LAMENTATION OF THE CHANDÁLA WOMAN.
Argument. Lavana goes to the Vindhyan region, and sees his consort and
relatives of the dreaming state.
Vasishtha continued:—Now Ráma, attend to the wonderful power of the
said Avidyá or error, in displaying the changeful phenomenals, like the
changing forms of ornaments in the substance of the self-same gold.
2. The king Lavana, having at the end of his dream, perceived the
falsehood of his vision, resolved on the following day to visit that
great forest himself.
3. He said to himself: Ah! when shall I revisit the Vindhyan region,
which is inscribed in my mind; and where I remember to have undergone a
great many hardships in my forester’s life.
4. So saying, he took to his southward journey, accompanied by his
ministers and attendants, as if he was going to make a conquest of that
quarter, where he arrived at the foot of the mount in a few days.
5. There he wandered about the southern, and eastern and western shores
of the sea (_i.e._ all round the Eastern and Western Ghats). He was as
delighted with his curvilinear course, as the luminary of the day, in
his diurnal journey from east to west.
6. He saw there in a certain region, a deep and doleful forest
stretching wide along his path, and likening the dark and dismal realms
of death (Yama or Pluto).
7. Roving in this region he beheld everything, he had seen before in his
dream; he then inquired into the former circumstances, and wondered to
learn their conformity with the occurrences of his vision.
8. He recognised there the Chandála hunters of his dream, and being
curious to know the rest of the events, he continued in his
peregrination about the forest.
9. He then beheld a hamlet at the skirt of the wilderness, foggy with
smoke, and appearing as the spot where he bore the name of Pushta
Pukkasa or fostered Chandála.
10. He beheld there the same huts and hovels, and the various kinds of
human habitations, fields and plains, with the same men and women that
dwelt their before.
11. He beheld the same landscapes and leafless branches of trees, shorn
of their foliage by the all devouring famine; he saw the same hunters
pursuing their chase, and the same helpless orphans lying thereabouts.
12. He saw the old lady (his mother-in-law), wailing at the misfortunes
of other matrons; who were lamenting like herself with their eyes
suffused in tears, at the untimely deaths and innumerable miseries of
their fellow brethren.
13. The old matrons with their eyes flowing with brilliant drops of
tears, and with their bodies and bosoms emaciated under the pressure of
their afflictions; were mourning with loud acclamations of woe in that
dreary district, stricken by drought and dearth.
14. They cried, O ye sons and daughters, that lie dead with your
emaciated bodies for want of food for these three days; say where fled
your dear lives, stricken as they were by the steel of famine from the
armour of your bodies.
15. We remember your sweet smiles, showing your coral teeth resembling
the red gunjaphalas to our lords, as they descended from the towering
_tála_ (palm trees), with their red-ripe fruits held by their teeth, and
growing on the cloud-capt mountains.
16. When shall we see again the fierce leap of our boys, springing on
the wolves crouching amidst the groves of Kadamba and Jamb and Lavanga
and Gunja trees.
17. We do not see those graces even in the face of Káma the god of love,
that we were wont to observe in the blue and black countenances of our
children, resembling the dark hue of Tamála leaves, when feasting on
their dainty food of fish and flesh.
Lamentation of the mother-in-law.
18. My nigrescent daughter, says one, has been snatched away from me
with my dear husband like the dark Yamuná by the fierce Yama. O they
have been carried away from me like the _Tamála_ branch with its
clustering flowers, by a tremendous gale from this sylvan scene.
19. O my daughter, with thy necklace of the strings of red _gunja_
seeds, gracing the protuberant breast of thy youthful person; and with
thy swarthy complexion, seeming as the sea of ink was gently shaken by
the breeze. Ah! whither hast thou fled with thy raiment of woven
withered leaves, and thy teeth as black as the jet-jambu fruits (when
fully ripe).
20. O young prince! that wast as fair as the full moon, and that didst
forsake the fairies of thy harem, and didst take so much delight in my
daughter, where hast thou fled from us? Ah my daughter! she too is dead
in thy absence, and fled from my presence.
21. Being cast on the waves of this earthly ocean, and joined to the
daughter of a Chandála, thou wast, O prince! subjected to mean and vile
employments, that disgraced thy princely character. (This is a taunt to
all human beings that disgrace their heavenly nature, and grovel as
beasts while living on earth).
22. Ah! that daughter of mine with her tremulous eyes, like those of the
timorous fawn, and Oh! that husband valiant as the royal tiger; you are
both gone together, as the high hopes and great efforts of men are fled
with the loss of their wealth.
23. Now grown husbandless, and having of late lost my daughter also, and
being thrown in a distant and barren land, I am become the most
miserable and wretched of beings. Born of a low caste, I am cast out of
all prospect in life, and have become a personification of terror to
myself, and a sight of horror to others.
24. O! that the Lord has made me a widowed woman, and subjected me to
the insult of the vulgar, and the hauteur of the affluent. Prostrated by
hunger and mourning at the loss of a husband and child, I rove
incessantly from door to door to beg alms for my supportance (as it is
the case of most female beggars).
25. It is better that one who is unfortunate and friendless, or subject
to passion and diseases, should rather die sooner than live in misery.
The dead and inanimate beings are far better than the living miserable.
26. Those that are friendless, and have to toil and moil in unfriendly
places, are like the grass of the earth, trampled under the feet, and
overwhelmed under a flood of calamities.
27. The king seeing his aged mother-in-law mourning in this manner,
offered her some consolation through the medium of her female
companions, and then asked that lady to tell him, “who she was, what she
did there, who was her daughter and who is his son.”
28. She answered him with tears in her eyes:—This village is called
Pukkasa-Ghosha, here I had a Pukkasa for my husband, who had a daughter
as gentle as the moon.
29. She happened to have here a husband as beautiful as the moon, who
was a king and chanced to pass by this way. By this accident they were
matched together, in the manner that an ass finds by chance a pot of
honey lying on her way in the forest.
30. She lived long with him in connubial bliss, and produced to him both
sons and daughters, who grew up in the covert of this forest, as the
gourd plant grows on a tree serving as its support.