That was enough to cheer up my husband. Crates of home-made soap began to arrive. Was that soap or lumps of clay? It was obvious that the foreign soaps that Mejorani used earlier, were still in use. These homemade soaps were just for washing her clothes.
Another day she came and said, ‘Thakurpo, I believe they’ve come out with locally made pens. I really must have some. Please, I beg of you, get me a bunch of those—’
Thakurpo was thrilled to bits. All the sticks that were being passed off as pens in those days began to gather themselves in Mejorani’s room. But that didn’t matter to her because she was hardly into any form of writing. The daily accounts could have been written with a breadstick for all she cared. I noticed that the ancient ivory pen was still in her writing box and on the rare occasion when she wanted to write something, that was what she reached for. As a matter of fact, she used to enjoy these antics only to highlight the fact that I did not encourage my husband’s whims. But there was no way I could explain this to my husband. If I tried, his face became so sullen and thunderous that I realized it was having the opposite effect. Trying to protect such people from being fooled only resulted in getting cheated yourself.
Mejorani loved sewing; one day when she was sewing, I spoke my mind to her, ‘What is this! On one hand you drool when your Thakurpo mentions some locally made scissors; but when you sew, you have to have the foreign ones?’
Mejorani said, ‘What’s wrong with that? See how happy it makes him! I have grown up with him and I cannot hurt him as cheerfully as you can. He’s a man and he doesn’t have any other passion—one of them is playing around with all these indigenous things and the other deadly passion is you—that’ll be the end of him!’
I said, ‘All said and done, I don’t think it’s a good thing to say one thing and believe in something else.’
Mejorani laughed and said, ‘Oh my simpleton, you seem to be as straight as a headmaster’s cane. Women can’t be that straight—simply because they are soft, they bend a little and there is no harm in that.’
I will never forget what she said—one of his deadly passions is you and that’ll be the end of him.
Now I firmly believe that a man needs a passion, but it’s best if it isn’t a woman.
The market in Sukhsayar was the largest in our district. Every day there was a market on this side of the river and on the other side a big marketplace was set up every Saturday. This marketplace began to grow really busy only after the rains. The waters of the pond merged with the river and made the crossing easy. At that time the import of thread and warm clothes stepped up.
In those days there was a wave of revolt against foreign clothes, salt and sugar in the markets of Bengal. All of us were up in arms. Sandip came to me and said, ‘Since we have this huge marketplace within our jurisdiction, we should turn it into a totally home-grown one. We must exorcise the foreign evil from this region.’
I agreed vehemently and said, ‘Yes , we must.’
Sandip said, ‘I have had many arguments with Nikhil on this score—I simply couldn’t convince him. He says speeches are fine, but there should be no coercion.’
With a trace of self-importance, I said, ‘Fine, leave that to me.’
I knew just how deep my husband’s love was for me. If I had the least bit of sense, I’d have died of shame rather than go to him on that day and make demands on that love. But I had to prove to Sandip how powerful I was. In his eyes I was Shakti—the goddess of power! With his powers of articulation, he had explained to me time and again that the supreme Shakti revealed itself to different people in the form of a special person. He said, ‘We are all wandering fervently in search of the “Radha” of the Vaishnava Idea. Only when we truly find her do we understand clearly the meaning of the flute that plays in our heart.’ As he spoke, sometimes he began to sing,
‘When you didn’t show yourself, Radha, the flute did play.
Now that I have looked into your eyes, my tune has washed away.
Then, in many beats and tunes
I had cried for you all over the place.
Now, all my tears have taken Radha’s form and turned into smiles.’
