Selected Short Stories

by Rabindranath Tagore

  Dakshinacharan Babu had turned yellow as he spoke, and his voice was hoarse. ‘Drink some more water,’ I said, touching him. My kerosene lamp guttered and went out. I noticed that it was getting light outside. The crows were cawing. Magpie-robins were whistling. An ox-cart creaked past on the road in front of my house. Dakshinacharan’s expression changed: there was no sign of fear any more. He seemed ashamed that the sorcery of the night and the frenzy of his imaginary fears had made him tell me so much. I felt that he blamed it on me. Without a single civil word, he abruptly rose and left the house.

  The next night, half-way through, there was a knocking at my door again, and the sound of ‘Doctor! Doctor!’

  Unwanted

  Towards evening the storm grew steadily worse. What with the lashing of the rain, the claps of thunder and flashes of lightning, it was like war between gods and demons in the sky. Great black clouds rolled hither and thither like banners proclaiming world-destruction; rebellious waves danced across the river, crashing on the shore; huge trees in the garden groaned as their branches heaved and thrashed to right and left.

  Meanwhile in a bungalow in Chandernagore, in a shuttered room lit only by an oil-lamp, a husband and wife sat on bedding spread out on the floor by a bed and talked.

  ‘In a little while,’ Sharat Babu was saying, ‘you’ll be quite recovered, and we can go back home.’

  ‘I’m better already,’ said Kiranmayi. ‘It won’t hurt me to go home now.’

  Any married person will know that the conversation was not actually so brief. The question was simple, but the argument to and fro fell short of a solution. It spun faster and faster like a boat without oars, till it seemed in danger of sinking in floods of tears.

  ‘The doctor says,’ said Sharat Babu, ‘you should stay a bit longer.’

  ‘Does the doctor know everything?’ said Kiran.

  ‘You must know,’ said Sharat, ‘that this is the season back home in which it’s easy to catch infections. You should wait for another month or so.’

  ‘Are you saying there are no infections here?’ said Kiran.

  What had happened was this. Kiran was loved by everyone in the household, even by her mother-in-law. When she fell badly ill, they were all alarmed; and when the doctor advised a change of air, her husband and mother-in-law were pleased to take her, gladly abandoning work and household. Village wiseacres questioned whether recovery would necessarily arise from the change: wasn’t it rather modish and excessive to make such a fuss about a young wife – as if no one else’s wife got ill sometimes, or people were immortal in Chandernagore? Was there any place where the prescriptions of Fate did not apply? But Sharat and his mother paid no heed. The life of their darling Kiranmayi was more important than the collective wisdom of the village. When a loved one is threatened, people are often irrational.

  Sharat took a bungalow in Chandernagore, and Kiran recovered from her illness: she was just still rather weak. There was a touching feebleness in her face and eyes, so that anyone looking at her felt, with quaking heart, that she’d had a most narrow escape.

  But Kiran was jolly by nature, gregarious. She didn’t like being alone in this place. She had nothing to do in the house, no neighbours or friends; simply nurturing her health all day bored her to death. The dose of medicine every hour, the watching of her temperature and diet – it was all very irksome. This was why husband and wife were quarrelling in a shuttered room this stormy night.

  So long as Kiran came up with replies, the argument proceeded equally; but in the end she resorted to silence. She sat with her head bowed and her face turned away from Sharat, who now found himself weak and weaponless. He was just about to give up the fight, when the Bearer was heard loudly calling from outside. Sharat opened the door. He was told that a young Brahmin boy had been shipwrecked – he’d swum ashore to their garden. Kiran’s anger and misery disappeared when she heard this, and at once she sent some dry clothes from the ālnā. In no time she had warmed a pan of milk and called for the boy to come in.

