Once again I muttered to myself
how my fate was just a puddle of muddy waters
where the memory of a heroic act kept croaking
like a frog’s sick joke.
I resolved to make amends.
I found out that in summer they went to Darjeeling.
I too felt keenly the need for a change of air.
Their villa was small. They called it Motiya.
It was in a nook, a bit below the road,
sheltered by trees
and facing snowy peaks.
When I got there, I heard they weren’t coming that year.
I was thinking of coming back, when I ran into a fan of mine, –
Mohanlal,
tall, thin, and in specs, –
whose weak digestion revived in Darjeeling.
He said, ‘My sister Tonuka
won’t be happy until she’s introduced to you.’
She was a shadow of a girl
with a minimal body,
more interested in books than in food.
Hence her strange admiration of the football star.
My coming for a chat was taken as a rare kindness.
What an irony of fate!
Two days before my scheduled descent from the hills
Tonuka said, ‘I would like to give you something
by which you’ll remember us. A flowering shrub.’
This was a nuisance. I kept quiet.
Tonuka said, ‘It’s a rare, precious plant.
Survives in this country only with masses of care.’
I asked her, ‘What’s it called?’
She replied, ‘Camellia.’
A shock pulsed in me, –
another name rippled through my mind’s darkness.
I smiled and said, ‘Camellia?
Is her heart not easy to win?’
I don’t know what Tonuka thought. She blushed,
seemed pleased as well.
I started my journey with the potted shrub
and found her, my fellow-traveller, not an easy neighbour.
In a two-room carriage
I hid the pot in the bathroom.
But never mind that travel-story.
Let’s skip, too, the next few months’ triviality.
In the Puja holidays the curtain rose on the farce
in the Santhal Parganas.
It’s a small place. I don’t wish to mention its name.
Change-of-air fanatics haven’t heard of it yet.
Kamala’s mother’s brother, a railway engineer,
had built a house there
in the shade of sal forests, the squirrels his neighbours.
There one could see the blue hills in the distance;
nearer, a stream of water ran through sand.
Silkworms had woven their cocoons in the polash woods;
a buffalo was grazing under a myrobalan,
a naked Santhal boy astride its back.
A guesthouse was nowhere to be seen,
so I camped right by the river.
Nor had I a companion
save the potted camellia.
Kamala was visiting with her mother.
In the dewy breeze
before the sun was fierce
she went for walks in the sal woods, a parasol in her hand.
The meadow-flowers beat their heads against her feet,
but do you suppose she looked at them at all?
She crossed the shallow stream
to the other side
and sat and read a book under a shishu tree.
And the way she steadily ignored me made it plain
that she’d recognised me.
One day they were picnicking on the sands by the river.
I wished I could go and ask, ‘Couldn’t I be useful in some way?’
I could fetch water from the river,
hew logs from the woods.
Besides, wouldn’t the near-by jungles harbour
at least a respectable bear?
Among the group I noticed a young man, –
in shorts, and a silk shirt of foreign make, –
sitting next to Kamala, his legs stretched out,
a Havana cigar in his mouth.
Kamala was absent-mindedly tearing to pieces
the petals of a white hibiscus flower.
Beside her lay
a foreign magazine.
Instantly I knew that in that private spot
of Santhal Parganas I was strictly superfluous:
there was no room for me.
I would have left at once, but had one last thing to do.
In a few days the camellia would flower.
I’d send it to her. Then I’d be free to go.
Gun on shoulder, I spent the days hunting in the woods,
returned before dark to water my shrub in its pot
and see how far its bud had developed.
The day arrived.
I called the Santhal girl
who fetched wood for my stove.
I would send it in her hand
on a platter made from sal leaves.
I was sitting inside my tent reading a detective story.
A sweet voice spoke outside, ‘Sir, why did you call me?’
I came out and saw the camellia
on the Santhal girl’s ear,
lighting up her dark cheek.
She asked me again, ‘Why did you call me?’
I said, ‘Precisely for this.’
After that I came back to Calcutta.
[August 1932 (27 Srabon 1339)]
A Person
An oldish man from India’s north,
skinny and tall.
White moustache, shaved chin,
face like a shrivelled fruit.
Chintz shirt. Dhoti in wrestler-style.
