Pīpā

There is a place in what is now Rajasthan where two rivers come together, and on the tongue of rock between them there is a hill, and on the hill there is a fort. Water stands against three of its sides. On the fourth a ditch has been cut down through the stone. The walls follow the shape of the hill and not the convenience of the men who built them, so that they bulge and turn and run back on themselves, and a man standing underneath cannot see along them. There is one road up. It goes in through a gate, turns, goes in through a second gate, turns again, and turns twice more before it reaches the top, because a gate that a horse can be ridden straight at is not a gate.

That is Gagaraungarh. The town of the same name lies below it, between the fort and the water, and the fields lie beyond the water, and in the hot months the rivers go down to a green stillness and the whole country smells of dust and cattle.

A fort of that kind is not a building. It is a payroll. There are men on the gates by day and men on the gates by night, watchmen at the corners, labourers to keep the ditch clear of scrub, masons always somewhere on the wall, because a wall that is not being repaired is coming down. There are horses, and horses in that country eat grain that has to be carted up a road with four turns in it. There are grooms for the horses and smiths for the horseshoes and armourers for the iron and water carriers for all of them. There are granaries that must be kept full against a siege that may not come for thirty years, and grain in a granary has to be turned and watched and paid for. A king in that country in the fifteenth century held what he held by being able to put men on a wall and horses on a road, and he kept those men by giving away a great deal of what came in to him, and what came in to him was grain off the fields and a cut of whatever the roads carried.

In that house a son was born, and he was called Pīpā, and in time the fort and the town and the country round them were his. The oldest account of him names his clan in its fifth line: Pīpā Khīchī, of the Chauhāns, and it says that the thirty-six clans lived in his town and that every house in it gave something away. It says he oppressed nobody, that he kept the rules a king is supposed to keep, that he was a hero in a fight, and that he was pious and shrewd, which is an unusual pair of words to find side by side.

He was a worshipper of the Goddess. Ādi Bhavānī, the accounts call her, the Devī who is queen of Nagarkoṭ away in the hills; Durgā; Śakti, which means power. She is the one who is worshipped in that country by men who carry arms, because strength is what she is, and a king in a fort on a hill has an obvious use for her and an obvious reason to keep on the right side of her. He acknowledged no second deity. Everything religious that he did, he did for her. He was not a man who went to her when he wanted something. He was bound to her by a vow, which is a different arrangement altogether: a vow is an obligation with a quantity in it, and it has to be met whether the year has been good or bad and whether the man who took it is well or ill or away at a war.

The quantity in his was forty maunds of food a day.

A maund is not a cooking measure. It is a load. It is what a strong man carries on his back, or what you weigh grain in when you are selling it off a cart. Set forty of them before an image every day of the year and you are not keeping a shrine, you are running a commissariat. Fires lit long before light. Grinding stones going in a row. Men to carry water and men to carry wood and men to carry the finished food up through the gates in covered trays, and more men to lay it out, and a standing order on the granary that nobody in the administration is permitted to query. Every day. Then it was taken away again, and what became of it is not recorded.

And there was more than the food. A fire offering every six months. The eighth day of Chaitra and the eighth day of Āśvin coming round, and the worship beginning in the bright half. An eight-day fast he did not break. The altar fire never let out, and the night watch kept beside it. The offerings are itemised in the old account the way a steward would itemise them: milk pudding, sugar, ghee, dried dates, raisins, cloves, cardamom, camphor. Then silk cloth, coconut, areca nut, aloes wood, sesame, barley, betel leaves.

He did that for twelve years.

There is no sign in any of the accounts that he was unhappy, or restless, or looking about him for something better. He was a king who did what he had undertaken to do, on a scale that his whole household had to be arranged around, and it evidently satisfied him. He was brave, the chroniclers say, and liberal, and learned, and religious, and he kept a tight hold on himself, and he watched everything.

Then some holy men came up the road towards his city.

They were wandering men with nothing, on the roads between one holy place and the next, and a party of them coming towards a capital was an ordinary event that every court in India knew how to handle.

Pīpā handled it well. He sent out provisions. Not cooked food, which they could not have taken from a royal kitchen, but the raw materials: flour, dāl, rice, water, and with it leaves to eat off and flowers and fruit. This is the correct and generous thing, and it shows a man who had been told how it was done and had listened. A sādhu cooks for himself, on his own fire, in his own pot, and what you give him is the stuff before it is touched. Pīpā sent out enough of it and he sent it out promptly.

They took what came, whatever it was, without asking for anything else and without remarking on it. Then they offered their food to God, as they always did, and they prayed.

They prayed that the king's understanding might be improved.

That is what is recorded, and it is not gratitude and it is not a blessing on his reign and it is not what a court would have expected to hear. They did not pray that his line might continue or his granaries stay full. They looked at what had come out of the gate to them, forty maunds a day going to an image and flour and rice coming out to the road, and they prayed that the man arranging all this might be given some sense.

Some time after that, fear got into him.

He woke at midnight and sat up on the bed and began to cry, and he could not stop. He had been dreaming. In the dream he had killed Mahiṣāsura, the buffalo demon, which is the one killing in the whole of the old stories that belongs to the Goddess and to nobody else, and it is the thing she is for and the reason she is armed; and then in the dream he had run away from what he had done, crying out as he ran; and then he had fallen into a blind well. When he woke he was still lost.

And the Goddess came into the room.

She asked him what he wanted, and she asked it again, and again. She gave him her name, which is Jālapā, and she said she was pleased with him. Tell me what is grieving you. Is it a sickness in the body? Is it poverty? Is there an enemy too strong for you? I will destroy the lot of them today.

He could not speak. The old account says love welled up in him and stopped his mouth, and that she stood there questioning him with her eyes and holding her own hem, the way a mother stands over a child and says that she will fill his plate.

Then, half conscious, he told her. And what he asked her for was not a sickness cured or an enemy destroyed. He asked her to cut the thing that was holding him. He told her he knew what his house was worth and did not want any more of it; that gold and women and a great name had no happiness in them anywhere; that when he looked at the pleasures he had they looked to him like excrement.