  He had long hair, large round eyes, and no sign of a moustache. Kiran sat with him as he ate, and asked him about himself. She heard that he belonged to a band of travelling players, and his name was Nilkanta. They’d been engaged to perform at the Sinhas’ house near by, but had been shipwrecked, and who knew what had happened to the others in the troupe? The boy was a good swimmer, so he’d saved himself. Here he was! Kiran felt a surge of tenderness towards him as she realized how easily he could have died.

  ‘This will be a good thing,’ thought Sharat to himself. ‘Kiran has something new to do – it will keep her going for a while.’ His mother, too, welcomed the merit to be gained from caring for a Brahmin boy; and Nilkanta himself was pleased to escape from death and his former master into the arms of this rich family.

  Before very long, Sharat and his mother began to change their minds. They felt that the boy had stayed long enough – there’d be trouble if they didn’t get rid of him soon. Nilkanta had begun to smoke Sharat’s hookah in secret, puffing away grandly. On rainy days he would shamelessly take Sharat’s favourite silk umbrella and strut around the village making new friends. A dirty stray dog he had petted brazenly frequented Sharat’s finely furnished room, leaving pawprints on the spotless floor-cover to record its gracious visits. A large circle of young admirers formed round Nilkanta, and the village mangoes were given no chance to ripen that year.

  Kiran was far too lavish with the boy – there was no doubt of that. Her husband and mother-in-law often took her to task for this, but she ignored them. She decked him out like a Babu, giving him Sharat’s old shirts and socks, and new shoes, dhoti and chadar. She would call him at whim, to satisfy her need to show affection as well as her sense of fun. She would sit smiling on the bed, pān-box beside her, with a maidservant combing and drying her long wet hair, while Nilkanta acted with flamboyant gestures the story of Nala and Damayanti. This way, the long afternoon passed quickly. She tried to get Sharat to come and watch the performance, but this annoyed him, and in any case in front of Sharat Nilkanta’s talent failed to shine. Sometimes Kiran’s mother-in-law came, attracted by the gods in the story; but her customary afternoon sleepiness soon defeated her piety – she would end up lying on her back.

  Nilkanta was often subjected to cuffs and boxes on the ear from Sharat, but used as he was from birth to even harsher methods of discipline he didn’t feel either hurt or dishonoured. He firmly believed that just as the world was divided between sea and land, so human life was divided between food and beatings – and beatings were the larger part of it.

  It was difficult to tell exactly how old he was. If he was fourteen or fifteen, one would say his face had matured beyond his years; if he was seventeen or eighteen, one would call him underdeveloped. He was younger than he looked, or else he looked younger than he was. Because he had joined the troupe of players at an early age, he acted Radha, Damayanti, Sita, and ‘Vidya’s confidante’. The needs of his master and the will of God coincided, and his growth stopped. Everyone thought of him as small, and he thought of himself as small: he was never treated as befitted his true age. Through such causes natural and unnatural, by the time he was seventeen, he looked more like an overdeveloped fourteen-year-old than an underdeveloped seventeen-year-old. His lack of moustache added to this false impression. Whether from smoking tobacco, or from using language ill-suited to his years, his lips had an adult curl to them; but his eyes, with their large pupils, were simple and childish. One could say that inside he was a child, but his yātrā-life had made him adult on the surface.

  Nature’s relentless laws, however, worked on him as he stayed on in Sharat Babu’s Chandernagore bungalow. Held back at the threshold for so long, he quietly crossed it at last. His seventeen or eighteen years of growth attained their proper ripeness.

