Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v2.c17.40

v2.c17.40

beauty in these words among others: “Her ankles do not stand out (but are imbedded in the flesh, a thing which in the Epic is often mentioned of the fair), and her thighs are firm and hard. Three things in her are deep (voice, understanding, and navel), six high-arched (nose, eyes, ears, nails, breasts, the joint of the neck), five red (the palms of the hands, and soles of the feet, the corners of the eyes, the tongue, the nails) ; she speaks unclearly as the swan, her brows and eyes are round-arched, red as the bimba-fruit are her lips, her neck is like shell, her veins are hidden, her face is like the full moon, and so on. Glorious she is as a mare from Kashmir.” Still more glowingly does Sudeshṇā express herself in K.: “For the man thou lookest on there is no more weakness, no more pain, no more weariness, no more discomfiture, no sorrow, and no torment. Sickness and old age, hunger and thirst, for him are done with to whom thou givest thyself in love. Were such a one even dead, and didst thou clasp him with thy lovely arms, then would he come back again to life (iv, 14.61 ff.).” Even the women gaze only at her; the trees seem to stand bowing before her; no man can see her without being held by love (iv, 9). So that it is no wonder if Kicaka says to her: “Who in the whole world must not fall under the sway of love, when he beholds the glorious moon of thy countenance, endowed with peerless splendour, along with the moonbeams of the smile in thine eyes and lashes,¹ and decked with heaven’s beams, ravishing by its heavenly sweetness? Thy two so glorious breasts, fit for a string of pearls, these well-shaped, splendid, plump, rounded breasts, set close to one another with no gap between, like unto lotus-buds, O thou with the lovely brows, thou with the sweet smile, goad me like the love god’s own goads. So soon as I see that waist of thine, sweetly ringed by folds, bent by the breast’s weight, and within the compass of the fingers, O thou slim one, and thy lovely secret parts, rising like a river-island, I am carried away by a love-sickness beyond cure. Quench thou, O lovely-hipped, the glowing fire of my love with the rain of self-surrender, and the cloud of union in delight ” (iv, 14.18 ff.).