Sinning for a Sinner

(A STORY)

BY PREMENDRA MITRA

(Translated from Bengali by Phani Bhushan Maitra)

His is an interminable illness.

At first it is an attack of cold. Directly he recovers from it, he falls a victim to virulent scabies. Next comes enlargement of the liver, and lastly jaundice as its after-effect. A tiny tot of four summers though, it is an endless tug-of-war between life and death.

He is all skin and bone. His emaciated limbs, like withered twigs, dangle loosely from the joints. The helpless eyes in his pale, wan face look big and prominent. They store in their depths the accumulated fatigue and discontent of humanity at large.

They are no eyes of a child. It seems as if some battered soul, who has been broken down with age and infirmity, and has drunk the bitter cup of life’s gall and wormwood to the lees, stares out of those deep cavities. The utter helplessness alone is childlike.

He whines and whines all day long. At times Chhabi can stand it no more.

"The devil be off with you, you screeching owl!" Driven to desperation, she gives him a smart hit on the and mutters in impotent rage, "How I wish you dead!"

The child only screams all the louder for it. The profound peace and stillness of the sleeping night is rent in twain. On a bed next to the child sleeps Lalit. The loud row wakes him. He is restless and impatient; yet he ventures no unwise remark. Previously he would often take his wife to task for so flaring up, and the occasions invariably ended in nothing better than mutual bandying of words, hot and caustic. What infinite torture and hopeless abandonment underlie this sudden outburst of temper he now realises but too painfully. The result is, he is tongue-tied. But his heart aches acutely in mute agony.

Really, What can he do? A Pretty Sarkar, he is employed in the loading and unloading of boats. He earns stray pennies and half-pennies, and that too when business is brisk. Otherwise, he is idle, and with nothing but stitches in his pocket. What ever he scrapes together in a month, scarcely suffices to pay for the, grocer’s bill. How can he then afford to get a doctor for his son? Yet, he leaves no stone unturned.

The piercing cry of the child neither stops nor grows less. It is no longer significant of any physical pain-it is but a loud protest against the shameless injustice of the world.

Chhabi now feels for having lost her temper at all and endeavours to pacify him in a thousand and one ways. In fear she casts timid glances at her husband stealthily to see if he has been disturbed. The ceaseless drudgery of the day weighs down her lids heavily like lead. But will the child never stop? No, perhaps he won’t. Not toys, nor sweets, nor even caressing–nothing will he have. The unbounded malice and ill-will he cherishes in his heart swell up and stream out in his wail. He cries not–it is thus that he curses the very Creation.

Lalit feigns sleep and broods on.

The blind cruelty of nature, the ultimate fruitlessness of his own existence, have no appeal for him. All Sorts of metaphysical problems he shuns with scrupulous care. The doctor advises change of air for his son; or, there is no escape. Will it be possible to secure it for him?……How?

This is what racks his brain and he knows no rest.

It is pitiable to hear how Chhabi does all she can to console him.

"Hush, hush, darling, please don’t cry…….. Tomorrow I will buy you a nice toy car, all red to look at……Ah, how you’ll like to drive it!"

But even such a grand prospect loses it effect on the child. He keeps on crying as before.

Chhabi next attempts to take him up in her arms. "Won’t you blow the horn of your motor car?" She tries to soothe him. "How splendid!"

The child wriggles and squirms and pushes his mother away. He hammers on the same complaint, "Why did you beat me?"

Suddenly to Lalit the whole affair appears so ridiculous. Nothing can be more unseemly than for a grown-up person to condescend to the level of a child and thus try to humour and divert him. This blunt and rude selfishness of the boy is almost without a parallel.

The very next instant he shudders at his own unfeeling criticism and is ashamed of himself. The feeble light of the smoky lantern dimly reveals to him the sleepy and blood-shot eyes of his wife. They are sunk deep in the hollows of her pale face, rendered drawn and haggard and distorted with a savage hand. Unceasing toil and anxiety have mercilessly ravaged her features. He gets angry with himself for his unmanly conduct.

