The Gift of Forgiving Gods

THE sacred city of Benares lifted its mysterious face to the morning sun, smiling, mystic, wonderful. Its gleaming pinnacles and gorgeous towers swam through the shining white haze of an early sky. The sunlight, as yet untainted by the feverish heat of noon, poured down from the flashing tips of two slender minarets, sentinels of Mohammed’s classic monument in the midst of a glowing Hinduism; poured down, deepened, and spread in a visible golden wash over the crowded buildings, over tier upon tier of stone steps, down to the edge of the blue Ganges. It flooded a molten stream of bronze bodies and brilliant saris that undulated up and down the long terraces, turned to fire a thousand brass vessels that glinted through the throng. Pure and kind and innocent, it penetrated into the haggard shrines that faced the holy river, touching gently the faces of barren women who knelt before the sacred lingum of Shivah and knocked their heads ceaselessly upon the stone pavement. Unconsciously merciless, it hung upon the mask-faces of ash-smeared fakirs, who squatted motionless by the water’s edge, blinking back to theheavens, in blind self-satisfied fanaticism. Laughingly it danced through the sparkling wavelets of the Ganges, turning them to silver and sapphire; playfully it caressed the limbs of the river’s devotees who came in hundreds to bathe and worship. Cool, limpid mother Ganges! Pure life-giving SunGod!

An old woman stood knee-deep in the water, lifting her withered face and dimmed eyes to the sky. Slowly she raised her shriveled black arms above her head, and poured the sacred water from her brass jar, an offering to the sun. A group of plump Brahmin women scrubbed their clothing vigorously on the steps behind her, laughing and gossiping as they washed. A large austere man, under a straw umbrella, round like a gigantic mushroom, dipped water from where he sat on his raft and drank, then marked his forehead and arms with ashes, elaborately careful. Far up the river, to the pearl-gray smoke of the Burning-Ghat, rippled the bright line of worshipers, but no one noticed the old woman. She was protected from the eyes of the curious by the covering of her uncomely old age, and she was oblivious to them all, isolated in the fervency of her prayer. For a moment her sorrow-stricken face quivered to the sun, then bowed itself to the waters that lapped her shrunken body, “ Gunga-Mai, Gunga-Mai,” she repeated, feebly imploring.

A crow dropped from the white sky over her head, and lit upon something that floated a little beyond her. It was thestiff body of a child. The old woman shrank together suddenly, cowered shaking in the water, and half stretched out her arms to the little form. “ Piari — meri Piari! ” she cried tremulously, yearningly; but the current of the river carried its burden onward swiftly, and only the blue waves answered her, laughing. Slowly she turned and waded back to the dry stone steps. Slowly, feebly she wrung out the drenched end of her single muslin garment, turning a bewildered face this way and that in search of some one.

As she put the meagre fold of her sari over her gray head, and lifted her brass jar from the stone at her bare knotted feet, he came along the steps above her, her son for whom she was looking, a tall, somewhat loosely-built, awkward youth, with a mild subdued face. On his forehead was the freshly marked sign of Shivah. He had been bathing too, and his cotton skirt clung to his body in damp folds. He carried a bundle bound to his bare bronze shoulders and a staff in one hand. Without speaking, he put his arm through hers and urged her gently up the great flight of steps. Slowly and silently they mounted through the streaming sunlight, through the unnoticing, eddying throng, the mother leaning her frail body upon her son; and on the face of each was the leaden weight of sorrow.

“ Will you rest here, Bhagwanti? ” asked the young man when they finally reached the stone-flagged street at the top of the steps.

He looked into the old face patiently as he spoke, but she seemed not to hear. Her weak eyes strained beyond him to a shrine guarded by a sacred tree. A dissolute-looking man,with a red shawl flung defiantly over his shoulder, was striding around the tree, fiercely, as though he grudged the gods this atonement for his sins. Several melancholy little women crept around behind him, timidly, to atone for the sins of their husbands, around and around. Bhagwanti shook her old head.

” She had no need to do that for you,” she murmured.

Her son’s face contracted in a sudden twist of pain.

“ Come, weary Mai-ji,” he said, hurriedly yet kindly. “ Come: we will seek first the Golden Temple and the Well of Knowledge. Then I will find for you sweet milk and a place to rest.”

He pulled her with him down the shadowed mouth of a narrow street. She followed, mumbling.

“ You were always a faithful son, yes, and a kind master to your house. ’T is your father’s widow who has angered the gods.—Ah! Ram, Ram — Ram! ” Her voice quavered off into silence as her bare feet slapped the dust behind her son’s footsteps.

