On the Jumna's Banks, a Pious but Peculiar Brahman

In the city of Dharmasthal, the Place of Duty, upon the lovely banks of the river Jumna, there lived a Brahman named Keshav — a man so devoted to worship that he modelled his own clay images rather than buy them ready-made, painted the tops of holy stones a devout red, and laid before them flowers, fruit, water, sweetmeats, and fried peas with his own hands. But this careful piety had not always marked him. Keshav had come to learning late — until his twentieth year he had cared for nothing but the worship of Kama-deva, the beautiful god of love, and his bride Rati the springtime, attended by cuckoos and humming bees and soft perfumed breezes. He had been, in short, a young man far more interested in romance than religion, and it took a fright he never forgot to turn him into the sober scholar the province would later know and respect.

The God in the Fig Tree, and a Youthful Crime

One day, stung by his parents' sharp rebukes over his idle, pleasure-loving ways, young Keshav stormed off to a neighbouring hamlet and hid himself sulking in the branches of a great fig tree — the very tree that shaded a celebrated five-faced image of the god Panchanan. An evil mischief took hold of him there: he pulled down the sacred stone, defiled it, and flung it into the nearest tank. The next morning the keeper of the shrine found his god gone and raised the whole village in an uproar. Keshav's own parents, searching for their runaway son, arrived in the midst of the commotion, and a bystander recalled seeing a youth sitting in Panchanan's tree. Cornered, Keshav confessed everything — the theft, the defilement, the tank where the stone now lay — and the villagers, aghast, prophesied that the five-faced god would surely strike him dead for such sacrilege. Terror did what scolding never had: from that hour Keshav applied himself to his studies with such fierce dedication that he became the most learned Brahman in the land.

A Daughter Fashioned from Moonlight

In time this reformed and learned Brahman had a daughter, and he named her Madhumalati — Sweet Jasmine. She was beautiful beyond the ordinary reckoning of beauty. The poets of Dharmasthal liked to say that the gods, wanting the finest material for her face, had broken off a portion of the moon itself to shape it — and did not the empty, shadowed patches still visible on the moon's surface prove the tale? Her eyes were the full-blown blue lotus of the ponds; her arms curved like the graceful stalk of the lotus flower; her loosened hair held the thick, soft darkness of midnight itself. She grew, as such girls do in stories and in life, into a young woman whose beauty was spoken of well beyond her father's house — and whose approaching marriageable age would, before long, throw that quiet household into an uproar no one could have predicted.

A Family Grows Anxious for a Bride

When Sweet Jasmine reached the age for marriage, her mother, her father, and her elder brother each grew privately uneasy, for the wise of that country had long warned that a grown daughter without a husband hangs over a household like a stone about to fall. It was said, too, that women, like kings and climbing vines, cling readily to whoever stands nearest them — and that a woman's nature, being unable to distinguish good from evil, cannot reliably be governed by kindness, gifts, correct conduct, or even the threat of punishment. Whatever the wisdom or foolishness of such sayings, the effect on Keshav's household was real enough: three anxious relatives, each independently determined that the matter of Sweet Jasmine's marriage should be settled properly and settled soon. It was this shared anxiety, pursued separately and in ignorance of one another, that would very shortly turn a simple family concern into a spectacular domestic farce.

Three Promises Made Behind Three Backs

The mischief began, as such things often do, through simple absence. Keshav the father was called away to attend the wedding feast of one of his village clients; his son, Sweet Jasmine's brother, departed at almost the same time to study at the house of his spiritual preceptor. That left only the mother at home — and it was she who, when a personable young stranger came calling, took one look at his good bearing and fine manners, inferred from his handsome face that his character must be equally fine, and promised him then and there, I will give thee my daughter in marriage. Neither father nor son knew a word of it. And unknown to the mother, the father — at the very wedding he had gone to attend — was at that same hour making an identical promise of his own, to a different young Brahman entirely, one he had met and taken a liking to at his employer's house.

A Third Promise, and the Truth Comes Home

While mother and father each quietly pledged Sweet Jasmine's hand to men of their own choosing, the brother was doing precisely the same thing at his teacher's house, betrothing his sister to a promising fellow student without a thought that anyone else in the family might already have settled the matter. Three separate promises, made by three separate members of one household, each in perfect ignorance of the other two — it could hardly have gone worse if it had been planned. When father and son at last returned home, each proudly brought his chosen young man along with him, only to discover a third suitor already seated comfortably in the house, put there by the mother. Tribikram, Baman, and Madhusadan — for such were the three young men's names — now sat together under one roof, equal to one another in birth, learning, age, and bearing, each one convinced, quite reasonably, that he alone was the promised bridegroom.

