The Home and the World eBook

“Are you for ever determined,” he cried after a pause, “to make gods of your petty household duties—­you who have it in you to send us to life or to death?  Is this power of yours to be kept veiled in a zenana?  Cast away all false shame, I pray you; snap your fingers at the whispering around.  Take your plunge today into the freedom of the outer world.”

When, in Sandip’s appeals, his worship of the country gets to be subtly interwoven with his worship of me, then does my blood dance, indeed, and the barriers of my hesitation totter.  His talks about Art and Sex, his distinctions between Real and Unreal, had but clogged my attempts at response with some revolting nastiness.  This, however, now burst again into a glow before which my repugnance faded away.  I felt that my resplendent womanhood made me indeed a goddess.  Why should not its glory flash from my forehead with visible brilliance?  Why does not my voice find a word, some audible cry, which would be like a sacred spell to my country for its fire initiation?

All of a sudden my maid Khema rushed into the room, dishevelled.  “Give me my wages and let me go,” she screamed.  “Never in all my life have I been so ...”  The rest of her speech was drowned in sobs.

“What is the matter?”

Thako, the Bara Rani’s maid, it appeared, had for no rhyme or reason reviled her in unmeasured terms.  She was in such a state, it was no manner of use trying to pacify her by saying I would look into the matter afterwards.

The slime of domestic life that lay beneath the lotus bank of womanhood came to the surface.  Rather than allow Sandip a prolonged vision of it, I had to hurry back within.

X

My sister-in-law was absorbed in her betel-nuts, the suspicion of a smile playing about her lips, as if nothing untoward had happened.  She was still humming the same song.

“Why has your Thako been calling poor Khema names?” I burst out.

“Indeed?  The wretch!  I will have her broomed out of the house.  What a shame to spoil your morning out like this!  As for Khema, where are the hussy’s manners to go and disturb you when you are engaged?  Anyhow, Chota Rani, don’t you worry yourself with these domestic squabbles.  Leave them to me, and return to your friend.”

How suddenly the wind in the sails of our mind veers round!  This going to meet Sandip outside seemed, in the light of the zenana code, such an extraordinarily out-of-the-way thing to do that I went off to my own room, at a loss for a reply.  I knew this was my sister-in-law’s doing and that she had egged her maid on to contrive this scene.  But I had brought myself to such an unstable poise that I dared not have my fling.

Why, it was only the other day that I found I could not keep up to the last the unbending hauteur with which I had demanded from my husband the dismissal of the man Nanku.  I felt suddenly abashed when the Bara Rani came up and said:  “It is really all my fault, brother dear.  We are old-fashioned folk, and I did not quite like the ways of your Sandip Babu, so I only told the guard ... but how was I to know that our Chota Rani would take this as an insult?—­I thought it would be the other way about!  Just my incorrigible silliness!”