“Save your tears,” he remarked. “Why shed them until you are sure he is dead?”
When our boat reached Calcutta, Dr. Misra again accompanied me. My youngest brother Bishnu was waiting to greet me at the dock.
“I know Ananta has departed this life,” I said to Bishnu, before he had had time to speak. “Please tell me, and the doctor here, when Ananta died.”
Bishnu named the date, which was the very day that I had bought the souvenirs in Shanghai.
“Look here!” Dr. Misra ejaculated. “Don’t let any word of this get around! The professors will be adding a year’s study of mental telepathy to the medical course, which is already long enough!”
Father embraced me warmly as I entered our Gurpar Road home. “You have come,” he said tenderly. Two large tears dropped from his eyes. Ordinarily undemonstrative, he had never before shown me these signs of affection. Outwardly the grave father, inwardly he possessed the melting heart of a mother. In all his dealings with the family, his dual parental role was distinctly manifest.
Soon after Ananta’s passing, my younger sister Nalini was brought back from death’s door by a divine healing. Before relating the story, I will refer to a few phases of her earlier life.
The childhood relationship between Nalini and myself had not been of the happiest nature. I was very thin; she was thinner still. Through an unconscious motive or “complex” which psychiatrists will have no difficulty in identifying, I often used to tease my sister about her cadaverous appearance. Her retorts were equally permeated with the callous frankness of extreme youth. Sometimes Mother intervened, ending the childish quarrels, temporarily, by a gentle box on my ear, as the elder ear.
Time passed; Nalini was betrothed to a young Calcutta physician, Panchanon Bose. He received a generous dowry from Father, presumably (as I remarked to Sister) to compensate the bridegroom-to-be for his fate in allying himself with a human bean-pole.
Elaborate marriage rites were celebrated in due time. On the wedding night, I joined the large and jovial group of relatives in the living room of our Calcutta home. The bridegroom was leaning on an immense gold-brocaded pillow, with Nalini at his side. A gorgeous purple silk sari [25-1] could not, alas, wholly hide her angularity. I sheltered myself behind the pillow of my new brother-in-law and grinned at him in friendly fashion. He had never seen Nalini until the day of the nuptial ceremony, when he finally learned what he was getting in the matrimonial lottery.