Home and the World

THIS was the time when Sandip Babu with his followers came to our neighbourhood to preach Swadeshi.There is to be a big meeting in our temple pavilion. We women are sitting there, on one side, behind a screen. Triumphant shouts of Bande Mataramcome nearer: and to them I am thrilling through and through. Suddenly a stream of barefooted youths in turbans, clad in ascetic ochre, rushes into the quadrangle, like a silt-reddened freshet into a dry river-bed at the first burst of the rains. The whole place is filled with an immense crowd, through which Sandip Babu is borne, seated in a big chair hoisted on the shoulders of ten or twelve of the youths.Bande Mataram! Bande Mataram! Bande Mataram! It seems as though the skies would be rent and scattered into a thousand fragments.I had seen Sandip Babus photograph before. There was something in his features which I did not quite like. Not that he was bad-lookingfar from it: he had a splendidly handsome face. Yet, I know not why,...