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The
Devotee
I
AT a time, when my unpopularity with a part of my readers had reached the nadir of
its glory, and my name had become the central orb of the journals, to be
attended through space with a perpetual rotation of revilement, I felt the
necessity to retire to some quiet place and endeavour to forget my own
existence. I
have a house in the country some miles away from Calcutta, where I can remain
unknown and unmolested. The villagers there have not, as yet, come to any
conclusion about me. They know I am no mere holiday-maker or pleasure-seeker;
for I never outrage the silence of the village nights with the riotous noises
of the city. Nor do they regard me as an ascetic, because the little
acquaintance they have of me carries the savour of comfort about it. I am not,
to them, a traveller; for, though I am a vagabond by nature, my wandering
through the village fields is aimless. They are hardly even quite certain
whether I am married or single; for they have never seen me with my children.
So, not being able to classify me in any animal or vegetable kingdom that they
know, they have long since given me up and left me stolidly alone.
But
quite lately I have come to know that there is one person in the village who is
deeply interested in me. Our acquaintance began on a sultry afternoon in July.
There had been rain all the morning, and the air was still wet and heavy with
mist, like eyelids when weeping is over. I
sat lazily watching a dappled cow grazing on the high bank of the river. The
afternoon sun was playing on her glossy hide. The simple beauty of this dress
of light made me wonder idly at man’s deliberate waste of money in setting up
tailors’ shops to deprive his own skin of its natural clothing.
While
I was thus watching and lazily musing, a woman of middle age came and
prostrated herself before me, touching the ground with her forehead. She
carried in her robe some bunches of flowers, one of which she offered to me
with folded hands. She said to me, as she offered it: “This is an offering to
my God.” She
went away. I was so taken aback as she uttered these words, that I could hardly
catch a glimpse of her before she was gone. The whole incident was entirely
simple, but it left a deep impression on my mind; and as I turned back once
more to look at the cattle in the field, the zest of life in the cow, who was
munching the lush grass with deep breaths, while she whisked off the flies,
appeared to me fraught with mystery. My readers may laugh at my foolishness,
but my heart was full of adoration. I offered my worship to the pure joy of
living, which is God’s own life. Then, plucking a tender shoot from the mango
tree, I fed the cow with it from my own hand, and as I did this I had the
satisfaction of having pleased my God.
The
next year when I returned to the village it was February. The cold season still
lingered on. The morning sun came into my room, and I was grateful for its
warmth. I was writing, when the servant came to tell me that a devotee, of the
Vishnu cult, wanted to see me. I told him, in an absent way, to bring her
upstairs, and went on with my writing. The Devotee came in, and bowed to me,
touching my feet. I found that she was the same woman whom I had met, for a
brief moment, a year ago. I
was able now to examine her more closely. She was past that age when one asks
the question whether a woman is beautiful or not. Her stature was above the
ordinary height, and she was strongly built; but her body was slightly bent
owing to her constant attitude of veneration. Her manner had nothing shrinking
about it. The most remarkable of her features were her two eyes. They seemed to
have a penetrating power which could make distance near.
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
days, 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 I 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. I
found out that the Devotee came from a good family in the country, and that her
mother was well-to-do, and desired to keep her daughter. But she preferred to
be a mendicant. I asked her how she made her living. She told me that her
followers had given her a piece of land, and that she begged her food from door
to door. She said to me: “The food which I get by begging is divine.”
After
I had thought over what she said, I understood her meaning. When we get our
food precariously as alms, we remember God the giver. But when we receive our
food regularly at home, as a matter of course, we are apt to regard it as ours
by right. I
had a great desire to ask her about her husband. But as she never mentioned him
even indirectly, I did not question her. I
found out very soon that the Devotee had no respect at all for that part of the
village where the people of the higher castes lived.
“They
never give,” she said, “a single farthing to God’s service; and yet they have
the largest share of God’s glebe. But the poor worship and starve.” I
asked her why she did not go and live among these godless people, and help them
towards a better life. “That,” I said with some unction, “would be the highest
form of divine worship.”
I
had heard sermons of this kind from time to time, and I am rather fond of
copying them myself for the public benefit, when the chance comes. But
the Devotee was not at all impressed. She raised her big round eyes, and looked
straight into mine, and said: “You
mean to say that because God is with the sinners, therefore when you do them
any service you do it to God? Is that so?”
