Page 13 - GALIET LOVE, FATE AND REMORSE: Sakuntala IV

Galiet & Galiet
ring inside a carp in Indra’s river represents the victory at the conceptual difficulties when crossing the rivers of transitions and passages of life. To cross a river is to move beyond one’s familiar place, is to embrace adventure and danger, in short, the odyssey of life. Sakuntala has to cross Indra’s Ford leaving behind her beloved innocence, her family and friends, her idyllic and spiritual dwelling bursting with deers, creeping vines and lotuses to embrace a hostile land of law and convention. This new territory is fearful and unknown to Sakuntala: it embodies the shores of motherhood and consort to long-absent King Dushyanta in an unnatural environment replete with duties, obligations, strangers and courtesans. It is precisely in her memorable and courageous crossing at Indra’s Ford where Sakuntala, unaware, loses King Dushyanta’s ring. To drop the ring at Indra’s Ford while worshipping suggests a letting go of the past, time and safety revealing the risks, dangers and misfortunes of Sakuntala’s exodus. Hence, King Dushyanta’s ring signifies both, a token of the eternal and of memory and thus of time: a paradox. Yet, the ring falls in the flux of timelessness and is beheld by Indra’s waters: the eternal flowing rivers. Indra’s waters, gift of sun and rain, are sustained by the primordial
elements that support that which expands and is expanded; in Siddharta’s words, “the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and at the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.”10 The symbolism of the ring becomes a contradiction: it is time and it is not time. Beneath the waters it merges with its eternal nature and above the waters it metamorphoses to its opposite: memory and time. Kalidasa seems to suggest that the eternal and universal (the infinite and eternal ring) participates in the impermanent and the particular (the finite and bound-in-time ring) and vice-versa. Moreover, Kalidasa seems to suggest that both, universals and particulars are real in their proper spheres and that they cannot co-exist without the other. All of Sakuntala’s sorrows, self-torment and fears, which exist in time, flow into the universal, purifying waters of Indra’s river when the ring drops from her finger. Truth and awareness in the temporal space shall be recovered only after the ring is digested and removed from the belly of the sacred carp. This is the beauty and
10 Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. Hesse, Trans. Hilda Rosner. New York: A New Directions Book, 1951. 87
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