III
ONCE THERE WAS A KING
"Once upon a time there was a king."
When we were children there was no need to know who the king in the fairy story was. It didn't matter whether he was called Shiladitya or Shaliban, whether he lived at Kashi or Kanauj. The thing that made a seven-year-old boy's heart go thump, thump with delight was this one [sovereign] truth, this reality of all realities: "Once there was a king."
But the readers of this modern age are far more exact and exacting. When they hear such an opening to a story, they are at once critical and [suspicious]. They apply the searchlight of science to its legendary haze and ask: "Which king?"
The story-tellers have become more precise in their turn. They are no longer content with the old indefinite, "There was a king," but assume instead a look of profound learning and begin: "Once there was a king named Ajatasatru."
The modern reader's curiosity, however, is not so easily satisfied. He [blinks] at the author through his scientific spectacles and asks again: "Which Ajatasatru?"
When we were young, we understood all sweet things; and we could detect the sweets of a fairy story by an unerring science of our own. We never cared for such useless things as knowledge. We only cared for truth. And our [unsophisticated] little hearts knew well where the Crystal Palace of Truth lay and how to reach it. But to-day we are expected to write pages of facts, while the truth is simply this:
"There was a king."
I remember vividly that evening in Calcutta when the fairy story began. The rain and the storm had been incessant. The whole of the city was flooded. The water was knee-deep in our lane. I had a straining hope, which was almost a certainty, that my tutor would be prevented from coming that evening. I sat on the stool in the far corner of the verandah looking down the lane, with a heart beating faster and faster. Every minute I kept my eye on the rain, and when it began to diminish I prayed with all my might: "Please, God, send some more rain till half-past seven is over." For I was quite ready to believe that there was no other need for rain except to protect one helpless boy one evening in one corner of Calcutta from the deadly clutches of his tutor.
If not in answer to my prayer, at any rate according to some grosser law of nature, the rain did not give up.