also how to free ourselves from the bondage of karma and become liberated. The little boy told him how every time we perform an action with the sense of I, we create a karma and these karmas accumulated become life scripts for future births and bind us. He also told Indra in great detail how to act without the I-sense, how to be the non-doer even when doing all kinds of actions. He taught Indra the secret of become asanga, unattached, to not only the results of one’s actions but also to the actions themselves. He taught Indra how to perform actions for the good of the world, as he had done when he had slain the snake monster Vritra and dedicate the results to the Divine.

The boy explained to Indra that each ant in the parade was once an Indra like him, from which Indra got visible proof, pratyaksha, that there had been endless number of Indras before him.  As Indras, the boy told him, prompted by their ego and arrogance, each one of them had asked the same question: Who in the universe is equal to me? This asuri sampada had led them to lower births and in their lower births too they had continued with asuri sampada until each of them had ended up an ant after countless lifetimes.

A little later an old wandering ascetic appeared on the scene wearing a deerskin as his loincloth, his hair matted, and taught Indra the same wisdom in different words. When the teaching was over and the ascetic disappeared on the spot, it became clear that he was none other than Lord Shiva. Following Shiva, the little boy too disappeared, revealing to Indra that he was none other than Lord Vishnu.

Indra now moved to the other extreme, like a pendulum, losing all interest in life, denying himself all joys, saying no to his wife, to all pleasures, to his responsibilities, saying no to life itself. A horrified Indrani, his queen, rushed to Brihaspati, the guru of the gods, who came and taught Indra how to balance between the extremes, how to remain in the world doing all that is expected of him, including his commitment to his wife and son and others, and yet remain free from karmas that bind us.

And yes, of course, he let Vishwakarma complete the palace without more micromanaging and constant squabbling. One other thing came to an end: he no more asked kon’yosti sadrisho mayaa, “Who on earth is my equal?” Every time the thought came to him, he remembered the parade of ants.

O0O

One question that arises here is if a man with asuri qualities can become Indra, a position that according to Pauranic Indian tradition goes to the one who has done the highest number of powerful religious rites and asceticism. Well, as I said earlier, please keep in mind we are not discussing here the Vedic Indra, symbol of the enlightened mind, but the Pauranic Indra, who stands for the ordinary mind, sem. The ordinary mind can feel haughtiness, arrogance and pride in its achievements – success can go to the head of a man with such a mind. He can be proud of the rites themselves, of his asceticism, as it happened with Jajali. Second, though the Gita says we are all born either predominantly asuri or predominantly daivi, our qualities are subject to change from moment from moment. A man who is wicked now can become good later and vice verse.  

The Saptashloki  Durga says: jnaaninaam api chetaamsi devee bhagavatee his saa balaad aakrshya mohaaya mahaamayaa prayacchati. Even the minds of enlightened men, she, the Goddess, the Mahamaya, draws by force and leads to delusion.  

It is like moss on the surface of water, says the wisdom tradition of India. You clear it with your hands to drink the water and a moment later, it is back again, covering the surface. So you have to be constantly on the alert. The famous story of the great yogi Matsyendranath tells us of how he became infatuated with the queen of Sri Lanka long after his enlightenment and his disciple Gorakhnath had to go to him and awaken him by saying those words that have since become legendary: Jaag macchandar gorakh aayaa – Wake up, Matsyendra, Gorakh has come. 

O0O

Ahalya’s Story: Parched Earth, Pouring Rain 2

Continued from …1

Life went on. The wheels of time rolled on.

It was one of those days that I first started looking at Indra with new eyes. He had come back to the ashram for a visit. One day I was sitting on a rock near the river where I had gone to fetch water when Indra came to the river for a swim. The sound of his diving into the water penetrated the world of my reveries and quickly turning my head in the direction of the sound, I noticed Indra rising up from the water.

For a moment I had a feeling I was looking at male beauty – male beauty personified.

I had seen Indra bathing in the river many times in the past. But never had he fascinated me like that.

Suddenly Indra seemed the centre of the universe. Everything seemed to revolve around him.

I was being drawn to him irresistibly, helplessly. My entire being clamored for him. Deep down within me I knew Indra was not my fulfillment but my death, my humiliation. I was being drawn into the vortex of some dark, abysmal non-existence from which nothing escaped. Indra was a whirlpool of darkness. And yet I wanted Indra. I wanted to be taken by him. I wanted to surrender myself to him, to be consumed by him, to be swallowed by him, to be annihilated by him, even as a moth offers itself to the burning fire at night.

