But it was different long years ago. That was a time of unusual happenings. The fair-skinned Devas had been vanquished, driven out of the kingdom of swarga, and Bali, the smooth and dark-skinned Asur, reigned over the three kingdoms of prithvi, swarga and narka. And in his kingdom, lived the ugliest creature ever born - a shadowy thing called Vakradeha. His eyes were weak - they drooped, they ached, they hurt; his body was gnarled – it was twisted, it was knotted, ungainly; his hair were coarse and tangled, and his six-toed feet, unnaturally large for his legs.

But Vakradeha was no ordinary being, he was a scholar of great repute, respected among the learned, and valued in the King’s court, and so, the Asuras of the city paid him deference, he was honoured in their gatherings, welcome to their celebrations, served well in their beautifully performed ceremonies. But when he was away, they would whisper. And the fine yarn of the whisper would spin long from merchant to farmer, farmer to soldier, soldier to bard, bard to young girls, old women, beggars and rude boys with slingshots and stones. And the whispers would mock him, snigger at his ugliness. And the whispers were twisted, cunning, stories and jokes, pictures and scrawls on the mud walls - “… a story about Vakradeha who took a buffalo for a bride…”, “… do not laugh! This is serious. A treatise on Vakradeha’s pig-faced mistress…” - and the children of the city, always cruel, ran about spreading rumours - “I saw it…he told me…it was yesterday…just a moment ago… a cow elephant fled… a cow elephant was frightened… a cow elephant blushed… because ugly Vakradeha looked at her.

And Vakradeha?

He smiled and nodded at them.

Then one day, in the early hours of dawn, when Vakradeha was returning from the royal temple, mumbling to himself about an old treatise on patience he had just read, he heard King Bali talk to a Pandit from Kashi.

They were standing by the lotus pond, smiling, talking, two old friends meeting after years. Vakradeha was amused and stood behind a pillar, enjoying their spirit of camaraderie. The pandit teased the good-natured king. All in good humour. He baited the king repeatedly, asking, probing - So? Bali! Will you rule forever? When will you dark-skinned asuras finally leave this kingdom?

Bali laughed, but the pandit kept at it. Asking asking. Again and again and again and again. And each time the king brushed aside the question with a shrug, a smile, an affectionate pat on the shoulder. But the pandit was persistent, almost obsessed, and Bali amused with his friend quipped, “Oh pandita! Let me see… hmmmm … I think … my reign will end and we will run to the forests for cover, the day ugly Vakradeha finds a lover!”

Vakradeha heard them laugh, and the laughter sounded like an old saw on wood, grating, unrelenting, hard and deep.

That was a day of unusual happenings, and so an unusual kind of rage shot up his brow, all the way into his brain where it dug like hundred crazed woodpeckers. He bellowed, stamped his feet, rubbed mud and dust into his face and his eyes and his body and ran towards the city tearing whatever stood in his path – trees, rocks, houses, walls. People ran and crowds scattered, and one could hear curses and cries rent the air, but Vakradeha suddenly did not care. He crushed the delicate skull of a little child in his large hands, tore the oiled curls off a beautiful woman; he battered temples and razed houses to the ground. And in his rage, he dug out mud and grass from each garden and chewed it, defiantly.

It seemed forever, but by night, he tired.

Restless and frightened of the King’s laughter, Vakradeha fled north, leaving behind his books and all his gentle pursuits. When the birds heard him thunder by, they quieted their singing, for his story had reached them long before he did, carried by web-winged bats who screeched in the dark distance. They say that even the proud lions hid within caves and the scowling unfeeling tigers paced behind bushes with their cubs in tow, scared, nervous and worrisome.

Vakradeha walked through villages and towns, climbed mountains and hills, crossed rivers and streams, and then, suddenly one night, he came upon a wild land of plenty. There were streams – and they made something like music upon the rocks and under the caves, and there were trees weighed with fruits and flowers – and they smelled something like young bodies after a bath in summer. How unusual a sight it was, under the stars that night!

“This… is beautiful so, and I,” thought Vakradeha, “so ugly.” And he dropped to his knees and sobbed and tugged at his hair that wouldn’t come away, and he roared and roared till a rolling cloud put away the moon for a while.

In a moment brief as a blink, every beast strong and weak awoke in fright. The lion called out to the elephant and the elephant to the antelope – and they all wanted to know - Whatwho? Whatwho?

The antelope leaped and bounded away, nervous-legged, to a humming bird that was hiding in a mulberry tree.

“You hear? Do you? Bird? Bird? Bird! You hear? Do you hear this voice breaking? I am afraid. And the others also fear. Do you? Surely, it is an omen the winds bear. Who is it? Is it someone killing sneha?”

“It is Vakradeha!” said the bird, “It is Vakradeha!”

So the antelope leaped and bounded back to the elephant and the elephant fanning his ears, nodded sagely to the lion and they all decided to flee to where the winds blew with the breath of a jasmine and the wing of a bee.

By the time the sun rose, the next morning, before its first rays could reach the inner trees, the last animal and the last bird had fled.

Vakradeha had laughed all night seeing them run; now, he slept, tired and weary from his exertions.

The forest grew old, dying slowly, saddened by its solitude. And Vakradeha liked it, this defacement - the ugly emptiness of the forest, the drooping wilted trees and the dry caked earth. Even the clouds were scared to rain now, and death was near, riding its buffalo as Yama behind the hill.

Every morning, Vakradeha woke and began his day by snorting and splitting a tree in two. He would then defile a hidden stream by blocking its flow with gigantic rocks and killing all its fish with ceaseless blows rained with his fist and a large pine trunk. And then he would let them float: golden and grey corpses in the muddied waters.