And the Goddess, who had been fed by him for twelve years, told him the truth.

She said that māyā is sweet in all three worlds and that no ritual gets a man out of it. She said that without devotion to Hari in the heart, and without the knowledge of what is actually there, nobody is released, by any road. And then she asked him the question that turns this whole life over, and it is the kindest thing anyone says to him in any account of his life:

Where have you ever seen liberation with me?

He fainted.

She was sorry for him. She fanned him, and she gave him water to drink, and the old poem says she did it the way a sister soothes a brother. After a while he came round, and the first thing he did was reproach her. I served you all this time thinking you were the way out. Was that your kindness? Why did you not tell me before?

She said he had never asked. She said the blame would not stick, because she had never once told him to stop.

Then she preached to him, at length. The substance of it was that people worship out of greed, and that release comes by no other road than the one she had just named, and that all the gods are Hari's servants. And then she told him what Hari is. He makes and unmakes. He is afraid of nobody, and everything is afraid of him. He does not age and does not die and cannot be got at by the senses, and he gives his own people every happiness there is.

When she had finished, Pīpā asked her how a man like him, who was worthless and conceited and not humble, was supposed to go about serving Rām.

She gave him the address. In the city of Banaras there is Rāmānand. Make him your guru. He will show you how it is done. Your liberation is certain.

Then she asked his leave to go, and before she went, she bent down and put her head on his feet.

Everyone in the house woke. At daybreak she was gone. He wept like a deer that has lost its forest, and like a woman whose husband has been twelve months away across the sea.

Every account of Pīpā's life gives her the credit for the whole of what follows.

His household could not get a word out of him. He wept and sighed and would not say why, and they did what people do. One of them said a snake had bitten him. One said he had been struck by a spell. One said a demon had hold of him. One said it was a disease. Physicians were sent for and gave him purges. The spirit-men said he was possessed. Charms were recited over him. The Goddess's own ornaments were pledged. Astrologers were brought in to read the almanac and gifts were made on account of the planets.

None of it worked, because there was nothing wrong with him.

His kinsmen wept, the men and the women together, and what they said was: how are we to rule without Pīpā? The city will be empty by tonight. And he told them that this was all self-interest, and that love of the higher thing is rare, and that they should look after themselves and not be ruined on his account, because death is coming for every one of them and they had better take shelter.

Then he left, and his people thought he had gone out of his mind. It is not hard to see why. The vow was a matter of state. The kitchen, the granary order, the carrying, the whole arrangement was the visible religion of that country, and the man at the top of it had got up one morning and said he was going east. Kāśī is the width of the north of India away, through country belonging to other men, and he was going there to ask a brahmin who had never heard of him to take him on as a pupil.

He did not travel light and he did not travel alone. He took a hundred horsemen and five hundred men on foot, and the reason he took them is the most endearing thing in his whole life: he intended that all of them should be initiated as well. He had found the address of the way out and he was bringing six hundred men with him to be let through it.

They went night and day, and on the thirteenth day they came into Banaras.

Rāmānand lived at the ghāṭ called Pañcgaṅgā, which is a flight of steps going down into the Ganges on the north side of the city, where the bank is highest above the water. Kāśī is that city's older name and its own name for itself. There was a house there with an open court and a door on the lane, and holy men came and went through it all day, and inside it there was singing.

Pīpā came up the lane and heard the singing and went to the door.

The singing is worth a moment. A house of that kind sings at fixed hours and the sound goes out into the lane, and any man walking past can stand and listen for as long as he likes, and men did. It is the one part of the arrangement that was never kept behind a wall. What was kept behind a wall was the teacher.

The doorkeeper stopped him.

A doorkeeper at such a house is not a soldier. He is a disciple with a job, and the job is to take a name in and bring an answer out, and he had plainly been given his instructions about this particular caller before the caller arrived.

What the doorkeeper said first, before any message went in at all, is preserved in the oldest account, and it is the kind of thing a man says at a door when he has decided in advance how the conversation is going to go. Stand outside. Speak when you are spoken to. Who are you and what country have you come from? You have walked in here uninvited. And do not imagine this is a royal court: this is Rāmānand's place, and he has no business with men or with kings, and he goes on remembering Rām night and day.

Pīpā answered him with the only sentence he had. We are Rajputs. We have come from the western country. I want initiation from Rāmānand.

Then the message came back out. It said there was a great difference between attachment to a household and renunciation, and that in this house they had no fondness for royal people, and that a king with māyā tied round him would understand nothing of what was taught here and had better find another teacher. Another telling of it puts the same thing shorter: this is a place for faqīrs, what business have kings here.

And the old account adds one detail that the later ones leave out. Rāmānand bolted the door. Not a servant. He went and put his own hand on it.

He had come the width of India on a road. He had been sent by the Goddess he had served all his life, by name, to this man, in this city. He was a king, and every door he had ever walked towards in his life had been opened before he reached it. And he was being told, in a lane, by a servant, that he was the wrong sort of person, and that the reason he was the wrong sort of person was the thing that everybody else in the world had spent their lives envying him for.

Nothing in the accounts says he argued. Nothing says he sent in his titles or offered money or asked for a hearing. What the accounts say is that he blew the whole thing away like a straw.

That is the phrase, and it is the right one. He went back and disposed of his entire wealth.

Not some of it, and not in the useful way a king disposes of wealth, which is to settle it on temples and on sons in a manner that keeps the revenue moving in the same direction it was already moving. He got rid of it. There is a great deal buried in that one sentence and no account fills it in: the granary orders cancelled, the treasury opened, the men who had run all of it standing in a courtyard being told that there was nothing further to run.

Then he came back to the door in Kāśī with nothing on him and said that he was a faqīr now.

And the order came out of the house: jump into the well.

He ran straight at it.

He did not ask what it was for. He did not stand there working out whether the Swami meant it. He turned and went at the well the way a man goes at something he has decided about, and Rāmānand's people, who had plainly been told to be ready, caught him in mid-spring, with his feet off the ground and the mouth of the well in front of him, and held him, and carried him in to the Swāmī.

