38

When Binodini found herself in an empty women's carriage watching, through the window, ploughed fields and tree-shaded villages going by, the life of the quiet, secluded countryside rose in her imagination. She began to think that within such a screen of leaves and shade she might find in her self-invented nest of the mind, with her beloved books about her, some respite for a time from all the vexation and burning and raw wounds of city life. Watching the grey, sun-scorched expanse of the harvest-bare plain at sunset, she felt that nothing more was needed --- her mind seemed to wish to close its eyes amidst this gold-suffused, wide-spreading stillness, to moor the vessel of her life after its storm-tossed passage on the shore of a quiet evening, to tie it beneath a motionless banyan tree, and want for nothing beyond.

As the train moved on, the fragrance of mango blossom drifted from a grove at one stopping place and enveloped her in the deep, mild peace of the countryside. She said to herself: it is well, it is right, I cannot go on tearing at myself any longer --- this time I shall forget, I shall sleep, I shall live a village woman's life and wear out my days contentedly in the work of home and hamlet. Carrying this hope of peace in her dry and thirsting breast, Binodini entered her cottage.

But where was peace? Only emptiness and poverty. Everything about her was worn and neglected and begrimed. The room had been shut for months; the dank, stagnant air caught in her throat. The few pieces of furniture that remained had been eaten by insects, gnawed by rats and buried in dust. Evening had fallen by the time she arrived --- cheerless dark. With difficulty she lit a mustard-oil lamp, and in its smoky flicker and dim glow the room's wretchedness grew only more visible.

What had once not troubled her was now unbearable; her whole rebellious inner self cried out: I cannot last a moment here. On the shelf were a few dust-laden books and magazines from before, but she could not bring herself to touch them. In the airless mango-grove outside, the cicadas and mosquitoes set up their drone in the dark. Binodini's elderly guardian had padlocked the house and gone a great distance to visit her daughter at her son-in-law's home. Binodini went to a neighbour's house.

The women there started to see her, looked her up and down --- good heavens, Binodini's complexion was positively clarified, her clothes neat and fine, as though she were a memsahib. They exchanged glances and meaningful looks over her head. Some rumour had reached them; this appearance seemed to confirm it. At every step Binodini felt how far she had moved beyond her village in every sense. Even in her own home she was in exile. Nowhere was there a moment's ease. The old postman was someone Binodini had known since childhood.

The next morning, as she was about to go down to bathe at the pond, she caught sight of him going past on the road with his letter-bag, and lost all self-command. She dropped her towel and ran out to call him: "Panchu-dada --- is there any letter for me?"

"No," said the old man.

"Perhaps there is --- let me look," said Binodini urgently.

She took the handful of five or six letters for the neighbourhood and turned them over one by one. None was for her. She returned to the ghat with a face drained of all expression, and one of her companions there gave her an arch sideways look and said: "Bindi, what is this great eagerness for a letter?" Another, bolder in her taunting, put in: "Lucky indeed --- who else here gets letters through the post? Our husbands, brothers-in-law, brothers all work away from home, and the post-boy never shows us any such favour." And so the gibes grew more pointed and the glances more cutting.

When Binodini had taken her leave of Bihari she had begged him, if not every day then at least twice a week, to write her even a few lines. The chance of receiving a letter from him today was extremely remote; yet her longing had grown so intense that she could not relinquish even so remote a possibility. It seemed to her as though she had left Calcutta an age ago. How widely the scandal of her name linked with Mahendra's had spread through the village, house by house --- this was not hidden from Binodini, thanks to the charity of enemies and friends alike.

Where was peace to be found? Binodini attempted to withdraw herself from all contact with the villagers. This only angered them the more. They had no wish to be deprived of the consoling luxury of reviling a sinner to her face and watching her suffer. In so small a village, the attempt to hide oneself from everyone was useless. There was no dark corner in which an injured heart might retire and nurse itself in private --- everywhere the sharp, curious gaze of the world fell upon the wound.

