Letters from a Young Poet (37 page)

Calcutta
Thursday, 11 October 1894

I've spent this beautiful śara
t
morning lying quietly on a
couch
—the plants and shrubs in my flowerpots were trembling in the lovely
breeze that came and touched my body. I really just wanted to lie there and have somebody in the next room play some pieces one after another on the piano as they pleased. And that Chopin of mine would be one of the pieces played. Even if a desire of this sort remains unfulfilled after you wish for it, there's a sort of happiness in the desire itself. The greatest suffering is when you don't even feel that desire—that's when the mind has becomes inert and heavy. There's a continuous music in nature which works within our minds in the form of an extraordinary anguished desire when we compose music—those desires have a beautiful rāginī of their own, like a very tender, melodious morning song—and that rāginī then makes even those unfulfilled desires peaceful and charming. It is when nature's music resounds desolately in the far-distant shadows of the mind and finds no returning echo that the mind really becomes joyless, inactive and inert. Then, even if there's no particular sorrow in your heart, its weight presses down on you like an immovable heavy stone….

The bīṇā was played quite wonderfully. Somewhat as that Badri had done—the melody seemed to be wrung out of it heart-wrenchingly, and occasionally the
jhaṅkār
[resonance] of all the strings, from the minor to the major, being struck all at the same time created a fast-paced sequence of waves that played upon the mind from one side to the other and left, and then again after a while, a very slow, tender, faint rustle seemed to smooth out those waves with a pair of soft hands right up to the farthest horizon of the mind and leave. Who will comprehend all the various things the instrument was speaking of—it was as if it nestled up to your breast and unburdened itself of all it wanted to say—at times, when the generous pity of the deep manly tones of the bass strings broke upon you, one felt that the world was completely false and that it was so full of an eternal sorrow and limitless beauty exactly because it was false, and that was why it contained so many rāginīs, such modulations….

After staying up last night, this morning I lay on the couch, tiredness in my limbs—that's why to my half-shut eyes, the sun
and the trembling of the plants and the breeze upon my tired body felt so sweet. The śara
t
morning today seemed to shimmer, full to the brim with memories of the idols' immersion and the festivities; as if all those melodies of the nahabat that had stopped playing had silently spread themselves across the clear sky, and the vacant, sighing tiredness and lassitude engendered by the ending of the festival has today therefore melted into the śara
t
sun and spread itself out over the entirety of the land, water and sky, wrapping it in a silent melancholy.

Calcutta
17 October 1894

Yesterday I was talking with B—— about the ‘meẏeli chaṛā' essay. He was saying he couldn't understand why I wanted to lecture ordinary folk on such an insignificant and pointless subject. I asked him, why did Kalidasa write Ś
akuntalā
and why has that endured till today? There are so many ways of looking at all the big and small things that exist around us and that arrive at every moment, and one can discover so many kinds of joy in them, that they constitute the most important subjects for our analysis. The education that makes the human mind conscious and gives it the strength to experience the world in many ways is the most valuable education of all. Literature has no other palpable result except that it makes the character of man more sentient—that is, it makes man's nature larger, so that it extends its domain to regions that were outside its purview before. The ability to receive is a far greater strength than any immediate result—that's why in literature one doesn't pay as much attention to the subject as to the composition, the imagination, the expression. But I'm not very sure that B—— quite understood all these thoughts.