  The change was not evident from the outside, but it was there in the way Nilkanta felt hurt and embarrassed when Kiran continued to treat him like a boy. One day she frivo
lously asked him to dress as a female sakhī: her request was suddenly awkward for him, though he couldn’t see why it was so. These days, if she asked him to imitate a yātrā-performance, he would run from her sight. He was no longer willing to think of himself as a juvenile member of a sordid yātrā-troupe. He had even made up his mind to try to learn to read and write with the manager of the bungalow. But because Nilkanta was Kiran’s pet, the manager couldn’t stand him; and so unaccustomed was he to concentrated study that the letters swam before his eyes. He would sit for hours on the river-bank leaning against a champak tree, with a book open on his lap: the water gurgled gently, boats floated past, fidgety birds on the branches made their irrelevant chirping comments, and Nilkanta kept his eyes on the book – but what he was thinking he alone knew, or maybe he didn’t. He could hardly move from one sentence to another, but he liked to feel he was reading a book. Whenever a boat passed, he would hold up the book impressively, mutter, and make a great show of reading; but as soon as the spectators had gone, his enthusiasm waned again.

  Formerly he sang yātrā-songs mechanically; but now their melodies caused a strange disturbance in his mind. The words were utterly trivial, full of meretricious wordplay: their meaning was impenetrable – but when he sang,

  O swan, swan, Brahmin twice born,1

  Why are you so heartless?

  Say for what good, in this wild wood,

  Do you threaten the life of a princess?

  he was suddenly now transported to a different life and world. The familiar scene around him and his insignificant life were transformed into song, took on a new appearance. The swan and the princess created extraordinary pictures in his mind: who he thought he was he couldn’t exactly say, but he forgot he was an orphan boy from a yātrā-troupe. Just as a miserable grubby child in a wretched hovel somewhere listens at night to the story of ‘The Prince, the Princess and the Ruby’, and in the dimly lit darkness of his dingy home is released from deprivation, finding in a fairy-tale world in which anything is possible a new beauty, a brighter aspect, a matchless power; so this yātrā-boy was able to see, through the tunes of these songs, both himself and his world in a new light. The sound of the water, the rustling of leaves, the call of birds, the smiling face of the kind woman who had given this friendless boy her protection, her loving bangle-laden arms, her preciously beautiful lotus-pink feet – all were transformed into music by who knows what miraculous magic! But another time this musical mirage was swept away: the yātrā-boy with his long shaggy hair was rediscovered, and Sharat – informed by the owner of a mango-orchard – was upon him, thwacking him with slaps on his cheeks; and Nilkanta would flee to his band of devoted followers to seek new excitement on land or in water or the branches of trees.

  Meanwhile Sharat’s brother Satish had come to stay in the house for his Calcutta college-holiday. Kiran was delighted – now she had something new to occupy her. He was equal to her in age: in her dress, manners, or in serving him at meals she teased him at every turn. Sometimes she smeared her palms with vermilio and pressed them over his eyes; sometimes she wrote ‘monkey’ on the back of his shirt; sometimes she bolted his door from outside and ran off merrily. Satish was not a man to be outdone: he would get his own back by stealing her keys, putting chillies in her pān, or slyly tying the end of her sari to her bed. Thus they spent the day teasing and chasing and laughing – or quarrelling, weeping, entreating and then making up again.

  Something got into Nilkanta now. He could not think of a reason for quarrelling with anyone, yet was full of bitterness and unease. He began to be needlessly nasty to the boys who followed him around; he gave his pet dog undeserved kicks, so that it yelped noisily; he violently slashed at weeds with a stick as he walked along.

  Kiran loved to see people eat well, to sit and serve them with their food. Nilkanta was a good eater: it was not hard to get him to take more and more of whatever he liked. So Kiran would often call him and serve him herself – it gave her special pleasure to watch him enjoying his food. But now that Satish was here, Kiran often did not have time to sit with Nilkanta as he ate. Formerly his appetite had not been affected by her absence: he would even rinse the milk-pan and drink the water. But now if she didn’t call him he was sick at heart and felt a bitter taste in his mouth: he would rise without finishing, telling the maid in a husky voice that he wasn’t hungry. He hoped that Kiran would send for him if she heard about this, entreat him to take some food; he resolved that he would not give in, would go on saying he wasn’t hungry. But no one told her, and she didn’t send for him: the maidservant finished up the food that was left. He would then turn out the lamp in his room, throw himself down on the dark bed, sobbing and choking and pressing his face into the pillow. But what use was this? Who took any notice? Who came to give him comfort? Eventually sleep – kindest of nurses – came with her gentle touch to bring relief to this sad, motherless boy.

