He: (Shey) (Modern Classics (Penguin)) (3 page)

*

This emergence from the confines of certified ‘children’s literature’ is instanced at several other points of the story. Not only does Rabindranath face up to his modernist critics, but there is evidence that he comes to a conscious understanding with himself. No doubt he wished his words to reflect his whims, to lose himself in ‘play without meaning’, as he writes in the dedicatory poem. He meant to step away ‘directionless/In baul’s dress’, to bloom as ‘a worthless flower among weeds’, to fill his work with laughter unrestrained by reason. But is he entirely successful in all this? The question is not the reader’s alone. It comes, indeed, from the self-conscious writer. When the story-character He draws the narrator aside and asks, ‘Aren’t you in need of a little improvement yourself? … Stop being so old. Here you are, ageing, but you’re yet to mature in childishness,’ we are witness to an act of self-judgement on the author’s part. It is clear that the pieces of advice proffered by He of the story,‘If you imagine you can make Pupu-didi laugh with these stories, you’d better think again!’ or ‘Leave off your scientific humour and try to be a little more childish if you can’, are really Rabindranath’s counsels to himself.

Equally evident is the writer’s uncertainty as to how this perfect pitch of childishness is to be reached. He recognizes that the story he has created is, in certain places, written ‘purely in jest, out of the cockiness of [his] advanced years’. The stories Pupu-didi wants to hear, however,‘are funny without poking fun at anything’. But the presence of satire is not the only problem; Dadamashai distinguishes between two kinds of smiles, one dental and the other cerebral, and says,‘It’s the cerebral kind that fell to me—what one calls wit in English.’ Simultaneously, it is driven home to him that ‘if you can’t stop being so clever, you’d better give up telling stories.’ His self-admonition, ‘The pungency of your intelligence has dried up all the fun in you’, precedes his quest for ‘pure laughter without any alloy of intelligence’, in other words, the journey towards a new story.Yet even after this, the disbelief in ‘Well, then, nitwit, could you make her laugh?’, or ‘The laughter you win by a cheap joke like that is of no worth’, or ‘I don’t claim that even this story belongs to the highest order of humour’, betrays the same self-deprecating hesitation.

The story begins to move away from fantasy towards social satire when, in the tale about the tiger, even Pupe declares she knows how choosy the caste-conscious tiger can be about what he will eat or touch. If a tiger pollutes himself by drinking unholy ‘vegetarian blood’, the puritanical tiger community demands he perform a penance.And if he refuses? The hapless father of no less than five girl-tigers will be ruined. His five keen-clawed daughters are all old enough to be given away in marriage, but even if he offers twenty-eight buffaloes as dowry, the ritually unclean tiger will fail to procure a suitor for even one of them. A greater punishment awaits him when he dies—no priest will consent to perform the funeral rites, and seven generations of his descendants will bow their heads in shame.What penance, then, can absolve him? He must remain in the south-west corner of the square where the shrine of the tiger-goddess stands, from the beginning of the dark lunar fortnight to the middle of its last moonless night, feeding only on a shoulder of jackal and using only his right hind-paw to tear off the flesh. Reading all this may remind us of Rabindranath’s play
Achalayatan
(1912) and its ridicule of absurd rites and conventions.The desire to play truant from society is possibly thwarted by such recurring allusions to the all-too-real world of men.

*

The gradual progress from the world of children to the grown-up world manifests itself in another way as well. As the nine-year-old Pupe grows into a sixteen-year-old, subtle changes occur in the nature of the story, slowly transforming it.The Pupe who was once ready to believe any impossible thing—who, on hearing of a pen that could make any sum come out right, could clap her hands and cry,‘What fun that would be!’, who invented stories about regaling tigers with the dregs of tea in her father’s cup, and fretted over the possibility that an Englishman’s ghost might starve—is not the Pupe of the story’s close. In the tenth chapter, her grandfather tells her,‘Your wits are ripening rather precociously, so today I think I’ll remind you that at one time you too were young.’The new Pupe can challenge,‘Let the story be built on a tougher skeleton this time. If we can’t slurp it down, we’ll at least be able to chew on it. Perhaps I’ll like it better then.’ A little further on, she comments,‘The young always show signs of age.’Thus, Pupe grows up.The nameless He, who once stood before her fancy, grows older with her. She knows now that He is ‘made up’, and remarks on his growing up as ‘progressing on a line parallel to my own’.

