Dasa’s Killing of Nala

Dasa’s killing of Nala is the decisive act of revenge in Dasa’s imagined life: after discovering that his wife Pravati has gone to the young Rajah, Dasa kills the prince and escapes into the forest. The episode converts a domestic betrayal into flight and lasting dislocation, while the tale’s later reflection casts Dasa’s attachment to love and happiness as part of Maya, the shifting world of appearance.

Discovery and Pursuit

The episode begins when a hunting party announces the young Rajah’s arrival in the neighborhood. Troops, horses, and a supply train follow, and the prince’s camp is set up near the fields and huts where Dasa lives. Dasa keeps to his work, tending the fields and mill, and tries to stay clear of the hunters and courtiers. His ordinary routine is broken when he returns home and finds Pravati missing. He had forbidden her to go outside while the court was nearby; her absence therefore brings both immediate fear and a sense of impending disaster. He searches the hut, the fields, the cabbage patch, the well, and his father-in-law’s house, repeatedly calling for her and looking for signs of where she went.

The youngest of Dasa’s brothers-in-law eventually tells him that Pravati is living in the Rajah’s tent and has been seen riding with him. Dasa then watches the camp from concealment, carrying the sling he had used when he was a herdsman. He repeatedly approaches the prince’s tent when it appears unguarded, but has to withdraw as guards arrive. From a tree overlooking the camp, he sees the Rajah return from riding and watches a young woman come forward to welcome him. Recognizing Pravati confirms her betrayal and deepens Dasa’s anguish: the happiness he had invested in their marriage gives way to a sense of loss and insult.

The Killing and Escape

Dasa remains near the scene of his loss through a day and night of wandering in the woods. Exhaustion and grief drive him from one brief rest to the next, yet he does not leave the vicinity: he circles his hut, the mill, the fields, and the Rajah’s hunting tent. At last he hides again in the trees above the camp, waiting until the Rajah steps outside. Dasa slips down, raises his sling, and strikes the prince with a stone. Nala falls motionless; before servants gather around him, Dasa disappears into the woods and the bamboo thickets leading toward the valley.

The killing does not bring simple release. In the instant he hurls the stone, Dasa feels as though he is casting his own life into an abyss with it, willing to die if only his enemy falls first. The silence after the blow interrupts that self-destructive impulse: an instinct to live draws him away from the camp. Once hidden and safe from immediate danger, he feels both revulsion at having escaped and a defiant resolve to survive; his heart also continues to exult in the deed. The hunt for the killer soon spreads through the woods. Searchers beat the thickets, but Dasa stays motionless in a marsh that they fear to enter because of tigers. He sleeps, keeps watch, and crawls onward until, by the third day, he has crossed the hills and is making for the higher mountains.

Place in the Imagined Life

The killing belongs to a fictitious autobiography, or “Life,” that Joseph Knecht wrote during his years of free study. In Castalia, such compositions were an official exercise for students not yet admitted to the Order: each imagined a life in a chosen historical setting, entering another culture and intellectual climate through the form of autobiography. The exercise preserved, without requiring literal belief, an old Asian idea of reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. Its purpose was imaginative as well as historical: students learned to regard their present identities as temporary masks, while some also shaped their fictional pasts into portraits of the people they wished to become. Dasa’s violent reversal thus takes place within a deliberately assumed life, not the frame narrative of Knecht’s own biography.

The tale’s later interpretation makes the episode more than a revenge plot. After Dasa recounts his life to the yogi, the old man responds with the word “Maya!” Dasa gradually understands it as a name for his youth, his happiness with Pravati, and the misery that followed: all are part of a changing world of appearances. Yet this insight does not immediately free him from what he has lived through. The story lets the loss, the killing, and the flight retain their force even as it places them within a spiritual exercise about attachment and illusion. In that tension, Dasa’s imagined life becomes a way for Knecht to enter a radically different existence while examining how thoroughly love, grief, and the will to survive can bind a person to it.