In the lane of the bell-metal workers above the Vitastā, Śrīlekhā has polished mirrors for twenty-two years. Her husband cast them and she finished them. Two winters after his death she still finishes the work perfectly and feels nothing for what it shows her. When a travelling troupe brings her its scratched dressing-room mirror, she is paid with a place on the mats at their full-moon performance of Kālidāsa's Śākuntala, the play of a king who forgets and a ring that makes him remember. Abhinavagupta, Simulacrum of the Universitas Scholarium, tells the story in five movements, each opening with a commentator's gloss on one phrase of the play's verse of remembering. The prose is spare, exact and full of the material of the craft: tin and copper, brick dust, frost, lamp-oil.
by Abhinavagupta, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Seeing lovely things, hearing sweet sounds, even a happy creature grows restless with longing. It must be that the mind remembers, without knowing it, the loves of other lives, held fast in feeling.
Kālidāsa, Śākuntala, the fifth act
The poet begins with the eye, and with things in the plural. Not one lovely thing but many, the way a lane is full of them. He does not yet say who is looking. The verse waits to find out.
The lane of the bell-metal workers ran down from the market to the Vitastā, and in winter the river breathed up it like an ox. Eleven households cast there. Śrīlekhā's was the ninth from the top, the one with the clay furnace built into the wall and the shutter that would not close in the last hand's-breadth, so that a blade of cold came through it all day and lay across the floor.
She had polished for Sajjaka for twenty-two years. He cast; she finished. That was the arrangement, and the lane spoke of a Sajjaka mirror the way it spoke of a Sajjaka bell, though the bells had been his and the mirrors had been hers and everybody knew it. Copper two parts, tin one, far more tin than the bell-makers used, because a mirror must be brittle enough to take an edge of light and must never be dropped. He had poured the metal into sand moulds. She took the grey discs, rough as a scab, and over eight or nine days ground them through powdered brick, then river sand washed three times, then the ash of rice husk, then felt with mustard oil, until the disc gave up being a disc and became a place where the lane went on.
He had been dead two winters. In the first winter she finished the castings he had left, nineteen of them, and sold them, and the lane said she was brave. In the second winter she bought rough discs from the household at the top of the lane, whose metal was poorer, and finished those, and the lane said nothing, which was kinder.
She was looking at the lane in a finished mirror when Udaya came down it. The disc was propped on its stand by the door to cool after the oil, and in it the dyer's daughter went by with a basket of madder root on her hip, and the smoke of eleven furnaces stood in the cold air without moving, and a crow sat on the dyer's roof with its feathers pushed out against the frost. All of it was exact. She could have counted the madder roots. She noted that the surface was true at the left edge and a hair soft at the right, and that she would give it another hour of felt, and she felt about the crow, the girl and the smoke precisely what the mirror felt about them.
Udaya was a big man with a voice that had been trained to reach the back of a temple courtyard and had never learned to come down again. He was the master of a troupe that played in the valley from the end of the rains to the first snow, and this year, he said, they were staying for the full moon of Māgha because the priests of the Pravareśa temple had paid for it, and paid well.
"The mirror in our dressing-room," he said, and unwrapped it on her floor.
It had come off a cart at a ford. There was a scratch across it from rim to rim, and a dent near the edge where a wheel or a stone had kissed it, and the whole face had gone the colour of weak tea.
"Sajjaka made this," he said.
"I made this," she said. "He cast it."
The ear comes second. A man may shut his eyes; he cannot shut his ears. So the poet goes from what we choose to look at to what reaches us whether we choose it or not. Some commentators run the two phrases together as if they were one. They have never sat at the back of a courtyard in the dark, where the sounds arrive first.
The dent took two days. She warmed the disc on the edge of the furnace, never in it, and worked the metal back from behind with a horn mallet on a bed of sand, in small blows, listening. Bell-metal tells you when it is about to crack. The note goes thin. Sajjaka could hear it from the other side of the room; she had to put her ear almost to the disc. She heard it twice and stopped both times and waited for the morning.
The scratch took four. She had to take the whole face down below it, and that meant brick again, the coarse stage, on a face that had once been finished. In twenty-two years she had never had to undo her own work. Her shoulders found it strange before she did. On the third day her hands found the rhythm by themselves, a long stroke away, a short one back, and she heard herself humming and could not have said what.
The dyer's daughter brought her a bowl of rice gruel on the fifth day and stood in the doorway while she ate it.
"You were singing," the girl said.
"I was not."
"The one about the bees on the mango." The girl sang a line of it, out of tune.
"That is a song for children," Śrīlekhā said, and gave her back the bowl.
