Bride of the Buddha Read online

  With that, he turned his back and, on his mud-splattered stilt legs, strode away.

  At least he’d said “you.”

  Nevertheless, he’d left me with more questions than I’d begun with, and my encounters with other holy men over the next couple of years didn’t help. They had all sorts of opinions. Some, similar to this first man, insisted that all beings were already happily ensconced in a common Soul, which for me seemed like a gigantic, bland pudding, expanding until it popped—inflating and exploding, over and over again. Others told me the Soul didn’t exist at all—nor did anything else, because all is impermanent. Meanwhile, I had yet to broach the topic of “going forth” with my mother.

  I was almost fourteen when an opportunity arose. By then my mother’s prayers to big and small gods had changed from repentence to thanksgiving, for my father had married off my two elder sisters and had just arranged the most coveted match of all for my third sister, Kisa, who at sixteen had the reputation of being the most beautiful girl produced by our clan—never short on beauties—in generations. Kisa’s looks were more an enhancement of perfection than anything unique: her eyes brighter and more expressive; her hair longer, thicker, and sleeker; her waist smaller; her fingers more tapered; her lips more full and curved; her cheekbones more exquisitely sculpted. Overall, these features, on the borderline of exaggeration, endowed her presence with such intensity that when she walked into a room it felt even to me as if she brought with her the realm of the devas, increasing the significance of everyone’s life. Young men, after setting eyes on her, had a way of improving their performances in athletic contests as well as fights, whether or not they had any chance to court her.

  Most importantly, she had attracted the attention of Suddhodana Gotama, my mother’s half-brother. Suddhodana was not only the richest member of our clan but also its current leader, elected by the elders. Although Suddhodana’s son, Siddhartha Gotama, didn’t seem eager for marriage any time soon—preferring to spend his nights with musicians and dancing girls and his days with feasting and sporting events—my sister’s beauty apparently had persuaded him to settle down. Our family ignored the rumor that he was spoiled beyond redemption—the result of a vision, shortly before Siddhartha’s birth, that the gods supposedly had presented to his father. Suddhodana’s mystical experience—full of revolving wheels of fire, streams of rainbow devas, and other celestial excesses—had announced that his unborn son’s destiny was either that of a world-turning monarch or some kind of ultimate holy man. To prevent his son from ever considering the latter option, Suddhodana had made sure his son enjoyed earthly life to the maximum degree.

  I could think of nothing worse than marriage to such a man.

  But it was my sister, not I, who was the bride in question, and my mother was both ecstatic and exhausted with the prospect of preparing for such a grand wedding. I hoped to use both her reactions to my advantage. One day we were alone in the women’s quarters folding altar cloths and pillow coverings, my sister having gone off with her many cousins to the market to price bangles. The grated windows were open wide, letting in light and the sweetness of the forest. Outside, fat clouds nudged each other in the eastern sky, far from the afternoon sun. It was another monsoon season, but much milder than the one after Deepa died.

  “You’ve borne the burden of marrying off so many daughters,” I said. “Not to mention all those dowries. I hate to think of putting you through this again.”

  “Burden?” Ama looked perplexed, then smiled and patted my hand. “Yasi, this is our life as the devas have ordained.”

  “But maybe the devas have ordained something different for me, to ease your burden. Perhaps I could go forth as a seeker.”

  “Yasodhara!” My mother’s dumfounded gasp and exhale made her earrings jingle wildly. “Has your mind been deranged by demons?”

  “Ama, I have to confess something. I’ve never seen a demon, or a deva either. I’ve heard talk of a certain blindness that some people have. According to some of the seekers, the only way to cure this blindness is to go forth and find the right teachers to train one’s mind.” This, granted, was a loose interpretation of what they’d actually said.