So he never went into the well. There is a man running four paces across a courtyard and being taken hold of in the air, and a teacher inside a room watching a doorway to see what comes through it.

The sources themselves are dry about the whole thing later on, when something happens that makes the well look like what it was, which was a rehearsal. That comes at the end of the week. For now it is enough that the man who had been turned away for being a king had proved, in about two seconds, in front of witnesses, that there was nothing left of the king to turn away.

Rāmānand was satisfied and took him in.

He was initiated with the proper rite.

The word to hold on to there is proper. Nothing was waived for him and nothing was shortened. He got what a potter or a tanner coming in at that door would have got, in the same words, in the same order, which was the entire point of the house he was standing in.

The order he was being taken into was one that had been made, not inherited. Rāmānand had been expelled by his own people over a rule about food, a rule that held that what was set before the image behind the screen was spoilt if any eye but the cook's fell on it, and Rāmānand had said what he thought of that and been put out for saying it. What he built afterwards had the culinary rules relaxed, Sītā and Rām at the centre of it, all castes eating and drinking together, and the door open. A weaver was in it. A tanner was in it. Anantānand was in it, and Sureśvarānand, and Sukhānand, and Bhāvānand, and Sain the barber, and Dhannā the farmer. And now a king was in it, which had taken slightly longer to arrange than either of the others, and had taken a well to do it.

Then he was sent home.

The instruction was to go back to Gagaraungarh and serve sādhus there until the service turned sweet. That is the whole of it and it is a strange thing to say to a man who has just given everything away and run at a well. Not: stay here at the ghāṭ and learn. Not: sit at my feet. Go back to the place where everybody knows you, to the fort and the town and the people who thought you had lost your reason, and wait on holy men there, and keep doing it until the doing of it stops being work and starts being the thing you would have chosen. And after a year, the guru said, I will come to you myself.

The twelve months passed like a moment. That is how it is put, and after everything else in this day it is the detail that most rings true. A man who has been given something to do and a date to do it by, and who does it, does not find the time long.

What he was doing was washing feet and carrying water and cooking and standing about waiting to be needed, in his own country, where he had been the king, in front of people who had known him at the top of that road with four turns in it. There is nothing at all in the accounts about how the town took it. There is only the fact that he was set a year of it and that when the year was over he was still there and still at it.

At the end of the year he sent a letter. It was a reminder, courteously put: the twelve months are over and you said you would come.

Rāmānand came. He set out from Kāśī with forty holy men, and among the forty were Kabīr and Ravidās, whom the reader of this book has been walking beside for six days.

It is worth saying what that party was, because it is the only time in this book that the whole company is in one place on one road. An old brahmin of Prayāg who had been thrown out of his own order over a rule about food. Forty men behind him with nothing between them. A weaver who was a Muslim and an unbeliever to both religions, and a tanner who worked hides and said so. They were walking several hundred miles to eat a meal in a fort belonging to a man who had been feeding an image forty maunds a day two years before.

They went west, the whole party of them, on the roads Pīpā had come east on. Forty men and their teacher, walking, sleeping where they were given room, cooking at the side of the road, singing at night, going towards a fort on a hill between two rivers where somebody was watching the road.

He came out of his own capital to meet them.

A king riding out to receive a holy man is not unusual and there is a form for it. You go out a decent distance, you dismount, you make an obeisance, you bring him in with honour, and everybody in the town sees the arrangement, which is that the king has humbled himself in a manner that increases him. That is not what happened.

A full prostration is the whole body on the ground, face down, arms stretched out beyond the head, nothing held back and nothing kept under you. It is not a bow. A man doing it cannot see anything and cannot get up quickly, and that is the point of it.

He prostrated before Rāmānand, full length, face down. Then he prostrated before the next man, full length. Then the next. He went along the whole party of forty and put his forehead on the ground in front of every single one of them, separately, with the town watching. Forty men who owned nothing. Some of them were low caste. One of them was a Muslim weaver. One of them worked hides.

There is no sign that he had planned any of this in advance. It has the look of a man doing the next thing that occurs to him and then the next, in public, with his whole administration standing round him in good clothes.

Then he had a palanquin brought and got his teacher into it.

A palanquin is the vehicle of exactly one kind of person. It exists so that a man can be carried through a place without his feet touching it, and everybody who sees one knows what is inside it and what the men underneath it are. It goes on a pole on the shoulders of four men or eight, and the men who carry it are the men who carry it, and their whole working lives are spent under that pole. Pīpā went in under it and took the weight on his own shoulder.

So the party came into Gagaraungarh with the king of the place in the carrying team, and the whole way in he was scattering wealth and grain into the street on either side.

Scattering grain brings a street out. Scattering money brings the next street out as well. By the time that procession was halfway in there would have been people running down from the lanes on both sides and children in front of the poles and a good deal of noise, and everybody in it could see who was under the back end of it. The fort was above them with his own flag on it. His guards were on the gates he was walking through. The men who had carried palanquins for him all their lives were standing at the edge of the road watching him do their work.

And Rāmānand, riding along in the palanquin on the shoulders of his disciple, looked down and made one remark.

He said that if Pīpā went on like this, then giving up the kingdom and staying on in the house were both alike for him.

That is the turn of the whole life and it repays reading twice, because it can be heard two ways and both of them are in it. On the surface it is a kindness: you need not leave, your conduct has already settled the question, a man in your state can stay where he is and be no worse off. Underneath it is the hardest thing anyone had said to him yet, which is that the kingdom no longer weighed anything at all. It had stopped being a thing he possessed and become a thing he was walking about inside. If the two are alike, then keeping it is not a sacrifice he is making and letting it go is not one either, and there is nothing there to be decided, and a man who has understood that has already gone.

He understood it.

He got out from under the pole and ran round to the front and fell down at his guru's feet, in the road, in front of the whole town, with the palanquin coming to a stop over him and forty men walking up behind.

