A decent young man and a caring, but self respecting, young woman - and a feudal society where he has no means of supporting her if his family would not have it and so lacks courage to elope with the woman he loves, so he does the decent thing and instead tells her he never saw her as a lover, a mistake he repents forever while throwing away his life. Wealth comes but is too late, and is of little use when love is lost.
(Wednesday, August 27, 2008.)
(Friday, September 18, 2010.)
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Paro, the love of his life, sees her loss when she sees him throwing himself away in drink and dissipation, sheer depression and inability to get past loss of her, pretty much a boat that has lost its sails and sailor and is at mercy of all winds and waves, and hears him telling her that if only she had been there she could have taken care of him and his household, his home, his mother who is at mercy of the other - the only now that he is alone - daughter in law, and he would have been free to not worry.
She reflects on the irony of caring for the widower she married, along with his grown up children who have come to respect and admire her for her virtues of patience and caring and selflessness, and all the while letting the people she cared for be left to mercy of fate.
She makes him promise he will come to visit her marital home - it is large enough to accomodate any number of relatives, servants and guests, as old well to do homes did - so she could care for him. One has to admire the sheer certaintly of her virtue she has, that there is no concern about anyone holding her in suspicion if this ever came to pass, and indeed she had established her own persona, her virtue and her clear conscience in her home by her life there being one of faultless exalted kind that even her much older husband respects her for.
But life takes its own course and she is immersed more and more in the day to day affaires of the household, and with no news of her older concerns they are sort of veiled and remain behind her everyday awareness. When he does arrive at her doorstep, finally, to fullfill his promise to her - he could have come earlier but has his self respect too, about being ill in her home and recovering, so he would rather throw away his life until it is too late to recover and the promise is fulfilled only in name - he is then too ill, dying on her doorstep outside the gates.
It has a haunting quality, the last few hours of his life when he is lying there, dying, and she keeps on waking up, hearing in her sleep her name he keeps of whispering and and going to the terrace wondering who is calling her. She keeps on being disturbed through the morning until she accidentally hears about the details of the guy who died outside the gate - it is too late then, to see him, even though she tries, running in desperation and throwing the household in turmoil to see her sedate usual self behaving in sounusual a manner. The villgers outside the gate have already taken him away for cremation.
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It is almost as if the writer was unconscious of what came through while he merely wrote the tale of an unfortunate man. For it is not just about loss of love that might mean loss of a future, a life that could have been, loss of the persons that were separated. Which is tragedy enough.
The last few hours of Devdas's life while he whispers her name again and again and she wakes up from her sleep hearing someone calling her, but is unaware of what might be going on right outside her own gate, has the quality of a truth of a higher plane. Thus might one lose one's own soul while one got busy with worldly care and lost track of that which one had brought with one's birth from above.
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I have heard many quote the facile summing up of Devdas, about comparison that men easily might make between the two women in his life. And I find it short sighted. This is not a story about ego vs love, one woman losing the latter for the former and the other the reverse.
Paro took much from her love of childhood as her parents did from his wealthy parents, the neighbours in village they lived in, but being told by him that his parents were right about not wishing to step down in matters of forming relations with a lower class family - not a serious caste difference but one of class, that is, of money, which came to replace the older and more benevolent system in that it was more snobbish and had no values to go with it - could finally not overcome the slight to her parents, her family by her love.
By the time he arrived to repent and offered to make it work, it was too late, and he assumed all he had to do was to express his wish to her parents - which was the last straw and she boiled over with indignation. She told him off, in no uncertain words, that her parents knew better than to leave her at mercy of so weak a character, and they mattered, and their submission to his will was by no means a guarantee as he assumed. And moreover they had prestige of their own too, she informed him, indignant at his remark in his letter about their lowering their status by this marriage. As a matter of fact they had easily found her a match far wealthier than his family, which was only a proof in her eyes that her family had no reason to feel low in comparison.
Self respect, not ego, was what this was about, when she told him off. That he could have in spite of that tried to make her parents and his agree to their marriage escaped his notice, and he satisfied his injured ego with hurting her, and giving up rather than carrying out his promise of a sincere attempt to make the two families see reason in the matter and make it happen. His love was sacrificed at the alter of his class and the ensuing ego of the family that he shared - and his temper.
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The other woman did not, could not have had an ego, in the profession that she was in, due to whatever circumstance - she and others in her profession have it hard enough to have self respect, or indeed even a sense of self, if they are not of a low consciousness, and this woman was awakened from her stupor of everyday life into her self by the disdain this man of clear conscience made clear to her. She longed for his respect and love and in the process her life is cleansed of the muck her profession throws at her. She transformed herself, but was not above setting up shop again when needed to find him when he was lost, and that did not bind her again to the profession either - she gave up all to live in a small village in a very simple lifestyle earning much respect from the villagers that knew her for her true self.
In the final hours Devdas confused her face with his mother's in his unconscious state, and becoming aware of that fact, did not think it was incongrous to confuse the two supposed extremes, a revered mother and a common courtesan. This, for the culture this story belongs to, where mother is an extremely revered persona and the Divine is seen as The Mother, is testimony indeed to the clear souls and the relationships.
(Friday, October 24, 2008).
(Monday, September 20, 2010).
