The Maiden Who Cooked the Jujubes

The great war had begun at Kurukshetra, and Balarama, who would not lift his plough for either side, had turned his back on the field and walked upstream along the Saraswati. He went as pilgrims go, slowly, bathing at each ford, and at each ford he asked for the story that had made the place holy. The river was his teacher on that journey. The ascetics who lived along her banks were her tongue.

At the close of one day he came to a landing where the water ran shallow and clear over pale sand. Back from the bank stood a grove of jujube trees, old and crooked, heavy with small hard fruit. There was a smell of woodsmoke about the place, though no fire burned anywhere in sight, and Balarama stopped where the path met the water and stood there a long while without knowing why.

"What ford is this?" he asked the ascetics who had come down to greet him. "It has a name. I can feel that it carries a name."

"It is called Badarapachana," said the eldest of them. "The Cooking of the Jujubes. The gods gave it that name themselves, and they gave it for the sake of a girl."

Balarama laid his plough down on the sand and sat beside it. "Then tell it," he said. "I have walked a long way to hear such things. I would rather hear this than eat."

The old ascetic looked at the grove, and at the water sliding past, and he began where the story begins, in an age far behind this one, when the forests along the Saraswati were thick with fire altars and the smoke of them went up all day. In those days a sage named Bharadvaja lived not far from this bank, and Bharadvaja had a daughter.

Her name was Sruchavati, and she grew up among the altars, learning the chants before she learned to grind grain. She had no wish for the things girls are taught to wish for. When her father first spoke to her of a husband she was silent for three days together, and on the fourth she came to him where he sat feeding the evening fire.

"Father, I have thought," she said. "There is one alone I will take, and he is Indra, who is lord of the gods and of the rain. If not him, then no one at all. I will stay in this grove until my body drops off me like a dry leaf."

Bharadvaja did not laugh. He had spent his life among people who bent the world with their will, and he knew what he was hearing. He said only, "Then you will need more than wanting," and he gave her his blessing and the ground beside the river, and he did not speak of marriage again.

So she stayed. Through the rains she stood in the Saraswati with the brown water at her throat and the current pulling at her, and she did not move. Through the cold she lay on the wet sand at night in a single wet cloth. Through the burning months she sat between four fires with the sun overhead for the fifth, and let the heat work on her from every side. She ate what the trees dropped, and then only leaves, and then only air. Her hair matted into ropes. Ants made their roads across her feet and she let them. The deer came down to drink beside her without lifting their heads, because she had become to them a thing as still as a stone.

Years passed in this way, more years than the ascetics who tell the story bother to count. And the heat of that vow went up out of the grove the way smoke goes up, and heaven smelled it.

In his hall among the clouds Indra felt her steadiness the way a man feels a lamp carried near his face, and he rose from his seat. He did not go to her as himself. He put off the thousand eyes and the wet garlands and the smell of rain, and he took the shape of an aged rishi, a form worn thin and grey with study, walking with a staff, his ribs showing under the deerskin. Some say he wore the very likeness of Vasishtha, so that she should suspect nothing at all.

He came up the bank at midday, and Sruchavati, seeing an old brahmana approaching her hut, forgot her posture and her penance at once and ran to meet him. She washed his feet with river water. She spread the cleanest grass she had. She brought roots and fruit and set them before him with her palms joined and her head lowered, and she said what the ancient law says a householder must say, though she had no house worth the name.

"Command me, sir. Whatever is in this place is yours. I am fortunate that you have come."

The old man looked at her a long moment. Then he untied a corner of his cloth and shook out five jujubes into his palm, small and green and hard as river pebbles, the kind the trees along that bank still bear.

"I have a fancy for these," he said, "but my teeth are gone and my stomach is old. Boil them for me. I will go down to the water and sit, and when they are soft I will eat, and then I will bless you and go on."

She took the five fruits in both hands as though they were something enormous. "It is a small thing," she said. "It will be done before you have finished your prayers."

The old rishi went down to the Saraswati, sat, closed his eyes, and left her to it.

She built her fire in the pit before the hut, set the earthen pot on it with water and the five jujubes, and sat down to wait with her chin on her knees.

The water boiled. The fruits knocked against the sides of the pot and stayed as hard as they had been in the old man's palm. She fed the fire and waited. The sun came off the noon and slid down the sky, and the fruits did not soften. She fed the fire again, and the pile of wood she had gathered that week went into it, stick by stick, and the fruits did not soften.

When the woodpile was gone she pulled the dry grass off the roof of her hut and pushed that in, and it flared and gave nothing. She broke the poles of the hut across her knee and fed them in. She went out into the last of the light and dragged back every fallen branch within reach of the grove, and fed those in, and the water in the pot boiled and boiled and the five jujubes lay in it unchanged, as though they were not fruit at all but something sent to ask her a question.

It was dark now. There was nothing left along that bank that would burn. Down at the water the old man sat with his eyes shut, waiting for his meal, and a guest was waiting, and she had promised.

Sruchavati looked at the fire, and then at her own body, and she understood that she had been mistaken all these years about what she had to give. She put her feet into the flames and held them there and did not cry out. When they were consumed she pushed in her legs. Then her hands, then her arms, feeding herself to the fire as calmly as she had fed it sticks, keeping her eyes on the pot the whole time to see whether the fruits had begun at last to soften.

The fire took the offering and rose, and in that light the old rishi was standing over her, and he was not old. The grey fell away from him. The thousand eyes opened. The smell of rain came off him and filled the grove, and the pot on the fire boiled over, and the five jujubes broke open, soft, sweet, cooked through.

"Enough," said Indra. "They are done, daughter. They were never going to soften for firewood."

Sruchavati could not join her palms, for she had no hands. She bowed what was left of her.

"You have stood in that river until the fish knew you," the god said. "You have sat between fires for years to make me look at you. I looked, and I was not moved. Any determined creature can burn itself slowly. Tonight an old man with no teeth asked you for a bowl of cooked fruit, and when there was nothing left in the world to give him you gave him your feet and your arms and never once said that the cost was too high. That is what heaven has been waiting for. Penance buys a seat. Only this buys the house."

Her body was made whole in the fire as she watched, and more than whole, shining. Then Indra said, loud enough that the ascetics up and down the Saraswati lifted their heads in the dark:

"Let this ford be called Badarapachana, the Cooking of the Jujubes, from this night until the end of the ages. Whoever bathes here and fasts here and remembers what was done at this fire will not be turned away from the worlds above. And you, Sruchavati, will come with me now, in this body, and dwell where I dwell."

The old ascetic stopped speaking. The river went on past them in the dark.

Balarama rose, waded in, and bathed there before he slept, and in the morning he gave gold to the brahmanas of that grove, and went on upstream, saying nothing for a long while.