He never took the kingdom up again.

Rāmānand wanted to see the temples at Dwārkā, which is on the coast of Kathiawar, at the western edge of the country, where the land runs out into the sea. The party would be going on. Pīpā was going with them, and he was not coming back.

The queens would not be left.

How many of them there were is not settled. Twelve is said. Twenty is said. The old commentary leaves both readings standing and this book leaves them standing too, because there is no way to close the question and nothing is gained by pretending otherwise. Call it a women's household of between twelve and twenty wives, every one of whom had been married to a king, and who had now been informed that he was leaving on foot with a party of mendicants for a coast none of them had seen.

They said they would come.

He told them what it would be, and telling them did no good, because they had nothing to measure it against. Hunger is a word to a woman who has never been hungry. Sleeping on the ground is a word. Walking is a word. They had all been carried everywhere they had ever gone.

So he stopped arguing and cut up a blanket.

It was the coarse kind, the sort a mendicant wears, and he tore it into strips, and he handed the strips out, and he gave them the instruction. Wear this. One piece at the neck and one at the waist. Take off the ornaments and take off the clothes. If staying at home does not suit you, then travel in that dress.

Not one of them could do it.

They stood there in the room with the strips of blanket in their hands, and nobody moved, and then they all wept.

It was an exact test, and it was not a test about poverty. He did not ask them to give up money, which they could have done, and women of that household had given away money all their lives and been praised for it. He did not ask them to fast or to walk or to sleep on stone. He asked them to be seen. Two strips of blanket is not clothing. It leaves a woman visible from every direction to every man on every road between Gagaraungarh and the sea, and the ornaments he told them to take off were the marks by which anyone looking would know who she was and whose she was and that she was not to be touched. He was asking them to walk out of the gate with the protection off.

He knew them. That is the thing. He had lived with these women for years and he put the one demand in front of them that he was certain not one of them would meet, and then he stood there while they wept, and he was right about every one of them but one.

The youngest of all of them got up at once.

She took off her ornaments and she took off her finery. She cast off shame, which is how the accounts put it, and it is the accurate expression, because what she was taking off was not cloth but a thing she had been dressed in since she was a child. She tied the strip of blanket at her waist. Then she came and stood with the company of holy men, with her hands folded in front of her, waiting.

Her name was Sītā Sahacharī.

Pīpā looked at her and said: take that off too.

She did.

Rāmānand pitied her. And Pīpā did not want her. He did not want to take a woman on the road with him, and he said so, and he went to his guru about it, and he begged him again and again to hand her over to some other disciple. Not once. Repeatedly. The youngest wife of the man who had just given away a kingdom and run at a well had done in one movement what nobody else in that household could do, and had stood there with nothing on and her hands folded, and her husband spent the next while trying to get her assigned to somebody else.

Rāmānand put him under oath.

Only then did Pīpā take her hand.

The queens made one more attempt and it was not a gentle one.

They went to the family priest, the brahmin who had served that house for as long as any of them could remember, who had done the births and the marriages and the offerings for the dead, and they told him to stop the king by any means he liked.

He chose his means. He came in front of Pīpā and swallowed poison.

It is the oldest pressure there is and it is aimed at exactly one thing, which is the other man's conscience, and it worked for as long as it took to work. Pīpā was terrified. He was watching a brahmin of his own household die in front of him on his account, and there is no version of that which a man walks away from clean.

Rāmānand brought the man back that instant.

Then he sent the whole party of them away, the priest and the queens together, and that is the last that is heard of any of them. There is no scene of forgiveness and no scene of blessing. They had tried to hold a man by killing somebody in his doorway, and it had been undone in about the time it takes to say so, and they were told to go home.

Then the walking.

They went west and south-west, out of that country towards the sea, and the accounts say only that Pīpā blessed people along the roads. It would have been a matter of months. The party had Rāmānand in it, who was an old man by any reckoning, and forty holy men, and one king with nothing, and one young woman in a strip of blanket. They went through country where nobody had ever heard of Gagaraungarh and through country where everybody had. They were fed by people with very little, which is who feeds mendicants. At some point the land goes flat and pale and the trees get thorny and the soil turns to sand, and then there is a smell on the wind that nobody from the middle of India has ever met before, and then, at the far end of a long peninsula, there is the sea.

Dwārkā stands on that coast. The temple is a tall thing on a rise above the water with a flag on it that can be seen from a long way out, and the town is built up against it, and the sea goes out from the foot of the town to a horizon with nothing on it at all. It is held to be the city Kṛṣṇa ruled in, at the end of his life, after he left the pasture country where the stories about him are set. Pilgrims came there from everywhere. The place lives on them.

The pilgrim who comes there from the interior arrives at the end of a road that has been getting drier and emptier for days, and then the ground stops. There is a great deal of sky on that coast and the light off the water is white. Boats go out and come in. The wind is salt and it gets into the food and onto the skin and it does not let up, and the temple flag stands straight out from the pole most of the day.

Rāmānand had come to see the temples. He saw them.

After some days the party turned round and set off back to Kāśī, which was a walk of the same length in the other direction, and Pīpā asked leave to stay where he was, and it was given.

Why he stayed is not given as a reason anywhere and does not need to be. He had come to the western edge of the land and there was a town on it that belonged to the person he was looking for, and he had nothing to go back for. Rāmānand let him go, which is the last recorded thing between those two men.

So the two of them stood on that coast and watched the road take forty-one men away east, and then they turned round and there was nothing in front of them but water.

They walked into the sea together and went under.

There was no reason for it except that they wanted to see God, and he was held to be in there, in the city that went under when he left it, and so they went in. Nobody sent them. Nobody was watching at the start, although a crowd gathered on the beach soon enough, because a man and a woman walking steadily out into the water do not go unnoticed for long on a pilgrim coast.

The water came up to the knee and then to the waist and then over them, and they kept going.

The seabed at Dwārkā shelves off slowly and then it does not. A man wading out there goes a long way before it takes him, long enough for everybody behind him on the beach to understand what they are watching and to start shouting.

