Selected Short Stories

by Rabindranath Tagore

  ‘I ran to the Yamuna – returned with my clothes soaking wet. I wrung the water out over Keshar Lal’s half-open lips, and tore wet strips of cloth to bind the ghastly wound that had destroyed his left eye. I brought him water a few more times in this way, and as I moistened his face and eyes he slowly regained some consciousness. “Shall I give you more water?” I asked.

  ‘ “Who are you?” said Keshar Lal.

  ‘I could not hold back any more and said, “I am your humble, devoted servant. I am the daughter of Golamkader Khan, the Nawab.” At least he would die knowing my devotion to him! No one could deprive me of the joy of that feeling.

  ‘But as soon as he heard who I was he roared out like a lion, “Daughter of an arch-traitor! Heretic! You, a Muslim, have profaned my religion by giving me water at my time of death!” He struck me a heavy blow on my cheek with his right hand: everything swam before my eyes and I nearly fainted.

  ‘I was sixteen years old and this was the first time I had been out of the zenana; the greedy heat of the sun had not yet stolen the luscious pink of my cheeks; but this was the first greeting I received from the outside world, from my one idol in the world!’

  My cigarette had gone out. All this time I had sat like a figure in a painting – so engrossed that I knew not whether it was words or music that I heard. I had said nothing myself. But now at last I burst out, ‘Animal!’

  ‘Animal?’ said the Nawab’s daughter. ‘Would a dying animal refuse a drop of water?’

  Embarrassed, I said, ‘Maybe not. He was a god, then.’

  ‘What sort of god?’ said the Princess. ‘Would a god reject the service of an eager and devoted heart?’

  ‘Indeed not,’ I said, and fell silent again.

  ‘At first,’ continued the Princess, ‘I was devastated. I felt as if the world had collapsed over my head. But I quickly recovered myself, bowed from a distance before that harsh, cruel, high-minded Brahmin, and said to myself, “O Brahmin, you accept neither the service of the wretched, nor food from another’s hand, nor the gifts of the wealthy, nor the youth of a girl, nor the love of a woman: you are separate, alone, aloof, distant. I have no right at all to offer my soul to you.”

  ‘I cannot say what Keshar Lal thought when he saw the daughter of the Nawab bowing down before him till her head touched the dust, but there was no surprise or change of expression in his face. He looked at me calmly; then, very slowly, stood up. I anxiously stretched out my arm to support him, but he silently refused it, and with great difficulty staggered to the bank of the Yamuna. A ferry was moored there. There was no one to cross and no one to take anyone across. Keshar Lal boarded the boat and untied the mooring-rope: the boat quickly drifted to the middle of the stream and gradually faded from view. I longed with all the force of my feelings, youth and unrequited devotion to make a last obeisance before that boat and drown: to end this futile life of mine in the waveless, moonlit Yamuna, in the still night, like a bud shed before it could bloom.

  ‘But I could not do that. The moon in the sky, the dense black woods on the bank, the inky-blue unruffled waters, the towers of our fortress glittering above the mango-grove in the moonlight, sang together a silent, solemn song of death; heaven, earth and the nether world that night, by their moon-and-star-studded stillness, told me with one voice to die. But a frail invisible boat, on the calm breast of the Yamuna, dragged me from the moonlit night’s soothing, ever-bewitching spell of death and back to the path of life. I followed the bank of the river like a sleepwalker, sometimes through clumps of reeds, sometimes over sandbanks, sometimes over rugged broken-up beaches, sometimes through scarcely penetrable thickets.’

  She fell silent here. I also said nothing. After a long pause the Nawab’s daughter said, ‘What happened after this was very complicated. I don’t know how to break it up and describe it clearly to you. I wandered through a thick forest, but I can’t remember which path I took when. Where shall I begin? Where shall I end? What shall I leave out? What shall I keep in? How can I make the whole story clear so that it won’t seem impossible or preposterous or unnatural?