Each day, he would run down to the far villages and poor settlements of the Shakas and bring home a woman who looked ruddy like the morning sun, bathe her all day, scrubbing her skin till it was sore, and sacrifice her to imaginary gods of his making.

No one but a scrawny dog kept him company and Vakradeha loved him for he was almost as ugly.

Then one day when winter had spent itself, Kama, one of the thousand and one gods who loved the cold mountainous lands, decided to end the torment of Vakradeha and sent the last breeze of winter to summon the lazy spring-god. When spring arrived, Kama said smiling,

- Come come Vasanta, I’ve been waiting for you. These are unusual times, you know. And you are needed more than ever now. Better go and dress up in your brightest yellow. Soak this corner with the most beautiful flowers, whatever they are - only you’d know. I want the birds and the bees to return to these empty trees. Come now, these are unusual times! Bless this land with a spring that will blind a bloodless heart to love. Come and confuse every beautiful eye that sees here, so there is nothing that seems ugly, nothing repulsive. You know how it is Vasanta, this beast of beauty and this beast of ugliness; they are never in the heart, but always sully the eye.”

So spring came softly when no one was seeing, that evening, with its colours and its flowers, and the unsuspecting Vakradeha was away hunting with his faithful dog by his side.

Kama was satisfied. But there was one small detail missing, and he intended to make his own little contribution to the happy design. He surveyed the rising colours about him and chose one particular tree, fuller, straighter, more fascinating than all the rest. It had red flowers brimming nectar; it was the Buransh, the reddest of all rhododendrons. Kama much pleased with his handiwork so far, walked up to the tree and whispered into a flower: Pushpaja. Out of the word came the meaning of the word, and out of the meaning of the word came the feeling of the word and out of it a woman who had no memory, no remembrances, only a rare restlessness that becomes beauty.

And this woman, looked about her and wondered: who am I? What is all this about me? And as she wondered and puzzled and fussed over her measured curves and as she felt the fullness of her lower lip with the tip of her upper lip, she saw Vakradeha return, tired, thirsty and panting. And she saw him go down on his haunches by the water-place like an animal and she saw him lap a bellyful of water with his dog.

As he stretched his limbs, ready to sleep, his dim eyes saw her staring at him, and though the image of her was unclear, it was enough.

It was then that the first breeze of spring wafted in and the first flowers sprung open then. Is there a heart that can still its restless murmur in a moment so warm and splendid as this? So the flower-woman could see no ugliness in Vakradeha’s eyes, she could see nothing repulsive in his peacock feet, and in the monster she felt only the sadness of longing.

Vakradeha knew – such is the way of love - that she did not fear him, he knew that she would not wince at his touch, and he was certain that she desired too. Though no one is quite sure what it is, this desire, people say it is an unusual thing and comes in unusual times, that it is light like dry leaf caught in light, that it will do and will not speak at all. So they spoke nothing, the woman and Vakradeha, and they did what desire bid.

That night the moon was fuller along the edges and the stars bent a palm-span close to the earth. The birds had returned already, a day back; now the animals too tip-toed to their homes through the night, in one long file.

“But that was just a beginning!” say the women who sing the story in the fields, piling hay upon the tall pine branches. “Vakradeha slept by her side ever since, every night, under the Buransh tree, and each night, they lay enchanted by the thick sweet juices of the red rhododendron. In a month the land belonged to Vasanta, it was a land of love and flowers, and the happy people who lived below on the slopes and by the large cliff-ridden heights began calling it Pushpaja – a land born of flowers.

The scrawny dog left one afternoon, scoffed at by the swan, clawed by the peacock. Strange that Vakradeha never noticed him leave.

But time changes. Some things go, some things linger, but nothing stays.

In the last week of the month of Jeth when Vakradeha sat wondering what the difference was between fate and will, he heard a rustle. It was the first leaf of late autumn.

Scrawled on it were words, written carelessly, like an uncivil man’s laughter, “Bali driven away forever. The devas rule again.”

Vakradeha was sad. He had loved the king once. He had wished him well, despite everything. Confused and troubled, he went to share his grief with the flower-woman who was neither under the Buransh, nor by the rocks, nor near the mulberry tree, nor the red striped cave, nor the head shaped bamboo grove. After much searching, he found her by the stream, peeling petals from flowers of Buransh that were strewn thick around her. As she saw the eager Vakradeha hobbling towards her, she burst out laughing. “What a strange sight you are Vakradeha!” she said, “Even the mountain is smoother than you.”

Vakradeha kept quiet; he just smiled and nodded at her.

The flowers had already begun to wilt; now leaves too began to fall off tugged gently by autumn winds.

Everyone agrees it was the saddest autumn of all. It was an unusual forgetting that went with the magic of a gone spring.

“She could now see, as clear as we see the eye of the needle,” say the women stopping mid-song, “- what he really was. And we know that he was an Asura. And that he was called Vakradeha. And that he was the ugliest thing ever born. She was frightened. He suddenly seemed another man. His skin seemed another’s, his voice strange and distant. But she said nothing, and one night, swiftly left Pushpaja forever.

Vakradeha searched, he walked the earth they say. It took him many days, but he walked the other worlds too. And yet he could not find her.

One day, searching, he came upon the dead remains of his scrawny dog, a skull, a paw, a tooth. And something told him that the dog had been killed by a beautiful beast of the woods.

Vakradeha wept quietly. He did not rage like the old days. He was strong still, strong and young, but his rage had gone with the spring.

All that remained with him was his unchanged ugliness, Pushpaja, the long winters, and the hope that there will be another spring.

Each year spring came with its bountiful laughter, but never came a spring like Vakradeha’s. For each spring is different and each flower has a life of but one spring, from year to year and season to season.

This is how it came to be that no one ever ventures near Pushpaja. Some in the fear that Vakradeha may arise with his fury, and some scared of the spring.