Parvati urges Devdas to stop drinking and come live with her

Parvati’s appeal to Devdas to stop drinking and come live with her is a private, emotionally charged attempt to turn long-held care into action. It brings her face to face with the consequences of his decline, makes her ask directly for his return, and ends in a promise that is tender but conditional: he will come if her wish to care for him makes her happy.

Background and Urgency

Parvati has hastened back after hearing of Narayan Mukherjee’s death, believing she should be at Devdas’s side in a time of trouble. Instead, she finds herself confronting how far his health has deteriorated. Her response is not simply to blame him. She turns accusation inward, wondering whether things would have reached this pass had she been present, and reproaches herself for the contrast between her current life and his neglect. While she has been arranging another household and giving charity to strangers, the person who matters most to her is, in her view, wasting away and almost starving.

The discovery makes her resolve to speak with him. Dharmadas’s distress sharpens the urgency: he fears Devdas’s days are numbered, believes Parvati may be able to persuade him, and feels unable to discuss the matter with Devdas’s parents or brother. Parvati’s visit therefore answers both her own sense of responsibility and a plea from someone who sees Devdas’s condition worsening but cannot reach him.

The Private Meeting

A little before dusk, Parvati enters Devdas’s room. He is sitting on the bed studying accounts. She shuts and bolts the door, then sits on the floor. The arrangement makes the encounter private and deliberate: she has come to speak, but her posture and the closed door also frame the meeting as an intimate appeal rather than an ordinary visit. Devdas greets her with a smile, though his face appears sad and calm.

His first question turns immediately to the injury he may have caused her reputation: “What if I dragged your name in the mud?” Parvati answers with a quick, pained glance before lowering her eyes. The narration presents the remark as something that will remain lodged in her heart. She has arrived with much to say, but proximity to Devdas silences her; the scene’s central plea has to emerge through pauses and renewed effort rather than fluent explanation.

Eventually she asks, “Why did you suddenly start drinking?” When he jokes that drinking takes little practice, she presses the issue by asking why he made it a habit. Her questions move from the act itself to its repetition: she is trying to understand how a behavior that now threatens his life became part of his daily existence. The exchange does not produce an explanation that changes his course. After a long silence, she asks him to promise never to touch liquor again. He refuses, comparing the demand to asking her never to think of him again. The comparison makes his attachment plain, but it also exposes the limit of her leverage: affection does not secure the practical promise she wants.

From Prohibition to an Offer of Care

The conversation briefly opens onto a more radical possibility when Devdas asks, “Really? Can you run away with me tonight?” Parvati’s heart seems to stop for a split second, but she answers that it is impossible. The offer turns their closeness into a test of what can actually be done. She cannot accept that proposal, and the scene does not treat the emotional force of the question as a solution to the constraints surrounding them.

Instead, Parvati returns to the concrete need she can address. In tears, she tells him that she feels close to death because she never got to take care of him, though she had always wanted to. Devdas wipes his eyes in the dark and says there is still time. She then asks him to come home with her, explaining that no one there is looking after him. The appeal gives her care a practical form: not an abstract declaration of love, but a request that he leave his present circumstances and accept her attention.

Devdas asks whether she will truly take good care of him if he goes. Parvati says she has always wanted to and prays that the wish will come true, adding that afterward she would not mind dying. Her words make the offer emotionally costly: she presents his care as a long-deferred desire, not a duty she has just assumed. Devdas begins to cry. When she repeats the invitation, he finally agrees.

The Promise and Its Limits

Devdas’s agreement is not a promise to stop drinking. On that request he has already said no. Instead, he promises to come if her happiness lies in caring for him, adding that he will come even if it is the last thing he does. He aims his words somewhere at her feet as he makes the pledge. The gesture lends the promise a gravity that contrasts with his earlier joking, yet its terms preserve the uncertainty of their bond: he commits to answering her wish, but the scene does not show him making recovery or abstinence the condition of his return.

The dusk setting gives the meeting a clear boundary. After Parvati falls silent, the conch sounds outside to herald evening; Devdas anxiously notes that it is getting late and tells her to go home. Their private encounter cannot continue indefinitely, and its promise has to carry what the meeting itself cannot settle. The chapter that follows says Devdas remains at home for six months after his father’s death before restlessness returns. That later detail prevents the pledge from being mistaken for a lasting resolution: the scene records a real assent, but not a cure for his disquiet or drinking.

Significance

The episode turns on the gap between what Parvati can ask and what Devdas can promise. She seeks an end to his drinking, then, when he refuses, asks for the chance to care for him. He declines the first request but accepts the second, allowing affection to become a practical arrangement without demonstrating that he has overcome the habit endangering him. Her offer is both an act of tenderness and a measure of her helplessness: she can open a way home, but she cannot make him choose recovery.

The scene also brings the two characters’ private attachment into contact with the limits of action. Devdas tests whether Parvati can run away with him; she cannot. Parvati asks him to come where she can look after him; he says he will. Between the impossible escape and the conditional promise lies the scene’s fragile achievement: for a moment, he lets her care become something he may accept, while the narrative leaves the future of that acceptance unresolved.