  ‘During this period of my life I realized that nothing is impossible or unattainable. To a young girl from a nawab’s zenana the outside world might seem totally forbidding, but that is an illusion: if one once steps out, a way through will be found. This path is not a nawab’s path; but it is a path by which people have always come. It is rugged, weird and uncharted, full of branchings and divisions, fraught with agony and ecstasy, obstacles and obstructions; but it is a path.

  ‘An account of a princess’s long, solitary journey along this inevitable path would not be pleasant to listen to, and even if it was I have no wish to tell it. In a word, I endured many trials and dangers and indignities; yet life was not unbearable. Like a firework, the more I burned the more wildly I moved; so long as I kept moving I did not feel I was burning. But now at last the flame of my pain and joy has gone out, and I find myself lying like a dumb thing in the roadside dust. My journey is over; my story is finished.’

  With this the Nawab’s daughter stopped. I mentally shook my head: the story was surely not yet over. I was silent for a while, then said in broken Hindi, ‘Forgive my rudeness, but if you would speak a little more openly about the last part of your story my impudent curiosity would be greatly eased.’

  The Nawab’s daughter smiled. No doubt my broken Hindi helped. If I had been able to speak Hindi properly, she would not have been so frank with me: the fact that I knew so little of her mother tongue created a space between us, a protective veil.

  She began again. ‘I often got news of Keshar Lal, but in no way could I get to meet him. He had joined Tatya Tope’s army,1 and kept appearing and disappearing like a bolt of thunder from a sky that was still dark with revolt: sometimes to the east, sometimes to the west, sometimes to the north-east, sometimes to the southwest.

  ‘I was by then dressed as a yoginī, and studying the Sanskrit Shastras in Benares with Shibananda Swami, my spiritual father. News from all over India reached him: I devotedly learnt the Shastras, and at the same time eagerly lapped up news of the war.

  ‘Gradually the British Raj stamped out the flames of revolution in Hindusthan. There was no more news of Keshar Lal. All the heroic figures, right across India, who had been glimpsed in the bloody light of battle, were eclipsed. I could hold myself no longer. I left the protection of my guru, and went out in the world again, dressed as a devotee of Shiva. I wandered from road to road, shrine to shrine, to ashrams and temples, but found no news of Keshar Lal anywhere. Some who knew his name said, “He must have died in the fighting or been executed.” My heart said, “That can never be: Keshar Lal cannot die. He is a Brahmin; that blazing invincible fire can never be put out; it is still burning brightly on a lonely, remote, ritual hearth, waiting for me to sacrifice myself to it.”

  ‘It is said in the Hindu Shastras that through meditation and austerity a Shudra can become Brahmin; there is no mention of a Muslim becoming a Brahmin, for the simple reason that there were no Muslims at that time. I knew it would be a long time before I could be united with Keshar Lal, because first I had to become a Brahmin. Thirty long years went by. I became a Brahmin inside and out; in habit and behaviour; in body, mind and speech. The blood of my Brahmin grandmother flowed through my body with unmixed energy; I acquired a strange mental fire, by abasing myself totally before the first and last Brahmin of my adolescence and youth, for me the only Brahmin in the world.

  ‘I had heard a lot about Keshar Lal’s heroism in the revolutionary war, but that was not what imprinted itself on my heart. What I saw was Keshar Lal floating out alone in a little boat into the calm central stream of the Yamuna, in the silent moonlight: that was the picture that obsessed me. I saw nothing but this, day and night: a Brahmin floating away on the empty stream towards some undefined mystery – with no companion, no servant, no need of anyone; immersed in the purity of his soul, complete in himself; with the planets, moon and stars watching him
silently.

  ‘Then I heard that Keshar Lal had escaped execution and taken refuge in Nepal. I went there. After living there for many months I heard that he had left Nepal a long time before and had gone nobody knew where.

  ‘I wandered through the mountains. This was not a Hindu land: it was a land of Bhutanese and Lepchas with their weird beliefs; there was no orthodoxy in their diet and behaviour; their gods and styles of worship were completely alien; I was terrified of the slightest desecration of the holiness I had acquired through years of spiritual endeavour. I took great pains to avoid being touched by anything unclean. I knew that my boat was nearly at the shore, that my life’s supreme goal was not far off.

