to shed tears at another's misery or suffering, I will admit; but it is quite a different and a much harder thing to go out of one's way and voluntarily to shoulder responsibilities like this. How many of our prejudices and fixed ideas are put to the test at such a time! For one thing, being born in a highly sacred line of descent from the venerable Rishis, in the Hindu community, which, in point of purity and sanctity, easily takes the lead of all the communities on the face of the earth, I had been taught to regard the touch of the dead as a terrible defilement and abomination, forbidden by a hundred rules and injunctions of the shastras, reinforced by as many scriptural prohibitions and expiations. Add to that the fact that we did not know of what disease the boy had died, what his caste was, and who his parents were. How could we touch the corpse, not knowing these things, not to speak of our total ignorance as to whether before the dead boy was taken from his home, the necessary penances had been performed for him? But as soon as with an inward shrinking I said to Indra, 'You do not know what his caste is—will you touch the corpse?' he put one arm under the neck and the other below the knee of the body and said as he lifted it up lightly, 'If I don't, the jackals will tear him to shreds and devour him. Poor thing! there is still the smell of medicine on his lips.' And he put the corpse down on the plank on which I had just been lying. Giving the canoe a push, he jumped into it. 'Do you really think a dead body has any caste?' he asked.
'Why shouldn't it have?' I asked.
'Why, it's just a dead body. How can anything dead have caste? This dinghy of ours—has it got any caste?
35
