‘When someone is deprived, this is the only way they know to conquer their deprivation—it is their only consolation.’
‘I don’t care what you say—women are very coy. They never admit the truth and resort to many pretences.’
‘That only proves how very deprived they are.’
When he brushed aside every little spiteful barb from the women of this household, I used to get very angry. There was no point discussing what society could have or may have been; but it was impossible to feel sorry for these thorns strewn on the way, the cruel jibes and the artifice.
When he heard this, he said, ‘So you have enough sympathy for yourself when your own feelings are bruised, and you have none to spare for those whose lives have been ripped to shreds by the cruel arrows of society? Should the loser be made to pay a fine for losing?’
Oh well! I was narrow-minded. Except me, everyone of course was good. A little miffed, I said, ‘You don’t even know half of it, since you don’t stay indoors—’ I tried to divulge some specific information about the other part of the house, but he abruptly got up saying, ‘Chandranathbabu has been waiting for me for a while now.’
I sat and wept. How could I bear to look so wretched in my husband’s eyes? There was no way I could prove to him that if I had been faced with misfortune, I would never have behaved in this manner.
Sometimes I feel that if God grants women a chance to be vain about beauty, they are spared from vanity of other kinds. One could be vain about jewels and baubles, of course; but in a rich household that would be meaningless. I placed my conceit in my chastity. I knew that even my husband would have to bow before it. But every time I spoke to him about some domestic matters, I ended up looking so petty that it tore me up inside. Hence, I wanted to make him look small in turn. I said to myself, ‘I’ll not let your words make you look good; it is mere naivety. It’s not altruism, you are being taken advantage of by others.’
My husband had a great wish that I’d step outside the inner chambers. One day I said to him, ‘I don’t need the world outside.’
He said, ‘The world outside may be in need of you.’
‘If it has survived for so long without me, it can continue to do so; it won’t the of sorrow.’
‘Let it die, I am not bothered. My concerns are for myself.’
‘Really? And what are you worried about?’
My husband smiled and didn’t reply. I knew his ways and so I said, ‘No , you can’t fool me by keeping quiet. You must finish your sentence.’
He said, ‘Can one sentence be enough to finish the thought? There are so many thoughts that take a lifetime to finish.’
‘Please stop your word-games and tell me.’
‘I would like you to be mine in the world out there. We need to settle our accounts in that space.’
‘Why, what’s wrong with our perceptions here, in this room?’
‘Over here, your eyes, ears and mouth have been wrapped in me; you don’t know who you want and who you’ve got.’
‘I know very well, dearest, I really do.’
‘You think you know, but you don’t even know if you really do.’
’I just hate it when you talk like this.’
‘Which is why I didn’t want to bring it up.’
‘Your silence is even more unbearable.’
‘That is why I wish that I won’t have to speak or keep quiet; you should just come out there and comprehend everything by yourself. Neither you nor I were made to play the game of life within this domestic chicanery. Our love will be true only if we really know each other in the midst of truth.’
‘Maybe you are yet to know me wholly, but my understanding of you is complete.’
‘Fair enough. Then why don’t you do it just to complete my understanding?’
We had many different versions of this conversation. He’d say, the glutton who loves the fish curry would cut up the fish, stew it and cook it to his taste, but the man who truly appreciated the fish wouldn’t really want to capture it in a bowl—he’d rather try to master it in the water itself, or he’d wait on land. When he returned home, he’d be happy that although he didn’t get what he wanted, at least he didn’t cut it up and destroy it for his own pleasure. It’s best to get all of something and if that is not possible, then it’s best to lose it in its entirety.
I never really liked these discussions, but that wasn’t the reason why I stayed indoors at the time. My grandmother-in-law was alive then. My husband had gone against her wishes and recast nearly four-fifths of the household by twentieth-century standards, and she had accepted it. If a daughter-in-law of this aristocratic household renounced her purdah and chose to come out, she’d have accepted that too. She knew for a fact that this was bound to happen one day. But I felt, it wasn’t so important that she should have to undergo the pain of it. I have read in books that we are all birds in a cage; I could not speak for others, but my cage was so full that I wouldn’t find such fullness out there amidst the world. At least that is how I felt at the time.
The primary reason my grandmother-in-law loved me so much was because she thought that I had been able to hold my husband’s love solely by the powers of my own qualities or the strengths of my astrological stars. She felt it was the inherent nature of a man to sink into decadence. None of her other granddaughters-in-law, with all their beauty and youth, had been able to lure her grandsons; they were destroyed by the flames of sin and no one could save them. She firmly believed that I was the one who had finally doused those flames singeing the men in this family. So she was very protective of me; my slightest ailment made her tremble with fear. She didn’t really like the clothes which my husband bought from foreign stores and dressed me in. But she felt that men were bound to have some such idiosyncrasies that were quite silly and a mere waste. There was no way of restraining them, but it was important to see that it didn’t lead them to total destruction. If my Nikhilesh didn’t deck up his wife, he’d have done the same to another woman. So, every time a new dress arrived for me, she called my husband and riled and teased him merrily. Gradually her taste changed too. Thanks to this unholy age of modernism, a day came when her evenings would be incomplete unless her granddaughter-in-law read her stories from English books.