  ‘What shall I say of what happened next? The end of the story is very brief. When a lamp is about to go out it can be extinguished with a single puff. I need not elaborate. After thirty-eight years, I have arrived in Darjeeling. I saw Keshar Lal this morning.’

  She fell silent again, so I asked her eagerly, ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I saw,’ said the Nawab’s daughter, ‘an aged Keshar Lal in a Bhutanese village with his Bhutanese wife, sitting in a filthy yard with their grandchildren born of her, picking grain out of maize.’

  Her story was finished. I thought I ought to offer some word of consolation. ‘How can anyone,’ I said, ‘who has had to survive amidst strangers for thirty-eight years, stick to his religious rules?’

  ‘You think I don’t understand that?’ said the Nawab’s daughter. ‘But why was I so deluded for so long? Why didn’t I know that the Brahminism that stole away my young heart was nothing but custom and superstition? I thought it was dharma, unending and eternal. How else could I – after being so shamefully rejected when I offered on that moonlit night my freshly bloomed body and heart and soul, trembling with devotion, after leaving my father’s house for the first time at the age of sixteen – how else could I have silently accepted the insult as a kind of initiation by a guru, and meekly dedicated myself to him with redoubled devotion? Alas, Brahmin, you exchanged one set of habits for another, but I gave away my life and youth, and how can I get them back again?’

  The woman stood up and said, ‘Namaskār, Babuji!’ Then a moment later she said, as if correcting herself, ‘Salaam Babusaheb!’ With this Muslim valediction she took her leave, as it were, of the Brahminism whose foundations had crumbled to the dust. Before I could say anything, she disappeared like a cloud into the mists that swirled round these icy mountain-tops.

  I shut my eyes for a while and let all she had described roll through my mind. I saw the young, sixteen-year-old Nawab’s daughter sitting on a fine carpet in her room overlooking the Yamuna; I saw the statuesque figure of a yoginī rapt in ecstatic devotion during evening worship in a place of pilgrimage; and then I saw also an image of heart-broken disillusionment in an older woman, shrouded in mist, on the edge of the Calcutta Road in Darjeeling; and the poignant music of beautiful, pure Urdu, formed by the clash of Brahmin and Muslim blood flowing through this woman in opposite ways, reverberated in my mind.1

  I opened my eyes. The clouds had parted, and the clear sky was bright with gentle sunshine. Englishwomen in hand-pushed carts and Englishmen on horseback were out taking the air. There were one or two Bengalis too, casting amused glances at me from faces swathed in scarves.

  I got up quickly, and in the bright light of this sunny world I could no longer believe in the stormy story I had heard. My imagination had made it up, out of mist mixed with ample tobacco-smoke. That Muslim-Brahmin woman, that Brahmin hero, that fort on the bank of the Yamuna, had perhaps no truth in them at all.

  Son-sacrifice

  Baidyanath was the shrewdest man in the village, and he always did everything with an eye to the future. When he married, he had a clearer vision of the son he hoped for than of the bride in front of him. So far-sighted a look at the moment of the first unveiling has rarely been seen.1 He knew what he was about, and was therefore more concerned with the offering of oblations after his death than he was with love. ‘One gets a wife to have a son’: it was in this spirit that he married Binoda.

  But even shrewd people can be cheated in this world. Though ripe for child-bearing, Binoda failed in her chief duty, and Baidyanath grew very alarmed when he saw the open gates of punnām-narak – the hell to which men without sons are condemned. Worried about who would inherit his wealth when he died, it became less of a pleasure to him now. As I have said, the future was more real to him than the present.

  But how could one expect the youthful Binoda to look so far ahead? For her, poor girl, the worst thing was that her precious present life was being wasted: her budding youth was withering away through lack of love. The hunger of her heart in this world burned too strongly for her to care about the hunger of the spirit in the next. The Holy Laws of Manu, and her husband’s psychical exposition of them, gave no relief to her craving.

  Say what one may, at this age a woman finds her every joy in giving and receiving love, and has a natural tendency to value it more than duty. But instead of the delicate showers of new love, Fate decreed a stinging, roaring hailstorm, poured down by her husband and his lofty family hierarchy. They all accused her of being barren. Her wasted youth wilted, like a flowering plant kept indoors away from light and air.