“Yes,”
I replied, “that is my meaning.”
“Of
course,” she answered almost impatiently, “of course, God is with them:
otherwise, how could they go on living at all? But what is that to me? My God
is not there. My God cannot be worshipped among them; because I do not find Him
there. I seek Him where I can find Him.”
As
she spoke, she made obeisance to me. What she meant to say was really this. A
mere doctrine of God’s omnipresence does not help us. That God is
all-pervading,–this truth may be a mere intangible abstraction, and therefore
unreal to ourselves. Where I can see Him, there is His reality in my soul. I
need not explain that all the while she showered her devotion on me she did it
to me not as an individual. I was simply a vehicle of her divine worship. It
was not for me either to receive it or to refuse it: for it was not mine, but
God’s. When
the Devotee came again, she found me once more engaged with my books and
papers. “What
have you been doing,” she said, with evident vexation, “that my God should make
you undertake such drudgery? Whenever I come, I find you reading and writing.” “God
keeps his useless people busy,” I answered; “otherwise they would be bound to
get into mischief. They have to do all the least necessary things in life. It
keeps them out of trouble.” The
Devotee told me that she could not bear the encumbrances, with which, day by
day, I was surrounded. If she wanted to see me, she was not allowed by the
servants to come straight upstairs. If she wanted to touch my feet in worship,
there were my socks always in the way. And when she wanted to have a simple
talk with me, she found my mind lost in a wilderness of letters.
This
time, before she left me, she folded her hands, and said: “My God! I felt your
feet in my breast this morning. Oh, how cool! And they were bare, not covered.
I held them upon my head for a long time in worship. That filled my very being.
Then, after that, pray what was the use of my coming to you yourself? Why did I
come? My Lord, tell me truly,–wasn’t it a mere infatuation?” There
were some flowers in my vase on the table. While she was there, the gardener brought some new flowers to put in their place. The Devotee saw him changing
them. “Is
that all?” she exclaimed. “Have you done with the flowers? Then give them to
me.” She
held the flowers tenderly in the cup of her hands, and began to gaze at them
with bent head. After a few moments’ silence she raised her head again, and
said to me: “You never look at these flowers; therefore they become stale to
you. If you would only look into them, then your reading and writing would go
to the winds.”
She
tied the flowers together in the end of her robe, and placed them, in an
attitude of worship, on the top of her head, saying reverently: “Let me carry
my God with me.” While
she did this, I felt that flowers in our rooms do not receive their due meed of
loving care at our hands. When we stick them in vases, they are more like a row
of naughty schoolboys standing on a form to be punished. The
Devotee came again the same evening, and sat by my feet on the terrace of the
roof. “I
gave away those flowers,” she said, “as I went from house to house this
morning, singing God’s name. Beni, the head man of our village, laughed at me
for my devotion, and said: ‘Why do you waste all this devotion on Him? Don’t
you know He is reviled up and down the countryside?’ Is that true, my God? Is
it true that they are hard upon you?”
For
a moment I shrank into myself. It was a shock to find that the stains of
printers’ ink could reach so far.
The
Devotee went on: “Beni imagined that he could blow out the flame of my devotion
at one breath! But this is no mere tiny flame: it is a burning fire. Why do
they abuse you, my God?” I
said: “Because I deserved it. I suppose in my greed I was loitering about to
steal people’s hearts in secret.” The
Devotee said: “Now you see for yourself how little their hearts are worth. They
are full of poison, and this will cure you of your greed.” “When
a man,” I answered, “has greed in his heart, he is always on the verge of being
beaten. The greed itself supplies his enemies with poison.” “Our
merciful God,” she replied, “beats us with His own hand, and drives away all
the poison. He who endures God’s beating to the end is saved.”
That
evening the Devotee told me the story of her life. The stars of evening rose
and set behind the trees, as she went on to the end of her tale. “My
husband is very simple. Some people think that he is a simpleton; but I know
that those who understand simply, understand truly. In business and household
management he was able to hold his own. Because his needs were small, and his
wants few, he could manage carefully on what we had. He would never meddle in
other matters, nor try to understand them. “Both
my husband’s parents died before we had been married long, and we were left alone.
