Selected Short Stories

by Rabindranath Tagore

  Appendix A: ‘Passing Time in the Rain’

  This famous poem – barṣā-yāpan from sonār tarī (‘The Golden Boat’, 1894) – is rightly felt by many Bengali readers to reach right to the core of Tagore’s short stories. It was completed in June 1892, but was begun ‘much earlier’; and in its picture of the solitary young Tagore whiling away the hours at Jorasanko, as well as in its tripping medieval metre, it has a charmingly youthful quality. But it is not quite as light and improvisatory as it first seems. There is strong cumulative energy in its evocation of the rain, the Meghadūta, and Vaishnava songs about Radha pining for Krishna, intermixed with the poet’s own passionate aspirations. The section containing the lines that I have italicized was used by Pramathanath Bisi as an epigraph for his book on Tagore’s short stories. choṭo prāṇ, choṭo byathā, choṭo choṭo duḥkha-kathā (‘small lives, small pains, small stories of unhappiness’) is what everyone quotes; but the lines about plain narrative and ‘incompleteness’ are just as germane, and the correlation between monsoon rain and human tears is sonorously explicit. The poem shows how deliberate the short stories were: Tagore knew exactly what he was doing in them.

  A third-floor roof in Calcutta,

  A wooden hut at one end;

  Dawn’s first eastern glimmer,

  South door open to the wind.

  My bedding spread on the floor,

  My head close to the door,

  I cast my roving eye

  At hundreds of roofs stretching,

  Such mysteries concealing –

  Frowning at the sky.

  In a corner of the wall,

  Pressing the window-sill,

  A trembling splash of green –

  A tiny peepul-seedling,

  Watching its shadow dancing,

  All day long alone.

  Filling the sky all round

  Āṣāṛh clouds descend,

  Rain approaches darkly:

  Yoking the heavens together,

  Indra’s horses thunder,

  Lightning flickers sharply.

  As streaming torrents pour,

  I feel I am banished far,

  Beyond the universe:

  Perched in my hut in the rain,

  I leave time and space.

  How happy such days have been

  As I sit here on my own,

  Reading the Meghadūta!

  Outside the wind blows wildly

  In constant fruitless frenzy –

  I lose myself in scenes

  Of mountains, rivers and towns

  In ancient monsoon India:

  Each cloud-covered village and land

  So mellifluously named –

  While the lovers I long have known

  Yearn and grieve and pine,

  Each imagining each,

  Hearts tugging them close

  While a great dividing space

  Keeps them out of reach.

  The Yaksa bride paces,

  Turns and listens and watches,

  Counting the days with flowers.

  Or else I embrace attentively

  Govinda Das’s padābalī

  As the rain noisily pours.

  I sing out again and again

  That trysting-song of monsoon

  Beside the dark Yamuna:

  Young, passionate Radha,

  Seeking her lover’s arbour,

  Nothing in the world can stop her,

  And the forest gets more lonely

  As the rain falls more strongly,

  Patters and pounds and pours –

  Only young Madan beside her,

  No other friend to shield her,

  No houses with open doors.

  As Āṣāṛh reaches its height,

  I mix two rāgas to write1

  A song of the monsoon floods.

  Or scanning the first stanza

  Of Jayadev’s Gītāgovinda

  I sing of sleek rain-clouds.

  Or at night when the air is still

  And buckets of rain fall,

  I lie deliciously sleepy

  And a song about nights in Śrābaṇ,

  The roar of incessant storm,

  Rolls around in my memory.

  Or – ‘Lying on a bed in bliss,

  Melting in amorousness,

  Sunk in dreamy longing’ –

  I imagine that vivid scene

  In ancient Vrindavan,

  Radha’s lonely dreaming,

  Her gently panting breath,

  Her smile on her dreamy mouth –

  Her closed eyes aquiver,

  Her head slumped on her arm,

  Lying all on her own,

  A dim lamp in the corner.

  In the mountains thunder rumbles,

  Rain in the trees rattles,

  Frogs burble all night –

  How joyously she dreams

  Of lying in her lover’s arms!

