IT took Ramesh nearly three months to settle his father’s affairs and to make all preparations for the old ladies’ pilgrimage. A few of the neighbours had begun to make advances to the young bride. The loose knot of affection that bound her to Ramesh tightened gradually as the days passed.
The young couple formed a habit of spreading mats on the roof and spending their evenings under the open sky. Ramesh now allowed himself familiarities; he would pounce on the girl from behind, press his hands over her eyes, and draw her head on to his breast. When she fell asleep early in the evening before supper he would startle her into wakefulness and earn himself a scolding. One evening he playfully seized her coiled hair, shook it, and remarked:
“Susila, I don’t like the way your hair is done to-day.”
The girl sat up. “Look here, why do you all persist in calling me Susila?” she asked. Ramesh stared at her in astonishment, at a loss to know what she meant by this question. “Changing my name won’t change my luck,” she went on. “I’ve been unlucky since I was a child and I’ll be unlucky all my life.”
Ramesh’s heart gave a throb of dismay and the colour left his face. The conviction was suddenly forced upon him that there had been a terrible mistake somewhere.
“Why do you say you’ve been unlucky all your life?” he asked.
“My father died before I was born, and I wasn’t six months old when my mother died too. I had a very bad time in my uncle’s house. Then all of a sudden I heard that you had turned up from somewhere and taken a fancy to me. We were married two days later and you know what happened after that!”
Ramesh fell back helplessly on his pillow. The moon had risen but there seemed to be no lustre in its rays. He dreaded to put another question and he tried to thrust aside what he had heard as a dream, a delusion. A warm south wind began softly to stir like the sigh of an awakening sleeper, a wakeful cuckoo was chanting forth its monotonous notes in the moonlight. From the boats moored at the neighbouring landing-place the boatmen’s song rose in the air. Finding Ramesh apparently oblivious of her existence the girl nudged him gently. “Sleeping?” she queried.
“No,” said Ramesh, but he gave no further response and she quietly dropped off to sleep. Ramesh sat up and gazed at her, but there was no indication on her forehead of the secret that Fate had written there. How was it possible that so dreadful a destiny could be masked by such loveliness?