One Bride, Three Bridegrooms, and a Baffled Father

Keshav looked from one earnest young face to another and despaired. Here is one bride and three bridegrooms, he said to himself. To which shall I give her, and to which shall I refuse? We three — my wife, my son, and I — have each pledged our word, unknowingly, to a different man. What in the world are we to do? A lesser man might have simply chosen at random and left the other two to nurse their grievances, but Keshav was a scholar, and scholars like a contest that flatters their own cleverness. He proposed to the three suitors a trial of wisdom: whichever of them could produce the finest, truest saying of the wise — the most excellent proverb of all — would be judged worthy of Sweet Jasmine's hand, and the other two would have to accept the verdict with whatever grace they could muster. All three, confident in their own learning, agreed at once to the test.

Tribikram Speaks First, of Courage and Faith

Tribikram, given the honor of speaking first, drew himself up and offered his chosen wisdom with the confidence of a man certain of victory. Courage, he declared, is tried in war; integrity is tried in the payment of debt and interest; friendship is tried in distress; and the faithfulness of a wife is tried in the day of poverty. It was a fine saying, weighty and well-chosen, touching on courage, honesty, loyalty, and — most pointedly for the occasion — the particular virtue of a devoted wife who does not abandon her husband when fortune abandons him. Keshav nodded thoughtfully, neither committing himself nor dismissing the offering, and turned his attention to the second suitor, curious to hear what Baman might set against it. The contest, everyone in the room understood, had only just begun, and a single daughter's future now rested on whichever young man could out-quote his rivals in the ancient art of moral aphorism.

Baman Answers, Warning Against a Faithless Wife

Baman took up the challenge next, and where Tribikram had praised the virtues of a good wife, Baman chose instead to catalogue the vices of a bad one — perhaps calculating that a warning cuts deeper than a compliment. That woman is destitute of virtue, he pronounced, who in her father's house is not in due subjection, who wanders off to feasts and amusements, who casts aside her veil before men, who lodges as a guest in the houses of strangers, who is overly fond of sleep, who drinks intoxicating drink, and who takes pleasure in being far from her husband. It was, in its way, a clever rejoinder — for by describing at length everything a virtuous woman was not, Baman implicitly promised that his own bride would embody the opposite of every fault named. Keshav weighed this too, saying nothing, while the third suitor, Madhusadan, waited his turn with a saying of his own already forming — one considerably darker than either of the first two.

Madhusadan's Warning — Trust Nothing That Can Turn on You

Madhusadan spoke last, and his chosen wisdom took a sharper, more cynical turn than his rivals'. Let none, he said, place their confidence in the sea, nor in anything that carries claws, or horns, or deadly weapons — and let none place their confidence, either, in a woman, or in a king. It was a bold thing to say in a room where the prize under discussion was precisely a woman, and where the judge weighing his words was her own father — but Madhusadan's proverb carried the ring of hard-won worldly caution, the kind of saying that impresses by its very refusal to flatter. Keshav found himself, against his own inclination perhaps, leaning toward this last and bleakest of the three sayings as the true winner of the contest. He sat turning the matter over in his mind, still undecided which young man should be told to prepare for a wedding — and it was at this exact moment, with the verdict still balanced on a knife's edge, that fate intervened in a form no one in the room could have anticipated.

Death Strikes Before the Contest Can End

While Keshav sat weighing the three sayings, inclining ever so slightly toward Madhusadan's grim wisdom about the untrustworthiness of women and kings, a serpent — unnoticed, unheralded, as serpents always are until it is too late — sank its fangs into the beautiful girl at the center of all this careful debate. Within a few hours, Sweet Jasmine was dead. The contest of proverbs, the rival claims, the anxious calculations of which young man deserved her hand — all of it collapsed in an instant into irrelevance. Her father and her three suitors sat for a long moment in stunned, wordless paralysis, unable quite to process how swiftly the ground had shifted beneath their feet. Then, as grief demands action even when action is useless, they rose and threw themselves into a desperate search for anyone who might undo what the snake had done — sorcerers, charmers, wise men and women skilled in drawing poison out by incantation, anyone at all who might reverse the unthinkable.

