BY PROF. N. S. PHADKE, M.A.

Menaka started.

There was a knock at the door.

She hastened to wipe her tears, and to thrust in her pocket the letter that had made her so miserable.

Then picking up one of the books that lay in a neglected heap on the table, and holding it as if she had been reading it, she summoned a cheerful voice to ask, ‘Who’s that?’

‘It’s me–Leela.’

‘Come in.’

Leela entered in a flutter, and instantly started her rebuke. ‘What do you mean by thus staying away? Everybody else is there. Everything is ready. Even the camera is set. They are all regretting and wondering at your absence. At last they sent me to fetch you. Come…..’

‘Please don’t…..’ pleaded Menaka.

Don’t be silly. We’ll soon take our degrees, and scatter away–perhaps never to meet again. Didn’t we intend this photograph as a sort of parting function? What charm can it have without you–the cleverest girl in our class, and the pride of everybody? Come now....’

‘She brushed the book from Menaka’s hand, and made a smile even more convincing than her urgent words. She expected Menaka to smile in return, and get up.

But Menaka neither moved nor smiled. She only whispered, ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Leela. I can’t join the photograph………’

‘But why?’ with great surprise.

Leela gazed at her friend, and thought there were traces of tears on her beautiful cheeks. She moved forward, and framing Menaka’s lovely face with her hands, asked, ‘You were crying?’

‘Who?…..What an idea?’ Menaka laughed feebly.

But Leela was not to be deceived. She persisted, ‘Tell me the truth.’

‘But I’m really all right.’

‘You aren’t, I know. Swear on my heart, and tell me. Weren’t you crying when I knocked?’

Menaka had then to confess the truth with a nod.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Leela.

‘It’s no use telling.’ Menaka bit her lip.

‘Even me?’ Leela drew her close to her bosom.

Menaka made no reply. Only her eye-lashes flickered under the weight of tears.

Leela mopped her eyes with her own handkerchief. ‘Please, let me know what’s troubling you. Won’t you? Are you angry with me?’

‘Don’t be a fool.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘Nothing much. Only I’ve to decide not to appear for the examination. I won’t fill up my form. And that’s why I can’t join the photograph.’

‘What do you mean?’ with utter surprise.

Leela was hugely surprised, and in addition to it she became deeply perplexed when Menaka refused to divulge the cause of her decision not to go up for the examination. She made a hundred wild guesses but to no purpose. She simply couldn’t understand it. Menaka was the best scholar in the class. It was therefore impossible that she was not well prepared for the examination. Nor was Menaka a daughter of rich parents who could afford to treat the examination as a luxury to enjoy at leisure. On the contrary, it was imperative for her to take the degree this year. An orphan brought up on charity, Menaka had careered through the school and the college on the strength of the scholarships she won. And during the last two years, when she had given herself the benefit of hostel life, she had worked extra hard giving tuitions to earn enough for the hostel expenses. She had nobody in this wide world except an elder sister. It was obvious, therefore, that Menaka must be impatient to grab the graduation degree, and step into independent life. In fact she had always said so……………

Why had she then decided not to fill up the form? …………….

Leela couldn’t see. And though she tried all her wiles, she couldn’t induce Menaka to tell her secret.

At last on the third day Leela used the most infallible feminine trick. With tears in the eyes, and a sob in the throat, she said to Menaka, ‘All right, don’t tell me. Why should you if you don’t care for me.’

On which Menaka put her arms round her neck. ‘Sh! You mustn’t talk such non-sense.’

Leela inwardly chuckled to find her trick working. But she showed no sign of her delight. On the contrary, she put a greater tremor in her voice as she said, ‘I will talk non- sense. I know you haven’t an atom of love for me. I love you so. But I’m a fool to do so when you don’t care for my feelings……….’

Here she had to stop. For Menaka put her hand on her lips, saying, ‘O how could you ever say this……….’