Bolpur
18 October 1894

We arrived in Bolpur yesterday in the evening. This morning, I woke up at dawn, had a bath, and came and sat in the south room; all the lassitude in my heart seems to have been dispelled. The mornings are so deeply quiet and beautiful and bright that I feel as if my mind has been completely immersed in a clear and cool light and emerged clean and cured. A plate heaped with
śiuli
flowers as new as childhood and as expressive as youth has been kept by my side—the śara
t
sun falls upon the veranda, the bed sheet is a glimmering white, everything is clean and empty, no crowds, no everyday chores, bird call to be heard, and where the row of trees up ahead ends, a great deal of green expanse can be seen. Sitting in the south room over here it feels like it used to in the sun-warmed veranda at Simla, where the deep blue, leaf-covered landscape seemed to appear right in front of your eyes, your breast and your body as you stood there. It's not exactly alike, but the same peace and beauty descends slow upon the mind. It's as if all of you are present in the next room as you were there, with your affection and your care ready and waiting for me. For me, that affection of yours has now melted into the landscape—this śara
t
morning's slow, cool breeze contains your caring, affectionate touch. It's so completely silent all around, Bob! It's as if this endless, clean, refreshing blue sky silently embraces my inner soul alone. And the soft, plump whiteness of the śiuli flowers seem to rain down tenderness upon my eyes. If my god separates me from all the chains of my routine to exile me here, I can calmly, quietly and completely immerse myself in the sky outside and my own inner self and get on with my own work…. I feel like throwing myself down upon the mattress in ——'s room with a pencil and an exercise book and begin some piece of writing. The morning is quite calm and new, perhaps its
best to start now…. My mind is so replete that it seems I can almost touch her, hear her tone of voice very close by.

Bolpur
Friday, 19 October 1894

Yesterday all I did was lie down flat upon my stomach on the bed to write a small poem and to read a book about travels in Tibet. I really love to sit alone in secluded spots like this one and read travel books. I can't touch novels in places like these. Alone in this first-floor room with all the doors and windows open and a mattress laid out, amidst such empty fields and forests of śāl, the tender sound of birds filling the dreamlike śara
t
afternoon, an English novel is so completely out of place. The great convenience of travel books is that they have a continuous motion, yet no plot—the heart finds an unfettered freedom there. Here the desolate field has a red road running through it—when two or three people or a bullock cart or two move very slowly down that road, all of it has a great pull for me, perhaps because that little bit of motion seems to make the completely motionless desolation all around even more sharply evident—the fields seem to stretch away even more endlessly, and there seems to be no address towards which these people travel. Travel books too seem to similarly draw a faint line of flow and motion in my emptiness of mind—as a result I seem to be able to feel my mind's spread-out, silent, lonely sky even more keenly. The traveller is a Frenchman, that's why he knows both how to travel and how to write. In one place, the man comes from the mountains suddenly upon a desert, and this gives rise to a feeling he calls the ‘
sensation of the desert
'—there he says he prefers this sort of vast desert to mountains and hills:

Solitude is a true balm, which heals up the many wounds that the chances of life have inflicted; its monotony has a calming effect upon nerves made over sensitive from having vibrated too much; its pure air acts as a douche which drives petty ideas out of the head. In the desert too the mind sees more clearly, and mental processes are carried on more easily.

In society or at work the mind disciplines its full strength to assume a much smaller form. But when it wants rest it becomes necessary to provide it with a huge bed extending up to the horizon for it to sleep on; it wants to occupy an entire country all on its own; then it does not find enough space for itself in the entire city, it cannot make do without a free sky and meadows and seas. I doubt that any English traveller would have found this ‘
sensation of the desert
' exactly happiness-inducing. Almost all the English travel books I have read display their proud, brutish nature and their arrogance. They're unable to do justice to other races or love them. Yet god has given them the responsibility of looking after a greater variety of races than he has to almost any other.

