FullReads

With those two large eyes of hers, she seemed to push me as she entered.

“What is this?” she asked. “Why have you brought me here before your throne, my God? I used to see you among the trees; and that was much better. That was the true place to meet you.”

She must have seen me walking in the garden without my seeing her. For the last few clays, however, I had suffered from a cold, and had been prevented from going out. I had, perforce, to stay indoors and pay my homage to the evening sky from my terrace. After a silent pause the Devotee said to me: “O my God, give me some words of good.”

I was quite unprepared for this abrupt request, and answered her on the spur of the moment: “Good words I neither give nor receive. I simply open my eyes and keep silence, and then I can at once both hear and see, even when no sound is uttered. Now, while I am looking at you, it is as good as listening to your voice.”

The Devotee became quite excited as I spoke, and exclaimed: “God speaks to me, not only with His mouth, but with His whole body.”

I said to her: “When I am silent I can listen with my whole body. I have come away from Calcutta here to listen to that sound.”

The Devotee said: “Yes, I know that, and therefore 1 have come here to sit by you.”

Before taking her leave, she again bowed to me, and touched my feet. I could see that she was distressed, because my feet were covered. She wished them to be bare.

Early next morning I came out, and sat on my terrace on the roof. Beyond the line of trees southward I could see the open country chill and desolate. I could watch the sun rising over the sugar-cane in the East, beyond the clump of trees at the side of the village. Out of the deep shadow of those dark trees the village road suddenly appeared. It stretched forward, winding its way to some distant villages on the horizon, till it was lost in the grey of the mist.

That morning it was difficult to say whether the sun had risen or not. A white fog was still clinging to the tops of the trees. I saw the Devotee walking through the blurred dawn, like a mist-wraith of the morning twilight. She was singing her chant to God, and sounding her cymbals.

The thick haze lifted at last; and the sun, like the kindly grandsire of the village, took his seat amid all the work that was going on in home and field.

When I had just settled down at my writing-table, to appease the hungry appetite of my editor in Calcutta, there came a sound of footsteps on the stair, and the Devotee, humming a tune to herself, entered, and bowed before me. I lifted my head from my papers.

She said to me: “My God, yesterday I took as sacred food what was left over from your meal.”

I was startled, and asked her how she could do that.

“Oh,” she said, “I waited at your door in the evening, while you were at dinner, and took some food from your plate when it was carried out.”

This was a surprise to me, for every one in the village knew that I had been to Europe, and had eaten with Europeans. I was a vegetarian, no doubt, but the sanctity of my cook would not bear investigation, and the orthodox regarded my food as polluted.

The Devotee, noticing my sign of surprise, said: “My God, why should I come to you at all, if I could not take your food? “

I asked her what her own caste people would say. She told me she had already spread the news far and wide all over the village. The caste people had shaken their heads, but agreed that she must go her own way.