“Women weak!” I exclaimed with a laugh.
“Men belaud you as delicate and fragile, so
as to delude you into thinking yourselves weak.
But it is you women who are strong. Men make
a great outward show of their so-called freedom, but
those who know their inner minds are aware of their
bondage. They have manufactured scriptures with
their own hands to bind themselves; with their very
idealism they have made golden fetters of women to
wind round their body and mind. If men had not
that extraordinary faculty of entangling themselves
in meshes of their own contriving, nothing could have
kept them bound. But as for you women, you have
desired to conceive reality with body and soul.
You have given birth to reality. You have suckled
reality at your breasts.”
Bee was well read for a woman, and would not easily
give in to my arguments. “If that were
true,” she objected, “men would not have
found women attractive.”
“Women realize the danger,” I replied.
“They know that men love delusions, so they
give them full measure by borrowing their own phrases.
They know that man, the drunkard, values intoxication
more than food, and so they try to pass themselves
off as an intoxicant. As a matter of fact, but
for the sake of man, woman has no need for any make-believe.”
“Why, then, are you troubling to destroy the
illusion?”
“For freedom. I want the country to be
free. I want human relations to be free.”
------
13. According to the Hindu calendar [Trans.].
14. The son-in-law is the pet of a Hindu household.
15. A Vaishnava poet (Sanskrit) whose lyrics
of the adoration of the Divinity serve as well to
express all shades of human passion [Trans.].
I was aware that it is unsafe suddenly to awake a
sleep-walker. But I am so impetuous by nature,
a halting gait does not suit me. I knew I was
overbold that day. I knew that the first shock
of such ideas is apt to be almost intolerable.
But with women it is always audacity that wins.
Just as we were getting on nicely, who should walk
in but Nikhil’s old tutor Chandranath Babu.
The world would have been not half a bad place to
live in but for these schoolmasters, who make one
want to quit in disgust. The Nikhil type wants
to keep the world always a school. This incarnation
of a school turned up that afternoon at the psychological
moment.
We all remain schoolboys in some corner of our hearts,
and I, even I, felt somewhat pulled up. As for
poor Bee, she at once took her place solemnly, like
the topmost girl of the class on the front bench.
All of a sudden she seemed to remember that she had
to face her examination.
Some people are so like eternal pointsmen lying in
wait by the line, to shunt one’s train of thought
from one rail to another.
Chandranath Babu had no sooner come in than he cast
about for some excuse to retire, mumbling: “I
beg your pardon, I...”
