Page:The King of the Dark Chamber.djvu/11

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THE DARK CHAMBER
11

misses the joys of privacy in these streets—this jostling and brushing shoulders with strange people day and night makes one long for a bath. And nobody can tell exactly what kind of people you are meeting with in these public roads—ugh!

Kaundilya

And it is Janardan who persuaded us to come to this precious country! We never had any second person like him in our family. You knew my father, of course; he Was a great man, a pious man if ever there was one. He spent his whole life within a circle of a radius of 49 cubits drawn with a rigid adherence to the injunctions of the scriptures, and never for a single day did he cross this circle. After his death a serious difficulty arose—how cremate him within the limits of the 49 cubits and yet outside