The Singer Passes: An Indian Tapestry

A MAN COMPELLED More of his mother's Indian self *te fancied must have gone to tile making of him than of the other three children who came some years after : all the initial loving and striving and secret misgivings ; the strain of adapting herself to alien ideals of marriage and holding out against the prejudiced the puzzled the politely aloof ; against the frank hostility of her fomidabl [...] Looking up his gaze lingered absently on the familiar portrait of his mother at the age of seventeen a thing of astonishing delicacy and truth : the velvet dark eyes the primrose sheen of her sari the clear olive skio so finely-textured that it seemed like a magnolia blossom lit.from within the bare arms resting on the balcony one exquisitely finished hand on the open page of her book. [...] Would she—high-priestess of home and family—approve his sudden urge to lease the Glary on the doorstep for the insidious appeal of the large and vague on the chance of achieving a book that might catch England's attention and India's imagination ? In the library lifted on his winged horse he had known hg would go. [...] And on the table by her vellum-bound Gita stood the now familiar marvel of his father's Chitor ' ; the sacred City of Rajasthan modelled in dull red clay by one who had never seen it with his actual eyes : a vision of Chitor in her great days before Akbar and his legions had made her a With a kind of fated feeling he went forward sat down in the carved chair and yielded himself to the famili [...] For a time he continued to stand there his brain and senses flooded with the unforgotten atmosphere of India : the spicy.smells the wood-smoke the blare of conches and—most Indian of all sounds—the throbbing of tom-toks the muffled tread of bare feet.