Kanva of the Malini

The Malini came down out of the foothills clear and cold, and along its eastern bank stood the hermitage of Kanva, son of Kashyapa, a man whose austerities were spoken of as far away as Hastinapura. He was old already in the year this story begins - old in the way of sages, which is to say unhurried, brown as the bark of the trees he tended, his hair the color of cold ash.

He had gone out at first light to gather flowers and kusha grass for the morning fire. The path he took ran through a stand of reeds where the river turned, and it was there, in the wet grass, that he heard a sound the forest had no business making.

It was not the cry of a fawn. It was a child.

Kanva parted the reeds. A newborn girl lay on the ground with nothing over her, and around her in a close ring stood a crowd of shakunta birds, the long-legged birds of the riverside, their wings half spread above her the way a roof is spread. They had kept the sun off her. They had kept the jackals off her. When the sage came near they did not scatter; they stepped aside slowly, the way attendants step aside for one who has the right to enter.

He understood what he was looking at. He understood, in the manner of men who have burned their appetites down to embers, whose child this was: that a sage of terrible power had done penance in these hills, that heaven had grown frightened of what he was accumulating and had sent down a woman of the apsaras to spoil it, and that the woman, her errand finished, had gone back up into the sky and left what she had made lying in the grass.

Kanva cursed no one. He was old enough to know that curses are the refuge of men who cannot think of anything better to do. He gathered the child up against his chest, and she stopped crying.

"The shakunta birds sheltered you," he said. "So you are Shakuntala. And you are my daughter, and no one will ever again ask you whose child you are."

He carried her home along the water, and the birds came after him most of the way.

A hermitage is not built to hold an infant. Kanva rebuilt it. The disciples who had come to him for the science of the Vedas found themselves boiling milk, plaiting reed cradles, and learning that a sage capable of sitting motionless for a season could be got out of his seat in an instant by one thin cry from the leaf hut.

He raised her twice over, as father and as teacher, and he never allowed the two to become confused. As a father he let her be extravagant with her love. She watered the young trees before she drank herself and would not pluck a blossom until she had asked the plant's pardon; the fawns of the ashram followed her as the birds had once ringed her, and one doe grew so bold it took grain from her mouth. He watched all of it and said nothing, because the softness in her was not weakness but a kind of surplus, and he had learned long ago not to prune what was growing well.

As a teacher he was exacting. He taught her the tending of the sacred fire, the correct forms of hospitality, the names and virtues of every herb along the Malini. He taught her to argue. It is not usual to teach a girl of a forest hermitage the whole logic of dharma, the difference between what is lawful and what is merely customary, and how a person may stand in an assembly and defend a truth against men who do not want to hear it. Kanva taught her anyway. His disciples thought it an old man's indulgence.

Only once did another sage ask him plainly whether it did not grieve him, having no son, to have spent his last strength on a foundling girl.

"A daughter," Kanva said, "is a thing held in trust. You take her in, you feed her, you make her fit to stand anywhere in the world, and then one day someone comes and takes her away, and you find you have been storing up sorrow the entire time and calling it happiness. Every householder in the world knows this. I knew it the morning I picked her out of the grass."

He went back to his fire. He had perhaps twelve more years before the sorrow came to collect.

The morning it happened, Kanva rose before anyone and told his disciples he was going to Somatirtha to gather fruit and to turn aside an evil fate that hung over his daughter's head. They were used to such statements from him and did not press. He took two of the younger men and went upriver, and the hermitage settled into its ordinary day: the fire fed, the pots filled, the deer wandering in and out of the doorways, Shakuntala and her two companions among the young trees with their watering jars.

Into that quiet came the noise of a royal hunt - horns, hooves, the crash of a chariot forcing a track through green wood - and then Dushyanta of the Puru line, emperor of the earth, at the gate of a hermitage whose master was elsewhere.

