Page:Tales of Bengal (Sita and Santa Chattopadhyay).djvu/57

Rh The boy was very glad. Surama understood.

That night, as they lay on a pair of bedsteads placed side by side how much they had to talk about to each other! Surama was practically a listener through-out, while Gopal was the speaker. Her spirits were depressed by the bad news she had received from her father's house, and the effort of hiding it made her somewhat silent; but lest the hard touch of her silence should choke the gush of his gay laughing chatter, she said a word or two now and again and thus kept the flow going.

His stories went on in endless succession. The story of the unknown blind beggar who sat singing to himself at the gate of an almost forgotten fair, nobody knows when, and the tragic ballad he sang with such pathos; the boat race on the Bijaya day; the delights of hot parched rice and peas as he sat by the fire in a cold winter evening well wrapped in dolai; the endless miseries suffered by the boys at the hands of the village schoolmaster; and a thousand other things, followed in bewildering confusion. The pleasures and pains, the tears and smiles, associated with those memories, seemed as though they would never come to an end. Suddenly in the middle of a story, Gopal said—"By the way, do you know why I was so late coming home to-day? Jadu Moyra (confectioner) was telling our teacher that an Arkati (a coolie-recruiter) had come to our village. I wondered what sort of a Kati (stick) it was! I had never seen one. So off we ran to the milkmen's quarter where we heard he could be found near the indigo factory. None of the fellows could beat me in running, you know. But what do you think we saw? Not a kati at all, but a big fat man, wrapped in a pair of sheets, who sat comfortably by a huge fire of chaff and straw, stretching his limbs. And they all said that this man was the Arkati, They thought me a fool, and tried to make me believe D