But my husband always needed some one to be over him. I am ashamed to confess
that he had a sort of reverence for me, and looked upon me as his superior. But
I am sure that he could understand things better than I, though I had greater
powers of talking.
“Of
all the people in the world he held his Guru Thakur (spiritual master) in the
highest veneration. Indeed it was not veneration merely but love; and such love
as his is rare. “Guru
Thakur was younger than my husband. Oh! how beautiful he was! “My
husband had played games with him when he was a boy; and from that time forward
he had dedicated his heart and soul to this friend of his early days. Thakur
knew how simple my husband was, and used to tease him mercilessly. “He
and his comrades would play jokes upon him for their own amusement; but he
would bear them all with long-suffering. “When
I married into this family, Guru Thakur was studying at Benares. My husband
used to pay all his expenses. I was eighteen years old when he returned home to
our village.
“At
the age of fifteen I had my child. I was so young I did not know how to take
care of him. I was fond of gossip, and liked to be with my village friends for
hours together. I used to get quite cross with my boy when I was compelled to
stay at home and nurse him. Alas! my child-God came into my life, but His
playthings were not ready for Him. He came to the mother’s heart, but the
mother’s heart lagged behind. He left me in anger; and ever since I have been
searching for Him up and down the world.
“The
boy was the joy of his father’s life. My careless neglect used to pain my
husband. But his was a mute soul. He has never been able to give expression to
his pain. “The
wonderful thing was this, that in spite of my neglect the child used to love me
more than any one else. He seemed to have the dread that I would one day go
away and leave him. So even when I was with him, he would watch me with a
restless look in his eyes. He had me very little to himself, and therefore his
desire to be with me was always painfully eager. When I went each day to the
river, he used to fret and stretch out his little arms to be taken with me. But
the bathing ghat was my place for meeting my friends, and I did not care to
burden myself with the child.
“It
was an early morning in August. Fold after fold of grey clouds had wrapped the
mid-day round with a wet clinging robe. I asked the maid to take care of the
boy, while I went down to the river. The child cried after me as I went away. “There
was no one there at the bathing ghat when I arrived. As a swimmer, I was the
best among all the village women. The river was quite full with the rains. I
swam out into the middle of the stream some distance from the shore. “Then
I heard a cry from the bank, ‘Mother!’ I turned my head and saw my boy coming
down the steps, calling me as he came. I shouted to him to stop, but he went
on, laughing and calling. My feet and hands became cramped with fear. I shut my
eyes, afraid to see. When I opened them, there, at the slippery stairs, my
boy’s ripple of laughter had disappeared for ever.
“I
got back to the shore. I raised him from the water. I took him in my arms, my
boy, my darling, who had begged so often in vain for me to take him. I took him
now, but he no more looked in my eyes and called ‘Mother.’ “My
child-God had come. I had ever neglected Him. I had ever made Him cry. And now
all that neglect began to beat against my own heart, blow upon blow, blow upon
blow. When my boy was with me, I had left him alone. I had refused to take him
with me. And now, when he is dead, his memory clings to me and never leaves me. “God
alone knows all that my husband suffered. If he had only punished me for my
sin, it would have been better for us both. But he knew only how to endure in
silence, not how to speak. “When
I was almost mad with grief, Guru Thakur came back. In earlier days, the
relation between him and my husband had been that of boyish friendship. Now, my
husband’s reverence for his sanctity and learning was unbounded. He could
hardly speak in his presence, his awe of him was so great.
“My
husband asked his Guru to try to give me some consolation. Guru Thakur began to
read and explain to me the scriptures. But I do not think they had much effect
on my mind. All their value for me lay in the voice that uttered them. God
makes the draught of divine life deepest in the heart for man to drink, through
the human voice. He has no better vessel in His hand than that; and He Himself
drinks His divine draught out of the same vessel. “My
husband’s love and veneration for his Guru filled our house, as incense fills a
temple shrine. I showed that veneration, and had peace. I saw my God in the
form of that Guru. He used to come to take his meal at our house every morning.
The first thought that would come to my mind on waking from sleep was that of
his food as a sacred gift from God. When I prepared the things for his meal, my
fingers would sing for joy.
“When
my husband saw my devotion to his Guru, his respect for me greatly increased.
