Letters from a Young Poet (7 page)
Read Letters from a Young Poet Online
Authors: Rosinka Chaudhuri
Such instances are not rare, but recur:
After discussing the arrangements for the transfer of property to another name on the rent roll, etc., for a while, the moment he stopped speakingâI suddenly saw the eternal universe standing silently in front of me that evening.
âI have a certain human domestic relationship with nature here, a certain intimate familial feelingâwhich no one knows but me,' he says one evening in August 1894 from his boat on the Padma. Intimacy with nature is fervently expressed and deeply felt; nature is often personified: as a veiled bride, as his
gá¹halakshmÄ«
, as companionate partner and lifelong friendâsomeone who strokes his hair, touches his body, embraces him, gives him refuge. His attachment to this earth is palpable:
This enormous world that is lying quietly over thereâI love it so muchâI feel like clutching its trees, rivers, meadows, noise, silence, dawn, dusk, all of it to me with both hands. I think: the treasures of this world that the world has given usâcould any heaven have given us this?
What is the meaning of such desire? In a different letter, he realizes he doesn't have an answer: âI don't quite understand what the desire entwined in it isâit's like a pulsating attachment with this vast earthâat a time when I was one with this world, when the green grass rose on top of me, the Åara
t
sunlight fell over me, when every pore of my green bodyâspread across enormous distancesâlet off the fragrance and heat of youth â¦' A sentiment Rabindranath expresses time and time again in his songs is recorded here as fact: âThis 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.'
Ranajit Guha calls the connection between Rabindranath and nature expressed in his letters and songs â
antaraá¹
ga ÄtmiáºatÄ
', an intimate relationship. The perception of nature as an âautochthonous entity' has a âparticular local impulse', and is felt most keenly by Rabindranath, he thinks, in the evenings and afternoons of certain seasonsâthat feeling of the revealed character of nature is related to a feeling of immediacy.
17
In a famous letter (Letter 142), Rabindranath had compared the âworld of the day' to âEuropean music' and âthe world of the night' to âour Indian music, a pure, tender, serious, unmixed rÄginÄ«'. But if evening and night have an immediate existence here as companionate presences, dwarfing the humans in his proximity with their living presence, in these pages in particular, it is the afternoons that reappear most often with a felt intensity. The âintense attraction' that the âafternoons here' in Shahjadpur hold for him is described: âThe sun's heat, the silence, the solitude, the call of birds, especially the crow, and the
long, beautiful leisureâall of it entangled together makes me very detached and yet emotional.' This immersion of self in the torpor of still afternoon sunlight has affected him, he says, âright from his childhood', and here it seems that âI want to write about the same thing every dayâthe afternoons over here. Because I just cannot surmount the attraction they hold for me. This light, this air, this silence enters my pores and mixes with my bloodâthis is newly intoxicating for me each day, I cannot say enough to exhaust the tender intensity of it.'
Light, and space, and air are like an addiction in the pages of these letters. Again and again, he speaks of these things being as essential to him as the oxygen in one's lungs. âThe sky, the light, the air and song have come together from every direction and loosened me up and absorbed me within themselves', he writes from Shilaidaha in 1892. Writing from the boat on the way to Boalia in the Åara
t
sunlight of September 1894, he exults:
How I love the light and the air! Perhaps because of the appropriateness of my name. Goethe had said before he died:
More light!
âif I had to express a wish at a time like that I would say:
More light and more space!
Goethe is mentioned often, and another quotation is given twice in the original German in the same letter (
Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren
), as though the music of the words was important enough for the line to be quoted in German alongside the English translation. He speculates:
If you want to keep the heart's faculties of sight, sound, touch and thought vigilant, if you want the ability to receive all that you can receive to remain sharp, you must keep the heart always hungryâyou have to deprive yourself of abundance. I have kept something Goethe said always in mindâit sounds simple, but to me it seems very deepâ
Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren.
Thou must do without, must do without.
⦠That's why the relative comfort of Calcutta begins to prick me after a short while, as if its small pleasures and enjoyments were making it difficult for me to breathe.
