Ronset Rongaya 056

This is John Steele reporting on adventure. You can make a law that looks good on paper. Laws always do. They've written a few laws about one thing or another in India. Only they seem to forget that you cannot legislate away a thousand years of history overnight.

I call this transcribed yarn, Ramset Rangaya. Bangu Khan is a small town in India. Enough sense of civic pride there has established an ashram. And Ashram is a home for orphan girls of good repute.

If they're lucky, the Ashrams find them husbands for a price. Not all Ashrams are what they're cracked up to be though. The story of Ramsat Rangaya and his great love for little Shana Scree may have its comical side, but it's not meant to be funny.

Ramsat was a young man of some education, but that was all. He had no job, nor much desire to get one. That was bad. Because he was in love. There had been an epidemic. Hundreds of people had died.

The funeral pyres along the banks of the river burned all through the night. The river at this point was not holy, but the ashes of the dead would eventually float into holy waters downstream. All night, little Shana Sree had crouched beside the funeral pyre of her parents.

All night long, Ram said Rangaya had watched her with a sense of misery and longing. Because when morning came, little Shana Sree would be taken away to the local ashram. Why did it happen? Why ask?

But I do. Film and ignorance? Is that what color is? That is what color is. And our people die from it. They die from it? And glory in it. You do not believe as they do?