‘I still feel that he will be suspicious of you and won’t fall into your trap. But if you want to give it a try then go by all means,’ Mr Johri said, looking lovingly at Miss Joshi. Lightly touching her hand, he left.
A cool, gentle breeze was blowing that starlit night. Silence had descended on the huge ground. It was completely deserted now, but Miss Joshi could still see Apte standing on the stage in front of her eyes.5
The next morning Miss Joshi left her bungalow dressed in simple clothes and with no jewellery on. Devoid of all the trappings of the sophisticated world she lived in, she appeared pure and clean. She walked up to the road and hailed a tonga.
Apte lived quite a distance away in a locality inhabited by the less fortunate. The tongawala knew his house so there was no problem finding it. Soon Miss Joshi was standing at Apte’s door with her heart beating in an unusual manner. With trembling hands she knocked on the door, which was opened by a middle-aged woman. Miss Joshi was appalled by the simplicity of the house. There was a cot in one corner, a battered bookshelf on the wall with a handful of books in it, a low writing desk on the floor, while a clothesline ran across the room with some clothes hanging from it. On the other side of the room there was a metallic stove and a few utensils. A well-built man—the husband of the middle-aged woman—was fixing a broken lock while a bright six-year-old boy was putting his hands around Apte’s neck and beginning to climb on to his back. Apte lived with this blacksmith in his house. Whatever he earned from his articles that appeared in newspapers he gave to the blacksmith, and thus relieved of the tedium of running a house, lived a life free of the mundane worries of day-to-day existence.
A little taken aback at seeing Miss Joshi there, Apte quickly regained his composure and stood up to welcome her, all the while wondering where he could ask her to sit. He had never felt as ashamed of his poverty as he did today. Aware of his embarrassment, Miss Joshi sat on the cot and said dryly, ‘I apologize for arriving uninvited, but there was something important that couldn’t be done without my coming here. Can I talk to you in private for a moment?’
Apte looked at Jagannath and motioned him to leave the room. His wife also left with him. Only the little boy stayed on, observing Miss Joshi with curiosity, wondering what she had to do with his Apte Dada.
Getting off the cot Miss Joshi now sat on the floor. ‘Do you have any idea why I have come here like this?’
‘I can only attribute it to your benevolence,’ Apte replied awkwardly.
‘No, no. No one is so magnanimous as to be benevolent to those who openly bad-mouth them. Do you remember all that you said about me in your speech yesterday? I want you to know that by casting those aspersions you have been extremely unfair to me. I didn’t expect this from a man as good, intelligent and balanced as you. I am a defenceless woman, and there is no one to speak up for me. Was it right on your part to make false allegations about me? If I were a man, I would have challenged you to a duel. But alas! I am only a woman, and all I can do is to reach out to your humane side. Everything that you said about me is completely untrue.’
‘Assessment is based on outward appearances,’ Apte said, boldly.
‘Outward appearances can never give a real picture of anybody’s inner self.’
‘It is only natural to get confused about someone whose outward and inner self are not the same.’
‘So it was your confusion that did it! And now I want you to erase the disgrace that you have labelled me with. Are you prepared to make amends?’
‘If I don’t then there would be no one more depraved than me in this world,’ Apte said.
‘Do you have faith in me?’ Miss Joshi asked.
‘So far I have never disbelieved an attractive woman.’
‘Do you suspect that I am leading you on?’ Miss Joshi inquired.
Apte looked at her with his sincere, honest eyes and said, ‘Madam, I am an uneducated, unsophisticated man, but the respect that I have for women is no less than the reverence in which I hold all gods. I never saw my mother, and have no idea who my father was, but the loving countenance of the kind-hearted woman who brought me up as her child is always there in front of my eyes, and has kept alive the respect that I have for womankind. I am distressed and ashamed of having said what I did that day. It happened in a moment of frenzy and today I am going to issue a statement in the newspapers regretting my words and seeking forgiveness from you.’
So far Miss Joshi had only been associated with self-centred men whose every word had an ulterior motive. Apte’s childlike faith was heartening. No one from her social circle of fashionable people would believe the happenings of today even if Miss Joshi swore that she was telling the truth. Face-to-face they may have agreed with her but she knew they would ridicule her the minute her back was turned. In complete contrast to that scheming lot was this man whose each word dripped with honesty and which seemed to emanate from the core of his being.
Miss Joshi’s silence worried Apte. He was convinced that no matter how much he apologized now, nothing would obliterate his rash speech. The thought made him unravel personal details about himself in the hope that it would further bring him down in her esteem. That Miss Joshi would know him for the undesirable creature that he was and would therefore expect nothing better from him.
He
