has a sense of humour, knows where to laugh,
can converse with ease on most humdrum topics,
but can also suddenly hold forth
in what people patronisingly call a poetic style
at eleven p.m. in the sal forest
by the River Mayurakshi.
Behind their cottage
they have a kitchen garden
and about two bighas of land where they grow rice,
plus orchards of mango and jack
hedged in by ash-sheoras.
In the morning my neighbour croons
as she churns yoghourt to make butter,
while her husband rides off to supervise the farm
on a red pony.
On the river’s other side stretches a road
and beyond the road a dense forest;
from there comes the sound of Santhal flutes
and gypsies come there for their wintering
by the River Mayurakshi.
That’s all. This dwelling of mine
I’ve never built, nor ever will.
Never have I even seen the Mayurakshi.
Her name I don’t hear with my ears:
upon my eyes I see it.
It rubs the unguent of dark blue magic
on my eye-lids.
And I despair
of my mind ever settling elsewhere.
Taking leave of everything, indifferent to all else,
my soul yearns to rush off
by the River Mayurakshi.
[August 1932 (3 Bhadra 1339)]
Memory
A town in the west country.
On its secluded edge
a neglected house beats the day’s heat
with a thatch that dips low on all four sides.
Eternal shadows lie prostrate in the rooms
and a musty smell lives as a permanent prisoner.
A yellow rug on the floor
is printed with images of gunmen hunting tigers.
Under a shishu tree a road of white soil heads north:
there the wind blows
like a fine-spun wrap on the fierce sunlight’s limbs.
On the sandbank in front are fields of wheat, cajan, melons,
water-melons.
Ganga glitters in the distance.
Boats being towed
look like ink sketches.
On the veranda, Bhajiya, silver bangles on her wrist,
grinds wheat between stones
and sings in a monotonous drone.
Girdhari the doorman has been sitting next to her
for a long time, under who-knows-what pretext.
Beneath the old neem tree the gardener draws
water from a well with a bullock’s help.
The midday’s wistful with its creaks
and the field of sweetcorn shimmers in water-streams.
The warm wind wafts the faint scent of mango buds
and tells us that bees have gathered on the mahaneem’s flowers.
Later in the afternoon a young woman comes from the town.
She is foreign to these parts and her sad face
is drawn and pale from the heat.
In a low voice she teaches the poetry of a foreign poet.
In a room where a tattered blue screen obscures the light
and the damp odour of vetiver fills the air,
enters the pain of a human heart from beyond the seas.
My early youth goes seeking its own expression
in a foreign tongue,
even as a butterfly flits
among beds of cultivated seasonal European flowers,
in their crowds of colours.
[August 1932 (7 Bhadra 1339)]
The Boy
He was about ten years old,
an orphan raised in a home that wasn’t his own,
like a weed that springs up by a broken fence,
not tended by a gardener,
receiving sunlight, gusts of wind, rain,
insects, dust and grit;
which sometimes a goat crops off
or a cow tramples down,
which yet doesn’t die, gets tougher,
with a fatter stem
and shiny green leaves.
From the jujube tree he’d fall, trying to pluck its drupes,
and break his bones,
faint after eating poisonous berries,
get lost on his way to the Chariot Festival;
but nothing could destroy him:
half dead, he’d revive,
lost, he’d return,
caked with mud, his clothes ripped;
would be spanked hard
and yelled at in torrents,
and when freed, he’d run off again.
Weeds had choked a dried river’s curve;
herons stood on its edges;
a jungle crow rested on a boinchi branch;
high above flew a white-breasted kite;
a fisherman had fixed long bamboo poles for his net;
a kingfisher perched on a pole;
ducks dipped their heads and picked water-snails.
It was the middle of the day.
The shimmering waters were alluring;
the water-weeds swayed with their leaves outspread;
fishes darted about.
Further down, weren’t there serpent-maidens
who combed their long tresses with gold combs,
casting those moving shadows on the ripples?
The boy fancied a dip precisely there,
in those green transparent waters
as smooth as a snake’s body.
‘Let’s see what there is’ was his greedy approach to everything.
So he plunged, got caught in the weeds, –
screamed, gulped water, and went down down down.
When a herdsman grazing his cows on the near-by bank
pulled him up with the help of a fishing-boat,
he was unconscious.
