42

When Rajlakshmi heard that Mahendra had left the conjugal bed in the night, she was exceedingly angry with her daughter-in-law. She concluded that Mahendra had gone away because of some provocation from Asha. She asked Asha, "Why did Mahendra leave last night?" Asha lowered her face and said, "I do not know, Ma." Rajlakshmi took this for wounded pride as well.

Irritated, she said, "You do not know --- then who is to know? Did you say something to him?" Asha said only, "No." Rajlakshmi did not believe her.

How could that possibly be true?

"When did Mahin leave yesterday?" she asked.

Asha shrank into herself and said, "I do not know." Rajlakshmi flew into a rage.

"You know nothing! A perfect innocent! All cleverness with you." It was Asha's own conduct and failings of character, Rajlakshmi declared in sharp tones, that had driven Mahendra from the house.

Asha bore the reprimand with her head bowed, then went to her room and wept. She thought to herself: "Why my husband once loved me, I cannot tell; and how I might win back his love, I cannot say either." When a man loves, the heart itself knows how to please him; but when a man does not love --- how to win such a heart back --- what did Asha know of that?

To go begging for tenderness from a man whose tenderness is pledged elsewhere --- could any effort be more shameful? How could she bring herself to do it? At dusk, the family astrologer and his sister, the Acharya's wife, came to the house. Rajlakshmi had summoned them on account of her son's afflicted stars. She asked the astrologer to look at her daughter-in-law's horoscope and read her palm, and had Asha brought and seated before him. Asha, acutely embarrassed at having her misfortune discussed before strangers, sat with barely extended hand, when Rajlakshmi heard, from the unlit verandah beside her room, a soft shuffling of footsteps --- someone attempting to pass through unobserved.

"Who is there?" she called.

At first there was no reply. She called again: "Who goes?" Then, without a word, Mahendra came into the room.

Asha felt no gladness --- the sight of Mahendra's shame filled her own heart with shame. Mahendra must now enter his own house like a thief. The presence of the astrologer and his sister made it worse. The shame she felt before all the world on behalf of her husband --- this had grown heavier to bear than even her own grief. When Rajlakshmi said softly to her daughter-in-law, "Bou-ma, tell Parbati to have Mahin's food laid out," Asha replied, "Ma, I will see to it myself." Even from the eyes of the household servants she wished to shield Mahendra.

Meanwhile, at the sight of the astrologer and his sister, Mahendra felt intense irritation within himself. That his mother and wife should conspire shamelessly with these uneducated simpletons to subdue him by supernatural means --- this Mahendra found intolerable. When the Acharya's wife asked, with an excess of honeyed sweetness in her voice, "Are you well, my dear?" --- Mahendra could no longer sit still.

Without answering the inquiry, he said, "Mother, I am going upstairs for a moment." His mother assumed that Mahendra wished to speak to his wife in the privacy of their bedroom.

Delighted, she hurried to the kitchen and told Asha: "Go, go quickly upstairs --- I think Mahin needs something." Asha went upstairs, her heart knocking with apprehension.

From what her mother-in-law had said, she had imagined that Mahendra had called for her. But she could not simply walk into the room --- before entering, she stood in the dark behind the doorpost and watched Mahendra. Mahendra was lying on the low bed with his head propped against a bolster, his heart utterly empty, staring up at the ceiling joists. So this was Mahendra --- the same man, the same room, everything the same --- and yet what a transformation. This very small bedchamber Mahendra had once made into a paradise --- why was he now defiling this room consecrated by the memory of that happiness?

So much pain, so much ill-humour, so much restlessness --- if this is what you bring, then sit no more upon that bed, Mahendra. Even in coming here, if you cannot remember those nights that were filled to overflowing, those deep and close noons, those days of thick monsoon rain when all work and all the world were forgotten, those trembling spring evenings stirred by the south wind, those words without number and without name --- then there are other rooms in this house; but in this small room, not one moment more.

The longer Asha stood watching Mahendra in the dark, the more deeply she felt that he had come straight from Binodini; that Binodini's touch was on his body, Binodini's face before his eyes, Binodini's voice in his ears, Binodini's longing clinging to his very mind and soul. How could Asha offer this Mahendra the pure devotion of worship? How could she say with a single heart: "Come, enter this utterly faithful heart of mine, place your feet upon the white lotus of my steadfast wifely love"?

She could obey neither her aunt's counsel, nor the Puranic teaching, nor the dictates of scripture --- in this Mahendra, fallen from the heaven of their married life, she could no longer feel the presence of her god. That night, into the ocean of Binodini's disgrace, she committed her heart's deity; and in that loveless darkness, in her ears and in her breast, in her mind, through every vein of her body, about her on every side, in the stars above, on the enclosed roof she knew so well, beneath the deserted and bereaved bed in her bridal chamber, there sounded with a terrible and solemn anguish the music of immersion --- the casting away.

