Take Care of My Bird

Crowbs came, according to custom; few sympathized. Who could justly sympathize with a mother who had refused to save her child? The kindly women would abstain from reproach; but all were not kind, and the feeling of the place was against her. Had she not burned the tulasi? Had she not refused, even to bring sure health to the child, all magic, even the mildest, all efforts to appease the angry gods? She would not break a mere halfpenny cocoanut in the devil’s honour. What wonder gods and demons were ranged against her now?

It is hard enough to bear grief when tenderness is all about one. What must it be to bear it when these pricking briars abound?

On the day he died the women, emboldened by the silence of her grief, said cruelly and openly to her that she, and she alone, was responsible; and they laughed at her vain prayers. ‘‘ Was it that your God did not hear you? Or is it that you do not know how to pray?” And they pointed to the little dead child. “There lies your God’s reply to you.”

Then Mimosa broke her silence. “My child God gave: my child God has taken. It is well.”

But she was weak and weary after the vain nursing, and she was ill with grieving; and when she was alone, and had not her God’s good name to defend, the question would return, Why was not her little peacock left to her? ‘Till at last it came to her that perhaps He knew she, his poor mother, could not have taken proper care of so beautiful a child, “and so He took him to Himself that He might take better care of him.” And she looked up with the old word: “I am not offended with You.”

But before this last comfort came, with the terrible hurry of the tropics, he had been snatched away from her. Sometimes — in cholera times, for example, when panic forbids the usual ceremonies — a man will pass from vigorous health through seizure, illness, death, and burial, or cremation, within four hours. A child, with hardly a minute’s pause for farewell, is wrapped in a little old cloth and carried out and burned.

“But my little one shall not be burned as a Hindu, as a child of the living God shall he be buried,” had been her decision, and nothing would move her from it. She had no perfect sureness about him, for she did not feel that she could claim room for him in the Place of Release, the Christian’s Heaven, because he was not a Christian child, and yet she could not bear to

seem to consign him to the uncertainty of his father’s creed. “For myself I did not go to the church, so I was nothing, and had no right to ask for anything for him, and yet my heart insisted: ‘He shall have Christian burial.’” So not a conch shell was blown for him, there was no wailing; and the little body was sown as a seed on the open plain, to wait the Resurrection of which his mother then knew nothing. And the people said: “She is mad. Who heeds what a mad woman does?” But Mimosa said: “My bird has flown.” And she held up her hands with a gesture of committal. “Take care of my bird.”