restore order to my troubled affairs. One afternoon on my home-coming, I
found the women lamenting with loud outcries over the body of my eldest
son, a lad of seven years. Unseen by any of the household he had been
knocked down on the road and crushed under the wheels of a heavy wagon
that was travelling past.

"That night, when his poor little body was being made ready for burial,
my elder wife, his mother, led me to the side of the bier. Uncovering
the child's shoulder, she showed me a strange mark, as if branded upon
the flesh by a hot iron. In the red, angry lines I had no difficulty in
tracing the head of a bull, the sacred mark of Siva. I said nothing,
and indeed commanded my wife to hold her peace.

"I knew now that this cruel calamity was indeed a warning from the
accursed priesthood, who had not even scrupled to murder an innocent
child so that they might wreak their vengeance on me or break my will.

"But, if I had been determined before, ten times more now was I resolved
never to yield. No cowardly surrender could bring me back my child. The
boy was dead, and what was done could not be undone, for the will of God
is eternal.

"That very night I visited the Ganapati, and in the frenzy of my bitter
grief and righteous wrath I swore, with clenched fist shaken before his
twinkling eyeballs, that I would break him into pieces, throw the blue
diamonds into a fire of charcoal, and myself die, rather than restore
him to the infidels who had destroyed my happiness and my home.

"The next blow fell swifter than ever. Only four days had passed when
the bereaved mother, who had refused to be consoled for the death of her
only child, was found drowned at the bottom of the well in the harem
garden. The household was plunged in lamentation over her pitiful act of
self-destruction, and now I became vaguely conscious that friends and
neighbours, as well as servants, were looking at me askance, and were
beginning to shun my presence as if a curse had fallen upon my head.

"It was at the funeral ceremonies of my wife that I was first made
pointedly to feel that there rested over me the suspicion of some
terrible crime that had drawn down the special wrath of Allah. Standing
in isolation, at a time when my sorrowing heart yearned for brotherly
comfort, I realized that already I was an outcast from among my own
people, one whom they deemed to be marked by heaven for special
vengeance, a moral leper, a menace to the community