Did She Not Burn the Tulasi?

LittLte Mavi was three, and his small brother, a chubby, glowing baby, had just begun to find his way all over the house on eager, uncertain little feet when one evening at dusk, while she prepared the evening meal, Mimosa was startled by a cry from her husband and ran to him on the outer verandah. ‘See, see! A thorn has run into my right foot’s ankle!”

But there was no thorn; it must have been a snake. No snake could be found. It had stung the foot and then glided off into the twilight.

“A snake! A snake!” No call in all India can more quickly gather a crowd. In the twinkling of an eye, as it seemed, the house was full of people, commiserating, inquiring, advising, declaiming, prophesying death and destruction. It was only the usual crowd that attends upon all excitements and completes all confusions; but in - and out of it and through it ran real emotion, real distress. Relatives wailed aloud, women tore their hair, and beat themselves, and violently knocked their heads against whatever hard thing lay near. To everyone poor Mimosa’s husband was as good as dead.

Meanwhile, thus encouraged, the poison “ascended to the skull” until the bitten man was in desperate pain, “as if the bones were being cleft in two,” and the sympathetic clamour waxed louder and more excited, and the street filled as half the village turned out to mourn and lament his rapidly approaching death.

And in the midst was Mimosa, doing what she could to relieve him, paying no heed to the sibilant whisper that presently began to fill the room like the hissing of a snake. “It is she! It is she! It is she that has swallowed her husband’s life. It is she! It is she! Did she not burn the tulasi?”

The excitement subsided, for her husband did not die, but lay very ill and tormented with pain, and she knelt by the stricken man, and she prayed, crying upon her God, the God of gods, and she went into the little dark room and held out her sari in supplication to Him. And she nursed him with all the skill she knew, putting on poultices of fine-chopped rice straw, and feeding him with tempting food. And her faithful, tender heart rejoiced exceedingly when at last he was out of danger of death; but he was blind and he was mad. Blind and mad on her brave hands!