A figure came to meet them. He had been sent by Kṛṣṇa to fetch them in, and he showed them the way, and he brought them through to the palace.

Kṛṣṇa was standing forward to receive them. Rukmiṇī was beside him.

They stayed seven days. The city under the water has streets in it and gates and courtyards and doorways and rooms behind the doorways, and they were taken through palace after palace, and it took seven days to go round, and for the whole of that time they were with him.

There is no description of any of it. Not one of the accounts tells us what the walls were made of or what the light was like or what was said. A man came from the middle of India and went under the sea and spent a week in the house of God and the record of it is that there were a great many palaces and that it took seven days.

Sītā Sahacharī had been a queen in a fort on a hill and had walked out of it in two strips of blanket, and had come the whole width of the country on her feet, and had been told twice that she should go home, and she went in beside her husband and came out the other side into the courtyards of that city, and was received there, and stayed a week.

At the end of the seven days he told them to go out.

They would not go. They said what anyone would say in that position, which is that they had spent their whole lives getting to this and did not propose to leave it.

So he explained.

He told them they would be in exactly the same absorption wherever they were. The state they were standing in was not a property of the place. It would not be left behind at the door, because it had never been in the building. He told them that too, in so many words, and they were listening to it in a courtyard under the sea, which is the one place where a thing like that is impossible to argue with, because they had come a very long way to a specific address and were being told the address was not the point.

And then he told them the practical reason, which is the part of the whole day that a reader should keep.

He said that if he did not send them out, the world would say that a devotee of God had drowned at Dwārkā. That is what the crowd on the beach would carry home and that is what would be said for the next hundred years: two of them went into the water and neither came back, and that is what comes of it. He said they had better go and wipe that off.

He gave Pīpā the branding seal. It is a seal of the kind that is heated in a fire and set against the skin of the upper arm, so that the mark it leaves stays there for the rest of a man's life and can be seen by anybody.

Rukmiṇī gave Sītā Sahacharī her own sari.

And then he came out with them, as far as the shore.

There was a crowd on the beach. A good many of them had been standing there seven days earlier and had watched the two of them walk in.

Seven days is long enough for a thing like that to be settled in a town. It would have been told in the lanes and at the water sellers and in the lodging houses where the pilgrims stay, and it would have been told in the past tense: a man and a woman went in off the beach on such a day and did not come out. A coast town knows what the sea gives back and when.

They came up out of the water, and not a thread of their clothes and not a hair of their bodies was wet.

The crowd took them back into Dwārkā with honour. The whole town came out to it, and there would have been people walking backwards in front of them the whole way up from the beach, and it was exactly the kind of procession that Pīpā had spent a good deal of effort getting out from under.

Then he went to the temple and gave the seal into the hands of the priests there, with God's own word attached to it, which was that whoever takes the brand crosses the ocean of existence.

A pilgrim who asked for it sat down and put out his arm, and the iron came out of the fire, and it was done in a second, and he walked away from that temple with a mark on him that he would be buried or burned with.

He did not keep it. He had been given the one portable thing in that entire week and he handed it over to the men whose work it was to stand in that temple and receive pilgrims, and it stayed there, and it was used on other people's arms.

There is no word anywhere about what the crowd said, or what the two of them said to the crowd, or whether anybody on that beach went into the water afterwards to see.

It is worth a sentence, and only a sentence, that the accounts themselves notice what the well at Kāśī had been. A teacher had once ordered this man to jump into water and had caught him before he reached it. The rehearsal was some years back. Nobody ordered him this time.

Set the two scenes beside each other and the second one is stranger than it looks, because the first one was a test and the second one was not. There was nothing to prove on that beach. Rāmānand was eight hundred miles away. The forty were gone. There was no one to be satisfied and no initiation waiting at the end of it and no crowd yet when they started. Two people who had nothing left to give away walked into the sea because the person they wanted was in there.

What the two of them had out of those seven days, in the end, was nothing they could show anybody. A sari and a seal came out of the water with them, and the seal went to the priests inside the hour. There was no book, no message to carry to the world, no instruction to found anything. They had been asked in, they had been shown round, and they had been sent out again with a job that took one morning: to walk up a beach in front of people so that nobody could say a devotee of God had drowned.

They stayed on that coast a while longer, and people came to them, and more people came, and that was the trouble.

A crowd is the thing this life keeps running away from. The doorkeeper at Kāśī had been right about one thing at least: a man with a following around him is carrying a household, whatever he calls it, and the two of them had just acquired the largest following they had ever had.

It was Sītā Sahacharī who said so. She said that if they meant to keep anything of what they had, they had better get out of a country where everybody knew their names and go somewhere nobody did.

They went off from the crowds, inland, towards the forest country.

There are only two of them from here on. Whatever else this day has in it, that is the shape of the rest of it: a man who had been a king and a young woman who had been a queen, on foot, in country where the villages are a day apart and the road between them goes through scrub and then through trees.

They had no escort of any kind. That is not a small thing in that century. The roads of the interior were worked by people who lived off them, and everybody who travelled either went in a party or paid somebody, and these two did neither, and had nothing worth taking, and were carrying the one thing that men of that sort take anyway.

On the way he told her the thing he had been working round to for some time. He said it was not right for a young and beautiful woman to travel alone with him.

She took no notice of it whatever.

They came to a place marked by a boundary stone, and there were Pathan robbers in that country, and one of them saw her.

The whole band came down on the two of them at once. What was wanted was not the bundle. There was no bundle. She was what was wanted. There were a number of them, and there were two of the party, and one of the two was a woman.

She prayed. What she said is preserved and it has no piety on it at all. She said that if God delayed by a moment she did not know what would become of her honour or of her life.

He did not delay. The men were punished, and she was given the sight of him standing in front of her, and she was brought back to her husband.

They walked on.

And after a while Pīpā said to her: look what keeps arising. Go home even now.

