The Prince in Local Exile

     Padmarana and Aruna slept in the stone hut for a week, during the late summer. The morning the monsoon began he awoke in a bed of sweat, although Aruna was sleeping right beside him. He dreamed he was swimming- no, drowning- in a sea of buttermilk. When he awoke, the rain had began to make a pool near the doorway of the hut. He sprung up and, ignoring the rain, grabbed a hoe and began to cut channels to divert the rainwater from their entrance. He could see, however, that this was a job which might take him the better part of the day, and he wished he had thought of it sooner, but the rains were here, and he would just have to cope somehow.

     While he dreamed of a buttermilk sea, Aruna beside him dreamed she watched a flock of birds “a hundred miles long” passing over their hut on their way south.

     Aruna watched him from the doorway called to him when she had made for them chapattis and dal­—the repast was nourishing, and he forgot for a while when he began again how uncomfortable he really was, with the rain falling on his back. He had never had ventured out into it while in the castle- although he spent many at the tower with Jaagudar doing garden work in the rain, and he had not a minded it, his dream felt so uncomfortable, that at the end of his work, when he had come in from the rain with muddy hands and feet, he collapsed onto their bed, and Aruna had to wash his extremities for him, because he fell straightaway to sleeping again, and woke up late, when the moon was out, and the clouds had passed, for now.

     Aruna was awake, then, as well, and had spent the time while Padmarana slept arranging her trousseau so that she had her wet weather things all laid out and easy to get to.

     “Aruna, we are going to have to do a few hard things...”

     “Yes, I know...”

     “We need to get some large jars to catch the rainwater, for one thing, And I need some more tools to work on making a garden... and I need seeds for plants, and we have to get them in as soon as we can. When the rains stop there will be no way of getting more water except if we walk all the way to the river, and I know, you do not wish to do that every day. Bad enough you must take our clothes to wash each week! But can you perhaps ask your father if he can spare us some seeds?”

     “Yes, love, I can ask it of him. I do not know how he will respond. Since last year when the zamindars came and took his cotton crop at less the price he thought hey would pay him, he is probably dear with the seeds we have there. But I shall ask for you.”

      When she visited her father, though, she found him irritable and more than a little upset.

“This is something which you two should have thought about sooner! I have seeds, yes, and I will part with some, mostly for the things you will need to eat, of course, but as for jars, your mother and I are hard put out for it. Perhaps you can go to Miti Adami, the potter, and ask of him?

     “I know Padmarana has some money, and he still has access to the riches of the castle, even as they will not allow him to return to live. We will find a way to pay Miti Adami.”

     ‘Everyone in the village is still shocked, you know, Aruna, that the king decided not to let you two live in the (castle with them). They will probably help you, but of course, if he greases their hands, of course, I am sure they will help that much better.”

     Emanadar, her father, went to his larder shelves and began to grab handfuls of seeds from the jugs he poured them from, which lay on shelves that reached to the roof, He made stops in six different jugs, and when he was done with each one, he poured the handfuls into scarves that he then knotted and tied. When he was all finished, he wrapped them in another, larger piece of cloth, and handed them to her.

     “This should see you both through until our next harvest at the end of the year. Beans, rice, greens, and some melons. I wish, daughter, that both of you can find some way back into the good grace of the king. I know it will probably not happen, given the king has such a stubborn way about him, but if you can...”

     He did not finish. Aruna knew his heart. She took the bag on her shoulder, kissed her father and set off for the home of Miti Adami, the potter.

     When she got there she found Adami taking a number of items out of his kiln, and lining them all up against the back wall. “There! I have just finished the order for Zamindar Zaroori Kaan. What can I do for you, my Princess?”

     “Please don’t call me that, no, not yet, Adami! I am a princess in name only, I am an outcast. And I am here to ask you a favor of my husband.”

     ”Yes, and?”

     “We are living in a small hut in the Ushakothi forest. We have no way to gather rainwater now. Can you make us, or do you have on hand, some jars which will help us through these rainy weeks to come? My husband can pay...”

     “Your husband, I am sure, can pay. But it is not a good thing which his father did to both of you! It is one thing to speak of “customs” and “the way things are always done,” it is another to turn a hard heart to one’s own flesh and blood! Bah! I want no money from the Prince! You may take what you need, and if it is more than you can carry today, I will have Gopal my runner boy bring more out to you, tomorrow!”