That is not all: another change is now seen in the story. He slowly begins to disappear from it, and his place is taken by a fourth character, Sukumar. The story moves from anonymity towards names; the imagination abandons ‘hysteria’ for a spellbound, dreamlike state. At the very beginning, the narrator asks,‘Now who is this story about? Our He isn’t a prince, but a very ordinary man. He eats, sleeps, goes to the office and is fond of the cinema.’Yet, towards the end he is forced to admit,‘I think we’ll have to seek the help of a prince’, and that prince turns out to be Sukumar. Sukumar does not himself talk of fantastic things; instead, he wants to hear what the parrot of fairy tales tells his mate. Like the parrot, Sukumar yearns to be where to exist is only to fly, without even a destination to fly towards. Like the parrot’s mate, he thinks of the forest full of fruits, flowers and trailing vines, where ‘at night, fireflies cast a shimmering veil over that clump of kamranga bushes; and in the monsoon, when the rain comes down in steady torrents, the coconut palms sway and their fronds brush against each other’. Sukumar would like to try being a sal tree and can imagine the murmur of new leaves quivering through his body and drifting up into the clouds.All he wants is to live as one with nature: that is why Dadamashai, facing his audience of Pupe and Sukumar, can keep saying that the scientific mind can accept the coexistence of two opposites; it does not have to choose between ‘either this or that’. He can talk to them of the beginning of the world, of life’s first foray upon the earth.

Sukumar even hears the story of Dadamashai’s encounter with death. ‘You know how I used to love Dhiru,’ begins Dadamashai, and goes on to describe how he watched Dhiru’s death draw close, and how he came to terms with that grief:

There seemed to be a droning in the sky. I don’t quite know why I kept saying to myself,‘From the western sky comes peace, made manifest in night—cool, dark, still. Darkness comes at the end of each day, but today it seems to have a special form and touch.’ I closed my eyes, and let the slowly approaching darkness wash over my mind and body, saying inside me,‘O peace, O night, you are my Didi, my sister of ages without end. As you stand waiting at sunset’s door, draw my little brother Dhiru to your breast; relieve him of his suffering.’

Dadamashai knows his words will touch Sukumar’s understanding, for he is all feeling and imagination, with the creative mind of the true artist.To study painting under Nandalal-babu is Sukumar’s dearest wish. When his father refuses to allow it, he secretly escapes abroad, like the madcap Abhik of Rabindranath’s story
Rabibar
(Sunday, 1939). Abhik went as a ship’s stoker; Sukumar goes ‘to train as a pilot’. But both leave behind a few of their paintings.‘For ten whole years, I’ve practised painting,’ Sukumar writes in his diary. ‘I’ve never shown anyone my pictures.’ Moreover, he asks Pupe’s Dadamashai to show her the paintings and see if he can make her take back her first scornful laugh at his artistic ambitions. If he fails, the pictures should be torn up. As for Abhik, he writes to his left-behind sweetheart, Bibha,‘Nowhere in Bengal will these pictures be valued at a higher price than torn-up paper’, but continues, ‘just as the thrust of a shovel sometimes reveals hidden treasure, I dare to boast that one day my pictures’ priceless radiance will suddenly come to light.Till then, laugh as you will—’

The painter Rabindranath discloses himself through Sukumar’s— or Abhik’s—preoccupation with art. The last decade of his life, in which he created these characters, was the time when Rabindranath himself turned to painting. It was also the time when he most doubted his claim upon this new creative form that he discovered only in his late years. ‘Many ignorant fools have wrongly praised my pictures. And the untruthful have resorted to artifice’—in these words of Abhik’s, Rabindranath’s own voice is clearly heard. But he did not give himself totally over to self-doubt: a profound inner self-belief was in evidence as well. In one of his affectionate letters to Nirmalkumari Mahalanobis (29 November 1928), he writes:‘Earlier, my mind had laid its listening ear against the sky, it heard the melodies of the breeze, its words; these days it has opened its eyes and exists in the realm of shapes, amidst a crowd of strokes and lines. I look at plants and trees, and see them more intensely—it is clear to me that the world is a great procession of forms.’

