BY P. S. N. SARMA

Life at Tiruttur moved like a barrow on rusted wheels, with that sickly monotony patent to our villages. Sarada would have loathed it, had she known there were other lives to be lived–but then her world was a little one. She took to the village as she took to the other prosaic details of her life–as, for instance, she took to her husband. He was an accident on her

way, though a very serious accident; a big burly man who gave her a vague sense of fear and a vague sense of duty though she could not help feeling sometimes, however profane the feeling, that he would have been a far better bargain as an uncle or somebody rather than a husband. She got accustomed to him, as one gets accustomed to a changeless presence, and much of her time was spent in his service. Then there was the kitchen where something always needed doing. And the river-ghat whence she fetched the water for daily use, where she met the other women from the village, and everybody talked of everybody else, and she got her dose of scandal which kept her going for the day. Among these, her husband, the kitchen, and the village gossip, her life went its diurnal round.

There were interludes, but few and far between. Somebody’s daughter came of age, or some body’s daughter was six months pregnant, or there were gala days at the temple, when the women went out decked like the temple-car, each taking mental notes of her neighbour’s jewellery. Or Kamala came down of an afternoon from the other end of the street–Kamala, the local doctor’s wife who sported short sleeves, who could read her Swadesamitran, who frequently attended the talkies four miles away from the village, who knew how best to wear lady-kana-kambarams, and who told them about Civil Disobedience and Rajagopalachari and all kinds of things. Or there were visitors, her husband’s relations mostly, whose advent her husband introduced with the cryptic remark, "There’s So-and-so coming to dinner today." And then she had to cut an extra plaintain leaf from the kitchen garden, polish the silverware extra, and scrub the floors with special care.

That was all the variety that was offered her, and she could pick out her spices from it as best she could. And thus her life would have run its smooth round, unbroken and complete, on to a speedy widowhood and the garrulousness of old age, and thus her unfulfilled longings would have dried up in her bones, and the whir pools of desire deep within her, of which she had no knowledge as yet, been allayed without an upheaval by the sheer force of circumstance, but for an interlude in which youth and modernity thrust their head immodestly into the fabric of her life and shook the web of her superficial calm to its very centre.

Youth and modernity came in the shape of a visitor.

There was nothing unusual in the prospect of a visitor–and she was not over-enthusiastic when her husband broke the news in her ear one day that a nephew of his, removed several times, was coming down to Tiruttur for a short stay after his University course in Madras.

She was not very imaginative and she couldn’t form any idea of what this nephew from the University might look like. Nor was she very particular about forming ideas.

Gopalan came with all the rattle with which the young University man from town makes his debut into a country kinsman’s household. A couple of trim suit cases and a tennis racked preceded him. He engaged a rickshaw at the station which, next to the doctor’s baby car, was the most fashionable conveyance in Tiruttur. He altogether made an impression, and felt very self-conscious.

Gopalan was by no means an exceptional boy, and in the city, he would not have passed for much. A tall, spare young man, with a hard-lined face, spectacled eyes sunk deep in their sockets through too much burrowing among moth-eaten tomes, straight hair parted in the middle and brushed back J. Krishnamurti way, sun-tanned skin, dressed like the Theosophists of Adyar in a long loose dhoti, an ample shirt without cuffs or collar and a folded shawl thrown carelessly over the shoulder, he was like many another young man you might meet of an evening on the promenade of the Madras beach. Suave and simple he seemed, but inside him were cataclysms. The tradition of his forbears warred with the latest stunt views hot from the brain-pan of Aldous Huxley, and his head was full of the Russian Revolution and the New Thought and Jawaharlal Nehru, and you couldn’t tell what else. A round man in a square hole, like many of his ilk, was he–this city-bred young man forced to live two lives, with his head in the clouds, but his feet on the solid earth.

Sarada watched him from behind the rails as he got down from his rickshaw and stepped into the pial. She heard him greet her husband in a cheery voice. He looked different from the people about her, and he kindled in her a feeling of newness. With a broad yawn she left the window and went about the house-work, with not a thought in her mind of her husband’s nephew, or his cheery voice, but engaged in deep speculations regarding the menu to be got ready.

She did not see him till dinner that night when he came and squatted down with her husband and she served them both. He chatted merrily and cut jokes that made even her phlegmatic husband laugh. She enjoyed his wit, but she could not laugh. For to have betrayed by sign or gesture her awareness of his presence, would have been nothing short of a sacrilege in a married woman. She had to move like a piece of machinery, for that was what her mother had done and her grandmother before her.

"You are too kind, aunt. You have killed me with all these good things. I will burst if I eat another morsel," he said at the end of the meal, addressing the atmosphere, for to address her directly would have been outre.

