LETTERS FROM ABROAD
NEW YORK, March 18, 1921.
I wish that I could be released from my mission. For such missions are like a mist that envelopes our soul—they seem to shut us off from the direct touch of God’s world. And yet I have such an immense hunger for this touch. The spring-time has come— the sky is overflowing with sunshine. I long to be one with the birds and trees and with the green earth. The call comes to me from the air to sing, but, wretched creature that I am, I lecture—-and by doing it, I ostracise myself from this great world of songs to which I was born, Manu, the Indian law- giver, enjoins us not to cross the sea. But I have done so: I have sailed away from my own native universe—from the birth place of those morning jasmines, from the lotus lake of Saraswati, which greeted me when I was a child even as the finger touch of my own mother. Now, when occasionally I come back to them, I am made to feel that I have lost my caste; and though they call me by my name and speak to me, they keep themselves apart.
I know that my own river Padma, who has so often answered to my music with an amused gleam of tender tolerance in her face, will separate herself from me behind an invisible veil, when I come to her. She will say to me in a sad voice: “Thou hast crossed the seal!"
