31

Harihar’s house was not a good one. Downstairs were two damp, musty rooms, so dark that if you came in suddenly from the outside, you couldn’t make out a thing. Sarbajaya had never lived in such a place; their country home, though old, had large doors and windows that welcomed the sun and air. It was a house of the old style, built on a high foundation, its floors clattering underfoot, bone-dry. The damp floors and darkness of this house gave Sarbajaya a headache. As for Apu, he hardly stayed in the house at all. Like a young sapling nourished by sunlight, his face was always turned towards the light. Having grown up in the open fields and the airy light of the river in Nischindipur, his spirit suffocated in the gloom of this shut-in house; he could not stand to be there for a single moment.

He was a little disappointed with Kashi. What did it matter if there were big buildings? There were no forests here at all.

One evening, the kathakthakur, the storyteller-priest, came to Harihar’s house. After this and that, he said, “Where is your son? I don’t see him.”

Harihar replied, “He’s gone out to play somewhere. He’s probably out towards Dashashwamedh Ghat.”

The kathakthakur, unwrapping some object from the end of his upper cloth, said, “I’ve grown very fond of your son, you know. The other day at the ghat, I called him over and we sat and talked for a long time. He likes playing with cowries, so when someone gave me these two big sea-cowries as part of a ritual offering, I thought I’d bring them for him. You keep them, and give them to him when he comes back.”

At the end of the month of Agrahayan, Apu began to pester his father about enrolling in school. “Everyone goes to school, Baba, I want to go too,” he said. “There’s a good school just a little way past the turn in the lane.”

Harihar enrolled his son in the school. Though it was a primary scholarship school, English was also taught. Nearly four or five years had passed since he had left Prasanna Guru-mashai’s pathshala; this was his re-entry into another house of learning.

In the middle of the month of Magh, the kathakthakur appeared at Harihar’s house one day, a piece of sandpaper in his hand. Showing the piece of paper, he said, “Have a look at this, mashai, and tell me, will it do if I write something like this?”

Harihar read it. It was a deed of gift, stating that a certain Ramgopal Chakrabarti of Kashi was donating ten bighas of his land in his home village to the kathakthakur, with so-and-so as witnesses, at the location of Dashashwamedh Ghat, on such-and-such a date. The kathakthakur explained, “You see what this is all about! In our village of Kumure, there was a Ramgopal Chakrabarti who was a great scholar. About a year before he died, he said to me, ‘Ramdhan, you have nothing. I’m thinking of donating ten bighas of land to you. Will you accept?’ Well, I thought, he is a good Brahmin, and he is offering it—what’s the harm? And so, he verbally gifted the land to me. He gave it, and that was that. For all this time, I paid it no mind. I planned to stay in Kashi, not live in the village, so what use was the land? Then Chakrabarti-mashai passed away. The gift remained a verbal one. After all this time, I’m thinking of going back to my village. What is a man without a family, mashai? To be honest with you, I’ve saved up three hundred rupees—and I did it by living on next to nothing, I tell you. If I can get another two hundred, I can find a bride from a good shrotriyo family. And if that happens, I’ll need the land, won’t I? A verbal gift, I thought—do you really think Chakrabarti-mashai’s sons will honour that? After much thought, I sat down and wrote out this document. I wrote it myself, mashai, the signatures and all—two witnesses, all made up. We’ll see if they accept a written document. I’ll go and say, ‘Look here, your father donated this land to me.’”

As he was getting up to leave, the kathakthakur said, “Oh, by the way, mashai, on Tuesday, the day of the Maghi Purnima full moon, I will take your son with me to the Thakur Bari of the Raja of Teota, the one right beside the Man Mandir. They hold a feast for Brahmins there every year after sunset.” He added with a touch of pride, “They send me an invitation card. The food is very good, excellent. I’ll come and get him that day, mind you.”

On the day of Maghi Purnima, from the last watch of the night, Sarbajaya was astonished by the crowds of bathers on the road. In group after group, men and women, chanting “Jai Vishwanath-ji ki jai!” and “Bolo Bom, Bolo Bom!”, defied the biting Magh cold and made their way to the river to bathe. When the sun was a little higher, Sarbajaya went to bathe with the Punjabi woman. The water of the Ganga ghat, the steps, the temples, the paths—all were filled with men and women in festive dress. Simply getting down into the water was a herculean task. A red flag flew above the temple of Shashthi.

