best to say that the body had been
burnt.

Towards dawn, when the men with the wood arrived they were told that,
owing to their delay, the work had been done without them; there had
been some wood in the but after all. No one was likely to question this,
since a dead body is not such a valuable property that any one would
steal it.

II

Every one knows that, even when there is no sign, life is often secretly
present, and may begin again in an apparently dead body. Kadambini was
not dead; only the machine of her life had for some reason suddenly
stopped.

When consciousness returned, she saw dense darkness on all sides. It
occurred to her that she was not lying in her usual place. She called
out "Sister," but no answer came from the darkness. As she sat up,
terror-stricken, she remembered her death-bed, the sudden pain at her
breast, the beginning of a choking sensation. Her elder sister-in-law
was warming some milk for the child, when Kadambini became faint, and
fell on the bed, saying with a choking voice: "Sister, bring the child
here. I am worried." After that everything was black, as when an inkpot
is upset over an exercise-book. Kadambini's memory and consciousness,
all the letters of the world's book, in a moment became formless. The
widow could not remember whether the child, in the sweet voice of love,
called her "Auntie," as if for the last time, or not; she could not
remember whether, as she left the world she knew for death's endless
unknown journey, she had received a parting gift of affection, love's
passage-money for the silent land. At first, I fancy, she thought the
lonely dark place was the House of Yama, where there is nothing to see,
nothing to hear, nothing to do, only an eternal watch. But when a cold
damp wind drove through the open door, and she heard the croaking of
frogs, she remembered vividly and in a moment all the rains of her short
life, and could feel her kinship with the earth. Then came a flash
of lightning, and she saw the tank, the banian, the great plain, the
far-off trees. She remembered how at full moon she had sometimes come
to bathe in this tank, and how dreadful death had seemed when she saw a
corpse on the burning-ground.

Her first thought was to return home. But then she reflected: "I am
dead. How can I return home? That would bring disaster on them. I have
left the kingdom of the living; I am my own ghost!" If this were not so,
she reasoned, how could she have got ou