Page:Tales of Bengal (Sita and Santa Chattopadhyay).djvu/22

Tales of Bengal her forehead was partly grey but she was still quite straight and strong. The boy was about six or seven years old and the girl was about twelve or thirteen. She was dark, thin and tall, with big round expressionless eyes which seemed for ever at a loss to make anything out of anything, and her broad forehead looked all the larger for her hair having been drawn back as far as it could be and tied into a knot behind her head. It was a huge knot. Not by any profusion of hair but because it was of the shape of a large hollow circle which encircled a stock of hair-pins. Or, shall I say, it was like a wheel in which the rim was of hair and the spokes of iron pins? Her eyes were remarkably pacific but blank, devoid of any stamp of intelligence; as if waiting for some one to give them meaning. She was not well dressed and the few signs of her or her mother's attempt at fashion added much to her homeliness. The girl entered the carriage, wet through and through, and remained standing in a corner. Her mother made just enough room to seat herself and her son and so the girl stuck to her post with a shapeless but by no means weightless bundle dangling from her arm. "Kalo," said the mother, "why are you standing? Sit down."

But she did not think it necessary to enquire where she was to sit down. The obedient girl found a solution of the problem by squatting down plump upon the flooded floor of the compartment. It never entered her head that she had as much right to find a seat for herself on a bench as other people, and her plain appearance, made more unattractive through careless dressing, stimulated nobody's sympathy enough to invite her to any seat that remained undiscovered.

The inquisitive soul which lurked behind the corpulence of Tara-didi, had become very restive at the possibility of gaining some new knowledge from this last addition Rh