Pipa

On a night in Gagaron, in the river-girded fortress where the Ahu and the Kalisindh meet and wind around the ramparts like a moat that never sleeps, a king woke to find his own bed overturned by hands he could not see. He was Pipa, lord of Gagaraungarh, a Rajput sovereign so devoted to the goddess Bhavani that he is remembered as having sent forty maunds of food from his own kitchens to her shrine each day, an offering vast enough to feed a small army of the faithful. That same devotion had made his court a place where wandering sadhus were never turned from the gate; when a company of them had passed through his city not long before, he had emptied his stores of flour and lentils, ghee and fruit, for their sake, and the men of God had gone away praising his generosity even as they quietly prayed that the king's understanding, not merely his larder, would one day be opened. On this night it was opened by fear. A monstrous presence flung his cot across the room, and in the middle of that terror Bhavani herself stood before him in a form too bright to be a dream.

He did not ask her for gold or for victory in battle, though both lay well within a goddess's gift. He asked her for release, for moksha, the end of the long coming and going of birth after birth. It is said that in that moment she confessed something rulers rarely hear from the deities who protect their thrones: that she could keep his kingdom, fatten his cattle, and answer his prayers for rain, but the ending of birth and death was not an office she held. What she could do was point. She told him plainly to go to Kashi and place himself at the feet of the great teacher Ramananda, for only surrender to Hari, not to her altar, would carry him across. A king who had spent his life pouring wealth into a temple built by human hands was being told, gently and by the very deity he had served, that the road out lay elsewhere.

So Pipa walked away from Gagaron, and the story remembers that the people of his own land thought their king had lost his reason. A monarch does not usually leave his fort to go begging at a stranger's door, and by every account the door did not open easily. Ramananda's household saw a man who still carried the bearing of a throne in his shoulders, and they turned him back more than once, unmoved by the fact that he had once been someone who commanded cities. Tradition says he had to be stripped of every claim to importance, arriving at last as nothing more than one more soul asking to be let in, before the guru would receive him. Only when the last trace of royal insistence had burned off him did Ramananda accept him as a disciple and set him, for the first time in his life, at somebody else's feet.

Even then the guru did not let him go easily into the wilderness. He sent Pipa home again, telling him to spend a year in his own house doing nothing more glamorous than serving sadhus who passed his door, so that his household would be tested before his vows were. Only after that year, when word came back that the discipline had taken root and was no longer a performance, did Ramananda call him back into the fold and let him leave the world in earnest. Pipa returned to his palace one final time, set his affairs of the heart in order, wrote to his guru asking that this same grace be sustained in him, and then walked out again, this time for good, at the head of a small company of about twenty souls. Among them were his twelve queens.

Not all of them meant to go the distance. However willing they had been to speak of renunciation inside the safety of a palace, the road tested that willingness before it had gone a mile. Someone, perhaps Ramananda himself, perhaps Pipa testing his own household one last time, warned them plainly of what lay ahead and then set the actual trial before them: tear the fine wraps from your body, put on the coarse cord of a mendicant, throw down every ornament that does not suit a beggar's life. Queen after queen could not bear it. They wept and turned back toward the comforts they knew. Only one, the queen remembered as Sita, stripped her jewels from her own body without a flicker of the shame a queen is trained her whole life to feel, and let them fall in the dust. It moved Ramananda to open compassion. It is said Pipa himself was not entirely at ease watching his wife tested so nakedly, a small, human detail the old poets did not bother to hide, but he did not stop it, and from that day she walked beside him not as a queen but as his Sahachariji, his companion on the path, in a marriage that had quietly become something closer to a shared vow than a shared throne.

That companionship was tested again, and violently, not long into their wandering life. The old verses remember a moment when Sita found herself alone with a stranger who meant her harm, and they preserve, almost in her own voice, the prayer she is said to have flung upward in that danger: I am only a helpless woman, she cries in the verse, what a cruel jest is this testing, do not delay, appear at once, O Beloved. Whatever the exact shape of the threat, the tradition is united that Hari himself answered it, terrifying the wicked man into submission and appearing in glory before Sita to deliver her unharmed. And what the old commentators find worth lingering on is not the rescue but Pipa's response to hearing of it: he took the whole episode as the unfolding of Bhagavan's own will, felt no need to rage at what had nearly happened, and simply returned to his solitary bhajan, trusting that the God who had let his companion be tested was the same God who had stood guard over her the entire time.

The roads of Malwa and Mewar gave him company of a different kind. Once, deep in a dense forest, the two mendicants heard the roar of a great lion drawing closer, drawn, as beasts of that breed are said to be, by the scent of human presence carried on the wind, so that the poets who praised Pipa afterward liked to call him the teacher who had tamed the very tiger of worldly craving, playing on the fact that the Hindi word for that scent-tracking beast also meant desire itself. The lion broke from the trees ready to attack, but the moment its eyes fell on Pipa it went as tame as a dog before a familiar hand. He went to it without fear, placed a strand of mala beads around its neck, whispered a mantra into its ear, and taught it, and the animal that had come to kill left instructed instead. On another day a man selling walking staffs refused Pipa a length of bamboo, telling him sourly to go cut his own from the thicket if he wanted one free. Pipa answered that by Ram's grace it would be exactly so, and the merchant's whole bundle of dead, dried staffs took root where they stood, throwing out green shoots until an armful of living bamboo stood rooted in the roadside dust. Pipa cut what he needed from the new growth and walked on.