With his upon them, he stares vacantly at the blank wall and thinks on. Wild and incoherent thoughts are they.

Has he lundered irrevocably in having married at all?……Well?…..No, never…..It can’t be true.

A humble parasite on his brother-in-law, he could pick up but scanty education. Directly it ended he had to shift for himself as best he could to square his accounts with him. There being nobody to really wish him married, at first he had resolved to die a bachelor. He was past the age at which the average youths of Bengal wed; yet his resolution was unbroken, not altogether unshaken though. But a canker-worm of indefinable discontent began rankling in his breast. His heart now hungered for marriage. He eagerly longed for a life of unalloyed joy, blessed with the company of a petticoat for the joy of building up a family entirely of his own. His unrealised dreams gave him neither rest nor respite. He was a haunted man. The prospect of the dreary life of a confirmed celibate elated him but little. It was a picture, dull and blurred, lacking all colour and the bold touches of the brush. To live unmarried was to him to be lame and to limp in life. Of course he thought of his chill penury. But then his mind would revolt against the idea of allowing his life to rot as a consequence of the economic disaster brought about by the ignorance of Man.

Thus he absently argues on in his mind. The scream of the child continues jarring on his ears without any break, "Why, did you beat me?

Where can he take his son for a change? An endless chain of names he recalls. But, no money, no change of place. Of all the ornaments Chhabi once had, only an old pair of bangles remains. These, too, she scarcely ventures to use, lest they should be worn away. How much can they be expected to fetch? Surely not above a poor hundred. How far can he go on it? How long would it last him?……Lalit knows nothing very definite.

It looks as if the child will cry on as long as time lasts. Lalit sits up and finds his wife dozing. The individual fibres of her muscles ache painfully and clamour for rest; sleep she must have; sleep, calm and forgetful. She starts as Lalit rises. "Are you now satisfied, you burly brute?" She slaps the crying child once again and storms, "You’ve startled the whole neighbourhood out of its sleep. What a little devil of a child have I brought to earth, really!"

Lalit is cut to the quick. "Aha," protests he in sympathetic pity, "Why do you beat him again?"

"Do you expect me to fondle him then? This is the dead of night, and he’s brawling like anything, the rattlepate."

"Suffering begets petulance," Lalit holds a brief for his son, and is about to take him in his arms. But the child will not come. He grips the corner of his mother’s sari in his firm fist and howls louder than ever.

With a jerk Chhabi snatches her sari away. "Go to the devil," she snarls in execration.

"Ah, Chhabi, you forget yourself."

She breaks down altogether. Unruly tears trickle down her cheeks. "Why, what’s there to forget?" Then with a catch in her throat, "Oh, I know, I know; he’ll die before he’s many days older. And the while he lives he suffers. But, mark my words, he’ll kill me before he leaves me." She turns her face and brushes the hot brine away.

The child sticks out his lean, lank arms towards his mother and seeks her shelter.

"Give im a change and he recovers," repeats Lalit by way of encouragement, after the doctor. But he gravely doubts if it will be practicable after all. So his tone lacks firmness and conviction.

Without a word Chhabi takes him from her husband and puts him to bed by force. "Shut up, you blowing trumpet," she threatens him sternly. "Open your lips once more and I throw you through the door into the gutter outside." Then with a mind to close down the scene, she lays herself down on the floor beside her son. "Why don’t you go to sleep?" This to her husband in admonition. "Will it do to sit up all night like this? Why, you’ll then ruin your health."

Lalit does as directed. But he fears that his wife is not likely to be able to snatch a wink of sleep.

"Oh, I’m all right; don’t bother, please. I’ll go to sleep directly."

Her dream does not come true. A new whim now seizes the fancy of the child. "Why should you lie down? Get up and sit there, I say." His bony finger points to a particular spot.

Chhabi has got to obey him; else he will not let her off.

At first she tries to divert him and fails.

