Selected Short Stories

by Rabindranath Tagore

  Police, defendant and witnesses were all in court. In the civil court opposite hordes of people were waiting for their cases. A Calcutta lawyer had come on a suit about the sharing of a pond behind a kitchen; the plaintiff had thirty-nine witnesses. Hundreds of people were anxiously waiting for hair-splitting judgements, certain that nothing, at present, was more important. Chidam stared out of the window at the constant throng, and it seemed like a dream. A koel-bird was hooting from a huge banyan tree in the compound: no courts or cases in his world!

  Chandara said to the judge, ‘Sir, how many times must I go on saying the same thing?’

  The judge explained, ‘Do you know the penalty for the crime you have confessed?’

  ‘No,’ said Chandara.

  ‘It is death by the hanging.’

  ‘Then please, please give it to me, sir,’ said Chandara. ‘Do what you like – I can’t take any more.’

  When her husband was called to the court, she turned away. ‘Look at the witness,’ said the judge, ‘and say who he is.’

  ‘He is my husband,’ said Chandara, covering her face with her hands.

  ‘Does he not love you?’

  ‘Like crazy.’

  ‘Do you not love him?’

  ‘Madly.’

  When Chidam was questioned, he said, ‘I killed her.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted my food and my sister-in-law didn’t give it to me.’

  When Dukhiram came to give evidence, he fainted. When he had come round again, he answered, ‘Sir, I killed her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted a meal and she didn’t give it to me.’

  After extensive cross-examination of various other witnesses, the judge concluded that the brothers had confessed to the crime in order to save the younger wife from the shame of the noose. But Chandara had, from the police investigation right through to the sessions trial, said the same thing repeatedly – she had not budged an inch from her story. Two barristers, of their own volition, did their utmost to save her from the death-sentence, but in the end were defeated by her.

  Who, on that auspicious night when, at a very young age, a dusky, diminutive, round-faced girl had left her childhood dolls in her father’s house and come to her in-laws’ house, could have imagined these events? Her father, on his deathbed, had happily reflected that at least he had made proper arrangements for his daughter’s future.

  In gaol, just before the hanging, a kindly Civil Surgeon asked Chandara, ‘Do you want to see anyone?’

  ‘I’d like to see my mother,’ she replied.

  ‘Shall I call your husband?’ asked the doctor. ‘He wants to see you.’

  ‘To hell with him,’1 said Chandara.

  A Problem Solved

  I

  Krishnagopal Sarkar of the village of Jhinkrakota handed over the running of his estate and his other responsibilities to his elder son, and set off for Benares. His humble tenants wept bitterly at losing him: so liberal and pious a landlord was rare indeed in the age of Kali.

  His son Bipinbihari was a modern, sophisticated BA. He had a beard, wore glasses, and did not mix much with others. He was highly virtuous: he never even smoked or played cards. His manner was courteous and affable – but in fact he was a very hard man, and his tenants quickly felt the effect of this. The old landlord had been lenient with them; but with his son there was no hope of a paisa’s exemption from debt or rent, on whatever grounds. They had to pay on the nail, without a single day’s leeway.

  When Bipinbihari took over, he found that his father had frequently released land to Brahmins free of rent, and many people had had their rent reduced. If anyone came with a plea of some kind, he was never able to refuse it: this was his weakness.

  ‘It won’t do,’ said Bipinbihari. ‘I can’t let half the estate go rent-free.’ He reached two separate conclusions. Firstly, workshy people who sat at home growing fat on rent from land they had sublet were in most cases useless and deserved no pity. Charity to the likes of them simply gave refuge to idlers. Secondly, it was much harder to ensure an income than in his father and grandfather’s time. There was much more scarcity. It cost four times as much to preserve a gentleman’s dignity as it had in the past. His father’s open-handed, happy-go-lucky scattering of assets would not do now; on the contrary, they should now be retrieved and expanded. Bipinbihari began to do what his conscience told him – that is, he began to act according to ‘principle’.1 Whatever had gone out of the house, bit by bit came in again. He allowed very few of the rent-free tenancies to continue, ensuring that even these would not be permanent.