As I heard all this constantly, I forgot that I was Bimala. I was Shakti, I was rasa, I had no ties and all was possible for me; whatever I touched was recreated by me—my whole world was created anew by me. The autumn sky was not so golden before my heart touched it. Every single moment I rejuvenated that brave, that mystic—my devotee—that remarkable genius enlightened by knowledge, fired by courage and blessed with passion. I could palpably feel that I was infusing new life into him every moment; he was my creation. One day Sandip brought one of his favourite followers, Amulyacharan, to me after much persuasion. Within a second I saw his eyes lit by a different light; I realized he had glimpsed Mother Shakti and I knew that my creation had begun its process in his bloodstream. The next day Sandip came to me and said, ‘What kind of a mantra is this—that boy is not the same anymore. Within minutes the flame within him has lit up. No one will be able to keep this fire of yours under a bushel. One by one they will come and light their lamps until the country will be ablaze in a festival of lights.’
I was intoxicated by this sense of my own glory and I decided to grant my disciple a boon. I also knew very well that no one could stop me from doing what I wanted to do.
That day I loosened my hair, combed it afresh and tied it again. My British teacher had taught me to draw the hair from around my neck and pile it high up into a knot, which was a favourite with my husband. He would say, ‘God has chosen to reveal to me, a non-poet, instead of to Kalidasa, just how beautiful are a woman’s neck and shoulders. Perhaps the poet would have likened it to the lotus stem. But I feel it is a burning torch with your dark knot raising its black flame upwards.’ And he would reach for my naked shoulder—but alas, why bring that up now.
Then I sent for him. Long ago I used to send for him thus on many pretexts, true or false. Lately all such excuses had come to a stop and I had run out of fresh ideas.
Nikhilesh
PANCHU’ S WIFE WAS STRICKEN BY TUBERCULOSIS AND SHE DIED. PANCHU would have to atone for it. The society did its calculations and came up with a cost of twenty-three and a half rupees.
I was angry and I said, ‘So what if you don’t atone for it—what are you afraid of?’
He raised his patience-laden eyes, tired as a cow’s, and said, ‘I have a daughter; she has to be married off. Besides, my wife’s last rites will also have to be done.’
I said, ‘If there has been a sin, there has also been enough atonement in the last few months.’
He said, ‘Well sir, that there has been! Some of my land had to be sold and some mortgaged to pay the doctor’s bills. But if I don’t give the necessary alms, and feed the Brahmins, there is no release.’
There was no point in arguing. I said to myself, ‘When will those Brahmins, who are being fed, atone for their sins?’
Panchu had always lived on the edge of starvation. But his wife’s illness and the subsequent expenses for the rituals threw him in at the deep end. He became a follower of a local hermit perhaps for some consolation. This offered him a new drug to dull the pain of his children being unfed and starving. He realized that life was nothing. Just as there was no joy, the sorrows were also mere dreams. Eventually, one night, he left his four children in the hovel and renounced his material aspirations.
I had no knowledge of any of this. My mind was fraught with the combat between accord and discord. My teacher didn’t even tell me that he had taken in Panchu’s children and was raising them alone. At the time his own son and daughter-in-law were in Rangoon. He was alone at home and all day he had to be at the school.
When a month had passed thus, one morning suddenly Panchu appeared. His ‘renunciation’ was a thing of the past. When his two elder children squatted at his lap, on the floor, and asked, ‘Father, where did you go?’, his youngest took over his lap and the third child, a girl, hugged him
from behind and rested her cheeks on his back, he broke down. They just wouldn’t stop. He said, ‘Master-babu, I don’t have the strength to feed them two square meals a day, and I don’t have the strength to leave them and walk away. Why do I get beaten like this? What have I done to deserve this?’
Meanwhile his trade, the faint thread on which his survival depended, had gone to pieces. The first few days that he took refuge in the professor’s home, turned into a permanent arrangement. He began to while away his time there and never mentioned going back to his own home. Finally Chandranathbabu said to him one day, ‘Panchu, why don’t you go on home? Your house will soon fall apart. Let me lend you some money. You can start a clothing business and pay me back gradually over a period of time.’