     Aruna bowed, for this was a rather handsome sacrifice for the poor potter to make for the behalf of a prince, even a banished one. He would be losing many rupees indeed! But she thanked him. She stuck the cloth full of seeds into one of the biggest jugs she could manage, and took up another one in her other hand. So burdened, she walked from the village back over the paths and the hills and along the river until she reached Pitapali, and the hut.

     Padmarana had spent his day preparing beds for whatever plants she might be returning with. When he saw the rice, he frowned.

     “Rice! What a lot of work that will be!”’

     ”But it will be easier because of the rains, dear!”
     “Yes, but my feet will always be wet!”

     “You would rather we had empty bellies?”

     “No, of course! But now I must create a place for rice as well. Oh well, so be it...”

      He was up early the next morning, building a paddy for the rice. Some of the channels he mad e the day before could be turned in so that they flooded it, but he was lucky that the bulk of the rains- when it would rain night and day- were yet perhaps a week away. It meant he could build the paddy as well as get the seeds in.

     They soaked the seeds in a large bowl and left them another day so that they’d sprout, and once they had, Padmarana went out into the paddy, which was about three inches of mud over his feel, and began the laborious task of inserting the seeds, some three to five at a time, into the mud beneath his feet. This took him the better part of the day, but he was heartened when Aruna came to him as he labored and bought him steaming hot tea, and chapatis. He took a break from the work and sat under one of the banana trees that rose from the edge of the hut. Here, they would need more than just their dreams to get by. They would need all the things they had learned and more, and there were always more things to learn. So many things that would never have occurred to a prince to need to know! But he was only a prince in name, now. He might as well be just another peasant.

     Padmarana noticed something as he sat looking toward the river. Along the path that ran by the river’s edge, he saw men walking. They were dressed in long robes of orange, and grey. For every five steps they took, they threw their heads to the ground, and spoke inaudible prayers, placing their forearms before their heads, then they rose, and took five more steps, while they repeated this over and over, as they made their way down the riverbank trail.

     Monks! They must be! The sight of the pilgrims making their way slowly and with such ritual left an impression on Padmarana- this would have been his life, perhaps, had he not fallen in love and decided to make Aruna his wife!

     The monks continued, slowly, and uninterrupted, and he watched them until they were no longer visible for all the forest brush, and they were gone.

     Aruna boiled water for tea in a kettle on the fire hearth. She had gathered a number of twigs and branches of various bushes and plants near the hut, and Padmarana sat looking out the window across the grass way to the river. The air was languid, simmering, hot with the doldrums of summer, and hung thick with promise of weeks of more of the same. Padmarana broke a biscuit in two, ate half, and placed the other on a plate on a table beside his chair at the window. Now the young river birds were just beginning to flock up, the first approaches of fall were hinted at. The situation between Padmarana and Mohan remained volatile and unpredictable, the son had begun to resent his father for the judgment that placed him and Aruna beyond the protection of the palace grounds, but now, Padmarana was more of a man of the people than he could ever become had he remained with the cloistered patrimony of the court. So far as he knew, his father was unrelenting once he made up his mind, and Padmarana decided to resign himself to the fact that, the future would be completely unpredictable. He was still eh heir to Mohan’s throne, this would not change, and so there was still the authority dispatched to him by Mohan among the jungle peasants, but even so, Padmarana’s status within the court was fully banished.

     And so the sooner he accepted it all, and just stayed close to his new home and wife, and took to protecting the population and the wildlife of the forest, he would have no other bad comportment to deal with at his father’s hands. The peasants acknowledged him as Prince, and as someone living amongst them, grew to favor him over the King himself, which was in the future to prove a lucky thing indeed.

     At the hut that night, Aruna made him a fabulous meal, which he took some part in preparing. Together they made rice balls, curried spinach, broiled greens and chapatis. They washed it all down with juice from several mangoes they had gathered that afternoon.\

     The night was hot and the wind was still. Only the birds echoing calls across the river, and crickets in the tall grass that wended its way to it, could be heard above the gurgle of the water.

     Aruna and Padmarana lay in the bed together, looking out the one window above them at the starry sky.

     “Did you know, Aruna, that in between the stars is a fantastic network of minds?”

     “No, I did not, my sweet. There is much about the wide world I have no such sense of.”

