Eyesore/Chapter 19
XIX
After a short while Mahendra, in his new lodgings, got a letter in a well-known hand. He would not open it in the midst of the turmoil of the day, but kept it over his heart in his breast pocket. As he was passing and repassing from hospital to lecture-room and lecture-room to hospital, the conceit occurred to him that a dove bearing a message of love was nestling at his breast. How softly it would coo in his ears when awakened later on!
In the evening when Mahendra was alone in his room he lit his lamp and settled himself comfortably in his chair. He then brought out the letter warm from his body. For a time he did not open the cover but kept looking at the superscription. He knew there could not be much inside. It was not likely that Asha would be able to give precise expression to her sentiments—he would have to divine her tender thoughts from her shaky letters and unsteady lines. His name in Asha's childish hand on the envelope made it seem to him set to music—the heavenly music vibrating from a loving woman's tender heart.
In these few days of separation, the weariness of constant intercourse, the irritation due to petty household worries, had completely disappeared from Mahendra's mind, and the happy memories of the days of their first love shone brightly in their place, round Asha's ideal image enshrined in their midst.
Mahendra lingered over the envelope as he slowly tore it open, and caressingly touched the letter with his lips. The paper was fragrant with his favourite scent, which entered his heart like a yearning sigh.
Mahendra unfolded the letter and began to read it. But what was this! The writing was childish, but not the language. The hand was uncertain but not the sentiments! This was the letter:
Lord of my heart! Why do I remind you by this letter of her whom you went away to forget? Why does the creeper which you ruthlessly tore off and cast on the ground shamelessly seek to cling to you again?
Was it my fault, my beloved, that you once did love me? Did I ever dare to dream that such good fortune would be mine? Whence and why did I come into your life—who ever knew or thought of me before? Had you not smiled on me, had I but been allowed to serve you as your handmaid, would I have complained or blamed you? What was it in me that attracted you, my beloved, what made you raise me so high? And if out of the cloudless sky came the thunder-bolt, why did it not reduce my wretched heart to ashes?
How much have I suffered, how much have I pondered over, in these few days—and yet one thing I have not understood. Need you have left home on my account—could you not have cast me from you where you were? Or if that could not be, was there no place in the wide world whither I could have fled—drifting away as I drifted to you?
What letter was this—whose the message? Mahendra had no doubts on that score. He sat rigid and motionless with the letter in his hand, like one who is suddenly paralyzed. Pursuing one line as he had been with the full force of his emotion, this blow from the opposite direction came as a collision which threw him off and entirely crumpled him up.
He read the letter over three times. What had been a distant fancy seemed to become near and real. The comet which had dimly risen on his horizon now threatened to spread its flaming tail over the whole sky.
It was of course Binodini's. The simple Asha had imagined she was writing her own letter. Ideas which had never crossed her mind seemed to awake in her as she wrote to Binodini's dictation. "How could Binodini," she thought, "so clearly find out and put into words exactly what I was feeling." Asha felt drawn closer than ever to her bosom friend on whom she had to depend for the very words which seemed to express the pain in her heart—so helpless was she!
Mahendra left his chair with a frown. He was trying to feel angry with Binodini, but succeeded only in getting annoyed with Asha. "What a little silly!" thought he, "how trying a wife for her husband." And to prove the truth of this he sat down to read the letter over again.
He tried to read it as a letter of Asha's, but the language refused to call up for him the memory of the artless Asha. A ravishing suspicion bubbled up like wine after the first few lines. The tidings of a love, hidden yet revealed, forbidden yet proffered, poisonous yet sweet, intoxicated him. He felt he wanted to hurt himself with a knife to come back to his senses out of its overpowering influence. He brought his fist down with a bang on the table and leapt from his chair saying: "Hang it all, I'll burn the letter!" and went over to the lamp. But instead of burning it he read it over once more.
The ashes that the servant swept off the table the next morning were not those of Asha's letter, but of his numerous abortive attempts at writing a reply.