For days thereafter he remembered that feeling
of losing his grip on things:
how the world went dark
and the image of his long-lost mother
returned only to yield
to the black-out.
It was quite exciting, really, –
like death, that big experience.
‘Go on,’ he urged a playmate to dare the same,
‘Just try to drown once, with a rope tied round your waist.
I’ll pull you up again.’
But the playmate wouldn’t agree to do it.
‘Coward!’ he fumed, ‘Coward! What a coward!’
Like an animal he’d slink to the Buxy family’s orchard,
getting plenty of blows, but eating many more jaams.
‘Monkey!’ they’d say at home, ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’
Why should he be ashamed?
The lame Buxy boy limped as he gathered fruits,
heaping them in baskets.
Branches got broken;
fruit got trampled.
Was he ashamed of it?
One day the second Pakrashi boy showed him a tube
with glass at its end and said, ‘Just peep inside!’
A pattern of colours he saw,
which shifted with each shake.
He begged, ‘Give it me, please.
You can have my polished shell
for peeling green mangoes
and my flute made from green mango kernel.’
It wasn’t given to him.
So he had to nick it.
He wasn’t acquisitive,
didn’t wish to hoard anything, just wanted to see
what was inside.
Cousin Khodon twisted his ear and said,
‘Why did you nick it?’
The scamp replied,
‘Why didn’t he give it me?’
As if the real blame lay with the Pakrashi boy.
Neither fear nor loathing did
his body know.
He would pick up a fat frog just like that
and in a hole in the garden meant to take a pole
keep it as a pet,
nourish it with insects.
He’d stow beetles in a cardboard box,
feed them on dung-balls,
raise hell if anyone tried to chuck them.
He’d go to school with a squirrel in his pocket.
One day he put a harmless snake inside the teacher’s desk,
thinking, ‘Let’s just see what Sir does!’
The gentleman opened his desk, leaped, and ran –
his flight was quite a thing to see.
A pet dog he had,
not pedigreed by any means,
very much a native of the soil.
He looked quite like his owner,
behaved like him too;
couldn’t always find food,
so had to steal it;
had to pay for his crime by having his leg number four lamed.
And the chastisers, by some causal connection,
had the fence of their cucumber field broken.
Save in his master’s bed the dog couldn’t sleep
at night, nor his master without him.
One day the dog met his end,
having stuck his muzzle into a neighbour’s just-served dinner.
The worst torment hadn’t drawn a tear from the boy,
but now he spent two days hiding from others and crying.
He wouldn’t eat or drink.
Koromchas had ripened in the Buxy orchard;
he wasn’t interested in pinching any.
Those neighbours had a nephew, seven years old,
on whose head he dumped a broken pot.
From under the pot came a whining, like from an oil mill.
Decent people wouldn’t have him in their homes.
Only Sidhu the milkwoman brought him in
and gave him milk to drink.
Seven years ago she had lost her son.
The two boys’ birthdays had been three days apart
and they’d had the same looks:
dark skin, flat nose.
On this milkwoman auntie of his the boy played his latest tricks,
cutting off the string which tethered her cow,
hiding her pails,
staining her clothes with catechu.
To the tune of ‘Let’s see what happens’ went his experiments,
which would only cause the milkwoman’s love to flow
even more, and if any told him off,
she would simply side with her favourite, and that would be it.
Ambika the schoolmaster regretted to me,
‘Even your poems written for children don’t appeal to him.
That’s how thick he is.
Mischievously cuts the pages
and says the mice did it,
the monkey that he is.’
I said, ‘The fault is mine.
If there was a poet truly of his own world,
the beetles would come out so vivid in his verse
the boy wouldn’t be able to leave it.
Have I ever managed to write with authenticity
about frogs, or that bald dog’s tragedy?’
[August 1932 (28 Srabon 1339)]
The Last Letter
The empty house seems displeased with me.
I’ve done something wrong
and it’s keeping its face averted.
I wander from room to room,
feeling unwanted,
come out panting with exhaustion.
I’m going to let this house and go off to Dehra Dun.
For such a long time I couldn’t go into Amli’s room:
it would twist my heart.
Now that the tenant will come, the room must be cleared,
so I undo the padlock and go in.
A pair of Agra shoes, a comb,
hair oil, a bottle of perfume.
On a shelf her school-books.
