Letter 5

My beloved Bal,
I was extremely glad to get your answer to my last letter which I sent to you in July 1916. How grateful we felt to here in your latest that you with all our friends are getting on well, and are healthy and happy. Thus it has pleased Providence to spare for you another year of bliss and especially of that tender and pure bliss which is only to be found in the bosom of a devoted and dear family life. You see, my Bal, the times and the climes in which the lot of our generation has fallen, make it so imperative for all noble and honest hearts to choose the path that leads through sorrows and sighs and separations which is the path of duty, that the heart so hardened and accustomed to the hard and merciless blows of fate comes to look upon disasters and disappointments as the very order of nature at any rate of our part in the nature’s scheme, and when a delighting event takes place, its attention is more fixed on how temporary such a good luck must be than how good that luck is. To me a joy is ever a solution of tears. Well, any how the days are changed and with changing fortune friends too are returning. When I left you in the Dock in Bombay High Court, and had a last look of you not being allowed even to shake hands, waved my hat and parted, my child, at that time the sting of the whole scene was in the thought that we- Dear Baba and I – could not do anything for you, our nearest and dearest charge. So young, so humble and having already suffered more than a man in his whole life does, you, my brother, were cast adrift, befriended by none, hated by many, suspended by a powerful Empire! The family hearth seemed extinguished for ever, the family gods broken to pieces. And although even all that could not deter us from the right nor make me ally myself with the wrong, yet it was with a bleeding heart that I wrote जो वंशबाग उध्वस्त झाला। संततपुष्प तोचि एक। (the garden that has shed all its flowers for the garland of the Gods is in blossom for ever.) Even the ever greens of hope stood withered and blasted. Only dear Vasanta, that was the bud, a melancholy memory of the past. But now a few kindly touches of the spring have revived the sap and the creepers are putting forth new buds. We had dear Vasanta, and we have our Raman and God willing we may be blessed with one more messenger of new life. The lamp of love is burning cheerfully under thy roof, and its warm and kind reflections have lightened the utter darkness of my cell here. And the new name of little Ranjan brings to mind the all suffering, the all loving , mother, his grand-mother, my dear Mavashi. What a joy it must have been to her! Please to give my love to that dear little child whom perhaps I may never see! And tell me whether it understands it or not! And why did you not write to me about Shanta herself? You left it to Vahini to do it for you. It is typically Indian but in your next you must write to me directly about your child and everything else. It is this extreme modesty that makes the generality of Indian babes grow rather in the shade than in the full light of their parents’ eyes. No, No! you must look upon it as a special and sacred charge. It was a pity that our dear Vahini should have been suffering from Plague. I thought that this dire epidemic had at last by this time left our shores but it seems that it rages there still. Please be very careful of it. Is it a little less rigorous than it used to be? Has not medical science as yet been able to find some reliable cure for it? You should better leave Bombay as soon as it appears there. Nothing can be too costly to avoid its dire claws, if indeed we can not blunt them.

The last parcel that I got was in January 1916 so neither of us has received any parcel for the last eighteen months or so when we ought to have received two. Now this was the reason what made us very anxious about your safety and I had to ask the permission of the Superintendent, who so kindly gave it, to wire to you. But I think we should take as much care as it is possible to avoid any such necessity. The best way would be that letters and parcels should be posted by you in fixed months, if not dates,…….

This much, so far as we are considered. But then there is the other party in the Post of the Government, and we cannot help suiting things to their pleasure. In your last letter you have written of a parcel lost in the post and last year my letter also was lost. Now what is the meaning of this? Thousands of parcels and letters come all right to this place; Only our letters and parcels should be so mysteriously spirited away! Is it the post? If so please to leave no stone unturned till they give some definite explanation for the loss of this parcel. You must have registered it; then it would be clear whether and through whose indulgence or malice, my letters and parcels are tampered with. This much for the post office. But if not the post – It is the Government ! Well; if so, then, Mum !!! Mum is the word!! As I have learnt to do without so many things which make life worth having, so also I shall and can learn to do without a yearly parcel too! But one should have thought that when a dozen censors have followed a book from the printer’s office to the clearance house and when powerful microscopes have searched the very anatomy of the pages, the books, at least, those which are found unobjectionable should have been returned to their owner!

The Nasik conference was really a success. The resolution about the release of the political prisoners has delighted even us, the forlorn and forgotten, and our deep gratitude to those who dare to remember us still. One wonders why the Congress should fight shy of any such thing even after its union. Perhaps the leaders of that body are too much weighed down by the sense of self-importance. Perhaps they think themselves too immaculate – far more responsible a band of statesmen and patriots than General Botha whose Government has released the leaders Rank and file of the Boer rebellion or Redmond whose nationalists have never ceased to try for the release of the Irish prisoners till they succeeded in having it. Nor can it be said that ‘that was a general participation in a rebellion’ as Mr. Bonarlaw has attempted to state; for firstly in the Indian Political prisoners also the overwhelming majority are convicts of general participation and secondly the suffragists though admittedly and case for case had been convicted of ‘Individual’ charges were released by Mr. Asquith long ago. But leave the Congress alone ! At any rate as soon as the war ends please to see if a public Petition for our release could be sent. Such a petition and resolution do not in themselves bring such a release, but they at any rate make it more acceptable if it ever comes. For I for one would indeed feel it a Shame to go back to a people which dares not, as for all I know wills not to remember those who loved and love and will never cease to love the land of their birth and rightly or wrongly but fell fighting for Her! See, see if the petition could be sent. That would be far more significant than any resolutions or meetings.

