HIS SOLITUDE
When Oman woke, the sun was high in the heavens, and the bird had
gone. During his sleep some one—his mother, doubtless—had covered him
with a pliable mat, and had placed something soft under his head. Full
consciousness returned by degrees. A sense of physical discomfort was
the first thing he knew. Then came a faint memory of what had happened
before the dawn. Sunrise and the bird were inextricably mingled in
his mind. In his heart he believed that the bird and the peace it
brought had been a dream. Now that he was fully awake, there was no
peace. He was hot with fever; and soon his body began to ache again,
with a dull, numb pain that was hard to bear in silence. Moreover, he
panted for water. It was not long, however, before Kota came out into
the veranda, her little boy clinging to her skirts and retarding her
progress. Disengaging the child, who fell backward disconsolately, she
bent over the sick one, felt the burning of his hands and head, drew
from him confession of his pain and also of his hunger and thirst, and
at once retired into the house, to return in a few moments with a bowl
of millet and milk. She found the baby sitting beside Oman, who was
talking to it in his mellow, gentle voice. Kota hastily set the bowl
upon the ground, picked up the baby, carried him inside, and, on coming
back once more, found Oman lying on his face, shaken with sobs; nor
could she, for a long time, persuade him to turn his face to the light
and take the nourishment he needed.
Despite his mother’s furtively loving care, and the cessation of his
exacting duties, Oman did not grow better of his sickness. Instead,
his fever increased till delirium came, and for days he was out of
his mind. In his times of pain he would become violent, screaming
and struggling when any one approached him. He talked much. Snatches
of Vedic text, old Sutras and Mantras, philosophical premises, and
suggestions of his own self-struggle were jumbled together in wildest
chaos. Gokarna, dreading to have a woman’s ears hear the holy words
that are forbidden to women, dreading still more the alternative of
a masculine Sudra nurse, sure to carry gossip, had Oman carefully
guarded and tended within the house. In his heart, the father, bitter
with grief and worse than grief at the outcome of Oman’s student-life,
repeated many times his prayer for the child’s death; and had he been
in a state to realize anything, Oman would have echoed that prayer with
all his heart.
Desire, however, was vain. For four weeks Oman lay fever-stricken, and
then, suddenly, began to convalesce, and in a fortnight more was about
as usual. Spring was now nearly gone, and summer, with its murderous
heat, upon the town again. The crops were up, and the business of
irrigation begun in the fields; for all the luxuriant foliage of the
wild was withered and dry, parched for the rains that were not yet to
come for a month or more. Among the townsfolk, in the evening, the
great subject of gossip was always: “The Child of Gokarna—called Oman.”
“He has given up the life of the Snataka.” “No more does he study the
sacred books.” “Yet the ceremony of the cessation of study has not
taken place.” “Ah, yes, something is wrong. It is very strange.”
Oman still wore the sacred cord of the Brahman. How should he, knowing
so much of the holy Vedas, remove it? But he moved through his native
town a wanderer, an outcast, addressing none of the townspeople, who
would scarcely have answered him for fear of defiling their caste. How
this situation had come about, Oman could not have told. It had been a
gradual and natural growth. During his convalescence it had occurred
to him that his father and mother were ashamed of him. This idea he
tested in various ways, and found it to be true. Up to that time he
had been ashamed of himself: furiously, bitterly rebellious concerning
his weakness. But now, at once, the spirit of self-protection rose hot
within him. Others, his own parents, were ashamed of him. Should he
turn against himself? Never. The masculine instinct of self-defence
turned inward toward that other timid, shrinking nature that he longed
so to conceal. And when, at length, he was about again, his parents
found him wrapped in an impenetrable mantle of—was it pride?—was
it stupidity?—was it temper?—arrogance? He was unapproachable and
unsociable. He took not the slightest notice of those around him, never
speaking of his own accord, and doing his best to prevent the address
of others.
Gokarna held many periods of self-communion with himself as to his duty
toward this child, and especially about the matter of the sacred cord.
But time passed, and no special action was taken. Oman seemed to have
marked out his life for himself; and the father, bewildered, let him
pursue the course he would, and finally ceased to torment himself with
questions.
