Meanwhile, in England, Dwarkanath’s health started failing. He lost his appetite and grew weak and listless. All he could eat were a few mouthfuls of the rice and curry his faithful servant Hooli, whom he had brought all the way from India, cooked for him. At night, half a cup of soup and a few mouthfuls of orange jelly. The heat was troubling him, even in England, and he was sleeping with his windows open. His personal physician Dr Martin was puzzled by the symptoms and recommended a change of location. On his advice, Dwarkanath, with his son Nagendra and the sixteen other members of his retinue, moved to the seaside resort of Worthing, taking up a whole floor of its best hotel. But his condition worsened. Within six months, the man whose drive and energy, even at the age of fifty, had baffled his countrymen was reduced to a shadow. And then, on a hot close day of August, when the sky was rumbling with thunder, he passed away. Upper-class London mourned his death, particularly the women. His special friends, the Duchess of Cleveland and the Duchess of Inverness, were inconsolable and the Queen, herself, was so moved she sent the royal pallbearers to carry the coffin of this exceptional alien who had come across the seas to die on England’s shores.
III
At the time that Dwarkanath was suffering the last throes of his strange malady, his eldest son was suffering too, not from physical symptoms like his father but from an intense weariness of spirit that left him drained and listless. One night he said to Sarada, ‘My father has left me with too weary a load, Bado Bou! The more I struggle to ease it, the heavier it sits on my shoulders. I have no peace. Yet, all I desire from life is peace. A quiet nook, far from the hustle and bustle of the city, where I can meditate on the greatness and glory of our Heavenly Father. Where I can seek His mercy. I wish to be released from all earthly bonds. Set me free, Bado Bou.’
‘Set you free!’ Sarada burst into tears. ‘Never! Whatever you do, wherever you go, I shall follow you like a shadow. Do whatever your heart desires. Only don’t abandon me.’
Debendra’s eyes filled with tears. He drew his wife’s head to his chest and said, ‘I was forgetting my primary duty, Bado Bou. You are right in reminding me of it. Women and children are vulnerable and must be protected at all costs. Don’t weep. I shan’t abandon you.’
Sarada wiped her eyes and sat up. ‘You have been working too hard for far too long and have neglected your health,’ she said, running her fingers through his hair tenderly. ‘The air of the Ganga is said to be rejuvenating. Let us go on a river cruise. You, I and the children.’
‘As you wish.’ Debendranath sighed and, turning over, went to sleep.
It was the month of August. Hiring a pinnace, Debendranath filled it with all the comforts required by a young family and installed his wife and four sons in it. For himself he took a small boat. The two glided over the river, graceful as a swan with her cygnet. The wind was strong, the currents rapid and they made good progress. Debendra spent the day in reading, prayer and meditation. Every evening, just before sunset, the anchors were dropped and he made his way to the pinnace to spend the night with his wife and children.
One evening, soon after leaving Kalna, the sky grew ominously dark and drops of rain came pattering down. He called out to the boatmen, ‘Drop the anchor and take me to the pinnace. There’s a terrible storm brewing.’ Even as he said this, the storm broke. Wild monsoon winds lashed at the mast of the pinnace, wrenching it in two. One half fell on Debendra’s boat, missing his head by inches. And now the two boats, pinned together by the broken sail and festoons of rope, flew over the water like a thing possessed. The boatmen fell to their knees and cried out to Allah to save their lives. The children screamed and clung to their mother. And Sarada kept calling out to her husband to make his way somehow to the pinnace. But Debendranath, who had narrowly missed death only a few minutes ago, was the picture of tranquillity. He kept sitting in the lotus pose, eyes closed, oblivious to the commotion around him.
After a while the fury of the storm abated. The rain continued to fall but the wind died down and the violent rocking of the boats subsided. Debendranath was helped into the pinnace where Sarada was waiting with dry clothes. But, even as she was wiping his head, the shrieks of the boatmen reached their ears. ‘Pirates! Pirates! Yah Allah! Yah Ali! You’ve thrown us from one peril into another. O Karta! Karta go!’ Debendra knew that pirates lurked in these waters, ready to waylay rich travellers and rob and kill them. Yanking his head out of Sarada’s hands, he rushed to the deck.
