Page:Works of Tagore from the Modern Review, 1909-24 Segment 1.pdf/157

574 place in the days when the burning of widows was customary.

Mahamaya had been bound hand and foot and placed on the funeral pyre, to which fire was applied at the appointed time. The flames had shot up from the pile, when a violent storm and rain-shower began. Those who had come to conduct the cremation, quickly fled for refuge to the hut of dying men and shut the door. The rain put the funeral fire out in no time. Meantime the bands on Mahamaya's wrists had been burnt to ashes, setting her hands free. Without uttering a groan amidst the intolerable pain of burning, she sat up and untied her feet. Then wrapping round herself her partly burnt cloth, she rose half naked from the pyre, and first came to her own house. There was none there; all had gone to the burning-place. She lighted a lamp, put on a fresh cloth, and looked at her face in a glass. Dashing the mirror down on the ground, she mused for a while. Then she drew a long veil over her face and went to Rajib's house which was hard by. The reader knows what happened next.

True, Mahamaya now lived in Rajib's house, but there was no joy in his life. It was not much, but only a simple veil that parted the one from the other. And yet that veil was eternal like death, but more agonising than death itself; because despair in time deadens the pang of death's separation, while a living hope was being daily and hourly crushed by the separation which that veil caused.

For one thing there was a spirit of motionless silence in Mahamaya from of old; and now the hush from within the veil appeared doubly unbearable. She seemed to be living within a winding sheet of death. This silent death clasped the life of Rajib and daily seemed to shrivel it up. He lost the Mahamaya whom he had known of old, and at the same time this veiled figure ever sitting by his side silently prevented him from enshrining in his life the sweet memory of her as she was in her girlhood. He brooded,—"Nature has placed barrier enough between one human being and another. Mahamaya, in particular, has been born, like Pallas-Athene, clad in Nature's panoply; there is an innate fence round her being. And now she seems to have been born a second time and come to me with a second line of fences round herself. Ever by my side, she yet has become so remote as to be no longer within my reach. I am sitting outside the inviolable circle of her magic and trying, with an unsatiated thirsty soul, to penetrate this thin but unfathomable mystery,—as the stars wear out the hours night after night in the vain attempt to pierce (the mystery of) the dark Night with their sleepless winkless downcast gaze."

Long did these two companionless lonely creatures thus pass their days together.

One night, on the tenth day of the new moon, the clouds withdrew for the first time in that rainy season, and the moon showed herself. The motionless moon-lit Night seemed to be sitting in a vigil by the head of the sleeping world. That night Rajib too had quitted his bed and sat gazing out of his window. From the heat-oppressed woodland a peculiar scent and the lazy hum of the cricket were entering into his room. As he gazed, the sleeping tank by the dark rows of trees glimmered like a polished silver plate. It is hard to say whether man at such a time thinks any clearly defined thought. Only his heart rushes in a particular direction,—it sends forth an effusion of odour like the woodland, it utters a cricket-hum like the Night. What Rajib was thinking of I know not; but it seemed to him that that night all the old laws had been set aside; that day the rainy season's Night had drawn aside her veil of clouds, and this Night looked silent, beautiful and grave like the Mahamaya of those early days. All the currents of his being flowed impetuously together towards that Mahamaya.

Like one moving in a dream, Rajib entered Mahamaya's bed-room. She was asleep then.

He stood by her side and stooped down to gaze on her,—the moonbeams had fallen on her face, But, O the horror! where was that face known of old? The flame of the funeral pyre, with its ruthless greedy tongue had utterly licked away a beauteous piece from the left cheek of Mahamaya and left there only the trace of its hunger.

Did Rajib start? Did a muffled cry escape from his lips? Probably so. Mahamaya woke up with a start—and saw Rajib