"Always, Huzoor. It is ever so. One is blind in each generation, so he makes Mai Âtma's crown."
He and his sons for ever! a strange coincidence truly.
"Then no one has ever seen her face 'within the wreath their fingers twine'?" I asked, quoting the words involuntarily and forgetting that he could not understand them. He answered the first part of the sentence.
"How could that be, Huzoor, seeing we are always blind?"
True. But if one was not blind? My thought was interrupted by Robbins' voice from behind.
"Hope you haven't found it long, old chap; but the baboo really knows a lot about Asoka. Fine old beggar he must have been. And then he has got a chant about some female called Âtma who had a lot of lovers, don't you know." Robbins pulled himself up hastily, and, to cover his confusion, protested that it was just the sort of unintelligible gibberish which interested me, and thereupon bade the baboo give me a specimen.
Before I could stop him, the brute had got well into the first line; but even in my wrath I was relieved to find that it was indeed absolutely unintelligible. New India evidently did not understand the old. I came to this conclusion before I got my fingers, as gently as I could, inside his rainbow-hued comforter and choked him off.
"I cannot help it, Robbins," I said as I tendered the baboo five rupees as hush-money. "If you knew all you would excuse me."
Robbins gave me one of his most sympathetic looks and said he quite understood.
Did he? Did I? I asked myself that question over and over again, until in the dead of the night I could ask it no longer. The desire for an answer grew too strong.