The man said nothing. He had never been one to eat many words, and of late years his labor in the fields had given him increased measure of silent patience, Since the gods had taken away the delight of his simple heart, the lustrous eyed Lakshmi, and their baby girl, the little Piari, he had never spoken of them, even to his mother. Her loneliness was querulous: for hours she would sit by the door of their thatched hut murmuring the name of the child, and clinging with both arms to her own empty shriveled breast; but he, it seemed, must bear his suffering like one of those poor dogs that hung sick and dumb about his lonely house in that far village whence they had come. It was for the woman’s, his mother’s, sake that he had made the weary pilgrimage to Benares. For him the prospect of worshiping by the sacred river held no solace; and why should he try to appease the anger of the gods?

A great crowd of pilgrims surged through the outer court of the Golden Temple, surged forward, were thrown back, and surged again about the Well of Knowledge. Thin, worn men and women they were, from far country villages, with dingy travel-torn garments, childlike hungry faces, bewildered by the clamorous clanging of temple bells, the lowing of sacred cows, the cries of peddlers who sold garlands, fruit, and glistening ghee for offerings. Passionately they pressed forward to drink of the blessed perspiration of Shivah, that half-filled the shiny stone basin of the well, and was doled to them in spoonfuls by a fat, squatting priest; then they tumbled past, to worship before the great red bull in the inner court. An insolent priest, with brutal, bloated face and protruding belly, stood guard by the huge head where the pilgrims knelt and left their offerings. One after another, they laid their foreheads to the stone, tossed sacred water over the beast’s forefeet and dropped a coin which the priest swept contemptuously into his chuddhar.

Bhagwanti and her son received their portion of the blessed fluid and were swept on by the crowd. “ Ai, ai,” whimpered the old woman, terrified and bruised. The boy encircled her narrow shoulders with his arms, and lifted her down the steps to the pavement before the Bull, pressing four coppers into her withered hand. Trembling she knelt with her gray head to the ground. Her weary spirit groped confusedly through the clamorous strangeness of her surroundings. She had come a three days’ journey on her aged feet. Her days were all but numbered, and her heart was fevered with a sickening sense of undefined sin. Somewhere she had offended, perhaps by clinging too happily to the cherished remnants of her old widowhood. Ah, if the great Shivah would but give her some sign of forgiveness!

She dropped the coins, praying piteously. With a harsh grunt, the priest tore her from her son’s arm and hurled her across the stones of the court. She fell in a queer formless heap. The boy sprang to her swiftly. Silently he picked her up, and taking her in his strong arms disappeared in the throng, as a pebble drops through turbulent waters, leaving no trace of its path; and still the pilgrims scrambled like eager yet frightened children to worship the beast; and the priest turned to another woman who left too small an offering and beat her head to the stones with his heavy hand. And in all the passionately pulsating throng, only Shivah’s bull stared straight ahead with sightless eyes, immovable.

The sun had risen slowly higher and higher, gathering feverish heat in its ascent, until it hung burning above the narrow winding streets of the city where the tide of life ran very low. All things seemed to have shriveled within themselves, except the blazing sunlight. The shadows cast by the awnings of fruit and food-shops shrank shamefacedly against the wall of high blistered buildings. Shopkeepers drooped shrunkenly as they crouched drowsing behind their wares. Even the gay silks that hung over the balconies of the great silk-store, the one with the sign in the language of the white sahibs, hung limp and pale in the still white heat of noon. The singing of a myriad infinitesimal insects made a thin vibrant sound that danced through the atmosphere, as though the dizzy shimmer of the sunlight were become audible.

VOL. 105 - NO. 2

Bhagwanti’s son half-carried, half-led her across the burning market-place. Her old knees knocked against each other feebly as she tottered along. Her head shook miserably against his bare shoulder. Her breath came in little gasps. Now and then she lifted her thin reedy voice in a little heartbroken wail. In a secluded corner of the square he put her down gently, with her back against the shaded wall of a food-shop. The pungent odor of many spices rose slowly from lazily-steaming cauldrons, from piles of newly-made cakes still glistening and dripping with grease. In the shelter of his booth the shopkeeper slept, squatting on his heels. He was an elderly man, with thin pointed face and spectacles pushed up over his clean white turban. Bhagwanti shook her head feebly as he roused himself and prepared to serve her.

“ Is there no milk?” she whimpered.

“ Yes, there is milk, weak and weary one,” answered the son soothingly.

A buffalo cow, goaded by a very small atom of humanity in a ragged shirt and red, tilted turban, was lumbering from the opposite mouth of an alley.

