The Home and the World

Mother, today there comes back to mind the vermilion mark at the parting of your hair, the sari which you used to wear, with its wide red border, and those wonderful eyes of yours, full of depth and peace. They came at the start of my life’s journey, like the first streak of dawn, giving me golden provision to carry me on my way.

The sky which gives light is blue, and my mother’s face was dark, but she had the radiance of holiness, and her beauty would put to shame all the vanity of the beautiful.

I had seen Sandip Babu’s photograph before. There was something in his features which I did not quite like. Not that he was bad-looking—far from it: he had a splendidly handsome face. Yet, I know not why, it seemed to me, in spite of all its brilliance, that too much of base alloy had gone into its making. The light in his eyes somehow did not shine true.

How could we help thinking that it was all supernatural? This moment of our history seemed to have dropped into our hand like a jewel from the crown of some drunken god. It had no resemblance to our past; and so we were led to hope that all our wants and miseries would disappear by the spell of some magic charm, that for us there was no longer any boundary line between the possible and the impossible. Everything seemed to be saying to us: “It is coming; it has come!”

“Won’t you bear witness to the burning of this man’s cloth?”

Sandip smiled. “Of course I shall be a witness in the case,” he said. “But I shall be on the opposite side.”

“If the idea of a United India is a true one,” objects Nikhil, “Mussulmans are a necessary part of it.”

“Quite so,” said I, “but we must know their place and keep them there, otherwise they will constantly be giving trouble.”

“It is my desire,” I said, “to plant something greater than Swadeshi. I am not after dead logs but living trees—and these will take time to grow.”

“I am afraid, sir,” sneered the history student, “that you will get neither log nor tree. Sandip Babu rightly teaches that in order to get, you must snatch.”

To hear Sandip’s phrases in the mouth of this mere boy staggered me. So delightfully, lovably immature was he—of that age when the good may still be believed in as good, of that age when one really lives and grows. The Mother in me awoke.

“Why is it possible,” I asked, “to use the Mussulmans thus, as tools against us? Is it not because we have fashioned them into such with our own intolerance? That is how Providence punishes us. Our accumulated sins are being visited on our own heads.”

“Sandip Babu,” I said, “I wonder how you can go on making these endless speeches, without a stop. Do you get them up by heart, beforehand?”

Then came a palanquin, followed by a litter. The doctor was walking alongside the palanquin.

“What do you think, doctor?” asked the Dewan.

“Can’t say yet,” the doctor replied. “The wound in the head is a serious one.”

“And Amulya Babu?”

“He has a bullet through the heart. He is done for.”