He walked, in time, toward the household of a devotee named Chidhad, whose fame for love of God had reached him on the road. What he and Sita found there was a home with almost nothing in it. Chidhad and his wife nearly wept with joy at receiving such guests and then realized they had no food to offer them. Without a word to her husband, the wife pulled off her own lehenga, her only good garment, and gave it to him; Chidhad sold it in the market for flour and lentils and carried the meal back to lay before Pipa and Sita as if it were a king's feast. When the meal was ready and offered, the couple asked that the lady of the house join them, and were told she would eat later. It was Sita who finally went looking for her and found her sitting in a bare storeroom with no clothes at all, having given away the one garment she owned so that her guests could be fed. Asked why she was not ashamed, the woman answered that this was simply how her days passed, that the joy of serving a sadhu swallowed every other feeling whole, and that when such grace arrived in a house, nobody stopped to ask whether the body wearing it was covered or bare. Sita, a queen who had once thrown down her own jewels without flinching, found in that bare storeroom a devotion that humbled even her; she tore her own cloth in two, wrapped half of it around the astonished woman, and led her out by the hand.

On another occasion a traveling merchant, a banjara moving goods and cattle along the trade roads, entrusted Pipa with a sum of money and asked him to hold it until he returned the next day. Pipa spent every coin of it feeding a gathering of a thousand sadhus who happened to be passing through, and when the merchant came back demanding his silver, Pipa simply gestured toward the crowd of holy men still finishing their meal and told him to look: here were the only merchandise he dealt in, souls whose provisions were bound for the next world, and if the merchant wanted his money's worth he should look at what it had bought. Something in the sight of those contented faces cleared the merchant's mind more thoroughly than any argument could have; he ran to fetch new clothes for the sadhus besides, gave still more silver for their comfort, and from that day gave the rest of his life to serving holy men with the same devotion he had once given to his caravan. A smaller wonder from those wandering years tells of Pipa leaving his horse untethered by a bathing tank while he washed; thieves led it away and stabled it in secret, yet when he came up from the water the animal stood waiting for him, saddled and ready, as if no hand but his own had ever touched the reins.

One strand of the old telling, not found in every version but repeated often enough to belong to how Pipa is remembered, says that he and Sita, hearing tales of Krishna's city of Dwarka lying drowned beneath the waters, could not bear merely to hear of it and threw themselves into a river or lake to find it. They did not surface for seven days. The villagers who had seen them go under mourned them as drowned, until the couple walked out of the water dry and radiant, telling of days spent as guests of Krishna and Rukmini in the sunken city, and bearing as proof a ring said to have been placed on Pipa's finger by the Lord's own hand. It is worth noting that Pipa's own words to Sita, preserved in the old verses from an entirely different scene, once teased her as being nothing less than a sakhi of Rukmini herself, as though the poets who first sang of him already assumed some old, private bond between his companion and Krishna's queen, long before any Dwarka story needed telling.

Another remembered episode, gentler in its miracle but no smaller in its teaching, tells of Pipa meeting a woman who sold oil and urging her to take the name of Ram on her lips. She refused, saying she associated that name only with death and funeral rites. When her husband died suddenly not long after, tradition says Pipa restored him to life and used the moment to teach her that it makes no difference whether a person says Ram, or Allah, or simply Saheb, since every soul answered to by any of those names belongs to the same Father. Whatever the precise history behind that story, it sits comfortably beside everything else remembered of him: a man who had once fed a goddess forty maunds of rice a day and ended by insisting that the divine could be addressed by whatever name reached it.

That insistence hardened, in his later years, into the sharpest and most lasting thing he left behind. Pipa had begun as a worshiper of Devi, moved on to devotion to Hari in the saguna form his guru Ramananda taught, and, like his fellow disciples Kabir, Ravidas, Dhanna, and Sena under that same master, ended his life among the sants who no longer needed an image at all. Only a single shabad of his survives, set down centuries later in the Guru Granth Sahib in Raag Dhanasari, and in it the man who had once measured his devotion in maunds of offered food arrived at the plainest possible statement of where God actually lives: kaaiaa devaa kaaiaa deval, he sang, the body itself is the deity, the body itself is the temple, and the incense and lamps and offerings a pilgrim carries from shrine to shrine are already present, unasked for, inside the one who is looking. It is the same teaching, stripped of every story and every miracle, that his whole wandering life had been quietly rehearsing: stop searching where you are not, because the temple was never elsewhere.

A small math still stands, by the account of those who have gone looking, at the confluence of the Ahu and the Kalisindh below the walls of Gagron fort, marking the place from which the king is said to have set out and to which his memory returned. Whatever can and cannot be verified of the miracles strung along his road, the shape of the life underneath them is not in serious doubt: a ruler who had everything a kingdom could give him, who discovered one night that even a goddess's grace has limits, and who spent the rest of his years discovering, staff by staff, lion by lion, beggar's hut by beggar's hut, that the limitless was never behind a palace wall or inside a shrine but had been waiting, the entire time, inside his own body.