Bride of the Buddha Page 6

  Suddhodana spoke: “My priests and diviners have agreed that the gods have given us your younger daughter as a gift.”

  My parents nodded and smiled vaguely; I could hear my father attempt to swallow his sigh of relief. I tried to smile as well, hoping my despair passed for a mixture of shyness and ongoing sisterly grief. As for the divine support for my marriage, I couldn’t help wonder how much Suddhodana had bribed his priests to tell him what he wanted. It was clear that both our families stood to profit from this switch.

  Suddhodana’s upper lip tightened a notch. “However, we are left with one question.”

  The room seemed to shrink.

  Suddhodana wasn’t smiling. “There are rumors your daughter has kept unsavory company.”

  “Cousin!” my father said. “Are you impugning Yasodhara’s purity?”

  Ama, still shaky after her ordeal, clutched her elbows. “That’s not what he means, husband.” My father’s benign indifference toward my life had resulted in his complete ignorance of my interest in holy wanderers.

  “Well then, what?” My father flashed his eyes at me, as if my mother had kept me in hiding my whole life and now was about to unveil some gross deformity.

  Suddhodana folded his arms. “I am not speaking of the purity of her body, brother, but rather of her soul.”

  Ama’s eyes were cast on the floor, as if she expected me to speak for myself.

  It was then I was tempted. Ama had resumed eating and presiding over household life, although not yet with her former vigor; still, it was possible she no longer needed me to keep my promise. I glanced over at her, but she wouldn’t look back at me. Did she feel guilty about my sacrifice? Was she giving me an out?

  What if I just confessed outright that I was hardly the kind of worldly wife suitable for the temporal monarch Siddhartha was destined to be?

  “Our family gets its share of spiritual seekers,” I began. “I couldn’t help meeting a few of them.” I hesitated. Now was when I was expected to laugh off my spiritual concerns and say that all I cared about were the visitors’ comical looks and stories of exotic places. Could I bring myself to speak such a lie? Surely telling the truth instead was justified, considering that my dedication to the holy life would benefit my family’s ultimate karma far more than the extra geese, cattle herds, and outbuildings a marriage to the son of Suddhodana would bring. Perhaps if I said nothing more, my mother would speak, either to condemn me to this marriage or to rescue me.

  No one spoke.

  I couldn’t lie, I decided. I prepared to confess who I truly was.

  Just then the outside door opened and in rushed Siddhartha. “Father, I couldn’t wait any longer,” he said in a breathless voice, “to look into Yasodhara’s eyes.”

  It was his face that undid me. I could go on about symmetry; the strong yet refined bone structure; the searching brown eyes lit from within; the full lips curving with sensitivity, yet firm enough to show strength of character; and all the other components of male perfection—but it was something else that melted my heart. His face, with its skin like concentrated honey, combined intelligence with a glowing innocence—something that even at fifteen I recognized. He also seemed to radiate a concern for all the world that I almost had to call love. And currently this love was directed at me.

  Transfixed, I found myself believing, if not in devas, in their realm, where this man and I would live as divine mirrors of each other, reflecting each other’s beauty, celebrating our natural glory and offering it like star showers to the living and the dead. Already, it seemed we were in love with each other—and ourselves—and this love was one and the same.

  Yet just a moment ago I had been convinced I could not and should not lie, and I had always despised personal vanity. Something inside me went tight. Had I believed in Mara, I might have wondered whether he was using Siddhartha to tempt me away from my true calling. “Why didn’t you come to Kisa’s funeral?” I asked him. “Did your father really forbid you?”

  “Yasodhara!” my mother warned.

  “He did,” Siddhartha said. His eyes beckoned me back into the exquisite universe of his gaze. “And I allowed him to, because I don’t believe that humans should dwell on death. I believe we honor the dead by serving life, and therefore I want to cherish your sister by serving you as long as I live. I promise to be the best husband I can be. This act I shall dedicate to Kisa, but I will belong to you and you alone.”