     “This, Aruna, is I believe the basis of us all. Between the stars are great networks of beaming energetic love. It sustains the fire of the stars, it sustains the fire in the lives of men. IT is the warmth and comfort of the great Mother that loves us all. That is what I see when I look up at the great sky.”

The Moon, which was in the sign of the Scorpion, was no mean candle as it shone down upon their hut and bounced its light in multicolored spatters across the foaming, rushing river. The branches of one of their garden vines that had wended themselves up the side of the hut was the only interruption of the clear frame of the sky beyond the window. Light grey clouds had begun to form up with a slight breeze that had come with sunset, and were now marching to the west rosy ribbed and pink above the Mahadani River.

     Padmarana gave thanks for his good fortune, marrying for love, made to feel he was shamed in his humble poverty, to the contrary, he felt glad that he was able to provide for his wife and himself and at the same time, free, with privacy, from the backbiting and sniping and name-calling that went on the with Brahmins, the courtiers, the purdah, and his Mother and Father the King and Queen, the daily gossip of the court, the mundane and often stupid concerns of those too ignorant to cherish the still space of their conscience.

     No, here he had peace, such peace as he could never have if he were to be thrust into his father’s throne, unprepared, to whatever extent that Jaagudar’s eccentric tutoring had not touched matters he would turn into deep nighttime worries. The worries of kings and men who have something to lose.

As they began to make love, Aruna clung to him and he felt a shiver through his entire spine as she led him through several levels of chakravarti. The energies in their spines merged throughout their bodies, and their passions stoked the kundalini serpent’s climb up through to top of their skulls. And these skulls too, he thought, will one day all be food for Kali’s ashes. Like the ones strung round her neck, merciless and thoughtless now, themselves just chains of beads on a string that adorned her nipple.

     The pink ribbed clouds of sunset had passed beyond the moon, but now overhead through the night came darker thick ones, and thunder. The monsoon would not arrive for another week, but the weather had begun to turn. When Padmarana finally rolled over to sleep, after considering the various concerns that went through his mind… the garden, was it properly tended? The grass for the cow, was it still greening? The different sacks of provisions, were they all stored carefully and neatly in the tiny stone hut’s pantry? Finally, all resolved that whatever he might be missing now, he was doing his best as a husband, he shut his eyes to the world.

     Padmarana finished his garden in the coming three weeks, all the while complaining about the mud caked round his ankles and the almost incessant rains, working while they were light and returning to Aruna’s side, in the warm hut, when they were torrid. Soon, his rice plants were half a foot tall, and sticking up green and flat against the backdrop of mud puddle and paddy. The other plants had sprouted as well, and bean vines began crawling up the several poles he and Aruna had staked around the sunny side of the hut. Everything else they had put in was beginning to show leaf as well, and it would only be for these ugly old rains to stop, for them to feel they had actually made something for themselves, here, out of nothing.

     For nothing was all that King Mohan felt the need to do, in favor of his son. Along with his work on the garden, Padmarana was still expected to groom his troops, inspect the forests and the borders, attack and seize any poachers he came across, and keep up good spirits in the numerous villages that rested between the river, the greater jungle, and the river at the northern border.

     Padmarana would spend those hours with the rain falling outside to clean his saddle and his sword, and as he was still prince, the small feathered crown he would disdain wearing, lest he were traveling to the villages. It was on those occasions when looking princely was something diplomatically needed, and while many of the villagers knew of his new condition, living outside Jharsuguda Gadh, just as many likely did not, and he needed all the powers of impression and persuasion he could muster.

     There were, of course, problems in the villages, problems that were rarely, if ever, brought before the king, mostly handled by the local village headmen, all elected by their peers, and serving, more or less, until they died off. In the village of Beura Padmarana came across a family who had had all their banana trees smashed and fruit stolen by marauding monkeys, and while the monkeys were somewhat looked on as “holy incarnations of Hanuman” and given wide berth from most human brickbats, Padmarana decided he would need to take action, lest these poor peasants (who otherwise had little in the way to support themselves) should starve over the coming months.

     Padmarana rounded up a number of his forest rangers, and set about making traps and snares for the monkeys, baiting each one with papayas and bananas. Within days, they had arrested over seventeen monkeys, and Padmarana ordered them cages, and ferried to the other side of the river, far from the village, out of the forests. It would not be meet enough to allow them to be hunted by their natural enemies, the panthers and leopards, for these monkeys had already succumbed to the attractions of human life, and would only cause more commotion.