“Ai, Dhuid-walā-ā-,” called the full voice of the village lad. Lazily the distant atom prodded the huge rough side of the buffalo, languidly he pulled the long tail. They moved slowly across the square, and Bhagwanti held out her brass jar thirstily. The boy squatted beneath his great cow and coaxed a stream of sweet white milk into the jar with minute, deft fingers; handed the jar to the old woman; and, biting the coin which her son gave him, moved off again, lifting his voice shrilly in a nasal cadence of song and twisting the lumbering cow’s tail abstractedly.

Bhagwanti sipped the fresh milk with trembling lips. She looked up at her son, questioningly. He had seated himself cross-legged on the platform of the shop, and was lazily rolling a betel-nut in a green leaf.

“ You will finish the puja ? The other gods —! ”

Her eyes besought him timidly. He put the ball of betel-nut into his mouth and, slowly chewing, looked up and down the hot square. A moment he hesitated, took another pull at the long pipe which the shopkeeper offered him, and turned to her, mild, patient, apathetic as always.

“ I will find you when the sun moves behind the temple tower.” He unfolded his legs and stood before her. “ We must take the road before evening.” He moved away.

Bhagwanti settled back into her corner and sipped again, but she no longer felt any hunger, only great weariness. The shopkeeper was. reading a book which he held between his toes. Now and then he chanted the words aloud to himself as he swayed backwards and forwards gently. A handsome Brahaminy bull paced majestically down the line of shops, helping himself here and there to choice bunches of turnips and carrots, unmolested. The square was deserted. Bhagwanti put the vessel of milk on the ground beside her. She drowsed. Her old head fell forward.

Suddenly the wail of a child pierced the hot noon silence close at hand. The old woman lifted her head with a start.

“Piari!” she murmured, half asleep.

“ Die, thou wretched baby,” sounded the not unkind voice of the shopkeeper.

Bhagwanti blinked. A plump naked baby girl sat in the dust at her knee, clutching in her two hands the brass jar of milk. Her short legs stuck straight out from her round little belly. Her lower lip was drawn down, dangerously trembling. Two tears plumped into the milk. The shopkeeper twisted the jar from her chubby fists, and with a cry of hungry rage the little one pulled herself to her feet, clutching the old woman’s knee.

“ ’T is the old Mai’s milk, greedy puppy,” remonstrated the man, putting the jar on the other side of the old woman.

Sobbing, the baby leaned her dimpled nakedness against the trembling old body, and dug a pair of fists into her eyes.

“Piari, little Piari!” murmured the lonely grandmother, dragging the child into her lap, and holding the milk to the quivering little mouth.

With a delighted gurgle, the baby drank, and when the last drop was drained, leaned her tousled head on the shrunken old breast and went to sleep.

“Piari! ” whispered the woman again, beginning to croon the minor strain of a village song.

“ What is this, foolish Mai-ji? ” The voice of her son was wearied and almost impatient. His hand fell upon her shoulder a trifle heavily. He had been to one shrine after another, doing puja, patiently, hopelessly. He was very tired.

The withered face smiled up at him in utter contentment.

“ It is Piari,” she breathed.

For a moment he gazed at the baby, bewildered, then turned to the shopkeeper, questioning.

“ It is seven days now,” said the latter, looking over his spectacles at the child. “ The old farmer who left her has never come back. He had the fever on him. Who knows what has come to pass? ”

“ You have taken her into your house? ”

“ Even so. The old man left some coppers to buy her milk, but we can keep her no longer. Already my house holds seven—five girls.”

He sighed and looked from one to another quizzically.

Bhagwanti gazed at him bewildered. She seemed not to take in what he was saying.

“ What will you do with her? ” asked the son.

“ Leave her in the temple. Some day she will be of use in the temple.”

The man smiled knowingly.

At this the old woman scrambled to her feet, still holding the baby in her thin arms.

“ Piari — a temple girl? ” she cried huskily. “ No! She is a sign from the gods, of forgiveness.” She looked at her son intently.

“ Take her with you,” said the shopkeeper nonchalantly, turning to serve a customer. The son looked for a long minute at the poor worn figure of his mother, at the round baby asleep in her arms. Then an expression like the shadow of a flown joy crept over his mild, melancholy face.

“ Perhaps it is — the little Piari,” he said. “Come, Mai-ji.” He put his arm through hers and led her away.

Before they reached the opposite side of the square, the shopkeeper saw him take the child from the woman and perch her astride his shoulder. The little one clung there sleepily. So the three left the sacred city of Benares.