A similar scene was enacted every morning and evening with the cow in the cowshed. Before milking the cow, its little calf was let out to suck its mother’s teats. Feeling the mouth of the calf on her teats, the cow would release all her milk into the udder, but just at that moment the calf would be pulled away and tied to a stake nearby. The cow was then milked by the Brahmin’s wife or a slave-girl. Dara would watch this without batting an eyelid.

‘You are so devious and crafty,’ the Brahmin’s wife would scold Dara. ‘In this lifetime you are suffering as a slave because of your past misdeeds. And in your future birth too you will suffer because of the sin of treachery that you are committing against your master now. The cow is only a beast, yet it is more honest than you.’

Dara would keep quiet, but in her own mind her situation appeared to be quite like the cow’s. The only difference was that there was no halter round Dara’s neck. In other respects she was just as helpless. ‘Does the cow feel any sense of injustice or wrong?’ she would ask herself. ‘If not, why not? Why do I feel this way? Why do I feel that I alone have the right over my body?’ To be a slave and yet regard her body as her own was, in Dara’s eyes, a sin, but she could not think otherwise. ‘Why doesn’t my child have the right to nourishment so that it may live and grow?’ she would ask herself.

Her imagination would take possession of her mind. Had her child been born in Prithusen’s palace, instead of in these conditions, the walls of the palace would have shaken with the sound of rejoicing and merrymaking. As Prithusen’s son, everything would have been available to Shakul. But since he was a fatherless child, there was no place for him. Dara felt that her son was like water that had overflowed the vessel and had fallen on the scorching ground, only to evaporate. But, no, she would not let Shakul be regarded as the neglected castaway of that wicked Prithusen. For her child she would do all that was possible.

At her own birth, her mother had fallen ill. She too had been breastfed by a wet nurse. ‘Is this the consequence of that deed?’ she would ask. ‘The Buddhist monks say that man suffers as a result of his own misdeeds. What are my child’s misdeeds? He has only just come into the world. Can it be that even before his birth his fate was sealed? He does not even know for which sin he is undergoing punishment or that he is being punished. If I am the one who is guilty, she thought, I am fully prepared to bear the punishment. Why should my son go hungry? … Was my love for Prithusen a misdeed? … Was bearing a child a sin? … The whole creation bears progeny. What have I done that others do not do? I conceived without the approval of the society of twice-born Brahmins; is my suffering the result of that misdeed? Are Brahmins alone the disburser of rewards and punishments?’