Five Sorcerers, Five Verdicts, One Certainty

The healers came and went, one after another, and each pronounced the same hopeless verdict by a different learned route. The first declared that a person bitten on the fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, or fourteenth day of the lunar month invariably dies. The second insisted that a bite received on a Saturday or a Tuesday is beyond any remedy. The third blamed the particular lunar mansions under which the poison had been infused. The fourth pointed to the wound itself — a bite to any organ of sense, the lower lip, the cheek, the neck, or the stomach, he said, is always fatal. And the fifth, oldest and most respected of them all, simply shook his head and said, In a case such as this, even Brahma the Creator could not restore life — what account, then, are we? Perform the funeral rites; we can do no more. One by one the sorcerers gathered their charms and departed, leaving Keshav with nothing left to do but grieve and bury his daughter properly.

The Cremation, and Three Broken Suitors

With no healer able to help, the mourning father took up his daughter's body himself and had it carried to the burning ground, where it was given over to the flames according to custom, and he returned to his empty house a changed and grieving man. But Keshav was not the only one left broken by Sweet Jasmine's death. The three young men who had so recently competed for her hand — Tribikram, Baman, and Madhusadan — found themselves united now in nothing but shared and unresolved sorrow. There was no bride left to marry, no contest left to win, only the raw fact of a beautiful girl gone before her time, and three young hearts each equally, uselessly devoted to her memory. They talked among themselves in the aftermath and arrived at the same restless conclusion: a man could not simply go home and resume his old life as though nothing had happened. Better, they decided, to do as the wise had always counselled the grieving and the restless — to travel, and let the road itself absorb the grief that stillness could not.

The Old Counsel of Travel, and a Division of Relics

They quoted to one another the ancient words attributed to Indra, god of the air, who had praised the wanderer above the man who stays home: that a good man who never travels is, in truth, no good man at all; that a traveller's legs are like blossoming branches bearing fruit as he walks; that fortune itself rises and sleeps and moves in step with the man who moves; that the traveller finds honey, finds sweet figs, and shares in the tireless happiness of the sun that never rests in its course. Persuaded, or at least comforted, by this old wisdom, the three young men prepared to part ways — but not before dividing among themselves what little remained of their beloved. Tribikram took charge of her burnt bones, carefully separated and tied into a bundle. Baman claimed her ashes for his own keeping. And Madhusadan, the third, took nothing physical at all, for his path was to lead him toward a very different kind of inheritance.

Tribikram Renounces the World for a Bundle of Bones

Tribikram, bundle of bones in hand, wandered until he joined the Vaisheshikas, a strict and powerful ascetic sect of that era. He swore off the eight great crimes of their order — eating after nightfall, killing any living creature, tasting the fruit of milk-giving trees or pumpkins or young bamboo, eating honey or flesh, plundering another's wealth, taking a married woman by force, eating flowers or butter or cheese, and worshipping the gods of rival faiths. He came to believe, with the fervour of the newly converted, that the highest virtue lay in doing no injury to any living thing, and that kings — as administrators of criminal justice, who kill in the name of law — were in truth the greatest sinners of all. He bound himself to five vows of total abstinence: no falsehood, no meat or fish, no theft, no strong drink, and no marriage, ever. He kept nothing in the world beyond a white loin-cloth, a mouth-towel, a beggar's bowl, and a small woollen brush with which he swept the ground before each footstep, so that he might never, even by accident, crush an insect beneath his feet.

A Grieving Ascetic Tries to Reason Away His Love

Tribikram tried, with all the discipline his new order demanded, to argue his love for Sweet Jasmine out of existence. Surely, he told himself, it was only my own pride and selfish weakness that ever let me believe a woman could grant me happiness. He remembered how he had once thought her eyes rolled like the tail of the water-wagtail, her lips like ripe fruit, her form resplendent as gold melted in the crucible, the very moon waning out of envy for her face — how he had believed one glance from her could heal a hundred battle wounds. Now, he told himself sternly, his mind had turned from the world entirely. Looking on any woman he would say instead: is this the form that so bewitches men — a basket of skin containing nothing but bone, flesh, blood, and impurity? Men call this arrangement of unclean matter a face, and drink its imagined charms as a drunkard drains his cup — blind, infatuated fools, all of them. It was, he told himself, his duty now only to seek the Lord of this body, and to remain indifferent alike to pleasure and to pain. Whether he entirely believed his own sermon is a question the story wisely declines to answer.