  Essentially the same thing I had said to my mother. Only he meant it. And now I wanted to mean it, too.

  Suddhodana cleared his throat. “We need to clear up this matter of your daughter consorting with vagrant holy men. My son cannot be distracted from his destiny by the pointless speculations of spiritual riffraff whose only purpose is to help Mara make mischief and disturb the divine order.”

  Siddhartha broke his gaze from mine and looked mystified. Apparently, he had not heard the rumors about my wishes to go forth.

  At that point, all I wanted to do was return to that mutual gaze between Siddhartha and me that had swept the clutter of my earthly life into its own heaven. Surely, I could learn about souls in some other way than by living as a celibate wanderer.

  Forgive me, Deepa, I thought I heard my true self whisper. A self to be locked away in the proud palace of my heart.

  I looked over at my future father-in-law. “As a child, I listened to the silly tales of beggars who stopped at our door,” I said. “But I stopped listening to them years ago. I have dedicated my life not only to Kisa but also to my youngest sister Deepa. I plan to serve as a wife in their names. Should I have other than sons, I shall name my children after them.”

  My future husband’s smile filled my entire body with incandescence. “Father, we will marry,” he said.

  I lowered my eyes, those of a devoted wife-to-be.

  I can make no excuses for myself, but when I think back on what won me over, I can only point again to Siddhartha’s innocence. It had not only surprised me that a grown man could possess such a thing, but also in itself it was so beautiful that I wanted more than simply to preserve it. In my vague, fifteen-year-old way, I wanted to inhabit it, believing in the promise I had made to his father the same way he had believed in his promise to me. And for a time, I did.

  3

  In these later years of my life, I’ve seen how the gossips and pundits distorted the truth about Siddhartha and me. I suppose many people want to fit us into a preconceived idea. (Kisa, of course, is never mentioned outside of a persistent rumor that Siddhatha took her as a second wife!) In the most popular depiction, Siddhartha was only sixteen when he married me, and I was little more than the prettiest of the crowd of girls and women who temporarily blinded him to life’s suffering. Nonsense. He was twenty-six; he had known women, and what he wanted when he met me was a far deeper love. Our life was never one of decadence, where Siddhartha enjoyed his orgies and I sat around contriving ever new ways to titillate him—and where my father-in-law was perfectly content to wait thirteen years for me to bear him a grandson. As if Suddhodana would have allowed his son to endure a barren wife for so long! Such an idea is preposterous. Most likely our first years together have been distorted because few want to believe that even a profound and committed love is not enough to stop one from going forth to relieve the suffering of life’s dualities. But that is what Siddhartha did.

  So what was our story? Had my husband died before I got pregnant or had we somehow lived to an innocent old age, I might have remembered those first three years of our marriage as a series of seamless moments of wonder and love, starting with our wedding. I wore a sari of scarlet and gold silk, material I’d received from my future in-laws as a gift, silk being almost unknown in our province. A rare Chinese fabric, it whispered to itself and reflected and mutated light in a way I’d never seen before. It seemed yet another manifestation of the deva realm I had entered, like the
wedding procession to my husband’s home. He and I rode on a painted elephant high above the celebrants, with a view of soft green forested hills and glimmering blue lakes filled with lotuses like floating rainbows. Everywhere, nature’s beauty was accentuated by bridges and pavilions Siddhartha had designed and built, garden paradises we now would share.

  My new husband introduced me to so much, beginning with my own body. After everyone’s endless vows, the spangled processions, the feasts of curries and crisp spiced meats on mounds of saffron-suffused rice accompanied by sweets of every kind—not to mention vessel after vessel of bright, transparent wine—we finally entered the marriage chamber. In front of the high rosewood bed—carved with images of vines and fanciful blossoms and shimmering with silk spreads like luxurious multicolored seas—my husband stripped off his garments.