Through the rainy season, Oman spent most of his time close to his
father’s house. There was a place for him there, such as it was,
where he was never molested. In the first weeks of his recovery, his
over-worked mind found some delight in simple freedom from burdensome
tasks. Idleness, silence, absence of rules and binding regulations,
were sweet to him. He had the true Hindoo faculty for dreams, and would
sit for hours lost in contemplation of unknowable and unfathomable
things. Little objects—the bluish curl of smoke over a house-roof,
the distant, flickering flame of sacrificial fires at dusk, a flight
of heron toward the southern hills, the notes of the bulbul or the
koïl—such things brought him infinite pleasure, and formed subjects for
long contemplation. These were the periods when his mind was freest
from its burden. But there were hours—days—weeks, when the world gave
nothing to him; when melancholy held him for her own. At these times
life seemed a burden too terrible for any mortal, and the continuance
of such suffering as his, a thing beyond the endurance of spirits of
the blessed.
When the rains were over, and August came in, Oman began to spend much
time wandering through the countryside, returning to the village only
to eat and sleep:—sometimes not that. The country around Bul-Ruknu was
broken, fertile, and unusually picturesque for India. To the east and
southeast, at a distance of three or four miles, rose the northernmost
hills of the Vindhya range, which extended thence, southward, to the
Narmáda plain, fifty miles away. To the north and west were stretches
of fertile fields, fringed with woods, and watered by a little stream
fed by mountain brooks and springs, that went meandering through
bottom-lands, and was used by farmers for purposes of irrigation.
Very early in the course of his wanderings, Oman came upon this
little river. During his childhood he had exhibited the curious trait
of marked aversion to running water; but he found now that the old
dread of it lingered only in a half-fascinating fear lest some day,
out of very wantonness, he should plunge into the little stream and
resistlessly let himself be overwhelmed in its lucent depths. This
fascination did not diminish with time. He loved to explore its
windings through the countryside, and follow it up a little way into
its mountain fastnesses. In the hills, one day, he came upon a shadowy
glade, turfed with kusa-grass and canopied with a giant banyan grove, a
tree of a hundred trunks, that overspread two acres of ground. Here, in
the green twilight, in a spot to which human beings never penetrated,
Oman found his haven:—a haven of solitude where, for three or four
years, he spent the greater part of his time.
Of the struggles, the wretched inward conflicts of this isolated
mortal developing alone, unaided, avoided by humankind, it were
terrible to speak. Physical maturity had come before the mental; and
it was here, in this scene of lonely beauty, that he passed through
the first, fierce stages of the new awakening. He was most miserably
human; and all the faults of humanity raged within him, unrestrained
and uncomprehended. He yearned constantly for that of which he could
know nothing; and, helpless and half-mad, he was tossed upon a sea
of morbid and lonely imaginings. At such times, the fact that he was
an outcast seemed to him hideous and impossible. Rebelling, he would
rise up and curse himself and the God of his creation. Then, when he
had spent himself in tragical invective, the other side of him would
take possession of his mind, and he would melt into tremulous weeping:
weeping so piteous, so forlorn, that it would have melted the heart of
any woman hearing it. Again, Oman was filled with a gentle and eager
desire for something on which to expend affection:—a dog, a kitten, a
bird,—any living thing that would accept his love. But nothing came to
him. It seemed as if the very beasts avoided his haunts. A few apes
were occasionally seen within the banyan grove; but no other living
thing passed through there, nor even a snake slept in the shadow of
its stones. Yet the hills beyond were alive with wild creatures.
By night lions cried through the great darkness. Immense troops of
monkeys chattered in the trees. Both the tiger and the bear dwelt in
the ravines; and the buffalo and antelope found pasturage on sunny
hillsides. The steepest crags were the resort of myriad wild goats, and
birds of all kinds winged their way over the heights and found their
nests by hundreds in the jungle trees. But in the midst of all this
wild, free life, Oman dwelt alone, unsought, lost in the wilderness of
his solitude.
