Letters from a Young Poet (20 page)

Shilaidaha
20 August 1892

Every day when I open my eyes in the morning I can see water to my left and to my right the riverbank flooded in sunlight. Often when you look at a picture and think—oh, if only I could be there—that's exactly the feeling that is satisfied over here. It seems as if I am living within a shining picture, as if the hardness of the real world is entirely absent here. When I was a child, the pictures of trees and oceans in books such as
Robinson Crusoe
or
Paul-Virginie
made me very melancholy—the sunlight here makes those childhood memories of gazing at
pictures come alive.
^*
I don't quite catch what the meaning of it is, I don't quite understand what the desire entwined in it is—it's like a pulsating attachment with this vast earth—at a time when I was one with this world, when the green grass rose on top of me, the śara
t
sunlight fell over me, when every pore of my green body—spread across enormous distances—let off the fragrance and heat of youth, when I would lie silently under the bright sky, stretched over native and foreign lands, water, mountains, when in this śara
t
sunlight my immense body would gather up, in a very unsaid, half-aware and large way, a particular flavour of joy and a life force—it's as if I can partly remember that time—this state of mind seems to be the feeling of that prehistoric world that was at every moment full of seed, flower, joy and the overlordship of sunlight. It's as if the stream of my consciousness is moving slowly through the veins of every blade of grass and root of tree, as if all the fields of grain are thrilling to the touch, and every leaf on the coconut trees is trembling with the passion of life. I want to properly express the heartfelt affection and kinship I feel towards this world, but perhaps most people wouldn't quite understand it correctly—they may think it very weird. That's why I don't feel like trying.

Boyalia
18 November 1892

Are you on a train right now? After the severe chill all night long, you have perhaps woken up and, having washed your face, sat down with a blanket over your legs. If you were travelling by the Jabalpur line I would have been well able to imagine the sort of scenery you're travelling through by now. At this time in the morning the sun rises
near Nowari on an undulating, hard-as-rock, treeless world. Possibly it might be the same on your Nagpur line too. Perhaps the new sun has made everything all around very bright, sometimes you can see a hint of blue mountains in the sky—not too many fields of grain around—suddenly at one or two places you see the churlish farmers of that region beginning to plough their fields with oxen—on either side, the cleft earth, black rocks, signs of dried-up waterfalls in gravel-strewn paths, small stunted
śāl
trees and, on the telegraph lines, black, long-tailed, restless
phiṅge
birds.
^*
It's as if a large, wild thing of nature has been tamed by the bright, soft touch of a young godchild of light to lie down quietly, very calm and still. Do you know why I picture it like that? In Kalidasa you have read of how the young son of Dushyanta, Bharat, used to play with a lion cub. It's as if he were affectionately running his pale, soft fingers slowly through the lion cub's long mane, and that large animal were lying quietly by his side and occasionally glancing sideways at his man friend with a look of affection and complete dependence. And you know what those dried-up waterfalls with their gravel-strewn paths remind me of? In English fairy tales we read about a stepmother who sends her stepchildren into an unknown forest, and then the brother and sister use their intelligence to mark the way home by dropping one pebble after another to show them the way. The small streams seem like those little children, who have wandered out into this unknown vast earth when they were very young, which is why they drop small pebbles on the way as they go—when they return they'll find these paths to their way home once more. This morning from the moment I woke up I've been sitting with you next to the window of your train to try and watch with you the sunlit scenes on either side. I'm arranging my recollections of long-ago train journeys, the many memories and many fragmentary scenes, on either side of my mind, spacing them, ordering them, spreading them out in the winter morning sunlight and talking to you sometimes about them.

Natore
1 December 1892

So yesterday Loken and I managed to set out. You have to go a long way by horse-drawn carriage. Twenty-eight miles ahead of us, and only ‘us two travellers'. Loken began with a cigarette and a book, I started to hum ‘
Sundarī rādhe āoẏe bani
'; after we had travelled about ten miles or so thus and the sun began to grow fainter the closer it reached sunset, Loken suddenly began a quarrel with the Vaishnava poets in the context of my song. I don't know if that argument would ever have reached a conclusion, but fortunately a lean and thin river suddenly appeared in the middle of it and drew a long full stop [
dāňṛi
] there. We had to get down from the carriage on that riverbank and cross a bridge over the river on foot—on the other side we suddenly discovered half a moon risen in the sky and beautiful moonlight. We both agreed that we should try and walk as far as we could. Then we stopped arguing and the two of us began to walk slowly and silently upon the hushed road engraved with the shadows of trees in the moonlight. Yesterday was Wednesday, so it was market day in the nearby village, from where at the end of the day a few villagers and village women were returning home, talking to each other. A single empty bullock cart pulled by two cows ambling slowly and absent-mindedly on, with a watchman huddled in a
wrapper
fast asleep upon it, went towards the rest house. Occasionally we came across a village hidden in dense woods—layer upon layer of smoke from fires lit with straw in the cowsheds hung low upon the bushes, heavy with dew, unable to rise up in the still winter's night. After travelling for a mile or two in this manner we got into the carriage again…. It was almost one o'clock by the watch. After a lot of begging and pleading we managed to persuade the Maharaja to take us for a drive and drop us home. Everybody agreed:
Such a night was not meant for sleep!
Really, it was a beautiful night. There were no people on the roads and the moonlight upon the large lakes of the royal palace and the shadows of the dense trees beside them were looking splendid. We went to bed after reaching home at about one-thirty at night.

