"Have you no mother?" asked Annapurna.
"Yes."
"Does she not love you?"
This last question seemed to strike the boy as highly absurd. He laughed as he replied: "Why should she not?"
"Why did you leave her, then?" pursued the mystified lady.
"She has four more boys and three girls."
Annapurna was shocked. "What a thing to say!" she cried. "Can one bear to cut off a finger because there are four more?"
2.
Tara's history was as brief as his years were few, but for all that the boy was quite out of the common. He was the fourth son of his parents and had lost his father in his infancy. In spite of this large family of children, Tara had always been the favourite. He was petted alike by his mother, his brothers and sisters, and the neighbours. Even the schoolmaster usually spared him the rod, and when he did not, the punishment was felt by all the class. So there was no reason for him to leave his home. But, curiously enough, though the scamp of the village—whose time was divided between tasting of the fruits stolen from the neighbours' trees and the more plentiful fruits of his stealing pressed on him by these same neighbours—remained within the village bounds clinging to his scolding mother, the pet of the village ran away to join a band of wandering players.
There was a hue and cry, and a rescue party hunted him out and brought him back. His distracted mother strained him to her breast and deluged him with her tears. A stern sense of duty forced his elders to make an heroic effort to administer a mild corrective, but overcome by the reaction they lavished their repentant fondness on him worse than ever. The neighbours' wives redoubled their attentions in the hope of reconciling him to his home-life. But all bonds, even those of affection, were irksome to the boy. The star under which he was born must have decreed him homeless.
When Tara saw boats from foreign parts being towed along the river; or a Sannyasi, in his wanderings through unknown lands, resting under one of the village trees, or a gypsy camp sprung up on the fallow field by the river, the gypsies seated by their mat-walled huts, splitting bamboos and weaving baskets, his spirit longed for the freedom of the mysterious outside world, unhampered by ties of affection. After he had repeated his escapade two or three times, his relations and neighbours gave up all hope of him.
When the proprietor of the band of players, which he had joined, began to love Tara as a son and he became the favourite of the whole party, big and small alike,—when he found that even the people of the houses at which their performances were given, chiefly the women, would send for him to mark their special appreciation, he gave them all the slip, and his companions could find no trace of him.
Tara was as impatient of bondage as a young deer, and as susceptible to music. It was the songs in the theatrical performances which had drawn him away from his home ties. Their tunes would make corresponding waves course through his veins and his whole being swayed to their rhythm. Even when he was quite a child, the solemn way in which he would sit out a musical performance, gravely nodding to mark the time, used to make it difficult for the grown-ups to restrain their laughter. Not only music, but the patter of the heavy July rain on the trees in full foliage, the roll of the thunder, the moaning of the wind through the thickets, as of some infant giant strayed from its mother,—would make him beside himself. The distant cry of the kites flying high in the blazing midday sky, the croaking of the frogs on a rainy evening, the howling of the jackals at dead of night,—all these stirred him to his depths.
This passion for music next led him to take up with a company of ballad-singers. The master took great pains in teaching him to sing and recite ballads composed in alliterative verse and jingling metre, based on stories from the epics, and became as fond of him as if he were a pet singing bird. But after he had learnt several pieces, one fine morning it was found that the bird had flown.