  Nilkanta was convinced that Satish was running him down before Kiran. On days when she was silent for no reason, he was sure she was angry with him because of something that Satish had said. He often now prayed to the gods fiercely, ‘May I be Satish in another life, and may Satish be me.’ He knew that a curse delivered by a Brahmin with full concentration never failed, and he therefore as good as burnt himself with passion as he put the fire of Brahma on to Satish, while peals of merry laughter – Satish’s laugh mixed with Kiran’s – came down from the room above.

  Nilkanta did not dare to come out in open enmity with Satish, but took every opportunity to cause him minor inconveniences. If Satish left his soap on the steps down to the Ganges while he went for a dip, Nilkanta would swoop and run off with it, so that when Satish returned it was no longer there. Once when swimming he suddenly saw his best embroidered shirt floating away: he assumed it had flown in the wind, but there didn’t seem to be any wind blowing.

  One day Kiran, wanting to entertain Satish, called Nilkanta and asked him to sing some yātrā-songs. Nilkanta made no reply. Surprised, she asked what had happened. Again Nilkanta was silent. She asked once more. ‘I’ve forgotten them,’ he said, and went out.

  At last it was time for Kiran to return home. Everyone started to get ready: Satish too was to go back with them. But no one said anything to Nilkanta. No one seemed even to consider whether he would go or stay. Kiran eventually proposed to take him; but when her mother-in-law, husband and brother-in-law all objected with one voice, Kiran too abandoned her resolve. Finally two days before they were due to leave, she called the boy and gently advised him to return to his village.

  To hear her speak tenderly to him again after such long neglect was too much for Nilkanta, and he burst out crying. Kiran’s eyes, too, filled with tears. She realized with great distress how wrong she had been temporarily to encourage affection in a person she would have to leave.

  Satish was near by at the time. Infuriated by the sight of a grown boy weeping, he snapped, ‘Good God! At the drop of a hat, overcome with snivelling!’ Kiran rebuked him for this heartless remark. ‘You don’t understand, Baudi,’ said Satish. ‘You believe in everyone too much. You knew nothing about him, yet you let him live here like a king. He’s frightened of being small fry again – that’s why he’s making such a scene. He knows that a couple of tears will sway you.’

  Nilkanta rushed out of the room. In his mind he was stabbing an image of Satish with a knife, piercing him with needles, setting him on fire. Satish’s actual body remained unscathed: the only blood that flowed was from Nilkanta’s heart.

  Satish had brought from Calcutta a fancy inkstand he had purchased, with two shell-boats on either side to hold the ink, and a German silver swan in the middle with its wings spread and beak open to hold the pens. Satish prized this greatly; he would even sometimes polish it carefully with a silk handkerchief. Kiran would often jokingly tap the swan’s beak with her finger and sing,

  O swan, swan, Brahmin twice born,

  Why are you so heartless?

  – and joking
arguments would follow between her and her brother-in-law about it.

  The morning before their departure, Satish could not find the inkstand. Kiran laughed and said, ‘Your swan has flown away to search for your Damayanti!’ But Satish was incensed. He was certain that Nilkanta had stolen the thing – he could even find witnesses who had seen him loitering near Satish’s room the previous night. The accused was brought before Satish. Kiran was present too. Satish asked straight out, ‘Where have you put the inkstand that you stole from me? Give it back!’

  Nilkanta had often received beatings from Sharat for various offences and also for no offences, and had borne them all stoically. But when the theft of the inkstand was ascribed to him in front of Kiran, his large eyes burnt like fire, his chest heaved and choked his throat, and if Satish had said one more word the boy would have pounced like a furious kitten and gouged him with all ten fingernails.