16
Shahjadpur
February 1891
There are a variety of village scenes in front of me that I quite enjoy observing. Right in front of my window, on the other side of the pond, a group of bede [gypsies] have hung up some bamboo and cloth sheeting on some poles and taken shelter there. Two or three really small awnings—nobody could even stand inside one of them. Their domestic life is undertaken entirely in the outdoor—only at night they all somehow bundle up in that small space and go to sleep. The bede race is like that. A bit like the gypsies. No homes anywhere, no taxes paid to any jamidār. They roam around, here and there, with a herd of pigs, a couple of dogs and some children. The police keep a strict eye on them. I often stand at my window and observe the goings-on of the ones who are here. They aren’t bad-looking; the Hindustani type. Dark, yes, but graceful; they have strong, well-formed bodies. The women too are quite good-looking. Quite slim and tall—compact bodies, with free movements like English girls. That is, their actions are unconstrained, there is a simple, easy flow in their quick movements—I do think they are just like dark English girls. The man has put a pot to cook on the fire and sits and makes rattan baskets, wicker baskets and winnowing platters by splitting bamboo into strips—the woman sits with a small mirror on her lap and parts her hair and combs it with utmost care. After the hairstyling is done, she wets a piece of cloth and wipes her face very carefully two or three times with special care, then hesitantly tugs and pulls at her āncal, etc., to rearrange her clothes, and, thus smartened up, she goes and sits on her haunches near the man; then she puts her hand to some bit of work or the other. I’m very entertained when I see this. These people, who are completely the sons of the soil, who are so absolutely attached to the body of this earth—even they are attracted to beauty and make an effort to please each other. They are born at any which place, reared on the streets, and die anywhere—I really feel like knowing their exact situation, their exact feelings. Days and nights under the open sky, in the free wind, on the unclothed earth—this is a sort of new way of life; yet, in the midst of this, there is work and love and children and domesticity, everything. I don’t see anybody standing around for a moment being lazy; there is always some work or the other. The moment they finish what they were doing, one woman sits down behind another and deftly unwinds her hair and begins to carefully sort out lice while jabbering on—no doubt about domestic affairs—under those three bamboo awnings—I cannot say for sure, but it certainly seems like it from a distance. This morning, tremendous trouble arrived uninvited in this peaceful bede family. It must have been about eight-thirty or nine in the morning—they had brought out the old sheets and torn rags they sleep on at night and hung these out on the bamboo-sheet roof to sun them. The pigs and piglets, all stuck together, had immersed themselves in a sort of hole they had made in the ground, lying there like an enormous mound of mud—after the winter night, they must have been feeling quite relaxed in the morning sun—when a couple of dogs belonging to one of their families began barking, rousing them. Expressing their irritation audibly, they went off in various directions in search of a colonial breakfast [choṭā hājri]. I was sitting and writing my diary, occasionally looking out unmindfully at the road outside, when suddenly an enormous commotion could be heard. I went to the window and saw that a crowd had collected in front of the bede ashram, in the middle of which an educated type was brandishing a staff and handing out terrific abuse—the head bede was shivering with fear and trying his best to answer him. I surmised that something must have aroused suspicion, and the police dārogā had decided to create a ruckus. The woman was sitting by herself and stripping a bamboo pole as though she were quite alone and there was no commotion anywhere at all. Suddenly she stood up and, waving her arms around, began to fearlessly deliver a lecture at the top of her voice right in the dārogā’s face. In a trice his forcefulness declined to almost a quarter of what it had been—he tried mildly to get in a word or two, but didn’t stand a chance. He began to slowly retreat, changing the attitude with which he had come quite substantially—after reaching a fair distance he shouted to them, ‘I’m telling you now, the lot of you will have to get out of here.’ I thought my bede neighbours would now perhaps begin to pick up their bamboo sheeting and poles, tie up their bundles, gather their kids, chase up their pigs and make their exit from here. But there’s no sign of that—they’re still sitting around, quite relaxed, splitting their bamboo, cooking, serving, picking lice.
