23
Shahjadpur
23 June 1891
These days I really enjoy the afternoons, Bob. All around it’s very quiet in the sun, the mind becomes very capricious—I pick up a book, but don’t feel like reading. A kind of grassy smell emanates from the riverbank where the boat is tied, and from time to time, you feel the hot, steamy breath of the earth upon your body—it’s as if this living, heated-up earth is breathing very near you; perhaps my breath too grazes its body. The short stalks of the rice plants tremble continuously in the breeze—the ducks descend into the water and incessantly dip their heads in and clean the feathers on their backs with their beaks. There is no other sound, except when the boat, pushed by the water, slowly leans over so that the boat’s steps and cable keep making a sort of tender, faint sound. Not very far away there is a ferry ghat. All sorts of people have gathered under the banyan tree to wait for the ferry; the moment the boat arrives, they quickly board it—I like to watch this coming and going of boats over a length of time. There’s a village market on the other bank, that’s why there’s such a crowd on the ferry boats. They go to the market and return from the market, somebody carrying a load of grass, someone a basket, and some a sack on their shoulders; this small river, and on either side these two small villages, and, between them, on this silent afternoon, this little bit of business, this little current of human life flowing very slowly. I was sitting and thinking, why are our country’s fields, riverbanks, sky and sun bathed in such a deep melancholy? The reason might be that in our country, it is nature one notices the most—skies free of clouds, fields without any end, the sun beating down—in the midst of this man seems very insignificant—men come and go like the ferry boat from this side to that, one hears their faint, indistinct murmur, one sees their little bit of coming and going in life’s marketplace in the hope of small joys and sorrows—but how small, how brief, how utterly futile those indistinct murmurs, the snatches of song, that constant activity and work seem in this vast, expansive, endless, indifferent natural world. One sees such a large, beautiful, careless and generous peace in this idle, drowsy, peaceful, aimless world of nature and, in comparison, one can see such a persistently trying, belaboured, harassed, minute and constant disquiet within one’s self that, gazing at the shadowy blue line of the trees on the distant shore, one becomes quite inattentive. ‘Chāẏāte basiẏā sārā dinamān tarumarmar pabane’ [Sitting all day in the shade with the rustle of the trees in the breeze], etc. Where nature is cowering and shrouded in cloud and mist and snow and darkness, there man is very lordly—there man thinks that all his wishes, all his efforts will be permanent, adding his signature to all his work, he looks towards posterity, builds monuments, writes autobiographies and even builds stone houses over dead bodies for everlasting remembrance—many of these signs are broken later and many names forgotten, but nobody notices because nobody has the time.
24
Shahjadpur
June 1891
In the evening I moor my boat at the ghat in the village here. Lots of boys play here together; I sit and watch them. But the foot soldiers who are stuck to me day and night give me no peace. They consider the boys’ play impudence; they think it is disrespectful towards the raja if the boatmen laugh and chat among themselves freely and openly; if the farmers bring their cows to the water to let them drink they immediately run towards them, stick in hand, to protect the raja’s prestige. In other words, they think the raja’s status is preserved only if the entire space around him is turned into a terrible desert devoid of laughter, play, sound or people—on the other hand, the miserable raja’s heart cries out for some relief. Yesterday too they had begun to chase the boys away when I abandoned my raja’s status and made them desist. The incident was as follows—
There was a mast from an enormous boat lying on the ground—a group of small, naked boys decided, after much discussion, that if they could all roll it along by pushing it together with the help of an appropriate amount of noise, they would have invented a most novel and enjoyable game. The moment they thought of it, they began work. ‘Well done, soldier, hey ho!’ ‘Push it again, hey ho!’ All of them began to shout and push. The moment the mast rolls around once, everybody laughs out loud with delight. But the one or two girls who accompany these boys have a different air about them. They’ve been forced to play with the boys because of a lack of companions, but this bizarre and strenuous sort of game doesn’t connect with them. One little girl, without a word, went and sat down quite calmly and seriously upon the mast. The boys’ wonderful game was ruined. One or two of them decided that in this case, it might be better to concede defeat. Moving away a bit, they stood around with wan faces and contemplated the unshakeable seriousness of the girl. One of them came up to the girl and began to experimentally push the girl a little. But she continued to sit there quite silently and peacefully. The oldest boy came up to her and showed her a different spot at which she could have her rest, but at that she vigorously shook her head and, folding both her hands upon her lap, settled down even more compactly. Then the boy began to use physical force and was immediately successful. Their joyous celebrations rent the sky once more, the mast began to roll again—in fact, after a while, the girl too abandoned her womanly pride and noble and natural independence to join the boys at their meaningless game with artificial enthusiasm. But it was quite obvious she was thinking, boys don’t know how to play, they just know how to behave absolutely childishly. If only she had at hand a yellow clay doll with its hair in a bun, would she ever join these immature, childish boys in this stupid game of pushing the mast! Suddenly they thought of another sort of game, that too was great fun. Two boys would catch hold of another and swing him to and fro by his arms and legs. There was obviously some great mystery in this, because the boys were very excited by it. The girl found it completely intolerable. She scornfully left the playing field and went home. But there was a mishap. The boy being swung fell down. Miffed, he abandoned his companions and went and lay down on the grass some distance away with his head on his hands. His air proclaimed—he wasn’t going to keep any further connection with this cruel, heartless world any more, he would just lie flat on the ground by himself and count the stars, he was going to spend his life with his head upon his hands, watching the clouds at play, and ‘for the rest of my life I will not play with anybody else’. Seeing such an untimely disaffection in him, the oldest boy ran quickly to him, took his head upon his lap and began to say, in a tone of repentance and regret, ‘Come, brother, get up brother! Are you hurt, brother?’ In a few moments, like two puppies, the two began a game of arm wrestling and within a minute or two that boy had begun to be swung again! Such are man’s vows! This is his mental strength! Such is his resolve! He leaves his playing to go and lie down at a distance and then again he allows himself to be caught and to be smilingly swung again in the swing of intoxication! How will such a man ever be free! There are some boys who leave their playroom and keep lying down with their head in their hands—there’s a home being built in paradise for all those good boys.
