Kathakoca or Treasury of Stories

Author(s): C H Tawney
Publisher: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation New Delhi

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hit on a device.
*
She said to herself: 'I will do what I want by means of the king's boon.' Having determined on this, she watched her opportunity, and said one day to the king: 'My lord, do you mean to grant me the boon which you promised me some time ago?' Then, on the strength of that boon, she asked the king to give her the government of the kingdom for five days. The king consented. Then the queen began her five days' rule. So in the last watch of the night she had Jayasundarí's son brought; she gave him a bath, and worshipped him with sandalwood, flowers, and grain, and laid him on a frame, and placed the frame on the head of a slave-girl; and so, surrounded with a train, and with drums beating, she went to worship the goddess. At this point a Vidyadhara named Súri, lord of Kanchanapura, who was travelling through the air in a sky-chariot, saw the boy on the frame; so he carried off the prince and put in his place another boy that was dead; he then returned to his own place and gave the prince to his own wife. Then the queen-consort Rati took the dead boy to the temple of the goddess, and dashing him down on the ground, accomplished her desire. Jayasundarí, deprived of her son, spent her days in great affliction. Then that Vidyadhara Súri, in the city of the Vidyadharas, gave that boy the name of Madanakumára. In time he acquired the magical arts of the Vidyadharas. One day, as he was roaming through the air in a chariot, he saw his own mother seated at a window afflicted at the loss of her son. Then Madanakumára, filled with great affection, seized his own mother and put her in the chariot; and the queen could not be satisfied with gazing on that prince. Then the queen's attendants, seeing that Jayasundari was carried off, cried out with a loud voice. But though King Hemachandra was very brave, what could he do on the ground against a Vidyadhara? Then the king said to himself: This second calamity is like the rubbing of salt into a wound; first comes the death of my son, next the carrying off of
* The point that a human victim is also an object of worship is, I think, brought out by Mr. Frazer in the Golden Bough.'