The Ancestors in the Pit

One day Agastya saw his own ancestors hanging head down in a pit. He asked them why they hung there, and they told him. We are your own fathers, they said. We have come to this pit and we hang here because our line has no offspring to carry it on. If you would beget a fine child, Agastya, we would be freed from this hell, and you too, son, would reach your goal.

Agastya, a man of power who held to truth and dharma, the right way of life, answered them. I will do what you wish, fathers, he said. Let the fever in your minds be gone.

Then he began to think about a wife who could bear his child, and he could find no woman worthy of it. So from every kind of creature he took the finest part it had, and from all those parts together he fashioned a woman beyond compare. At that time the king of Vidarbha was longing for a son, and the great ascetic gave this woman, whom he had made for himself, to be born as the king's daughter.

She was born there, fortunate and shining like a flash of lightning, and she grew in beauty day by day. The moment she was born the king rejoiced and told the brahmins, and they welcomed her and named her Lopāmudrā. She grew quickly, as a lotus grows in water or a clear flame grows in a fire. When she came of age, a hundred well-dressed maidens and a hundred serving women attended her, and she sat among them like the star Rohiṇī in the sky.

She was grown now, of good character and good conduct, and still no man asked for her, for fear of the great seer Agastya. She was truthful and more lovely than the apsaras of heaven, and by her goodness she was a joy to her father and to all her family. Her father looked at his grown daughter and wondered to whom he should give her.