Indra was now standing before me, his whole body wet, water dripping from his hair, from his chest, from his limbs. Magnificent Indra. Magnificent male.

Sadyasnata – freshly bathed, just bathed. The sadyasnata male is no less desirable to the female than the sadyasnata female is to the male, I discovered.
I looked up into his eyes. Long. Wordlessly. As he stood looking into mine.
And then I shook. Shook all over, a sudden fear possessing me, exulting fear, intoxicating fear, maddening fear, fear that at once made all my senses stop functioning and made all of them sharp as never before.

I had a feeling a word spoken would explode me. The sound of a leaf falling from the nearby tree and I would explode. The smallest movement and I would explode. I had become so intense that if he so much as stretched out his hand at me, I felt I’d explode into a million pieces.

Time stood still. The sun in the sky had stopped. The wind wasn’t blowing. I knew even the plants and trees around me, the grass around me, had ceased to grow, had ceased to breathe. As I had ceased to breathe.

The pulsation of life within me had ceased. And yet I had never ever been so intensely alive. An eternity lived in a moment.

And then I found myself getting up and walking away.

We hadn’t spoken a word.

But I knew I had been transformed by that moment. I had been made new. I had been made whole. I had suddenly become what I really was. A woman. Not in the physical sense, not in the social sense, not in the sexual sense that Gautama had made me. But in a spiritual sense, in an existential sense.

In that moment I metamorphosed once again. In that moment I received into me the agonies and ecstasies, the desires and cravings, the hopes, the passions of ten thousand generations of women. These had been poured into me.

I was now sufficient unto myself – whole, complete and sufficient. I felt healed – healed of all that was inflicted upon me since sage Gautama took me for a wife.
I felt like a virgin again – pure, sacred, inviolate. And inviolable.

Early the next morning, while the sage was away for his bath, Indra came to me. And I received him, took him into myself.

I did not feel I had violated anything by my taking Indra into myself. I did not feel I had wronged the sage in any way. I felt as though I had always been Indra’s – sage Gautama was the outsider, the intruder. Adultery was what the sage and I did together not what Indra and I did. Sin was what the sage and I did together. Our coming together was what was repugnant. But Indra and I belonged to each other. I felt I had always been waiting for him – even as the earth awaits the rains so that she could bathe in the ecstasy that inundates her and the seeds in her could sprout.

Indra came to me day after day while the sage was away for his morning bath and ablutions. He came to me at that sacred hour when the scriptures forbid men and women uniting – the brahma muhoorta. He came to me as the first rays of the sun reached to thrill the earth each morning, as the fore-glow began brightening the eastern sky. At the hour full of mystery and magic, the hour full of wonder, and he filled that hour with ecstasies.

I knew this could not go on. I knew we were bound to be discovered. I knew suffering would follow – unspeakable suffering. And yet we kept meeting morning after morning.

As days passed, a suspicion grew inside me. Did Gautama know what was going on? I had started observing subtle changes in him. The sage had begun to grow withdrawn. He was never very fond of talking, was always reserved, but he had always been more lively and cheerful when he was near me. I felt that he had not only been not talking to me as much as before, but had perhaps been avoiding me.

Were these changes real? Or was I imagining them? I did not know.
Besides, I myself had changed since that first encounter with Indra by the river. Maybe it was my dread of the sage, or maybe it was my guilt – but whatever it was, I had definitely begun to avoid Gautama.

I was now living in two worlds. One was a world of unrealities, in which I lived with Indra constantly. The time I spent with him each morning was short, but in that world of unrealities, I lived perpetually with him. It was a world of brightness, almost ethereal brightness, a world full of vivid colors, fantastic shapes, full of fervent touches and smells almost consuming in their intensity, a world of burning passions, fascinating emotions and feelings, a world filled with unbelievable ecstasies. The other was the world of realities that intruded into this world occasionally, though as a physical presence it was always there, far more real that the world I had brought into existence with Indra. It was a world that oppressed me, that made it difficult for me to breathe, a world from which I shrank away in horror, which I wanted to disappear, cease to exist, so that I would be liberated into the world of Indra and me for ever.

I knew the two worlds could not exist together for too long – one or the other had to end.

And then one day it happened. The sage was returning from his bath when some of his disciples told him: “How great you are, Master! Great indeed is the power of your austerities! You are standing here before us and yet you are inside with your wife!”

That is when I became Ahalya – the unploughable one. On the day his disciples told him that.

The sage’s curse.

Did he discover about Indra and me on that day? Or had he known it all along and was tolerating it, accepting it, admitting his failure to give me what I deserved, out of his guilt, acting only when his disciples taunted him about it? I never discovered. And, in any case, it did not matter any more.

