Shri Pavant Ji

At the edge of a great hall strung with silk and marigold, where a hundred kings and princes waited with their breath held for a princess to choose her husband, two wandering rishis stood among the crowd, and for once in their long, laughing, star-crossing lives, neither could meet the other's eye. Narada, whose veena had carried Hari's praise through three worlds, and his constant companion, a devarshi the wider Puranic tradition calls Parvata (it is this same figure the Bhaktamal remembers, in its own spelling, as Shri Pavant Ji), had each fixed his heart in secret on the same maiden: Shrimati, a princess so lit with grace that the assembly murmured she must be an amsha of Lakshmi herself, walking the earth in a mortal frame. Neither had told the other. That alone should have troubled them, for these two had once bound themselves by a vow that no thought, however small or shameful, would ever pass between their hearts unspoken.

Each, that morning, had gone apart to bathe and pray, and each had asked Hari for the same private favor, though neither knew the other was asking it. Narada bowed at the river's edge and begged the Lord: let my face today carry a fragment of your own beauty, that Shrimati's eyes fall on me and nowhere else; and, that no rival stand in my way, let my dear friend Parvata wear, this one day only, the face of a vanara. At another ghat of the same river, in the same hour, Parvata was whispering the identical prayer, word for word, asking the identical unkindness for his friend. Hari, who hears every prayer and refuses none spoken in full sincerity, is said to have smiled the smile that later becomes a whole age's story, and granted both requests exactly as they were worded.

So when the two rishis entered Shrimati's hall side by side, robes fresh, spines straight, hearts pounding with hope, they walked in wearing the faces of monkeys, and neither man knew it upon himself. The court did not bow to two of the three worlds' most revered sages; it laughed. Shrimati, garlanded and courted by suitor after human suitor, took one look at the pair of grinning, long-jawed strangers and turned away in open scorn. It was only afterward, catching his own reflection in a temple pool, that Narada understood, and in that single instant two shames arrived together: the shame of public mockery, and the far deeper shame of realizing that the friend beside him, dearer than his own breath, had prayed the same secret cruelty against him that he had prayed against Parvata. Whatever the two rishis had imagined they wanted that morning, what stood revealed at the water's edge was smaller and more human than either wished to admit: two great souls, still capable of wishing to outdo the one they loved most, for the sake of a woman's glance.

It is worth pausing here to ask who this Parvata is, since the Bhaktamal names him only once, in a single borrowed line, and moves on. The Mahabharata calls him a devarshi in his own right, no lesser figure than Narada, and kin to him besides, remembered most often as his mother's brother, though the two behave less like uncle and nephew than like twins raised at the same fire. Wherever the old epics need a witness of unquestionable holiness, a wanderer who needs no chariot or wing to cross the sky, a sage to be seated in the assembly at Emperor Janamejaya's great sacrifice of the serpents, or to bless a childless king with the promise of a son, Parvata is named in the same breath as Narada, as though the compilers of these texts could not picture one arriving without the other close behind.

This was not, in fact, the first time the bond between the two had cracked under the weight of a woman's beauty, nor the first time it had healed. Long before Shrimati's swayamvara, the elders tell it, Narada and Parvata had journeyed together to the court of King Srinjaya, who received the two sages as living gods and set his daughter Sukumari to serve them with water, fruit, and fanning through the heat of the day. Watching her devotion, Narada felt love rise in him unbidden, and for the first time in his life he did not speak it aloud to his companion, though their old vow of mutual disclosure demanded exactly that. Parvata, whose tapasya had sharpened his sight past the veil of another man's silence, perceived the hidden longing anyway, and felt the old sting of betrayal before Narada had said a single word. In his hurt he pronounced a curse: that Narada would indeed win Sukumari's hand, but that from the hour of the wedding onward, every eye but hers would see, resting on his shoulders, the head of a monkey.

Narada, cut to the heart by a curse from the one person on earth who was supposed to hold his secrets rather than punish them, answered in kind: he cursed Parvata that he would never again set foot in the heaven his penances had earned him. The two friends married their wounds to each other and walked apart. Sukumari, for her part, married a husband the whole world mocked and loved him without a flicker of complaint, tending him with the same unwavering service she had once shown a wandering guest, proof that a woman's devotion could see past a curse to the soul sitting beneath it. Only when the two rishis met again by chance in the forest, both worn thin by what their anger had cost them, did each beg the other's forgiveness and lift the curse he had spoken. Parvata returned to the heavens, Narada's borrowed face is remembered as having passed from him, and the two resumed the old, easy companionship of men who have quarreled hard enough to know exactly how much they need each other.