The sky was dark and the rain blurred his vision but he could see a dingy coming towards the pinnace. He shaded his eyes with his hand and peered into the distance. Now he could see a figure standing at the helm – a solitary figure. ‘Stop your caterwauling,’ he chided the boatmen. ‘You’re frightening the children. The dingy is not carrying pirates. There’s only one passenger in it. Can’t you see?’
As the dingy drew nearer, Debendranath recognized the man who stood so still in the falling rain. It was Swarup, his father’s khansama from Jorasanko.
‘Swarup!’ he called out anxiously, ‘what brings you here?’
‘Bad news!’ Swarup called back. ‘Bad news from England.’ Clambering on to the deck of the pinnace, he dug his hand into his breast pocket and brought a letter wrapped in oilskin. ‘Bardada babu!’ he said, bursting into tears, ‘Kartamoshai is no more.’
After the first cry of shock, Debendranath steadied himself. They would have to go back to Jorasanko. But how? They had left Kalna far behind. The quickest way would be to go to Palta, where the Tagores had a garden estate, then take a carriage back to Kolkata. ‘To Palta!’ he shouted instructions to the boatmen. ‘Take us to Palta.’
By the time the party reached Palta, it was eight o’clock. Debendranath’s decision to break journey here was a fortuitous one. As soon as the pinnace scraped the bank, it tilted dangerously from the water that had gathered, two and a half feet high, in its hold. Had it remained on the river for even an hour longer, it would surely have sunk and all its occupants would have drowned.
‘Your carriage is ready, Bardada babu,’ the servants who had come to receive them said. ‘You may leave as soon as you like.’
Debendranath glanced at his wife. Sarada was exhausted from the anxieties of the day and the nausea that assailed her during the first three months of her pregnancies. For it was on this cruise, a few days ago, that she had discovered she was pregnant for the sixth time. She hadn’t told her husband yet and decided not to do so now. ‘The children are tired and hungry,’ she said instead. You need some rest too. Let’s spend the night here. We’ll leave tomorrow at dawn.’
‘I wish to leave immediately. You can come tomorrow with the children.’
‘But it’s still raining and the wind is whipping up again. Another storm is brewing. Besides, who knows what dangers lurk at night in these parts? I won’t let you go alone.’
‘Then we’ll all go together. Now. Take the children and get into the carriage.’
The carriage drove through the night at a snail’s pace. The path was flooded and the wheels kept getting stuck in the mud. The children cried out that they were hungry and wanted their milk, before falling asleep, exhausted with hunger and weeping.
Sarada turned to her husband with a question that had been worrying her ever since she had heard of her father-in-law’s death. ‘Who performed Sasur Thakur’s last rites?’ she asked, stammering a little. ‘You’re the eldest son…’
‘Nagendra was with him,’ Debendra replied. ‘Besides, don’t forget he died in an alien land where there are no Hindu priests. The letter says he was buried in a cemetery just outside London called Kensal Green.’
‘Buried!’ A shiver passed over Sarada. ‘A zealous Hindu like him! Won’t his soul suffer torment?’
‘I don’t know.’ Debendra shook his head reflectively. Then, fixing his eyes on Sarada’s face, he continued. ‘You might as well be prepared, Bado Bou. Baba may have been a Hindu. But his sons are Brahmos. We will perform his shraddha according to Brahmo
rites.’
Sarada stared in dismay. What Brahmo rites? How were they performed? She hadn’t the slightest idea. She only knew that the soul of a Hindu could not rest in peace if the rites were not carried out in accordance with the shastras. Pinda, lumps of cooked rice, had to be offered to the departed one in accompaniment with the proper mantras. Else the starved spirit would remain hungry throughout eternity. Bestowals had to be made to priests and Brahmins, and the poor and deprived, fed. The ashes had to be taken to Haridwar and set afloat on the Ganga. Finally, a special pinda had to be offered in Gaya. Deprived of these, the spirit hovered over the house in which it had lived. What if Sarada’s father-in-law’s ghost never got exorcized? What if it remained in Jorasanko to haunt them? What if she or her children heard his footsteps, at dead of night, or saw him striding down the gallery, his gold-headed cane in one hand, his tortoise-shell snuffbox in the other? She shuddered and crept closer to her husband.