  Alas, alas when she wakes

  And her frenzied rapture breaks

  In mournful solitude,

  She sees the lamp nearly out,

  Hears the watchman’s hourly shout –

  And the force of the rain is renewed,

  With thunder’s booming sound

  And crickets buzzing all round,

  Filling the whole world.

  When she wakes during such a pounding,

  Caught between waking and dreaming,

  Think how her heart is swirled!

  One book after another,

  Dipping in out of order,

  Thus I pass the night.

  I flick through some English1 verses

  But find in none of them traces

  Of the shade of this monsoon rain –

  No sound of this dark pattering,

  No deep, indolent yearning,

  No self-immersing pain!

  The rain’s relentless note,

  The music, inside me and out,

  Of torrents beating the ground,

  Carrying me wide and far,

  Roving from shore to shore,

  Where in such poems is it found?

  I throw the book on the floor,

  I sit close to the door,

  Bury myself in thinking.

  Nothing to do, now,

  I gaze and wonder how

  I shall pass the time till evening.

  But then I buckle down,

  Write to a new plan,

  All day carefully –

  Why should I not, if I want,

  Following my own bent,

  Write story after story –

  Small lives, humble distress,

  Tales of humdrum grief and pain,

  Simple, clear straightforwardness;

  Of the thousands of tears streaming daily

  A few saved from oblivion;

  No elaborate description,

  Plain steady narration,

  No theory or philosophy,

  No story quite resolved,

  Not ending at the end,

  But leaving the heart uneasy.

  All the world’s unnumbered

  Stories never completed:

  Buds unripely torn –

  Dust of fame unsung,

  The love, the terror, the wrong

  Of thousands of lives unknown.

  From all the world around me

  They seem to fall unceasingly

  Like floods of monsoon rain:

  Momentary smiles and tears

  Pouring through the years,

  The sound goes on and on.

  Each lost and forgotten moment

  Whirls in a dancing torrent:

  Oh may I from it gather

  The clouds of life’s monsoon,

  And make them rain down

  What else would be gone for ever!

  Appendix B: Letters

  1. chinnapatrābalī, Letter No. 3, Shelidah, 28–30 November 1889, to Indira Devi1

  Our boat has been moored by a sa
ndbank opposite Shelidah. It’s a huge, desolate sandbank, stretching out of sight: with slivers of river-water here and there, or expanses of wet sand that look like water. No village, no people, no trees, no grass – but monotony is broken by patches of cracked, wet black earth, alternating with dry white sand. If you turn and look to the east, an endless blueness meets an endless pale yellowness. The sky is empty and the earth too is empty: dry, harsh, barren emptiness below; ample, airy emptiness above. I have never seen such desolation. If you look round to the west again, you see a small kink in the river where the stream scarcely flows, a high bank, and beyond that huts and trees, wonderfully dreamlike in the evening sunlight. It’s as though on one side you have Creation and the other Destruction. I say ‘evening sunlight’, because we go out for a walk in the evening and I have a mental picture of the scene as it is then. If you stay in Calcutta you forget how extraordinarily beautiful the world really is. It’s only when you are here, and can see the sun setting behind the peaceful riverside trees, and thousands of stars appearing above the unending, pale, lonely, silent sandbank, that you realize how amazing these daily events are. The sun seems to open a huge book each morning, and by the evening a huge page has been turned in the sky above: what extraordinary things are written on it! And this narrow river and vast sandbank, and the picture-like bank opposite with its plain fields beyond, are a vast, silent, secluded school being taught from the book. Enough! All this would sound like ‘poetry’2 in the city, but here it doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