The sage had already cursed me.

I accepted the curse. Deep in me, perhaps I was relieved. For I had always known the curse was coming. I had known it even before that first morning when Indra had come to me. I had known it that day when I sat on the rock and Indra stood before me, our eyes lost in each other’s.

Perhaps I wanted it to come – come as soon as possible, so that I would be relieved of the anxiety of waiting for it to strike me. Also, perhaps, the intensity of the world, the world in which I lived with Indra, had begun to frighten me. That was a life no woman could live for long, endure for long.

I became Ahalya. Ahalya – the unploughable. Earth that is cursed to be barren forever. Earth that receives no rains.

Perhaps I was relieved for another reason too. After Indra had touched me, had taken me, I did not want the sage to touch me anymore. Now he wouldn’t.

The sage cursed Indra too.

I did not receive rains anymore. The winds were the only thing that nourished me now. Hot winds. Dry winds. Moisture less winds.

I had become a desert. Uninhabited, neglected by men, forgotten by them, invisible to them.

I shall not touch you any more – that is what Gautama had said. I do not need you any more, that is what Gautama had said. Your presence is repugnant to me, that is what Gautama had said. Before he walked away leaving me behind. Before he went to the mountains for tapas.

He had declared me unfit for ploughing. And his declaration made me land unfit for ploughing. Accursed earth.

Repent, he had said. Purify yourself, he had said. Purify yourself through repentance and tapas, he had said. Purify yourself through your loneliness and suffering, he had said.

The creator had played a trick on me. The creator had dealt a blow to me, had betrayed me. He had given me to the man I considered my father all the years of my growing up. My beauty had been punished. My youth had been punished. My womanhood had been punished. All for no fault of mine. Except for that I was a woman, and beautiful.

Youth should be the reward of youth, not old age. Young life should unite with young life – not with old age.

I knew I had sinned by men’s standards. But my crime, my sin, was that I gave in to the longings of the young life in me, to its young cravings. What I had done was to answer the call of life from within me.

I searched deep within me – and I found no sin in me, no hala. They say ahalya also means without fault, impossible to find fault with, without blemish. I found it impossible to find fault with me. I was without blemish. Ahalya.

But I felt deeply guilty, too. True, the sage should not have taken me for a wife. Perhaps, he should have given me to Indra, who had always loved me. Or to someone else, maybe that emperor that the sage talked about when I was a child. Or to someone else. He should not have taken me for himself.

But I couldn’t help feeling guilty. For, I had betrayed him. He was my husband, whether I liked that fact or not.

So when the sage pronounced me guilty, made me ahalya, unploughable, I did not protest. I did not plead for myself. I accepted his curse. And I lay without receiving rains, subsisting on the winds, accursed earth where only barren winds blew. Fallow. Dead.

Until all longing for rains ceased in me. Until the earth in me no more thirsted for rains. Until Indra and our love became just a long ago memory.

By the time the two youths came to me I had become luminous, they say. I was lit up by the glow of my austerities, they say.

Suffering is a kind of penance. Self-denial is a kind of penance. Burning within is a kind of penance.

The two princes of Ayodhya were very young then. Two adolescents. Rama, the elder, was clearly the leader. It was he who had come and touched my feet first. And then Lakshmana did the same.

They were my first visitors in ages. The world had rejected me all these years.

And then they came. Life touched me once more. And I felt I was alive once again.

I welcomed them to the ashram and offered them hospitality. The ashram came alive once again.

And then Gautama too came back to me.

O0O

That was eons ago.

I am an old woman now. With no hungers of youth.

Gautama and I live quietly in our ashram. Two very old people. Sufficient unto ourselves.

At times when I think of my past I wonder if Indra ever was. Indra and all that followed.

I feel I have been living like this with the sage always.

Gautama and Ahalya – two very old people.

Gautama and Ahalya – the bright, scorching sun and the fallow, unploughable earth.

We were never made for each other. Though we were given to each other. Which, perhaps, was our tragedy.

In my old age, I often think of the worlds to come. This world, following Gautama, named me a sinner. But will I be treated as a sinner in those worlds too?

I do not know. But I know one thing. If they asked me there if I had lived the life that was given to me, if I had used that most precious gift of all and not thrown it away, if I had been true to my innermost instincts and impulses, if I had been true to my flesh and blood, if I had been true to the woman in me, then I’d say, with all honesty:

Yes, I have. Yes, I have. Yes, I have…

O0O

Ahalya’s Story: Parched Earth, Pouring Rain 1

I had always known Indra. I grew up watching him. He was one of the sage’s students. And I was the sage’s daughter. Or at least so I thought. For, I had known no father other than Sage Gautama. I had always thought I was born in the ashram, born to the sage. It was only years later that I discovered that this was not true, that I was only brought up by him.

