Читать книгу The Lady of the Jewel Necklace & The Lady who Shows her Love - Harsha - Страница 23

room; he saw her asleep and the magician asleep beside her in his own form. The king wanted to kill him, but just then the magician was awakened by his magic and he went out and flew away to the sky. In a moment, Kalinga·sena woke up too; she said to the king, “Why did you go away a moment ago and come back with your minister?” The minister explained to her, “Someone who took the form of the king magically deluded you and married you; it wasn’t the king.” And they left. The minister told everything to Vasava·datta, who thanked him.

Udayana kept thinking about Kalinga·sena’s beauty, and one night when he was full of lust he went to her room alone, with a sword in his hand, and asked her to become his wife. But she rejected him, saying, “You should regard me as another man’s wife.” The king withdrew and eventually forgot about her. But the magician, who had overheard the conversation, praised his wife and continued to visit her, though he added, “Even though you are a virtuous woman, you have gotten the reputation of a whore” (‘Ocean of the Rivers of Stories’ 31–34 [6.5–8]).

The magician is revealed in his post-coital repose, the sleep that both allows possession and reveals it. For the Hindus believe that a god or demon who masquerades as someone else in bed is compelled to take his own true form when he loses mental control and hence inadvertently turns off the current from the magic projector in his mind; this happens when he sleeps, gets drunk, dies, gets angry—or makes love, when sexual passion strips away the final illusion, the curse or disguise, and reveals the true identity (Doniger 2000). But in this case the unmasking takes place ________