  In the evening one of the servants takes the children off over the sandbank in one direction and Balu, the two ladies and I also go off in separate directions.1 Meanwhile the sun goes down completely, the last gleam of light fades from the sky, and everything is obliterated – until the faint shadow of one’s body to one side shows that a slender crescent moon is weakly shining. The ample expanses of sand in the pale moonlight become even more confusing: what is sand, what is water, what is sky, becomes a matter of guesswork; so everything seems like a kind of unreal fantasy-world. Yesterday, after wandering there for a long time, I returned to the boat and found that apart from the children no one else had got back. I sat down in an armchair, and began to read an extremely obscure book called Animal Magnetism in the equally obscure light of an oil-lamp; but still no one returned. I put the book face down on the bed and went out on deck: nothing could be seen in the blackness all around. Everything was dim and deserted. I shouted out ‘Balu’ loudly: my voice rang out in all directions, but no one answered. Then my chest tightened, suddenly folded up like an umbrella. Gofur went out searching with a lamp, and Prasanna, and the crew of the boat: I sent them all off in different directions. I was shouting ‘Balu, Balu’, Prasanna was shouting ‘Choṭo Mā’, and the boatmen’s shouts of ‘Babu, Babu’ mingled with the rest. Together our voices made a bleak kind of music in the desert, in the silent night. No one answered us. Gofur once or twice cried from a long way off, ‘I’ve seen them’ – but then a moment later corrected himself with ‘No, no’. Imagine the state I was in: picture the silent darkness, the faint moonlight, the still and deserted empty sandbank, Gofur’s lantern moving around in the distance, and every now and then from one direction or another anxious calls and their melancholy echoes, with sometimes a burst of excited hope and the next moment despairing disappointment. An appalling dread took hold of my mind. Sometimes I thought they must have fallen into quicksand; sometimes I imagined that Balu had fainted or something; or else I had fantasies of various kinds of ferocious wild beasts. I recalled that ‘those who do not look after themselves often unwittingly cause danger to others’.1 I turned bitterly against any notion of freedom for women! But a little later there were shouts that they were over on the other side of a channel – they had crossed by using bits of sand as steppingstones, and now could not get back. A boat was dispatched, and they were rescued – with Balu saying, ‘I’m never going to go out with you again.’ They were all ashamed, exhausted and upset, so I refrained from giving them a proper talking-to. The next morning, however, I couldn’t bring myself to be angry, and what had actually been a serious alarm evaporated in laughter, as if it had all been a joke. Ah well, at least in describing it to you three days later I’ve got it off my chest.

  Oh dear! Maulabi-saheb2 is here salaaming before me with a crowd of tenants. I want to say:

  Down with tenants! Down with the jamidāri!

  If only they could all get lost with Maulabi!3

  2. ciṭhipatra, Vol. I, Letter No. 5, Kaligram, December 1890, to Mrinalini Devi

  Bhāi Choṭobau,

  I arrived at Kaligram today. It took three days to get here. I had to pass through lots of different places. First a big river; then a small river, with trees on both sides, beautiful to look at; then the river gradually became narrower, very like a canal, with high banks on either side, very closed in. Then to a place where the current was extremely swift: twenty or twenty-five people were needed to pull our boat through. There is a huge marsh which they call the ‘Moving Marsh’. Water pours out of it into the river. With a great deal of pushing and pulling, we managed with considerable difficulty to get the boat into the marsh. Water stretched drearily all around, with clumps of grass or scrub on patches of land here and there: like a field flooded after heavy rain. Sometimes the boat got stuck on the bits of land, and it would take an hour or an hour-and-a-half of pushing and shoving to get her afloat again. The mosquitoes were terrible. To be honest, I didn’t like this marsh at all. After that we sailed along small streams, or through more marshes. At last we arrived. I don’t relish the prospect of a similar journey to Birahimpur. The river here has no current at all: with its patches of floating moss, and clumps of jungly vegetation, it smells like a stagnant village pond, and at night the mosquitoes are quite something. If it becomes unbearable, I shall flee back to Calcutta.

  When I got Bela’s sweet letter I wanted to come straight back home. Is she missing me a lot? She’s so little, I don’t know what to do for her. Tell her there’ll be lots of kisses and jam for her when I come. Last night I dreamt of Khokā:1 I was dancing him on my knee, and he was finding it great fun. Has he started to talk yet? I think that Bela was already talking a lot at his age. Is it cold with you? I’ve been shivering with cold here – except that last night when we found a firm mooring for the boat and I drew all the curtains, I woke up feeling too hot! And on top of that, at one or two in the morning, right next to us, a crowd of people started singing, ‘Why do you sleep so much, my love? Wake up, wake up!’ If ‘my love’ lived near by perhaps she would have given them a beating. The boatman shut them up, but that line ‘Wake up, wake up, my love!’ kept on going round and round in my head: it made me feel quite ill. I slept only at the end of the night, after I had drawn back the curtains and opened the window. So today I’ve been feeling sleepy all the time. How is your brother getting on in Calcutta? Have you made any arrangements for his studies? How many months’ allowance has he already been given? I hope to come back in about a fortnight – but I can’t say exactly when.

