114 REV. FR. J. HOFFMANN", S.J. 



especially the mothers, do not suffer keenly from their own helplessness in presence of 

 so much suffering of their children. However, the children have inherited the light- 

 heartedness and, unfortunately too, the light-headedness of the race. They quickly 

 forget a past pain and never seem to think of the new one ahead. 



This characteristic and the parents' intense participation in their children's alter- 

 nations of pain and pleasure form the subject of the following song. 



Among the several kinds of small fish, which during the rains leave tanks and 

 streams to roam about in the flooded rice fields, there are two, conspicuous for their 

 silvery scales, the chirpis, a tiny little thing, and the aera, slightly bigger. Evidently 

 many a young Munda has watched with pleasure the bright and varying metallic shim- 

 mer of the chirpis as they rush and tumble about in the clear, shallow, sunlit waters 

 as well as the graceful undulating movements of the aeras. The song shows suffi- 

 ciently that the lookers-on have made the following reflexions : These little things 

 seem to have nothing to do but to amuse themselves and play about the livelong day. 

 And yet by leaving the stream the majority of them are doomed to a speedy and 

 painful death. For the rice-field ridges will soon be closed to keep the water standing 

 in them and thus a return to the stream is cut off. As the fields are gradually drying 

 up, chirpis and aeras may be seen struggling in agony : their playground is turning 

 into a graveyard. Sometimes an occasional shower partly refills the fields with water, 

 and then the survivors who were but now on the point of breathing their last, suddenly 

 play about again as though there had been no trouble at all and as though certain 

 destruction did not await them with the final and complete drying up of the fields. 



The first stanza depicts the happy play of the fishes in the flooded fields. The 

 second stanza shows the contrast : the fields drying up and the fishes gasping in pain. 

 The third shows a passing shower of rain with the accompanying welling up of water 

 from the field springs and the renewed play of the light-hearted aeras and chirpis. 

 And here it stops. It does not intend to leave on the mind the sad emotion produced 

 by the scene of the second stanza ; by thus ending with the picture of regained happi- 

 ness it does, at the same time, inculcate the lesson that it is, in the long run, a wiser 

 philosophy to dwell on the bright rather than on the dark side of life. A poetic ren- 

 dering of the saying : " After rain comes sunshine." Or as the Mundas put it : " We 

 can eat and drink and enjoy ourselves like kings when we have it, and when we 

 haven't, then we can fast too in a royal manner," i.e., we don't allow ourselves to be 

 downcast by misery, we never say die. 



The piece is a good example, too, of the accuracy and the detailed thoroughness 

 with which they choose their similes. The flooded rice fields are the happy play ground 

 of the bright little fishes, the dry fields are their doom So too for the people; when 

 the rice fields have abundance of water there will be a rich harvest and the children's 

 natural playfulness will not be marred by hunger and concomitant sickness But 

 when the fields remain dry the children are suffering even as the gasping chirpis and 

 ceras. 



The fields are very appropriately called toa-leka. Toa means not only milk, 

 but also breast. Hence here toa-leka means breast-like or breasts. . 