     “Let them cause commotion across the river, where the people are not under my powers of command,” he told the troops.

     The villainous monkeys were taken in several large cages, screaming and screeching their defiance at relocation, and the rangers took them to the river near Jharsuguda Gadh, where they found two or three ferrymen to take them over to the other shore.

     “They will not dare to swim back across, (captain of the rangers) said, “they will find a new life, and make it some way.”

     When Padamrana visited Jaagudar the next time, he told Jaagudar what he had done.

     “This was something of wisdom on your part, my prince. For you did not think to just slaughter the monkeys. Such a thing would well be in the grasp and mettle of your father to do. But you removed the irritation from the people, and you spared their lives. Excellent thinking, young man!”

Padmarana blushed. He could only hope his future decisions could be as full of benevolence.

     Aruna’s sleep in the stone hut on those nights she was alone, and Padmarana out amongst the forest and villages, was never broken when the rains came, or even thunderclouds stole over the moon and broke their trumpets against the stillest hours of the night. And as the rain fell, often if Aruna were laying awake staring at the ceiling, she would sense the presence of the highest goddess of all the apsaris in the realm, Saraswati herself.

     “Fear not Aruna, for I am giving you and your friends the ability to make many changes, many changes in your land. The prince will prosper, and there will be strange energies, but rest assured that both your time here in this shepherd’s hut, and his time away from the palace of his father, will not be long in years or in your time. And I am giving you the talas and the ragas you will need, and you can use to bring harmony amongst the people of the citadel, and farther, along the river and through the deep forest lands. All will come to recognize the power of your realm and the rightness and compassion of its rulers. But that day...”

     Aruna lie there, startled. What day? When? What was this? The goddess was telling her not to worry. But worry about what, and for how long? All these things both mystified and annoyed her.           While Aruna was belittled, and turned away from the court for her “non-caste” family and parentage, in actuality, amongst the apsaris, Aruna was the chief of all the music-spirits which dwelled in Sakwadwipa. Even more than her friends, who had also reincarnated to the villages of the Ushakothi, Aruna alone had the power to communicate with certain animals, particularly the birds, and with the goddesses themselves. Many lifetimes she had conquered the base desires of fame and fortune What fortune now came her way- betrothed to the future king of Sakwadwipa! -was that which she had earned. Although her mind was not far from one of your typical village maiden, she also was quiet, pious, and attended to her elderly parents most dutifully. When she and Padmarana had been banished to the forest of Ushakothi, she took it lightly, for she knew that every situation we hold in life is but temporary. The temporary may last days, or years, but nothing is ever what we felt it might have been yesterday, and the wise move along with slow surety toward their goals, regardless of the obstacles made out of cloth lying back in the past.

     For Aruna, the ability to speak to the goddesses was not something she had actually ever sough. More, if she were praying ,the goddesses themselves might take it upon themselves to intercede in her prayers, and correct her in the manner or ends which she sought so ardently. The prayers she prayed were for: good health for her and her husband, and most of all, because of his position, and his future one- his safety. And for the rains, and for a good harvest, and that the forest animals would not make mincemeat of their garden, and for the health of her old doting parents, bless their hearts. And then she would pray for her friends, and the parents of her friends, and then, singly for each person she knew well in the village, for they were all bearers of a significant and localized karma, and whether or not any of them knew it, they would all play a role in the new Sakwadwipa, which would be founded on the kingship of her husband, but in their future life.

     Expectations for their future life were rare in her mind, although they were never entirely absent. You could not say Aruna was without any ambitions at all, but that these ambitions were yoked to the idea that she was put here by the goddesses to both serve their common muse, and change the dharma of Jharsaguda and the Ushakothi woods people, and that there might ever be peace within this kingdom, so long as she had life to live, breath the breathe, and stars in the darkened sky to walk beneath.

     For now, the goddess had vanished into the mists of the river fog, and as the rain ceased and the little frogs made their creeping, creaking chirps to welcome the first signs of dawn, Aruna realized there was little she could do that would arrest her fate, whatever that was to be.

     And so she sighed, resigned. Something and someday, the goddess says. Well let us see!