‘What are Brahmo rites?’ she asked, her face pale and tense with anxiety.
‘You’ll see,’ Debendranath replied solemnly. Sarada was silenced. She knew that she wouldn’t get another word out of him.
By the time the carriage rolled in through the gates of the mansion, it was well past midnight. The house was dark and silent and all its inmates asleep. That night Sarada told her husband about the coming child. ‘Sasur Thakur loved his home and family,’ she said. ‘Do you think he is coming back to us? Lots of people do. Ma go! To think of a great man like him growing in my womb!’
But Debendra laughed her fears or hopes, whatever they were, away. ‘I should think not. There’s no such thing as rebirth. In fact I hope we have a girl this time. I’ve wanted one ever since we lost our first-born.’
Sarada didn’t contradict him but she didn’t share his hopes. She wanted only sons.
Debendranath observed the twelve-day mourning period in strict accordance with the rules prescribed by the shastras. Seeing him, no one could imagine that he was anything but a high-born Hindu, observing mandatory rituals following the death of a parent. He wore a single length of unbleached cotton cloth, ate unsalted rice once a day, stopped combing and oiling his hair, and went about on bare feet.
Sarada breathed a sigh of relief. Her husband wouldn’t embarrass her or do anything awkward. He would follow the traditions faithfully and her father-in-law’s soul would take flight for Heaven. But something in the air around her was baffling. She and her sisters-in-law were performing the same rites as sahadharminis of their husbands, and they were doing everything together. Yet, it seemed to her, and she wasn’t very perceptive as a rule, that they were keeping something from her, that they were avoiding intimate conversation and exchange of confidences. Why? She couldn’t imagine.
She didn’t know what they knew. Debendra had sent for Girindra the day after his arrival and declared his intention of performing their father’s shraddha according to Brahmo rites. These were unformulated as yet, but Debendra had decided that they were to comprise the reciting and singing of verses from the Upanishads, accompanied by expositions and discourse by Anandachandra Vidyabagish.
But Girindra, one of the twenty who had been initiated along with Debendranath, had hemmed and hawed and finally changed his tune completely. ‘We’ll be cast out of our family and community, Dada,’ he had said. ‘Our water will become unacceptable and we won’t find grooms for our daughters and brides for our sons.’
His words had astonished Debendra. He didn’t know, though he had a strong suspicion, that Girindra was parroting what his wife had been saying to him, over and over again, ever since his initiation into the new faith. Girindra had tried to reason with her, to make her see his point of view, but she was by far the stronger character and could subdue his feeble protests with forceful arguments.
‘But we are Brahmo,’ Debendra said. ‘We’ve taken a vow to abjure idols. Shall we abandon our faith for fear of social disapproval?’ He looked, hopefully, at his younger brother but Girindra stood in shamed silence. He admired Debendranath and respected him. But his love for his wife went beyond everything in his life. Her beauty and vibrant personality had given her a power over him which he couldn’t resist. He feared the loss of her love, the withdrawal of her body, as he feared nothing else in the world. Something about her reminded him of his mother. Though unlinked by blood, they were cast in the same mould.
Girindra had done something else. He had approached his uncle Ramanath Thakur and begged him to intervene.
‘Dada was a Hindu,’ Ramanath came to Baithak Khana Bari one day and advised Debendra with his habitual ponderous solemnity. ‘His last rites must be performed according to Hindu tenets or his soul will remain forever trapped in the meshes of this world. It is your filial duty, as the eldest son, to ensure that his spirit is released from earthly bonds and sent winging towards Heaven.’ Ramanath stretched his hand towards the sky as if following the route his brother’s spirit would take in its journey to Heaven.
Debendra bit his lip to hide a smile. His head was bowed, out of deference, but his voice when he spoke was firm. ‘Command me in anything else, Kakamoshai, and I will obey. But I cannot look upon the Shalagram, kush, tulsi and gangajal as holy anymore. My new religion forbids it.’
