Returning from the city, I found a note on my desk: "Come to the library!" I met Maitreyi there, who told me, frightened:

— Khokha knows!

I tried to appear untroubled and to convince her that this meant nothing. Maitreyi looked at me intently, squeezing my hands, as if seeking in my certainty some support.

— We must become engaged before telling baba. He is ill now, it would be hard to tell him, it would disturb him even more.

— But haven’t we been engaged for so long? I wondered. Didn’t you give me the garland, and didn’t I hold you in my arms?

— Now Khokha has seen us, Maitreyi explained, glancing fearfully in all directions. We must strengthen our union, so we are not cursed, so we do not upset the rhythm.

I felt the same mixture of disappointment and delight that I always experienced when deciphering, in Maitreyi’s love and soul, the jungle of superstitions. The rhythm, karma, the ancestors... How many powers had to be consulted and invited to ensure our happiness?...

— I have chosen the stone for your ring, Maitreyi told me, untying from the corner of her sari a green-black gem shaped like a lizard’s head, crossed at the crown by a blood-red streak.

She began to explain the ring to me. It would be crafted according to the Indian marriage ceremony—from iron and gold—like two entwined serpents, one dark and the other yellow, the first representing virility, the other femininity. She had chosen the stone herself from an entire pile, gathered from ancestors and kept in Mrs. Sen’s chest. It had no price, and no one could say she had stolen it by taking it without her mother’s knowledge. Besides, there were many others like it there, in the jewelry chest. (Why did she try so hard to excuse and defend herself? I learned later; she feared I would judge her “in the Christian way,” by some moral or civil criterion.) Not all engagements are sanctified in this way. Usually, Maitreyi explained, only the wife receives a bracelet in which, on the inside, the two threads of gold and iron are intertwined; the husband wears only a ring. But since she could not wear the betrothal bracelet, we had to combine both symbols into a single ring... She spoke to me at length that evening, and I listened, enchanted; although the remnant of lucidity I still possessed rebelled against this uncertain and mystified ceremonial. It seemed to me that any tendency to legislate and

symbolic exteriorization. What I thirsted for most in our love was precisely its spontaneity and autonomy. Yet, when the jeweler brought me the ring, I took it in my hands and turned it every which way with a childish delight. It was crafted with such mastery that it could easily pass for an ordinary ring—more original than others, it’s true, but perfectly camouflaging its symbol. Everyone in the house saw it as such, and if Lilu and