In my durbar too, I’ve seen that when a woman comes with a complaint, she may be hidden behind her veil, but the voice like bell metal that emerges from under it has no trace of fear or anxiety or a pleading tone at all. Just total insistence and pure argument. Quite plainly she says, ‘The nāẏeb maśāi is not fair in his dealings with me!’ It’s impossible to get her to understand what’s fair or unfair, just or unjust; she just keeps saying, ‘I’m a widow, I have small children.’ There’s no answer to that. How should I argue with her! I feel like laughing. She too turns her face halfway towards me and keeps a covert eye on my expression from behind her veil. The day a woman arrives at the durbar, everything becomes quite lively: the bailiff becomes less ostentatious; other men who have come with requests do not find time to present their case.
Anyway, I get to see all sorts of scenes from my open window. Taken all together, I quite like it. But sometimes you see something that’s really upsetting. When they pile the cart high with an impossible load and keep hitting or thrusting a pointed wooden stick into the cows, I find it absolutely unbearable. This morning I was watching a woman who had brought her small boy—thin, dark, naked—to bathe in the canal water. It’s very cold today—when she was pouring water over his body, he was crying miserably and shivering, his throat racked by the most violent coughing. The woman suddenly gave him such a slap across his face that I could hear its sound from my room…. The boy bent over and, putting his hands upon his knees, began to whimper and cry, his tears getting caught in his cough. Then she caught hold of that naked, still-wet, shivering boy by the arm and dragged him homeward. This incident seemed so monstrously cruel! The boy was really young, about my son’s age. When you see something like this, man’s ideal suddenly suffers a blow, like stumbling awfully in the middle of a confident stride. How helpless small boys are! If you behave unfairly with them, they cry helplessly and manage only to irritate a hard heart even more; they cannot even express their complaint properly. The woman was well wrapped-up against the cold, and the boy had not a stitch on him—on top of that he had a dreadful cough, and then a beating at the hands of this witch!
17
Shahjadpur
February 1891
On some days, the postmaster of this place comes over in the evenings and begins to chat with me, telling me many stories about the letters that come and go in the mail. The post office is on the ground floor of this bungalow of ours—it’s very convenient, we get our letters the moment they arrive. I really enjoy the postmaster’s stories. He tells a huge number of the most impossible tales with complete seriousness. Yesterday he was saying that the people in this part of the country have such an extreme faith in the Ganga that when a relative dies, they grind the bones and keep them, and when they meet someone who has drunk Ganga water, they feed him those ground bones mixed in a paan, and think that some part of their relative has at last found the Ganga. I began to laugh, and said, ‘That’s a story, surely?’ He thought over it very gravely and admitted, ‘Sir, perhaps it is.’
18
Shilaidaha
February 1891
The maulabī and the clerks having left, and with the boat moored to a secluded sandbank at the other shore of the kāchāri, I’m feeling quite relaxed. I can’t tell you how beautiful the day and everything all around seem to me. It’s as if one is renewing one’s acquaintance with this vast world again after a long time. It too said, ‘Hey there!’ I too replied, ‘Hey there!’ And then we’ve both been sitting next to eac
h other—no further conversation, the water lapping and the sunlight aglitter on it, the sandbank stretching on and on with small wild jhāu trees growing along it. The sound of water, the hum of the afternoon silence all around, and from the jhāu bushes the cik-cik sound of one or two birds—taken all together it’s a dreamlike feeling…. I feel like writing on—but of nothing else, this sound of water, this sunny day, this bank of sand. It seems I’ll have to come back to writing of these same things to you every day—because when I get intoxicated I keep going on about the same thing…. Our boat has crossed the bigger rivers and entered the mouth of a smaller river now. On either side women bathe, wash clothes, and walk home with their water pitchers in their wet clothes, their heads veiled, the left hand swinging free—the boys, smeared with mud, splash water at each other wildly, and one boy sings tunelessly, ‘Call me brother once, O Lakkhan!’ Above the high banks one can see the straw roofs and the tips of the bamboo groves of the village nearby. Today the clouds have gone and the sun is out. The clouds that are still left in one corner of the sky look like a heap of cotton wool. The breeze is slightly warmer. The small river doesn’t have too many boats—one or two small dinghies loaded with dry branches and sticks ply tiredly by, their oars making a slapping sound—on the shore, fishermen’s nets dry on bamboo poles—the world’s work this morning has been temporarily suspended—
19
Chuhali. On the waterway.