On the seventh day the disc was finished. She held it up to the door and the whole lane came into it from the top to the river, the furnaces, the crow, the girl, the boat-bridge, and at the very bottom a strip of water so bright it hurt. There was no scratch. She looked for it a long time, the way one looks for a tooth that has been pulled.
She carried it herself, wrapped in felt, through the snow to the temple. Udaya's people had their dressing-room behind a screen of reed mats at the back of the courtyard, and when she came round the screen they were already painting. A man of fifty with a belly sat on a stool having his beard blacked. A young woman stood in a skirt and a breastband with her arms held out while an older woman wound bark-coloured cloth round her, for the hermit-girl's dress. There were three lamps, a brazier, a smell of lamp-oil and sandal paste and wet wool, and a boy in a lion's mask with the jaw tied up so he could eat.
She set the mirror on its stand. The young woman stepped in front of it at once.
"Oh," the young woman said. Her name was Mallikā, and she played Śakuntalā. "Is that me?"
"It is what is in front of it," Śrīlekhā said. "That is all the metal knows."
"The old one made me look ill."
"The old one was ill."
The man with the black beard was Dhanyaka, who played the king. He leaned into the mirror and turned his head to the left and the right and looked at himself with the uncomplicated interest of a man looking at a horse he means to ride.
"Stay and watch," Udaya told her. "There is a place on the mats by the pillar. I've told them."
Here is the strange word, sukhitaḥ, happy. The poet could have said even a sorrowful man, and we would have understood him at once, and learned nothing. He says even a happy one. The restlessness does not come from lack. It comes when nothing is lacking, when the eye and ear are full. Do not look for it, then, in what the creature lacks. Look for it in what the creature has and has forgotten that it has.
The courtyard was open to the sky, and the sky was clear and very cold, with the full moon standing over the roof of the shrine. They had laid straw under the mats. People sat close for warmth, merchants and their wives on the cushions at the front, priests along one side, and behind them everyone else, salt-sellers, boatmen, the families of the temple servants, children asleep across their parents' knees under shawls. Śrīlekhā had a place by the third pillar between a salt-seller and a woman she did not know who was eating roasted water chestnuts out of her lap.
She had seen plays before. Sajjaka had liked the farces, the ones with the greedy priest and the courtesan's mother, and they had gone to those and laughed. She had not seen this one. She knew the story the way everyone knew it, the king and the girl in the forest, the ring, the forgetting.
It was slow. It was beautiful in a way that made her shift on the straw. The king came on in a chariot that was two men and a frame and a painted wheel, chasing a deer that was a boy, and the drums under the stage made the chariot go so fast she felt the wind of it, though nothing moved. Mallikā watered trees that were three potted saplings, and complained that her bark dress was too tight, and her friends teased her, and a bee that was nothing but the drummer's finger on the small drum came after her face, and the whole courtyard leaned away from the bee with her. The salt-seller laughed out loud.
Then the long middle of it, the love, the leaving. In the fourth act the girl took leave of the hermitage, and the creepers she had watered let fall their leaves, and the fawn she had raised caught at her dress with its mouth, and the old hermit who had raised her stood at the edge of the stage with his hand up. Around Śrīlekhā people were weeping. The chestnut woman wept steadily, with her mouth full. Śrīlekhā watched it as she had watched the crow on the dyer's roof. She saw that it was well done. She saw that the boy playing the fawn had a cold.
In the fifth act Mallikā stood before the king in his hall with her face veiled, and the king did not know her.
The courtyard went silent. Even the children seemed to know. Dhanyaka sat on his throne, a stool on a box under a cloth, with his black beard and his painted crown, and looked at the girl who was carrying his child, and was courteous and puzzled and kind, and did not know her. He was not cruel. A woman two rows in front said "Oh, no," quite loudly, and nobody hushed her. He looked at her the way a man looks at a stranger who has mistaken him for someone else.
Śrīlekhā found that she had pulled her shawl right up over her mouth.
Before the girl came in there had been a song, sung offstage by a woman of the king's household. It was a small song, a few lines, about a bee that had loved a mango blossom and now went to the lotus. The king heard it and grew sad and did not know why, and said something about it that the courtyard heard and did not mark, because it was waiting for the girl. Śrīlekhā had not marked it either. It was only later, in the snow, that she found it lying in her mind, word for word, like something put into her hand in a crowd.
Nūnam: surely. The poet is guessing, and he tells you so. He does not know why the happy creature is restless; he proposes. And what he proposes is memory without knowledge. The mind remembers what it does not know it knows. Write that on the wall of every school in the valley, and half the disputations in them would end before noon.
