Cūḍālā
Contents6 of 14
  1. The King and the Princess of Surāṣṭra
  2. What Am I?
  3. You Speak like a Child
  4. The Powers She Did Not Show
  5. The King Goes to the Forest
  6. Eighteen Years
  7. The Boy from the Sky
  8. Kumbha's Teaching
  9. The Fire in the Hermitage
  10. Still as a Rock
  11. A Woman by Night
  12. Heaven Refused, and the Lover
  13. I Am Cūḍālā
  14. The Return

Eighteen Years

At midnight Cūḍālā woke in fear, like a doe sleeping in the middle of a village, and found the bed empty. How hard it is, she thought, that my lord has left the kingdom and gone to the forest. I will go to his side; a husband is a woman's refuge.

She went out through a window into the sky, riding the wind, and the siddhas who saw her face thought it a second moon. In the night she saw her husband walking alone with a sword in his hand, at the hour of the night spirits. Standing in the sky, she saw the whole of what was to come for him: when and where and through whom his freedom would come. She saw that it must come in its own time, and she turned back, to let it come as it would. Let my going wait for today, she thought. Before very long I must go to him; that is the fixed order of things. So she turned back to her bed, and told the people of the city that the king had gone away for some reason.

Then she ruled the kingdom herself, looking on all alike, guarding it as a woman guards a field of ripe rice. Neither saw the other's face. For eighteen years Cūḍālā lived in the palace and Śikhidhvaja in the thicket of the forest.