  In Benares, Krishnagopal heard, through letters, of his tenants’ distress: some of them actually went and appealed to him personally. He wrote to Bipinbihari saying that what he was doing was deplorable. Bipinbihari replied that formerly when gifts had been made various things were received in return. There had been a reciprocal relationship between zamindar and tenants. Recently laws had been passed that banned anything being given in return other than straightforward rent: a zamindar’s rights and privileges, other than rent, had been abolished. So what else could he do but keep a close eye on his dues? If the tenants gave him nothing extra, why should he give extra to them? The landlord-tenant relationship was now purely commercial. He would go bankrupt if he went on being so charitable: it would be impossible to maintain either his property or his ancestral dignity.

  Krishnagopal pondered deeply on the way that the times had so greatly changed, and concluded that the rules of his own era no longer applied to what the younger generation had to do. If one tried to interfere from a distance, they would say, ‘Take back your property then; we can’t manage it in any other manner.’ What was the point? It was better to devote what was left of one’s life to God.

  II

  Things went on like this. After a great deal of litigation, wrangling and argument, Bipinbihari had arranged nearly everything as he wanted. Most tenants were afraid to resist his pressure; Mirja Bibi’s son Achimaddi Bisvas was the only one who refused to give in.

  Bipinbihari’s attacks on him were the most severe of all. Land given away to a Brahmin could be justified by tradition, but it was impossible to see why this son of a Muslim widow should be given land free or nearly free. True, he had won a scholarship and learnt a little at school, but this did not give him the right to be so above himself. Bipin learnt from the older staff on the estate that the family had received favours from the landlord for a long time – they did not know exactly why. Maybe the widow had gone to him with tales of woe, and he had taken pity on her. But to Bipin the favours seemed highly inappropriate. Never having seen the family’s former poverty, he looked at their prosperity and arrogance and felt they had cheated his soft-hearted, unsuspecting father – had stolen some of the zamindar’s wealth.

  Achimaddi was a very confident young man. He was determined not to budge an inch from his rights, and a fierce contest developed. His widowed mother urged repeatedly that it was stupid to take on the zamindar: they had been protected so far – it was best to have faith in that protection, and give the landlord what he wanted. ‘You don’t understand these things, Mother,’ said Achimaddi.

  Achimaddi lost at each stage as the case went through the courts. But the more he lost, the more his tenacity increased. He staked all he had on keeping all that he had.

  One afternoon Mirja Bibi came with a small present of garden vegetables and met Bipinbihari privately. Casting her plaintive eyes on him as if caressing him with her motherly gaze, she said, ‘You are like my son – may Allah preserve you. Do not ruin Achim, my dear – there’ll be no virtue in that. I consign him to you: think of him as an unruly younger brother. Son, do not begrudge him a tiny piece of your untold wealth!’

  Bipin was furious with the woman for impertinently using the privilege of age to speak so familiarly to him. ‘You’re a woman,’ he said, ‘you don’t understand these things. If you’ve anything to tell me, send your son.’ Mirja Bibi
had now been told by another’s son as well as her own that she didn’t understand these things. Praying to Allah, dabbing at her eyes, the widow returned to her house.

  III

  The case went from the criminal court to the civil court, from the civil court to the district court, from the district court to the High Court. It continued for nearly eighteen months. By the time that Achimaddi was awarded a partial victory in the appeal court, he was up to his neck in debt. Moreover, he had escaped from the tiger on the river-bank only to be assailed by the crocodile in the river. The money-lenders chose this moment to put the court’s decree into action. A day was fixed for the auctioning of all that Achimaddi had.

  The day was Monday, market-day on the bank of a small river near by. The river was high during the monsoon, so some of the trading was on the bank, some of it in boats: the hubbub was continuous. Among the produce of the season, jackfruit was especially plentiful, and there was lots of hilsa-fish too. The sky was cloudy: many of the traders, fearing rain, stuck bamboo-poles into the ground and stretched canopies over their stalls.