Bolpur
Saturday, 20 October 1894

Clouds have gradually been accumulating since last night. But there's also some sun. Heaps of black clouds have gathered on the margins of the sky, and in the light of the sun their borders have turned a silvery white. All around the fields the new crop of ā
man
rice has assumed a dark and luscious green colour, and the cool lustre of the clouds above it looks lovely. I remember when I first came to Bolpur with Bābāmaśāẏ I was about nine or ten years old—I had never seen rice fields before, and I was very curious to see them. We reached Bolpur at night; while travelling to the house in a palanquin I didn't
look out properly on either side in case my curiosity was dispelled to some extent in that unclear evening light. The moment I woke up at dawn I came outside and looked—but there were only fields all around, no sign of any rice plants anywhere. In places, the ground had been dug up; I heard that was where crops had been grown. At that time, I had so much curiosity bottled within me like corked
champagne
—now I've seen more or less everything of the world, yet the joy has not lessened, rather its intensity has increased even more. That first sight of Bolpur—I remember so many things about it. I used to write poetry even then. I had an idea that if you wrote poetry under a tree with the open sky above you, you were accomplishing something truly poetic. That's why I woke up at dawn and with an old
Letts' Diary
and pencil in hand, sat under a small coconut tree in one corner of the garden and wrote a heroic poem called ‘
Pṛthvīrājer parājaẏ'
[The Defeat of Prithviraj]. It took me about seven days to write it. Where's that diary, and where's the poem now! I don't remember a single line of it. I only recall that Baṛ-dada had liked that poem. I was very particular in those days about exactly how a poet should be—in the afternoons I would sprawl in the shade of a cave in the khoẏai region across the fields, a faint trickle of water flowing across the sand in front of me, and I would feel like a real poet. Small clusters of dates would be ripening on wild date trees—you couldn't possibly enjoy eating them, but still, to think that I was plucking wild dates from wild date trees by myself at the edge of the desert and eating them made me feel very proud. There was a small pond in the khoẏai called Amanidoba which had small fish in it—I'd take off my clothes and go and jump into it and believe that I was bathing in a waterfall. No people around anywhere, no regulations, no discipline; I would spend the entire day playing the poet by myself in those caves within the fields—some days I would feel scared of dacoits, but there was poetry even in that fear. It's true that I still write poetry, but I don't think of myself any more as a poet described in history or in novels—in fact, when I read my own poetry I don't feel as if I've written it; almost as though I write
good poems by accident, not because I want to. Whatever else may happen, it's impossible for me sit under a tree and write poetry any more; I get distracted too easily.

Anyway, if I ever find that
Letts' Diary
, I'd like to sit once more at dawn under that coconut tree in the garden and reread ‘Pṛthvīrājer parājaẏ'.

Santiniketan
Tuesday, 23 October 1894

It's become progressively cooler since day before yesterday, making everything all around even more pleasant. That tired air the breeze had seems to have gone. In the mornings when I come and sit here after a bath in clean clothes and this cool morning breeze touches my body, it is as if it collects a little more calm—the light that comes and falls upon the eyes seems anointed by refreshing dew and full of the cool smell of śiuli flowers. The skies are blue, the plants and trees shimmer, the green rice fields in between seem wrapped in the soft, pale light of the sun, there's no saying from how far away the wind comes unobstructed across the fields, kissing the dew-wet tips of grass—one cannot say where the desolate red road winding across the middle of the empty fields came from or where it is going—in the midst of all this, I'm sitting here overjoyed, submerged in a flood of ice-clean
hemanta
[autumn] light, greeted in body and mind by the dew-wet breeze, a plate piled high with śiuli flowers in front of me—there's no one to disturb me here, all three rooms on the first floor are entirely my own and all eight hours of daylight are for my independent use alone. The large, clean white bed with its pillows and bolsters in the bigger middle room seems to be waiting for my convenience—I feel like a proper
nab
ā
b
. Remember Satya had said to me, ‘There's an air of luxury about you, like the Muslim nababs'?
That's not entirely true; in the sense that my nabābi is a mental nabābi—there, in my own kingdom, I don't want any restrictions on me, I want an unchecked right in my domain. But the sort of nabābi that the nababs indulged in was something that obstructed mental nabābi; it required so many possessions and trappings and people and foot soldiers and equipage and outfits that that entire heap of material things simply smothered the mind and killed it. I try and escape the tyranny of things at every opportunity—if it's constantly excited and amused, my inner self becomes secretly rebellious; there seems to be somebody there within myself who becomes jealous the moment I'm seen in proximity with the outside.