Umbrella on left shoulder. Short stick in right hand.
Shoes with turned up toes. He’s walking to town.
Bhadra morning.
Sun muted by thin clouds.
After a muffled, stifling night
a fog-damp breeze
vacillates through young amloki twigs.
The wayfarer appeared
on the outermost line of my universe,
where insubstantial shadow-pictures move.
I just knew him to be a person.
He had no name, no identity, no pain,
no need whatsoever of anything.
On the road to market
on a Bhadra morning
he was just a person.
He saw me too
on the last limits of his world’s waste land,
where, within a blue fog,
connections between men there were none,
where I was – just a person.
At home he has a calf,
a myna in a cage,
a wife, who grinds wheat between stones,
fat brass bangles on her wrists.
He has his neighbours, – a washerman,
a grocer with his shop.
He has his debts, – to merchants from Kabul.
But nowhere in that world of his
is there me – a person.
[Post-rains, 1932 (17 Bhadra 1339)]
Writing a Letter
You gave me a gold-capped fountain-pen
and so many accessories to writing.
The little desk
made of walnut-wood.
Notepaper with printed heads
in different sizes.
A paper-cutter of enamelled silver.
Scissors, pen-knife, sealing-wax, reel of red tape.
Paper-weights of glass.
Pencils – red, blue, and green.
You said I must write you a letter
every other day.
Here I am, sitting down, ready to write you a letter.
I’ve had my bath already, – earlier in the morning.
I can’t think of a subject to write about.
The
re’s only one piece of news:
you’ve gone away.
That’s an item of news known to you too.
Yet it seems
you may not know it that well.
Well then, what about letting you know
that you’ve gone away.
But each time I begin to write
I find that piece of news by no means easy to report.
I am no poet:
I cannot give language a voice
or put into it the way eyes look.
The more I write, the more I tear up.
Past ten o’clock.
Time for your nephew Boku to go to school.
Let me go and give him his meal.
Before I go, let me write this for the last time:
you’ve gone away.
The rest are scribbles
and doodles on the blotting-paper.
[Rainy season 1932 (14 Ashadh 1339)]
FROM Shesh Saptak (1935)
No. 1
So sure was I that you were mine
that it never even came to my mind
to check the real value of your gifts.
Nor did you claim a price.
Day went after day, night after night.
You gave, emptying your baskets.
Glancing sideways, with an absent mind
I would put them away in my store
and not remember them the next day.
The new spring’s madhabi
added its presence to your gifts;
the post-rains full moon
lent them its special touch.
Covering my feet
with your black hair’s flood, you said,
‘What I give you is much less
than the revenue due to your realm;
more I cannot give
for I have no more.’
As you spoke, your eyes filled with tears.
Now you are gone.
Day comes after day, night after night,
but you don’t come.
After all these days I’ve opened my treasure-chest.
I’m looking at the jewelled necklaces you gave me,
pressing them to my breast.
My pride that partook of indifference
is bent to the ground –
there, where your two feet have left their imprints.
In pain I pay you now the price of your love,
and thus, having lost you, I have you fully at last.
[Santiniketan, mid-November 1932 (1 Agrahayan 1339)]
No. 2
Through the interstices of a casual conversation
in an unforeseeable smile
one day you set rocking
my youth drunk on itself.
A filament of deathlessness
sparked then suddenly across your face,
never to be seen again.
The play of waves at flood-tide cast from the deep
a gem-fragment of the ever-rare
on the sea-beach of a million incidents.
Thus does an unfamiliar moment’s abrupt pain
knock us on the breast in a trice,
through our half-open inner window borne
in a farer’s song
from a far forest’s edge.
So does the never-been-before with its unseen fingers
set our heart-strings in separation’s ache,
moving through microtones in slides from note to note,
in our rain-resonant lonely hours abroad,
in the evening jasmine’s sad and gentle scent,
leaving us the unexpected, invisible
caress of its slipped cape.
Then one day
for no reason at all, at an odd time
that instant, surprise-unquiet, returns to our minds, –
say, in a winter midday,
when we’re passing the time, staring
at a field shorn of crops, where cattle are grazing,
or in the darkness of a lone twilight, when
from sunset’s other shore the pain
of a soundless vina begins to vibrate.
