Siva’s Sign
But would they follow it? Kinglet, her first-born son, had rubbed Siva’s ashes on his forehead.
Some distance from Mimosa’s village is a celebrated town which is a very fort of Hinduism. Its temple dominates it from centre to rim; things are done within its walls which could never be written in a book. “Sodom? This is Sodom,” said one who knew. In this town Mimosa’s husband was now living with his disreputable brother, and he took his eldest boy to live with him there. Nothing Mimosa could do could prevent it. The man was stubborn now with the set will of the weak.
Among his friends was a rich merchant who wanted a little boy to train as helper in the bazaar. Kinglet was to be that little boy. But first he must behave as a proper Hindu should. He must rub Siva’s sign on his forehead. So his father took him to the temple.
The temple in that town is a gigantic place. Great pillared corridors, with sculptured columns and carved stone roofs, and awful chambers with
doors that look as if all the powers that ever were 89 could not move them on their hinges. In the glare of daylight it is overwhelming enough; at night it is stupendous. It was night when the father took his son, led him in through the mighty doors past which only certain castes may go, on to the far end of the darkness, where a hundred lights twinkled round the inmost shrine.
And there he told the boy to rub on Siva’s ashes, the Vibathi that his dying grandfather had refused. To do so would mark him a worshipper of Siva.
Kinglet thought of his mother and shook his head and tried to push away the ashes. But what could a boy do against those tremendous influences? His father “smote him with his words.’ The glimmering darkness did the rest. He yielded, and the ashes were rubbed on for the first time, and thereafter daily. Siva had won.
And Mimosa heard of it. She went alone to her little room of refuge. ‘“O my Father, can I bear it? Will all end wrongly? It seems so, my Father. I cannot understand it. I prayed for something quite different. Will not my prayer be answered?” And her tears fell as they had never fallen even when Mayil was taken; for this was a piteous thing and bitterer than death. It was torture. Even now, long afterwards, when her boy’s brow is washed clear, she can hardly speak of it. Her very soul quivers at the memory of it.
And then — and she does not know how to tell of its coming; she only knows it came — peace once more filled her heart. “I will not trouble You with more askings,” she said aloud. (All her communings with her Father were aloud, except when sorrow or gladness passed beyond the reach of words.) “TI will leave all I have asked with You. Is it not Your concern? Have You not heretofore most wonderfully led me? In every least thing have You not led me? Was not that word that was spoken to me true? Then why do I grieve like this now? I and mine, my husband and my children, I think, Father, are Your care. Is it not so? Then I need not be afraid.” Perhaps the triumph of faith is too fulltoned a word for such an experience. But did it not come near it?
And after that she rejoiced in any good thing she heard about her little son; for example, that he was the one boy the merchant had found who was perfectly honest in word and deed. “I had said to my Father, ‘Let that be so; let there be given to my children a perfect truthfulness.’ This virtue He had given to Kinglet. The merchant sold many things — cocoanuts and oils of all kinds, and spices and fruits; but he could leave the bazaar to my boy and knew all would be right when he returned. The money taken he could trust with him. When Kinglet left him he wept — yea, wept — for he said: ‘ Not another such shall lever find?”
It was a sweet cupful of joy; but the one drop of poison in the cup was the sight of the ashes on her boy’s forehead when he came back, as he did twice a year for five days, to see her. She would rub the ashes off — she could do that — but she could not keep them from being rubbed on again, and all that was connoted by that one single sign was grief and abhorrence to her. And she had kept him pure from taint of idolatry from his babyhood. And he was her first-born son.