  3. chinnapatrābalī, Letter No. 13, Kaligram, January 1891, to Indira Devi

  This great world of Nature lying silently in front of me – how I love her! I want to reach out with my arms and embrace her: her trees and rivers and fields, her sounds and quietness, her dawns and dusks. I feel that we receive the world’s gifts as from a kind of heaven. I don’t know what else this heaven could give, but I cannot imagine it has given more of itself than in the people here – so gentle, weak, touchingly timorous and childlike. This world of Nature, our own Mother Earth, comes to us bringing, like riches in her lap, all the feelings of the humble, mortal hearts that are found here – in her golden fields, by her nurturing rivers, in dwellings filled with happy and sad tenderness. So useless are we, that we cannot protect these people, we cannot save them; various unseen powerful forces work to tear them from her breast; but Earth does all she can for them. I love this Earth so much. There is a great,
outstretching grief in her face, as if she is thinking, ‘I am the daughter of a god, but I do not have the power of a god. I love but I cannot save; I begin but I cannot complete; I give birth but I cannot ward off the clutches of death.’ This makes me turn away from heaven and look at my Mother Earth in her humble home with even more love. She is so helpless, so powerless, so incomplete, so stirred all the time by thousands of anxious fears.

  4. chinnapatrābalī, Letter No. 16, Sajadpur, February 1891, to Indira Devi

  I see all sorts of rural sights, which I greatly enjoy watching. Just opposite my window on the bank of a canal, a group of gypsies have set up camp, stretching cloth and matting over split bamboo-poles to make tents – small awnings, I should say, too low to stand up in. They do all their domestic tasks out in the open; only at night do they sometimes pack themselves into the tents to sleep. Gypsies are like this. They have no proper home anywhere, they don’t pay rent to any landlord: they wander around from place to place with a herd of pigs, a few dogs and a bunch of children. The police keep a suspicious eye on them. I often stand by my window and watch them going about their work. They are quite handsome – Hindusthani in looks. Dark-complexioned, certainly, but graceful, strong and shapely in physique. The women are attractive: tall and slender and lean, rather like English girls in the frankness and freedom with which they move – that is to say they are very confident, with an easy, swift, springiness in their gait. Yes, they are just like dark-skinned English girls. A man will put a pan on to cook, and then sit splitting bamboo to make wickerwork baskets or trays; his wife will sit with a small mirror in her lap and carefully wash her face with a wet rag two or three times, pat and pull at her sari to get it nicely arranged, squat down near to her man, and get on with some kind of task. They are real children of the soil, truly close to Nature – they are born and die wherever they find themselves, they wander around from place to place. I’m very curious to know exactly how they live and think and feel. They are out in the open all the time, in the freedom of land and air; it’s an unconventional existence, yet they have their work and affections and children and domestic routines. I have never seen any of them idle; they are always busy with one kind of work or another. If a woman comes to the end of her work, she immediately goes and sits behind another woman, unties her hair and begins carefully to pick it over for lice – and maybe she gossips about whatever is going on in that small three-tent encampment: I cannot precisely tell from a distance, but it looks to me to be so. This morning this peaceful gypsy encampment was severely disrupted. It was about half past eight or nine – they had brought out the rugs and tattered quilts they sleep on at night to spread them out in the sun on top of the awnings. The pigs and piglets had all settled down in a hole, nestling up to one another so that they looked like a huge ball of mud: after the cold of the night they were obviously finding the morning sunshine very warm and comfortable. Suddenly two of the dogs came and jumped on their necks, yapping and yelping and waking them up. Squealing with annoyance they ran off in search of some breakfast.