Natore
2 December 1892

Yesterday we went to the Maharaja's place after
breakfast
, and in the evening we all went out together. I liked the road through the middle with the fields on either side. The vast, empty, desolate fields of Bengal with trees at their farthest margins in the light of the setting sun—I just can't describe how beautiful it is—such an enormous peace and soft pity—such a silent, wan embrace between this world of ours and that distant sky, modest with the weight of affection! The infinite has a sort of great un-fragmented sorrow of eternal separation that partially reveals itself in the evening light upon this abandoned earth—all the water, land and sky fill up with a particular spoken silence—if you gaze wide-eyed at it for a long time in silence, you think that if this complete silence stretched across everything cannot hold itself in any more and its self-born language bursts out into expression, then what a deep, serious, peaceful, beautiful, tender music would sound out from this earth to the starry skies! Actually that's what is happening. Because the trembling of the earth that comes and hurts our eyes is light, and the trembling that hurts our ears, sound. If we try to sit still and meditate we get a rough idea in our minds of the vast melody created with the
harmony
of all the light and colour of the world. If we could just try and be still and attentive, we would be able to partly translate in our minds the vast
harmony
created by all the earth's light and colour as it comes together into one
enormous song. We only have to shut our eyes and listen with our inner hearing to the endless trembling sound of the flow of images over the world. But how many times will I write to you about this sunrise and this sunset! I experience it in a new way every day, but can I express it in a new way every time?

Shilaidaha
9 December 1892

Now I'm alone, settled by my
boat's
window, at peace after a very long time. The
boat
is moving with a favourable current; on top of that its sails are full—the winter day has warmed up a little in the afternoon sun, there are no boats on the Padma—the empty sandbanks' yellow colour is drawn like a line between the river's blue on one side and the sky's blue on the other—the water trembles and shimmers very slightly in the north wind; there are no waves. I'm sitting leaning by the open window; there's a gentle breeze that touches my head—it's very soothing. After a severe illness over many days, the body is in a slack, weak condition—at this time nature's slow, affectionate care and attendance feel very sweet—like this narrow winter river, my entire being seems to lie lazily in the mild sun and shimmer while I almost absent-mindedly go on writing this letter to you. Every time before I come to the Padma I fear that perhaps my Padma has become old. But as soon as the boat pushes off, and the sound of water is heard on all sides—a trembling, pulsating murmur in the light and the sky in every direction, a very soft, spread-out blue space, a very new green line—a continuous celebration then begins of colour and dance and song and beauty, and once more my heart is completely overwhelmed. This world is constantly new to me, like someone I have loved for a very long time and over many lives; there is a very
deep and far-reaching relationship between the two of us. I can remember quite well, many ages ago when the earth was young, how she had raised her head above the sea water to greet the new sun, and I, a tree in the first flush of life then on this earth's new soil somewhere, had borne new leaves. There were no animals or living things in the world then, just the vast ocean swaying day and night, wildly embracing the earth from time to time like an ignorant mother, covering it completely. I had drunk the first sunlight on this earth with my entire body; like a newborn child stirred by the blind joy of life under the blue skies, I had embraced my mother earth with all my roots and drunk her breast milk. My flowers bloomed and new leaves grew with a dumb joy. When the dense monsoon clouds amassed, their deep blue shade would touch all my leaves like the palm of a familiar hand. Even after that have I been born on the soil of this earth in every new age. When the two of us sit alone, face-to-face, that old acquaintance comes back again to my memory little by little. My mother earth sits now by ‘one sunlit yellow region of gold' by that riverbank's fields of grain—I fall at her feet, into her lap—just as many a son's mother remains absent-minded yet affectionate and calm, not paying much attention to their child's coming and going, so too my earth looks towards the horizon this afternoon and thinks of many ancient things, not paying much attention to what I do while I keep on talking endlessly. Time passes in this way. It's almost evening. It's winter, you see, and the sun falls away very quickly.

Shilaidaha
18 December 1892

Just as you hear thunder only after it has fallen, so too we don't hear anything at the right time if we're some distance apart; we
can only discuss the event in a letter well after it's all over! Have you only just come to know about the pain in my teeth and ears? When I had obscured my head in layers of soft cotton to nurse it with the utmost tender care—covering and enclosing my face on every side like a sick child is wrapped up and protected—there were people in this world blithely assuming I was both healthy and happy. And now, when all that's left is only the faintest memory and the tiniest bit of inflammation of the molar tooth, one hears all sorts of expressions of fear, worry and advice! Now I feel like slapping that godforsaken forehead of mine and saying, ‘You've wasted that precious pain of yours on Jadu-babu! Such a big calamity gone to “neither the gods nor religion”!' … There's no ‘
fun
' in falling ill these days, that's why nowadays I try to pay special attention to my health. But the mysteries of the body are exactly like the mysteries of the mind. I've made a sort of acquaintance with this wretched body of mine over the last thirty years—I've developed some understanding of what results in what and what doesn't. And after all that experience, I had just begun to function accordingly. Now suddenly at thirty-one I see that when I do something, what didn't happen before happens when I do it—once again there are new lessons to be learnt, new introductions to be made. And then again just when I've spent another thirty or thirty-five years stumbling around—figuring out these new discoveries of when I must wear
flannel
, when I must keep the doors and windows closed, when I must bathe in hot water, when to use hot bandages and when the
poultice
, when to have over-boiled soft rice and when to have
morol
ā fish curry—there won't be too many days left to put that valuable experience gained over so many days to much use…. I ask you, this toothache, earache, throat ache—where was all of it all these days? If I'd been given some prior notice, why should such terrible things have happened in Natore, of all places? Man's mind, after all, is
unreasonable
enough and, if you think about it, the body is right after. Tell me, Bob, where is
the thing called
reason
? Only in Sully's
psychology
?
^*
Today after reading your letter I've been thinking about many such serious problems of this sort.