6o
THE WRECK
was ! There in that unpretentious house, in the heart of the teeming city, dwelt a wondrous being in the modest guise of a girl-student.
The metropolis swarmed with people like Ramesh — pleaders, graduates, foreigners, natives. Why should he be singled out for a special mark of divine favour denied to the rest? Why should it have been he and none other who had stood at the window with this girl by his side in the mellow autumn sunlight and beheld in a vision all creation floating on an illimitable sea of joyful mystery? What a miracle it was! A miracle that had transformed his innermost soul, that had transformed the world about him!
He paced up and down the roof till the night was far advanced. The setting moon was hidden behind the opposite house, and the darkness of night settled over the earth while the firmament still glowed with the farewell embrace of her light.
Ramesh's weary limbs shivered with cold, and a sud- den fear leapt upon him and held his heart in its grip. On the morrow he would have to face battle again in life's arena. No line of care scored the face of the heavens, no restless activity ruffed the serenity of the moonlight; the stillness of the night was unbroken, and the whole universe with its countless stars in ever- lasting motion was none the less steeped in everlasting repose; only in man's restless strife is there no pause. Alike in prosperity and in adversity human life is an unceasing struggle against odds.
On the one hand the eternal peace of the Infinite, on the other the eternal conflict of the world! How can the two exist side by side? Obsessed as he was with his own difficulties, Ramesh paused to speculate on this insoluble problem.
A vision of Love in the everlasting and boundless
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