"You newfangled youngsters don’t eat half as much as we used to do in our day," observed his uncle from the lofty heights of his fifty-odd years.

You should see us at work on our Hostel Day," said Gopalan……...

So he had called her his aunt. And so she was, in a manner of speaking. It was curious, however. She, the aunt of this tall young man with spectacled eyes and the broad learned forehead, who looked so sure and self-confident, as if he knew the secrets of the earth! It was impossible. But there it was. She was just twenty-four, but she was his aunt!

She felt angry with him for calling her aunt.

Back in the conservatory after dinner–her husband always slept in the open air, on the roof of the house–she did a curious thing.

She fetched a dim mirror deep down from an old trunk and scanned her face in it. There was something old-worldish about her–a sort of shop-soiled look. Her eyes were large and dark, if a trifle tired in their expression, and her mouth was just a streak of red on her face–it was as if she once had a mouth, and now it was gone because she had no use for it. Her skin was still soft, though covered with a slightly anaemic pallor. She gathered her hair in her hands to see what it looked like–it wasn’t changed much really, it was still that tar-black mass of curls which had been her pride when she was a girl of fourteen…..Suddenly she dropped her face in her hands and cried. She had never known she was young... And that awful young man had called her his aunt. Aunt indeed!

Gopalan got bored with the village in three days, as a city-bred young man should. And it wasn’t wholly his fault, either. Tiruttur was not much of a place for ‘doing.’ It was March. The moment you left your pial, the sun came for you like an inquisitor, heaping coals of fire on your head, and scorching you to the marrow of your bone. You left the narrow street of straggling houses, and then you could see nothing but paddy fields for miles around. Brown seas of upturned earth greeted you everywhere, because the harvest was just over. Here and there a line of palmyra or a clump of mango trees broke the symmetric monotony. The half-dry river ran across like a frightened rattle-snake. Far away in the distance a line of naked hills rose into the air like so many absurdities. But all this, hills and trees, you saw only if you wanted to see. Only the paddy stressed itself into view. The broken earth was everywhere, even the dry wind seeme-laden with the scent of it. Gopalan wondered how men and women could live amid this shiftless scene, condemned to this dreary stretch of paddy land, and not go mad. Something must be gone from them, some integral part of them, and that was why they didn’t. And he remembered what enthusiastic people said about the Indian village, its beauty, its crystal simplicity, its nirvanic peace. He smiled. Its beauty was the beauty of baldness, its simplicity was something crystallized from the stagnant cess-pools of its changelessness, its peace was not a dynamic quietness, but the quietness of decay and death.

Luckily he had brought a camera with him, or he would have blasphemed the village worse still. The camera and a generous outfit of films embalmed his indignant soul a bit. He took long walks into the country and photographed whatever caught his eye. To his vegetarian nature, this shikar with the camera had all the excitement of a regular hunt.

One morning he stopped at home because the post had brought him some of his films developed and printed, and he wanted to put them by in his album. His uncle had gone on his regular inspection of the paddy fields, and he was alone in the house. He took himself to a cosy room at the back of the house, so as to be free of the pial-chatter from across the street and the yells of a troop of street-arabs who had got hold of a donkey and were experimenting on the animal’s sense of humour.

He was turning over the prints in his hand when he became aware of two steady eyes fixed on him from behind the half-open door. He turned round and saw his aunt standing timidly at the entrance. He smiled a vague smile so as to ease the situation, and went on with his work.

"Perhaps you are looking for something in the room?" said he, summoning enough boldness to speak.

"No," she answered. And added, "I was looking at those pictures."

He trembled. His aunt had never spoken to him before.

"Is that our temple gopuram?"

"Yes," he answered without looking at her.

"It is very nice," she continued awkwardly.

"You can see it better from here." He held up the photograph in his hand for her to see.

She drew nearer to him, and he could almost feel her draw a deep breath. There was a strong scent of jasmine about her, and looking closer he could see that she had done her hair with special care. Her eyes were pitch-black with eye-paint, and the betel stain on her lips matched the kum-kum on her fore-head.

"It is wonderful!" she said, extending her hand for the print which he held out to her. "Where did you buy it?"

"I photographed it," he replied with a touch of pride.

"you?"

"Yes I, why not?" He laughed, feeling quite at ease, once the ice was broken.

"And all that is your handiwork?"

"So it would appear."

"You are very clever."

"Come, Take a look at my collection," he said, placing his album in her hand.

She turned over the pages, thrilled, He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Her eyes danced with joy, she was brimming over with mirth like a child let loose in a toy-shop. There was something sad in the prospect too. What was she better than a child? A child who had grown into a woman without knowing it–who had never looked life in the face, but gone on existing, just existing, amid the drowsy desolation of the village.