The discovery disturbed me highly. And brought up a number of questions to my mind. Who, for instance, was my father then? Who was my mother? Why did they give me up? Or is it that something had happened to them? Where did the sage find me? An endless number of questions.

One thing I was sure of. That they hadn’t given me up. I was an orphaned child – not an abandoned child. To be an abandoned child was shameful – and too painful. No, I wasn’t that. I was orphaned. Something had happened to my parents and I was orphaned. And the sage had found me and brought me up.

One day I gathered the courage to ask the sage some of these questions. I overcame my awe of him and asked him the questions that were foremost in my mind. Who were my parents? Where did the sage find me?

How old was I when I raised that question? I do not remember. Maybe six, maybe seven. And the sage looked at me sweetly and smiled, treating me as he had always done – like a little baby. And he told me a story – not a word of which I believed, of course. It was the kind of story grownups always told children – especially a grandfather told a granddaughter.

The sage told me that I was created specially by Brahma, the creator. No, I was not born of man and woman. The creator chose all that is most beautiful in all creatures and out of that he created me. “That is why,” he told me, “you are the most beautiful child in the world. And when you grow up, child, you are going to be the most beautiful woman in the world. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the mightiest emperor in the world himself would be tempted by you.”

How prophetic the sage was!

Another time I pestered him, sitting in his lap and pulling at his long beard, with all his disciples watching, he told me that Brahma created one thousand women first – and from each of these women he selected the most beautiful part and out of these he formed me. And the sage added – “the one who gets you for a wife will be getting all that is best in a thousand women. He will be marrying a thousand women in fact.” And he laughed.

I, of course, never believed any of these stories and kept asking him the same questions again and again. He told me many more stories about my birth. Once he said I was the daughter of the earth. Another time he said I was the earth itself.
I never learnt who my parents were. What I came closest to believing was that I was the daughter of King Bhadryashwa and the Apsara Menaka.

But I doubted even that was just another story and the search for my parents – that is, the desire to know them, the question who they were, remained in my heart.

In those days I often asked Indra that question. We were friends then, though Indra was older to me, much older. I asked him if he knew who my parents were. And he too repeated the stories that the sage had told me. When I rejected one of the stories told by him, he told me another. And when I rejected that too, yet another – just as the sage did. And Indra too ended every story he told me with – “that is why you are the most beautiful girl in the whole world, and that is why when you grow up you are going to be the most beautiful woman in the whole world.”

And then he added: “And that is also why when you grow up I am going to marry you, make you my wife.”

I pushed him away from me when he said that. I was deeply embarrassed. Shy. Marriage was something every girl had to do – but a girl did not think of marriage before it was time for it and certainly I did not like Indra talking to me about it.
Indra finished his studies and left our ashram. It was only years later that I met him and by then I had become the wife of the sage whom I had looked upon as my father all my growing up years.

I had asked the sage how I could be his wife. I had asked him how he could have me for a wife when he had brought me up in his ashram and he had always treated me as a daughter – even as a granddaughter. And he said the creator, Brahma, had given me to him as a daughter when I was a child and he had looked after me as such. And now, he said, when I had become a woman, the same creator, pleased with his self-restraint, had given me to him as his wife. He had rewarded his self control towards me by giving me to him as a wife.

I wanted to ask Brahma if restraining oneself from one’s daughter, not being tempted sexually by one’s daughter, was an act of such merit that it deserved to be rewarded by giving the man the same daughter as his wife.

Besides, it was as though I had no say in these matters. That my opinions did not count. That my feelings did not count.

As though the creator could give me to whomever he wished – as a daughter to bring up, or as a wife. And if they so desired as both to the same man, one after the other.

And in any case, I did not believe this creator story, the story of the creator giving me to him as his wife, anymore than I believed the other story of the creator specially creating me and giving me to the sage for bringing up.

O0O

I do not know what a man feels about making one’s own daughter his wife. But I do know what a woman feels when she is forced to make her father her husband.
It is disgusting. It is revolting. It is obnoxious. It is against all that I hold sacred in life. Only animals do that.

The day he announced he was taking me as his wife obeying the order of the creator, something broke in me. I could feel it breaking in me – physically feel it, though I did not know what it was that broke in me.