Leela waited for Menaka to withdraw her hand. Then she asked, ‘Tell me then. Why have you decided not to appear for the exam.?’

‘All right, I’ll tell you. But you must make a promise.’

‘Let’s know.’

‘You mustn’t give out to anybody what I’ll tell you.’

‘O, trust me.’

Menaka took a letter from the drawer, and handed it to Leela. ‘From my sister. Read it.’

It was a sad letter, containing the news of a sudden calamity on Menaka’s sister. The poor woman’s husband, who was a common schoolmaster in a small district town, lay seriously ill. It was a case of cancer, and doctors advised immediate operation. This meant huge expenses, and Menaka’s sister had not a penny to spare. She wrote:

‘I must ask for your help, though I know it’s a shame to do so. Being your elder sister I should have helped you all along. But I’m not fortunate enough to be able to fulfill that duty. We’re already in debt upto the neck, having had to run a home for a big family on a miserable income. This operation is the only thing that can save my husband. And it can’t be done unless I get ready hundred and fifty rupees at the least. So I’ve no recourse left but to beg for your assistance. Please send me as much as you can…..’

Leela finished the letter, and looked at Menaka.

‘Now look at this’, said Menaka, giving her a Bank Book.

Leela stared. There were Rs. 63-6-9 standing to Menaka’s account.

Menaka asked, ‘Do you now understand why I decided not to fill up the examination form?’

‘You’re a great girl, Menaka’ clapping her on shoulder.

‘O, no. I’m simply doing my plain duty.’

‘Well, I don’t know. You were terribly impatient to get through this examination. Your last fence to clear, you always said. Didn’t you? The hour had arrived when your long labour would be rewarded. But now....’

‘But isn’t this too a fine reward to be able to help my sister?’, Menaka exclaimed, and made a captivating smile.

It was a false smile, Leela knew.

Leela kept thinking of poor, unlucky Menaka, and that made her restless. Nothing interested her. Friends were boring, and books positively hateful. At last in the evening she decided to try a chat with her cousin, Manohar, and left the hostel.

Manohar was a bank clerk, and lived in bachelor rooms in one of the suburbs of Bombay. A very likeable fellow, his friends described him. Leela thoroughly agreed with this view. Manohar was a convincing proof, she always told people, that you could always keep smiling in spite of the pinch of poverty. Whenever she ran out of her cheerfulness, she would run down to him for a fresh stock.

She found him in his rooms thumbing the pages of a few illustrated catalogues of musical instruments.

She laughed. ‘Shall I compliment you on the profound literature in your hands?’

Manohar waved the catalogues at her. ‘These are really very profound books, Leela. Too deep for me to fathom. For every company shouts at me that its products are the best and the cheapest in the market, so that having looked into all these amusing books I’ve lost my head, and can’t decide which company to trust. Don t you pity me?’

‘But why solicit pity? Do you really seriously intend a purchase?’

‘Yes. I’ve so often dreamt of sitting on a window sill on a moon-lit night, and playing on a mandolin! Our Bank is giving me tomorrow a small bonus long overdue. So I thought……’

‘I can’t admire your spendthrift plans. You rather ought to save money and think of getting married. When will you bring a wife for yourself?’

Manohar was in a jesting mood. ‘Believe me, a mandolin is far better to have than a wife. Would never quarrel. Would always entertain. And, when you want to be alone, would lie mute in its box as a wife never will…….’

‘Shut up; I can’t listen to such blasphemy of my sex!’

‘But isn’t there sound logic in it?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Tell me, when do you intend purchasing the mandolin?’

‘Tomorrow. I’ll get my bonus in the afternoon. And the moment I get it I’ll be off to the musical stores. You i must come again tomorrow evening. We’ll celebrate the arrival of the mandolin with a coffee party.’

‘Does that mean you’ll send me back without my usual coffee cup now?’

‘Ah, what a dreadful charge. Don’t you worry. You’ll get your coffee all right, greedy woman.’