16 June 1891
We have now unfurled our sails and are coursing over the Yamuna. On my left are cows grazing on a field, to the south we cannot see the bank at all. The fierce river current makes the soil from the bank fall continuously into the water with a plopping sound. The astonishing thing is that there is no other boat to be seen on this enormous river save ours—all around, the moving water makes a slapping, slipping sound, and one can hear the wind whistling…. Last evening we had moored our boat to a sandbank—the river was a small one, a tributary of the Yamuna; on one side, the white empty sands stretched far into the distance—no relationship with men or mankind—and on the other, green fields of crops and in the far distance, a village. How many more times shall I tell you—the evening as it falls on this river, these fields, this village, is so incredible, so vast, so peaceful, so immeasurable that it can only be felt silently; the moment you try to express it, you become restless. Slowly, as everything began to become indistinct in the dark, only the line of the water and the line of the land could be demarcated any differently, and the trees and bushes and huts had all merged into one another, spread out in front of one’s eyes like an obscure world, it felt exactly as though all of this was the fairy-tale world of childhood—when this scientific world had not yet completely come into being, when creation had only just begun, when the whole world was enveloped in the darkness of evening and in a thrilling silence full of fear and wonder—when the beautiful princess was still asleep for ever in a fairyland across the seven seas and thirteen rivers, when the prince and the courtier’s son were wandering around in the wilderness on some impossible mission—this seemed to be a certain silent riverside in that half-conscious, forgotten, enchanted and tender world of long ago and far away—and perhaps one could even imagine that I was that prince, roaming that evening world in search of some impossible expectation—that this small river was one among those thirteen mythical rivers, and the seven seas were still to come—that far distances, many events and much searching was yet to happen—so many nights lit by the faintest moonlight yet to come, waiting for me by unknown riverbanks or unacquainted seashores—followed perhaps by many journeys, many tears, much pain, until at last suddenly one day the story ends—‘āmār kathāṭi phurolo, naṭe śākṭi muṛolo’*—suddenly it will seem as if there was a story happening all this while, that I was laughing and crying in turn at the fairy tale’s joys and sorrows, that now the story has ended, now it is late night, now it is time for small boys to go to sleep.
20
Chuhali
19 June 1891
Yesterday, I had barely sat down outside for fifteen minutes or so when the sky was overcast with terrible clouds—very deep black, loose sort of clouds coloured by a hidden light falling in their midst—exactly like in the pictures one sees of storms sometimes. One or two boats quickly made their way from the Yamuna into this little river, set down anchor and rope, and, holding on tightly to land, settled down unworriedly—those who had come to the fields to cut grain ran homeward with a load on each head—the cows too ran, and the calves, waving their tails in the air, tried to run alongside. After some time a roar of rage was heard—a number of ragged scattered clouds arrived from the far west like breathless messengers of bad news—and then thunder and lightning and rain and storm all arrived together and began a tremendous Turkish dance.* The bamboo trees, moaning loudly, began to sway and prostrate themselves this way and that, and the storm began to blow like a snake charmer’s wailing flute. And the waves in the water lifted up their crests like three hundred thousand snakes and began to rhythmically dance along. The whole affair yesterday—how do I describe it to you! The sound of thunder refused to stop—as if an entire world was being broken into pieces in some part of the sky. I was sitting with my face upon the open window of the boat and letting my mind swing to the rhythm of the furious force of nature. Everything within me was leaping like a schoolboy suddenly on holiday. Finally, when the driving rain had quite soaked me, I shut both the window and the poetical, and sat down quietly in the darkness like a bird in a cage.
21
On the waterway. Shahjadpur.