She is but a creature of the earth, earthy; and so, her patience flagging, presently the devil in her frets and fumes. Yet, precious little the child quails before it.

" Please, my love, I’m so sleepy. All right; let me lie here…..How now? You’re glad? …..I’ll sleep just for a few moments." She is not sure of her ground and beseeches him again in all humility. But the child is cleverer than that. There is no putting him off so easily.

"Sit up, I say," he insists, with dogged persistence.

To keep still under the circumstances is the severest of trials. Lalit sits up a second time. "Shall I take him out for a walk?" he proposes lamely, with hesitation

"I can’t, for the life of me, make out," protests Chhabi irritated why you leave your bed at all!"

"Because he won’t stop otherwise," quite apologetically.

"I see, so you mean it?" Then after a pause, with menacing calm, "Well, let ‘im alone, I request’ you."

Lalit is helpless. He submits.

All that is now left to Chhabi is to sit as asked and rub her drowsy eyes hard to chase all sleep away. At last the child is quiet.

Chhabi looks a picture of extreme exhaustion

Taking his eyes off her appalling countenance Lalit indulges in wild, wandering dreams, impracticable most of them. To give his son some change of place is now a necessity he can hardly hope to do without.

His tired brain slowly sinks into a light nap under its weight of cares and torments. Suddenly the child shrieks and gives it a rude shake. He wakes with a start to find Chhabi fast asleep by her son, huddled in a clumsy heap. Her head kisses the ground.

Nature, outraged, ultimately overpowers and subdues its combatant.

All vocal efforts unavailing, the boy now trusts to his limbs. "Oh, ma, why do you sleep?" He kicks her as hard as his legs allow and tugs at her hands.

Thus drag on their days and nights.

Their humble tenement consists of a fair-sized living room with an iron-corrugate roof of a dingy hole of a thatched kitchen and a narrow strip of yard, running in front. Here, by the side of the tap there has sprung up, God knows how, a wild, nameless shrub of the perennial variety. It is a thorough die-hard. In total indifference to all neglect, it grows luxuriantly on and puts forth a wealth of flowers in the winter annually. Beauty or fragrance the flowers have not, it is true; still, they serve as a sort of cheap decoration to the habitation.

It is the small, hollow smile on the blanched lips of the starving family.

Even through this tiny home the same old stream of human destiny flows languidly on, with the eternal revolutions of the sun and the moon. For the daily life of man is but an endless string of events, of illustrations of startling hardship, uncommon sacrifice and frequently, severe mortification of the flesh.

Perhaps the very Creator is struck with ‘awe at the enormity of the tortures.

But Lalit views this from a different standpoint altogether. To him it is paying for the else and comfort of married life, for the dignity of being born’ a man. He never deluded himself or cherished any fond hope that his would be a happy-go-lucky existence, that life with him would dance gaily along like a 1ight boat on the calm waters of a slow-moving stream. The fierce ordeals of life he knew. The grave responsibilities incumbent on having a wife he seriously took into account. But, weighed in the balance against magnified happiness and imaginary facilities, they seemed trivial-and he married.

Will he and life be ever quits?

Chhabi’s face bears not looking into. The smooth gloss and the rosy flush of youth have long vanished from it, and with them have departed all its soft lineaments. She is now but a wreck of what she erstwhile was, Harrowing cares have wrought such havoc as is shocking and repulsive. Actually a young girl yet in her teens, she looks, for her furrows and sharp bony angularities, a dilapidated crone in the advanced sixties. The child too is walking straight to death with a slow steady tread.

Only a few days ago, the doctor attending on the child paid them a visit unasked. Getting down from his car at the entrance into the blind alley, he walked straight to the house and called out to the inmates from the door.