How, through three long years, he managed so to occupy his mind as to
keep at bay the madness that besets the absolutely solitary, he himself
knew best. Probably the first months seemed longest. The hours were
dismissed, one by one, while he busied himself over little things; for,
at his age, he was not able to create a systematic pursuit. His mind
worked in unaccustomed spheres, conning, vaguely and indefinitely,
problems that put him at a more or less safe distance from himself.
In time, the atmosphere of the deep banyan shade, with the near
tinkling and flashing of the brook, and the dim, greenish sunlight
that slipped through the interwoven foliage, became so beautifully
familiar that it was home to him. He bathed and floated in the chilly
water, and afterwards kindled a sacrificial fire and sat before it on
his knees, delighting in the high-leaping flames, feeling that the
play of the two elements satisfied his bent of mind. And during this
time, by unconscious cerebration, what Oman had learned in his five
years of studentship, all that mass of inert, half-decayed knowledge,
concentrated into living truths that fixed themselves firmly in his
brain and lay waiting to be used. Something further still came out of
the solitude:—a self-dependence, a strength, and a fortitude without
which, at a later period, he could not have lived.
Thus, until his sixteenth year, Oman spent his days. Then a change came
upon him, and he felt this life unendurable. Insensibly, a scene from
one of the old, heroic epics that he had read in his student days, came
to him, fastened itself in his mind, and would not be dislodged. It was
the picture of the “Sinner’s Road”, described with ghastly vividness by
a long-dead writer:
“A burning forest shut the roadside in
On either hand; and mid its crackling boughs
Perched ghastly birds—or flapped among the flames—
Vultures and kites and crows, with brazen plumes
And beaks of iron; and these grisly fowl
Screamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts,
Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouths
That hungered, but were never full.”
Here, in the land where these dim spirits dwelt, Oman, in perilous
despair, beheld himself. He must die as he had lived, and live in death
as he had lived in life—miserable, desolate, desperate, without hope of
betterment. And then, as the days scourged him, he was finally driven
to take a stand, for sanity’s sake. Thus, one noontide, he girded
himself up and returned to Bul-Ruknu, and there, within his father’s
house, sought an interview with Gokarna.
It was a long and solemn talk. Since the days of his sickness, three
years before, Oman and his father had spoken scarcely a dozen words
together. True, he usually slept at home, and his mother always left
him food for the day in a corner of the veranda. But he was not of his
family. In the village he had come to be looked on as a recluse, almost
a hermit; and as such was in some measure respected. Now, however, Oman
had come to demand one of two things: speedy death, or a place in the
world. Gokarna was taken aback, demurred, finally offered his son a
menial position among the priests, which Oman straightway refused.
“My brain is sick of religion and the gods. My power of worship is
spent. Let me work.”
“Work! You are a Brahman.”
“Thou knowest I am not—cannot be.”
Gokarna glared at him, and muttered some sort of insult; whereupon Oman
rose and left his father, and within twelve hours apprenticed himself
to a weaver in the town, thereby renouncing caste and becoming one of
the Vaisyas, the lowest order to whom was granted the right of re-birth
and investiture with the sacred cord. Yet, in the village, Oman was
now regarded as a privileged being; and, after a week of banishment
from his home, during which time he worked steadily and well, Kota went
to him, and begged him to return to his father’s house, to sleep and
eat as he had been wont to do; and when Gokarna sent a message to the
same effect, Oman, for his mother’s sake, consented, and resumed the
old relations with his people. He could not, of course, eat in their
presence, nor sleep in the same room with one of them, nor take part in
the Agnihotra. But at night he was there, in the veranda, as of old;
and the heart of his mother was at peace.
Now, in the endless sunshine, Oman Ramasarman worked at his trade:
first combing and carding the wool, later dyeing it, then learning how
to mix the different threads for warp and woof, and finally sitting
down to the loom, where, under his skilful manipulation, the cloth was
turned off, smooth and strong and useful. And now, at last, Oman’s
thoughts were taken from himself, and he was like a busy child, playing
at work, working at play, till two swift years had rolled round again,
and it was the spring of the year 1224, with Oman in his eighteenth
year of expiative life.