  “My child. What you speak of is not blindness, it’s the devas’ despair over our degenerate age, which these self-appointed seekers themselves have caused. If you want to see gods and spirits, you need to perform the correct prayers and carry out your duties, and most of all you must listen. Do you think I am always in the company of the gods? No, I must beg them to come to me, and then listen with all my heart and soul. We no longer live in the times of your great-grandmother. The devas sang to her constantly.” My mother suddenly looked older, and I noticed for the first time that grief and accumulating years had dulled her hair (but only to the shine of ordinary women half her age), and imprinted the faintest of mushroom-colored crescents under her perfect brown eyes. “My grandmother lived her whole life inside their songs.”

  I wondered if that was true, or if it was just another story about the past, full of prodigious beings and titanic gods who nobody had actually ever seen. “But I’ve listened for these voices,” I said. “The seekers taught me how to still my mind so my thoughts wouldn’t block the way. And I’ve tried to do my household duties, and I’ve prayed, but I’ve yet to see or hear anything except a tingling in my ears.” I didn’t add that the tingling sometimes opened into a vastness that seemed to expand my spirit far beyond my small concerns—even my worries about Deepa’s soul—a state I wasn’t sure I wanted. “I need to find if somewhere there’s a teacher who can cure me.”

  “But to go out all alone on the road!”

  “Some women do,” I said.

  “Very few, and those women are old. As a young girl, you would be attacked and left to die—or sold into slavery.”

  “Times are different now. There are more women seekers, I think.”

  “That’s how much you know! In this darkening age, things are getting worse for women, not better. Men have started calling themselves not only kings but emperors, whose soldiers regard females as spoils of war. In the cities we’re bought and sold like pet monkeys. And not far from here, I’ve heard that we can’t even own property anymore. If our husbands die, we are slaves to our sons.”

  “All the more reason to go forth and defy these changes.”

  “Haven’t you heard me at all? These changes mean far more danger to every young woman walking alone, let alone homeless ones.”

  “So? I could get attacked or a lion could eat me in the rice fields just outside our house. I’m not afraid. Besides, I’d take care to walk with other mendicants and only in the day.”

  My mother gazed at me silently. All at once she lunged toward me, her bangles ringing loud as prayer bells, and pulled at my hair, worn in a knob like a boy’s, until it spilled out and cascaded down my shoulders and back. I gasped, too surprised to say anything as she plunged her hands into the whole mess and ran her fingers through it, easing out the major tangles and kinks. “Wait here.” She got up and left for her private dressing chamber, two rooms away. When she returned she was carrying a mirror, unlike any I’d seen before. We had a small one of polished obsidian, but this one appeared to be silver. “I traded for this in honor of my daughters’ marriages.” She held it up to my face.

  I had no choice but to look at the bright reflecting silver. There was my face, unsettlingly like Kisa’s, with the same luminous features and emerging cheekbones, with darker eyes and a slightly sharper jaw. Curving eyelashes thick as feathers. I’d hardly glanced at my image before; I’d never even used the obsidian mirror. At most I’d glanced at myself in a pool or a ceramic bowl of clear water.

  Ama kept holding up the silver mirror. “Do you want this beauty to shrivel away under some patched and malodorous mendicant’s robe? Do you want to become an old woman, never knowing the joys that young womanhood has to offer? Never to lie with a man?
Or to feel the love of a husband? Or to be celebrated in a wedding, surrounded by the love and joy of all your kin?”

  The mirror image stared back at me, rose-hued lips curving with innocent sensuality, dark eyes shining and full of depths I didn’t know I possessed, skin smoother than the silver that reflected it. A tiny thrill jolted my belly and spread through my chest, softening and brightening me inside and out. Yes, I was falling in love with myself. And what better way to fulfill this self-love than by marrying? Looking every day into the eyes of a living mirror, a husband radiating love and admiration for my beauty.

  Except that in next to no time I’d be a droopy-nosed old woman mourning this beauty and knowing nothing beyond the vanity it engendered. And then I’d die and turn into a Thing. And I would have deserted Deepa.

  Panic sent me stumbling backward.

  “Ama, I can’t stay here.” I could barely speak.

  My mother stared at me.

  “I visited the charnel ground,” I said. “I tried to rescue Deepa right after she died. I promised her spirit, even though I couldn’t see it, that I would find her. And do whatever I could to make her happy.”

