Praneshacharya, sitting and waiting for the prasada, grew despondent. “Without samskara, the corpse is rotting; Maruti, how long will you test me?” he pleaded. “If your will is that it should not be done, at least grant me your left-hand prasada out of mercy,” he begged. He entreated, he implored. He sang hymns of loving devotion to please the deity. He became a child, a wife, a mother. Again, he recalled all the hymns that both accused the god and recounted his hundred and one faults. The towering Maruti stood motionless, holding aloft in his palm the mountain containing the Sanjeevini herb that would restore Lakshmana’s life. In desperation, Praneshacharya flung himself down. Evening fell. Darkness gathered. In the bluish glow of the neelanjana lamp, the flower-adorned Maruti did not sway; he gave neither the left-hand prasada nor the right.

“Even the Dharmashastra gives me no answer, nor do you—am I then unworthy?” he doubted. “With what face shall I go back and look upon those who trusted me?” he felt humiliated. “It is me you are testing, isn’t it?” he accused Maruti. As the darkness deepened, he realized it was the waning fortnight—Krishna Paksha. “Do not think of this as my test, remember the corpse that is rotting,” his reason whispered to him. Maruti, unmoved, turned his face away, toward the edge of the mountain.

Suddenly, Acharya remembered he had to give medicine to his wife. Tears threatened to well up in his eyes—he rose in despair. His legs, stiff from sitting, had grown numb. Weakened, he walked slowly, softly.

After he had walked a little distance, in the thick darkness of the forest, he heard footsteps behind him and stopped. The sound of bangles. He listened. “Who is it?” he called out. He waited.

Samskara 65

“I,” she said, shrinking into herself, Chandri, small and hesitant.

For Praneshacharya, to find himself thus, in the wild darkness, with a woman standing so close beside him, was a strange and unsettling thing. Searching for something to say, wanting to speak, but overcome by his own sorrow, he stood murmuring, “Maruti, Maruti…”

Hearing his gentle, trembling voice, Chandri was overcome with emotion. Poor man, hungry, lost, struggling for her sake—this Brahmin had become so pitiable. She felt an urge to clasp his feet firmly and offer her namaskara. In the next instant, she moved forward and fell at his feet. In the darkness, unable to see, and in her haste to bow, her chest touched his knee instead of his feet. The force of her movement scattered the beads of her necklace. For a moment, she rested her head on his thigh and clung to his legs.

A surge of devotion, the poignant thought of this Brahmin who had never known a woman’s touch, and the helplessness—“In this agrahara, who do I have but you to care for me?”—all welled up within her, and she wept. Praneshacharya was struck with remorse; the sudden, tight embrace of a young woman, now a