Baman Retreats into the Forest with Her Ashes

Baman, the second suitor, tied up his own bundle — the ashes of his beloved — and followed, somewhat prematurely for a man his age, the ancient precepts the lawgiver Manu had set down for the aging householder who feels his muscles slacken and his hair turn grey. He took up a hermit's consecrated fire and withdrew into the lonely forest, there to live with total mastery over every sense and impulse. He ate only the purest food — green herbs, wild roots, forest fruit — dressed himself in black antelope hide or rough bark, and bathed morning and evening without fail, letting his hair, beard, and nails grow wild and untended. He slid backward and forward along the bare ground as penance; he stood a full day balanced on his toes; he sat exposed at noon to five fires — four blazing around him and the sun above — and in the rains stood bareheaded while the heaviest downpours soaked him through, deliberately increasing the severity of his suffering season by season, until at last, having committed even his sacred household fires to memory alone, he lived without fire, without shelter, in total silence, eating nothing but roots and fallen fruit.

Madhusadan Takes Up the Wanderer's Wallet

Madhusadan, the third rival, took a different road entirely. Taking up only a beggar's wallet and a plain neckband, he became a wandering Jogi, living on nothing more than husks and chaff, and gave himself over entirely to spiritual discipline. He pursued the four duties said to lead a man toward the vision of Brahma — hearing, meditation, fixing the mind, and absorbing the mind — and set himself to conquer the three great enemies of the spirit: restlessness, cruelty, and lust, doing so by fixing the Deity firmly in his heart, mastering his senses absolutely, and starving every desire until it died of neglect. In this way he sought to strip away Maya, the great illusion that hides true knowledge from mortal eyes, repeating the sacred Name until it appeared to him as a kind of dry, radiant light. Though his body remained a thing of blood and bone and weakness, of hunger and sorrow and the habits of past lives, he trained himself never to mistake these things for reality. He even took a stray dog as his sole companion, sharing his own meagre food with it, the better to keep his mind fixed on spirit rather than comfort.

The Discipline of Breath and the Eighty-Four Postures

Madhusadan's asceticism went further still. He practised the operations of the vital air within the body, and gave himself over to Pranayama — the slow, deliberate suppression of breath — training his attention with fierce precision, fixing his gaze upon the tip of his nose to master smell, upon the tip of his tongue to master taste, and so through each sense in turn. He worked through all eighty-four of the ascetic's postures until he no longer felt heat or cold, hunger or thirst, and came especially to favor the lotus-posture, feet drawn to his sides, each hand cradling the opposite foot. In his breath-work he began by holding his inhalations to twelve fingers' breadth from his nostrils, slowly narrowing that distance until, even after long restraint, he drew breath from no farther than his own heart, and stretched his holding of each breath from a mere twenty-six seconds toward something approaching perfection. Seated cross-legged, sealing every avenue of breath with his own fingers, he fought off the four enemies of concentration: a sleepy heart, unruly passion, a wandering mind, and attachment to anything other than Brahma alone — climbing, rung by rung, from the grossest images of divine power toward its true and glorious source.

A Wandering Jogi Is Offered Hospitality

One day, in the course of his wanderings, Madhusadan the Jogi came to a certain house seeking alms, and the householder, seeing a holy man at his door, welcomed him warmly. Be so good as to take your food here today, the man said, and led his guest inside. Madhusadan sat, had his hands and feet ceremonially washed, and was seated upon the Chauka, the square space set aside for meals, the householder sitting beside him and reciting, as was proper, the old scriptural duty of hospitality: that no guest should ever be turned away in the evening by a host, for a guest arrives sent by the returning sun itself, in season or out of it, and must never be left in a house without entertainment; that a householder should taste no delicacy without first offering it to his guest; and that the satisfaction of a guest brings the host wealth, reputation, long life, and, in the end, a place in heaven itself. It was a warm and generous welcome, offered in perfect good faith — and it was about to be shattered by an act of such sudden, casual horror that Madhusadan would rise from that meal a changed man.

The Wife's Terrible Act of Anger

The householder's wife came out to serve the meal — rice and split peas, oil and spices, all cooked with pure firewood in a fresh earthen pot, exactly as custom required for an honored guest. Part of the food had been served, the rest still waiting, when the woman's small child began to wail and cling stubbornly to the hem of her dress, refusing to let go no matter how she coaxed him. The more she tried to free herself, the harder the boy cried and the tighter he clung — until something in the mother snapped. In a single flash of fury she seized the crying child and flung him bodily into the cooking fire, where he was burned to ashes in an instant, before either the host or his stunned guest could move to stop her. Madhusadan, watching this happen not three feet from where he sat with his food half-eaten before him, rose from the Chauka without another bite, his appetite and his composure both extinguished at once by what he had just witnessed a mother do to her own son.