Upanayana, it is said, gives a second birth to a person. I was already twice born with the upanayana the rishi had performed for me, the sacred initiation of the thread that I had undergone with the sage as my guru, by which act he had become my father in yet another sense. And now, with my marriage to him, I had been reborn once again.

For, marriage is a rebirth to every woman.

In marriage, a woman gets a new father and a new mother, new brothers and sisters, new uncles, aunts and grandparents, and a new home. It is like being born again.

But in my case I was reborn in a different sense, too. The rishi’s announcement had broken me, had killed me.

And then I was reborn again.

But the new I was completely different from the old one.

The old I was an ephemeral creature. A creature born of airy substances. Of one woman’s smile, the glow in another woman’s eyes, the gait of a third woman, the sweetness in yet another woman’s voice, someone else’s laughter. But she had no soul, no substance. She was not a person.

She was a thousand things that men found beautiful in women. Made up of a thousand things that male fantasies of women consisted of. She was the stuff of their longings, of their dreams. But she was not real, she was not a woman. She was not a person. Dreams are not persons. Fantasies of women are not women.
That day, the day the sage took me as his wife, a new I was born.

This I was made of flesh and blood. She was a person. A female person. A woman. And as a woman, she was heir to all that was real about women – not just what men found beautiful in her, not just what men fantasized about her, but all that was real about women.

A woman of flesh and blood. And an heir to all women’s heritage on the earth and the heavens.

On that day I grew roots into the earth. On that day I discovered in me arteries linked with the sky, with the air, with fire and water. I was floating in the air so far – suddenly I grew roots and these roots began nourishing me, filling me with longings I had so far never known, with thirsts that I had so far never known. It was as though I had just remembered who I was, discovered, realized, who I was and what I was meant for. I began receiving powerful, life-giving messages from deep within me, a fire was ignited in me, a fire that thirsted for many things, but above all
I had suddenly discovered great strength within me – strength and courage. The strength and courage to be what I am, the strength and courage to desire what I needed, the strength and courage to go after what I desired and to get it. I had never felt fettered before – but now I suddenly felt I had always been in fetters, fetters so fine I had never realized I was in them – and suddenly I felt free of those fetters.

With freedom came longings – longings of the earth in me. Longings of the earth that thirsted for rain, life-giving, life-sustaining, life-generating rain. When the wind blew I did not want it to be just a wind, a wind that soothed and refreshed you, that cooled you, but I wanted it to be a wind that brought seeds that would sprout into fresh life.

I had discovered my kinship with the night and the earth – the fecund night and the fecund earth.

I suddenly wanted to belong – no, not just belong, but to be thirsted for.

My insides had suddenly begun to speak to me – in the language of life, in the language of women, in the language of women everywhere – the language of passion, of dreams, of instincts and impulses…the language of the earth, the language of the night.

It seemed as though so far I was leading an ephemeral existence, living in a dream world, and suddenly I had become real.

Rishi Gautama adored me. And I hated his adorations. I hated his attentions. I hated his look. I hated his touch. His very presence grew repugnant to me. For, all the time he was with me, something deep within me whispered – this is an unholy union, this is a union that should not be. Incest – my mind screamed. This man was my guru – my guru and my father.

And yet I submitted to him. I wanted to get up and run, but I lay there, not a muscle in my body moving.

Gautama’s was an old man’s love for a young woman – the obsessive, compulsive, adoring, self-sacrificing, self-surrendering, self-effacing love.

And yet with the control developed by ages of penances, he controlled himself, restricting himself to the days and hours that tradition permitted. Sex was to be limited to the ritu period, the fourteen days following my ritual bath after my periods, that is, to those fourteen nights.

And I? While I hated his very touch with all my being, my body began longing for it with hunger in every inch of it. My muscles, my nerves, my flesh, my blood, began longing for it. I had begun living for what I hated, what I detested, more than anything else in the world. The very thought of what disgusted me more than anything else filled me with thrills. I dreaded with every cell in my body the days the rishi could take me and I longed for those days with every cell in my body. It was as though I was not one person, but two. Twin selves, twin bodies. I often wondered which of the two was more real and I knew both were equally real. The rishi had transformed me from a girl to a woman and it was that newly born woman in me that was seeking fulfillment.

I knew the fulfillment my body sought, my senses sought, my instincts and impulses sought, my existence sought, will not come through the rishi.

For, to receive that fulfillment in the arms of a man, the woman has to give herself to him – give herself to him totally and completely, freely and happily, in an act of celebration. But I couldn’t give myself to the rishi. Part of me rejected him, part of me detested him. There was no celebration in me.

Which did not prevent me from becoming a mother, though.

Continued… 2