"By gad, still in this rotten hole! You haven’t yet moved away? "

With legs wide apart, and his thumbs thrust inside the pockets of his vest, he stood on the threshold and shook his head in disapproval, as might one sincerely interested in the welfare of the child. "Oh, no," he went on reprovingly in the tones of sweet cordiality, "you don’t seem to care that he should live,"

"Why, Chhabi, as sure as eggs are eggs, his love for us is no sham," Directly the doctor had turned his , Lalit beamed up in unusual animation, "He looked anxious, and he was it. Bless my soul, it wasn’t his professional call." for corroboration, "Don’t you think so?"

It was sometime before husband and wife had finished dwelling elaborately on the large-hearted sympathy of the physician. Nothing short of a mental vow would stifle the excitement in his breast. "When it’s change of place and life for my son," Lalit promised solemnly within himself, "have it I must…….How? Bless me, if I know."

Even Chhabi was for the time being buoyed up in spirit. She went about her domestic duties with a less heavy heart.

Perhaps it was all lip-deep, what the doctor said. Yet how it worked like a magic balm on the couple! They could, though for a few brief moments, make light of their burden ,. and breathe the easier for it.

Alas, joy is evanescent and our happy moments but too quickly.

Another day begins and ends, and it is night again. With tired limbs and a heavy heart, Lalit returns home. The scene that greets his eyes is far from welcome. The boy will not leave his mother. He is whining, as ever he whines.

"Have I no cooking to do?" Chhabi remonstrates with the boy "Leave me, love…Ah there is an angel."

She is about to go away.

The soft murmur of dissension broadens into a loud clamour of protest.

"Please, please Chhabi, dear," moved to pity, Lalit begs in real concern, "let ‘im have his will……No cooking this evening. I’ll go to a neighbouring confectioner’s and make shift with some sweets for the night."

"Indeed! Just from office through mire and slush, you now like to go out again! Besides, can you stand it? …..Beware, love is nourishing, but indulgence is unwholesome."

"Oh, dear, no; they, that is, the sweets are not really so injurious." Then, more in entreaty than in suggestion, "Well, it’s just taking an evening off."

"The idea!…….look, how its raining."

Chhabi tears herself away and starts for the kitchen.

Like a mad bull in topping rage, the child kicks and bellows frantically, as one distracted.

Without a word Lalit steps out into the inky darkness of the night beyond, an aching thorn in his side. It is still drizzling and the street is sloppy, with scattered puddles here and there. Hardly equal to dragging his weary feet about, which sink deep into inches of sticky mud at each step, he plods aimlessly on.

The sickly, rickety child forms the pivot on which this family, with its mountain-load of miseries, slowly rotates.

It is a long list of sacrifices offered on the altar of the blind selfishness of an ailing, unfeeling child.

But angles of vision are seldom identical. A child is a future man. He may lay claim to everything a man has. What is there to overrate his worth? This is how Lalit argues.

The doctor, so genuinely anxious for the well-being of the child, had been to their place again. This time he was not the same, old sympathiser. He assumed quite patronising airs and was overbearing. Seating himself cautiously on the only half-broken chair they could offer him, he rested his hands loosely on the head of his cherry-wood stick and read them a lecture. "Confound me." he concluded, "how can you be so self-centred and irresponsible? Glaring examples of unwilling parents all! Why should you bring undesired-for children to, earth if you simply leave them to fate and to themselves?"

Even when he was about to drive away, he leaned out of his car and shot his last poisoned shaft. "By Jove, people who breed children for passion are veritable criminals, and should suffer as such. Isn’t it?"

The wheel of life revolves unchanged. Day by day all softness melts away from Lalit’s face. Hard-set lines of unbending determination stand out on it. It is now a visage of stone. Who knows what iron resolve is sprouting out of the dark recess of his heart!

The child is mending.

Seated comfortably on a deck-chair on the verandah in front, Lalit aimlessly watches the child playing, and weaves pleasant fantasies.

