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JAIN JOURNAL VOL XXIX, NO 1, JULY 1994
...Her chaste sandal, never beyond the palace gate. "Yes, Father." But she had felt her heart grow icy-cold. Here and now, Rajimati saw the chariot had stopped. Drums echoed off, the procession dragged its feet, Uneasy silence, then from the pen came a wailing, Broken wailing from the food-animals near to the blade. Down from his chariot stepped the stranger, O blaze of ancestral jewels !
With his own hand, he opened the thorn-gate to the pen, Animals fled, but he stood oddly far and away. Of a sudden, then, he threw down his jutting headdress.
Sun-flushed face, with the unyielding Yadava jaw, Yet with bones fine-cut under a rain of celestial lotus. ...A moment of far-seeing struck Rajimati, Beyond time and space, a bond of soul remembrance... She felt her heart, now waking and pulsing hotly, And she saw her maiden's hands, reaching out to him, To him and none other.
He was speaking with a wrathful blue outrider, He reached up, he embraced the rider like a brother, Then he turned, alone he strode off into the hills, Dusty hills folding into the sky, higher and higher, Upward to a silvery place of a mountain, floating...
"Abandoned bride", her father father stood in the doorway. "Your husband departs to become a wandering monk, His ear is opened to the wailings of the ages, Unfleshly monk, he seeks the highest goal of human birth, O lotus of liberation at the top of the spiritual mountain."
...Empty hands, empty of the sun-flushed dream... Rajimati reddened, she flung down her garlands, "Abandoned ! And I, a king's daughter!"
Echoes of a sly old nurse: Throw dust in a man's eyes.' Thence home! she thought joyfully. With him! hand-in-hand.
"Not to fear, you shall have a second husband."
"My husband is this wandering monk and none other.
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