"But where is he?" I insisted.
Face looked at face half puzzled, half amused. Who could tell where Lâl was? He might be miles away, or in the next jungle. Some one had seen him at Sukkhur a week agone, but that was no reason why he should not be at Bhukkur now, for Lâl followed the river, and like it was here to-day, gone to-morrow.
Baulked in my curiosity, I took refuge in business by inquiring what revenue Lâl paid on his field. This was too much for the polite gravity of my hearers. The idea of Lâl's paying revenue was evidently irresistibly comic, and the venerable pantaloon actually choked himself between a cough and a laugh, requiring to be held up and patted on the back.
"But some one must pay the revenue," I remarked a little testily.
Certainly! the Lord of the Universe was right. The village community paid it. It was the village which lent Lâl the field, and the bullocks, and the plough. It was the village which gave him the few handfuls of seed-grain to scatter broadcast over the roughly-tilled soil. So much they lent to Lâl. The sun and the good God gave him the rest. All, that is to say, that was not wanted for the parrot, the pig, and the squirrel people, and, of course, for the pony of the Lord of the Universe.
There are so many mysteries in Indian peasant life, safe hidden from alien eyes, that I was lazily content to let Lâl and his field slip into the limbo of things not thoroughly understood, and so, ere long, I forgot all about him. Spring passed ripening the crops; summer came bringing fresh floods to the river; and autumn watched the earth once more make way against the water; but Lâl was to me as though he had not been.
It was only when another year found me once more in the strange land which lies, as the natives say, "in the stomach of the river," that memory awoke with the words, "This is the field of Lâl." There was, however, no suggestion made about loosening my pony's bridle as on the former occasion, the reason for such reticence being palpable. Lâl had either been less fortunate in his original choice of a field this year, or else the sun and the good God had been less diligent care-takers. A large portion of the land, too, bore marks of an over-recent flood in a thick deposit of fine glistening white sand. A favourite trick of the mischievous Indus, by which she disappoints hope raised by previous gifts of rich alluvial soil--a trick which has given her a bad name, the worst a woman can bear, because she gives and destroys with one hand. Here and there, in patches, the sparse crop showed green; but for the most part the ground lay bare, cracking into large fissures under the noonday sun, and peeling at the top into shiny brown scales.
"A bad lookout for Lâl," I remarked.
Bad, they said, for the squirrel people and the parrot people, no doubt; but for Lâl--that was another matter. L&I did not live by bread alone. The river gave, the river took away; but to Lâl at any rate it gave more than it stole.
"What does it give?" I asked.