Page:The Autobiography of Maharshi Devendranath Tagore.djvu/85

lap and watch everything, quietly, from the window. Now my Didima is no more. But after how long, and after how much seeking, have I now found the Didima that is hers also; and, seated on Her lap, am watching the pageant of this world. Some days before her death Didima said to me, " I will give all I have to you, and nobody else." Shortly after this she gave me the key of her box. I opened it and found some rupees and gold mohurs, whereupon I went about telling every one I had got mudi-mudki.^[1] In the year 1757 Shaka (1242 B.S.), when Didima was on her death-bed, my father had gone on a journey to Allahabad. The vaidya^[2] came and said that the patient should not be kept in the house any longer; so they brought my grandmother out into the open, in order to take her to the banks of the Ganges.^[3] But Didima still wanted to live; she did not wish to go to the Ganges. She said, "If Dwarkanath had been at home, you would never have been able to carry me away." But they did not listen to her, and proceeded with her to the river-side. She said, "As you are taking me to the Ganges against my wish, so will I too give you great trouble; I am not going to die soon." She was kept in a tiled shed on the banks of the Ganges,

1. Rice parched and rice sweetened with treacle hence white and gold coloured.  
2. Physician.
3. To die on the banks of the sacred Ganges was desired by the religious. Hence the practice of taking a person whose last moments had come to the banks of the Ganges.