Glimpses of Bengal Part 6

The year 1293 [1] will not come again in my life, and, for the matter of that, how many more even of these first days of _Asarh_ will come? My life would be sufficiently long could it number thirty of these first days of _Asarh_ to which the poet of the _Meghaduta_[2] has, for me at least, given special distinction.

[Footnote 1: Of the Bengal era.]

[Footnote 2: In the _Meghaduta_ (Cloud Messenger) of Kalidas a famous description of the burst of the Monsoon begins with the words: _On the first day of Asarh_.]

It sometimes strikes me how immensely fortunate I am that each day should take its place in my life, either reddened with the rising and setting sun, or refres.h.i.+ngly cool with deep, dark clouds, or blooming like a white flower in the moonlight. What untold wealth!

A thousand years ago Kalidas welcomed that first day of _Asarh_; and once in every year of my life that same day of _Asarh_ dawns in all its glory--that self-same day of the poet of old Ujjain, which has brought to countless men and women their joys of union, their pangs of separation.

Every year one such great, time-hallowed day drops out of my life; and the time will come when this day of Kalidas, this day of the _Meghaduta_, this eternal first day of the Rains in Hindustan, shall come no more for me. When I realise this I feel I want to take a good look at nature, to offer a conscious welcome to each day's sunrise, to say farewell to each day's setting sun, as to an intimate friend.

What a grand festival, what a vast theatre of festivity! And we cannot even fully respond to it, so far away do we live from the world! The light of the stars travels millions of miles to reach the earth, but it cannot reach our hearts--so many millions of miles further off are we!

The world into which I have tumbled is peopled with strange beings. They are always busy erecting walls and rules round themselves, and how careful they are with their curtains lest they should see! It is a wonder to me they have not made drab covers for flowering plants and put up a canopy to ward off the moon. If the next life is determined by the desires of this, then I should be reborn from our enshrouded planet into some free and open realm of joy.

Only those who cannot steep themselves in beauty to the full, despise it as an object of the senses. But those who have tasted of its inexpressibility know how far it is beyond the highest powers of mere eye or ear--nay, even the heart is powerless to attain the end of its yearning.

_P.S._--I have left out the very thing I started to tell of. Don't be afraid, it won't take four more sheets. It is this, that on the evening of the first day of _Asarh_ it came on to rain very heavily, in great lance-like showers. That is all.

ON THE WAY TO GOALUNDA,

_21st June 1892._

Pictures in an endless variety, of sand-banks, fields and their crops, and villages, glide into view on either hand--of clouds floating in the sky, of colours blossoming when day meets night. Boats steal by, fishermen catch fish; the waters make liquid, caressing sounds throughout the livelong day; their broad expanse calms down in the evening stillness, like a child lulled to sleep, over whom all the stars in the boundless sky keep watch--then, as I sit up on wakeful nights, with sleeping banks on either side, the silence is broken only by an occasional cry of a jackal in the woods near some village, or by fragments undermined by the keen current of the Padma, that tumble from the high cliff-like bank into the water.

Not that the prospect is always of particular interest--a yellowish sandbank, innocent of gra.s.s or tree, stretches away; an empty boat is tied to its edge; the bluish water, of the same shade as the hazy sky, flows past; yet I cannot tell how it moves me. I suspect that the old desires and longings of my servant-ridden childhood--when in the solitary imprisonment of my room I pored over the _Arabian Nights_, and shared with Sinbad the Sailor his adventures in many a strange land--are not yet dead within me, but are roused at the sight of any empty boat tied to a sand-bank.

If I had not heard fairy tales and read the _Arabian Nights_ and _Robinson Crusoe_ in childhood, I am sure views of distant banks, or the farther side of wide fields, would not have stirred me so--the whole world, in fact, would have had for me a different appeal.

What a maze of fancy and fact becomes tangled up within the mind of man!

The different strands--petty and great--of story and event and picture, how they get knotted together!

SHELIDAH,

_22nd June 1892._

Early this morning, while still lying in bed, I heard the women at the bathing-place sending forth joyous peals of _Ulu! Ulu!_[1] The sound moved me curiously, though it is difficult to say why.

[Footnote 1: A peculiar shrill cheer given by women on auspicious or festive occasions.]

Perhaps such joyful outbursts put one in mind of the great stream of festive activity which goes on in this world, with most of which the individual man has no connection. The world is so immense, the concourse of men so vast, yet with how few has one any tie! Distant sounds of life, wafted near, bearing tidings from unknown homes, make the individual realise that the greater part of the world of men does not, cannot own or know him; then he feels deserted, loosely attached to the world, and a vague sadness creeps over him.

Thus these cries of _Ulu! Ulu!_ made my life, past and future, seem like a long, long road, from the very ends of which they come to me. And this feeling colours for me the beginning of my day.

As soon as the manager with his staff, and the ryots seeking audience, come upon the scene, this faint vista of past and future will be promptly elbowed out, and a very robust present will salute and stand before me.

SHAZADPUR,

_25th June 1892._

In to-day's letters there was a touch about A---'s singing which made my heart yearn with a nameless longing. Each of the little joys of life, which remain unappreciated amid the hubbub of the town, send in their claims to the heart when far from home. I love music, and there is no dearth of voices and instruments in Calcutta, yet I turn a deaf ear to them. But, though I may fail to realise it at the time, this needs must leave the heart athirst.

As I read to-day's letters, I felt such a poignant desire to hear A---'s sweet song, I was at once sure that one of the many suppressed longings of creation which cry after fulfilment is for neglected joys within reach; while we are busy pursuing chimerical impossibilities we famish our lives....

The emptiness left by easy joys, untasted, is ever growing in my life. And the day may come when I shall feel that, could I but have the past back, I would strive no more after the unattainable, but drain to the full these little, unsought, everyday joys which life offers.

SHAZADPUR,

_27th June 1892._

Yesterday, in the afternoon, it clouded over so threateningly, I felt a sense of dread. I do not remember ever to have seen before such angry-looking clouds.

Swollen ma.s.ses of the deepest indigo blue were piled, one on top of the other, just above the horizon, looking like the puffed-out moustaches of some raging demon.

Under the jagged lower edges of the clouds there shone forth a blood-red glare, as through the eyes of a monstrous, sky-filling bison, with tossing mane and with head lowered to strike the earth in fury.

The crops in the fields and the leaves of the trees trembled with fear of the impending disaster; shudder after shudder ran across the waters; the crows flew wildly about, distractedly cawing.

SHAZADPUR,

_29th June 1892._

I wrote yesterday that I had an engagement with Kalidas, the poet, for this evening. As I lit a candle, drew my chair up to the table, and made ready, not Kalidas, but the postmaster, walked in. A live postmaster cannot but claim precedence over a dead poet, so I could not very well tell him to make way for Kalidas, who was due by appointment,--he would not have understood me! Therefore I offered him a chair and gave old Kalidas the go-by.

There is a kind of bond between this postmaster and me. When the post office was in a part of this estate building, I used to meet him every day. I wrote my story of "The Postmaster" one afternoon in this very room.

And when the story was out in the _Hitabadi_ he came to me with a succession of bashful smiles, as he deprecatingly touched on the subject.

Anyhow, I like the man. He has a fund of anecdote which I enjoy listening to. He has also a sense of humour.