"My lord the king hath sent me to call you to himself," said the messenger gently; "he offers to his adopted son a welcome and a home."
Farebwala had so poisoned the mind of the wretched Bandhu, that he regarded his royal benefactor with some fear, but nothing like love. The lad had not the slightest wish to appear before the king, and with some impatience, he exclaimed, "Even were your message true, which I do not believe, I could not possibly go to the court now, as I start on a pilgrimage to a holy place to-morrow."
"Yes," cried his companions together, "Bandhu is going on holy pilgrimage."
"About as holy as the songs which you were singing just now," observed Prem Chand.
"What! See you no merit in pilgrimage!" exclaimed Bandhu, with mingled surprise and displeasure. "You will next say that there is no merit in bathing in holy rivers, or in the austerities of the Jogi." *
Prem Chand replied in the words of the sage Kabir—
"If by wandering about naked union † be obtained,
Then every deer of the forest will become emancipated.
If by shaving the head perfection is obtained,
The sheep is emancipated, no one is lost.
Who perform ablution in the evening, and at dawn
They become like frogs in the water."
* Men who, to acquire fancied merit, put themselves to various tortures; some holding up an arm till it withers, or clenching a hand till its nails grow into the flesh.
† Union—that is absorption into the Divine nature, which leaves no individual sense of existence. "When by thousands of meritorious acts through a great many successive births, a man becomes perfectly holy, he becomes one with the Supreme Being, just as a drop becomes one with the ocean by falling into it."—Rev. Ishuree Dás's "Domestic Manners and Customs."
The young men around burst out laughing; Bandhu looking perplexed. His mind, drugged with superstition, was too dull to take in at once the wit of the ancient poet of Hindustan. But a Brahmin had approached the spot whilst Prem Chand was speaking, and had listened with a countenance darkened by anger. This was the same Brahmin as he who had pretended to find out by divination that Bandhu was a Chhatri; while the real truth was that the boy's father was a herdsman, and that the string which his fancy had turned into a janeo, was in fact only one used for tying up goats. The wise Brahmin knew nothing of this, and merely said, for the sake of a few rupees, what Farebwala told him to say. For the bribe of a hundred rupees, he would have declared the herdsman's child to be the son of a rajah.
"Who are you, O ass, and son of an ass, who would pour contempt on holy devotees!" cried the angry Brahmin.