serves a key-function in the novel. When, halfway through the story, LITERATURE Durga's mother throws away the toy-chest and its contents in a fit of anger, it is like a ritual ending of Durga's childhood. In the society which this novel depicts, marriage for a girl is her initiation into adulthood. The passing of Durga's childhood coincides with strange premonitions of departure. She begins to look at familiar sights - the bamboo grove behind the house, the road under the gab tree, the ferry ghat of the river - somewhat sadly. At this point in the novel, like Durga, the reader tends to relate this feeling to the separation from Nischindipur that is bound to happen when she gets married. Durga's own thoughts of marriage, combining both anticipation and apprehension, refer to an archetypal feeling - an amalgam of joy with sadness -celebrated in marriage songs in different parts of India. In Bengal, where until the early decades of the twentieth century a girl used to be married off before she attained puberty, marriage figures largely even in nursery rhymes and children's songs. This separation-through-marriage motif is so insistent in Bengali culture that the entire ritual of Durga Puja, the annual autumn festival that is central to the life of Bengal, can be seen as an enactment of a folk myth where the goddess Durga as a married daughter comes home to her parents for a few days, and the joy of these few days is invariably tinged with the sadness associated with her impending departure. When at the end of these few days the clay image of the goddess is immersed in the river, the sad music reflects the mood of the occasion. Durga in the novel Father Parichali is made of the earth, water and air of the village, and it seems inherent in the logic of the novel that she has to be immersed in the waters of Nischindipur before the novel can move forward. The Bengali poet Sudhindranath Datta (1910-59) once suggested an ecological link between Bengali's climate and culture; the fact that the people of Bengal dfel not build stone temples and, instead, 'worshipped clay images which, once the day was done, went back to rest in the beds of super-abundant rivers and ubiquitous marshes' could be related to the wet climate and alluvial soil of Bengal.2 The girl Durga in the novel, a barefoot, tangle-haired waif, who in a way embodies the spirit of the place, also goes back to its elements when her day is over. Marriage as a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood is preempted by Durga's death. In her death on a stormy night'there is per- Journal of Arts and Ideas , 21