It must be remembered that the grotesque is part of this realm of forms.‘Whatever we see,’ says Rabindranath in the same letter,‘a bit of stone, a donkey, a thorn-bush, an old woman—anything’, if we can, with certainty, see it,‘we touch the infinite’. Just as he paints stroke after stroke in an effort to capture this world of shapes, he also attaches images to his words.This connection between words and pictures is evident not only in the fact that books like
Shey
are illustrated with just such strokes of the author’s brush, it exists also in his obvious preoccupation with forms and shapes throughout the story. Hence Dadamashai can tell Pupe, ‘I had wanted to be a bit of the landscape, stretched over a wide expanse.’To imagine oneself as an entire landscape seems outlandish to Pupe, but Sukumar’s mind stirs in response. He says, ‘It’s fun to think of you spreading over trees and streams and becoming part of them.’

These roads to forgetting oneself and becoming other things open up in pictures and poetry; by following them, we can arrive at an Age of Truth. Thus utterly releasing the imagination from restraint, Dadamashai ends his story, one in which there is room for both life and death. At the same time, it witnesses the birth of a wistful love.At the story’s end, when Pupe hears there is no news of Sukumar, her face grows pale; she goes quietly to her room and closes the door. It is then that Rabindranath’s creation, journeying through many realms of the weird and grotesque, finally comes to rest in a ‘smooth rhythm’.

*

A young girl has grown up translating this story. Almost at the age when Pupe began her story-conversations with her grandfather, another girl felt encouraged to begin translating them.At first, perhaps, the work was just another kind of play. But slowly, a close intimacy with the text came to be born of playing with it—the translator began to wander off in new directions, in the excitement of discovering new images and word-forms.With astonishing skill, she finished her work at exactly the age Pupe is when the story ends.There must have been a natural sense of identification with the little girl who first listened to the tale, a feeling of growing up with her, beside her.

The work of a translator often takes the form of an intimate and unending exchange between author and translator. Talking to Dadamashai, listening to him, becoming Pupe in her imagination, the young translator’s engagement with both the writer and the narrator grows into a rich and fulfilling conversation. It is our hope that this exchange will succeed in conveying Rabindranath anew to an extensive community of readers.

Sankha Ghosh

GOD, IN HIS WISDOM, HAS CREATED MILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF PEOPLE, but the expectations of those people are far from satisfied. They say, ‘Now we want to create people of our own.’ So as the gods played with their living dolls, people began to play with their own dolls, dolls they had themselves created. Then children clamoured, ‘Tell us a story,’ meaning, ‘make people out of words’. So new creations evolved—fairy-tale princes, ministers and their sons, spoilt queens and neglected queens, mermaids, the Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, and many, many more. So many, in fact, that they almost outnumbered the people on earth. Even old men, on office holidays, said, ‘Make some people’, and the
Mahabharata
was composed, in eighteen volumes. And so, in every country, groups of storytellers set to work.

Recently, at my granddaughter’s command, I too have joined these storytellers, and am working on the making of these make-believe characters. They are only to play with, not answerable to truth or falsehood. The person who listens to these stories is nine years old, and the person who tells them will never see seventy again. I began the work alone, but so light and pleasing was the stuff of which these stories were made that, quite as a matter of course, Pupu started to help me in their making. I employed another man to help me as well, and you will soon get to know him better.

Many stories start, ‘Once there lived a king.’ But I began, ‘There lives a man.’ Also, in this story of mine, there is no trace of what people usually call a story. This man didn’t cross the field of Tepantar
¹
on a magic horse. One night, after ten o’clock, he came to my room. I was reading a book. He said, ‘Dada, I’m hungry.’