The eminent scholar was still young when the powerful Greek king Milinda, at the head of a mighty army, invaded the kingdom of Madra—then ruled by the Paurav dynasty—and established his own imperial rule in its place. On the death of Vagish Sharma, who had held the office of the Chief Justice during the reign of the Paurav dynasty, Milinda appointed his son, Dev Sharma—gifted with rare talent and wisdom—to the same post. For many years, Dev Sharma administered justice, giving to the traditional policies and organization of a caste society, the flavour of a Greek way of life. When the mighty King Milinda embraced the Buddhist faith, justice in the state became charged with humanism and a feeling of universal compassion. It was during Dev Sharma’s lifetime that the righteous King Milinda gave up his throne, renounced the world and took to the path of Nirvana. As Milinda was childless, a republican state of the dynastic order was founded and in the new regime, Dev Sharma continued to discharge his office in accordance with the new concepts of justice.

Dev Sharma had three sons by his three wives. Of these, one died. From the other two sons he had four grandsons. The wife of one of these grandsons, the eldest, gave birth to a baby girl. The birth of a girl child in the family, already well provided with sons and grandsons, occasioned great joy, just like the appearance of the half moon, on the eve of a waxing lunar month, holds out the promise of resplendent moonlight, even as the glow of the setting sun still pervades the sky. She was given the name of Divya, the radiant dawn, showing the faith that people had in her bright future and, like the crescent moon, her effulgence only increased with the passage of time.

As ill luck would have it, Divya’s grandfather and both her parents succumbed to a fatal disease and met with untimely deaths. The girl was left to the tender affection and caring of her great-grandfather and thus became the apple of his eyes.

The stately palace of the Chief Justice, surrounded by ramparts and gardens and looked after by a large retinue of servants and maidservants, was a centre of learning and culture. In its meeting halls, votaries of the caste system, Greek philosophers and Buddhist monks freely discussed and argued on matters of all kinds, both to quell their doubts and for the sheer joy of debating.

Here, the love of knowledge and discussion was far greater than addiction to wine or women. The guests, lost in argument, would be oblivious to the dark and tawny-complexioned slave-girls who stood before them, holding on silver trays, crystal cups brimming with the famous kapisha wine. Even the parrots and the mynahs of the household, in their silver or copper cages hung from the arched doorways in different chambers of the palace, would in that atmosphere of learning mimic the speakers by uttering maxims, aphorisms, precepts and the like. Sometimes, to shake off their drowsiness, one of them would cry out a sutra from the Vedas, or some such religious or philosophical saying.