  “You visited the charnel ground? Oh, my dear baby, why? The dead are dead; you must have faith that their spirits are with the ancestors.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t have that faith. And I promised! If not for me, she never would have climbed out on that branch! She would be alive!” I buried my head in my hands, my shoulders heaving with sobs.

  My mother put her arms around me. “Dear, dear, Yasi. You can’t blame only yourself. I locked you up, after all, and tempted you both.”

  She sat back up, looking over my head, staring out the window into the empty space where the mango tree had been, the one Deepa fell from, which Ama had ordered cut down shortly after. Finally, she spoke. “Perhaps to seek your own truth is your karma. And mine.”

  She waited as I slowly straightened, my whole body filling with hope. “But I don’t want you wandering off like a crazy woman,” she said. “There are groups of female mendicants. When you’re ready, we can try to see if any of them are suitable for you to join. But you must promise me that until then you’ll start acting like a graceful young lady and not an orphan beggar boy. I want you to learn to be a proper woman, with all the skills necessary to be a wife, so you can recognize your true karma when the time comes.”

  “Yes! Yes! I promise. Thank you, Ama.”

  Both of us stood up from our mats, brushing off our saris, preparing to go downstairs and dust the altars. We didn’t hear my brother until he burst through the door.

  “Ama! How could you allow such a thing, for my sister to go out as a beggar! I forbid it.” Jagdish, now taller than Suppabudda, our father, and with broader shoulders, stood before us in a black lungi, his naked chest glistening, his head thrust back, hands on his hips. He looked so much like our father, with his cleft chin, long nose and penetrating eyes—lacking only his stiff gray mustache.

  Ama took a step forward. “A son does not issue orders to his mother.”

  He raised his hand as if to strike her. I tensed. “You touch our mother,” I said, “and you’ll spend a thousand kalpas in hell.”

  Slowly, he lowered his hand, but he kept his eyes strictly on Ama. “Our uncle Suddhodana will never approve of my sister wandering the roads like some fanatical hag,” he said. “Yasi will ruin the chances for Kisa’s marriage.”

  My mother snorted, even smiling a little. “The marriage will have occurred long before the question of Yasi’s destiny comes up.”

  “That doesn’t matter. She’ll be a laughingstock and bring shame to the family.”

  “Not true!” I said. “A lot of people think going forth is the noblest thing one can do. What if a few pompous old men like Siddhartha’s father disapprove? What if some silly gossips laugh at me? But you don’t care about our family. You just care about yourself and how your self-important friends might see you.”

  Jagdish continued to address only Ama. “How can you let her defy me? Yasi is not you! She’s five years younger than I am!” He was blinking rapidly; you’d have thought I’d held him up with a bow and arrow. “She’s probably doing all of this just to spite me.”

  “What!” I couldn’t believe my brother was taking my actions so personally. “You are the most conceited person I’ve ever met.”

  Ama smacked her hands together. “Enough! Both of you. The question of Yasi’s going forth won’t even come up for several years. Meanwhile, we must all meditate on our karma and hope that the devas will give us direction.” Her voice was a heavy knife, cutting through our anger and pride. “And that includes you, Jagdish. It’s not seemly for young men to listen in on women’s conversations.”

  My brother’s complexion deepened with shame, and I realized how important it was for him always to perform perfectly; in that way he resembled our mother. “I had not intended—”

  “But you committed the act,” Ama said. “Now go. And let there be peace between the two of you.”

  Silently, Jagdish left the room.

  Once he was gone, Ama turned to me. “Don’t be too hard on your brother. Your father has always taken him too seriously, while your sisters don’t take him seriously enough.” She leaned over and picked up the silver mirror, polishing it on the edge of her sari. “You haven’t been around your sisters and Jagdish enough to know how they’ve mocked and teased him over the years, even while your father wants to set him up as Siddhartha’s mighty general and heir to some throne yet to be devised. These conflicts have created an imbalance in your brother—if you want to speak of blindness, he’s an example. He can’t always distinguish between his idealism and his pride.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “He often mistakes himself for a god.”