A small harmonium.
A scrap-book
covered with cut-and-pasted pictures.
On a clothes-rack towels, dresses, saris of homespun cotton.
In a small glass cabinet a variety of dolls,
bottles, empty powder tins.
I sit silent on the seat
in front of the table.
There’s the red leather case
she used to take to school.
From it I pick up an exercise-book,
a maths one, as it happens.
Out slips an envelope, unopened,
with my own address
in Amli’s childish hand.
They say when a man drowns,
pictures from the past
in one moment press before his eyes.
So does that letter in my hand
in an instant bring back so many things to my mind.
Amala was seven
when her mother died.
The fear that she wouldn’t live long
began to haunt me.
For there was something sad about her face,
as if the shadow of an untimely parting
had tumbled backwards from a future time
to fall on her big black eyes.
I was so afraid to leave her alone.
Working at my office,
I would suddenly wonder
if something awful had happened at home.
From Bankipore came her mother’s sister on holiday.
She said, ‘The girl’s education’s in a mess.
Who’s going to bear the burden of an ignorant girl
in this day and age?’
Ashamed to hear her words, I blurted out,
‘I’ll get her admitted to Bethune School tomorrow.’
Admitted she was, but her holidays seemed to grow
more in number than days of academic work.
There were days when the school bus came and went without her.
Her father was involved in those plots.
The following year her aunt came on holiday again.
‘This just won’t do,’ she said,
‘I’ll take her with me and put her in a boarding-school
in Benares, for she must be saved
from her father’s loving excess.’
So she went away with her aunt,
dry-eyed, but deeply hurt
because I let her go like that.
I set out on a pilgrimage to Badrinath
in a sudden desire to run away from myself.
For four months there were no communications.
Thanks to my guru, I reckoned,
the knot that tied me had slackened.
In my mind I placed my daughter in God’s hands
and my chest felt lightened.
After four months I came home.
I was running to Benares to see Amli,
but on my way got a letter.
What’s there to say? –
It was God who had taken her.
But I don’t want to talk about those things.
Sitting in Amala’s room, I open the unopened letter
and read:
‘I want to see you so much.’
There’s nothing else on the paper.
[August 1932 (31 Srabon 1339)]
Camellia
Her name’s Kamala:
I’ve seen it written on her file.
She was on the tram-car, with her brother, on her way to college.
I was on the seat behind.
The clear outline of a side of her face I could see,
and the soft hair-wisps on her nape, under the hair-coil.
On her lap were books and files.
I couldn’t get off where I should have done.
From then on the time I left home was adjusted
not so much to fit my own needs at work
as to match with the time when these two left home.
And often we met. r />
I thought, unconnected as we were,
at least she and I were travellers together.
Her mind’s clarity
shone in her countenance.
The hairs were combed away from the delicate forehead;
the bright eyes were without a hint of embarrassment.
I wished a crisis would occur,
so that I could help her and glorify myself:
some sudden disturbance
or a ruffian’s insolence,
not infrequent these days.
But my fate resembled a puddle of turbid waters
which wouldn’t hold historical episodes,
where the tame days croaked like monotonous frogs
and neither sharks nor crocodiles, nor swans came for a swim.
One day the car was packed with jostling crowds.
A Eurasian was sitting next to Kamala.
I wished I could just knock the hat off his head,
grab him by the neck and shove him into the street.
My hand itched to do it, but could find no excuse.
Then he got out a fat cheroot
and began to smoke.
I came close to him and said, ‘Chuck that cheroot.’
He pretended he hadn’t heard
and puffed out even bigger whorls of smoke.
I pulled the cheroot off his mouth
and flung it to the street.
He clenched his fist and glared at me for an instant,
but said nothing, just got off the car in a leap.
He might have recognised me,
for in football I happen to be a name, –
quite a big name, in fact.
The girl’s face reddened.
She opened a book, lowered her head,
and pretended to read.
Her hands shook, but she didn’t spare
one sidelong glance at her heroic champion.
‘You did the right thing,’ said the office workers in the car.
The girl soon got off, not at her usual stop,
and hailed a taxi and went away in it.
The next day I didn’t see her,
nor the next.
On the third day I spied her
going to college in a rickshaw.
I knew then how stupid I’d been.
She was a girl who could look after herself.
She didn’t need me.