He noticed his Guru’s eager desire to explain the scriptures to me. He used to
think that he could never expect to earn any regard from his Guru himself, on
account of his stupidity; but his wife had made up for it. “Thus
another five years went by happily, and my whole life would have passed like
that; but beneath the surface some stealing was going on somewhere in secret. I
could not detect it; but it was detected by the God of my heart. Then came a
day when, in a moment our whole life was turned upside down. “It
was a morning in midsummer. I was returning home from bathing, my clothes all
wet, down a shady lane. At the bend of the road, under the mango tree, I met my
Guru Thakur. He had his towel on his shoulder and was repeating some Sanskrit
verses as he was going to take his bath. With my wet clothes clinging all about
me I was ashamed to meet him. I tried to pass by quickly, and avoid being seen.
He called me by my name.
“I
stopped, lowering my eyes, shrinking into myself. He fixed his gaze upon me,
and said: ‘How beautiful is your body!’ “All
the universe of birds seemed to break into song in the branches overhead. All
the bushes in the lane seemed ablaze with flowers. It was as though the earth
and sky and everything had become a riot of intoxicating joy. “I
cannot tell how I got home. I only remember that I rushed into the room where
we worship God. But the room seemed empty. Only before my eyes those same gold
spangles of light were dancing which had quivered in front of me in that shady
lane on my way back from the river. “Guru
Thakur came to take his food that day, and asked my husband where I had gone.
He searched for me, but could not find me anywhere. “Ah!
I have not the same earth now any longer. The same sunlight is not mine. I
called on my God in my dismay, and He kept His face turned away from me.
“The
day passed, I know not how. That night I had to meet my husband. But the night
is dark and silent. It is the time when my husband’s mind comes out shining,
like stars at twilight. I had heard him speak things in the dark, and I had
been surprised to find how deeply he understood. “Sometimes
I am late in the evening in going to rest on account of household work. My
husband waits for me, seated on the floor, without going to bed. Our talk at
such times had often begun with something about our Guru.
“That
night, when it was past midnight, I came to my room, and found my husband
sleeping on the floor. Without disturbing him I lay down on the ground at his
feet, my head towards him. Once he stretched his feet, while sleeping, and
struck me on the breast. That was his last bequest. “Next
morning, when my husband woke up from his sleep, I was already sitting by him.
Outside the window, over the thick foliage of the jack-fruit tree, appeared the
first pale red of the dawn at the fringe of the night. It was so early that the
crows had not yet begun to call. “I
bowed, and touched my husband’s feet with my forehead. He sat up, starting as
if waking from a dream, and looked at my face in amazement. I said: “‘I
have made up my mind. I must leave the world. I cannot belong to you any
longer. I must leave your home.’ “Perhaps
my husband thought that he was still dreaming. He said not a word.
‘Ah!
do hear me!’ I pleaded with infinite pain. ‘Do hear me and understand! You must
marry another wife. I must take my leave.’ “My
husband said: ‘What is all this wild, mad talk? Who advises you to leave the
world?’ “I
said: ‘My Guru Thakur.’ “My
husband looked bewildered. ‘Guru Thakur!’ he cried. ‘When did he give you this advice?’ “‘In
the morning,’ I answered, ‘yesterday, when I met him on my way back from the
river.’ His
voice trembled a little. He turned, and looked in my face, and asked me: ‘Why
did he give you such a behest?’ “‘I
do not know,’ I answered. ‘Ask him! He will tell you himself, if he can.’ “My
husband said: ‘It is possible to leave the world, even when continuing to live
in it. You need not leave my home. I will speak to my Guru about it.’ ‘Your
Guru,’ I said, ‘may accept your petition; but my heart will never give its
consent. I must leave your home. From henceforth, the world is no more to me.’
“My
husband remained silent, and we sat there on the floor in the dark. When it was
light, he said to me: ‘Let us both come to him.’
“I
folded my hands and said: ‘I shall never meet him again.’
“He
looked into my face. I lowered my eyes. He said no more. I knew that, somehow,
he had seen into my mind, and understood what was there. In this world of mine,
there were only two who loved me best–my boy and my husband. That love was my
God, and therefore it could brook no falsehood. One of these two left me, and I
left the other. Now I must have truth, and truth alone.”
She touched the ground at
my feet, rose and bowed to me, and departed.
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