Srikanta
XI
I WROTE a letter to Piari just to tell her that I had kept my promise. I got her reply in a few days. One thing I had noticed all along: not only had Piari never urged me to come to her house at Patna, she had never even suggested it. Not even in her letter was there a hint of any such invitation.
There was however, at the end, a request that I have not yet forgotten. It was a request that I might remember her in my days of trouble, if not in those of happiness.
Days passed on and Piari's memory grew dim and almost faded away. But I noticed a strange thing at times: after my return from the shikar my mind was distracted and ill at ease; a sense of bereavement numbed me and weighed me down.
At last there came a night when I lay tired and listless on my bed. It was the night of the Holi[1] festival. I had just come home from it worn out and exhausted, and had not yet washed the red powder out of my hair. A window by my side was open, and I lay looking through the chinks in a pipal tree at the moonlight that flooded the heavens. That is all that I remember of that night. I do not remember why I went straight to the station, bought a ticket for Patna, and got into the train. The night passed, and when on the next day I woke up to the fact that we
- ↑ Holi: this is the spring festival during which people throw red powder on each other.
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