Frugality of habit and extravagance of feeling, inner emotion and outer delight, leisure and work, land and water, the everyday and the eternalâeach mode of being is contradicted and complimented by its opposite in the pages of this book of letters. Such a correspondence is a form of literary extravagance possible only when a surplus of thought and emotion accumulates. Other forms of literature remain the author's and are made public for his good; letters such as these that have been given to a private individual once and for all become the reader's with an intimacy that is therefore characterized by a more generous abandonment. What they do, above all else, is allow us to savour with some immediacy the plangent feeling of being in the presence of a young poet within the radiant particularity of time and place inhabited so intensely by him here.
Darjeeling
September 1887
We've only just reached Darjeeling. Beli
behave
d very well on the way.
*
Didn't cry a great deal, although she did holler and create a commotion, and ululated as well, and turned her hands around and called out to the birds, though one couldn't see where the birds were. There was a great fuss while boarding the steamer at Sara ghat. Ten o'clock at nightâthousands of things, very few coolies, five women, and only one man. After crossing the river we managed to get on to a small train which had four sleepers while we (including Makhan) were six human beings. The women and all the extra things were loaded on to the
ladies' compartment
âthe statement is brief, but the doing of it wasn't quite so simple. There was a huge amount of calling and shouting and running around involvedâstill, Na-didi says I didn't do a thing.
â
That is, a full-
grown man like me, accompanying five women, should have done a great deal more of calling and shouting and running around, and should have sometimes got off here or there on the
platform
to stride around spouting Hindustani. That is, it would have been much more appropriate for me to have become the image of what happens when one whole man gets wholly incensedâthat would have been more befitting of a real man. Na-didi was utterly
disappointed
with my cool demeanour. But in these two days I have opened so many boxes and closed them again and shoved them underneath benches and then pulled them out again from the same place, and I have chased after so many boxes and bundles, and so many of these boxes and bundles have followed me around like a curse, so many have been lost and so many found again, and so many not found again and then so much effort expended in trying and continuing to try for their retrieval, in a way that no twenty-six-year-old son of polite parents has had fated to happen to him. I'm sure I've developed box-
phobia
âwhen I see a box, my teeth start chattering. When I look all around me and all I see are boxes, only boxes, small, big, medium, light and heavy, wooden and tin and leather and clothâone on top, one below, one on the side, one behindâthen all my ordinary strength to call and shout and run around ebbs awayâand then if you see my vacant gaze, drawn face and poor aspect you'll think me a downright cowardâtherefore Na-didi's opinion of me is quite correctâtrapped in the midst of this variety and multiplicity of boxes, I was not myself. Tell Suren to draw a picture of me in this state. Anyway. After that I got into another compartment and lay down. That compartment had two other Bengalis in it. They had come from Dhakaâthe moment you saw them you thought of them somehow as being from Dhaka [
dh
Ä
k
Ä
i
]âone of the two had a head that was almost completely bald and speech that was extremely at an angleâhe asked me, âWas your father on Darjeeling?' If Lakhhi had been there she would have had an appropriate answer; perhaps she would
have said: âHe was on Darjeeling, but Darjeeling was feeling cold then, so he has gone home now.' My reflexes couldn't supply me with such Bengali.
From Siliguri to Darjeeling, Sarala's continuous wonderstruck
exclamations
: âO my, how wonderful', âhow amazing', âhow beautiful'âshe kept nudging me and saying, âRabi-mama, look, look!'
*
What to do, I must look at whatever she shows meâsometimes trees, sometimes clouds, sometimes an invincible blunt-nosed mountain girl, or sometimes so many things at the same time that the train leaves it all behind in an instant and Sarala is unhappy that Rabi-mama didn't get to see it, although Rabi-mama is quite unrepentant. The train kept on going. Beli kept on sleeping. Forests, hilltops, mountains, streams, clouds and a vast number of flat noses and slant eyes began to be seen. Progressively it became wintry, and then there were clouds, and then Na-didi developed a cold, and then Bar-didi began to sneeze, and then shawls, blankets, quilts, thick socks, frozen feet, cold hands, blue faces, sore throats and, right after, Darjeeling.
