In this part of the country, during June and July, a succession of fairs are held turn by turn in the different villages, and bands of players and singers and dancing girls, together with hordes of traders of every kind, journey in boats along the big and little rivers from fair to fair. Since the year before a novelty in the shape of a party of acrobats had joined the throng. Tara after leaving the ballad singers had been travelling with a trader, helping him to sell his pan. His curiosity being roused, he threw in his lot with the acrobats. He had taught himself to play on the flute, and it was his sole function to play jigs, in the Lucknow style, while the acrobats were doting their feats. It was from this troupe that he had last run away. Para had heard that the Zamindar of Nandigram was getting up some amateur theatricals on a grand scale. He promptly tied up his belongings into a bundle with the intention of going there, when he came across Moti Babu.
Tara's imaginative nature had saved him from acquiring the manners of any of the different companies with whom he had hobnobbed. His mind had always remained aloof and free. He had seen and heard many ugly things, but there was no vacancy within him for these to be stored away. Like other bonds, habit also failed to hold him. Swan-like, he swam lightly over the muddy waters of the world, and no matter how often his curiosity impelled him to dive into the mire beneath, his feathers remained unruffled and white. That is why the face of the runaway shone with an unsullied youthfulness which made even the middle-aged, worldly Moti Babu accept and welcome him, unquestioning and undoubting.
After dinner was over, the boat was cast off and Annapurna, with an affectionate interest, went on asking all about Tara's relatives and his home life. The boy made the shortest possible replies and last sought refuge in flight to the deck.
The vast river outside, swollen by the seasonal rains to the last limit of its brink, seemed to embarrass mother Nature herself by its boisterous recklessness. The sun, shining out of a break in the clouds, touched as though with a magic wand, the rows of half-submerged reeds at the water's edge, the fresh juicy green of the sugar-cane patches higher up on the bank and the purple haze of the woodlands on the further shore against the distant horizon. Everything was gleaming and thrilling and quickening and speaking with life.
Tara mounted the upper deck and stretched himself under the shade of the spreading sail. One after another, sloping grassy meadows, flooded jute fields, deep green waves of Aman rice, narrow paths winding up to the village from the riverside, villages nestling amidst their dense groves, came into sight and passed away. This great world, with its wide-gazing sky, with all the stir and whisper in its fields, the tumult in its water, the restless rustle in its trees, the vast remoteness of its space above and below, was on terms of the closest intimacy with the boy, and yet it never, for a moment, tried to bind his restless spirit within a jealously exacting embrace.
Calves were gambolling by the riverside. Hobbled village ponies limped along, grazing on the meadow lands. Kingfishers, perched on the bamboo poles put up for spreading the nets, took a sudden plunge every now and then after fish. Boys were playing pranks in the river. Village maids up to their breasts in the water chattered and laughed as they scrubbed their clothes. Fishwives with their baskets and tucked-up skirts bargained with the fishermen over their catch,—these everyday scenes never seemed to exhaust their novelty for Tara, his eyes could never quench their thirst.
Then Tara started to talk with the boatmen. He jumped up and took turns with them at the poles whenever the boat hugged the shore too closely. And when the steersman felt he would like a smoke Tara relieved him at the helm, and seemed to know exactly how to work the sail with the changing direction of the breeze and the boat.
A little before evening Annapurna sent for Tara inside and asked him: "What do you usually have for supper?"
"Whatever I get," was the reply, "and some days I don't get anything at all!"
Annapurna was not a little disappointed
