Selected Short Stories

by Rabindranath Tagore

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ said my husband. That very day he returned with an English doctor. I don’t know what exactly was said, but it seemed that the sāheb gave my husband quite a scolding – for he stood silently, hanging his head. When the doctor had gone, I took my husband’s hand and said, ‘Why did you bring that conceited white-skinned ass? A native doctor would have done. Why should that man understand my eye-condition better than you?’

  ‘It has become necessary to operate on your eyes,’ said my husband nervously.

  I made a show of anger and said, ‘If an operation is necessary, why did you not tell me so at the beginning? Did you think I was scared?’

  My husband became more confident again, and said, ‘How many men are so heroic that they wouldn’t be scared at the prospect of having their eyes cut open?’

  ‘Maybe they’re only heroic to their wives,’ I said jokingly.

  ‘You’re right,’ said my husband, turning suddenly pale and solemn. ‘Men are essentially driven by vanity.’

  I dismissed his solemnity by saying, ‘Do you want to match us in vanity too? We have the edge over you even in that.’

  Meanwhile my brother had come, and I called him aside to say, ‘Dādā, by following all this time what the doctor of yours prescribed, my eyes have been getting much better, but by mistake the other day I smeared on to my eyes the medicine which I should have swallowed, and they’ve started to go fuzzy again. My husband says I shall have to have an operation.’

  ‘I thought you were following your husband’s treatment,’ said my brother. ‘I was annoyed, that’s why I haven’t been to see you.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve secretly been following that doctor’s prescription. I didn’t tell my husband, in case he got angry.’

  What lies women have to tell! I couldn’t upset my brother, and I couldn’t damage my husband’s self-esteem either. A mother has to beguile her child; a wife has to keep her husband happy – women have to stoop to so many deceptions! But the result of my ploy was that before I finally became blind I was able to see a reconciliation between my husband and brother. My brother supposed that the damage was done by the treatment he arranged secretly; my husband felt that it would have been better to have listened to my brother’s advice from the beginning. They both felt guilty, and thus longed for forgiveness and drew very close to each other. My husband came to my brother for guidance, and my brother sought my husband’s opinion on all matters.

  At last they mutually agreed to call an English doctor to come and operate on my left eye. In its weakened state, it failed to withstand the shock of surgery, and its dim remaining light went out. After that the other eye also little by little faded into darkness. A curtain was drawn forever over the sandal-decorated youthful image I had first seen in childhood, standing in front of me at the moment of the śubhadṛṣṭi.1

  One day my husband came to my bedside and said, ‘I shall not try to bamboozle you any more. It was I who destroyed your eyes.’

  I could tell from his voice that he was close to tears. I pressed his right hand with both my hands and said, ‘Don’t worry, you took what belonged to you. Suppose my eyes had been destroyed by some other doctor’s treatment – what comfort would there have been in that? If it was inevitable that no one could save my eyes, the one consolation of my blindness is that my eyes were taken by you. When he had insufficient flowers for a pūjā Rama tore out his own eyes and offered them to God. I too have given my eyes to a god – I have given to you my light of the full moon, my morning sunshine, my blue of the sky, my green of the earth. Describe to me anything you see that pleases you. I shall receive from you the grace of your gift of sight.’

  I was not able to say all this – I could not find the words for it; but I had felt these things for a long time. Sometimes when weariness overcame me, when my faith started to ebb, when I started to regard myself as deprived or tragic or unfortunate, then I would speak to myself in these terms: I would try to lift myself out of my depression by relying on this solace, this devotion. That day, partly by what I said, partly by what I was not able to say, I think I conveyed my feelings to him. He said in turn, ‘Kumu, I can never give you back what I destroyed through my stupidity, but as far as I am able I shall make up for your loss of sight by staying by you.’

  ‘There is no point in that,’ I said. ‘I shall never allow you to make your home a hospital for the blind. You must marry again.’

