Kamala

On September 4th, 1935, I was suddenly released from the mountain jail of Almora, for news had come that my wife was in a critical condition. She was far away in a sanatorium at Badenweiler in the Black Forest of Germany. I hurried by automobile and train to Allahabad reaching there the next day, and the same afternoon I started on the air journey to Europe. The air liner took me to Karachi and Baghdad and Cairo, and from Alexandria a seaplane carried me to Brindisi. From Brindisi I went by train to Basle in Switzerland. I reached Badenweiler on the evening of September 9th, four days after I had left Allahabad and five days after my release from Almora jail.

There was the same old brave smile on Kamala’s face when I saw her, but she was too weak and too much in the grip of pain to say much. Perhaps my arrival made a difference, for she was a little better the next day and for some days after. But the crisis continued and slowly drained the life out of her. Unable to accustom myself to the thought of her death, I imagined that she was improving and that if she could only survive that crisis she might get wed. The doctors, as is their way, gave me hope. The immediate crisis seemed to pass and she held her ground. She was never well enough for a long conversation. We talked briefly and I would stop as soon as I noticed that she was getting tired. Sometimes I read to her. One of the books I remember reading out to her in this way was Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. She liked my doing this, but our progress was slow.

Morning and afternoon I trudged from my pension in the little town to the sanatorium and spent a few hours with her. I was full of the many things I wanted to ted her and yet I had to restrain myself. Sometimes we talked a little of old times, old memories, of common friends in India; sometimes, a little wistfully of the future and what we would do then. In spite of her serious condition she clung to the future. Her eyes were bright and vital, her face usually cheerful. Odd friends who came to visit her were pleasantly surprised to find her looking better than they had imagined. They were misled by those bright eyes and that smiling face.

In the long autumn evenings I sat by myself in my room in the pension, where I was staying, or sometimes went out for a walk across the fields or through the forest. A hundred pictures of Kamala succeeded each other in my mind, a hundred aspects of her rich and deep personality. We had been married for nearly twenty years, and yet how many times she had surprised me by something new in her mental or spiritual make-up. I had known her in so many ways