Before evening, the kathakthakur came to fetch Apu. Sarbajaya said, “Let him go. The man has taken a fancy to Apu. He calls him over at Dashashwamedh Ghat and tells him stories; apparently he even bought him a papaya one day. Let him go, he’s a good man.”

Apu first went with the kathakthakur to his lodgings. It was a room with a tiled roof and mud walls, on which accounts were written in chalk in various places. For instance:

Bhagabat reading at the Siyarsol Rani’s house ….4, At Musammat Kunta’s Thakur Bari … ditto … … 2, One day’s provisions for Dharak Lal-ji Dobe … 4.

There was very little furniture. A narrow cot was laid out, a small tin trunk, a rope slung as a clothes-rack, a pair of wooden sandals. A large string of lotus-seed beads hung from a nail in the wall.

The kathakthakur asked, “Will you have an orange?”

Apu nodded his head. “Do you have one?”

For some reason, with this kathakthakur, he felt no shyness or hesitation. As the man peeled the orange, Apu asked, “Do you know ‘Kale barshatu parjanyang’?”

“‘Kale barshatu parjanyang’? Of course I do, I recite it every day. You must hear it sometime.”

“Why not say it now, just once?”

The kathakthakur chanted it with feeling, but it seemed to Apu that it sounded better when his father recited it; the storyteller’s voice was too rough.

To take back to his village, the kathakthakur had collected all sorts of small clay and stone items—dolls, toys, shivlingas, beads, wooden combs. Showing them to Apu, he said, “These are things from Kashi. Everyone will say, ‘Let’s see what you’ve brought!’ That’s why I’m taking them.”

After passing through many narrow alleys, the kathakthakur stopped before the door of a dark house. Ducking low to enter with great difficulty, it seemed to Apu that there was no one in the house; all was silent. The kathakthakur cleared his throat once or twice, and someone, waking from a charpoy on the verandah, asked a question in a gruff Hindi voice which Apu could not understand. Even after the kathakthakur introduced himself, the man seemed neither to recognize him nor to have been expecting their arrival. Then the man went off, as if slightly annoyed, to ask someone something. But he took so long to return that Apu began to think they would be told they hadn’t been invited and sent away. In any event, after they had stood in the dark for a good fifteen minutes, the man returned and, in a half-lit corner of the verandah, spread out a few sal-leaf plates and motioned for them to sit. He had left a heavy brass lota of water. The kathakthakur, as if in fear, went and sat on the makeshift seat. What kind of food did they serve at a Raja’s house? With keen anticipation, Apu sat for another twenty minutes or so before the leaf plates—but there was no sign of anyone. Just as doubts about getting any food at all were beginning to surface once more in Apu’s mind, the unprecedented event of a server’s appearance occurred. Thick flour puris and a tasteless, odourless mash of eggplant—and finally, very large laddus. When Apu tried to take a bite of a laddu, he couldn’t sink his teeth into it, it was so hard. The kathakthakur, however, eagerly ate ten or twelve of those thick puris, glancing at Apu from time to time and saying, “Eat your fill, don’t be shy. The food is very good—aren’t the laddus excellent? My teeth are still strong, I can chew them just fine.”

One might live beside a person for a hundred years, and yet they may remain forever outside one’s heart if no special event occurs to unlock its doors. Apu, though only a boy, had understood the slight and the disdain of this invitation to feast. And yet, seeing the storyteller’s greed and delight in the food struck a chord in Apu’s innermost heart. He felt that this kathakthakur was a man most wretched. He thought: Poor man, he never gets anything to eat. Ah, that’s why he’s eating that laddu like that. One day, I’ll tell Ma to invite him to our house for a meal.

Pity is the most precious mortar of love; it makes for the strongest bond. In his childish mind, this stranger, this Bengali kathakthakur he had known for only a few days, became strung upon the same thread as his sister and Gulki, all because of the desperate greed in the way he ate a laddu.

Not long after this, the kathakthakur left for his village. At the storyteller’s insistent pleading, Harihar took Apu along to see him off at Rajghat station. It occurred to Harihar that what this man—who was at least eight years older than his own present age—was now going back to his village to do, namely to start a new family life, was the very same thing he himself had gone back to do twenty-two years ago. In that case, what was his own age? What could he possibly lack the time to do?

When the train pulled away, tears came to Apu’s eyes. In a boy’s heart, a lasting and genuine affection for an older person can sometimes take root. It is all the more precious for its rarity.