  Whenever she could bear the scolding and repression no longer, she would go to Kusum’s house to play cards. She enjoyed this greatly. The terrible shadow of damnation lifted for a while, and jokes and laughter and chatter flowed freely. On days when Kusum had no female partner for the game, she would call in her young brother-in-law Nagendra, brushing aside any objection that either he or Binoda might make. Older people know how one thing can lead to another, how a game can become something more serious; but the young are not so aware of this. Nagendra’s objections faded: soon he could hardly bear to wait for each card-playing session.

  It thus happened that Binoda and Nagendra started to meet each other often, and he often now lost the game, because his eyes and mind were on something more vital than cards. Kusum and Binoda were both well aware of this (the real reason why he lost). As I have said, the young do not understand the consequences of their actions. Kusum found it highly amusing, and avidly watched the joke unfold. Young women delight in secretly watering the seeds of love.

  Neither was Binoda unwilling. For a woman to wish to sharpen her weapons of conquest on a man may be wrong, but it is not unnatural. So as the games were won and lost and the cards were shuffled and dealt, the minds of two of the players came together in a way that only one other (apart from God) saw – and enjoyed.

  One day at noon Binoda, Kusum and Nagendra were playing cards. After a while Kusum heard her young child (who was ill) crying, and went out of the room. Nagendra kept on chatting to Binoda, but he had no idea what he was saying: his heart galloped, and his blood surged through every vessel in his body. Suddenly youthful passion broke through the barriers of modesty: he seized Binoda’s arms, wrenched her towards him, and kissed her. Shocked, angered, wounded, flustered by this affront, Binoda struggled to get free – but suddenly they noticed a third person in the room, a servant-woman. Nagendra looked at the ground, searching for an escape-route.

  ‘Bauthākrun,’ said the woman in a grim voice, ‘your aunt is calling for you.’ Tearfully, and with flashing glances at Nagendra, Binoda went out with her.

  The servant-woman soon raised a storm in Baidyanath’s house, making light of what she had seen but greatly elaborating what she had not. The plight that Binoda fell into is easier to imagine than to describe. She did not try to defend her innocence to anyone; she merely bowed her head.

  Baidyanath, deciding that his chance of a son by her to offer funerary oblations was now extremely remote, turned on her with the words: ‘Slut! Get out of my house.’

  Binoda shut the door of her bedroom and lay on the bed, her tearless eyes blazing like a desert in the afternoon. When it was dark, and the crows in the garden stopped cawing, she looked up into the p
eaceful, star-studded sky and thought of her mother and father; only then did tears start to trickle down her cheeks.

  That night, she left her husband’s house. No one tried to find her. She did not know at that time that she had attained ‘woman’s greatest fortune’: that her husband’s salvation in the next world was secure in her womb.

  Ten years passed, during which Baidyanath grew wealthier and wealthier. He had now left the village and bought a large house in Calcutta. But the more his wealth increased, the more anxious he became about who would inherit it.

  He made two more marriages, each of which led only to dissension, not to a son. Soothsayers, healers and holy men filled his house: a stream of roots, amulets, magic waters and patent medicines. If the bones of all the goats he sacrificed at Kalighat had been piled high, they would have dwarfed Tamburlaine’s victory-tower of skulls. But not even the tiniest of babies – not even the tiniest bundle of bones and flesh – arrived to inherit a corner of Baidyanath’s palatial estate. He could hardly eat for worry about whose son it would be who would feed off his substance after his death.

  Baidyanath married yet again, because human hope has no limits, and there is no shortage of parents with daughters to dispose of. Astrologers examined the girl’s horoscope and pronounced that the auspicious conjunctions therein were such that Baidyanath’s household would quickly increase its numbers; but six years went by in which those conjunctions failed to become active.

  Baidyanath sank into despair. Finally, on the advice of pundits learned in the Shastras, he prepared an enormously costly fertility rite.1 Scores of Brahmins were fed in connection with it.