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CHAPTER TWELVE
lot wrought by fate. What can an elephant, even if strong, do, if tied by a rope ?
Kūņika did not permit any one to go near Sreņika; only he did not prevent Celaņā from courtesy to his mother. Celaņā, her hair wet with a hundred washings in wine, like one who had just bathed, went to Sreņika daily. Inside her hair, Celaņā put a ball of kulmāşa like a wreath of flowers and, devoted to her husband, took it to him. Celaņā gave the hidden ball of kulmāșa to her husband. When he had obtained it hard to obtain, he thought it equal to divine food. Śreņika maintained life by the ball of food. For disease, characterized by a desire to eat, without food leads to death. Celaņā, devoted to her husband, made drops of wine from the hundred washings fall from her mass of hair together with tear-drops from her eyes. Śreņika drinks the falling drops of wine, like a thirsty cātaka242 the drops of rain-water fallen from a cloud. By means of this wine drunk only in drops, Śreņika did not feel the beatings and did not suffer from thirst.
While Kūņika was haughtily exercising sovereignty after imprisoning Śreņika, his wife Padmāvati bore a son. Kūņika made the slave-girls, nurses who had come at that time, covered with clothes and ornaments like shoots of a wishing tree. He himself went to the harem and took the boy with his hands; and the baby, resting on his lotus-hands, looked like a young hansa. Looking at his son, the sun to his lotus-eyes, Kūņika recited a verse, with extreme delight unrestrained: “You were produced from body and body; you were born from the heart. You have become like myself, son. Live for a hundred years.” Reciting this again and again, Kūņika never tired, as if pouring forth the joy in his heart in the guise of this verse. The baby was laid on the lying-in couch by old women skilled in the care of children, who took it from the king's hand. The king held a great
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Cucculus melanoleucus. It lives on raindrops, traditionally.
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