Fragments from a Shattered Image

Fragment 1

The girl wiped off the sweat from her brow. She gazed up at the sky. The sun was too bright that day just as it had been the past week. Yet, the village astrologer had predicted rains. She snorted as she thought of him. Him and his rains!!

She looked all around. The woods were still. An occasional breeze skimmed the grass and reached the trees, only to die a strangling death among their branches. The river's surface too was unmarred by ripples.

She sat down wearily on a rock on the shade of a tree. She was grateful for the shade. It was boring, this work of ferrying the occasional passenger across. And tiring too. She looked at her arms in distaste. They were tanned brown from the hours she spent in the sun. And she was already dark to begin with.

She would not have felt so bad if she hadn’t heard the stories of princes and princesses told by the village storyteller. Beautiful they were, according to the story teller, fair and shapely with ornaments adorning their limbs and fragrant with oils and unguents. Not like Satya who was dusky and smelling of fish. And the princes were handsome and brave wearing golden armor and divine weapons, quite unlike the men in Satya's village who carried fish nets and looked taciturn.

Absently, she picked up a blade of grass and began to chew on it.

It was thus the sage found her. In the first blush of her youth, her lovely eyes fixed on the faraway horizon, a blade of grass between her teeth, her pose was languid and seductive.

The girl was unconscious of the picture she presented. She was aware of her arms and body, baked brown from the sun, of her clothes which she was beginning to grow out of and which were patched at several places, of the fishy odour which refused to leave her no matter how many times she bathed, of the calluses in her hands and feet from her hard labour and miles of walking.

The man saw the shapely limbs, the clothes barely adequate to cover her youthful body, her curves straining against them. He saw the straight nose, the firm jaw, the dimpled cheek. He saw her as a temptation and wondered if he should leave.

But he had to cross the river and go to the ashram that day. That decided it for him. He was a sage with control over the senses, he told himself. He was not going to lose control over some fisher girl ferrying the boat no matter how attractive she was.

Even the odor of fish that clung to her combined with the musk of her sweat was intoxicating him.

'Stop it, Parasara,' he told himself sternly.

Satyavati saw the young sage and she rose from where she sat.

"O venerable one," said she. "Do you wish to go across?"

The sage nodded. He was nice looking, she noticed, or would have been if his expression was not so forbidding. There was a look in his eyes that made her tremble, though not from fear. And yet, there was something frightening about him too.

He boarded the boat in silence, his eyes not leaving her. She felt as if his eyes were devouring her whole and she shivered though the day was hot.

"Where to, O great one?"

The question was only a formality. They all came here to go to the ashram on the north east. It was a journey Satya did not like, for sometimes the fog banks would roll in and once they did, they would stay for hours. It would be impossible to guide the boat and Satya would have to drop anchor and wait it out. It would get so cold that she would shiver and worst of all would be her passengers who seemed totally unaware of the situation and would sit still and silent without saying a word.

"The ashram." His voice was a croak, as if his throat was dry.

No wonder, thought she. It was such a hot day.

As she pushed off from the bank, she noticed the fly caught in a spider's web on the grass near the landing. No time to free that now, she thought, feeling agitated. Her passenger would not like waiting. With a sigh, she dropped the pole and picked up the oars.

In later years, Satya asked herself many times if she could have done something differently. Something. Anything. But her mind never gave any answers. It mocked her for being a fool. He was a powerful sage. What could a fisher girl like you have done? It asked her. Why do you even think that you had the power to do anything?

When the fog rolled in, Satya had expected another boring wait. In retrospect, she would have exchanged that afternoon for all the boredom in the world.

"I am a powerful sage," he had told Satya when it was over. "As such no sin will come to you for this."

Satya had heard his words, but had not believed them. She had lost her belief in sages.

Her father had been aghast when he learned the truth. He had been angry but he was practical enough to know that Satya was helpless to stop what had happened. He was also a shrewd man. He had sent Satya to his sister who lived in one of the islands that dotted the great river. And he had also tracked down the sage.

Her father had made a big gamble counting on the sage's youth when he threatened to publicize his act unless he took responsibility for the baby that was growing inside Satya. The sage had less to fear from exposure. Satya's father knew this. If the sage had called his bluff, there was nothing else he could have done but to bury his dreams and his grand ambitions.

But his reading of human nature was not faulty, as it turned out. Parasara was contrite. He agreed to take responsibility for the child. He would have been happy never to see Satya or her father again. It was Satya who stipulated that the child's whereabouts be informed to her.

All that was a thing of the past now. Years had passed. Satya still had nightmares of arms holding her like vices… of hot breath fanning her body… of a knee nudging her legs apart... and in her nightmares, her voice was not stolen by fear and she screamed her “No!” so loud the skies echoed them back.

But in spite of the nightmares, all Satya felt was a curious kind of indifference when she thought of the sage. She was grateful to the sage for two things. The first was the child. Her son Krishna, the dark one who was named Dwaipayana by his father as he was born on an island. The second was for teaching her how to get rid of her body odor and the fishy smell. The sage had told her how to extract fragrances from flowers and herbs and how to use them so that her body would remain fragrant for hours. In fact, she became known as Yojanagandha among her people who were amazed at how fish smelling Satya suddenly became so sweet smelling. Her aunt thought it was the sage's magic. Satya never attempted to correct her. She knew that her aunt's superstition was the best protection for her reputation.