The cross Savitri has to carry has been made known to her by Narad. She has chosen Satyavan as her lover and husband and she is firm about the choice irrespective of whatever it might entail. Narad is going round and round, and not coming to the point straightaway. He knows everything, and already the royal audience has understood that there is something ominous about what Savitri has decided to do. But now the queen-mother of Savitri, Malawi, is insistent and demands of the sage to come out with the truth though harsh it might be to bear. Perhaps the sage was waiting for this demand on him, because one of the intentions he had in his mind was to steel the will of Savitri, to remain firm in her decision in spite of the calamitous prophecy he was about to make. In the process he was to set free the spring of cosmic Fate. So it was not just the calamity pertaining to an individual, it was through that individual’s deep and irreparable misfortune that the very future of the universe was going to be decided. So Narad is going to make the mysterious announcement with that full sense of responsibility. He even asserts that the great Gods use the pain of human hearts as a sharp axe to cut the path of the cosmic future, the path of glory and triumph—as though that pain is serving a kind of noble purpose. So Christ must carry the Cross, and Sri Aurobindo must suffer harshness and severity of the solitary imprisonment, the infuriating onslaught of its madness, and Savitri must bear the agony of the death of Satyavan exactly one year after the marriage. So now he sets universal destiny free in that epoch-making hour.

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