'Yes,' she said, bursting into tears again, 'I can't understand their speech and can't eat their food, and I cry day and night. But Father never writes to me, and he doesn't take me away from here.'
'Why did your father marry you into a family which lived so far away and whose language you do not know?'
'We are Tewaris,[1] you know,' she explained. 'We can't find anybody to marry us in Bengal.'
'Do these people beat you?'
'Don't they? Look at this.' Sobbing convulsively, she showed me welts on her arms, her back, and her cheeks. I shall kill myself like my sister.'
My eyes too had grown wet. I went out without asking further questions and without waiting for my alms. The girl however followed me, saying, 'Won't you tell my father? Tell him to take me away or I shall—' I nodded assent and strode rapidly away. Her heart-rending appeal continued to ring in my ears.
At the turning of the road I saw a grocer's shop. Seeing me enter, the grocer stood up to do me honour. Though he was surprised to hear me ask for paper, pen, and ink, instead of alms, he supplied them. I wrote a letter to Gauri Tewari, describing all that I had learned, not omitting to mention the news that his elder daughter had committed suicide and that the brutal oppression that the younger girl had been subjected to had made her resolve to put an end to her life in a similar manner. Unless he came, I wrote, and did something to relieve her
- ↑ A Brahmin sect, whose home is up-country and not in the Ganges plain.
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