My Reminiscences Part 17

When I started for my second voyage to England, I made the acquaintance on board s.h.i.+p of Asutosh Chaudhuri. He had just taken the M. A. degree of the Calcutta University and was on his way to England to join the Bar. We were together only during the few days the steamer took from Calcutta to Madras, but it became quite evident that depth of friends.h.i.+p does not depend upon length of acquaintance. Within this short time he so drew me to him by his simple natural qualities of heart, that the previous life-long gap in our acquaintance seemed always to have been filled with our friends.h.i.+p.

When Ashu came back from England he became one of us.[57] He had not as yet had time or opportunity to pierce through all the barriers with which his profession is hedged in, and so become completely immersed in it. The money-bags of his clients had not yet sufficiently loosened the strings which held their gold, and Ashu was still an enthusiast in gathering honey from various gardens of literature. The spirit of literature which then saturated his being had nothing of the mustiness of library morocco about it, but was fragrant with the scent of unknown exotics from over the seas. At his invitation I enjoyed many a picnic amidst the spring time of those distant woodlands.

He had a special taste for the flavour of French literature. I was then writing the poems which came to be published in the volume ent.i.tled _Kadi o Komal_, Sharps and Flats. Ashu could discern resemblances between many of my poems and old French poems he knew. According to him the common element in all these poems was the attraction which the play of world-life had for the poet, and this had found varied expression in each and every one of them. The unfulfilled desire to enter into this larger life was the fundamental motive throughout.

"I will arrange and publish these poems for you," said Ashu, and accordingly that task was entrusted to him. The poem beginning _This world is sweet_ was the one he considered to be the keynote of the whole series and so he placed it at the beginning of the volume.

Ashu was very possibly right. When in childhood I was confined to the house, I offered my heart in my wistful gaze to outside nature in all its variety through the openings in the parapet of our inner roof-terrace. In my youth the world of men in the same way exerted a powerful attraction on me. To that also I was then an outsider and looked out upon it from the roadside. My mind standing on the brink called out, as it were, with an eager waving of hands to the ferryman sailing away across the waves to the other side. For Life longed to start on life's journey.

It is not true that my peculiarly isolated social condition was the bar to my plunging into the midst of the world-life. I see no sign that those of my countrymen who have been all their lives in the thick of society feel, any more than I did, the touch of its living intimacy. The life of our country has its high banks, and its flight of steps, and, on its dark waters falls the cool shade of the ancient trees, while from within the leafy branches over-head the _koel_ cooes forth its ravis.h.i.+ng old-time song. But for all that it is stagnant water. Where is its current, where are the waves, when does the high tide rush in from the sea?

Did I then get from the neighbourhood on the other side of our lane an echo of the victorious paean with which the river, falling and rising, wave after wave, cuts its way through walls of stone to the sea? No! My life in its solitude was simply fretting for want of an invitation to the place where the festival of world-life was being held.

Man is overcome by a profound depression while nodding through his voluptuously lazy hours of seclusion, because in this way he is deprived of full commerce with life. Such is the despondency from which I have always painfully struggled to get free. My mind refused to respond to the cheap intoxication of the political movements of those days, devoid, as they seemed, of all strength of national consciousness, with their complete ignorance of the country, their supreme indifference to real service of the motherland. I was tormented by a furious impatience, an intolerable dissatisfaction with myself and all around me. Much rather, I said to myself, would I be an Arab Bedouin!

While in other parts of the world there is no end to the movement and clamour of the revelry of free life, we, like the beggar maid, stand outside and longingly look on. When have we had the wherewithal to deck ourselves for the occasion and go and join in it? Only in a country where the spirit of separation reigns supreme, and innumerable petty barriers divide one from another, need this longing to realise the larger life of the world in one's own remain unsatisfied.

I strained with the same yearning towards the world of men in my youth, as I did in my childhood towards outside nature from within the chalk-ring drawn round me by the servants. How rare, how unattainable, how far away it seemed! And yet if we cannot get into touch with it, if from it no breeze can blow, no current come, if no road be there for the free goings and comings of travellers, then the dead things that acc.u.mulate around us never get removed, but continue to be heaped up till they smother all life.