  I was shaken out of my trance. Was this big glistening penis actually going to force its way into me? Of course, I had been prepared for this as part of my education since childhood, and I had long ago accepted that I would feel some physical pain. But now I was remembering the holy men’s talk of celibacy, how it was a way of guarding one’s true Being, which otherwise would be squandered and washed away in the tide of desire. And if a man’s soul could be lost, how much more so a woman’s? I wasn’t ready to be changed into a completely sexual entity, much less a mother, my questing soul forever subordinated to my animal role.

  My husband’s voice was gentle. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I said, pressing my elbows against my ribs. I was still in my wedding sari.

  “No, something is wrong, I can tell.” He reached down and picked up his upper scarf, which he wound around his waist.

  All I could see in his eyes was sadness, not the anger I might have expected. “Isn’t it better to be celibate?”

  I explained to him the theories of the holy men and confessed that I’d once considered going forth on a quest to discover the soul’s true nature.

  “Souls!” Siddhartha laughed in his innocent way. “What can we know of them, really? They’re just ideas floating in the future or past. All we have is the present, where our bodies are, and our love.” The scarf around his waist stirred, and now he reached for my shoulder. “All I know is that I love you more than the devas, Yasi.”

  “I’ve never seen a deva,” I said, suddenly needing to reveal this.

  My husband’s grin spread across his face as if I’d told a marvelous joke. “You don’t need to! You’re more beautiful than any of them!”

  “So you don’t believe in devas?” I dared to hope that he shared my peculiar blindness.

  He kept on smiling, although with a bit of strain, I feared, because of the delay I was causing. “I don’t worry about devas,” he said, without anger or righteousness. “Best they stay in their realm and visit only on holidays.”

  “But what about our souls? Do you believe they live in the deva realm?”

  “So what if they do or don’t? I live in the earthly realm. Yasodhara, you are so much more than some ghost of a soul.” He leaned toward me, his eyes tender in spite of a touch of exasperation, and I could feel his warmth, smell his salty scent, and a sweet weakness pulled at my belly. But I told myself I needed to resist, because suddenly I knew that here was my one opportunity for a life where I could gain some kind of knowledge—if not of souls or devas, at least of the world that Siddhartha seemed to think took precedence over them.

  I touched his warm shoulder. “Only one thing,” I said, my heart pounding—with fear and desire but also with determination. “I want to see this earthly realm for myself, and not spend all my time in the women’s quarters.”

  He blinked. “You mean ride with me in my chariot? Help me inspect the property?”

  “Yes.” I held my breath. “And help out as well.”

  A funny little smile quirked up one side of his mouth, but his eyes lit up with wonder, as if he’d just heard a butterfly speak. “My father would never approve.”

  “He would. You’re his precious only son. He grants you everything.”

  He laughed again, fresh as rain. “Why not?” he said.

  “Why not, indeed! We love each other. So why wouldn’t we want to be together?”

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll do it.” He took my hand, still on his shoulder, and gently placed it around his waist, where his scarf was in the process of drifting to the floor. My sari followed suit.

  “But please, Yasi,” he said in a breathless voice. “No more talk now of souls.”

  With his merest touch, the swells and curves of my flesh turned to silk, my senses uniting in surrender to his gentle hands encompassing my waist and thrilling their way to my breasts. I closed my eyes in a swoon of pleasure, all my doubts and speculations falling away like diaphanous shawls, useless in the moment’s mounting heat. What could be more solid and real than our warm clutch as we fell upon the bed, my desire rising hot and urgent beneath him—my soul, whatever I might have thought it was, dissolving into a wild throbbing ecstasy—the pain of his entry opening me to a profound release of all my life’s petty tensions, followed by blissful, oblivious peace.

  I needed nothing else, I thought. I had yet to turn sixteen years old.

