পাতা:Vanga Sahitya Parichaya Part 1.djvu/৮২

74 INTRODUCTION. and in an unguarded moment when our hero least suspected any foul play, the miscreant killed him by a stroke of his sword. Sakhi Sená implored the mercy of the goddess Chandi who was pleased with her devotion and restored her husband to life. But Sakhi Sená's troubles did not end here. Kumāra had left her in a forest, greatly fatigued as she was, in order to seek a market-place where he might buy articles of food. On his way back he was transformed into a lamb by the witchcraft of a woman named Hirā. In her forlorn condition, Sakhi Senā was carried away by a king named Naradhwaja, who proposed to marry her. Sakhi Sená promised to marry this king if within a year her husband did not return, and Naradhwaja the king granted her request as he saw from the attitude of the princess that force would be of no avail with her. At the end of the year, which our lovely heroine spent in penances and austerities with a view to please Chandi, the goddess appeared to her in a dream and related to her the condition to which her unfortunate husband had been reduced by Hirā. She also told her the secret by which he would be restored to his former self. Sakhi Sená told king Naradhwaja that she should now perform a religious ceremony before giving consent to marry him; and Naradhwaja, overjoyed at the prospect, made arrangement for the ceremony. The princess, however, required that a particular lamb which Hirā the flower-woman living in the city, kept concealed in her room, should be produced before her, and the king commanded Hirā to offer the lamb for the purpose of the ceremony. Hirā at first denied the possession of the lamb but was at last forcibly made to give it up. The Princess sprinkled holy water on the lamb uttering the Mantra taught her by Chandi, and she was once more in the embrace of her dear husband. Naradhwaja saw in the transformation of a lamb to a man the mercy of the goddess Chandi and ungrudgingly shared in the joy of the couple who had met after long years of hard separation. The old king Vikramajit had by this time heard of the coming of Sakhi Sená to a neighbouring kingdom, and he himself came to take the couple back to his city. Thus the days of woe and trouble were over, and Sakhi Sená lived a long life of happiness inheriting the kingdom of her father at his death. o The school-room where Sakhi Sena gave the promise to the Motowal's son, Kumāra, now reduced to a mound of earth full of debris, is still pointed out at Moghalmari and is called Sakhi Sená's Päthshālā. In the extracts given below the reader will see that it was the compulsion of a moral pledge that made the princess leave the palace with Kumāra and not the ordinary feelings of lovers. This is only an index of the pure ideal of the folk-lore which throughout retains a lofty standard of fidelity and spiritual resignation.