Page:Eyesore - Rabindranath Tagore.pdf/33

434 can he go? He must come back! He is mine!"

After a short while Mahendra, in his new lodgings, got a letter in a well-known hand. He would not open it in the midst of the turmoil of the day, but kept it over his heart in his breast pocket. As he was passing and repassing from hospital to lecture-room and lecture-room to hospital, the conceit occurred to him that a dove bearing a message of love was nestling at his breast. How softly it would coo in his ears when awakened later on!

In the evening when Mahendra was alone in his room he lit his lamp and settled himself comfortably in his chair. He then brought out the letter warm from his body. For a time he did not open the cover but kept looking at the superscription. He knew there could not be much inside. It was not likely that Asha would be able to give precise expression to her sentiments—he would have to divine her tender thoughts from her shaky letters and unsteady lines. His name in Asha's childish hand on the envelope made it seem to him set to music—the heavenly music vibrating from a loving woman's tender heart.

In these few days of separation, the weariness of constant intercourse, the irritation due to petty household worries, had completely disappeared from Mahendra's mind, and the happy memories of the days of their first love shone brightly in their place, round Asha's ideal image enshrined in their midst.

Mahendra lingered over the envelope as he slowly tore it open, and caressingly touched the letter with his lips. The paper was fragrant with his favourite scent, which entered his heart like a yearning sigh.

Mahendra unfolded the letter and began to read it. But what was this! The writing was childish, but not the language. The hand was uncertain but not the sentiments! This was the letter:

What letter was this—whose the message? Mahendra had no doubts on that score. He sat rigid and motionless with the letter in his hand, like one who is suddenly paralyzed. Pursuing one line as he had been with the full force of his emotion, this blow from the opposite direction came as a collision which threw him off and entirely crumpled him up.

He read the letter over three times. What had been a distant fancy seemed to become near and real. The comet which had dimly risen on his horizon now threatened to spread its flaming tail over the whole sky.

It was of course Binodini's. The simple Asha had imagined she was writing her own letter. Ideas which had never crossed her mind seemed to awake in her as she wrote to Binodini's dictation. "How could Binodini," she thought, "so clearly find out and put into words exactly what I was feeling." Asha felt drawn closer than ever to her bosom friend on whom she had to depend for the very words which seemed to express the pain in her heart—so helpless was she!

Mahendra left his chair with a frown. He was trying to feel angry with Binodini, but succeeded only in getting annoyed with Asha. "What a little silly!" thought he, "how trying a wife for her husband." And to prove the truth of this he sat down to read the letter over again.

He tried to read it as a letter of Asha's, but the language refused to call up for him the memory of the artless Asha. A ravishing suspicion bubbled up like wine after the first few lines. The tidings of a love, hidden yet revealed, forbidden yet proffered, poisonous yet sweet, intoxicated him. He felt he wanted to hurt himself with a knife to come back to his senses out of its overpowering influence. He brought his fist down with a bang on the table and