It was the third time. He had told her not to come when the blanket was cut up. He had begged his teacher to give her to somebody else. He had told her on the road out of Dwārkā that a young woman should not be travelling alone with a man. And now he had watched a band of armed men come at her out of the scrub because of her face, and he turned to her on the road afterwards and told her to go back.

Here is what she said.

She said: this maidservant will never put a foot backwards. Not now and not for this and not for anything. She said he had not thought rightly, and she said it to his face, on the road, straight afterwards. Then she asked him two questions. What effort, she asked, did you ever make on my behalf? Name it. When the men came out of the scrub, what did you do about it, and what could you have done? And what trouble was there, she asked, in the whole of this, from the fort to the blanket to the sea to the men at the boundary stone, that the two of them failed to quiet?

The two of them. Rām and Sītā, the divine pair, the ones whose names she had been given half of. Every single thing that has come at us, she is saying, has been quieted, and not by you, and not by me, and you know quite well who quieted it, and you are standing here offering me a road home as though the arrangement depended on your protection.

Then he laughed.

He told her he had been testing her. He told her that her firmness had given him the greatest pleasure there is.

Take it as it stands. It was a test, and he had been running it since the day he tore the blanket into strips, and the woman he ran it on did not fail it once, and at the end of it he was laughing on a forest road and telling her so. She had passed out of being the youngest queen of Gagaraungarh some considerable time before. From here to the end of the book she is the other half of everything that happens.

The forest they went into after that was dense.

Dense is not a decoration. It means the track is a single line of trodden earth with the growth standing up on both sides of it above head height, and that a man walking it can see about fifteen paces in front of him and nothing at all to either side, and that anything which wants to come at him has only to wait.

Somewhere in it there was a roar.

The animal had their scent and it came for them, hunting them out through the undergrowth in the way that such an animal does, working from the smell towards the thing that makes it.

The moment its eyes reached them it went as meek as a goat and began wagging its tail like a dog.

Pīpā walked up to it. He gave it a mantra. He put a garland round its neck. He told it what it was to do, and it listened, and that is the whole of the story and the accounts do not decorate it.

Nobody in those accounts is surprised, and nobody explains. The man who had gone under the sea at Dwārkā and come out dry walked up to an animal on a forest path and gave it something to say and something to wear and instructions, and then the two of them went on down the track.

One thing about that animal, and then it can be left alone. The shortest verse we have about Pīpā, the one made by Nābhādās, says he gave instruction to a tiger that tracked by scent. The long commentary written a hundred years later tells of a lion. They are not the same animal. The verse is short and it is among the earliest things anyone said about him, and it is worth having whole:

Pīpā's glory is known through the world.

He taught a tiger that hunts by scent.

At the start he was the Goddess's man

and ran to beg his freedom from her,

and that power told him the truth

and pointed him to firm shelter in Hari.

Once he had hold of Rāmānand's feet

he became the very boundary of devotion.

The channel that ran out of him turned sweet

and became the good fortune of the world.

Notice what is not in it. There is no sea and no Dwārkā, no queens, no blanket, no grain market, no five bodies. One of the oldest things anybody said about Pīpā is that he taught an animal, that the Goddess started him and told him the truth, that he got hold of his teacher's feet, and that what came out of him afterwards was sweet and the world drank it. Most of the rest of this day was written down by men working from what was told.

The channel that turned sweet is the same word the guru used at Kāśī when he sent him home to serve holy men until the service turned sweet. It is a small thing and it is the whole of his life in one image: something is dug out, and the water in it is brackish for a long time, and then one day it is not, and after that anyone who comes to it can drink.

Further on there was a man on the road selling sticks.

A stick seller sits with a bundle of cut lengths beside him, dry, trimmed, sorted roughly by thickness, and he sells them to whoever is walking, and it is a living of the smallest kind.

Pīpā wanted a staff. What he got was the answer a man gives when he does not much care for the look of the customer, which was that there was a grove over there and he could go and cut his own.

Pīpā said very well. He said that by Rām's grace it would be so.

Every dry stick in the man's bundle took root where it stood and came up green bamboo.

Pīpā went into it and cut one staff out of it and went on down the road, and the man was left with a bamboo grove growing out of his stock.

He had asked for one stick and been sent away, and what he took in the end was one stick. There is no sermon attached to it in any account and no word about what the stick seller said or did afterwards.

Chīdhar was a holy man and they went to see him. Going to see somebody, in this life, meant walking to wherever he was and arriving at his door with nothing and being fed, which is the arrangement among such people and works because everyone in it is on both ends of it in turn.

He and his wife had nothing. That is not a figure of speech and it needs to be taken at its full weight: there was no grain in that house, no money to buy grain with, and nothing that could be sold to raise the money. There was a roof and there were two people under it.

When they heard who had come to the door, the wife went inside and took off her own skirt and handed it out, and Chīdhar took it to the market and sold it and bought provisions with what he got.

The food was cooked and it was good and everybody sat down to it.

Then somebody asked for the lady of the house.

Chīdhar said she would eat afterwards. It is the ordinary answer and it is what a wife in most houses in India would have been doing in any case, and nobody in the room had any reason to look at it twice. Sītā Sahacharī got up and went to find her.

She found her sitting in a storeroom with nothing on.

She asked her why. And Chīdhar's wife told her, without any embarrassment and without making a case of it, that her days passed like this. She said that when holy men come to the house there is a happiness in it that nothing else even feels like sorrow beside. And then she said the sentence the whole scene is built on, which was: so what is there to discuss about whether the body is covered or bare?

Sītā Sahacharī tore the garment she was wearing in half, and put one half of it on her, and took her by the hand and brought her out to the others.

They all ate together.

Afterwards she thought about it, and what she took out of that storeroom was not admiration. She had been given something to do.

She said that her duty now was to sell her own beauty and feed those two.

She went into the market and sat down where the grain was heaped, in the open, in the part of a market where that trade is carried on, and she sat there like any other woman sitting there.

The men who had the habit came round her. It is an old sickness and they had it badly and they came across the market the way such men come. And when they got to her and looked at her the habit went out of them where they stood, and it never came back. Not one of them ever looked at a woman that way again.

