The Test in the North

"Grandfather," said Yudhishthira, sitting close by the bed of arrows, "a man is watched all his life. In the assembly, at the sacrifice, in the field before his own soldiers, there are always eyes upon him, and a man will hold to any vow so long as eyes are upon him. How is it ever known whether his mastery belongs to him, or only to the people looking at him?"

Bhishma said that the question was an old one, and that the sages had answered it not with argument but with a story. There was in the ancient days a sage named Ashtavakra, bent in eight places from his birth, whose body men laughed at before they heard him speak and never laughed at afterward. While still a boy he had walked into the court of Janaka in Videha and taken up the debate with Bandin that no scholar there had survived, and had come out of it undefeated. After that no one in the land of Videha needed to be told what he knew.

When his study was complete and the years for it were finished, Ashtavakra wished to marry, as a man does who has closed one stage of his life and means to enter the next in the appointed order. He went to the hermitage of the sage Vadanya, whose daughter Suprabha was spoken of as having no equal in beauty or in conduct, and asked for her plainly, saying who he was and what he had learned and that he came for her in the manner the law prescribed.

Vadanya neither refused him nor consented. "Go to the north," he said, "past the mountain of Kailasa, and there you will find a woman living. See her. When you have seen her, come back to me, and my daughter is yours." He would say nothing further about who the woman was, or what seeing her would accomplish. Ashtavakra asked no question at all. He turned toward the north and went.

The road north climbed out of the plains and out of the seasons men keep count by. Ashtavakra crossed the lower Himavat where the pines stand so close that a traveller walks half a day without sun, and above them the belt of birch and juniper, and above that the open shoulders of rock where nothing grows and the wind carries grit against the face all afternoon. His crooked body took the passes badly. He went slowly, and did not stop.

Beyond that country he came into regions that the ordinary world does not touch. He passed the gardens where Kubera's servants keep the flowering trees, and the lakes whose water lies so still that a bird crossing above it appears twice. He passed groves where the trees bore fruit and blossom at once, out of any season, and streams that ran warm over white sand between banks of lotuses opened wide at midnight. Music came to him from places where he could see no player. Nothing on that road hindered him and nothing hurried him, and he understood that he was walking through country that had been made rather than grown.

At last, in a valley set about with flowering trees, he came upon a hermitage. It was well kept, swept, fragrant with the smoke of an evening fire, and the sound coming out of it was the sound of women singing at their work. Seven maidens lived there, each of them so beautiful that a man arriving from the world below would have taken any one of them for the reason the road had been built. They came out when they saw him, and there was no laughter in their faces at the shape of him, only the greeting due to a guest who has come a long way in the cold.

Ashtavakra stood in the doorway of a house at the end of the world, and the sun went down behind the mountain, and he had not yet seen any old woman at all.

The mistress of the house came forward last. She was very old. Her hair was white to the roots, her back was bent almost as badly as his own, and her hands shook a little as she took the water for his feet from the maidens and gave it to him herself, which is the hostess's own office and is not delegated to anyone while she can still lift the vessel.

She honoured him exactly as the books prescribe and no less because he was crooked. She named him a guest, seated him, washed his feet, offered him the water for his mouth, set food before him and waited until he had eaten before she ate, asked after his road and his health and his family and did not once ask his errand, since a guest is not questioned about his purpose on the first evening. Ashtavakra received all of it with the courtesy of a man raised in hermitages, who knows that hospitality is a rite with two sides and that a guest can dishonour it as easily as a host.

When the meal was done the maidens took up their singing again, and then, as the fire settled, they went out one by one until the room held only the old woman and her guest. The lamps burned low. Outside, the cold came down off the rock.

Then the old woman rose, and as she rose the years went out of her. Her back straightened, her hair darkened, her hands steadied, and there stood in the lamplight a woman young and unspeakably beautiful, dressed as a bride is dressed, looking at him with no confusion in her face at all, as though this were simply what she had always been and the other thing had been the costume.

"Stay with me tonight," she said. "I have chosen you. There is no one here but ourselves."

Ashtavakra did not start back, and he did not raise his voice. He said, "I am a guest in your house, and you have honoured me tonight past what I was owed. I am pledged to the daughter of Vadanya, and I keep the vow of continence until I am given her. What you ask, I cannot do. That I cannot do it is not a judgment on you."

She did not accept the refusal, and the night was long. She told him that desire is not a fault in nature, that the trees outside his door bore fruit by it, that the gods themselves were not strangers to it. She told him that a woman who asks and is refused carries the refusal a long time. She praised him, and the praise was the hardest part of the night, for she praised him accurately: his learning, his victory in the court of Videha as a boy, the courage of a body that had crossed those passes without complaint. She said that no one had followed him up the mountain, that the maidens slept, that the world he had come from lay a hundred leagues below and could not see the roof of this house, and that whatever happened here would be known to precisely two people, both of whom would keep it.

He answered each thing she said, and never once answered it rudely. He did not call her shameless, or accuse her, or take the easy safety of insulting a hostess so that she would stop. That would have been a second sin laid on top of the refusal, and he had been fed at her fire. He simply said again, in whatever form her argument required, that he was not free, that a man who is not free cannot make a gift of what is already promised, and that if she wished to keep him in her house until morning as a guest he would gladly stay and talk with her until the lamps failed.

And so they talked until the lamps failed, and the cold hour came, and the sky beyond the door went from black to grey, and he had not moved from where he sat.

At first light she stood up, and the bridal ornaments were gone from her, and what stood in the room was no longer a woman of any house. "I am the Northern Quarter," she said. "I am the direction you have been walking toward since you left the plains. Vadanya sent you to me. He wished to know whether learning had also made you continent, since the two do not always travel together, and there is no way to learn such a thing about a man in his own country, where he is watched. You have not failed. Go back, and take the girl, for you have been given to her already by what you did here."

Ashtavakra bowed to her as a man bows to a teacher, and went down out of the mountains, and Vadanya gave him Suprabha, and the marriage was made in the proper season with the proper rites.

Bhishma said, "Consider what the test was, and where it was set. Not in Janaka's hall, where the whole court watched him break a great debater and where every word he spoke earned him something. Here there was no audience, no rival, no prize, and nothing at all waiting on the other side of surrender except a silence that would never have been broken by anybody. That is where a man's mastery is actually kept or lost, and it is why the sages say a vow is not tested in the assembly. The assembly tests only whether he can read the faces in front of him."

"And mark the second thing," he said, "which men forget when they praise him. He was refusing a woman in whose house he had eaten. He could have made the refusal easy for himself by making it cruel, for insult ends a conversation faster than reason does. He would not buy his own safety at the cost of her dignity. Continence that has to be defended with contempt is not continence, Yudhishthira. It is only fear wearing the clothes of a vow."