Svetaketu abstained from food for fifteen days. Then he came to his father and said: 'What shall I say?' The father said: 'Repeat the Rik, Yagus, and Sâman verses.' He replied: 'They do not occur to me, Sir.'

In plain words: Svetaketu goes without food for fifteen days, as his father told him. When his father asks him to recite the Vedas, the holy verses he had learned (the Rik, Yajus and Saman), he says he cannot remember them.