25
Shahjadpur
June 1891
Last night I had a very strange dream. All of Calcutta city seemed enveloped in a great, terrible and yet surprising feeling—the houses could all be seen through a dark black mist—and within it there was some enormous commotion going on. I was travelling through Park Street in a hired carriage—as I went I saw that St Xavier’s College was growing exponentially to an enormous size—in that dark mist, it had become impossibly high. Then gradually I came to know that a group of strange people had arrived who could use some sort of trickery to perform these astonishing feats for money. Reaching the Jorasanko house, I saw they had reached there too—awful-looking, with somewhat Mongolian features—thin moustaches, scraggly beards pointing this way and that on either side of their faces. They could make humans grow in size too. That’s why all the women of our house were out on the porch—applicants for more height
—those people were sprinkling some sort of powder on their heads and whoosh, they were all growing taller. I kept saying—how astonishing, this is just like a dream. Then, somebody proposed that our house be made to grow higher. They agreed and began to break a part of the house. After smashing up a portion, they said, ‘Now you have to pay us a certain amount of money, or we shall not work on the house any more.’ Kunja Sarkar said, ‘How’s that possible, the work can’t be paid for until it has been completed!’ Immediately they became very angry—the whole house then sort of bent out of shape and became horrible, and in some places you could see that half a person was embedded in its walls, with the other half hanging out. Overall it seemed as if all of it was the work of the devil. I said to Baṛ-dada, ‘Baṛ-da, do you see what’s happening? Come, let us sit and pray.’* We went to the inner courtyard and sat down to fervent meditation. Emerging from there, I thought I would reprimand them in the name of god—but although my heart felt as if it would burst, I couldn’t speak. After that I’m not sure when I woke up. What a strange dream, don’t you think? All of Calcutta under the devil’s spell—everybody trying to grow with his help and the whole city enveloped in this hellish, dark mist, horribly growing all the while. But there was a bit of farce in it as well—in the entire world, why was the devil so particularly well disposed towards the Jesuits?
After that the teachers at the English school here in Shahjadpur arrived with expectations of an audience with the lordship. They just didn’t want to leave, yet I had really nothing very much to say to them—every five minutes or so I asked them one or two questions, to which they gave me an answer or half, and then I sat there like a fool, fiddling with my pen, scratching my head—I ask them what the crops have been like this season over here. The schoolmasters know nothing of crops, and whatever there was to be known about the students has already been said at the start. So I go back to the beginning and start again; I ask, ‘How many students in your school?’ One of them says, ‘Eighty.’ Another says, ‘No, a hundred and seventy-five!’ I think, now these two are going to have a tremendous argument. But instead, both immediately agree with each other. One and a half hours after that, it’s difficult to know exactly why, they suddenly remembered to say, ‘We’ll take your leave now.’ They could have said so an hour earlier, or they might have remembered to say so twelve hours later—it seems that there’s no rule for this sort of thing—just a blind faith in miracles.