Leela burst into laughter, and got up to assist him in getting things ready for the coffee.

Her cheerfulness waned a little, however, as they both sat at the coffee. Thoughts of Menaka came back to her, and, with a pang, she wondered if it was right for her to be thus happy when her friend Menaka was probably brooding over her own sorrow.

Manohar noticed a shadow cross her face. ‘What’s worrying you?’

‘Something very sad is about to happen,’ muttered Leela as if to herself.

‘Yes?’

‘Very sad. You’ll also curse it if you know.’

‘Tell me.’

Leela hesitated for a moment. ‘You know my friend Menaka……’

‘Well, what about her?’

‘The finest girl in our class. She would surely have obtained a first class in the exam……..’

‘Why "would have?",

‘Yes, it’s now a case of ‘would have been.’ She can’t appear for the exam.……’

Manohar appeared quite shocked. Setting aside his coffee he asked, ‘But why? Is she ill?’

‘No. It’s rather like this. Listen.’ And inspite of the promise she had made to Menaka, Leela narrated everything to Manohar.

Manohar succeeded in concealing his own feelings as Leela spoke to him of Menaka’s misfortune. But when she was gone, he crumpled in a chair with a heavy heart, and lay there like a stricken child, how long he did not notice. Night fell, and the street-lamps dutifully blazed outside. But he did not get up to switch on the light in his room. Nor did he think of going out to the hotel for his supper, though the usual hour came, and passed.

He kept thinking of Menaka. For, though while listening to Leela he had pretended as though Menaka meant to him nothing beyond the mere name of his cousin’s friend, in his heart of hearts he had kept telling himself, ‘This is about Menaka–the girl whom you adore and love!’

So, as he lay in the chair after Leela’s departure, he frantically searched for a way to help his beloved girl. And as he did so, his mind again and again conjured up the memories of his various meetings with her.

Funny acquaintance it had been, both in the beginning and development.

He had first noticed her in the Bank. She had an account there, and since Manohar did duty at the ‘Savings’ window, she had to deal with him whenever she visited the Bank. Manohar had experienced a thrill of sympathy and admiration the very first time he had seen her. She was not extra beautiful. But she was pretty, prim, and precise; and her face glowed with intelligence, and her big dark eyes held a delicious frankness in them. She walked with such graceful, firm steps that you knew from them that she was a self-made woman. She walked like a queen, thought Manohar. There was a certain amount of poetic glamour round the figure of this young, brave, wide-eyed maiden, earning her own living, and keeping a small account of her own at the bank!

Who was she, he had always wondered, and never hoped to know.

But he had unexpectedly known it one day.

For she had come to the bank on that day with Leela. She was obviously Leela’s friend, he had guessed; and then he had lost no time in asking Leela a hundred things about the ‘glamorous girl,’ without seeming curious.

And whatever he had learnt from Leela had made him even more fond of Menaka. He had then begun exchanging a word or two with her whenever she came to the bank. And his mind would linger on whatever replies she made.

And then a queer thing had happened one day.

He had been to the Pathe for the Matinee show. He was a bit late, and as the attendant guided him with a torch-light through a row of chairs he took the first vacant seat against which he stumbled in the darkness.

When the interval came, and the lights went up, he found himself sitting next to Menaka! ‘Good Lord’ he thought, as he noticed that she was alone.

He greeted her, and thought she smiled one of her sweetest smiles. Feeling encouraged he asked, ‘Won’t you like to come out a little?’

She nodded her dissent.

‘But really let’s go " he urged, ‘You get such fine drinks at the Soda-fountain here.’

‘I don’t need a drink.’

‘But what harm if you have one? You mustn’t say no. Come….’

‘How dare you be so free with me when we don’t know each other much?’ with a positive frown.

‘True,’ he smiled, ‘We don’t know each other much. But how can we ever, if you don’t let ourselves?’

‘I don’t see why I should.’

‘If you do, there is every chance of your liking me, and my liberties.’