  I was just about to explain in detail why it was so necessary for him to marry again, when I choked slightly. Before I could recover my breath, my husband blurted out: ‘I may be stupid, I may be arrogant, but that is not to say that I am wicked too! I made you blind with my own hands; if I compound my error by deserting you and taking another wife, then I vow, by my iṣṭa-devatā Krishna, to count it a sin as wicked as patricide or the killing of Brahmins!’

  I would not have let him make so terrible a vow – I would have stopped him; but tears were swelling my breast, throttling my throat, straining my eyes, preparing to stream down in torrents: I could not restrain them enough to allow myself to speak. As I listened to what he said, I buried my face in the pillow and wept tears of intense joy. I was blind, but he would not leave me! He would clutch me to his heart as a grieving man clings to his grief! I did not expect such blessings, but my mind, in its selfishness, revelled in them.

  When my first shower of tears was over, I drew his face close to my breast and said, ‘Why did you make such a dreadful vow? I did not tell you to marry again for your own happiness. It would be in my interest to have a co-wife. I could hand over to her work for you that my blindness makes impossible for me.’

  ‘Housework can be done by servants,’ said my husband. ‘How can I marry a servant out of convenience and place her on the same seat as you, who are a goddess to me?’ He lifted my face and placed a single, pure kiss on my forehead; that kiss seemed to open a third eye on my brow, to invest me with instant divinity. ‘Fine,’ I said to myself. ‘Now that I am blind I cannot be a housewife any more in the outer, physical world, but instead – rising above that world – I can be a goddess working for my husband’s good! No more lies, no more deceptions – I’m through with the meanness and deviousness that are the housewife’s lot.’

  Yet for the whole of that day there was a conflict within me. I rejoiced in the deep-seated knowledge that my husband’s awesome vow would prevent him from marrying again. Nothing could dislodge that joy. But the goddess I had found in myself that day said, ‘Perhaps a time will come when remarriage will do your husband more good than adherence to the vow.’ To which the woman in me answered, ‘That may be so, but having made such a vow, no way can he marry again.’ The goddess then said, ‘Maybe – but there’s no reason for you to be happy at that.’ To which the woman answered, ‘I understand what you are saying, but he did, after all, make the vow.’ And so forth. The debate went on and on. The goddess then lapsed into silent disapproval, and my whole inner self was engulfed by a terrifying darkness.

  My conscience-stricken husband put a ban on all servants, and was ready to run errands for me himself. At first I enjoyed my helpless dependence on him in every trivial matter, because in this way I kept him always near me. Because I couldn’t see him with my eyes, my desire to keep him close grew overwhelming. That part of my pleasure in him that had belonged to my eyes was now shared out between my other senses – who fought to increase their share. Now, if ever my husband worked away from the house for long, I would feel lost, bereft, with nothing to hold on to. Previously when my husband went to college, if he was late coming back, I would open the window a bit and watch the road. I would let my eyes, as it were, bind to myself the world in which he moved. Now my whole sightless body tried to reach out to him. My main bridge between my world and his had collapsed. There was now an impassable darkness between him and me: I could only sit helplessly and anxiously, waiting for him to come from his shore to mine. Therefore, whenever he had to leave me for even a moment, m
y whole blind body longed to cling to him, desperately called out to him.

  But such yearning and dependence is not healthy. A wife is burden enough on her husband, without adding the great weight of blindness as well. My all-consuming darkness was for me alone to bear. I fervently promised I would not use my blindness to bind my husband to me.

  Within a short time I had learnt to carry out my customary tasks through sound and smell and touch. I even managed much of the housework with greater skill than formerly. I came to think that vision distracts as much as it helps us in our work. The eyes see far more than is necessary to do a job well. And when the eyes act as watchmen, then the ears become lazy; they hear much less than they should. Now, in the absence of those vigilant eyes, my other senses did their duty calmly and fully. I stopped allowing my husband to do my work, and restored to myself all the work I had done for him before.

  ‘You’re depriving me of my chance to make amends,’ my husband said.