Another letter duly arrived:
So you have not replied to my letter! It is as well. The truth cannot always be told—but my heart understands you. When the devotee offers worship the reply comes not in words. Has my offering at least found a place at your feet?
Mahendra again made an attempt to reply. But he had not the skill to appear to be writing to Asha, the reply to Binodini would obtrude itself. He spent the greater part of the night in writing, and in tearing up what he had written; and when at last he did manage to finish a letter and put it into an envelope, something seemed to cut him like the lash of a whip when he had to write on it Asha's name. "You scoundrel!" some one seemed to say, "would you betray that trusting girl!" He tore it into a hundred bits and spent the rest of the night with his face in his hands as if trying to hide from himself.
The third letter:
Can it be that I have not understood you truly—that I have dared too much—that I have been overbold in writing first to you? While you were silent I laid bare my heart. But if I have misunderstood you, had I no excuse? If you will look back over the past, from the beginning to the end, was it not you who made me to understand what I did?
However that may be, my only regret is that what I have written cannot now be effaced, what I have given cannot now be taken back. But think not that one who loves can for ever submit to disdain. If you do not want my letters, let them be. If you will not reply, this is the end.
Mahendra could no longer stay away. His righteous indignation impelled him homewards. Did Binodini think that it was to forget her that he had fled from home? He would show her by returning at once that she was arrogating too much to herself!
It was at this juncture that Vihari came to his rooms. Mahendra's inward elation was redoubled at the sight of him. Many an unspoken suspicion had hitherto made him jealous of Vihari. After these letters, his jealousy allayed, he welcomed his friend with an extra effusiveness. He rose from his chair, slapped him on the back, and pulled him by the hand into a seat.
But Vihari was gloomy to-day. The poor fellow must have been to see Binodini and met with a rebuff, thought Mahendra.
"Have you been to our place, of late, Vihari?" he asked him.
"That's where I'm coming from," replied Vihari gravely.
Mahendra felt somewhat amused at Vihari's plight. "Unfortunate Vihari!" he thought, "the love of woman is not for him." And as he passed his hand over his breast pocket, the three letters crackled inside: "How did you find everybody at home?" he inquired.
Vihari did not reply to this, but asked in his turn: "How is it that you've left home to stay here?"
"I'm constantly on night-duty now-a-days; it's very inconvenient to be staying all that way off."
"You've had night-duty before, but I've never seen you leave home."
"D'you suspect anything wrong then?" asked Mahendra with a laugh.
"Don't try to be funny, come along home," said Vihari.
Though Mahendra was only too eager to do so, Vihari's importunity made him delude himself into the opposite belief. "How can that be, Vihari?" he said, "I might lose one whole year."
"Look here, Dada," said Vihari seriously, "I've known you since we were children, it's no use trying to play it on me. You are doing a great wrong."
"And whom am I wronging, pray, Mr. Judge?"
"What's become of the heart on which you used to pride yourself?" asked Vihari with some heat.
"It's in hospital at present," chaffed Mahendra.
"Oh stop all that, Mahendra," exclaimed Vihari impatiently; "while you are joking here, Asha is weeping all over the inner and outer appartments of the house."
The idea of Asha in tears gave Mahendra a bit of a shock. "Why should Asha be weeping?" he queried.
"You don't know that," said Vihari bitterly, "and you expect me to know it!"
"If you're angry because your Dada is not omniscient you had better blame his maker." Mahendra said this lightly, but he was astonished at Vihari's emotion. He always had an idea that Vihari was not burdened with the troublesome thing called a heart—when had he managed to acquire it, he wondered. Could it have been from the day they had gone together to see the maiden Asha? Poor fellow! Mahendra thought of him in terms of commiseration, but felt more amused than pained. He knew only too well where Asha's heart was unalterably fixed. And the thought that the prizes for which others were vainly longing had of their own accord surrendered themselves to him, made his breast swell with pride.
"All right." said he to Vihari. "Let's go. Fetch a carriage, will you?"
(To be continued)
Translated by
Surendranath Tagore.