"How charming!" Chhabi appears on the scene and remarks in frank appreciation. "What a heaven of a place to live in!" She is in an ecstacy of delight, and loquacious. Then, as by virtue of association of thoughts, she is put in mind of the dust and dirt of Calcutta, she shudders at the contrast. "It gives me the creeps to think of ever having to return to that hell…..Believe me, dear," suddenly she bends her head low and whispers to her husband confidentially, flying off at a tangent, "as I lifted up Khoka from the floor the other day, my arms ached." The very memory brightens her up.

Her cheeks are full and ruddy, the colour of the tawny dust of the country around. The radiant health and graceful liveliness of the sal forest are reflected from every limb of her person.

Mechanically Lalit turns his face to her. The glad tidings fail to rouse him from his reverie.

"Leave him, darling," presently Chhabi calls out to her son, "don’t you see how you hurt him?"

The once sickly child, wee and frail, is today a chubby boy. Riding astride on the neck of his playmate, he tries with all the strength of his arms to strike the playmate’s head against the floor, Precious little he heeds his mother.

Lalit at last comes and separates the vengeful boy from his prey.

With the ghost of a smile parting his pink lips, Tunu, as the other child is called, raises his dusty head from the ground. "Am I as strong as that, uncle? Can I take ’im on my shoulders?" he pleads his inability shamefacedly. It is irresistibly sweet, the way he speaks.

Lalit does not know when he unwittingly compares his own turbulent and ill-behaved son with this handsome child of his neigbbour. The wide disparity digs a dagger into his heart.

The boy is lean, unusually so. He wears a rich crop of long, silken hair on his tiny scalp. His clear, azure eyes, his small and delicately-moulded face, and a sad yet fascinating smile seem inseparable from one another.

"What the devil did you hurt him for, you fiend?" Lalit holds his son by the ear and rails at him, "To play is to quarrel, eh?"

Khoka grows red in the face, but offers not to excuse himself.

"Oh, uncle, no," Tunu comes to his rescue. "when did we quarrel? We were simply playing at horse and rider. As I sank beneath his weight, he just lightly hit my head against the floor.……Why, I’m not hurt."

"Even so." Lalit warns his son, "take care that you never again lay hands on him."

"Tunu is no match for our son," a few minutes hence Chhabi casually observes to her husband, a touch of maternal pride in her voice. She wishes him to join her in the subject; but a look at his brows, knitted in an angry frown of perplexity, dries up further words on her lips.

Tunu and his friend can hardly resume their game. In spite of all supplications, Khoka sits sulkily apart and meditates mischief and revenge.

All on a sudden he gives his companion a sharp twinge and runs hotly away.

Tunu jumps and screams.

Lalit and Chhabi are stunned. The latter runs to the ill used boy and takes him up in her arms. The blunt audacity of her malicious and malevolent son wrings a volley of abuse from her tongue.

Lalit sits immovably on, his face distorted in insufferable pain.

"You saw, uncle, how Khoka pinched me for nothing." Tunu comes to him and complains, "I shall never play with him again."

As yet dazed and speechless, Lalit is lost in a sea of bitter and agonizing thoughts and stares abstractedly in front of him with unseeing eyes.

But Tunu is not as good as his word. He comes to his friend ere the sun sets.

Lalit is now busy teaching his son his lesson. More than half an hour has elapsed, yet he has not been able to make him scribble anything which bears the faintest resemblance to the first vowel of the Bengali alphabet.

Tunu takes his seat on a corner of the mat. He does not obtrude.

"Can you write the first letter, darling?" Lalit inquires of the boy.

"Oh, Yes, uncle, I can," a happy smile of satisfaction spreads over his face as he readily returns, "I can as well write out lines from my ‘Rudiments of Knowledge……Shall I try?"

"What!" Lalit is surprised." "You read Rudiments of knowledge

"I’ve finished that already from cover to cover." All eager to show his skill in writing little he cares for what he has read.

But Khokil would not allow him to use his slate. He holds it fast.

"Please, uncle," prays Tunu, impatient, "Tell ’im to give me the slate and I’ll show you what a good hand I write."

