Hindoo Holiday (38 page)

His Highness began to shake with suppressed amusement.

At that time, he said, there had been a boy in Chhokrapur named Dhama who came to him one day and told him that he had had a vision. He had dreamed, he said, that if a pair of baskets were attached to the shoulders of a certain other boy named Kanaya, and he were thrown up into the air, he would be enabled to fly to Indra and petition him to turn off his devastating rain.

Dhama, as His Highness very well knew, was always teasing Kanaya, for they were both sons of rival jewelers; but Dhama told his vision so convincingly that Kanaya was immediately sent for and baskets were fastened to his shoulders without loss of time.

These baskets, said His Highness, were shaped rather like elephant's ears and used for sifting grain.

Rather surprised at these proceedings, Kanaya asked for an explanation, and His Highness, amused and excited, informed him that he was going to be sent to heaven, and that when he got there he must find Indra and beg him to stop the rain. And no sooner were the baskets attached than Kanaya was bundled out into the Palace courtyard by Dhama and four or five servants. There, in the pouring rain, he was firmly grasped by the legs and ankles, raised from the ground, and with the impetus of half a dozen preliminary swings, flung high into the air.

“Fly! fly!” cried Dhama, as he heaved.

“Fly! fly!” cried every one.

But Kanaya didn't. He fell, instead, on to his head, and was severely bruised, much to the surprise of the spectators—and to their subsequent delight when Dhama confessed that he had never had a vision at all. His Highness rocked and choked with laughter.

“I expected to see him go up! up! up!—but he fell down on his head! Such a bang!”

The car trickled on over the dusty roads through the shifting, blinding haze, and His Highness said that to-day he was going to take leave of me at the Palace, and the car would then convey me back to the Guest House.

“If I give you land,” he cried, “will you come with all your family and live here?”

I said at once that I thought it might be arranged, knowing that immediate acquiescence was the most effective way of quenching his singular enthusiasms; and, indeed, it was in a far less eager voice that he asked:

“How much land will you want?”

I gazed out over the stony, unmanageable jungle.

“Just enough to sit on,” I said.

He nodded pensively. We reached the Palace at last. Under the pink porch the armed guard, in a dilapidated khaki uniform, with puttees but no boots or socks, was dozing with his back against one of the pillars. Some servants were gossiping on the steps. Through the doorway at the top the hindquarters of the sacred cow protruded.

“Honk!” said the car.

The servants scrambled to their feet and bowed their foreheads to the ground; the guard, his turban over his nose, started upright and executed a shaky presentation of arms; the tail of the sacred cow twitched to and fro.

The car stopped; His Highness descended; leaning on the shoulder of his gray-bearded cousin, he climbed stiffly up the steps, and pushing the cow to one side, disappeared into the Palace.