The wife of Love lay helpless in a swoon until grief awakened her to the first cruel taste of widowhood. Opening her eyes in anxious desperation, she searched every corner where he might still be found, yet nowhere did she behold the beloved she longed for. Rising in anguish, she cried out for the lord of her life, only at last to discover him as nothing more than a trace of ashes upon the ground.
Her heart breaking, her breast stained by the cold earth, her hair loosened in despair, Charm wept aloud and poured her sorrow into the forest itself, as though the trees and winds might somehow share the burden of her grief. She lamented the terrible cruelty of surviving the destruction of such perfect beauty, wondering how her own heart could continue to beat after witnessing the end of the one she loved.
She cried out to Love, asking where he had gone, saying that his affection had lasted but a moment while she would need its strength forever. She compared herself to a lily abandoned by the stream that once sustained it, left alone to mourn the dying flower beside it. Never, she said, had either of them caused pain to the other, so why should she now be left in such fruitless suffering while he did not return to comfort her sorrow?
Her memory turned to their playful intimacy—the teasing punishments, the blossoms that had flown into his eyes, the affectionate words he used to call her the heart of his own heart. Those memories only deepened her torment, for if those words had truly been real, she felt her own life should have ended the moment his did. To live even a moment apart from him now seemed a stain upon her devotion.
Charm reflected on the emptiness now left in the world without Love. How, she asked, could maidens find their way through midnight secrecy to the hearts they longed for? What power now remained in glances, in wine, in moonlight, in flowers, if none of these could awaken love? Even the moon, she imagined, would feel its light to be vain, and the mango blossoms would lose the very force that once made them arrows in Love’s hands.
She begged him to arise again in his radiant form, to resume his gentle tyranny over longing hearts and the messengers of desire. Her mind lingered on the spring garland he had once woven for her with his own hands, a token now transformed into a relic of unbearable memory. Even the unfinished adornment of her feet became for her a symbol of the love that death had interrupted before it could be completed.
In the extremity of her sorrow, Charm resolved to follow him into death. She compared herself to a moth flying headlong into flame, unwilling to remain behind while celestial nymphs in heaven might one day attract his attention before she reached him. To delay even a moment longer felt like betrayal. Yet even as she prepared herself for death, the vivid image of him remained before her eyes—his blossom-arrow, his bow resting across his breast, his smiling glance toward his friend Spring.
At that thought, Spring himself appeared, pierced by the accents of her grief as though by poisoned darts. His presence opened her sorrow even further, for grief finds its fullest expression before the friends of the beloved. She showed him the ashes scattered on the ground and cried that this grey dust was all that remained of the one he sought.
Charm then turned to Spring with a final request. Since fate had left her alive while Love had perished, she asked him to perform the last office of a kinsman: prepare her funeral fire and send her spirit to rejoin her husband. Just as moonlight never wanders far from the moon, and lightning follows the cloud, so too, she said, a wife must follow her mate. She longed to lie in the flames as gladly as she once lay upon a bed of flowers beside him.
She asked Spring to fan the fire with southern winds, to sprinkle drops of friendship-water upon his ashes and upon her, and in time to return to the place of their death with showers of mango blossoms, for Love had always delighted in those flowers. Her sorrow transformed even death into an extension of conjugal devotion.
As Charm stood ready to end her mortal suffering in flame, a voice from heaven suddenly intervened with mercy. The divine voice revealed that Love was not lost forever. His destruction by Shiva’s fire had fulfilled an older curse laid upon him when Brahma, once stirred to improper desire by Love’s arrows, had condemned him to die by flame. Yet the curse had been softened: when Shiva’s heart would one day rejoice in marriage, Love’s body and soul would be reunited as a gift to the mountain bride.
Hearing this prophecy, Charm’s thoughts turned away from death. She was urged to preserve her body for the day of reunion, just as a stream diminished by summer is restored by autumn rain. Though still consumed by grief, she accepted the promise of future restoration and waited in sorrowful patience for fate to fulfil its hidden design. Like the waning moon longing for the return of its light, she endured the darkness while awaiting the destined hour of renewal.