26
Shahjadpur
Saturday, 4 July 1891
There is a boat moored to our ghat, and many ‘common women’ from the village are standing in front of it in a crowd … Perhaps one of them is going somewhere and everybody else has come to say goodbye. Lots of little boys, lots of veiled heads and lots of grey heads have got together. But there is one girl among them who attracts my attention more than anybody else. She must be about twelve or thirteen, but looks about fourteen–fifteen because she’s well built. Her face is superlative. She’s quite dark, yet quite good-looking. Her hair is cut like a boy’s, and it suits her face. She has such an intelligent, self-aware, clear and simple look. She stood there with a boy on her hip, staring at me unabashedly with such unalloyed curiosity … Really, her face and figure were very attractive, but she was neither stupid nor lacking in simplicity nor deficient in any way. Her half-boy, half-girl look especially attracted my attention. A boy’s complete unselfconsciousness had been mixed with sweetness to create an entirely new kind of girl. I had never expected to see this type of village girl in Bengal. I see that their entire clan is quite un-shy. One of the women is standing on the riverbank in the sun, running her fingers through her hair to disentangle it, while talking to another woman on the boat about domestic affairs at the top of her voice. I heard she had just one ‘gal’ [māiẏyā], no other ‘kids’ [chāoẏāl nāi]—but the daughter’s not sensible at all—‘says anything to anyone, does anything at any time, has no consciousness of “them” and “us”’…. I further learnt that Gopal Sha’s son-in-law wasn’t that great and the daughter didn’t want to go to him. Finally, when it was time to go, I saw that they were trying very hard to get my short-haired, round-limbed girl with a bangle on her arm and her bright simple face on to the boat, but she just didn’t want to go—eventually, they got her on to the boat after a lot of pushing and pulling. I realized that the poor thing was probably being taken from her parental home to her husband’s home—after the boat sailed away, the women stood on the shore, looking out, while one or two slowly wiped their faces and eyes with their āncals. A small girl with tightly tied hair climbed up on to an older girl’s lap and, putting her arms around her neck and her head on her shoulder, began to cry silently. The one who left was probably the poor thing’s elder sister and playmate, who had sometimes joined in when she played with her dolls, maybe giving her a push sometimes if she were naughty. The morning sun and the riverbank and everything seemed to fill up with such deep melancholy! Like the deep sigh of a piteous rāginī of the morning, it seemed that the world was so beautiful, but so full of pain…. The history of this unknown little girl seemed to become very familiar to me. When it’s time to leave, to leave upon a boat on this flowing river seems to be even more moving. A little like death—to float away from the shore—those left standing wipe their eyes and turn to leave; the one who floats away, disappears. I know that this deep sorrow shall be forgotten by both those who remain and those who leave, perhaps it is already lost to some extent. The hurt is temporary, while the forgetting is permanent. But if you think about it, it is the pain that is real, not the forgetting. At the time of certain partings and certain deaths, man suddenly realizes how terribly true this pain is. He realizes that man is quite mistaken to live serenely; it is this grief and this anxiety that is the inner truth of the world. Nothing remains, nobody remains; that’s so true that we don’t even remember it, and grief departs—and realizing that it is not only that we shall not be here, but that nobody will even remember, man becomes even more desperate. One shall disappear without a trace from both within and without. Truly, with the exception of our country’s tender rāginīs, no other song is possible for all of mankind, for mankind throughout the ages.
27
On the waterway towards Cuttack
August 1891
A gentleman’s self-respect is completely lost if he is preoccupied night and day with the fact that his clothes are becoming progressively shabby and unbearable, and his bag of clothes is missing. I cannot now stride around purposefully in society with my head held high in the manner in which I could have if I had had the bag. My only wish is to somehow keep myself concealed and out of sight. I’ve slept in these clothes at night and am revealed in the same attire in the morning. On top of that the steamer is full of coal dust and shabbiness, and my entire body is steaming in the mid-afternoon heat. Thinking of this state of affairs, coupled with my utterly meek character, you must be trying to hold your laughter in check. Besides which, what’s the point of writing to you about the joys on board this steamer! There’s no end to the variety and number of companions I’ve found. There’s somebody called Aghor-babu here, who insists on referring to every conscious and unconscious object upon this earth as his mother-in-law’s brother’s nephew.*. Another man with a musical knack began to practise the Bhaiňro ālāp in the middle of the night.* For various reasons, this appeared to be entirely untimely. We’ve managed to spend from last evening to about nine o’clock today with our ship stuck in a narrow canal. I was lying down, dejected and lifeless, surrounded by a crowd of passengers in one corner of the deck. I had requested the khansamaji to prepare luci for the evening meal—he made some fried floury stuff without shape or substance and presented it without a trace of any accompanying vegetables, fried or curried. I expressed some amount of surprise and regret on seeing this. This person then anxiously said, ‘Hum abhi bana deta.’† Seeing that it was very late in the night, I disagreed, and, having eaten the dry luci as well as I could, lay down in the light
in the midst of all those people in my pantaloons—mosquitoes in the air and cockroaches roaming all around—another person sleeping right at my feet, whose body my legs were touching from time to time, four or five noses snoring continuously, a few mosquito-bitten, wretched, sleepless souls pulling at their tobacco, and through it all, the Bhaiňro rāginі. At around 3.30 a.m., some overenthusiastic people began to wake each other up to encourage them to begin their morning ablutions. Hopelessly tired, I quit my rest and went and sat down, leaning back on my chair, waiting for dawn. The night passed like a strange curse. One of the ship’s crew informed me that the steamer was stuck in such a way that it would not be able to move the entire day today. I asked a worker whether it would be possible to board a ship going to Calcutta. He smiled and said, this ship would be returning to Calcutta once it had reached its destination, so if I wanted to, I could always return on the same ship. Fortunately, after a lot of pulling and pushing, around ten o’clock the ship began to move again.