She often found opportunities to engage him in conversation after that.

"Isn’t it horrid?"

She was visibly shocked. What he was telling her seemed nothing short of a scandal. She had been pumping him as usual for odd bits of information about his life in the city. He had just told her that his college was a mixed one.

"I don’t see anything horrid in it. Things look horrid only when you have gone on believing they are horrid."

"All the same I am sure it is very wicked."

"You are mistaken, aunt. I shall tell you about a certain girl in my class. She lost her husband when she was twelve, but her father couldn’t stand by and see her go to pieces, so he put her to school. She is with us now, as gay and sprightly a girl as you could meet anywhere. Don’t you think it is her right to be gay? Don’t you think it would have been cruel to keep her shut up for life in a conservatory or a kitchen, all for no fault of hers?"

He warmed up to his subject, and she listened to him as to some superior being. He did not know that she was an impressionable woman in spite of her prejudices, that his vigorous ideas were burning themselves into her virgin mind, kindling unknown longings in her bones.

"You see, things have been forced down our throats from our very births, and we just take them for granted. We never stop to question. Who said it is improper for a girl to attend a boys’ school? Some scared old men and some scared old widows probably….You have only got to see how perfectly boys and girls get along together in a mixed institution, and you will see the old widows were frightfully wrong. Last year, for instance, we planned an excursion to a place called Krusadi island……."

He opened his suit-case, and showed her a snap of a couple of college-girls collecting specimens on a hill-side, while a handful of boys and girls watched them from somewhere in the background.

She asked him a strange question:

"Let go your college-girls. Will you do me a favour? I have been wanting to ask you all these days."

She blushed deeply, and there was a look of appeal in her eyes which disturbed him.

"You go on photographing everything you see–hills, trees, temples, college-girls, all odds and ends. Won’t you take a photo of your aunt?"

She drawled out her words like a petted child. He blushed in his turn. He felt very ill at ease, but could see no way of denying her request.

"All right. Wait a minute. Let me see if my camera is ready. Stand near that window–no, a bit this side. That is good."

Click!

He had been growing suspicious. His uncle had no notion of the conversations he was having with his aunt behind the old man’s back. He did not like to do things on the sly, but commonsense told him he had to. When, at the end of the week, he announced at dinner his intention of leaving the village the next evening, he was prompted more by a sense of guilt than of boredom.

His uncle pressed him to stay, but he would not.

He went to bed with a stilled conscience. A swarm of mosquitoes kept up a disgusting trill round his head, stilled conscience or no, and he could not go to sleep. He lighted a lamp and tried to read a newspaper. The night was well on its way, but there was a half-moon which he could see through the window. The village had retired to rest, and the air was without a murmur. Above him on the roof of the house, he could hear his uncle snoring away as if nothing short of an earthquake could wake him.

He threw away his paper, and lay in bed thinking, thinking. He was always thinking. Heaven knew what he was thinking about–he didn’t. It was just a modern disease.

He heard the door move gingerly on its hinges behind him. Vague, suspicions rose like dark spectres in his mind. He got up trembling–it was as he had dreaded.

It was Sarada.

In the pale glare of the little oil-lamp he saw that she was trying to smile–but the attempt was a caricature.

They stood looking at each other for a minute, unable to speak. He wanted to be harsh and severe, but confronted with something he had never bargained for, he was too stunned to reprimand. Perhaps not merely stunned; for a gnawing fire somewhere in his centre conspired with the tempting darkness, and spurred him on to foolishness....There was desire in her eyes, but she was pale, quivering as if she were frightened of herself. She looked more like a supplicant than like a temptress.

It was she who broke the pregnant silence.

"You are going to-morrow?"

"Yes."

"You never told me. Must you go so soon?"

"Yes."

Something tugged at his throat–he could not speak except in monosyllables. He nerved himself to speak his mind.

"Why have you come here? What will happen if somebody should see us?" he blurted out.

And he repented the brutal severity of his words, the moment he had said them.

For answer she raised her large, lustrous eyes to his–and then, as if the windows of her soul had opened for an instant, he understood. He turned away from that look as from a flash-light. Instinctively he moved towards the window.

That look was a little poem. It spoke of the agony of her desolation, and of the dark fires of desire which had lain smouldering within her for years, but had leapt up now in flames fanned by some unknown hand, driving her helpless, blind, frenzied, to him.

Now she was behind him and he could almost feel her hot breath on his hair. It intoxicated him. Suddenly she whipped out a hand and caught his in an unnerving grip. The flower-like feel of her fingers sent a thrill up his blood–but he fought against it.

"Let go of my hand," he cried, hoarse with madness, not anger.