At this Menaka had got up from her seat, and left the theatre in a huff.

She knew that Manohar, who had taken liberties with her, was Leela’s cousin. But she had thought it prudent not to talk to her of the incident.

She had come to the bank a few days after this, and Manohar had taken a daring step. After having made the necessary entries in her pass book he had returned it to her, with a letter enclosed.

He had written:

‘I love you, and I can’t see any crime in expressing my love. Why should you get annoyed with me? If you don’t return my love, you have every right and freedom to tell me so. But why this show of offence and annoyance? You can’t treat me as sinner for simply telling you what I feel for you! Please do believe me. I bear to you a great love, and no amount of reproof can ever check it……..’

Menaka had torn the letter to pieces, and returned them in an envelope along with her pass book the next time she had called at the bank.

It was not only Manohar in whose memory these incidents lingered. Menaka, too, often remembered them. And every time that she thought of Manohar and tried to explain to herself his behaviour, she would have to conclude with the stereotyped utterance ‘Strange!’ And the fun of it all was that though she outwardly showed a strong disapproval of Manohar’s advances, she could never decide if she was not inwardly immensely pleased with him.

With the result that she always kept thinking of the young man inspite of herself.

She thought of him now as she went to the bank to draw all her money to send to her sister. And that made her considerably nervous. Her visits to the bank used to make her nervous since the day she had returned the pieces of his letter. Her reason advised her to be stern and haughty to Manohar, but it cut her heart sorely to assume a stiff coldness towards this ever-smiling, honey-worded young man. She almost hated going to the bank.

But this would be her last visit, she told herself.

She went to the ‘Savings’ window as usual.

What wonder! Manohar was not there! There was another clerk, doing duty in his place.

‘This is good in away,’ she thought.

But she couldn’t help asking the new man, ‘Where’s the usual gentleman?..er I…. mean……

‘He is on leave.’

‘Has he gone out of Bombay?,’ she heard herself asking, and wondered why she asked the anxious question when she professed not to care for ‘the usual gentleman.’

She filled up and signed the necessary form, and handed it over along with her pass book across the window, saying, ‘I want to close down my account. My balance is sixty-three rupees, and some odd annas and pies. Is that right?…..Let me have the whole amount.’

The clerk looked into the pass book, and then cast a very strange glance at Menaka. He then proceeded to consult two or three big ledgers, looked again with curious, unbelieving eyes first at her and then at her book, and at last seemed to suppress a smile, why Menaka could not guess.

‘What’s your balance you said?’ he asked.

‘Sixty-three rupees and.……’

‘O, never…..’

Menaka felt a stab in her heart. With a tremulous voice she asked, ‘Why? There isn’t even that much?’

‘No. Lots more.’

‘What?’

‘Yes. One hundred and sixty three rupees and………’

‘Oh! Impossible.’

‘That’s the truth. Only yesterday one hundred rupees have been deposited to your account.’

‘Strange. I never paid them.’

‘Somebody else seems to have.’

‘But who? I must know his name. Tell me.’

‘Sorry, but I can’t. There’s no signature on record.’

‘But how did the bank accept the money without asking for the man’s signature? Tch! Curious ways you bank people seem to have.’

‘You may call them curious. But there they are. And you can’t help them. We make no end of inquiries if you come and ask for money from us. But if you come to pay money we quietly receive it without asking a single question. Funny. But that’s our rule.’

‘Hang your rules,’ thought Menaka. She flung a challenging glance at the clerk. ‘Look here. I don’t know about your rules. I only know that I must get to know the man who made the payment to my account.’

The clerk shrugged his shoulders. ‘That can never be done.’

‘I’ll see the manager.’

‘You may see the Prime-Minister of England if you like. But it would be no good.’

