Ramchander was walking up and down the yard when Parvati brought milk and fruit for his breakfast and summoned him. He washed his hands and feet mechanically with water from a brass pot while Parvati waited. It was a day of fasting for her. She had finished her ablutions and puja in the morning.
‘Do you know what I was thinking of, Parvati?’ asked Ramchander although he had no faith in her capacity to take part in a discussion on his problems. ‘I was wondering to what extent our actions are really our own, or how far they are subservient to the laws the universe has ordained for us. That is to say, are we the riders of horses or just the carriers of burdens…’
Parvati did not say anything, nor did Ramchander expect her to. He peeled a banana, ate it and went on as if all he wanted was to give expression to what was in his mind: ‘If everything happens according to a predetermined pattern as the scriptures say, would it not mean that our actions cannot be judged—that there is no right or wrong, no sin or virtue?’
This time Parvati answered: ‘It’s not like that. Virtue, sin, heaven, hell, they all exist.’
Ramchander looked at her with admiration.
‘How right you are!’ he said. ‘It’s just as I thought. Our Puranas point to the rising and setting of the sun, the sequence of days, nights and seasons, as examples of the mechanical and cyclic nature of events. But Yama, the son of Surya, went beyond the mechanical nature of events and discovered that they had characteristics and attributes. He separated them into right and wrong ones. Are not the account books of the heaven and hell you spoke of, where every individual’s actions are recorded, in the possession of his assistant, Chitragupta?’
At a loss for words, Parvati simply smiled.
Lost in the conversation, Ramchander forgot his breakfast. ‘Like the scriptures, the physical sciences also say that the sun, the moon and all the planets move along paths dictated by certain fixed laws. But it is different with a human being. If he walks on a straight path along the rounded surface of the earth, he will come back to the spot from where he began, like the planets. But he is at liberty to take a path that is not straight. What do you say?’
Ramchander laughed to himself, shaking his head. A cat came up to him, mewing impatiently, and he poured out some milk for it on the floor.
‘This means that although these rules and dictates exist, there is also right and wrong on the earth and the need to judge actions. Do you know, whenever our Kayastha Sabha meets, we discuss the same things: mistakes in grammar, deviations in metre, the breaking of customs and rituals, violation of laws, lapses of government—why even printers’ devils in books! But what stays insistently in my mind is the wrong done to that man, Govardhan.’
The cat mewed asking for more milk and finally sprang up and overturned the glass. Ramchander looked on curiously.
‘It was milk that had been offered to the goddess on this day of fasting!’ exclaimed Parvati, annoyed. ‘I know. All this started after that man barged into your room at midnight. You used to sit quietly in the same spot working out your mathematical problems. Now you speak as if you’re delirious, walk up and down like one possessed…I think it was a ghost who came here!’
‘No, Parvati, it was a man. Perhaps the one person who can answer all my problems. I even suspect that he might be the man who pulled our Chitragupta, the guru of the kayasthas, out of his house and left him on the roadside. The greatest thing human beings can achieve, Parvati, is to understand the pain of the wounded, the suffering of the helpless. Who but the wounded and the suffering themselves can describe that to us? That is why I say that the answers to our problems lie on the path that man took. Because his path is that of suffering.’
The cat was busy licking up the milk spilled on the floor. Parvati watched, uncertain what to do. Ramchander got up and went back to walk in the yard.