  ‘I don’t know about your making amends,’ I said, ‘but why should I add to my failings?’ Whatever he might say, it was a great relief to him when I set him free. No man should have to make a lifelong vow of servitude to a blind wife.

  My husband qualified as a doctor and took me off to a country district. To come to a village was like returning to my mother. I was eight years old when I left my village and came to the city. In the next ten years, my birthplace became as vague as a shadow in my mind. For as along as my sight lasted, Calcutta crowded out my memories. When I lost my sight, I realized that Calcutta had merely tricked my eyes; it could not fill my heart. As soon as I lost my sight, the village of my childhood grew as bright in my mind as a starry evening sky.

  Towards the end of Agrahāyan we went to Hasimpur. It was a new place for me – I did not know what it looked like; but it hugged me with the scents and sensations of my childhood. The dawn breeze from the newly ploughed, dew-soaked fields; the sweet pervasive scent of golden fields of mustard and pigeon-pea; the songs of the cowherds; even the clatter of bullock-cart wheels on broken roads; all thrilled me. The buried memories of my early life seemed to come alive, to surround me again with their inexpressible sounds and scents; my blind eyes were no obstacle to them. I returned to my childhood: only my mother had not been restored to me. I could see in my mind my Didimā letting her sparse hair hang loose down her back in the sun, and laying out rows of baṛis in the yard; but I no longer heard, in her sweet old quavering voice, the lilting hymns of our village saint. The festival of the new rice-crop boisterously rang through the moist winter air; but among the crowd threshing the new paddy in the husking-shed, where were my village playmates? In the evening I heard the lowing of the cattle from some way off, and I remembered Mā with an evening lamp in her hand, on her way to place it in the cowshed. The smell of damp fodder and burning straw-smoke so entered my heart that I seemed to hear the cymbals and bells from the Bidyalankars’ temple next to our village tank. It was as if someone had sifted through all the things I had known in my first eight years of life, and had wrapped me round with their quintessential flavour.

  I also recalled my childhood religious devotion – the way I picked flowers at dawn to offer to Shiva. But alas, how Calcutta’s hustle and bustle and chatter deform the mind! Religion loses its simplicity. A short time after I became blind I remember a friend from my old village came to me and said, ‘Aren’t you angry, Kumu? If I were in your shoes I wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of your husband.’ I replied, ‘The sight of him has been stopped, true, and I’m cross with my useless eyes for that; but why should I blame my husband?’ Labanya was angry with him for not having called a doctor in time, and was trying to make me angry too. I explained to her that if we live in this world, our wisdom and follies cause us – whether we like it or not – various kinds of pleasure and pain; but if we keep a firm faith within, we can have peace even amidst troubles – otherwise we spend our life in anger and rivalry and conflict. Being blind was burden enough; so why should I increase the burden by harbouring a grudge against my husband? Labanya was not pleased to hear such old-fashioned notions from a girl like me, and she went away, contemptuously shaking her head. But there can, I admit, be poison in words: no words are wholly without effect. A few sparks from her anger entered my mind; I stamped them out, but one or two burn-marks remained. This is why I say that there is too much talk, too much chatter in Calcutta; one can so quickly become harsh and entrenched in one’s thinking.

  When I came to the village, the cool scent of śiuli-flowers picked as an offering to Shiva revived my hopes and beliefs, made them bright and fresh as they were in childhood. My heart and home were filled with the Spirit of God. I bowed my head and said, ‘O Lord, it is good that my eyes have gone, for you are mine.’

  Alas, I was mistaken. To say of God ‘You are mine’ – even this is vanity. ‘I am yours’ is all we have a right to say. And a day was soon to come when God forced these words out of me: when nothing was left for me, yet I had to struggle on; when I had no claim on anyone, only on myself.

  Life was happy for a while. My husband became quite a respected doctor. His income became respectable too. But money is not a good thing. It stunts the mind. When the mind is in control, it creates its own pleasure; but when wealth takes up the pursuit of pleasure, there is nothing for the mind to do. Where formerly the mind’s pleasure reigned, possessions now stake their claim. Instead of happiness, we acquire nothing but things.