While together for a minute or so, I said one day to our dear Baba, that there is said to be a पितृऋण Pitrarina and देवऋण Devarina and ऋषिऋण Rishirina &c. So also there is Putrarina पुत्रऋण (Debt due to a son). After the receipt of your letter I felt myself fully acquitted of it! For after all you are now fully educated and fully fledged. Now come what may at least two years of joy have been bestowed on you by the kind Providence and through you on us. No day can shine forever . The life on this earth is like a three patalled flower; one is coloured with pleasure, the second with the colour of pain, the third mixed or colourless. Now the petal of pleasure and then that of pain gets wormed and thus this vain round of recurrence goes on. Take any letter or any life or even History itself it is more or less a book of mere statistics of so many births and so many deaths, so many weddings and so many mournings, so much colours and so much shade. So while there is a brief respite, a passing ray of joy, a single touch of the spring, let us not forget the hardship of the winter or foolishly depend upon and get addiction to these wines of spring, while they are dancing in the cup. No, No, our,…of those who are born in India in this age… our constant companion is winter and not spring! Let us not forget- that our life is a vast Sahara unbearable and still to be borne, sandy, burning. And while we are keeping to the path of duty that passes through this parched desert, if the grace of God places in our path such on ‘Oasis’ as this with which we have been recently blent, then let us not forget that it is an accident, an art of grace; and without haste and rest must continue our way on this holy pilgrimage of life. Let us pray in all humility as the old saints prayed ‘Give unto us what thou wilt and when thou wilt and how much thou wilt! And also take away from us what thou wilt and how much thou wilt’. After all the fine ideal for a young man is not to acquire but to sacrifice, not to rear but ‘the garden that sheds all its flowers for the garland of the Gods and thus is in blossom for ever.

How is my dear Mai getting on. What a silly idea I could forget my only Sister! I may as well get angry and cease to speak with myself. While the day lasts try to save something and invest in some safe form in the name of dear Shanta or dear Ranjan for we can never tell when winter may come again.!! Nothing could match the ideal constancy of affection of our dear Madam Cama. Even the war has not made her forget you! Thus it is that many a time the blood is not thicker than choice and there are affections which noble hearts alone can know of which neither the lack of blood nor of interest can cool and which growing up in an ideal land flourish and are nursed on forces so subtle that the every day and matter of fact would fails to see or comprehend.

How are also my beloved Mai (Yamuna) and Vahinis getting on. My love to them all. How is dear Balu? When I saw him in the Bombay jail he seemed to upright and so loving a boy! Now he must be quite a respectable gentleman? And so also Anna. I expected him to be a clever and able youth and shall be very glad to know how far my guess has been correct. I wish I could know everything about all my brothers including dear Dattu and Nana and what they do. But it is not and can not be owing to my forgetting them as my dear Yamuna seems to think but for other reasons which she can well understand by her past experiences that refrained me from mentioning in my previous letters. If there be any man or any family next to dear Baba to whom I owe all that is best in me, and owing to whose noble patronage and winning solicitude I had unusual chances and facilities of assimilating the noblest things of this world and even of doing something for our common Mother-land, then that man and that family is theirs: (Chiploonkers). But the sense of having been the cause of so much worry and loss and pain to them with whom the dearest ties of blood and love and mutual respect have bound me, has already been so keen a source of sadness and mental unhappiness to me that I do not dare to add an inch more to it all. And so have denied myself the gratification of expressing my thankfulness or love. Otherwise who cannot be proud of those fine youths such as my own brothers in law are-at any rate promised to be? And of him who brought me up as dearly as them?.....and of that saintly dutiful mother!! The same thing is true of all my friends! I remember them all! But for their own sake and not for my own sake, dare not acknowledge them all. I could not understand who the pleader was, who came to you as my contemporary but if really so, please to thank him on my behalf for remembering me still. By the by, be very careful of men who may come to you as acquainted with me or even claiming to have seen me here or having had talk with me here. You are too experienced to be cautioned but nevertheless I assure you I send no word or message through any one to you. Hear all but believe none, except what stands to your reason without my recommendation and on its own merit. Now the time is over and I must finish. I am all right, the details you asked would be sent in dear Baba’s letters. Love to all from both of us. Do not worry for our health. As far as possible take care of your own health. If in spite of all human effort the worst comes to the worst well then we are quite ready to face it all! Do not worry.