At first Panchu was a little upset. He felt the world was a place devoid of human sympathy, and when the professor made him sign a handnote before giving the money, he felt, ‘What’s the point of such help when I have to return the money in the end?’
The professor hated the idea of giving alms to someone and making them feel encumbered. He always said, ‘Loss of dignity is equal to a loss of pedigree.’
After taking the money thus, Panchu couldn’t really bring himself to really bow down low at the professor’s feet. The professor smiled to himself. He always wanted a short greeting anyway. He says, ‘I would like to respect and be respected in turn. That is my ideal relationship with others. I do not deserve any veneration.’
Panchu bought some clothes and winter-wear and began to sell it to the farmers. He got his payment in instalments. But similarly, the rice, jute or other crops that he got when he made the exchange, were a bonus. Within two months he was able to pay back the professor one instalment of the interest and also a part of the principal. This payback obviously also affected the length of the greeting once again. Panchu began to feel that it was a mistake to take the teacher for a great soul. He actually had his eye on the good old silver.
Thus Panchu’s days passed. At this point, the wave of swadeshi swept through the countryside. The young boys from our village or the neighbouring ones, who went to school or college in Calcutta, came back for the holidays, some of them already having abandoned their studies. They appointed Sandip as their chief and wholeheartedly lent themselves to the task of spreading the swadeshi-message. Many of these boys had passed out of the free school run by me; a lot of them had scholarships borne by me. One day they came up to me in one big group and said, ‘You’ll have to ban foreign threads and clothes from the Sukhsayar market.’
I said, ‘That is impossible.’
They said, ‘Why? Will it affect your profits?’
I realized the barb was meant to hit home. I was about to retort, ‘Not mine, but certainly the poor people’s.’
My teacher was present. He exclaimed, ‘Of course it will; that will never be your loss.’
They said, ‘For the sake of the country—’
Chandranathbabu overrode what they were saying by exclaiming, ‘The country is not just this land and soil, it is also the people. Have you ever bothered to spare these people a second glance? Today, suddenly you have woken up to the fact that you must decide what they’d eat and what they’d wear. Why should they tolerate that and why should we let them tolerate that?’
They replied, ‘But we ourselves have also taken to indigenous salt, sugar and cloth.’
He said, ‘You are all angry on a whim and that has given you the strength to do all this happily. You have the money and if you use a few paise more to buy homespun goods, they don’t come and stop you. But what you want them to do is sheer abuse of power. They are caught in the fray of life every single day of their lives, struggling to just stay afloat—you cannot even imagine the value of a few paise to them—you have nothing in common with them. You spend your days in a different section of the palace of life; today you want to transfer your burden onto their shoulders, you want to use them to take the edge off your anger? I believe this is cowardice. You are free to take it as far as you wish, as far as you can go, even till death. I am an old man. I am ready to salute you as the leaders and follow in your footsteps. But if you trample on these poor people’s freedom and sing songs in praise of liberty, I will personally stand in your way, even if it kills me.’
They were, nearly all of them, ex-students of the professor and so they couldn’t retort to his face. But their blood was on the boil. They looked at me and said, ‘Look, are you going to be the only one resisting the vow that the entire nation has taken today?’
I said, ‘It is not my place to resist. On the contrary, I’ll do my best to encourage it.’
An MA student smiled slyly and asked, ‘How are you encouraging it?’
I said, ‘I have stocked the homespun cloth and threads in our markets; we also send these out to other markets in the area—’
The student shouted, ‘But we went to your market and saw that no one is buying these.’
I replied, ‘For that, neither I nor the market is to blame. The only reason for that is that the whole country has not yet taken the same vow as you.’
Chandranathbabu said, ‘Moreover, even those who have taken the vow seem more intent on causing havoc. You would like to force the uninitiated to buy the thread, weave the cloth and also buy the fabric. By what means? By force and the use of the zamindar’s henchmen and their lathis. In other words, the vow is yours, but the ordinary people are the ones who’ll fast and you will celebrate that fasting.’
