Her eyes filled with tears. But she was not free even to cry. She could not give vent to her feelings as freely as Chhaya could. Her throat so choked with tears that she would find it hard to breathe. In her mind’s eye would appear the same sequence of events: Prithusen, tired, weary and eager, seeking rest and solace in her arms and then, frustrated by her rejection, plunging headlong into the thick of the battle. ‘From which, very likely, only my dead body will come back,’ he had said. Prithusen’s dejected face rose before her eyes and her soul felt crushed.

She began to imagine the worst. She saw Prithusen, falling from his horse, covered in blood. She saw a troop of soldiers, stricken with grief, standing round a dead body. With such scenes as these, she also saw visions of her own death. She recalled the discussions about life, death and the thereafter in her great-grandfather’s assemblies, and she would imagine that she and Prithusen would be born again, to be united forever. She remembered the utterances of Buddhist sages, that it was the keen desires and mental restlessness of mankind that made death so painful.

Prithusen’s eagerness and longing came back to her. She became restless, and kept repeating to herself, ‘My body belongs to him, my mind belongs to him, my whole being belongs to him. Why should I see him suffer? Whatever he desires shall be his. But where can I meet him before he sets out for the battlefield? There is only one evening left.’

Divya held in her hand the all-protecting amulet that she had procured from the tantrik. She would not let Prithusen go to the battlefield until she had tied the amulet around his arm with her own hands. Though she appeared calm, inwardly every fibre of her being trembled with anxiety, like the swings of a veena.

In the temple of Brahma, the Lord of Creation, a grand yajna was organized by Prestha, the magnate, to offer prayers for the well-being of his son and for the victory of the forces of Madra. In the holy monastery of the Buddhists, the magnate organized for the chanting of hymns by three hundred monks before the image of Lord Buddha, and afterwards he fed a thousand bhikshus. While in the temple of the Greek god Zeus, he arranged for the sacrifice of a horse with great pomp and ceremony. Taking Chhaya with her, Divya went to all three places, but Prithusen was nowhere to be seen. She learned that he was in the military camp. She turned back disappointed, but the disappointment made her all the more restless. She begged Dhata to go to the palace of the magnate and sent Guha, a slave, to the military camp to find out where Prithusen was.

Divya was perplexed. On one hand, each moment she spent without Prithusen seemed to be as long as a lifetime, on the other, the sun sinking towards the west, made her feel that time was rapidly slipping out of her hands. Neither had Dhata come back from the palace, nor had Guha returned with any news of Prithusen. The setting sun illuminated only the treetops now. To Divya its fast-fading rays seemed to be carrying away with them her last hopes.