During the Rains there are only dark clouds and showers. And in the Autumn there is the play of light and shade in the sky, but that is not all-absorbing; for there is also the promise of corn in the fields. So in my poetical career, when the rainy season was in the ascendant there were only my vaporous fancies which stormed and showered; my utterance was misty, my verses were wild. And with the _Sharps and Flats_ of my Autumn, not only was there the play of cloud-effects in the sky, but out of the ground crops were to be seen rising. Then, in the commerce with the world of reality, both language and metre attempted definiteness and variety of form.

Thus ends another Book. The days of coming together of inside and outside, kin and stranger, are closing in upon my life. My life's journey has now to be completed through the dwelling places of men. And the good and evil, joy and sorrow, which it thus encountered, are not to be lightly viewed as pictures. What makings and breakings, victories and defeats, clas.h.i.+ngs and minglings, are here going on!

I have not the power to disclose and display the supreme art with which the Guide of my life is joyfully leading me through all its obstacles, antagonisms and crookednesses towards the fulfilment of its innermost meaning. And if I cannot make clear all the mystery of this design, whatever else I may try to show is sure to prove misleading at every step. To a.n.a.lyse the image is only to get at its dust, not at the joy of the artist.

So having escorted them to the door of the inner sanctuary I take leave of my readers.

Printed in the United States of America

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A jingling sentence in the Bengali Child's Primer.

[2] Exercises in two-syllables.

[3] Roofed colonnade or balcony. The writer's family house is an irregular three-storied ma.s.s of buildings, which had grown with the joint family it sheltered, built round several courtyards or quadrangles, with long colonnades along the outer faces, and narrower galleries running round each quadrangle, giving access to the single rows of rooms.

[4] The men's portion of the house is the outer; and the women's the inner.

[5] These Bustees or settlements consisting of tumbledown hovels, existing side by side with palatial buildings, are still one of the anomalies of Calcutta. _Tr._

[6] Corresponding to "Wonderland."

[7] There are innumerable renderings of the Ramayana in the Indian languages.

[8] A kind of crisp unsweetened pancake taken like bread along with the other courses.

[9] Food while being eaten, and utensils or anything else touched by the hand engaged in conveying food to the mouth, are considered ceremonially unclean.

[10] The writer is the youngest of seven brothers. The sixth brother is here meant.

[11] Obsolete word meaning bee.

[12] The lane, a blind one, leads, at right angles to the front verandah, from the public main road to the grounds round the house.

[13] G.o.d of Death.

[14] G.o.ddess of Learning.

[15] The Jupiter Pluvius of Hindu Mythology.

[16] The King of the Yakshas is the Pluto of Hindu Mythology.

[17] Corresponding to Lethe.

[18] Krishna's playground.

[19] Correspondence clerk.

[20] Spices wrapped in betel leaf.

[21] It is considered sinful for non-brahmins to cast glances on neophytes during the process of their sacred-thread invest.i.ture, before the ceremony is complete.

[22] Two novices in the hermitage of the sage Kanva, mentioned in the Sanskrit drama, Sakuntala.

[23] The text for self-realisation.

[24] Bards or reciters.

[25] The Cow and the Brahmin are watchwords of modern Hindu Orthodoxy.

[26] An instrument on which the keynote is strummed to accompany singing.

[27] A large proportion of words in the literary Bengali are derived unchanged from the Sanskrit.

[28] Servants call the master and mistress father, and mother, and the children brothers and sisters.

[29] Name of Vishnu in his aspect of slayer of the proud demon, Madhu.

[30] Nirada is a Sanscrit word meaning _cloud_, being a compound of _nira_ = water and _da_ = giver. In Bengali it is p.r.o.nounced _nirode_.

[31] Betel-leaf and spices.

[32] Father of the well-known artists Gaganendra and Abanindra. _Ed._

[33] In Bengali this word has come to mean an informal uninvited gathering.

[34] Systems of notation were not then in use. One of the most popular of the present-day systems was subsequently devised by the writer's brother here mentioned. _Tr._