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proficiency in the seventytwo arts and possessed the sixtyfive qualities that courtesans are expected to possess. Her all knowledge of men and the twentynine different ways in which they can possibly be gratified was well matched by her expertise in the twentyone different modes of flirtation. Her art of titillating men in whom the nine sense organs had been dormant was without parallel. She could speak fluently in eighteen different languages and her dresses, rich and fashionable highlighted the curves of her body. Deservedly, she had acquired great reputation and her fees were exhorbitant. She was permitted the rare honour of using an umbrella, chowries and fans. Her little chariot was elegant in its looks.
In the same town there lived a wealthy merchant who had a young son called Ujjhitaka who was a handsome young man. His parents were extremely fond of him because the mother's earlier children were all still-born and this boy alone had survived. When he was born, the mother in order to assure him long life, had left him on a dung hill for the whole night. Next morning, when the child was found to be still alive, she brought him back and reared him most affectionately. They observed various customs and performed various rites to ensure long life for the child. They exposed the child to the sun and the moon and kept careful vigil throughout the day and the night on the sixth day of the birth and collected all relatives and friends to make him rich gifts of clothes etc. On the twelfth day they gave the child an appropriate name. Since they had abandoned the child on a dung hill immediately after its birth, the name given was Ujjhitaka (abandoned). The boy was looked after by five nurses as carefully as a campaka plant.
The father of Ujjhitaka set out on a long trade voyage across the Lavana sea. He had collected a variety of commodities for the voyage but unfortunately the ship broke in the Lavana sea and the merchant lost his life. When the news reached home, the merchant's wife, Ujjhitaka's mother also died leaving the young man alone in the world but he was turned out of his own house by people who had loaned money to his father for the voyage. The young man grew up on the streets and fell into the company of
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