Binodini's Mahendra was to Asha like a stranger --- more than a stranger; a man who was not even a stranger and yet was utterly shameful to approach. She could not enter the room. Presently Mahendra's distracted gaze descended from the ceiling joists to the wall before him. Following his eyes, Asha saw --- beside Mahendra's photograph on the opposite wall, her own photograph hung. She wanted to spring forward, wrap it in the end of her sari, snatch it away. Why had she not noticed it before, out of sheer habit --- why had she not taken it down long ago?

The thought filled her with contempt for herself. She imagined Mahendra smiling inwardly, and Binodini's image, enthroned in his heart, casting a laughing sidelong glance from beneath her arched brows at that photograph on the wall. At last Mahendra's restless gaze came down from the wall. Of late, Asha had taken to studying --- in the evenings, whenever she had a little respite from household duties and attendance upon her mother-in-law, she would sit alone and read until late at night, that she might overcome her ignorance.

Her notebooks and books were stacked in one corner of the room. On an idle impulse, Mahendra reached over and pulled out one of the notebooks, opened it, and began to look through it. Asha wanted to scream and rush in and snatch it away. Imagining Mahendra's heartless, mocking gaze upon her childish, uncertain handwriting, she could not remain there another moment. She turned away quickly and went downstairs --- without even troubling to muffle her footstep. Mahendra's supper had been entirely prepared.

Rajlakshmi had been assuming that Mahendra was engaged in intimate conversation with his wife, and had been reluctant to interrupt them by carrying the food up. Seeing Asha come downstairs, she had the meal brought into the dining room and informed Mahendra. The moment Mahendra rose to eat, Asha flew into the bedroom, tore down her own photograph, flung it over the parapet of the roof, and swiftly gathered up all her notebooks and carried them away. After the meal, Mahendra came and sat in the bedroom.

Rajlakshmi searched for her daughter-in-law in the adjoining rooms without finding her; eventually she came downstairs to the kitchen and found Asha there, boiling milk for her. There was no need for it --- the maidservant who ordinarily boiled Rajlakshmi's milk each night was near at hand, and was voicing protest against Asha's uncalled-for enthusiasm; for she was privately agitated at the prospect of losing the small portion of milk she was accustomed to replenish with water.

"What is this, Bou-ma?" said Rajlakshmi.

"Why are you here? Go, go upstairs." Asha went up and took shelter in her mother-in-law's room.

Rajlakshmi was displeased with her daughter-in-law's behaviour. She thought: "If by some miracle Mahendra has managed to break free of that enchantress for a moment and come home, here is his wife sulking and standing on her dignity, doing her best to drive him away again. That Mahendra has been caught in Binodini's net is Asha's own fault. Men are naturally disposed to go astray --- it is the wife's duty to keep her husband on the right path by whatever means she can --- by tact, by will, by skill."

"What sort of behaviour is this, Bou-ma?" said Rajlakshmi sharply.

"When your good fortune has sent your husband home, why are you skulking in corners with a face like a clay pot?" Asha, stung into a sense of her own guilt, went upstairs with a goad in her heart, and without giving herself a moment to hesitate, walked straight into the room in one breath.

It was past ten o'clock. Mahendra was standing before the bed, shaking the mosquito net at unnecessary length with a preoccupied expression. A sharp resentment against Binodini had risen in him. He was saying to himself: "Has Binodini so entirely assumed my servility that she felt not the least unease at sending me to Asha? If I were to fulfil my duty to Asha from this day forward, upon whom would Binodini depend in the world? Am I so worthless that such an act of duty is quite beyond me? Is this the impression of me that Binodini carries away at the end? I have lost her respect; I have not gained her love; she did not hesitate to humiliate me." Standing before the mosquito net, Mahendra was steeling himself with the resolve to rebuke Binodini's insolence --- somehow to turn his heart towards Asha, and so take revenge for the humiliation she had dealt him.

The moment Asha came into the room, Mahendra's absent shaking of the mosquito net stopped. How to begin speaking to her --- this presented itself as a most intractable problem. Mahendra forced a wooden smile, and said the first thing that came to his lips.

"I see you have been applying yourself to your studies as I have to mine. There were notebooks here --- where have they gone?" The remark was not merely ill-timed --- it struck Asha like a blow.

The fact that foolish Asha was attempting to educate herself was her most private secret --- she had decided it was simply absurd. If anything was a matter to be concealed even from the faintest suggestion of someone's laughter, then above all from Mahendra. When Mahendra, after so long a separation, chose this very subject as his first greeting --- and smiled as he did so --- Asha's whole mind contracted and ached, like the tender body of a child struck by a cruel cane. She made no reply; she turned away and stood holding the edge of the side-table.

Mahendra knew the instant it was uttered that the remark was neither apt nor timely --- but what would have been apt in the present circumstances he could not, for the life of him, determine. After so great an upheaval, no ordinary word sounded natural; his heart was utterly mute and unready to utter anything new. He thought: "Once I get inside the mosquito net, perhaps in that enclosing privacy it will be easier to speak." And so he began to smooth the outer fringe of the net again.

Like an actor new to the stage who stands nervously in the wings before his entrance, rehearsing his lines in his mind, Mahendra stood before the mosquito net turning over what he meant to say and do. Then a very soft sound made him look up --- Asha was no longer in the room.