On the morning of the shraddha, Debendranath entered the structure of bamboo and straw that had been set up for the ceremony, to find that all the arrangements for an elaborate set of Hindu rituals were complete. Sacks of silver coins were stacked in one corner for distribution to the poor. Four healthy bulls, decked out in sindoor and garlands, stood stamping their feet and twitching their tails as though waiting in eager anticipation for the mantras of the brishotsarga which would spell their release. The air was pungent with the mixed fragrance of fruits and sweets, flowers and incense. The purohit sat in state with the Shalagram before him. Girindra sat by his side, the picture of Brahminical purity, with his shaved head and muga chador, the golden colour of which merged with the colour of his skin.
They looked up at his approach and the priest grinned ingratiatingly. ‘Come, Bado Dada babu,’ he invited, ‘take your place.’
Debendranath smiled and shook his head. ‘Girindra will do whatever is to be done,’ he said. Facing the life-sized portrait of his father, who looked every inch the prince in his brocade robe, turban and jewels, he bowed before it and brought his palms together. Then, turning, he walked out as quietly as he had come.
Commanding the steward to send for Anandachandra Vidyabagish, he made his way to his apartments. Turning a corner of the gallery, he very nearly collided with a figure coming from the other side. It was a woman, tall and graceful, the broad red border of her sari pulled down to her breast. He stood aside to let her pass and she moved away hastily. But not before he caught a glimpse of a pair of flashing white feet lined with alta. He knew who she was.
Jogmaya had recognized him too. Though somewhat hazily, she could see through the fine muslin of her jamdani sari. In the one second that they had stood together, she had caught a certain expression on his face. His eyes had conveyed something. What was it? Hate? Anger? Contempt? Pity? No. It was none of these things. It was as though he had stood there measuring her. Measuring her strength. Jogmaya trembled. She knew she had made an enemy. An implacable enemy.
Debendranath entered his room and locked the door. He spent the hours waiting for Anandachandra in meditation and prayer. On his arrival, Debendranath performed his father’s last rites with readings and explications from the Upanishads. Though unstructured, this was the first Brahmo shraddha.
Debendranath’s refusal to participate in the Hindu rituals that were being performed in the same premises set off a storm of controversy in the city of Kolkata. The population got divided, the majority siding with the conservative group led by Raja Radhakanta Deb who denounced him as an unnatural son. Only a few, of whom Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar was one, granted him the right to act according to his own convictions. The matter was reported in the newspapers to the shame and
chagrin of the other branches of the family. His uncles, who had loved him best out of all his brothers, withdrew from him. Friends started keeping a distance and invitations to social functions and celebrations became infrequent. But Debendranath remained unshaken.
1846–1866
I
From the time that Sarada had come to Jorasanko, as a little bride of six, her life had been smooth and easy. She wore the finest saris and jewels, ate the choicest foods and was waited upon hand and foot by dozens of serving women. She didn’t have a care in the world except when her children fell ill. Though generally considered a negligent mother, she worried a lot during those times, refused to be comforted by the thought that her little ones were going through what were routine ailments, and insisted on keeping them with her.
But after her father-in-law’s death, her life changed dramatically. On the very next morning after their arrival from Palta, the family steward came rushing into their apartments with the news that a large number of creditors were standing at the gate demanding to see the new master. Sarada was frightened and burst into tears but Debendra said calmly, ‘Tell them that I shall conduct no business till the thirteen-day mourning period is over. I shall meet them all, after the shraddha, and hear what they have to say.’
Debendranath, for all his other preoccupations, was aware that that his father’s princely lifestyle in Europe together with his own neglect of the business and zamindari were draining the family finances surely and swiftly and they were sinking into debt. But he had little idea of the extent. Taking stock of the situation he discovered, with a shock, that it was to the tune of one crore of rupees. He made a quick calculation. The family assets, barring the Trust property, were worth seventy lakhs. Even if the Tagores lost all their business – their tea plantations, coalfields, shipyards and factories – they would still be thirty lakhs short.
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