Menaka fumed and fretted at her helplessness. She even thought of drawing only sixty-three rupees from the bank, and let the inexplicable hundred remain to rust. But would it not be wiser, she asked herself, to take advantage of the windfall? She would then be able to help her sister with a bigger amount than she intended to send, and also to pay her own examination fees. She wavered for a moment between two impulses–the impulse to satisfy her sense of dignity by throwing aside the anonymous gift, and the impulse to warmly clutch the hand of a friendly fate.

The latter impulse proved the stronger in the end. What harm was there, she argued, if she accepted the help that had come her way unasked? True, the friend who helped was today unknown. But he would be found out sooner or later. And then she could repay his debt.

She therefore drew one hundred and sixty rupees, sent one hundred to her sister, and also filled up her examination form.

When she met Leela in the evening, she couldn’t help telling her everything. Leela was so overjoyed at the news that her dear friend was going up for the examination, that she never troubled herself with guessing who the secret friend

of Menaka could be.

A fortnight later Leela called on Manohar.

‘Very nice of you indeed, showing up after a whole fortnight! One would think you were lost into the blue!’

Leela made a winning smile. ‘But don’t tell me I’ve forfeited my claim on the usual coffee cup for that reason.

‘Where’s your mandolin by the bye? Let’s have a look at you strummmg its strings.’

Manohar shrugged his shoulders, and threw up his hands.

‘No mandolin, Madam. Didn’t buy any.’

‘You don’t mean it! You were awfully bent on buying one.’

‘Yes. But I got sober later on, and realised the folly of wasting money over a mandolin.’

A very strange guess flashed across Leela’s mind. She got up, and moving to his table, picked up his diary.

Manohar protested. ‘What’s the idea? If ladies peer into men’s diaries, they do so at their own grave risk, don’t you know!’

Leela waved her hand. ‘Ah, I know everything all right. I must find out where your bonus has gone.’

She fluttered the pages of the diary until she found the date she wanted to look up. One look at the entries on that page was enough. She had made the right guess.

Turning to Manohar with a radiant smile she clapped his hand with great warmth. ‘So you helped Menaka? You did the sweetest thing. But don’t you think I must be angry with you? You loved her all these days, and never let me have a hint of it! I’ll never forgive you!’

It was not long before Leela revealed to Menaka the identity of her secret friend. On learning it Menaka deeply regretted the way she had behaved with Manohar. She had never been able to understand exactly the nature of her feelings towards him. But now she felt certain that in her heart of hearts she had always loved the young man. Even her stiffness and coldness had been, she now thought, but a part of a lover’s technique.

On the evening when the examination was over, she went with Leela to Manohar’s rooms.

He welcomed them with his usual cheerfulness, and asked, ‘What about your papers? Good?’

Leela nodded. ‘Yes, fairly good. Menaka has come specially to thank you for your secret help, which alone made it possible for her to sit for the examination.’

Manohar looked embarrassed. But he smiled. ‘O, I see.’

Menaka looked at him. ‘I can of course never repay your debt fully. But I’ll at least pay back the tangible part of it. I’ve decided to do extra tuitions, now that I would be free, and I hope to pay back………’

Manohar cut in, ‘O, no, no, no. I can’t take back the money.

‘That’d be too cruel on me,’ Menaka entreated, ‘You must let me return your money. I’ll feel humiliated if you don’t.’

Manohar gazed at her with a hint of smile. There was mischief in his eyes as he said, ‘All right. I’ll take the money on one condition.’

Menaka was too simple-minded to scent mischief. She said, ‘All right. I agree to your condition, whatever it is. Tell me.’

Manohar smiled at her. ‘I must have not only the money, but also your hand along with it.’

This was too sudden. Menaka felt smothered by the rush of a strange embarrassment. Her cheeks flushed. She hung down her head.

Leela shot a significant glance at Manohar. ‘O, you are the limit, my dear cousin! Actually proposing to my friend in my presence! There never was a more shameless young man!’

That made everybody laugh.

Within a few days’ time Leela found Manohar’s rooms decorated with a wonderful wife, and also a beautiful new mandolin!

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