What passed between them belongs to their own telling: the guest received according to the forms because there was no one senior to receive him, the questions asked and answered, the birth story told, and at the end of that long afternoon a marriage of the gandharva rite, by mutual consent and by no authority but their own. The king went back to Hastinapura and promised to send for her.

Afterward it was fashionable among the ashram's visitors to say that the old man had been unlucky in his errand, that if Kanva had been at his fire that day nothing of the sort could have occurred.

His disciples, who knew him better, were not so certain. Kanva could read the movement of a season in the flight of a single bird. He had known for years that his daughter was not made to end her life carrying water to trees. He had gone out that morning saying, in so many words, that he was going to avert something - and the sages who studied him afterward could never agree on what he thought he was averting, or whether he had gone away in order to be absent.

When he came back down the river path with his basket of fruit, he found the hermitage exactly as he had left it, and one girl sitting among the seedlings with her chin on her knees, not watering anything at all.

She did not come to meet him at the gate, which was itself an answer. She was ashamed. She had received a guest, she had disposed of her own life in an afternoon, and she had done both without her father's word, and she was waiting for the thing that everyone in every hermitage on every river expected: the raised voice, the cold silence, the curse of a Brahmin whose authority had been stepped over.

Kanva set down his basket and looked at her for a while.

"Come here, child," he said. "What you have done today, you did without asking me, and it was still not wrong. A man of the kshatriya order, faultless in his line, was received in this house and chose a wife, and she chose him, and the union of two who desire each other and take each other by consent is a lawful marriage - the gandharva rite is named in the law books along with the rest, and for a kshatriya it is no disgrace at all. You have not fallen from dharma. You have only grown up while my back was turned, which is a thing daughters do."

Then his eyes changed, in the way his disciples had seen perhaps three times in thirty years, and he was not looking at her any longer but through the years in front of her.

"Ask me for a boon," he said, "since you have not asked me for anything else."

She could not speak. He gave it to her anyway.

"You will bear a son of measureless strength. He will rule this earth to the edges of the sea, and every kingdom will come under one wheel, and the chariot of that wheel will not be turned back by god or man. He will offer the great sacrifices and give away wealth beyond counting, and long after your name and mine are forgotten in these woods, men will still call this whole land by the name of your son."

The disciples standing behind him heard it, and were afraid.

Kanva simply picked up his basket. "Wash your face," he said. "There is a fire that has not been fed since morning."

No messenger came from Hastinapura. Not that season, nor the next.

The child was born in the hermitage and grew up there, and the hermitage had never held anything like him. They called him Sarvadamana, the all-taming, because at six years old he was dragging lion cubs out of the grass by the scruff to count their teeth, and the lionesses of that forest learned to move their litters elsewhere. He wrestled the ashram's oxen. He could not be tired out. The disciples measured his shoulders against the doorframe and shook their heads, and Kanva watched him from beside the fire and said nothing at all, because he had already said everything on the day of the boon.

Then one morning the old man called his people together.

"A boy of this power cannot be kept among reed huts," he said. "A jewel does not become more valuable by being buried. It is not lawful for a woman to live too long in her father's house after her marriage; it eats away her reputation, her virtue, and her peace, and I will not have my daughter spend her life waiting at my gate for a summons that a king has been careless about sending. Take her to Hastinapura, with the boy. Take her to her husband."

They asked him whether he would go.

"No," Kanva said. "If I stand in that hall, every word she speaks will be heard as mine. She will need to be heard as herself."

So he sent them - his own disciples as escort, an elder to speak for the hermitage, the boy walking, and Shakuntala carrying nothing of the forest but what she had been taught in it. What waited at the end of that road - the token, the denial before the whole assembly, the voice from the sky that overturned it - is another story, and she met all of it standing, alone, arguing dharma with an emperor.

Kanva never saw her again. He went back to his fire and fed it, in a hermitage suddenly very quiet, having done the last thing a guardian is for: he had made her fit to stand anywhere, and then he had let her go and stand there.