  As Siddhartha had promised, we spent those early days inspecting the land, riding in a chariot driven by his wiry and dependable manservant Channa, steering Siddhartha’s ivory-white war horse Kanthaka over the clay roads, hard as stone during the dry season—the worst heat a month away. Siddhartha’s knowledge of all aspects of practical life astounded me—planting, plowing, carpentry, metallurgy, engineering (he’d even invented a roller to remove the seeds from cotton); his aim was to create a good life for all, no matter what class you belonged to. But he had definite ideas of what this life required.

  One crystalline day, we’d stopped at a cluster of squat, orange-brick buildings next to a grove of lychee trees, where a half-dozen bricklayers in dhotis were enlarging the servants’ quarters, seeming to ignore the worker sitting at the edge of the grove with his back against a tree. Siddhartha leapt out of the chariot, and I was expecting that he’d launch into some lecture to the foreman on some new method of stacking one brick on another. Already, I understood my husband was a great talker—he loved to teach and he also loved to learn, so he could teach some more. But not that day.

  He approached the foreman, a mahogany-skinned giant about forty with ballooning calves and biceps, his dusty black hair tied up in a red rag. The air around him smelled of straw and sweat.

  “What’s this man doing here, Agrata?” Siddhartha asked him, nodding at the worker sitting under the tree. The narrow leaves pelted shadows across the man’s leathery back.

  The foreman wiped his forehead with the back of his wide wrist. “He’ll be okay, Master.”

  “His eyes are watering,” Siddhartha said. The man was breathing harshly as if in pain, but when he saw my husband, he blinked frantically and wavered to his feet. Sweat had slicked his thin gray hair against his head; one of his eyes had a pearly white cast, as if half his vision had lost itself in the realm of the dead.

  Siddhartha kept his eyes on the foreman, making no move to approach the sick man. “He needs to go the hospital.”

  “We’re short on workers today,” Agrata said. “He was just taking a break.”

  Immediately, Siddhartha pulled up his lungi into a makeshift dhoti. “Channa, take the man, now.” He nodded to the foreman. “I’ll help you unload.”

  “But, Master, you can’t perform the duties outside your varna—”

  “Agrata, the sight of this unfortunate man will only upset your workers and sap their strength.” Siddhartha was already bent over the wheelbarrow scooping up bricks, his back to the sick man.

  My first impulse was to admire my husband for choosing kindness over class duty, which had always seemed like just some more priestly mumb
o-jumbo—especially the varna system, introduced by Suddhodana’s newfangled gods, which unduly segregated the four social classes. Yet even in the midst of my admiration, some cold hand pulled aside a curtain in my heart as if to reveal a falseness where my Siddhartha was deliberately overlooking something important. But what? The worker was clearly ill, and certainly getting him to a doctor was the right thing to do. I shook off the feeling. “I’ll go with Channa,” I said. “I can help.”

  “No! You wait right here,” he said to me over his shoulder. “I’ll have Agrata’s wife bring you some lassi.”

  I glanced over at the craggy-featured Channa, who shrugged in a knowing way, as if he was used to his master’s behavior. I was mystified, and the feeling of falseness returned. “I’d like to go along,” I said. “I’ve never seen a hospital.”

  Siddhartha straightened, his back to me. “And pray to the devas you never shall.”

  “But I want to. Perhaps I could help out there.”

  He thundered the bricks into the wheelbarrow, then strode over to me, placing his hands on my shoulders. For the first time since our marriage, I thought I saw his father’s tight upper lip pressing against his teeth. “Yasi, it is our duty to keep sickness as separate as possible from health. We’ll all have to face such things soon enough. There’s no reason to be miserable in advance.”

  “But what about Channa? And all the people who have to care for the sick and the dead.”

  Siddhartha shifted from one foot to the other, sweat glittering under his clear eyes. “They have some karma, obviously. Even so, I believe in making it as easy as possible for them, with plenty of time to get away. No one healthy needs to live permanently anywhere near where they’ll come in contact with pain and misery.”

  His discomfort made the day seem to gray over, despite the sun shining on. I remembered that first monsoon season after losing Deepa. “Sometimes I can’t help but think of death,” I said quietly.