A student of science asked, ‘Fine, then go ahead and explain which part of the fasting have you yourselves undertaken?’
My teacher said, ‘Do you want to know? Fine then, hear this: it is Nikhil who has to buy that thread from the indigenous mills. He sponsors the weavers who weave the cloth and conducts classes to train them. Given his business sense, by the time a towel is woven from those threads, it’ll be worth the same as a piece of expensive silk. So he will buy that towel himself and hang it up as drapes in his drawing room; it wouldn’t even cover the half of it. By that time if you are through with your vow, you’d be the first to laugh at the rustic designs on his curtains. If at all that coloured fabric is appreciated anywhere, it is by the British.’
I had been with him for so long, but never had I seen my teacher quite so upset. I realized that the grievance had been collecting in his soul over the past months, simply because he loved me so much. It was that pain that had chipped away at the dam of his patience, and finally given way.
A student of medicine spoke up, ‘You are all elders and so we shan’t argue with you. So, in a word you are saying that you will not ban the foreign goods from your markets?’
I said, ‘No, I will not do that, because it is not mine to ban.’
The MA student smiled derisively and said, ‘You won’t because that’ll cut into your profits.’
My teacher confirmed, ‘Yes it will, and so it is entirely his business.’
Thereafter all the students shouted ‘Vande Mataram’ and walked out.
A few days later, Chandranathbabu brought Panchu to me. What was up?
‘His landlord, zamindar Harish Kundu had fined Panchu a hundred rupees.’
‘Why, what did he do?’
‘He sold foreign cloth. He went to the zamindar and fell at his feet saying that he had bought this cloth with money taken on loan and once these were sold off, he would never do such a thing again. The zamindar said, “Impossible. Burn the cloth in front of me and only then will I let you go.” Panchu couldn’t take it. He shouted, “I cannot afford it, I am poor; you have enough. Why don’t you buy the cloth and then burn it?” At this the zamindar flared up and said, “You bastard, your tongue wags too much—give him the shoe.” One round of humiliation followed and then he was fined a hundred rupees. These are the kind that follow Sandip around, shouting Vande Mataram. These are the so-called servants of the land.’
‘What happened to the cloth?’
‘Burnt.’
‘Who els
e was there?’
‘Hordes of people. They began to shout Vande Mataram, Sandip was also there. He picked up a handful of ash and said, “Brothers, this is the first time the pyre of foreign commerce has been lit in your village. These ashes are sacred. You will have to smear these ashes on yourselves in order to work towards ripping away the shroud of Manchester and turning into naked saints.”’
I said to Panchu, ‘Panchu, you’ll have to go to court.’
Panchu said, ‘No one will bear witness.’
‘No one—Sandip, Sandip, come here.’
Sandip came out of his room and said, ‘What is the matter?’
‘This man’s bag of cloth was burnt by his zamindar in front of your eyes. Won’t you bear witness?’
‘Of course I will,’ Sandip laughed, ‘But I am a witness for his zamindar.’
I said, ‘How can you be a witness for someone? You’ll be a witness for the Truth.’
Sandip said, ‘And the Truth is merely what has taken place, is it?’
I asked, ‘What is the other Truth?’
Sandip said, ‘That which should take place. The Truth that we need to formulate. Many lies are needed to make the Truth just as many illusions are needed to make the world. Those who have come into this world solely to create, they do not accept Truth, they formulate it.’
‘Hence—’
‘Hence, I will be a witness for that which you call a lie. Such false witness has been proudly presented at the courtroom of your Truth by those that have colonized, built empires, formed societies and framed religions. Those who will rule need not fear lies. The iron shackles of Truth are meant for those who will be ruled. Haven’t you read history? Don’t you know that in the largest kitchens of the world where the mishmash of politics and civics is cooked up, the ingredients are all lies?’