The Home and the World eBook

The other day Sandip begged me to receive a young lad, Amulya, an ardent disciple of his.  In a moment I could see a new light flash out from the boy’s eyes, and knew that he, too, had a vision of __Shakti__ manifest, that my creative force had begun its work in his blood.  “What sorcery is this of yours!” exclaimed Sandip next day.  “Amulya is a boy no longer, the wick of his life is all ablaze.  Who can hide your fire under your home-roof?  Every one of them must be touched up by it, sooner or later, and when every lamp is alight what a grand carnival of a __Dewali__ we shall have in the country!”

Blinded with the brilliance of my own glory I had decided to grant my devotee this boon.  I was overweeningly confident that none could baulk me of what I really wanted.  When I returned to my room after my talk with Sandip, I loosed my hair and tied it up over again.  Miss Gilby had taught me a way of brushing it up from the neck and piling it in a knot over my head.  This style was a favourite one with my husband.  “It is a pity,” he once said, “that Providence should have chosen poor me, instead of poet Kalidas, for revealing all the wonders of a woman’s neck.  The poet would probably have likened it to a flower-stem; but I feel it to be a torch, holding aloft the black flame of your hair.”  With which he ... but why, oh why, do I go back to all that?

I sent for my husband.  In the old days I could contrive a hundred and one excuses, good or bad, to get him to come to me.  Now that all this had stopped for days I had lost the art of contriving.

Nikhil’s Story

VI

Panchu’s wife has just died of a lingering consumption.  Panchu must undergo a purification ceremony to cleanse himself of sin and to propitiate his community.  The community has calculated and informed him that it will cost one hundred and twenty-three rupees.

“How absurd!” I cried, highly indignant.  “Don’t submit to this, Panchu.  What can they do to you?”

Raising to me his patient eyes like those of a tired-out beast of burden, he said:  “There is my eldest girl, sir, she will have to be married.  And my poor wife’s last rites have to be put through.”

“Even if the sin were yours, Panchu,” I mused aloud, “you have surely suffered enough for it already.”

“That is so, sir,” he naively assented.  “I had to sell part of my land and mortgage the rest to meet the doctor’s bills.  But there is no escape from the offerings I have to make the Brahmins.”

What was the use of arguing?  When will come the time, I wondered, for the purification of the Brahmins themselves who can accept such offerings?

After his wife’s illness and funeral, Panchu, who had been tottering on the brink of starvation, went altogether beyond his depth.  In a desperate attempt to gain consolation of some sort he took to sitting at the feet of a wandering ascetic, and succeeded in acquiring philosophy enough to forget that his children went hungry.  He kept himself steeped for a time in the idea that the world is vanity, and if of pleasure it has none, pain also is a delusion.  Then, at last, one night he left his little ones in their tumble-down hovel, and started off wandering on his own account.