Bubbles of the Foam | Page 6

the biter, and condemned him, by a sentence even more merciful than he deserved. For what could be more intolerable than even Heaven without Saraswati, unless it be the curse that is about to produce such a melancholy condition of affairs?
And then, those two deities disappeared suddenly from Heaven, and descended to be born as man and woman on the earth.[12]
[Footnote 12: This exordium, which has points of resemblance with that of the insufferable Bána's Harsha-charita, is only the Hindoo method of declaring that the two characters presently to be brought upon the scene are mortal incarnations of love and charm: as we call a man, an Adonis, or a woman, a Venus.]
III
Now just at that very moment, it happened, that there were living in the desert two Rajpoots of the race of the Moon; and the name of the one was Bimba, and that of the other, Jaya.[13] And Saraswati was born as the daughter of the wife of Bimba, while Kámadewa was born as the son of the wife of Jaya. Now Bimba was a king: and Jaya was his cousin on the mother's side. And very soon afterwards, Jaya set upon his cousin, laying claim to the throne, and driving him away, took his kingdom, and kept it for himself. And he caught the wife of Bimba, and put her to death, as he would have done also with her daughter and her husband. But Bimba succeeded in escaping with his daughter, and ran away and hid himself. So Jaya remained in triumph, reigning over the kingdom, whose capital stood on the very spot on which we are sitting now. For the kingdoms of the earth come and go upon it, like the shadows of the clouds: and they grow up suddenly like grass, and perish a little later, and vanish clean away, leaving behind them absolutely nothing but mounds, such as those now lying all about thee, and fragments of recollections, and half-forgotten names, like the dreams of the night which morning obliterates and drives away, vaguely hanging in its memory like wreaths of mist curling and twisting on the black still surface of a pool in some dark valley screened from the early sun by one of thy father's[14] peaks.
[Footnote 13: i.e. the disc of the moon, and victory. Pronounce Jaya to rhyme with eye.]
[Footnote 14: i.e. the Himálaya.]
And of all the elements that made up Java's good fortune, there was not one which filled him with such pride and exultation as his son. And he looked upon him as the very fruit of his birth in visible form, little dreaming, that could he but have looked into the future, and seen what was coming, he would rather have deemed himself more fortunate to live and die without any son at all, than to have begotten such a son as he actually had. For sons resemble winds, which sometimes lift their families like clouds to heaven, and sometimes dash them to the earth, like hail.
For having waited so long to get a son at all, till hope was all but gone, the joy of both his parents, when he actually arrived, was so extravagantly great, that they could not make too much of him. And as he grew up, they spoiled him so completely, by the want of all discretion in their admiration and the flattery of their affectionate caresses, that after a while he became utterly intolerable, even to themselves. And this came about, not only by reason of their own foolishness, but also by the very disposition and qualities of that son himself. For he was so marvellously beautiful, that every time they saw him, they could hardly believe their own eyes, and were ready to abandon the body out of joy. And in the intoxication of delight they gave him the name of Atirupa,[15] which was no more than he deserved. And he became a byword and a wonder in the world, till the heart of his mother almost broke with the swelling of its own pride. For nothing like him had ever been seen by anybody, even in a dream, since his beauty did not in the least resemble that of other men, but hovered as it were half-way between one sex and the other, as if the Creator when he made him, unable to decide, whether to make of him a man or a woman, had combined, by some miracle of omnipotence and skill, the fascinations of the two. For though he was tall, and strong, yet strange! his body and his limbs were rounded, and delicately shaped, and slender, with soft and tender hands and feet that were almost too small, even for a girl: and as he moved, he fell as if by accident into attitudes that as