"Enough! Don’t trouble yourself overmuch, my boy!" Suddenly Lalit flames up in a fit of burning envy and spite,

"Go home now…..Don’t you see, Khoka is reading?"

This unaccountable harshness silences the timid child totally. He obeys, pale and frightened, and dares not apologise.

To prolong tuition after this, is what he simply cannot do. Directly Tunu retires, Lalit follows him, scowling.

"How’s this?…..Done so early today?" Chhabi comments jokingly, "My Lord, the may you work at his lessons, you’d shortly make a judge or a magistrate of him."

"H’m" is all that Lalit replies.

It is two days since Tunu came here last.

The deep sense of shame eating away at his heart is unbearable. How immeasurably he has been lowered in his own estimation!

On the third day, as Lalit is issuing out of the gate, he starts to find Tunu leaning against the spikes and peeping through them into the yard. Pity and remorse share his heart between them.

"Tunu!" he calls out, with utmost affection in his voice.

Thus caught red-handed in skulking in the vicinity of the forbidden area, Tunu has his heart in his mouth and is about to slink away.

"Why don’t you come to play with your friend, Tunu?"

The note of sincerity partly assures the child.

"You won’t scold me then?" He is yet nervous and wishes to be surer.

Tears start to Lalit’s eyes. Why should this frail and graceful boy, so closely resembling a delicate flower of sweet perfume, be forever afraid?

Lalit lifts him up bodily from passionately. "No, my child, why breathes in his ears."

"I may then run in and play?" asks he, his cheeks glowing in enthusiasm.

"Of course!"

He scrambles down to the ground and trots away in high glee.

Since the unhappy episode a few days ago, Lalit has been on the rack. Feeling himself thoroughly absolved, he now goes out for his stroll.

As the sable folds of dense mist roll away before the glint of the penetrating morn, so all his cheerfulness vanishes as be overhears the angry words of his son on his return home. "No, no, mamma, I won’t simply have it. Why should you give him two pieces of sandesh?…..Detestable greedy devil!.….Let ’im go to his mother and take twenty if he wanted."

A sudden surge of angry blood suffuses his face to the tips of the ears. This strange revelation of naked jealousy squeezes his heart as between the jaws of a vice.

"Dear, dear," Chhabi is heard to reason with her son, "should you ever be envious? Both of you will have two goody-goodies apiece."

"But, auntie," it is Tunu protesting, "I’m ill; I’d take just a bit and no more."

"All right, my love, you take this one. And Khoka, here are two for you…Cheerio, lad."

But he is not content. He threatens to swoop on his friend and snatch his share away.

"Let me see how you dare! You’ve got two and still you’re to be satisfied."

"Two or one, is no question. Why should he have anything here at all?…Only the other day Pa turned him out. How can he then dare show his shameless face again, the brazen imp! "

"That’s no look-out of yours, mind you, Khoka."

Perhaps it is nothing very serious and bears no far-reaching significance. But as he listens to it, Lalit just chokes. It seems to him as if all his hopes have been blighted, his dreams shaken and shattered, all sweet consolation and content cruelly trampled under foot.

Unperceived Lalit goes and takes his stand on the threshold of the adjoining room.

By this time Tunu has been given a sandesh. "I shouldn’t take so much, auntie; I’m....."

Scarcely the words have left his lips when Khoka wrenches it away from him, "Aha, as if I’m going to stand by, an idle spectator!"

Tunu shrieks out in pain.

Chhabi gives her son a good hiding. What has Lalit to say? He retraces his steps as silently as he came.

"It’s a pity that Tunu’s so seriously ill," Chhabi informs her husband with unfeigned concern.

In the gathering darkness of the evening Lalit sits on his favourite chair, in a corner of the solitary sanctum of the portico. He is in a brown study.

"Who’s ill, you say?….oh, its Tunu."

"Who else, pray?.….How his mother was sorrowing! The place’s healthy and the climate so bracing; still, nothing avails in his case. He’s wearing away with the days."

Lalit turns away, pained.

