I
It was a night of full moon early in the month of Phalgun. The youthful
spring was everywhere sending forth its breeze laden with the fragrance
of mango-blossoms. The melodious notes of an untiring papiya (One of the
sweetest songsters in Bengal. Anglo-Indian writers have nicknamed it the
"brain-fever bird," which is a sheer libel.), concealed within the
thick foliage of an old lichi tree by the side of a tank, penetrated a
sleepless bedroom of the Mukerji family. There Hemanta now restlessly
twisted a lock of his wife's hair round his finger, now beat her churl
against her wristlet until it tinkled, now pulled at the chaplet of
flowers about her head, and left it hanging over hex face. His mood
was that of as evening breeze which played about a favourite flowering
shrub, gently shaking her now this side, now that, in the hope of
rousing her to animation.
But Kusum sat motionless, looking out of the open window, with eyes
immersed in the moonlit depth of never-ending space beyond. Her
husband's caresses were lost on her.
At last Hemanta clasped both the hands of his wife, and, shaking them
gently, said: "Kusum, where are you? A patient search through a big
telescope would reveal you only as a small speck-you seem to have
receded so far away. O, do come closer to me, dear. See how beautiful
the night is."
Kusum turned her eyes from the void of space towards her husband, and
said slowly: "I know a mantra (A set of magic words.), which could in
one moment shatter this spring night and the moon into pieces."
"If you do," laughed Hemanta, "pray don't utter it. If any mantra of
yours could bring three or four Saturdays during the week, and prolong
the nights till 5 P.M. the next day, say it by all means."
Saying this, he tried to draw his wife a little closer to him. Kusum,
freeing herself from the embrace, said: "Do you know, to-night I feel
a longing to tell you what I promised to reveal only on my death-bed.
To-night I feel that I could endure whatever punishment you might
inflict on me."
Hemanta was on the point of making a jest about punishments by reciting
a verse from Jayadeva, when the sound of an angry pair of slippers
was heard approaching rapidly. They were the familiar footsteps of his
father, Haribar Mukerji, and Hemanta, not knowing what it meant, was in
a flutter of excitement.
Standing outside the door Harihar roared out: "Hemanta, turn your wife
out of the house immediately."
Hemanta looked at his wife, and detected no trace of surprise in her
features. She merely buried her face within the palms of her hands, and,
with all the strength and intensity of her soul, wished that she could
then and there melt into nothingness. It was the same papiya whose
song floated into the room with the south breeze, and no one heard it.
Endless are the beauties of the earth-but alas, how easily everything is
twisted out of shape.