"No, you mustn’t talk to me like that. I will die if you turn me out."

She looked as if she meant it. His passion crumbled and left him. A moment ago he was not sure of himself, there was a little spirit biting at his vitals; but now the path of duty appeared to him clear as a railway-track. Pity came to his rescue, pity the destroyer of Love. With pity came logic.

He tore himself from her grasp and left the room. He sought the open air of the terrace. He wanted to think. He thought. Could he indict her for what she had done? he asked

himself. "No," came the prompt answer.

All round him the moonlight poured down like a heavy rain. The village lay still and hushed, a dead child in the arms of night. He could see the crude homesteads crouching in the half-light like ghosts, where, as the moon gave place to the dawn, life would stir once again and wriggle forth to go its soulless rounds again–where men would huddle round a betel-box or a pack of cards gossiping, where cubistic women little better than bits of machinery would chatter for ever of births, marriages and pregnancies, where death would stalk in a pseudo-form of life. In the distance the little crooked river glistened in the moonlight, lying in wait for the procession of death to begin over again. Farther on the formless fields of paddy brooded–paddy, paddy, paddy. The paddy that was the curse, the bane of village life. His old impatience came back and with it the query he had asked himself a hundred times: Could men and women live amid this changeless desolation, and not go mad? Was this the place for a young woman whose blood flowed in her veins undiluted as yet by the premature despair, miscalled resignation, which must come in the wake of defeat, which must needs follow blunted sensibilities, repressed emotion, and unfulfilled desire? Was she to blame if her elemental passions were stronger than the codes which tried to throttle her?

His eye fell on the podgy form of his kinsman who lay stretched at full length on a mat, snoring his life away as it were. He wondered if the man ever thought of his wife or of the gulf of years which separated her from him–as if that burly mass could think! Why had he married her? Probably because he wanted someone to cook and keep house for him. Probably to help a pauper out of his difficulties. What must she feel about him?………..

Was she not dying, dying every day, every hour? Was it wrong of her to make a bid for one meagre hour of life, like a moth beating its frail wings against the lamp which is its death, however hectic, melodramatic the bid?

He went back to his room, drowned in his thoughts. She sat in a corner where he had left her. She was crying. It broke his heart to see her crying. He tried to comfort her.

"You must not cry, aunt."

She repulsed him with a movement of her hand.

"Go. Don’t call me aunt. I am not your aunt."

He tried to reason with her.

"Think of what you are doing. Is it right, is it proper? Remember you are a married woman."

"You talk of right and wrong. You come to teach me. Didn’t you harangue me yesterday that it is improper to keep a woman shut up in a kitchen for her fault of being born a woman? Didn’t you tell me women should be taught to read and write like men, that they have the same needs, and they should have the same rights? Didn’t you tell me that marriage is all wrong, that men and women are men and women, and not chattels to be bought and sold? And now you come and lecture me. You are a fine man, it seems! You are loathsome. You are a hypocrite, liar!"

He saw that it was no use arguing with her–she was not in the mood to listen.

"If you knew what I am feeling! It is as if my heart will break. If you knew how much, how much you are to me! I don’t care about anything, I don’t care about my husband, I don’t care about what people will talk. O, don’t kick me out. If you leave me I will jump into the river to-morrow and kill myself. You can see my body rotting on the bank. You will have my death on your soul. Have you no pity, are you so hard-hearted?……."

She was raving–he could see that she was not mistress of herself. He put a gentle hand on her shoulder. The situation demanded tact. He murmured in her ear, ever so tenderly:

"Not to-night. Some other time. I am not leaving to-morrow."

"You promise?"

"Yes, I promise."

She sobbed a few sobs, but when she left him she was comforted.

He did go the next evening, nevertheless. He was glad to go. Sarada was not sorry that he went–the storm had spent itself in the burst.

Five years have passed since all this–and it is not much to be called ‘all this’–happened. Life still moves at Tiruttur like a barrow on rusted wheels. Brown seas of upturned earth, or green seas of paddy, still greet you everywhere, if you happen to stop at Tiruttur. The river trails along like a frightened rattle-snake. You see the same houses crouching like prophets of doom. Men still hover round a box of betel and chatter their lives away on aged pials. The women still draw on births, marriages, and pregnancies for their gossip. Sarada is a fat widow of thirty. Gopalan is just a memory with her. There are rare occasions when her mind cuts adrift from her and skips back to him; but if she thinks of him, it is just to call a blessing on his soul. For today she has no doubt that he was right.

Gopalan is a young man without work in the city. Tiruttur, Sarada, the night in which he was weighed in the balance–the drama is being reconstructed everyday in his mind. Doubt torments his soul. Was he found wanting? He thinks and thinks–it is a modern disease.

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