No. 3
Days of Poush are coming to an end.
Inquisitive dawnlight
pushes fog’s wrap aside.
Suddenly I see
on the dew-moist shaddock tree
budding new leaves.
The tree looks astonished at itself.
As once Valmiki, on Tamasa’s edge,
was himself amazed
at his own breathed out metre,
so looks this tree to me.
From a long silent neglect into the crimson light
these few leaves have
brought their unabashed speech,
like those few words which you alone could have said
but left unsaid when you left.
Then was spring near
and between you and me
hung the curtain of unfamiliarity.
Sometimes it fluttered;
sometimes a corner went flying;
but the south wind, though it grew bold,
never blew it off entirely.
Unshackled interval didn’t come to pass.
The bell tolled
and at the day’s end
you went away
into the unspoken’s darkness.
No. 9
Fallen in love, the mind said,
‘All my kingdom I give unto you.’
The childish wish exaggerated, of course,
for how could such a thing be given?
All of it: how could I get hold of that?
A continent
broken up by seven seas,
it lives alone with its distances,
speechless, not to be traversed.
Its head rises in cloud-capped mountain peaks,
feet descend into cavernous darkness.
Like an inaccessible planet is this my being,
in a vaporous mantle, where there are occasional gaps,
and these alone are what the telescope prods.
What I can call my wholeness
hasn’t been named.
When will its ongoing design be completed?
And who is it that’ll have direct commerce with it?
The identity the name so far conveys
is a patchwork of pieces gathered from the edge
of the undiscovered.
The sky is scattered with the flickering shadows and lights
of desires, vain and filled.
From there fall tinted shadows of so many aches
on awareness’s earth;
the winds are touched by winter or by spring;
and who has clearly seen
that restless play of the unseen?
Who can hold it
in language’s cupped hands?
A margin of life’s territory is firm
with the ruggedness of work’s diversity;
on another futile labours vaporise,
turning into clouds, ascending into space, –
mirages busy at their sketches.
This world of the individual shows itself amongst men
in the narrow corridor connecting birth and death.
In its obscure provinces
massed in vast unknownness
are powers oblivious of themselves,
greatnesses that haven’t received their dues,
seeds of success, unsprouted, ensconced in the soil.
There crowd the shy one’s timidity,
concealed self-abasements,
histories not bruited about,
the many accessories
to conceit and disguise.
There much hidden thick muck
waits to be mopped up by death’s working hands.
This undeveloped, unmanifest myself:
for whom is it, and for what?
So many beginnings it brought, so many expressions;
with so much toil was its language-build
ing fraught,
so much not reaching the felicity of speech, –
to perish abruptly in no-meaning’s abysmal pit!
Such childishness of creation: how can it be borne?
The maestro works with his study’s curtain half drawn;
the blossom stays veiled in the bud.
The artist’s unfinished picture’s not for the public:
a few hints may be had,
but full viewing’s forbidden.
In me his vision’s not completed yet,
which is why so much dense silence surrounds me,
why I’m unfamiliar, unattainable.
Circled by an impenetrable guard,
in his hands is this creation still;
the time’s not ripe to hold it to any eyes.
All are far from me, –
and those who said ‘I know’, knew not.
[Santiniketan, 27 March 1935]
No. 11
In the dawn half-light
the koel’s intermittent calls
are like fireworks of sound.
Torn clouds disperse,
on each a fragment of a golden script.
Market day.
Bullock carts trundle
on the track that crosses the field.
Sacks of rice, fresh cane molasses in pitchers,
and carried on the hip-baskets of village girls,
kochu greens, green mangoes, shajina sticks.
Six a.m. in the school clock.
The bell’s ding-dong and the tint of the young sunshine
merge with my mind.
By the wall of my little garden
I sit on a chair
under an oleander.
From the east the sun’s strength casts
an oblique shadow on the grass.
Two coconut trees standing side by side
toss their branches unquietly in the breeze
like twin children making an enormous fuss.
Sheltered by shiny green,
young fruit peep from the pomegranate tree.
The month of Chaitra’s moored to its last week.
The sail slackens
in the sky-floating raft of spring.
I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems Page 19