Srikanta
Take the case of Annada Didi. I can never forget her sweet face, angelic in its calm. After she had left us few nights went by when I did not sob myself to sleep. How often I cried, 'Didi, I have no more fear for myself: I am saved. By the alchemy of your touch all that was base in me has been turned to gold. Now nothing in me can rust by exposure to the changing weather of circumstances: the gold will remain bright and glittering to the end. But you are gone, my Didi, and no one can share in this good fortune of mine, for no one else has seen you as I have done. If others had known you, my Didi, as well as I have done, their nature, I have little doubt, would have been transmuted into an exceeding goodness.' My imagination busied itself at that tender age with conceiving a thousand ways in which I could have saved the world by sharing my Didi with it. Sometimes I would think that if I could get seven big pots of gold I would place her, like Devi Choadhurani,[1] on an enormous throne: I would clear forests and make an open space, and call people together, and they would be her subjects. Sometimes I would think of the great possibilities of putting her into a big house-boat which would be taken from one country to another, a big, magnificent band playing to announce her greatness. Thus in a day I would build a thousand castles in the air, castles that seem fantastic enough at this distance, the memories of which in these sober days bring smiles, and tears as well.
I had a conviction in those days as solid and massive as the Himalayas, that there certainly never existed in this world, and could hardly exist in any other world, the woman who could win my heart. 'If I ever meet any
- ↑ Devi Choadhurani: the heroine in Bankimchandra Chatterji's novel of the same name.
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