"What will you sing?" I asked, preparing to idle away ten minutes comfortably in a lounge-chair which lay convenient.
"I sing what I sing. Give me the vina, woman."
The veil gave up such a very large instrument that the smallness of the remaining wife became oppressive. So large indeed was it, that one gourd over-filled the boy's lap, while the other acted as a prop to the high twined turban. Even the connecting bamboo, slender though it was, seemed all too wide for those small fingers on the frets.
"Is the permission of the Presence bestowed?" suggested Râmchunderji, with the utmost solemnity.
Twang, twang, twangle! Heavens, what a vina and what a voice! I nearly stopped both at the first bar; then patience prevailing, I lay back and closed my eyes. Twang, twangle! A sudden difference in the tone made me open them again, only to find the same little bronze image busy in making a perfectly purgatorial noise; so I resigned myself once more. Palm-trees waving, odorous thickets starred with jasmin, forms, half-mortal, half-divine, stealing through the shadows, the flash of shining swords, the twang of golden bows bent on ten-headed many-handed monsters. Bah! Pundit Narayan Das, prosing over those epic poems of his, had made me drowsy. "What have you been singing?" I asked, rousing myself.
Râmchunderji spread his hands thumbs outwards, and the three wrinkles on his high forehead deepened: "God knows! It is what they sang before the great flood came. The vina was theirs, and my turban, and my wife's veil; the rest was too big altogether, so I gave it away for some bread. When the belly is full of greed the heart hath none left, and the nine-lakh necklace is worth no more than a mouthful. If the Presence could see into my heart now, he would find no greed there."
This delicate allusion to an inward craving produced a four-anna bit from my pocket, and sent Râmchunderji away to the sweet-meat sellers in order to appease his hunger; for sweet-stuff is cheap in the East, especially when it is stale. Seeta and the vina, mysteriously intertwined beneath the veil, followed duteously behind.
The next day they were back again, and the twang of that infernal instrument broke in on the pundit's impassioned regrets over the heroic days of his favourite poems. "By the by," I interrupted, "can you tell me what that boy is singing? I can't make out a word, and yet--But it was no use bringing fancy to bear on Narayan Das, so we went out to listen. They were sitting under a trellised arch covered with jasmin and roses, and a great Gloire de Dijon had sent a shower of blown petals over Seeta's veil.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," quoted Narayan Das sententiously, after listening a while. "It is Râmayâna, the immortal poem your honour reads even now; but debase, illiterate. You say wrong, boy! it is thus."
Râmchunderji waited till the pompous periods ceased; then he shook his head gravely. "We did not sing it so in the days before the great flood came."