Ilachikumar on the Rope

The opening of the story

In the city of Benatat, on a bright afternoon, the palace yard was packed from wall to wall. Two tall bamboo poles had been planted in the beaten earth, and between their tops ran a rope, so high that people at the back had to tip their heads right back to see it. At the foot of one pole a young woman sat with a drum across her knees. On a raised seat under an awning sat the king, the queen beside him, and around them the princes of the court, five hundred of them, the old accounts say, in their silks and turbans. Then a young man in the plain, tight clothes of a rope dancer took hold of the first pole and began to climb.

Not long before, that young man had worn silk himself, in his father's house in the town of Ilavardhan, where the servants called him the young master and the whole market knew his name. How he came to be climbing a bamboo pole in a strange city, for a king who did not wish him well, is a story that begins in another life altogether. It ends, as the Shvetambar teachers have told it for many centuries, at the top of that pole.