The Jogi Refuses to Eat Under That Roof

The householder, baffled and perhaps already dreading the answer, asked his guest why he would not eat. Madhusadan answered him plainly: I came here as your Atithi, a guest to be honored under your roof — but how can any man break bread in the house of one who has just permitted such a devilish, Rakshasa-like deed? He reminded his host of the old sayings — that a man who cannot govern his own passions lives his life in vain; that a foolish king, a man drunk on riches, and a spoiled child alike crave what can never rightly be had; that a king may destroy his enemies even while retreating, that an elephant's touch and a serpent's very breath can kill — but that the truly wicked destroy even while they are laughing. It was a hard rebuke to deliver to a man who had just shown him such generous hospitality, and harder still, perhaps, for the householder to hear only moments after his wife's crime — but Madhusadan's asceticism had not cost him his plain speech, and what happened next would prove his host had a far stranger response in mind than mere shame.

A Hidden Book, and a Child Restored to Life

The householder only smiled at the rebuke, rose without a word of protest, and went to another part of the house, returning with an ancient book he had kept hidden between two beams that nearly touched where they met the opposite wall. This was no ordinary volume — a treatise on Sanjivnividya, the science of restoring the dead to life, its loose leaves some six inches wide and three times that in length, the paper stained yellow with orpiment and tamarind-seed juice to keep insects away. Unwrapping the cloth that protected it and untying the flat boards that bound it, the householder drew out a charm, spoke the Mantra over it with careful ceremony, and — before his astonished guest's eyes — restored his burned child to life exactly as though nothing at all had happened to the boy. Of all precious things, the householder said calmly, tying the book back up, knowledge is the most valuable. Other riches may be stolen or spent away, but knowledge alone is immortal — the more it is spent, the more it grows, and no thief can ever diminish it by taking a share. Madhusadan stood watching this miracle with his ascetic composure entirely forgotten, a single overwhelming thought already forming in his mind.

A Temptation Too Great for Any Ascetic

Watching the dead child breathe again, Madhusadan felt a thought rise in him that no amount of yogic discipline could suppress: if only he could obtain that book for himself, he could restore his own beloved Sweet Jasmine to life, and gladly abandon every uncomfortable posture and breath-restraining exercise he had spent years perfecting. All his hard-won detachment, all his careful arguments about the illusory nature of the body and its pleasures, evaporated in an instant before the simple, overwhelming hope of getting her back. He said nothing of this to his host. Instead, with the same outward calm he had maintained throughout his travels, he sat back down and quietly finished his food, giving no sign of the resolution already forming behind his eyes. He remained in the house through the rest of that day exactly as an honored guest should, waiting — patiently, and not without a certain grim irony, given the sermon on virtue he had just delivered to his host — for the one opportunity that would let him put his new plan into action.

A Theft in the Dead of Night

Night came at last, and after the household had eaten its supper and retired to sleep, Madhusadan lay down in the guest's corner of the house as well — but he did not let sleep close his eyes. He waited, patient and wide awake, until he judged that a full quarter of the night's dark hours had passed and that everyone in the house had sunk into their deepest slumber. Only then did he rise, silent as the discipline of years had trained him to be, and steal into the room where the householder slept. He reached up between the two beams, took down the hidden book of Sanjivnividya exactly as he had watched his host retrieve it, and slipped out of the house into the darkness without waking a soul. Whatever guilt he may have felt at repaying such open-handed hospitality with theft, it clearly did not slow his feet — he had, after all, delivered his host a lecture on virtue only hours before, and was now walking away in the night with the man's most precious possession tucked under his arm, bound for the one place in the world he most wanted to return to.

Reunion at the Place Where She Was Burned

Madhusadan walked straight from that house to the very burning ground where the beautiful Sweet Jasmine had been reduced to ashes, and there, to his considerable surprise, he found his two old rivals already sitting together, comparing the strange fortunes that had befallen each of them since they parted. Tribikram the ascetic and Baman the forest hermit looked up and recognized him at once. Brother! they called out. You too have been wandering the world all this while — tell us, have you learned anything in your travels that might be of use to us? Madhusadan answered them simply: I have learned the science of restoring the dead to life. The effect was immediate. Both men, forgetting in an instant every rivalry that had once divided them, seized on his words at once. If you have truly learned such a science, they exclaimed together, then restore our beloved to life! And so, gathered once more at the exact spot where they had scattered her ashes years before, the three former rivals found themselves suddenly and improbably united in a single, desperate purpose.