  Achimaddi had also come to do some shopping, but without a paisa in his hand: no one would sell to him even on credit. He had brought a kitchen-chopper and a brass plate, hoping to raise money by pawning them.

  Bipinbihari had strolled out to take the evening air, attended by a couple of bodyguards with lāthis. Attracted by the crowd, he decided to visit the market. He was just – out of interest – questioning Dvari the oil-man about his earnings, when Achimaddi came at him charging and roaring like a tiger, brandishing his chopper. The stallholders intervened and quickly disarmed him. He was soon handed over to the police, and the trading in the market continued as before.

  It cannot be said that Bipinbihari was unhappy at this turn of events. For a hunted animal to turn and have a go at the hunter is an atrocious breach of etiquette; but never mind, the fellow would receive his due punishment. The women of Bipin’s household were outraged by the episode. The fellow was an impudent scoundrel! The prospect of his punishment, though, consoled them.

  Meanwhile, that same evening, Mirja Bibi’s house – foodless, childless – grew darker than death. Everyone forgot what had happened, had their dinner and went to bed: only for one old woman was it more significant than anything else, yet there was no one in the whole world to fight against it except for her: a few old bones and a frightened, bitter heart in an unlit hut!

  IV

  Three days passed. On the next there was to be a hearing before the Deputy Magistrate. Bipin himself was to give evidence. He had no objection, even though the zamindar had never appeared in the witness-box before. That morning at the appointed time, he put on a turban and watch-chain and with great ostentation was carried in a palanquin to the court. The court-room was packed: there had not been such a sensational case for a long time.

  Just before the case was to be heard, an attendant came up to Bipinbihari and said something in his ear: somewhat flustered, saying he was needed outside, he left the court-room. Outside, he saw his aged father standing a little way off under a banyan tree. He was barefoot, wore a nāmābali, and carried a Krishna-rosary: his slender body seemed to glow with kindness; calm compassion for the world shone from his brow. In his chapkan, jobbā and tight fitting pantaloons, Bipin had difficulty in doing obeisance to his father. His turban slipped over his nose, and his watch fell out of his pocket. Fumbling to replace them, he invited his father to step into a lawyer’s house near by. ‘No,’ said Krishnagopal, ‘what I need to say can be said here.’

  Bipin’s attendants drove curious bystanders away. ‘Everything must be done to release Achim,’ said Krishnagopal, ‘and the property taken from him should be returned.’

  ‘Have you come all the way from Benares just to say this?’ asked Bipin, amazed. ‘Why do you favour him so much?’

  ‘What would be the point of telling you why?’ said Krishnagopal.

  Bipin was insistent. ‘I’ve managed to retrieve gifts of land from many whom I felt were unworthy of them, Brahmins among them – and you didn’t turn a hair. So why have you gone to such lengths over this Muslim fellow? If, having gone so far, I release Achim and hand back everything, what shall I say to people?’

  Krishnagopal was silent for a while. Then, fiddling nervously with his rosary, he said in a quavering voice, ‘If a frank explanation is necessary, tell them that Achimaddi is your brother – my son.’

  ‘By a Muslim mother?’ said Bipin in horror.

  ‘Yes, my boy,’ said Krishnagopal.

  Bipin was flabbergasted. At length he said, ‘You can tell me everything later. Please come home now.’

  ‘No,’ said Krishnagopal, ‘I shall not live at home ever again. I’m returning to Benares at once. Please do whatever your conscience permits.’ Blessing him, fighting back tears, unsteady on his feet, Krishnagopal set off back.

  Bipin could not think of what to say or do. He stood in silence. But at least he understood now what morals were like in the old days! How superior he was to his father in education and character! This was what happened when people had no ‘principles’! As he walked back to the court, he saw Achim waiting outside – drained, exhausted, pale, white-lipped, red-eyed – captive between two guards, clad in dirty rags. And this was Bipin’s brother!

  Bipin was friendly with the Deputy Magistrate. The case was dismissed on a technicality, and within a few days Achim was restored to his former circumstances. But he did not understand the reason, and other people were surprised too.

