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PLAYS
161
Keshav, in extreme rage, curses Roma
"O horrible blasphemer ! You are doomed For ever you shall be roasted in black hell On a frying pan in the stinking oil of sharks And the dread demons shall belabour you With red-hot tridents burning all your hair Till you'll be bald as-as this fool Murari Who will insult me and yet bend his knees To a callow youth and call him my superior.
Yes, he too shall be haled to Hades with you."'12
Roma is scared when Keshav curses her. But Murari, who himself is a learned man, who also owns a 'tol' (Sanskrit school) like Keshav, is not afraid of Keshav's curses. He tries to console Roma by telling that he, too, has the same feeling as Roma has about Sri Chaitanya's being an Avatar.
"I feel within my heart A nameless beat of hope..an exaltation... A sudden wing-waft of a Bird of Fire... A momentary glimpse of a mystic Truth Through some chance opening... rending of the curtain... An adventitious vision through a fissure In our granite wall of jealous Ignorance. I fail to account for what I see or why. But this I know: it's something rich and living Which is at war with its antipodes: The phantom falsehood which yet seems more real
Than the great Reality while it holds out And so I too have lived a citizen, Even though sick of its hollow make-believes, Of words, words, words of soulless pedantry Till it has grown now into a deafening blare. No wonder we hear nought else but words today In this our age of din. No wonder we But grasp at shadows letting slip the form. No wonder Krishna has to be born on earth Again and again and wounded by our arrows That He may heal our wounds with his own blood: To simulate our blindness that He may
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