Terrible Sights Gather Over the Burning Ground

Madhusadan set about his incantations at once, and the burning ground answered him with a chorus fit for the occasion. Terrible shapes moved in the air above them; jackals howled, owls shrieked, crows and cats and asses and vultures and dogs and lizards all added their voices to the din, and unseen presences of every unholy order — messengers of Yama, ghosts, devils, demons, imps, fiends, devas, and succubi — pressed close around the three men, furious, it seemed, at this trespass upon death's proper domain. It would have driven any ordinary man from the ground in terror, but the three lovers, past caring for their own safety after everything they had already endured, drew blood from their own bodies and offered it up to the goddess Chandi, chanting as one: Hail, supreme delusion! Hail, goddess of the universe! Hail, thou who fulfillest the desires of all! May I offer thee the blood of my body — wilt thou deign to accept it, and be propitious toward me! The night around them seemed to thicken and press closer with every word, as though the ritual itself were tearing a hole in the ordinary fabric of things.

Flesh Offered to the Goddess of Delusion

Having offered their blood, the three men went further still, making a burnt-offering of their own flesh to the same fierce goddess, each one praying in turn: Grant me, O goddess, to see the maiden alive again, in exact proportion to the fervency with which I offer thee my own flesh and call upon thee to be gracious to me. Salutation to thee, again and again, under the mysterious syllables ang! ang! It was a horrifying spectacle by any ordinary measure — three grown men, one an ascetic sworn to harm no living creature, one a hermit who had spent years mortifying his own body in the forest, and one a thief only hours removed from his crime, standing amid howling jackals and circling vultures, cutting their own flesh and burning it as sacrifice, driven past every boundary of sense or self-preservation by grief and hope in equal measure. Whatever the goddess Chandi made of such devotion, the men pressed on, moving at last from prayer and sacrifice to the final and most fearful stage of the rite — the heap of bones and ashes that had waited years for this exact moment.

Bones and Ashes Rise into a Shadowed Form

Then they gathered together the bones that Tribikram had so carefully kept and the ashes that Baman had so faithfully preserved, heaping them upon the ground, and as Madhusadan pressed on with his incantation, a thin white vapour began to rise up out of the earth itself. Slowly, terribly, it thickened and gathered shape, condensing by degrees into a perispiritual form — the pale, shifting outline of a soul's own envelope, not yet flesh, not yet nothing. The three watching men felt the blood freeze in their own veins as, before their eyes, the scattered bones and grey ashes were drawn up and absorbed one by one into that waiting, shadowy shape, filling it out, giving it weight, giving it, impossibly, a face they all three remembered. Only when the shape at last spoke — when the restored Sweet Jasmine herself begged, in a voice none of them had ever thought to hear again, to be taken home to her mother — did the three men find themselves able to move, to breathe, to believe that what they had just done amid the jackals and the vultures had actually, unbelievably, succeeded.

Love Restored, and Reason Instantly Lost

No sooner was the miracle accomplished than Kama, the god of love, blinded all three men at once — not literally, but in the old sense that matters more, clouding whatever judgment their long years of penance and sacrifice might have earned them. Each man looked at the living, breathing woman standing before him and wanted her entirely for himself. A fierce quarrel broke out on the spot, right there among the bones and ashes and lingering smoke of the ritual that had raised her. Tribikram insisted that the bones he had kept and carried through years of ascetic wandering were the true foundation of the miracle, and that this fact made her rightfully his. Baman swore with equal conviction that it was the ashes — his ashes, guarded through his own years of forest austerity — that had truly restored her. And Madhusadan simply laughed at both of them, certain that neither bones nor ashes meant anything without the knowledge he alone had stolen and mastered. Not one of the three would yield an inch, and Sweet Jasmine herself stood at the centre of this argument, restored to life only to become, instantly, the subject of a dispute none of them showed any sign of settling.