  It soon got about, however, that Krishnagopal had appeared at the time of the trial. All sorts of rumours circulated. Shrewd lawyers guessed the truth of the matter. Among them, the lawyer Ramtaran had been brought up and educated at Krishnagopal’s expense. He had all along suspected – and now he could see clearly – that if you looked carefully, even the most respectable could be caught out. However much a man might finger his rosary, he was probably as much of a rogue as anyone else. The difference between the respectable and the unrespectable was that the former were hypocrites and the latter were not. In deciding, however, that Krishnagopal’s famous generosity and piety were a sly façade, Ramtaran found that an old and difficult problem had been solved and, in addition, felt – through what logic I do not know – that the burden of gratitude was lifted from his shoulders. What a relief!

  Exercise-book

  As soon as she learnt to write, Uma caused tremendous trouble. She would write ‘Rain patters, leaves flutter’ on every wall of the house with a piece of coal – in great, childish, curving letters. She found the copy of The Secret Adventures of Haridas that her elder brother’s wife kept beneath her pillow and wrote in pencil, ‘Black water, red flower’. Most of the stars and planets in the new almanac that everyone in the house used were, so to speak, eclipsed by her huge scribbles. In her father’s daily account-book, in the middle of his calculations, she wrote:

  He who learns to write

  Drives a horse and cart.

  Up to now she had not been interrupted in these literary endeavours; but at last she met with a dire mishap.

  Uma’s elder brother Gobindalal had a very benign look about him, but he wrote perpetually for the newspapers. None of his friends or relatives supposed from his conversation that he was a thinker, and indeed one could not justly accuse him of thinking on any subject. Nevertheless he wrote – and his opinions were in tune with most readers in Bengal. He had recently, for example, completed an elegant essay demolishing – by the spirit of his attack and the exuberance of his language rather than by logic – some gravely false ideas about anatomy that were current in European science.

  In the quiet of the afternoon, Uma took her brother’s pen and ink and wrote on the essay in bold letters:

  So well-behaved is young Gopal

  Whatever you give he eats it all.1

  I don’t believe she meant this to be a dig at the readers of Gobindalal’s essay, but he was beside himself with rage. First he smacked
Uma; then he took away her pencil-stub, her ink-smeared blunted pen and all her other carefully accumulated writing implements. The little girl, quite unable to understand the reason for such disgrace, sat in a corner and cried her heart out.

  When her punishment was finished, Gobindalal softened a little. He returned the confiscated items, and tried to dispel the little girl’s distress by giving her a well-bound, nicely ruled exercise-book.

  Uma was seven years old at the time. From then on, this exercise-book was under her pillow every night, and in her lap or under her arm all day long. When with her hair plaited Uma was taken along by the maid to the girls’ school in the village, the exercise-book went too. Some of the girls were intrigued by the book, some coveted it, and some begrudged her it.

  In the first year that she had the exercise-book, she neatly wrote in it: ‘Birds are singing, Night is ending.’1 She would sit on the floor of her bedroom embracing the exercise-book, chanting out loud and writing. She accumulated many snatches of prose and rhyme in this way.

  In the second year, she wrote some things of her own: very short but very much to the point: no introduction or conclusion. For example, at the end of ‘The Tiger and the Crane’ – a story in kathāmālā – a line was added which is not to be found in that book or anywhere else in Bengali literature. It was this: ‘I love Yashi very much.’

  Let no one suppose that I am about to concoct a love-story! Yashi was not an eleven- or twelve-year-old local boy: she was an old house-servant, whose actual name was Yashoda. But this one sentence should not be taken as firm proof of Uma’s feelings towards her. Anyone wanting to write an honest account of the matter would find that the sentence was fully contradicted two pages later in the exercise-book.

  This was not just a stray example: there were blatant contradictions in Uma’s writings at every step. In one place one could read of her life-long rift with Hari (not Hari meaning Krishna, but a girl at school called Haridashi). But something a few lines below suggested there was no one in the world whom she loved more than Hari.