The humiliation at Shrimati's swayamvara, then, was an old wound arriving in a far larger shape, and this time neither sage could simply curse the other, because both had done the same thing to each other in the same breath, and both stood equally exposed. Their fury turned upward instead, toward the one who had granted their prayers so exactly and so mercilessly. Narada, with Parvata at his side, called out to Hari that as he had this day robbed them of the wife they desired and dressed them for it in ridicule, so should Hari himself one day be born on the earth as a mortal man, forgetting for long years his own divinity, and wander forest after forest, deprived of his own wife, searching for her as any bereaved husband searches, in grief. And because Shrimati herself carried Lakshmi within her, the curse gathered Lakshmi into its net as well: she too, the tradition says, was bound to descend and be born into a mortal house, so that Narayana's exile and Lakshmi's exile would be one and the same sorrow.

Here the story turns, as the deepest bhakti stories always turn, from a wound into a welcome. Vishnu did not answer the sages' curse with anger, and he never unwound it once it was spoken; he received it as an offering rather than an insult, because the descent it demanded of him, Ramachandra of Ayodhya, husband of Sita, was already the avatar his own devotees on earth had been aching for since the age began. This is the secret the Bhaktamal is pointing toward in the single line it spares for Pavant-ji: that Bhagavan's leela is wide enough to gather even a sage's jealousy, even two old friends' half-forgiven grudge over a woman neither of them married, and weave it, without waste, into the very shape of the Ramayana that has since taught the world what fidelity, exile, and longing mean. Nothing spoken against Hari, even in real anger, leaves his hands as mere damage; it returns, in time, as story, as grace, as the very leela devotees have been singing for centuries.

It is in this frame that the Bhaktamal's line about Ravana and Kumbhakarna belongs. Because Narada and Parvata's curse compelled Lakshmi-Narayan to take birth as Sita and Rama and to be parted from one another exactly as the two rishis had demanded, everything that followed, the exile into the Dandaka forest, the golden deer, Sita's abduction, the long search, the alliance with the vanara hosts (Hari's own other meaning, monkey, folded back with a kind of cosmic irony into the very army that would win the war), and at last the deaths of Ravana and Kumbhakarna on the field before Lanka, unfolds as the working out of that one curse. The Bhaktamal, citing the Adbhuta Ramayana by name, calls this the cause "in one kalpa," and that phrase deserves to be taken seriously rather than smoothed away. Hindu tradition remembers more than one reason for Rama's descent, and more than one account of who Ravana and Kumbhakarna had been in an earlier life; readers of the Bhagavata Purana will know the separate, equally cherished story of Jaya and Vijaya, Vishnu's own gatekeepers, cursed by the four Kumaras to fall and rise again as demon-kings across three ages. The tradition does not force these tellings to agree; it lets them stand side by side as different windows onto the same descent, and the Bhaktamal, in naming Pavant-ji at all, chooses to honor this particular window rather than let it be forgotten.

What matters for Parvata's own place in this garland of devotees is not that he once let a private jealousy get the better of him in a wedding hall, but that the tradition never lets that single evening define him. He is named beside Narada again and again in the years the epics remember afterward: present at Janamejaya's sacrifice, where the old debts of the serpent line were finally answered; granting King Srinjaya the son the king had long ached for; still crossing the sky without wing or chariot exactly as before; still, by every account, a devarshi whose holiness the humbling at Shrimati's swayamvara never actually diminished. One evening of wounded pride, however sharply the Puranas remember it, was never allowed to outweigh a lifetime spent at Narada's side, singing of Hari.

Perhaps that is the real reason the compilers of the Bhaktamal, moving quickly through the great company of rishis gathered around Rama's story, paused long enough to spend even a single borrowed line on a name as easy to pass over as Pavant-ji. A garland of devotees was never meant to be strung only from flowers that never wilted. It holds this rishi too: ash-smeared and briefly ridiculous in a hall full of kings, cursing his dearest friend in one chapter of his story and forgiving him in the next, cursing the Lord of all three worlds and being answered not with punishment but with the Ramayana itself. Anyone who has ever loved a friend fiercely enough to hurt him, or wanted someone else's fortune badly enough to feel ashamed of it afterward, may find in Parvata's story not a warning to keep at arm's length but a companion to sit beside: proof that even the oldest, holiest hearts carry an unfinished corner, and that Hari, rather than despising that corner, has been known to build his own most beloved avatar out of exactly such material.