Chapter 100 — Ila and Budha

Bharata and Lakshmana listened in astonishment. They had heard the terms of Uma's boon, and the terms raised another question at once.

“How did the king live through such misfortune when female?” they asked Rama. “And when male, what life was possible?”

Rama continued the tale as it had come down to him.

In that first month, Ila was not alone. The companions who had followed their king into the mountain had undergone the same change. They too were women now. The chariots and other vehicles stood abandoned around the mountain hollow, no use to a party moving on foot through the close, uneven ground. Ila went forward with the companions among trees, thorny shrubs, and vines that hung from branch to branch. The forest was full, green, and shut in by stone.

Nothing in Ila's memory reached beyond that month. Bahlika, the army, the hunt, the court, and the king who had entered the mountain were not available to her. She had companions, a forest path, and the unexplained life now before her.

Near the mountain she came upon a beautiful lake. Flocks of birds moved through its reeds and above its open water. In the middle of the lake stood Budha, son of Soma, in severe tapas: a disciplined religious austerity. He stood in the water with raised arms, unsupported, bright in his youth and splendor, shining like a full moon newly risen.

Ila and the transformed companions entered the lake. Their movement disturbed the water around the ascetic.

Budha looked upon Ila, and desire seized him. He could not master himself. Looking at her, he wondered who she could be. Among goddesses, serpent women, asuras, and apsaras, he said to himself, he had never seen anyone of such beauty. If she belonged to no one else, he thought, she might be a fitting companion for him.

Budha came out of the water and went to his hermitage. There he called four of Ila's companions, who bowed before him.

“Whose is this woman?” he asked. “Why has she come here? Tell me truly, and do not delay.”

The women answered in gentle words, but their answer carried no history that could make sense of the situation.

“She is always our mistress,” they said. “She has no husband, and she wanders with us at the edge of the forest.”

Budha heard the uncertainty in their speech. He turned to a sacred knowledge and learned what had happened to the king of Bahlika: the entry into the mountain, the divine change, and the condition that had remade Ila and the entire party.

Then Budha spoke not only to the four who had answered but to the transformed companions as a whole.

“There are no men here in this mountain refuge,” he told them. “Make your dwelling on this mountain. Roots, shoots, and fruit will sustain you. As women, you will find husbands called kimpurushas.”

The kimpurushas were a race of the mountain country. Budha's word gave the women their husbands, and gave that race its beginning.

The companions accepted Budha's direction. They left Ila and settled in different places about the mountain.

Their departure changed the silence around the lake. Ila stood apart from the former retinue. No remembered kingdom gave a name to the loss; no companion remained to tell the history that Budha had learned. Budha was there, bright beside the water, and Ila was alone in the forest with him.