A Riddle No Wise Man Could Untangle

The dispute raged on and on, and no one — however learned — could bring it to a close. The wisest doctors of the district were consulted and left the argument exactly as baffled as they had entered it. As for the local Raja, the story concedes with a shrug that no one goes to a king expecting wit or wisdom, so his opinion hardly mattered to the outcome. And here, at last, the Vampire's tale folded back upon itself, for it was the Baital himself, still slung wrapped across Raja Vikram's shoulder as the king carried him doggedly through the dark toward the waiting ascetic, who paused in his narration to pose the question directly to his royal captor. I wonder, the fiend mused aloud, with unmistakable relish, whether the great Raja Vikram could decide which of these three men the woman rightfully belongs to? It was, as always, a trap dressed up as flattery — and as always, King Vikram, bound by his own vow of silence, would nonetheless find himself powerless to resist answering.

Vikram's Verdict, Delivered in Anger

To Baman, the man who kept her ashes, fellow! Vikram snapped back at once, plainly nettled by the Baital's habitual insolence — for the vampire had, as usual, wrapped his question in just enough sly provocation to needle the king past his own resolve to stay silent. It was a swift answer, and a confident one, but the Baital was never a creature to let a swift answer pass unchallenged, particularly not one that left such an obvious opening for further mischief. The fiend had asked his riddle knowing full well it had no easy resolution — three men, three claims, one impossible knot — and Vikram's blunt naming of Baman, however instinctively correct it might prove to be, was exactly the kind of unsupported verdict the Baital most loved to pick apart. The night was far from over, the road back to the sorcerer Shanta-Shil was far from finished, and the vampire, sensing an opening, drew breath to press the king further, plainly delighted at the prospect of forcing a fuller and more considered explanation out of his stubborn, silence-bound captive.

The Baital Presses for a Reason, Not Just a Name

Yet, the Baital rejoined at once, with the impudent relish he brought to every one of these exchanges, if Tribikram had not preserved her bones all those years, how could she ever have been restored to life at all? And if Madhusadan had not gone out and learned the very science of raising the dead, how could she ever have been revivified in the first place? It seems to me, at least, that either man might claim as good a right to her as Baman does. But perhaps, he added, with the particular false humility he always used to needle his royal captor hardest, your royal wisdom sees something in this that I, a mere hanging corpse, cannot. It was a fair challenge dressed as flattery, and both men on that dark road knew it. Vikram had named a winner, but he had not yet explained why the bones and the borrowed knowledge should count for less than the ashes — and a king who prided himself on justice could hardly leave so sharp a question hanging unanswered in the night air.

Vikram Explains — Son, Father, and Husband

Devil! Vikram said again, angrily, unable to let the fiend's challenge stand, and he laid out his reasoning in full. Tribikram, he said, had kept and carried her bones — and a man who preserves the bones of the dead performs precisely the office of a son toward a parent, the very duty owed by a child at the time of cremation. By that act, Tribikram had placed himself in the position of her son, and a son, plainly, could never afterward become her husband. Madhusadan, likewise, by restoring her to life through his stolen science, had done nothing less than give her life itself — the exact gift a father gives a child at birth — and a father, no less than a son, could never rightly become a husband to the woman he had fathered into being. That left only Baman, who had kept nothing but her ashes — the plain relic of mourning, carrying no special claim of kinship, no office of son or father to bar the way. It was Baman, therefore, and Baman alone among the three, who remained free to stand toward her as a husband stands toward a wife, and so it was to Baman, Vikram concluded, that Sweet Jasmine rightfully belonged.

The Baital's Delight at Having Won Again

The Baital received this careful, reasoned answer with unmistakable and rather insulting delight — not because he had been bested, but because he had once again succeeded in dragging a full answer out of his silent, long-suffering captor. I am happy to see, O king, the fiend exclaimed, with the particular glee he reserved for exactly this moment in each of their nightly encounters, that in spite of my own gloomy presentiments, we are not to part company just yet! These little separations of ours, I have come to feel, are like the quarrels of lovers — mere preludes to a still closer union between us. And so, with your gracious leave, we shall once again practise a little suspension. There was no true request for leave in it, of course — the Baital had never once waited for Vikram's permission to do anything, least of all this — and the king, standing grim and silent in the dark with his son beside him, understood exactly what was coming even before the fiend finished speaking.

The Vampire Slips the Cloth and Is Gone

And with that, before Vikram could so much as tighten his grip on the bundle at his shoulder, the Baital was already gone. There was no visible struggle, no sound of tearing cloth — only a sudden lightness at the king's back, as though the night itself had exhaled, and then the dark shape of the vampire was rising swift and silent through the branches overhead, flitting back toward his own familiar tree exactly as he had done every time before. The wrapping of turban-cloth and waistband that had held him only a heartbeat earlier now hung slack and empty across Vikram's shoulder, its knots still tied, its burden vanished from inside it as completely as smoke escapes a closed fist. High above, half-seen against the dark canopy, the Baital swung himself back up into the tree and hung there once more, suspended by his heels in the old attitude, silent now and waiting, as though nothing at all had happened.

