I, also, am possessed of just such a yearning.
I likewise have lost my home and also lost my way.
Both the end and the means have become equally shadowy
to me. There remain only the yearning and the
hurrying on. Ah! wretched wanderer through the
night, when the dawn reddens you will see no trace
of a way to return. But why return? Death
will serve as well. If the Dark which sounded
the flute should lead to destruction, why trouble
about the hereafter? When I am merged in its
blackness, neither I, nor good and bad, nor laughter,
nor tears, shall be any more!
------
18. The condition of the curse which had reduced
them to ashes was such that they could only be restored
to life if the stream of the Ganges was brought down
to them. [Trans.].
In Bengal the machinery of time being thus suddenly
run at full pressure, things which were difficult
became easy, one following soon after another.
Nothing could be held back any more, even in our
corner of the country. In the beginning our district
was backward, for my husband was unwilling to put
any compulsion on the villagers. “Those
who make sacrifices for their country’s sake
are indeed her servants,” he would say, “but
those who compel others to make them in her name are
her enemies. They would cut freedom at the root,
to gain it at the top.”
But when Sandip came and settled here, and his followers
began to move about the country, speaking in towns
and market-places, waves of excitement came rolling
up to us as well. A band of young fellows of
the locality attached themselves to him, some even
who had been known as a disgrace to the village.
But the glow of their genuine enthusiasm lighted
them up, within as well as without. It became
quite clear that when the pure breezes of a great
joy and hope sweep through the land, all dirt and decay
are cleansed away. It is hard, indeed, for men
to be frank and straight and healthy, when their country
is in the throes of dejection.
Then were all eyes turned on my husband, from whose
estates alone foreign sugar and salt and cloths had
not been banished. Even the estate officers
began to feel awkward and ashamed over it. And
yet, some time ago, when my husband began to import
country-made articles into our village, he had been
secretly and openly twitted for his folly, by old
and young alike. When __Swadeshi__ had not yet
become a boast, we had despised it with all our hearts.
My husband still sharpens his Indian-made pencils
with his Indian-made knife, does his writing with
reed pens, drinks his water out of a bell-metal vessel,
and works at night in the light of an old-fashioned
castor-oil lamp. But this dull, milk-and-water
__Swadeshi__ of his never appealed to us. Rather,
we had always felt ashamed of the inelegant, unfashionable
furniture of his reception-rooms, especially when
he had the magistrate, or any other European, as his
guest.
