IX.
Asha felt quite frightened. What could be happening? First the mother goes away, then the aunt. Their happiness seemed to be driving everybody away—would it be her turn to be spirited away next, she wondered! To resume afresh the play of their wedded life in the now deserted household seemed to her somehow unseemly. Mahendra on the other hand, in a spirit of reckless rebellion against this unsympathetic household of his, proceeded to exhaust in one blaze all the candles of his love carnival, in a desperate attempt to maintain the festivity of their union in the midst of this ominous solitude.
With a little fling at Asha he would say, "What is the matter with you, now-a-days, Chuni? Why need your heart be so overcast at Kaki's departure? Is not our love sufficient unto itself?"
Asha with great concern would wonder, "Am I then really wanting in my love—else why should my thoughts turn so often to my aunt—why should my mother-in-law's absence make me so nervous?" And she redoubled her efforts to make up for what she thought lacking in her love.
The affairs of the household were not getting on well. The servants had begun to get lax in their duties. One day the maid said she was not well, and failed to turn up. Another day the cook was drunk, and made himself scarce.
"What a lark," said Mahendra to Asha, "let's do the cooking ourselves."
Mahendra hired a carriage and went off a-marketing, but as he had no idea how much of what was wanted, he returned in great glee loaded with quantities of odds and ends. Nor was Asha any clearer as to what was to be done with the things he had brought. It was considerably past the hour for their meal by the time the experiments were over and Mahendra was in a position to triumphantly produce a variety of unknown and uneatable dishes. Asha, however, was unable to share Mahendra's high spirits. She felt greatly ashamed and oppressed by her ignorance and want of skill.
Things had got so mixed up in every single room that nothing could be found when wanted. One of Mahendra's surgical instruments had done duty as a kitchen knife, and thenceforth gone into hiding in the dust-bin. His college notebook, after performing the functions of the palmyra-leaf fan, was reposing under the ashes of the kitchen grate. Mahendra was hugely amused at this unusual topsyturvydom, but Asha felt it more and more keenly. It seemed to the young girl to be a sacrilege to be watching with a smiling face the household welfare being borne away on the tide of self-indulgence.
One evening they were seated together on a bed spread on the floor of the covered verandah of their room, facing the open terraced roof. A shower of rain was just over, and the housetops, stretching as far as the eye could see, were flooded by the moon-light.
Asha had gathered a heap of rain-washed vakula flowers, and was bending over the garland she was stringing. Mahendra seemed to be trying his best to provoke a quarrel by criticising it unfavourably, pulling it about, and generally hampering her work. Every time Asha opened her lips to give him a scolding, he would nip her lecture in the bud by the illogical method common among lovers.
Suddenly the tame koil belonging to a neighbour cooed out from its cage. At once both Mahendra and Asha looked up at the cage hanging from the eaves of the sunshade over their heads. Their koil had never failed to respond to the call of the neighbour's bird. But why was he silent to-day?
"What's the matter with the bird?" asked Asha anxiously.
"He must have been shamed into silence by your voice," suggested Mahendra.
"Dont be silly," said Asha petulantly, "do see what's happened to him."
Mahendra took down the cage, and taking off its cloth cover found the bird dead inside. The servant boy had taken leave after Annapurna's departure, and there had been no one to look after the koil.
Asha's face fell, her fingers gradually left off moving, the flowers lay unheeded! Mahendra also was shocked, but he tried to retrieve the situation by laughing away the incident. "A good riddance," said he, "while I was away at college the bird must have kept plaguing you with his cooing."[1] And Mahendra put his arms round Asha and tried to draw her near him.
- ↑ It is a common conceit with the ancient poets that the cooing of the koil aggravates the pangs of separation.
