After a break of three weeks and a sultriness of weary waiting, your letters have come in a downpour; and I cannot possibly tell you how refreshing they are! I seem to be travelling across a desert, and your letters are like weekly provisions dropped by some air-service from cloud-land. They are expected; and yet they have the element of surprise. I hungrily attack them and then fall upon extra portions supplied from your letters written to others.
Your letters are delightful, because you have your interest in details that are generally overlooked. The world is made beautiful by the unimportant things. They furnish this great world-picture with all its modulations of shades and tints. The important is like the sunshine. It comes from a great source. But the unimportant composes the atmosphere of our life. It scatters the sun’s rays, breaks it into colours, and coaxes it into tenderness.
You have asked for my permission to abolish the matriculation class from our school. Let it go. I have no tenderness for it. In our classical literature, it was the strict rule to give all dramas a happy ending. Our matriculation class has ever been the fifth act in our Ashram, ending in a tragedy. Let us drop the scene, before that disaster gathers its forces!
I am enclosing with this a translation, which runs thus:
WOMAN
The fight is ended.
Shrill cries of loss trouble the air,
The gains, soiled and shattered,
are a burden too heavy to carry home.
Come, woman, bring thy breath of life.
Close all cracks with kisses of tender green,
Nurse the trampled dust into fruitfulness.
The morning wears on;
The stranger sits homeless by the road-side
playing on his reed.
Come woman, bring thy magic of love!
Make infinite the corner between walls,
There to build a world for him,
Thine eyes its stars, thy voice its music.
The gate-door creaks in the wind.
The time is for leave-taking at the day’s end.
Come, woman, bring thy tears!
Let thy tremulous touch call out its last lyric
From the moment of parting.
Let the shadow of thy sad gaze
Haunt the road across the hills.
The night deepens;
The house is empty; its loneliness aches with silence.
Come, woman, bring thy lamp of vigil!
Enter thy secret chamber of sorrow.
Make the dark hours quiver with the agony of thy prayer,
Till the day dawns in the East.