  Ama’s small smile was almost mischievous. “You’ve never seen a god,” she said. “So how would you know?”

  Over the following weeks, I noticed that Kisa and Jagdish seemed to be always quarreling, especially after competing for Siddhartha’s attention on his family visits. Jagdish definitely had dreams of being his second-in-command. “He’s marrying me, not you!” I overheard Kisa say. They stood at our iron-bolted entrance door, having just bid farewell to the visitors. My brother and sister were oblivious to my presence, which was understandable. I was a fixture by now, stationing myself as often as I could on the path in front of our house, hoping against hope for some female holy wanderer to happen by, full of advice for a fellow aspirant.

  Kisa snorted at our brother and gave a little shake to her head with its glittering array of intricate black braids embellishing a gleaming bun at the nape of her neck. “Don’t think for one moment that you’re joining my household after the wedding.”

  “That choice will be your husband’s, not yours.”

  Kisa only laughed, her perfect white teeth flashing in the sunshine. “How could you ever think that a future husband of mine would risk angering me for the sake of a dolt with barnyard breath and the wit of a dung beetle? You bore him as much as you do me.”

  Jadish stood for a moment, quivering, although from rage or shock or hurt I couldn’t tell. His reply seemed to crawl ominously from his throat. “You overestimate your influence, which you’ll learn soon enough after you marry.”

  Kisa laughed all the more. “We’ll see.”

  “If you don’t behave properly,” Jagdish said, his voice smoothing while his ominous tone remained, “the devas might not let you marry at all.”

  I thought little of these exchanges. I was too busy helping my parents prepare for the grandest wedding they could afford. We planned to harvest all our marigolds and hibiscus and purchase more from traders; we also would bring in extra cooks to help set up the banquet and prepare the spices. My father employed his brother-in-law’s goldsmith to refine the precious metal and hammer out bangles and earrings, along
with vases, platters, and other dowry gifts. Some of these were displayed at the family visits where my sister had finally met the nonpareil Siddhartha. He visited three times that season, accompanied by his father and the aunt who had raised him after his mother died shortly after his birth. This aunt, named Pajapati, supposedly doted on him even more than his father did. I hardly noticed her, my future enemy and ally, as everyone sat on newly dyed straw mats and our best patterned cushions—with Suddhodana, Kisa’s future father-in-law, occupying the largest one, woven with gold thread. I was given the task of demurely handing out almonds to the group, which now included my two eldest sisters and their husbands; I had to prove to Ama that I knew how to make myself attractive, braiding my hair neither too tight nor too loose and wearing a sari folded to perfectly display my navel, an important part of a woman’s appearance, as it represented the center of the universe. The purple and gold cloth of my garment also set off my new gold necklaces and earrings. In this way, I showed off my personal wealth as well as my sparkling beauty to prospective husbands.

  I thanked whatever powers ruled the universe that Siddhartha had no brothers.

  As for Siddhartha himself, I made a point of never looking at him. I noticed only that he was clean-shaven, unlike my father and uncle, whose mustaches occupied their faces like extended raptors’ wings. Otherwise, Siddhartha resembled the other men at these gatherings, wearing an ankle-length formal paridhana pleated in front and an uttariya thrown over his shoulder. He also wore the standard princely gold earrings and his thick hair in a high knot that to me seemed prouder than those of the others, except for another cousin, Devadatta—yes, that Devadatta, who became an object of such controversy in later years. At this point, he was just another relative, albeit one who seemed intent on outdoing his cousin Siddhartha in every respect. My brother, four or five years younger than these cousins, followed Devadatta around as much as he could, joining in the boring conversations—mostly about the grandness of Suddhodana’s establishment and the many projects that Siddhartha had undertaken to improve it, not only designing new mansions but also installing pleasure parks, including an artificial lake for fishing, boating, and growing lotuses. Did he have no notion at all that these pleasures led only to death?