‘My king,’ resumed the misogyne parrot, ‘of such excellencies as these are women composed. It is said that “wet cloth will extinguish fire and bad food will destroy strength; a degenerate son ruins a family, and when a friend is in wrath he takes away life. But a woman is an inflicter of grief in love and in hate; whatever she does turns out to be for our ill. Truly the Deity has created woman a strange being in this world.” And again, “The beauty of the nightingale is its song, science is the beauty of an ugly man, forgiveness is the beauty of a devotee, and the beauty of a woman is virtue—but where shall we find it?” And again, “Among the sages, Narudu; among the beasts, the jackal; among the birds, the crow; among men, the barber; and in this world woman—is the most crafty.”
‘What I have told thee, my king, I have seen with mine own eyes, and I have heard with mine own ears. At the time I was young, but the event so affected me that I have ever since held female kind to be a walking pest, a two-legged plague, whose mission on earth, like flies and other vermin, is only to prevent our being too happy. O, why do not children and young parrots sprout in crops from the ground—from budding trees or vine-stocks?’
‘I was thinking, sire,’ said the young Dharma Dhwaj to the warrior king his father, ‘what women would say of us if they could compose Sanskrit verses!’
‘Then keep your thoughts to yourself,’ replied the Raja, nettled at his son daring to say a word in favour of the sex. ‘You always take the part of wickedness and depravity——’
‘Permit me, your majesty,’ interrupted the Baital, ‘to conclude my tale.’
When Madan-manjari, the jay, and Churaman, the parrot, had given these illustrations of their belief, they began to wrangle, and words ran high. The former insisted that females are the salt of the earth, speaking, I presume, figuratively. The latter went so far as to assert that the opposite sex have no souls, and that their brains are in a rudimental and inchoate state of development. Thereupon he was tartly taken to task by his master’s bride, the beautiful Chandravati, who told him that those only have a bad opinion of women who have associated with none but the vicious and the low, and that he should be ashamed to abuse feminine parrots, because his mother had been one.
This was truly logical.
On the other hand, the jay was sternly reproved for her mutinous and treasonable assertions by the husband of her mistress, Raja Ram, who, although still a bridegroom, had not forgotten the gallant rule of his syntax—
The masculine is more worthy than the feminine;
till Madan-manjari burst into tears and declared that her life was not worth having. And Raja Ram looked at her as if he could have wrung her neck.