To the lips of one who, like myself, desired to drown the grief that was eating away his life, the golden cup of pleasure, filled to the brim with its intoxicating Lethe draught, was freely—nay, prodigally—held by the fair hands of this joyous sisterhood. Owing to my many talents and wide knowledge of the fine arts, and, not less, of all social games, I became a favoured guest of the great courtesans, of whom one indeed, whose favour could scarcely be measured by gold, fell so passionately in love with me that she quarrelled with a prince on my account. On the other hand, owing to my complete mastery of the robber dialect, I was soon on confidential terms with the wenches of the low streets, whose company, on the path of pleasure of a coarser and more robust type, I by no means despised, and of whom several were heart and soul devoted to me.
Thus madly did I dive deep down into the rushing whirl of the pleasures of my native city, and it became, O stranger, a proverbial saying in Ujjeni: “As fast as young Kamanita.”
It was about this time that an event occurred which goes to show that evil habits, and sometimes even vice, may to such an extent be the source of good fortune that the man of worldly mind cannot easily decide whether he most owes his prosperity to his good or to his bad qualities.
I refer particularly to that familiarity with the wenches of the lower classes to which allusion has already been made, and which became of the greatest service to me. My father’s house was broken into, and jewels, which had been for the most part entrusted to him for valuation, were stolen, to an amount, too, which it was practically impossible to make good. I was beside myself, for absolute ruin stared us in the face. In vain did I make use of all the knowledge I had gained in the forest. From the fashion in which the subterranean passage was constructed, I could easily tell to what class of thief the deed was to be ascribed. But even this most useful hint proved useless to the police, who, to be sure, do not, in Ujjeni, occupy the high position taken by the institution of the courtesans—a circumstance not without suggestion of some inner relationship between the two bodies. On one occasion, in a very learned lecture on the love affairs of the various classes, I heard with my own ears the following sentence: “The gallantries of the police officer have to take place during his nightly round of inspection, and with the courtesans of the city. By order.” Which, taken in connection with Vajaçravas’ remarks upon “the service rendered by the city courtesans in hoodwinking the police,” gave me, in those days of anxious waiting, much food for thought.
Now, however, in this strangest of all worlds of ours, things seem to be so arranged that the left hand must make good what the right has done amiss. And that is what happened here. For that flourishing blossom from Ujjeni’s flower-garden actually yielded me the fruit which the thorny hedge of the police—perhaps stunted just on account of that very same flourishing condition of the said blossom—failed to ripen.
These kind maidens, seeing me in despair because of the ruin threatening me and mine, discovered the culprits, and forced them, by threatening the complete withdrawal of their favour, to hand over the plunder, so that we got off leniently with the loss of the little that had already been spent, and with a fright which did not fail of its effect in my own case.
It woke me up from the dissipated life in which I was uselessly squandering the best of my years and strength. For, quite apart from this waking up and its occasion, my folly had now reached a point where it was certain either, in the garb of habit, to enslave and deprave me utterly, or, on the contrary, to fill me with gradually increasing disgust. This latter result was now very much hastened by the experience I had just had. I had seen poverty staring me in the face—the poverty to which the life I had been leading would have handed me over defenceless, after it had, with all its costly pleasures, treacherously left me in the lurch. At this juncture I bethought me of the words uttered by the merchant at the grave of Vajaçravas: “Did I stand so high in Vajaçravas’ favour as thou dost, I should in a very few years be the richest man in Kosambi.”
And I resolved to become the richest man in Ujjeni, and to this end, to devote myself with all my strength to the caravan traffic.
I carried out my resolutions; and whether my friend and master Vajaçravas, from his abode in the other world, did or did not stand by me in his own person in all my undertakings I dare not certainly say, although I have at times believed it; but this much is certain, that his words in their aftereffects now did. For my having become familiar, through his teaching, with all the customs and usages of the various types of robbers, and my having even been initiated into the mysteries of their secret rules, now placed me in a position where I was able, and that without ridiculous foolhardiness, to carry to a successful conclusion enterprises which another would never have dared to venture on. But just such I now selected, and no longer condescended to the ordinary routes.
As a result, when I conducted a large caravan to a town to which, for months, no other merchant had been able to proceed, because powerful bands of robbers had, as it were, cut off the district from all intercourse with the outer world, I found the inhabitants so desperately anxious to buy my wares that I was at