Towards the end of the month of Magh, Harihar came home one day and suddenly collapsed at the edge of the courtyard. Sarbajaya dropped what she was doing and hurried to his side. “What is it? Why did you sit down like that?” But as she looked at her husband’s face, the words died in her mouth. Harihar’s eyes were as red as hibiscus flowers, and his right hand seemed to be trembling. When Sarbajaya came to help him up, he said in a dazed, slurring voice, “Where’s Khoka gone? Khoka?”

Sarbajaya touched his body; it was burning with fever. Gently taking him by the hand, she led him into the room and settled him on the bed, saying, “Apu will be here. That Nanda Babu from upstairs called for him; he has probably taken him to his shop at the Godhulia crossing.”

Apu had not gone to the shop. He was sitting on the roof in front of Nanda Babu’s quarters, reading a book. Over the past month, Apu had struck up quite a friendship with Nanda Babu. He was not old enough to guess the man’s age with any certainty, but he seemed younger than his father. He had discovered many books in Nanda Babu’s room upstairs; whenever Nanda Babu was home, he would take a book and sit on the roof to read. But he was afraid that Nanda Babu might stop him and snatch the book away, for such a thing had happened once. He had been sitting in a sunny corner of the roof, reading, when Nanda Babu, searching for something inside, came out and spotted him. He had snapped at him, “Hey, put that down! All you do is sit around reading those books. You never put things back where they belong, and I can never find them when I need them. Go on, put the book away, go!”

But he never touched anything else in the room, so why scold him? Since then, he had been timid about taking the books.

In the evenings, Nanda Babu would part his hair, put on fine clothes, dab on some scent from a bottle, and go out for a stroll. One day he had sprinkled a little of it on Apu’s skin; it had a lovely, fragrant smell.

Before, Apu used to go up to Nanda Babu’s room to read in the evenings as well. But after dusk, Nanda Babu would take a bottle from his cupboard and drink a reddish medicine. Once, when Apu had gone into the room at that time, he had been scolded severely. The stairs to Nanda Babu’s room were on the other side. Another night, going upstairs unexpectedly, he had seen a woman sitting in the room. Seeing him, Nanda Babu had said, “You can go now, Apurba. This is my sister-in-law—she came for a visit, she’ll be leaving shortly.” As he was turning to leave, he had heard Nanda Babu say, “Oh, he’s just the son of the tenant downstairs. He doesn’t understand a thing.”

Nanda Babu would often ask him about his mother. He would say, “Ask your mother to prepare some paan for me, will you? My servant doesn’t know how to do it.”

Apu would wheedle his mother and often bring paan upstairs. Nanda Babu would sometimes ask, “Does your mother ever say anything about me? No?” Apu would come home and tell his mother, “Nanda Babu is a nice man, Ma. He asks about you every day.”

“About me? What does he ask about me?”

“He was saying, ‘Tell your mother I ask after her.’ He’s a nice man.”

“Let him ask. You naughty boy, why do you go up to his room so often? What do you do sitting up there in the afternoon?”

Harihar’s fever abated a little. Apu came home from school and was putting his books down. Hearing the sound of his footsteps, Harihar said, “Come, Khoka, sit for a bit, my son.”

Apu sat and began to tell him stories from school. In a low, happy voice, he said, “I’ve only been at the school for two months, Baba, and already everyone likes me very much. I sit first in class every day. The class is going to publish a paper once a month. They’ve put me on the team. I’ll show it to you when it comes out, Baba.”

Harihar’s heart ached with tenderness and pain. Apu took out a piece of paper and said, “I’ve written something for the paper, and they said they’ll print it. My name will be on it, but they said they’ll only print pieces by those who contribute two rupees. Will you give two rupees, Baba?”

Harihar eagerly took the paper from his son’s hand and began to read. He had not known his son could write. It was a well-crafted story about a prince’s hunt. Pleased, Harihar propped himself up on his pillow and said, “You wrote this, Khoka?”

“I’ve written lots of other things, Baba. Ghost stories, stories about princesses. Back home, I used to write things for Ranu-di in her notebook.”

Hearing the mention of money, Sarbajaya was unwilling to give it. With her husband sick, whatever little they had would not be enough for household expenses; there was no need for a printed paper. Harihar reasoned with her and made her give the money, saying, “Let him have it. Ah, let the boy’s piece be printed. Once I’m better and on a convalescent diet, that Bhagabat reading at the Thakur Bari is a sure thing. I’ll get a good ten rupees from that, too.”