After her death, my husband wanted us to go and settle in Calcutta. But I just didn’t feel right about it. The family roots were here—our grandmother-in-law had borne so much misery and yet held onto this home for so many years and if I just dropped everything and left, her sighs wouldn’t let me rest. This thought haunted me continually—her empty seat stared me in the face. That pious woman came into this house at the age of eight and she died when she was seventy-nine. She didn’t have a happy life. Fate had repeatedly shot arrows at her, but each misfortune had only made her stronger. This large household was a memento built on the piety of her tears. How could I leave this and go into the muck of Calcutta?
My husband felt that this was a chance to hand over the charges of this house to my sisters-in-law; that would make them happy and our life would be able to take its own course, in its own space, in Calcutta. But that is what I didn’t want to accept.Were they to be rewarded for torturing me all these years and for envying my husband’s good fortune and character? Besides, the ‘royal’ house was right here. All our subjects, our employees, the luckless relatives, the guests, were all strewn around, clinging to this homestead. I did not know who we were in Calcutta where no one knew us. The complete image of our status, power and wealth lay right here. Should I just hand over all this to them and go into exile, like Sita? Only to have them mock me in my absence? Did they know the value of this magnanimity that my husband wanted to show or did they even deserve it? Later when I’d have to return here someday, would I get back my rightful seat? My husband said, ‘Why do you need that seat? Life has other things to offer.’
I said to myself, ‘Men really don’t understand these things very well. They don’t know how significant the positions
in the inner-chambers are since they live and breathe the air outside. Here they should abide by the advice of women.’
I thought it was most important for one to have some firmness in one’s character. It would be a defeat if we went away, handing over everything to those who have only wished us ill. Although my husband was ready to do that, I wasn’t. In my heart of hearts, I felt I was speaking from the righteousness of my chastity.
Why didn’t my husband force me to leave? I know why. It was because he had the power to do so, that he didn’t use it. He has always said to me, ‘I wouldn’t accept it if you were to always agree with whatever I said and had to put up with every whim of mine. I’d rather wait—if you and I come to a consensus, it’ll be great. If not, there’s nothing to be done.’
But there is something called firmness of character and that day I’d felt that perhaps on that score I was—no, I can’t even utter those words today.
It would be impossible to close the gap between night and day if one were to start doing it slowly, over a period of time. But when the sun rises, night disappears—the lengthy reckoning is resolved in a moment. All at once, the age of swadeshi came upon Bengal; but no one knew how it arrived suddenly. It was as if the passage of time between the age of swadeshi and the one before it just didn’t exist. Perhaps that was the reason why the new age swept away all our fears and worries in the blink of an eye, like a deluge. There was no time to consider what had happened and what the future had in store.
When the groom and his party are at the door, with the music playing and the lights glowing, the women of the village stream up to the terrace, scarcely caring to cover their face. Just so, when the music played, signalling the arrival of the groom of the entire country, how could the women stay busy with their household chores? Ullulating and blowing on the conch, they peeped out from the door or window nearest to them.
In that moment my sight and mind, hopes and wishes, were coloured by the tempestuous new age. On that day, although the mind didn’t break free of the bonds of wishes, desires and pious thoughts within which it had settled itself happily, the world that it had known till then, it did peer over it all and it heard the clarion call from far away; the meaning of that call wasn’t clear, but the heart lurched dangerously.
During his college days, my husband was interested in manufacturing all that the land needed within the land itself. There were many date trees in the area and he spent several days trying to figure out how to collect the extract from all the trees at the same spot with the help of a single pipe and boil it to produce sugar. I have heard that a very effective way was indeed discovered, but it required so much more money to be spent than what could be earned, that the business soon folded up. The kinds of crops he reaped from the farmlands, through various experiments, were quite remarkable, but the money that he spent in the process was even more astonishing. He felt that the reason no large-scale industries can be sustained in our country was because there were no banks. At that time he began to teach me political economy. There was no harm in that. But he felt it was imperative to inculcate the habit and the desire to save money in banks among our people. So he started a small bank. The urge to save money in the bank was strong among the villagers because the rate of interest was very high. But for the precise reason for which the people’s interest grew, the bank slipped through the high interest chasm and disappeared. His old clerks grew very upset over these eccentricities and his enemies made fun of him. One day my elder sister-in-law saw to it that I was within earshot when she exclaimed that her cousin brother, a renowned lawyer, had told her that if one pleaded the case before a judge, it may still be possible to salvage some of the reputation and wealth of this distinguished family from the hands of a lunatic.
Of all the people in this family, only my grandmother-in-law was unperturbed by all this. She called me and chided me often, saying, ‘Why do you all plague him like this? Are you concerned about the fortune? In my days, I have seen this estate go into the hands of the receiver all of three times. Men are not like women. They are restless and they only know how to squander. Granddaughter-in-law, you are lucky that he isn’t frittering himself away along with it. Since you have never been hurt that way, you seldom remember that.’