20 June 1891
After receiving a reply from you all by telegram yesterday, we finished our work and set the boat off in the evening. There were no clouds in the sky, the moon was up, there was a slight breeze—with the oars making a slapping sound, we sailed down the tributary in the face of the current. We seemed to be surrounded by fairyland. At that time all the other boats had tied their cables to the shore, furled their sails, and were lying fast asleep, silent in the moonlight. Eventually the boat reached a safe place nearby where the tributary joined the Yamuna and was tied there. But a safe place has many disadvantages—there’s no breeze, it’s a bit enclosed, near the other boats, smells of the jungle, etc. I said to the boatman, ‘There’s no breeze on this bank, let us go to the other side.’ The other side did not have a high bank—the land and the water were at the same level; in fact, the rice fields were immersed in knee-deep water. At the royal command, the boatman tied the boat where he had been ordered. At the time small flashes of lightning had begun to appear in the sky behind us. I had just got into bed and was looking out at the fields with my face at the window when suddenly a commotion arose—a storm coming. Even as we heard: ‘throw the ropes’, ‘weigh anchor’, ‘do this’, ‘do that’, a tremendously destructive storm hurtled down upon us. The boatman began to repeatedly say, ‘Don’t be afraid, brothers, take the name of Allah, Allah is the master.’ Everybody repeated after him, ‘Allah, Allah.’ Hit by the wind, the curtains on both sides of the boat began to make a flapping sound; our boat was like a chained bird flapping its wings—the storm was making a high-pitched sound like a predatory kite suddenly bearing down to snatch its prey by the tuft and tear it away, and the boat responded by shuddering and trembling noisily. After a long time, the rain began and the storm ended. I had wanted a bit of breeze—I was given it a bit excessively, beyond all expectation. As though someone were joking, ‘Have your fill of the breeze now, and then, when you’re full, I’ll give you some water to drink—this will fill you up to such an extent that you wouldn’t feel like eating anything in the future.’ We have the status of nature’s grandchildren, that’s why she jokes with us in this way from time to time. I’ve constantly said that life is very seriously sarcastic; it’s difficult to follow its sense of humour—because the person being made fun of cannot always appreciate the fun of it all. Think about it—you’re lying in bed late at night, when suddenly the earth gives you suc
h a sound shaking that there’s no place for anybody to run to. The intention is very novel and entertaining, no doubt about that, quite befitting a first-of-April trick. What fun it is to make important and respected gentlemen run from their beds in the middle of the night, dishevelled and breathless! And is it any less of a joke to wreck an entire roof upon the heads of one or two helpless, witless, just-awakened people! How that prankster nature must have laughed when the poor man was writing a cheque at the bank that day to settle the mason’s bill!
22
Shahjadpur
22 June 1891
Nowadays the nights here are full of such marvellous moonlight, what can I say! Of course, I don’t mean to say that you too don’t have moonlit nights at your place—it has to be admitted that at your place the moonlight slowly spreads its silent authority over the meadow you have, that church spire, the silent trees and bushes. But you have many other things besides the moonlight—you have your harmony and discord, your tennis, your marble tables, the song and music sessions in the drawing room—but I have nothing except this silent night. Sitting here alone, I cannot begin to express the boundless peace and beauty I see within all of this. There is one lot that becomes restless thinking, ‘Why can’t I know everything about the world?’ and there is another lot that is frustrated wondering, ‘Why can’t we say everything that’s on our minds?’—in between, what the world has to say stays within the world and the inner thought stays within…. I rest my head upon the window—like the affectionate hand of nature, the breeze slowly runs its fingers through my hair, the water flows past with a rippling sound, the moonlight shimmers, and sometimes ‘the eyes spontaneously overflow with tears’. Often, when you’re deeply hurt inside, tears well up as soon as you hear the sound of an affectionate voice. The lifelong hurt that we feel against nature for this unfulfilled life turns into tears and flows silently the moment nature turns sweetly affectionate. Then nature caresses you all the more and you hide your face in her breast with even more fervour, and you attain a sort of melancholic peace that comes from ‘disinterested wisdom’. Such are my evenings.