NIGHT had fallen before all the letters were despatched. Ramesh retired to rest but he could not sleep. His thoughts flowed in two currents, one clear and one turbid, like the confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna. The two streams mingled and disturbed his rest. For some time he tossed from side to side, then suddenly he threw off his coverings and got up.
He crossed to the window and looked out. The houses on one side of the lane were in deep shadow, while those on the other side stood out sharply outlined in the bright moonlight. Ramesh stood wrapped in silent thought. Casting off the trammels of his material environment with all its strife and uncertainty, his innermost being seemed to float away into the boundless cosmos where all is eternal, peaceful, and universal.
In a vision he saw birth, and death, toil and rest, beginning and ending, for ever issuing, to the ineffable rhythm of super-terrestrial music, on to the stage of the finite from the silent and illimitable behind the scenes; and from that infinite in which there is neither light nor darkness Ramesh beheld the twin loves of man and woman emerge into the starlight of this world.
Slowly Ramesh climbed to the roof. His eyes turned to Annada Babu’s house. Not a sound disturbed the stillness. The moonlight and the shadows had woven a pattern on the wall of the house, under the eaves, in the interstices of the doors and windows, and on the roughcast of the roof. How marvellous it was! There in that unpretentious house, in the heart of the teeming city, dwelt a wondrous being in the modest guise of a girl-student.
The metropolis swarmed with people like Ramesh — pleaders, graduates, foreigners, natives. Why should he be singled out for a special mark of divine favour denied to the rest? Why should it have been he and none other who had stood at the window with this girl by his side in the mellow autumn sunlight and beheld in a vision all creation floating on an illimitable sea of joyful mystery? What a miracle it was! A miracle that had transformed his innermost soul, that had transformed the world about him!
He paced up and down the roof till the night was far advanced. The setting moon was hidden behind the opposite house, and the darkness of night settled over the earth while the firmament still glowed with the farewell embrace of her light.
Ramesh’s weary limbs shivered with cold, and a sudden fear leapt upon him and held his heart in its grip. On the morrow he would have to face battle again in life’s arena. No line of care scored the face of the heavens, no restless activity ruffled the serenity of the moonlight; the stillness of the night was unbroken, and the whole universe with its countless stars in everlasting motion was none the less steeped in everlasting repose; only in man’s restless strife is there no pause. Alike in prosperity and in adversity human life is an unceasing struggle against odds.
On the one hand the eternal peace of the Infinite, on the other the eternal conflict of the world! How can the two exist side by side? Obsessed as he was with his own difficulties, Ramesh paused to speculate on this insoluble problem.
A vision of Love in the everlasting and boundless tranquillity of the womb of creation had just been granted to him. Now he beheld Love in contact with the world trampled and tossed about in the press of life. Which was the true vision and which was illusion?