The list of my husband’s charities was endless. If someone tried to install a loom or a rice-husking machine or something along those lines he helped him till the project was obviously a failure. He floated a swadeshi company to compete with the British ships that journeyed to Puri. Not a single ship sailed from that, but several company documents were drowned in the process.
I used to be most upset when Sandipbabu extracted money from him, giving some excuse about the country’s work. Sandipbabu wanted to run a newspaper, or spread the word about swadeshi, or said that the doctor has advised him to spend a few days in Ootacamund on health grounds—and my husband casually shouldered the cost. Besides, he received a certain amount every month to meet his regular expenses. But the strangest thing was that my husband didn’t even agree with him on most principles or ideologies. My husband felt that it was a kind of destitution if one failed to mine the existing resources in one’s land properly and in the same way, if we couldn’t discover and realize the essential richness in the heart of our land, it was the greatest shame of all. One day I was a little irked and said to him, ‘You are being cheated by all these people.’ He laughed and said, ‘I have no qualities to speak of and yet, just by throwing away some money, I am acquiring some greatness—I am the one who’s gaining something treacherously.’
The moment the air of the new age brushed past me, I told my husband to burn all the foreign clothes I owned.
He said, ‘Why should you burn it? Instead, stop using them for as long as you wish.’
‘How can you say “as long as I wish”; never in my entire life—’
‘Fine, don’t wear them ever again. Why should you make a display of burning them?’
‘Why are you stopping me from doing this?’
‘I feel you should devote all your energy to building something instead of wasting even a quarter of it in the excitement of destroying something.
‘But this excitement helps you build something.’
’So you would claim the only way to light up one’s home is by setting it on fire? I am ready to go to great lengths to light a lamp, but I don’t want to set my house on fire just to get the job done quickly. That only looks like exuberance, but in reality it is a weak compromise.’ He went on, ‘Listen, I can see that my words seem futile to you today, but I suggest you consider them. Just as a mother decks each of her daughters with her own jewels, the day has come when the earth is adorning each of its countries with her own jewellery. Today all our needs are linked to those of the whole world. I believe that this connection is a sign of good fortune for every nation and there is no greatness in rebutting that.’
Then there was another problem. When Miss Gilby first came into the house, there was a furore for some days. Gradually everyone became accustomed to her and there was no further talk about it. But now all those debates surfaced again. I had quite forgotten whether she was a Bengali or British, but the thought crossed my mind again at this time. I said to my husband that she’d have to go. He was silent. That day I spoke to him harshly and he walked away, despondent. I cried my heart out. At night when I was a little more collected after my crying bout, he said, ‘I can’t look at Miss Gilby in a bad light simply because she is British. So many years of familiarity should be able to break through the barriers of names. She happens to care for you.’
I was a little ashamed and yet, with a shade of my earlier tantrum I said, ‘Fine then, let her be. Who wants her to leave?’
Miss Gilby continued to come. One day as she walked to church, a young boy who was a distant relation of ours, hurled a stone at her and insulted her. Until then the boy had lived in my husband’s care; after this incident he was promptly thrown out. This caused quite a commotion. People believed wha
tever that boy went out and said to them. They began to say it was Miss Gilby who had insulted the boy and made up the tale. I too felt that wasn’t entirely improbable. The boy didn’t have a mother and his uncle pleaded with me. I tried very hard on his behalf, but it was of no avail.
That day, no one could pardon my husband’s decision, not even I. In my heart of hearts I criticized him. This time Miss Gilby herself quit. She had tears in her eyes when she left, but I didn’t feel a thing. I felt for the boy: poor child, how she had ruined his life. And what a splendid boy! His enthusiasm for swadeshi had robbed him of hunger and sleep.
My husband personally escorted Miss Gilby to the station in his own car. I thought this was taking things a bit too far. I felt he deserved the censure when this incident was blown up and recounted in the local newspaper, which called him all sorts of names.
Until that day, I had suffered many anxieties on account of my husband, but never did I feel ashamed of him. That day I did. I didn’t know what crime Naren had committed against Miss Gilby, but in this day and age it was shameful that one could be righteously just and be punished for it. I had no desire to smother those feelings, which made Naren act so rudely towards a British woman. When my husband refused to agree with me on this, I took it as a lack of boldness in his nature. And that made me feel shame. Moreover, what hurt me most was the fact that I had to concede defeat. My resolute nature only served to make me miserable and it couldn’t raise my husband from ignominy—it was a humiliation of the power of my chastity.
Yet , it was not that my husband had no interest in matters of swadeshi or that he was opposed to it. But he could never wholly accept the absolute superiority of the ‘Vande Mataram’ mantra. He said, ‘I am willing to serve my country; but the One whom I’ll invoke is far above it. If I pray to my country, it will be disastrous for her.’