Dreams of Youth 71and prepare to move house. “I felt rather uncomfortable after you all
left suddenly,” Subhas wrote to Bivabati. “The empty house gave a for-
lorn feeling—the mind became restive—I seemed to have lost for a
while the moorings of my daily life—it will be no exaggeration to say
that I felt a pang in my heart.” He had imagined that he had tran-
scended worldly attachments, but now had been given a stern reminder
that he was not wholly unattached. Basanti Devi and Bivabati were the
two sig nifi cant women in his life at this stage, both of whom he had
elevated to a motherly sta tus. He blamed the long lectures he had in-
flicted on them through his letters on the colonial masters. Arguing
with the En glish, “even a shy and diffident person” like him had “be-
come garrulous.” It took some time to readjust to his quiet surround-
ings. “The azure sky, green fields, the mountain ranges all around,
the play of light and shade in the forests, the continuous roar of the
waterfall,” he wrote to his sister- in- law reassuringly, “all this keeps me
contented.” When the rains cleared he would go out to commune with
nature, as he had done as a child in Cuttack, and be reminded of
Shakespeare’s lines in As You Like It:
And this our life, exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks
Sermons in stones, and good in ev ery thing.^56The exemption from public haunt did not last long. No sooner had
he descended from the hills to the plains than Subhas was elected
president of the Bengal provincial Congress committee. In December
1927, at the annual session of the Indian National Congress held at
Madras, he—along with Jawaharlal Nehru and Shuaib Qureshi—was
appointed a general secretary of the All- India Congress Committee.
After several years of slumber, Indian anticolonial politics had been
galvanized by the announcement of an all- white seven- member com-
mission, chaired by Sir John Simon, to look into the constitutional fu-
ture of India. The 1919 reforms had provided for a review in ten years.
The Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin in Britain brought it
forward, fearing a loss of power to the Labor party at the next elec-
tions.