Two days later, Apu, his face crestfallen and his red lips in a pout, came quietly to his father’s side and whispered, “It didn’t work out, Baba. The people at the printing press asked for too much money, so they announced at school today that they need a contribution of four rupees each.”

The look of disappointment on his son’s face stabbed at Harihar’s heart. After talking about other things for a while, he said, “Go and see where your mother is, Khoka….” He took the key-ring from under his pillow and gave it to him. “Quietly open that wooden box with the stamp on it, the one where I keep my bundle of reed pens… See how many rupees are in the corner.” Then Harihar watched his son, busy opening the box, with eyes full of tenderness. So innocent, so innocent, utterly innocent! That beautiful, bright, moon-like forehead was his mother’s forehead; those eyes were his mother’s eyes. When Harihar, in his first youth, had married and brought his wife home, the very same smile of the young bride Sarbajaya was now on the untroubled, fresh face of eleven-year-old Apu.

For no reason, a sea of affection swelled and surged in Harihar’s breast, bringing tears to his eyes.

Apu was like a tender new leaf in the first days of spring. The joy on his face was like the fresh glow of dawn’s new sun. In the gaze of his large, bluish eyes, Harihar saw the boundless dreams of his own past youth, the exultant murmur of a young sal forest on a blue-green mountain… the distant music of a shoreless sea.

Apu quietly showed his father. “There are four rupees, Baba!” Harihar had put that money aside in his own box for an emergency; his wife did not know about it, so he could say with a clear conscience, “Take it, Khoka, and pay the contribution. But don’t you tell your mother.”

Apu said in a happy tone, “When it’s printed, I’ll show you, Baba. They said they’ll publish it with my name. It will come out the Monday after next.”

From the next morning, Harihar’s illness grew worse again.

Frightened, Sarbajaya said to her son, “Go and tell Nanda Babu to come and have a look.”

After examining him, Nanda Babu said, “We’ll have to call a doctor, Apurba. Tell your mother.”

In the afternoon, Nanda Babu himself brought a doctor with him. After his examination, the doctor said, “He’s caught a chill. It’s broncho-pneumonia. He needs good nursing. How can he stay in a room like this downstairs! …Khoka, bring a bottle to my dispensary, I’ll give you some medicine.”

For several days, Apu went to the doctor’s dispensary on Dashashwamedh Ghat to fetch the medicine.

There was no significant improvement. Day by day, Harihar grew weaker. Meanwhile, the few rupees they had were spent on the doctor’s visits and special diet. The doctor said that if the patient did not get at least a seer of milk and other fruit every day, he would become perilously weak. He also prescribed an imported invalid food that cost three and a half rupees. They were in a foreign land, a strange city. There was not a single person to look in on them and offer a word of courage. Sarbajaya saw only darkness all around her.

In the midst of this disaster, Sarbajaya faced a new one. By standing on the upstairs roof and leaning over, one could see into her cooking area. She had occasionally seen Nanda Babu peeking towards her kitchen from the roof before, but since Harihar’s illness, he had grown much bolder. On various pretexts, he would come into their room ten times a day. Before, he would ask questions using Apu as a screen; now he addressed her directly. At first, Sarbajaya had thought nothing of it—in fact, she had felt grateful that this unrelated man was helping so much during this time of trouble. But gradually, she began to feel that this over-attentiveness was somehow out of place. Nanda Babu would buy paan himself, place it before her, and say, “Having the servants prepare my paan—my life is ruined, Bouthakrun. Won’t you prepare one for me?” Even this Sarbajaya had not found fault with; rather, she had felt a little pity for this sojourner deprived of a family’s affection. But the familiarity was beginning to cross the line of decency. Nowadays he would bring the paan and say, “Here, take this, Bouthakrun!” as if he wanted Sarbajaya to take it directly from his hand. Apu was a will-o’-the-wisp—most of the time he was nowhere to be found in the house. In the other room, Harihar lay unconscious. And it was precisely at these times that Nanda Babu would come into the room, ostensibly to see the patient. He would not leave without spending half an hour on this pretext or that. He would say, “Don’t you worry about a thing, Bouthakrun. I’m right upstairs. Whether Apurba is here or not, just call out from the top of those stairs! In a crisis, one can’t be so particular… Give me a little lime, will you? No spatula? …Ah, can’t you just give me a little on your fingertip…”

Whenever Harihar regained consciousness, he would grow restless for his son. Looking this way and that, he would ask in a faint voice, “Where’s Khoka? Where’s Khoka!…” Sarbajaya would say, “He’s coming. Does that wretched boy ever sit by his side for a moment… He must have gone out to that ghat.” When the boy came home, she would demand, “Can’t you sit near him for a little while!… He’s driving himself mad calling ‘Khoka, Khoka’—and you, you’re not losing any sleep over it! Go on, go sit with him. Can’t you even stroke his head and his body a little? Is this how a son earns his passage to heaven?”