The more fiercely Binodini's inner nature struggled and thrashed, like a live fish in a basket, the more painfully she struck herself against the tightening walls of her confinement. Even the freedom to suffer completely, fully, was denied her here. On the second day, before the time for the post had passed, Binodini shut her door and sat down to write --- "Thakurpo, do not be afraid --- I am not writing you a love letter. You are my judge, and I bow before you. The sin I have committed you have punished severely; I have borne your sentence on my bowed head and carried it away. The sorrow is that you cannot see how heavy that sentence is. If you could see it, if you could know it, even the pity it would awaken in you I am denied. I shall endure even this, keeping your memory before me and laying my head in thought at your feet. But Master, does even the prisoner in his gaol receive no sustenance? Not delicacies --- but the bare ration without which he cannot keep alive, surely that much is allotted to him? Two lines of your letter are my ration in this exile --- if I do not receive even that, it is not exile alone but a sentence of death. Do not put me to so severe a trial. My sinful spirit knew no limit to its pride --- that it would ever have to bow its head before anyone in this manner was beyond even my dreaming. You have won, Master; I shall not rebel. But have mercy on me --- let me live. Give me that little provision for this forest-dwelling. Then no one and nothing will ever move me from your law. This much of my sorrow I have told you. The other things that are in my mind --- the things that are tearing my breast for want of utterance --- I promised I would not tell you. I have kept that promise.Yours, Binod-bouthhan." Yours, Binod-bouthhan.

Binodini sent the letter by post; the neighbourhood set up a clucking of disapproval. Locked in her room, writing letters, assailing the post-boy --- is this what two days in Calcutta does to a woman? Must one forfeit all modesty and be utterly ruined? The next day too no letter came. Binodini sat still all day long, her face hardening. Beaten from without and within, the churning of insult upon insult began to bring up from the dark depths of her heart a ruthless capacity for destruction, taking shape and pressing towards the surface.

Binodini felt the rising of that dreadful cruelty with a fear that drove her inside and shut the door. She had nothing of Bihari's with her --- no likeness, not one written line, nothing at all. She scrabbled in the void for something to hold to. She wanted to press some token of him to her breast and bring water to her dry eyes --- to melt with tears all that had grown hard within her, to quench the fire of revolt, and to keep Bihari's stern commandment enthroned in the tenderest corner of her heart.

But like a noon sky in the height of a drought, her heart could only burn and burn; strain her eyes as she might in every direction, she could find not one sign of a single drop of --- of relief, of tears. She had heard it said that if one summons another with concentrated and entire devotion, that person cannot but come. And so with folded hands, with closed eyes, she called on Bihari: "My life is empty, my heart is empty, all around me is empty --- come to me through this emptiness, come for one moment, you must come, I will not let you go." As she said the words with all the force within her, a real strength seemed to enter Binodini.

She felt the power of it --- the power of love, the power of invocation --- would not go to waste. To merely long and long, to water hopeless roots with the blood of one's own heart, is only exhaustion. But to invoke thus with a concentrated, whole-souled intensity --- to desire with every force of the will --- was to feel oneself no longer helpless. It was as if the sheer strength of the longing, released from all other objects and bent solely on the one desired, drew that person nearer, moment by moment, slowly, steadily, as if closing a distance.

When Bihari's image had so filled the lampless dark of the room at dusk that society and the world, village and countryside, the whole of creation had dissolved into nothingness --- at that moment Binodini heard a knock at the door. She sprang up from the floor, and ran to the door and flung it open in a certainty beyond all question: "My lord --- you have come?" She was wholly convinced that in this moment no one else in all the world could possibly be at her door.

"I have come, Binod," said Mahendra.

Binodini drew back with an immensity of disgust and contempt.

"Go away --- go away --- get away from here. This instant." Mahendra stood there completely stunned.

"Bindi, you know what your great-aunt-in-law said yesterday---" a middle-aged woman neighbour came talking to Binodini's door, then stopped dead, said "Oh, good lord!" yanked her veil down over her face, and fled at speed.