On the first day of the separation she put off her garland and drew her hair into one braid. At the end of the curse, with the grief gone out of me, I am the one who is to unwind it. It hurts to touch; and again and again she pushes it off the spread of her cheek with a hand whose nails have not been cut, and it is hard and ridged under the hand.
**The braid is a vow, and the stanza is a promise.** The एकवेणी — Mallinātha's एकीभूतवेणीम्, *the braid become one* — is the single plait a woman keeps while her husband is away and does not undo until he is back. So it was tied on a particular day, it has been in for a year, and the man who is to untie it is the speaker. **The whole of that future is carried by one affix.** उद्वेष्टनीयाम् is a kṛtya, the form that says a thing is *to be* done, and no verb in the stanza is in a future tense; मया beside it is the third case naming who will do it. Between आद्ये विरहदिवसे and शापस्यान्ते the entire term of the curse is enclosed, and what is inside it is a braid nobody has touched.
**And it is the only place in either canto where he says what he will be like.** विगलितशुचा, with the grief run off him — Mallinātha glosses वीतशोकेन, free of sorrow. Everything else the cloud is carrying is about her, or the road, or the city. This is one word about himself, and it is tucked into a bahuvrīhi that exists only to qualify the agent of a gerundive. **The same compound comes back in the dual, of both of them, in a stanza this corpus does not carry** — संयोज्यैतौ विगलितशुचौ दंपती, having brought the pair together with their grief run off, in one of the nine closing stanzas `text.md` prints with no number and `tools/build_corpus.py` drops as doubtful. So the promise made here is answered there, outside the hundred and twenty.
**Two accusative feminine pronouns are in the sentence and they point at different things.** The ताम् the stanza prints is the braid, and Mallinātha writes the noun in — तां शिखाम् — because four accusatives have gone past by then. The ताम् the sentence needs for its verb is the woman, and it is not in this stanza at all: he closes with “तां पश्य” इति पूर्वेण सम्बन्धः, *the construction is with the previous one*, which sends the reader back to the पश्य of 2.28. **That is the fourth cross-reference of his the run can check and the first that quotes his own gloss rather than the poem** — पश्य and ताम् are both in 2.28 but four syllables apart and in the other order. It identifies the stanza all the same.
**He names two compound rules in three lines, and both are about how loose the tradition is willing to be.** कठिनविषमाम् puts two adjectives together with no noun between them, and he cites Pāṇini 2.1.57 विशेषणं विशेष्येण बहुलम् with the standard example खञ्जकुब्ज, *lame-hunchbacked*, adding that either one may be taken as the principal according to what the speaker wants foregrounded — बहुलम्, diversely, is in the rule to allow exactly that. एकवेणीम् he refers to 2.1.49 पूर्वकालैकसर्वजरत्पुराणनवकेवलाः समानाधिकरणेन, which names एक among seven words that compound with a word in the same case-relation, and calls the result a तत्पुरुष, which is the genus of the karmadhāraya the rule actually makes.
**He closes with the eighth state**: असकृत्सारणाच्चित्तविभ्रमदशा सूचिता — from the pushing-back done over and over, the state called disorder of mind is indicated. That is the item after लज्जात्याग at 2.31 and विषयद्वेष at 2.30, so the count still holds, and one adverb — असकृत्, *not once* — is the whole of what he reads it out of. No figure is named. This is the last of the four stanzas he announced at 2.28.
uncheckedthe reader's reading, following Mallinātha, Sañjīvinī's gloss. His are: मालाम् for दाम and त्यक्त्वा for हित्वा, ग्रथिता for बद्धा, वीतशोकेन for विगलितशुचा, मोचनीयाम् for उद्वेष्टनीयाम्, स्पर्शे सति मूलकेशेषु सव्यथाम्, निम्नोन्नता for विषमा with “विशेषणं विशेष्येण बहुलम्” and the खञ्जकुब्ज analogy, एकीभूतवेणीम् with “पूर्वकाल-” इत्यादिना तत्पुरुषः, तां शिखाम्, अकर्तितोपान्ता for अयमिता, कपोलविस्तारात् for गण्डाभोगात्, मुहुर्मुहुः for असकृत्, अपसारयन्तीम् for सारयन्तीम्, “तां पश्य” इति पूर्वेण सम्बन्धः, and असकृत्सारणाच्चित्तविभ्रमदशा सूचिता. That the tense of the promise lives in the kṛtya affix alone, that विगलितशुचा is the poem's one description of the speaker's future state, that the two accusative feminine pronouns of the sentence point at different things, and that this cross-reference quotes his own anvaya rather than the poem, are the reader's; that पश्य and ताम् both stand in 2.28, that शाप stands elsewhere only at 1.1 and 2.50, and that विगलितशुचौ stands in a stanza marked `॥ ? ॥` and dropped by `tools/build_corpus.py`, are checked against `text.md`, and the state-labels against `vendor/meghaduta-sanjivini.itx`“asakṛtsāraṇāc cittavibhramadaśā sūcitā”
On the first day of the separation she put off her garland and drew her hair into one braid. At the end of the curse, with the grief gone out of me, I am the one who is to unwind it. It hurts to touch; and again and again she pushes it off the spread of her cheek with a hand whose nails have not been cut, and it is hard and ridged under the hand. The stanza folds a whole year into a sentence about a plait — the day it was tied, the day it will be loosed, and the sleepless present in which she keeps brushing it away — and the only thing the yakṣa says of himself in all four stanzas is the two words that promise to be the one who unbinds it.
- Mallinātha, Sañjīvinī — 2.32, whole-verse gloss