They asked who she was.

She said: I am a courtesan. She said: I have no household. She said: and there is no pimp with me.

Then she said nothing more at all.

Those three sentences are as good as anything in this book. The first two are true in the letter and every word of them is a knife. She was selling her beauty, and she had no house, and she had walked away from the largest household in that part of the country. The third is the one that finished them, because every man there knew that a woman sitting in the grain market alone, with nobody standing behind her taking the money and nobody to come out of a doorway if things went wrong, is either mad or is not what she appears to be. Then she shut her mouth and let them work it out.

They worked it out. It became certain to all of them who the two of them were, the man and the woman who had come into that country with nothing.

They began piling things in front of her. Grain out of the heaps, and gold, and food, and money, and it went on until there was a heap of it on the ground in the market with a woman in a torn half-garment sitting behind it.

She had the whole of it carried to Chīdhar's house.

And only then did she get up.

Not before. She sat there in the market until every last measure of it had been lifted and taken away down the street to the house where two people had sold the clothes off their backs to feed her, and when it was all in and delivered she stood up and went home.

He spent his later years in a village called Toḍā, out towards the north-west, in dry country, and the eating there was not regular. Some days it was ghee and grain. Some days it was a fistful of gram, which is what a poor man in that country chews on a road. Some days there was nothing, and nothing is not a hardship when it happens once, and is a different thing altogether when it is one of the three ordinary possibilities of the day.

He went down to bathe one morning and saw pots in the ground with the earth fallen away from the tops of them, and they were full of gold coins.

Buried money is ordinary in that country. There is no other place to keep it, and the man who put it there dies or is driven off, and then a river changes its mind or a bank comes down in the rains and the top of a pot comes into the light.

He looked at them and walked away.

At night he told her what he had seen. She said it would be better not to go to that bathing place again.

Somebody was listening at the wall.

The thieves went out that night and found the pots and got them open, and what was in them was snakes. Venomous ones, coiled in the mouths of the vessels. They took it for a trick. They decided the faqīr had known exactly what was in there and had said it out loud in his house on purpose so that they would go and put their hands in, and being men of that sort they did not go away and think about it, they got angry. They dug the pots out of the ground, carried them across the village, and dumped the whole lot into Pīpā's house so that the snakes would bite him.

Seven hundred and twenty gold coins came out onto his floor. They were heavy ones, five tolās apiece, which is a coin you feel in the hand.

He took it for a gift and spent it. All of it. It was eaten and given away inside three days, and at the end of the three days the house was as it had been before, which is to say that the eating went back to ghee and grain, or a fistful of gram, or nothing.

Money did that in his hands all his life. There is a story from that country about a caravan trader who was told by men who thought it would be funny that Pīpā had excellent trained bullocks for sale. The trader came with a great deal of money and laid it out and was told to come back the next day before noon. Pīpā spent every coin of it that same day on a feast for holy men. The trader arrived in the middle of it and asked for his bullocks, and Pīpā took him by the arm and showed him the assembly sitting there eating and said: look at these. These are the bullocks that carry you to the next world. These are the bullocks I trade in. Take them. The man went out and bought cloth and came back and clothed every one of them.

Once a merchant met the two of them in a lonely place and gave them a cartload, grain and ghee and sugar and money on top of it. Robbers came on them almost straight away and Pīpā handed the cart over without an argument. Then, when they had gone a little way, he went after them down the road calling out, and caught them up, and told them he had this much money on him as well and they had better take that too. They asked his name. When they had it, they got down and put their heads on the ground and brought the cart back.

And there was a famine in that country once, a bad one, and the king could not cope with it. Pīpā handed out grain and water and clothing from a hut with nothing in it, and when what he had was gone he went out and dug buried treasure out of the ground and gave that away, and he kept digging it up and handing it out for as long as the famine lasted.

The king of that country was called Sūryasenmal, and Sūr Sen for short, and he came to Toḍā to see the holy man everyone was talking about.

He was greatly pleased with what he found. He prostrated, and got up, and prostrated again, and asked to be initiated.

Pīpā told him what the first lesson was. He said that the first lesson is to become a renunciate, and that he had better do it if he can, and then he said the reason, which is the flattest and most alarming sentence in the whole of the day: because we make people like ourselves.

He was not recruiting. He was warning a man off. Look at what happens to people who come near me, he is saying. Look at what I was and look at what I am. That is not a thing I do to people deliberately and it is not a thing I can undertake to stop, and if you stand here you will go the way I went, so decide now.

The king said: whatever you tell me, I will do it.

So Pīpā gave the order. Bring your entire property, and bring your queen, and make them over to me.

And the king went away and did exactly that. He brought the treasury and the land and the whole of what he had, and he brought his wife, and he handed them across.

Then Pīpā initiated him, and gave him the queen back, and gave him the kingdom back.

He gave it back on terms, and the terms were these. They are all mine now, and you are not to consider any of it your own. Serve God, and serve the holy men. Keep nothing hidden. And let the queens come out and take a plain look at holy men, face to face, because it is not necessary for a woman to put a cloth over her head in front of one.

That is the arrangement he made and it is exactly the arrangement Rāmānand had offered him in the palanquin, turned round and handed on. Giving up the kingdom and staying on in the house are both alike for you. Pīpā had heard that and got out from under the pole and run to the front and left. Sūryasenmal heard the same thing and stayed where he was, and was not thought any the worse of for it, and went on being king with somebody else's name on the deeds.

It did not hold. Some while later the story of what Sītā Sahacharī had done in the grain market travelled, as such a story will, and it reached the king in his own assembly hall, and the brahmins of his court got up and shouted that this was an improper business and no saint's wife would sit in a market like that. The king listened to them. His love fell away.

That is how it is put and it is the right way to put it. Nobody renounced anything. There was no breach and no announcement. A man who had handed over his treasury and his wife and got them back found, after listening to the right people for long enough, that the thing he had felt was not there any more, and that the teacher he had begged on his knees to initiate him was now somebody it would be awkward to be seen with.