Apu, looking abashed, would sit by his father’s head. But after sitting for only a little while, he would think—Ohh. How long am I supposed to stay here? This is just great. I suppose I’m not allowed to go for a walk or play at all. His feet would grow numb in the biting cold. His mind would strain at its leash, longing to break free—to run all the way to Dashashwamedh Ghat. The gleam of the water, the clean, open air, the crowd of well-dressed men and women. Patu… Subir… Gulu… Patal—Paltu’s big brother. The Raja of Ramnagar’s great mayurpankhi boat—there was to be a race again today, at four in the afternoon! Fidgeting and restless, he would let the evening come on out of shame, not daring to leave for fear of his mother.

One morning, Sarbajaya said to her son, “Listen, do you know which chhatra is next to that white building?”

“No—”

“You haven’t eaten at a chhatra even once since we came here? When you come to Kashi you’re supposed to eat at a chhatra, didn’t you know? Why don’t you go eat there today? …Or just go have a look?”

“Why do you have to eat at a chhatra when you come to Kashi?”

“It’s a pious act—today, after you bathe at Dashashwamedh Ghat, go straight to the chhatra and have your meal, understand?”

At noon, Apu returned home after eating at the charity kitchen. His mother was sitting on the veranda outside the kitchen, eating something from a small bowl. Seeing him, she first tried to hide it, but Apu had come too close—thinking that hiding it would only arouse suspicion, she tried to ask in a casual tone, “You’ve eaten? How was the food?”

His mother was eating soaked arhar dal.

“Not good—some horrid mash of pumpkin—and you have to sit and wait forever. All the people who go to eat there wear such filthy clothes—I’m not going again, I don’t need the religious merit. What’s that you’re eating, Ma? Are you observing a vow? Haven’t you cooked?”

“Today is my Kulai-Chandi brata—just these few lentils, soaked. I find them quite delicious, I love them… Would you like to try some this evening?”

That night, too, no cooking was done. His mother said, “Just try the soaked arhar dal, won’t you? You’ll see, it’s quite nice. I didn’t cook this evening. You eat so little anyway, just a few grains of rice is all you sit down to—after eating that, would you have been able to eat anything else?”

The next afternoon, Nanda Babu gave Apu a sheaf of betel leaves and said, “Go get these prepared by your mother, will you?” In the room next to the sickroom, Sarbajaya was preparing the leaves. Nanda Babu came down from upstairs, the sound of his shoes announcing his arrival, and entered the sickroom. A moment later, he came out and entered the room where Sarbajaya was. Having been awake all night, Sarbajaya had been nodding off; the sound of the shoes startled her awake, and seeing Nanda Babu directly in front of her, she shrank back and pulled her veil down over her face. Nanda Babu said, “Are the betel leaves ready, Bouthakrun?” Silently, Sarbajaya pushed the plate of prepared betel rolls towards him. Nanda Babu picked one up and put it in his mouth, saying, “You use far too little lime in your betel, Bouthakrun. Move aside, let me get some myself—”

The betel box was right beside Sarbajaya’s lap. There was no one else in the house; Apu had gone out somewhere. In the next room, Harihar was sleeping under the influence of his medicine. The afternoon was silent. Suddenly, it seemed to Sarbajaya that Nanda Babu, on the pretext of taking some lime, was trying to press unnecessarily close to her. With a choked cry, she leaped up in an instant and stood outside the doorway. A current like lightning shot through her from foot to head. Pointing a finger towards the stairs, she said in a sharp voice, “Go upstairs this instant! And don’t you ever come downstairs again! If you come down, I’ll smash my head on the ground and kill myself! Why do you come here? I’m warning you, don’t come again!”

Sarbajaya found herself in a terrible predicament. A foreign place, a sick man in the house—she was helpless, without a single paisa to her name, not a familiar soul in any direction, her son only eleven years old—and a simpleton at that, utterly guileless. And on top of it all, this sort of trouble.

