It made me very anxious to hear that you fell ill after your strenuous work in Howrah. There is one consolation owing to the delay in receiving letters from a distance. It is the hope that the evil tidings, which they bring, may have had time to give place to good tidings before their answer is received; and by this time I expect you have got over your illness. I am sure you need rest and change, and this was why I had been hoping that you would have been able to spend your summer vacation in Europe.
I quite understand why it was not possible for you to accept my invitation, and what a great sacrifice it was for you. There are times when one has to be utterly reckless; but it seems to me, that, for you, those times never come to their end. However, it makes me eager to come to your rescue and lure you away from your work and drag you into the delicious depths of neglectfulness of duty.
I am myself dreaming of such a glorious opportunity; and when it does come, you may be sure that I shall claim your companionship in my path of idleness, strewn with unanswered letters, forgotten engagements and books with uncut pages. But we are fast getting into the vicious habit of keeping ourselves busy. Before long, we shall lose all taste for leisure, for refinements of laziness.
Perhaps a day will come, when I shall pine for doing my duty, and my pious example will be quoted in text books on which I shall have to pass my examination in my next birth! Please know that I am serious! I am afraid of trampling down the limits of my arrested twenty-seventh year in sheer haste for keeping appointed time! When one is not compelled to keep count of time, one forgets to grow old; but when you must constantly consult your watch, you are pushed into your twenty-eighth year directly you complete your twenty-seventh. Do we not have the example of Nepal Babu before our eyes? He never respects time; and therefore time fails to exact its taxes from him and he remains young. In this, he is an inveterate non-co-operator—he has boycotted the Government of Chronometry! And I want to register my name on the list of his chelas. I shall strew my path of triumphant unpunctuality with shattered watch dials, and miss my trains that lead to the terminus of mature age.
But, Sir, what about my International University? It will have its time-keeper, who is no respecter of persons—not even of the special privileges of some twenty-seventh year which has taken its Satyagraha vow never to move forward. I am afraid its bell will toll me into the haze of hoariness across the grey years of fifty. Pray for my youth, my dear friend, if it ever dies of old age, brought about by self-imposed responsibility of ambitious altruism!
This is a beautiful country, a dwelling place of the Gods invaded by man. The town is so dainty and clean with its river of limpid water and the sky unpolluted by the belching of smoke. The big towns, like New York and London, are vulgar because of their pretentious hugeness and perpetual bustle. In the streets here, motor cars are few and crowds are leisurely. It is a town that seems to have been created in the atmosphere of vacation. And yet it is not sluggish, or somnolent. Life here flows like its own bright river, humming a song and breaking into merry peals of laughter.
I fervently hope that you will not run away before I reach home. My mind is so full of plans, which it must discuss with you or else it will burst. The kernel of a plan is for carrying it out, but the most delicious part of it is the pulp, which is merely for discussion. I must have you for this game of agreeing and disagreeing, putting down figures on paper and then flinging them into the waste paper basket. *