________________
WHY MEN ARE HANGED
parents had done the unprecedented thing of sending him to study in a college. In quest of the benefit of higher education, he had to go far away from his native village in the hill regions of Kumaun to some large town. A couple of years in circumstances so very diffcrent from those of his native place had unsettled the emotional life of the impressionable youth. He had returned home, not so much with new ideas as with awakened impulses and desires which, in the atmosphere of his native village, could not but lead to disaster. I saw hiin under the sentence of leath, awaiting exccution resignedly, if not quite chcerfully. For, as he declared himself with tragic frankness, was he not going to atone for his sin ? It was opcration of the inscrutable will of God-of the incxorable law of karma. That was his own explanation.
What was the crime for which he was hanged? He had fallen in love ; and, having lived his adolescence in the unsettling atmosphere of neu'-fangle: ideas, was partially free from the inhibition against the physical basis of the emotion. Of course, seximpulse was still a matter of shame to him, as with the vast majority of Indian youths, notwithstanding their modernism in other respects. And, unfortunately, thanks to the social atmosphere of the village, it drove him towards something still more shameful. He committed, or nearly did, incest.
189