â
Again those boxes, those bags, that bedding, the same bundles. Luggage piled on luggage, bearer upon bearer. Checking all the things kept in the
brake
, identifying them, loading them on to the heads of the bearers, showing the receipt to the
saheb
, arguing with the saheb, not finding things, and then making various arrangements to find those lost thingsâall this took me about two hours, by which time Na-didi and company had got into their conveyance, gone home, wrapped themselves up in shawls and were reclining on sofas, resting, thinking to themselves that Rabi was not really fully a man yet.
Darjeeling
1887
You will get all the news about my back from Suri's letter.
*
Never again shall I think of the back as merely a place to tuck in the ends of one's
dhuti
âman's humanity is sheltered in his back. If today's letter is
dull
, that is, if it has no
movement
âif my pen does not move fluidly from subject to subject, feeling to feeling, news to newsâthen you will know that it is the fault of my broken backâone cannot blame anything else. In addition, occasionally there is a disastrous sneeze releasedâand it seems as if the upper half of the body shall hurtle away from the broken back. But that's it. I shall not write of my back any more. I swear that I shall not write of my back again! Worthless waist, and it too has a tale! Firstly it neglected every law of
aesthetics
and gradually increased its girth in serial increments; over and above that, it has a thousand different demands. Whoever I speak to about this back laughs; it attracts nobody's pity; as if breaking one's back is in any respect any less than breaking one's heart! But I will not speak of itâI do not ask for pityâ
My back is mine alone,
I have not sold it to anybody else!
It may be broken, but whatever it is
My back remains mine alone!
But however proud I try to be in my verseâthe truth is I really wish my back was somebody else's back! I have heard of the phrase that tells you that it is always best to oil one's own mill, and I've always agreed, but if you are speaking of the back then I'll freely
say that rather than massage hot mustard oil into my own back, I would much rather
prefer
to knead oil into somebody else's back. On this subject, my
sentiments
are entirely
unselfish
, in fact
almost Christian
! But let it be; when I have promised not to speak of my back let us not speak of it. Because, apart from the back, man has many other parts to his body; he has a mind, a heart, a soulâbut whatever you say, he also has a backâvery much soâ
I have immersed my mind in enjoyment
Yet why does my back ache so!
All around me people move around,
My back, why does it ache so!
When one is heartbroken, one comes to the hills to be comforted, but if one's back is broken, then level ground is the best place. I was thinking of those bolsters in Park Street, and at the same time, a few other memories came to mindâbut that's itâI shall not speak of anything to do with my back any moreâI shall forget everything about the time I last suffered from backache; but the ache in my back right nowâhow do I forget that?â
Keep aside your
bÑá¹Ä
, do not sing your song,How will my pain be gone?
Na-didi said there's a way outââ
Rus Tox 6th dilution
every two hours.' I too think so. Sarala is waiting to read my letter and
contradict
me. But the poor thing will be extremely disappointedâthere's no way she can look into what is happening inside my back, her womanly
prying instinct
cannot enter there, for there is
no admittance
there for anything
except
mustard-oil
ointment
. But still, it doesn't seem as if Sarala will give up. She will not tolerate my receiving any sympathy from all of you in this foreign land. This time, though, you will have to concede that as far as my back is concerned, I remain the most trustworthy informant, even Sarala is not a
better authority
on
this subject. But, Bob, don't worry about this back of mine at allâI shall silently suffer this back of mine all on my own. But âsilently' is the wrong word, because the manner in which I've been shouting out loud from time to time when compelled to move about cannot exactly be called silent. And this letter I've written to you today can hardly be called silent either. I had thought at first that you would come to know all about my back from Suren's letterâthat I would not speak of or raise the subject of my back with you, that I would not awaken those old memories of oil massagesâbut look where we've ended up! Insteadâ
All of that, all of that, that lamentation
Those flowing tears, the backache.
But I shall not speak about my back any moreâmainly because I'm running out of space. If there were space enough, I could continue to speak of it from now up until
Doomsday
. But would I have been able to stand up on
Doomsday
with this back? The trumpet would sound, everybody would stand, and I would be moaning with my hand on my back. But that's not something to make light of; you might just get a little annoyed. In any case, both my letter and talk of my back end here.
