This is an account of my coming disgrace, now a matter of days, not months. It will tell of the fall of a celebrated poet whom flatterers once compared to the master poet, the divine Kalidasa himself. Blinded by fame, as an elephant is by rut, my mind so stained, I often boasted that from Kashmir to Gujarat and Mewar, from Kanyakubja to Karnataka, and to the eastern lands beyond the ocean, there is no village or country, no capital city or forest region, no pleasure garden or school where the learned and the ignorant, the young and the old, male and female alike, do not read my poems and shiver with pleasure. As a renowned alchemist of feelings, I conducted myself in the world as if my body was not of flesh, blood and bones but of fame, impervious to threats of old age, death and rebirth. Today, I shrink in shame when I recollect how I stooped to brag about a fame that, like life itself, is ephemeral. As the morning droplet on a lotus leaf.
What impels me to narrate the events around my abasement? To help others live a moral life through the cautionary tale of my own degradation? To tell the story myself before my enemies begin to slaver around its entrails? Perhaps. What I do know is that I need to write down the events of the last two years, stripped of self-serving evasions and shorn of embellishments, if I want to reclaim my soul. It is too late to salvage the esteem in which the world once held me, the praise it showered on my verse, the honours it laid at my feet; it is not too late to expose the sludge of my desires to the cleansing fire of truth. I must rummage in its embers at the risk of burning my fingers, less to find when and how it all went so horribly wrong more to brace myself for what awaits me with the calm acceptance of the ascetic in the forest preparing himself for death and after life.
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