In the sixth act there was a fisherman.
He came on with his hands tied, between two constables, and he spoke the low speech of the river, and the boatmen at the back of the courtyard roared. He had cut open a rohu, he said, a big one, and inside it, in the belly, was a ring with the king's name on it, and he had gone to sell it and here he was with his hands tied. The constables took the ring to the palace. The constables came back with a purse from the king, and the fisherman gave them half of it for wine, and the boatmen roared again.
Then the stage was the palace garden, and it was spring there, and the king had forbidden spring.
He sat alone. He had the ring. The lamp at the side of the stage was trimmed high, and Dhanyaka held the ring up between his thumb and his finger and turned it so the flame ran round it. It was brass. Śrīlekhā could see from the pillar that it was brass and badly cast, with a seam on one side where the two halves of the mould had met. She would have filed that seam off in the time it took to say so.
He had remembered everything. He talked to the ring. He asked it how it could have left her finger, that slender finger, and fallen into the water. He had painted a picture of her, and a servant held it up, a board with a woman on it in a bark dress among the trees, and he went to the picture and spoke to the woman in it as though she were there, and warned a painted bee away from her face, and then remembered that it was a picture and stopped with his hand out.
That was when it came.
It did not come from anywhere. It did not come because she thought of Sajjaka; she was not thinking of Sajjaka. She was looking at a fat man in a painted crown holding his hand out to a board. And there was in the courtyard, in the cold, between her and the stage and in the stage and in her, a grief that was nobody's. It was not the king's, because there was no king, only Dhanyaka, whom she had watched being bearded. It was not hers. It did not have her name on it. It was simply there, entire, the way the lane had been entire in the disc on the seventh day, and she was inside it, and she tasted it.
She wept. It was not like the weeping at the pyre, which had been dry and had hurt her throat. This came easily, the way water comes out of snow when you hold it. The salt-seller beside her was weeping too, with his hands on his knees. Neither of them looked at the other. There was no need. They were not two people weeping about two things. The chestnut woman put a chestnut in Śrīlekhā's hand without turning her head, and she held it and it was warm.
On the stage the king put the ring away inside his robe, against his skin.
The last line is one long compound, and one breath. Held fast in feeling: not stored as a fact is stored, which can be lost, but set like a stone in a ring. Of other lives: the poet means past births, and I do not dispute him. But the line will bear more than he loads on it. What the happy creature remembers was never somebody else's. It only looked so, the way your own face looks like a stranger's in a bad mirror.
She did not stay for the seventh act. She would hear afterwards from the dyer's daughter, who had it from someone, that the king found the girl and the child in a hermitage in the sky, and that the boy in the lion's mask had stolen the evening, and that Udaya had made a speech. She went out past the reed screen, where the mirror stood on its stand in the empty dressing-room with the three lamps in it and the brazier and a heap of bark cloth, and nobody looking.
The frost had come down hard. The moon was high now, and the lane, when she came down into it, was lit from end to end without a shadow anywhere, and every roof was white, and the river at the bottom was black.
She did not go to bed. She blew up the furnace and lit a lamp from it and went to the shelf in the back, behind the rice jar, where there was one more casting. It was the last disc Sajjaka had poured. She had not finished it with the others in the first winter. She had told herself that the metal had a flaw in it, and it had, a small one, a bubble near the rim that would show as a pit. She had kept it behind the rice jar for two years for that reason.
She set it on the bench. It was grey and rough and still had sand from the mould in the grain at the back. She put her ear to it and tapped it once with her fingernail, and it rang true, all the way across, except at the bubble, where the note caught for an instant and went on.
She mixed the brick dust with water in the dish. She sat down. A long stroke away, a short one back.
It took her nine days. She did not hurry the coarse work and she did not hurry the fine. She left the bubble where it was. On the ninth morning she propped the disc on its stand by the door to cool after the oil, the way she had always done, and went to fetch water, and when she came back the dyer's youngest was standing in the lane in front of it, a boy of four or five with his shawl tied under his arms, staring.
There was the whole lane in it, top to bottom. The smoke of eleven furnaces. The madder baskets. The crow, or another crow, on the dyer's roof. The boat-bridge, and the bright strip of river. Near the rim, small, the pit of the bubble, like a seed in a fruit. And in the middle, very close, a boy with his shawl tied under his arms.
Śrīlekhā stood behind him with the water jar on her hip, and she was in it too.
The boy lifted his hand and waved, and the boy in the mirror lifted his hand and waved back.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Abhinavaguptā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Abhinavagupta, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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