"He is a man, you see, one of us. My only quarrel with him is
that he delights in a misty vision of this world. Have you not
observed how this trait of his makes him look on __Swadeshi__
as if it was some poem of which the metre must be kept correct at
every step? We, with the clubs of our prose, are the iconoclasts
of metre."
"What has your book to do with __Swadeshi__?"
"You would know if you only read it. Nikhil wants to go by made-
up maxims, in __Swadeshi__ as in everything else; so he knocks
up against human nature at every turn, and then falls to abusing
it. He never will realize that human nature was created long
before phrases were, and will survive them too."
Bee was silent for a while and then gravely said: "Is it not a
part of human nature to try and rise superior to itself?"
I smiled inwardly. "These are not your words", I thought to
myself. "You have learnt them from Nikhil. You are a healthy
human being. Your flesh and blood have responded to the call of
reality. You are burning in every vein with life-fire--do I not
know it? How long should they keep you cool with the wet towel
of moral precepts?"
"The weak are in the majority," I said aloud. "They are
continually poisoning the ears of men by repeating these
shibboleths. Nature has denied them strength--it is thus that
they try to enfeeble others."
"We women are weak," replied Bimala. "So I suppose we must join
in the conspiracy of the weak."
"Women weak!" I exclaimed with a laugh. "Men belaud you as
delicate and fragile, so as to delude you into thinking
yourselves weak. But it is you women who are strong. Men make a
great outward show of their so-called freedom, but those who know
their inner minds are aware of their bondage. They have
manufactured scriptures with their own hands to bind themselves;
with their very idealism they have made golden fetters of women
to wind round their body and mind. If men had not that
extraordinary faculty of entangling themselves in meshes of their
own contriving, nothing could have kept them bound. But as for
you women, you have desired to conceive reality with body and
soul. You have given birth to reality. You have suckled reality
at your breasts."
Bee was well read for a woman, and would not easily give in to my
arguments. "If that were true," she objected, "men would not
have found women attractive."
"Women realize the danger," I replied. "They know that men love
delusions, so they give them full measure by borrowing their own
phrases. They know that man, the drunkard, values intoxication
more than food, and so they try to pass themselves off as an
intoxicant. As a matter of fact, but for the sake of man, woman
has no need for any make-believe."
"Why, then, are you troubling to destroy the illusion?"
"For freedom. I want the country to be free. I want human
relations to be free."
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