The Punjabi woman from upstairs came down only on rare occasions. Once or twice she had taken Sarbajaya up to her rooms, but even after five or six months in Kashi, Sarbajaya could neither speak Hindi nor understand it well, so conversation had never flourished. Today, however, she went to her and, telling her the whole story of the incident with Nanda Babu, burst into tears. The Punjabi woman’s name was Surajkuanri; she and her husband were both from Rohtas district in the Punjab, and her husband worked as an overseer on the railway. Although not very young, the woman looked youthful; she was fair-skinned, with large eyes and a tall, slender, well-proportioned figure. After hearing everything, she said, “Don’t you worry at all. You stay here without fear. If you see any more signs of his wickedness, you tell me. I’ll have my husband cut his nose off and set him straight.”

It was the middle of the day. After so many sleepless nights, Sarbajaya had spread the end of her sari on the floor and fallen fast asleep. A sliver of sunlight, entering through the window of the north room, fell at an angle across the narrow courtyard. Apu had planted some marigolds in an earthen pot; two or three single-petaled flowers had bloomed, looking utterly cheerless. A kitten was sitting at the base of the pot. Apu was sitting by his father’s bedside. His father had been a little better since morning—the doctor had said that perhaps there was hope for his life now. But even though he was better, the patient did not seem to be fully conscious; he was in a stupor. His father suddenly opened his eyes, stared at him for a while, and said something. It seemed to Apu that his father was asking him to move closer. As Apu moved, Harihar, with his two thin, wasted hands, wrapped them around his son’s neck and, in silence, stared at his face with a fixed gaze for a long time. Apu was a little taken aback; he had never seen such a look in his father’s eyes before.

At ten o’clock that night, a sound woke the sleeping Apu. A dim light was burning in the room. His mother was in a deep sleep. From his father’s throat, a strange, multi-toned sound seemed to be emerging. Apu felt a prickle of fear. The soot-covered beams, the damp floor, the bone-chilling cold, the smoke from the charcoal fire—it all combined to form a nightmare. If only his father’s illness would end, what a relief it would be.

In the last watch of the night, he was woken by his mother’s shaking. “Apu, oh Apu, get up! Quickly, go upstairs and call the Hindustani woman down!”

Getting up, Apu heard that the sound from his father’s throat had grown louder. A little while after Surajkuanri came down, at four o’clock in the morning, Harihar died.

On a rain-swept, mist-shrouded day in the middle of the monsoon, does one not wonder: were the sun-drenched days of the world a dream, or were they real? This cloud, this dark time—will they be one’s only companions on the infinite path of the future? Like a mirage on the horizon, the days of Chaitra and Baisakh have faded into the past—can they ever return?

From all sides, a kind of fog closed in around Sarbajaya. Through it, she could not see the path, could not recognize a companion, could not know where she was. A doubt crept in: perhaps this fog would not lift even when the sun rose with the day; perhaps behind it lay the pale grey, sky-swallowing clouds of an unseasonable, all-day rain.

In her time of trouble, the Punjabi overseer Jalim Singh and his wife were of enormous help. Jalim Singh skipped work at his office to go around the Bengali quarter looking for men to help with the last rites. Hearing the news, a few volunteers from the Ramakrishna Mission also arrived.

At Manikarnika Ghat, after the cremation was over, Apu bathed in the evening and, shivering in the cold west wind, climbed the steps. A volunteer from the Ramakrishna Mission and Nanda Babu were draping an uttariya shawl over his shoulders. The day was almost gone; the fading light of the setting sun glinted only on the very tops of the stone temples. Bewildered by the day’s events, it seemed to Apu that he could hear his father’s familiar voice, reciting before an eager audience of listeners—

Kāle varṣatu parjanyaṁ pṛthivī śasyasālinī… Lokāḥ santu nirāmayāḥ…

The father whom they had all brought to Manikarnika Ghat to be cremated today—that father, defeated by illness, by the battle of life, was only a dream. Apu did not know him, was not acquainted with him. His own father—the constant, familiar pillar of his life, the smiling father he had known since his first memories—was sitting somewhere, just as he did every day, his beautiful voice singing a benediction in the wistful strains of a Purabi raga—

Kāle varṣatu parjanyaṁ pṛthivī śasyasālinī… Lokāḥ santu nirāmayāḥ…