  I cannot pin-point a particular remark or event, but whether because a blind person’s powers of perception are intensified, or for whatever other reason, I was well able to see a change in my husband as his material prosperity increased. The deep concern he had had, when young, for justice and injustice, right and wrong, seemed to grow duller each day. I remember how at one time he used to say, ‘I am not studying medicine only to earn a living, but to bring as much benefit as possible to the poor.’ On the subject of doctors who turned up at the doors of the dying and would not even take a pulse without being paid in advance, he was almost speechless with disgust. But I could see that was not so now. A poor woman came and clung to his feet, begging him to save the life of her only son, and he shook her off; in the end I persuaded him to treat the boy, but his heart was not in it. I remember well my husband’s attitude to corrupt earning in the days when we were short of money. Now there was lots of money in the bank, yet a rich man’s secretary came and had two days of secret discussions with my husband – I don’t know what about; but when he came to me afterwards talking breezily about other things, an uneasy feeling in my heart told me he was up to no good.

  Where was the husband I saw for the last time before I went blind? He who had elevated me to a goddess by kissing me between my sightless eyes, what had become of him? Those who suddenly fall prey to a raging passion can pick themselves up again through another emotional impulse; but those who, day by day, moment by moment, harden from the marrow of their being, whose emotional capacities are throttled, steadily, by outward success – for them I see no way out.

  The visual gulf that had arisen between my husband and me was nothing in itself; but I felt sick inside when I realized that where I was now, he was not. I was blind – sitting in an inner region devoid of the world’s light, with my youthful love still fresh, my devotion still intact, my trust still unshaken: the dew of my gift of śephālī-flowers – arranged with girlish care, offered to God at the start of my life – had still not dried up; yet my husband had left my shaded, cool, eternally renewing world, and was lost in the desert of money-making! All the things I believed in, the faith I held to, all that I valued more than any worldly treasure, were now scorned and dismissed by him from afar. At one time there was no such rift; when we were young we had started along the same road; but then (neither he nor I knew exactly when) our paths divided, and now he was out of hearing when I called.

  Sometimes I wondered if I made too much of things because I was blind. With eyes, I could have seen the world a
s it is.

  My husband himself one day told me no less. That morning an old Muslim had come to ask him to treat his granddaughter for cholera. I heard the man say, ‘I’m poor, sir, but Allah will bless you.’ My husband said, ‘Whatever Allah will do is not enough; tell me first what you will do for me.’ When I heard this I thought, ‘God has made me blind; why not deaf too?’ The old man sighed, ‘O Allah!’ and took his leave. I at once got my maid to bring him to the back door of the women’s quarters, and said, ‘Bābā, here is some money to pay for your granddaughter’s treatment. Fetch Dr Harish from the village – and pray for my husband.’

  All day I had no appetite. My husband woke up from his afternoon nap and asked, ‘Why are you looking so glum?’ I was going to give my usual answer – ‘It’s all right, there’s nothing wrong’ – but the time for pretence had passed, and I said clearly, ‘I’ve been thinking of telling you something for a long time, but I couldn’t think of how to say it. I don’t know if I can explain to you what I am feeling, but I think you must know in your heart that we who were one when we started our life together have now become separate.’

  My husband laughed and said, ‘Change is the way of the world.’

  ‘Money, beauty, youth may all be subject to change,’ I said, ‘but are there no eternal values?’

  He then said more seriously, ‘Think of women who have true cause for complaint – with husbands who earn no money, or who do not love them; you have plucked your misery out of the air!’ I realized then that blindness had smeared my eyes with a salve that had set me apart from this changeable world; I was not like other women; my husband would never be able to understand me.

  Meanwhile an aunt-in-law had come from her village to see how her nephew was getting on. The first thing she said after we had taken the dust of her feet was, ‘Well now, Baumā, you have unfortunately lost the sight of your eyes. How is our Abinash supposed to run his household with a blind wife? Let him marry again!’