Pīpā went to the palace to put it right and had his arrival announced at the door.

The king sent word out that he was at his worship and could not be disturbed.

Pīpā sent word back in. He said the king was a great fool. He said that the man was sitting at the cobbler's having a shoe stitched and pretending to be at his prayers.

The king's mind was at the cobbler's. That was precisely where it had been for some minutes, on the shoe and the stitching and what it was going to cost, while he sat in front of the image with his eyes shut and the door barred against his teacher.

He came out of that room at a run and went down the steps and put his head on Pīpā's feet.

Put the two ends of it side by side.

At one end there is a fort on a hill between two rivers, and a kitchen in it the size of a barracks kitchen, and forty maunds of cooked food going up through the gates every day of the year on covered trays, in front of an image, because a man had given his word.

At the other end there is a hut in a dry village in the north-west, and in it a man and a woman who ate ghee and grain when there was ghee and grain, and a fistful of gram when there was a fistful of gram, and nothing when there was nothing.

And here is the part that is easy to walk past. The man in the hut gave away far more than the man in the fort. The forty maunds were a quantity fixed by a vow and paid out of a revenue, and the vow was met, and the granary was never in any danger. In the hut there was no revenue. Seven hundred and twenty gold coins came in through the door one night and were gone inside three days. A caravan trader's purchase money went on a dinner for holy men the same afternoon it was handed over. A cartload of grain and ghee and sugar went to robbers, and then he ran after them to give them the rest. In a famine he emptied a hut that had nothing in it, and then went out and dug up the ground to find more.

A king gives from the top of a heap and the heap is still there in the morning. This man gave the way a poor man gives, which is the only way that costs anything, and he had to learn it, and where he learned it was on the road with a bowl.

He learned something else there too, and it is in the one song of his that was carried the whole way across the north and written into the great scripture of the Panjab a hundred years after he died, among the songs of Kabīr and Ravidās and Nāmdev and the rest of that company.

His teacher has one song in the same book, the one the second day of this reading closed on, in which an old brahmin sets out for the temple with ground sandalwood and aloes and sweet oils in his hands and is stopped at his own door by the discovery that the thing he was going to look for is already inside him. The pupil who gave away a kingdom says the same thing from the other end of a lifetime, and says it in the plainest words either of them ever used:

God is in the body. The body is his temple.

The pilgrims are in the body, and the travellers with them.

The incense is in the body, and the lamp, and the food set out for him.

So are the leaves laid down for the dead.

I have searched a great many countries.

It is only in the body that I have found the nine treasures.

There is no coming for me now and no going,

not since the day I asked him for it.

Whatever there is in the whole of creation is in the body,

and whoever looks there will find it.

Pīpā says: he is the first thing there is,

and when a man has a true teacher, the teacher will show him.

That is a man who fed an image forty maunds a day saying that the food offering is in the body. It is not a rejection of the fort and it is not an apology for it. He is not saying that the kitchen was wasted or that the vow was foolish. He is saying something flatter and worse for everybody, which is that the whole apparatus, the incense and the lamp and the tray and the pilgrimage and the leaves put down for the dead, was already inside the man who was paying for it, and that he went to a great deal of trouble and walked across most of India before he found that out.

The nine treasures are the whole wealth of the old stories, the hoard a king would go to war for. He says he looked for them in a great many countries. He had. He had been over the width of the country twice on his feet and down into the sea at Dwārkā, and he came out of all of it saying that the thing he had been looking for was at the address he had started from.

Nobody wrote down a death for him.

There is no last illness in the accounts, and no deathbed, and no year, and no place. Somebody with a tidy mind could supply all four and nobody would be able to disprove any of it, and this book is not going to. What stands where the death should be is this.

Invitations came from five villages on the same day.

An invitation of that kind is a man walking over from the next place with a request, and the request is that the holy man should come and sit at the festival, because a festival with him in it is a different thing from a festival without him, and the village has been saving for it. It is not a social courtesy. People go into debt for these days.

That happens. A man who has been in a district for years is asked to everything, and the festivals fall where they fall, and sooner or later two of them land on the same date and somebody has to be disappointed. On this day it was five. And the holy men arrived for all five of them at the same moment, so there was nobody he could put off without sending a houseful of men away with nothing.

So he took five bodies and went to all five.

That is the whole of the statement and nothing is added to it anywhere. Five villages had asked him on the same day, and the holy men had come to all five, and he went to all five, in five bodies, and no account offers a word of explanation. The villages are not named. The distance between them is not given. Nobody says which of the five he set out from, or whether the five of him knew about each other.

He sat through every one of the festivals. Understand what that means in a village: the courtyard swept and watered, the lamps lit along the wall, the food cooked in quantity by people who have very little, the drum going, the singing starting after dark and running through the whole night with the old men dropping out towards morning and the young ones keeping it up.

He was at that, in each of the five villages, all night, in five places.

At one of them, at dawn, he gave up his body.

Which of the five that was is not said.

Two women disciples set out to carry the news. They were not told which village it had happened in, and the accounts have not kept it either.

They went on foot, the way everybody in this day has gone everywhere, from one village to the next across that dry country, with the news they were carrying sitting in them like a stone. Who they were is not given. Two women who had attached themselves to him and had been sent, or had gone.

In the second village they came to, they saw his body burning.

You see the smoke before you get to a village. It stands up straight in that country in the early part of the day and it can be seen from a long way off across flat ground, and anybody walking in can tell from it that somebody has died, and the two of them came in and it was him.

They went on to the third, and there was his pyre again.

In all five of them they were told the same thing in the same words: that he had been at the night's singing, and that he had gone at dawn, and that his fire was burning that day.

They came into Toḍā at the end of it with five funerals behind them.

The assembly was sitting. It would have been going since before they got to the edge of the village, because it is the sound that carries furthest out of a place like that: a drum, and a good many voices, and one name in all of them.

They went in past the drum and stood at the edge of it and looked.

He was sitting in the assembly of the holy men with Sītā Sahacharī beside him, swaying, saying the name.