Land of Five Rivers by Khushwant Singh

Author:Khushwant Singh
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Orient Paperbacks
Published: 2012-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

Next morning more wedding guests were due to arrive and a few of us went to the railway station to receive them. On our way back, I recalled my promise, asked my companions to excuse me and went towards tai Eesree’s house. Around the corner of the lane on which she lived, there were little groups of people standing with their heads lowered. I ignored them and quickened my pace. On the ground floor of her house many others were gathered, all of them in tears. Tai Eesree had died that morning, while I was at the railway station.

They had laid her on the floor of her room wrapped in a white sheet. Her face was uncovered. There was an odour of burning camphor and incense. A pandit was chanting Vedic mantras.

Tai Eesree’s eyes were shut, her child-like face already grey. It had something of an eternal loneliness in it, a peace, a dissolution in fathomless dreams which made it look, not like the face of the tai Eesree that I had known, but of the vast earth itself — the earth in whose eyes ran the rivers of the world, in whose lap were a hundred thousand valleys where human habitations were sheltered by smiling mountains; mountains, from which rose the fragrance of selfless love and the radiance of innocence.

I was standing at her feet gazing on her face when someone put a right hand on my shoulder. I turned round and saw a young man. His eyes were swollen with weeping.

‘I am Gopi Nath,’ he said softly.

I realised who he was but made no comment. I did not know what to say.

‘I went to look for you in Tej Pal’s house; you had left for the railway station.’

I remained silent.

‘Tai asked for you several times this morning. She knew you would come to see her. She waited for you till her last breath. When she knew she could wait no longer, she said to me — “When my son Radha Kishen comes, give him this.”

Gopi Nath stretched out his hand and placed a four anna pice in the flat of my palm.

I broke down and cried.

I do not know where tai Eesree is today, but if she is in heaven I am certain that even now she is sitting on her coloured peerhi, with her open wicker basket at her feet, patting the heads of the gods and giving them each a four anna pice.

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