A King's Grim, Wordless Reckoning

Vikram stood perfectly still for a moment in the dark, the empty cloth hanging loose and useless from his shoulder, and said nothing at all — no curse, no sigh of frustration, not even the flicker of surprise a lesser man might have shown at watching his captive vanish out of a knotted bundle without so much as untying it. He had been through this exact defeat too many times now for it to provoke anything so undisciplined as an outburst. Instead, after that single motionless beat, he simply turned around without a word and began retracing his steps back through the dark toward the tree he had already left behind once that night, his son falling into step silently beside him, neither of them needing to discuss what had happened or what must now be done. There was, after all, only one possible response to this particular failure, and Vikram had long since stopped wasting breath on complaint when the work of undoing it was so simple, if wearying, to perform.

Back Up the Tree, One More Time

Father and son walked back together through the darkness until the familiar tree rose up before them once more, and without a word of complaint Vikram climbed it exactly as he had climbed it every time before, found the Baital hanging there in ghoulish silence, cut him down with the same sharp stroke he always used, and slung the fiend back over his shoulder, binding him up again in turban-cloth and waistband as securely as his patience and his experience could manage. It was, by now, a task so familiar to him that his hands moved through it almost without thought — climb, cut, catch, bind, descend — the whole grim little ritual of recapture playing out in near total silence beneath the tree's dark branches. Whatever weariness the king felt at performing this exact sequence yet again, for what was surely not the first time and would certainly not be the last, he kept entirely to himself, exactly as a king who has sworn an oath to a sorcerer must learn to do.

Vikram Tries a New Strategy — Sitting Down

But this time, once he had climbed down with his recaptured burden and stood again on solid ground, Vikram paused to consider something new. Perhaps, he thought to himself, it was the very act of walking that undid him each time — perhaps the double effort of putting one foot before the other while also following the twists of the vampire's story was precisely what let each tale's riddle slip past his guard and drag an answer out of him before he could stop himself. Would it not be wiser, this time, to simply sit down and listen, sparing his mind the burden of the road while he attended fully to the fiend's next tale? Resolved on this new approach, Vikram set his bundle down upon the ground, well secured in its knots of turban-cloth and waistband, seated himself cross-legged before it exactly as a man settles in for a long story, and instructed his silent, ever-patient son to do precisely the same beside him.

The Baital Objects, and Is Overruled by His Own Words

The Baital, predictably, objected at once and with considerable heat to this new arrangement, insisting loudly that sitting down to listen was a plain violation of the covenant struck between himself and the king back when this whole nightly ordeal had first begun. It was precisely the sort of technical objection the fiend most enjoyed raising — but Vikram, who had not survived this many exchanges with the vampire by being careless about the exact terms of their agreement, answered him by reciting the covenant's actual words back at him, point by point, and proving conclusively that nothing in their original bargain said one syllable about walking, or standing, or sitting, or any other particular posture at all. It applied, as sworn, only to the manner in which the tales were told and heard — and on that ground, sitting was every bit as lawful as walking had ever been. The Baital had built his objection on nothing but presumption, and Vikram, grim and precise as ever, had dismantled it in a single well-aimed reply.

Bound by Fate, the Vampire Begins Again

Beaten on this point exactly as cleanly as he had, moments earlier, triumphed on another, the Baital fell into a deep sulk and swore aloud that he would not utter one more word that night, to Vikram or to anyone else. It was a fine, dramatic vow — and it lasted, as all such vows made by the Baital seemed fated to last, for almost no time at all, because the fiend, for all his cunning and all his mockery, remained bound by the same chain of destiny that had bound him to this endless cycle of tale-telling and escape from the very start. Before long his lips parted again, quite against his own declared intention, and he opened once more with the same familiar prelude he used before every one of his tales — the flat, formal announcement that he was about to relate a story, and that the story he was about to tell was a true one. And so, with Vikram seated cross-legged upon the ground, his son beside him, and the emptied, re-knotted bundle resting once again exactly where it belonged, the night's contest resumed precisely where it had never really stopped — the Baital already talking, the king already listening, and the long road back to the sorcerer Shanta-Shil still waiting, unfinished, ahead of them both.