Like giant masses of solid gloom the distant hills stand out far away. Perhaps, it is from them he seeks to have the delaying answer to this inexplicable mystery.

As Chhabi moves to go away, Lalit pulls at her skirt "Listen," he says.

"Well," she draws close to her husband, expectant. The words are long in coming.

"What’s it you like me to hear?" Well, fire away, please. I’ve so many things on hand."

Lalit half turns on his seat and confronts his wife.

"Chhabi, Khoka’s all right, Isn’t it?"

"So he appears, no doubt."

"You’re happy?"

"I be blowed if you don’t rave. Do you need question me to know? Why, how do you feel about it yourself?"

"H’m," Lalit is not definite.

Chhabi is once more about to leave her husband to his thoughts; he draws her a second time, "Well, dearest, this son of ours,–our Khoka, I mean,–one day he’ll grow up a raw youth; time passing, he’ll have a family of his own and with it everything else that is man’s lot to have. Don’t you think so?"

He appears constrained and his voice is hard and grating.

"Have you taken leave of your senses?" his wife asks him brusquely.

"Oh, I’m talking sense enough, This our son,-can you deny?–he’s the future hope of the world. Through a long line of interminable progeny he’ll enjoy this earth. All we do today, is to bring it to pass,"

Chhabi can make neither head nor tail of it. She takes herself away in a wrath.

Lalit sits on and on. Maybe, he endeavours to depict but a rough sketch of this approaching future from whose cruel talons there is no escape for its victims.

Before many days are out, one night Chhabi starts up from sleep. It is loud wails of agonized bereavement, she hears. "Hark!" She wakes her husband.

"Well!"

"Don’t you think it’s Tunu’s relatives lamenting?" Chhabi goes pale in the face and inquires.

"So it seems, to be sure."

"The poor boy had a crisis yesterday, I’m afraid he’s passed away." She wipes away two big beads of involuntary tears from her eyes.

Lalit gets down from bed and stands by the open window. Presently he commences pacing up and down the floor. "Well, Chhabi," he stops in front of her and demands, a harsh metallic ring in his voice, "Isn’t it passing strange that such a sweet angel as Tunu should come to his reckoning so early, while that devil of our son lives on?"

Chhabi shudders from head to foot, She ventures no reply.

His head sunk low on his chest, Lalit once more begins sauntering about, bursting with boiling emotion. "But then how much we’ve suffered for him!" He soliloquises, "What have we not done for him? Little wonder that he should be spared. Millions and millions of human devils of his class live and grow. They fly blindly at each other’s throat. Envy and malice drive them mad. They kick up and maintain a sort of perpetual civil war on Earth. This is what is to be. Otherwise, what is it we’ve so strenuously struggled for, why have we endured so much?" He speaks as one possessed.

"Are you mad?" Chhabi is annoyed and vents her spleen.

"Maybe, I am." Lalit at once assents. "Can you imagine, Chhabi," he now holds her firmly by the hands in his excitement, "how I secured my son this change? Do you know what I did to act the father?"

His countenance bewilders his wife.

"Is it anything very dreadful?" she is at her wit’s end and expects the worst.

"Why, I stole……surreptitiously I sold away a bale from a boat. A child is a future man, the hope and pride of his country, of the world at large–thus I met his demand. Did I do wrong?"

"Alas, we’re undone!" her voice shakes in trepidation."

"Cheer up, darling, why do you tremble?" Lalit laughs a bitter laugh, his face hideous. "The fun of it is, it will never come to light. It will, like an ugly nightmare, ever bear me company to the end of my days.

Empty sentimentality should not be mistaken for deep feeling.

Lalit calms down as quickly as he has blazed up.

He opens the door, and the soothing stillness of the night around convinces him that he has made a mountain of a mole-hill.

The vast dome above, studded with countless, throbbing stars, wonderfully pulsates. Her long-cherished hopes as yet unrealised, calmly lies the earth beneath in meek and patient expectation.