Selected Short Stories Read online

  I was thinking, why is there such a deep note of mourning in the fields, ghāṭs, sky and sunshine of our country? I think perhaps the reason is that Nature is constantly before our eyes: the wide, open sky, flat and endless land, shimmering sunshine – and in the midst of this men come and go, crossing to and fro like a ferry-boat. The little noises that they make, the ups and downs of their happy or sad efforts in the market of the world, seem in the context of this endlessly reaching, huge, aloof Nature so small, so fleeting, so futile and full of suffering! We feel in Nature’s effortless, unambitious stillness and serenity such vast, beautiful, undistorted, generous Peace; and compared to that such an effortful, agonized, tormented, petty, perpetually unstable lack of peace inside ourselves, that when we look at the distant blue line of the shady woods on the river-bank we are strangely unsettled. Where Nature is swathed and cramped by mist and snow and dark clouds, man feels in command, feels that his work can leave a permanent mark: he looks towards ‘posterity’,1 he builds monuments, writes biographies and erects huge stone memorials over dead bodies…2

  The contrast between India and Europe is significant here, and crops up elsewhere in the letters. Woken up on his houseboat by the noise of the river, Tagore sits and stares out at the dimly moonlit night, and the day seems unreal; but when he gets up in the morning, the night seems remote and dreamlike:

  If one sits up in the middle of the night and looks out at the scene, the world and one’s own self seem to take on a new existence – the daytime world of contact with other people seems false. But when I got up this morning, my night-time world seemed distant and dreamlike and insubstantial. For man, both these worlds are real, but they are very different. To my mind, the daytime world is like European music – consonant and dissonant bits and pieces are combined to produce an overall harmony. And the night-time world is like our Indian music – a pure, poignant, solemn, unmixed rāga. We are stirred and moved by both, yet they are opposed to each other. What can be done? At the root of existence there is a conflict, an opposition; everything divided between the King and the Queen, day and night, variety and unity, time and eternity. We Indians live in the kingdom of the Night – we are attuned to eternity and unity. Our melodies are lonely and single; Europe’s music is social and communal. By our songs the listener is taken beyond the limits of day-to-day happiness and sadness to a companionless, detached world at the root of the universe; and European music takes us on a marvellous dance through the endless fluctuations of human happiness and sadness.3

  From letters like this, and from stories and poems contemporary with them, we can draw up a list of opposites which seem to lie at the back of much of Tagore’s thinking at this time:

  India

  Europe

  Night

  Day

  Country

  Town

  Padma

  Calcutta

  Single-line music

  Harmonic music

  Solitude

  Crowd

  Silence

  Noise

  Spirit

  World

  Female

  Male

  Child

  Adult

  Imagination

  Pragmatism

  Sensitivity

  Cruelty

  Poetry

  Prose

  Idealism

  Realism

  Peace

  sukh-duḥkh

  jal

  sthal

  Unity

  Division

  Eternity

  Time

  Pramathanath Bisi in his study of Tagore’s short stories notices a tension between ‘a longing to enter the human world of happiness and sadness, meeting and parting, and a longing to rove freely in a world of unfettered beauty’.1 The former mainly finds expression in the stories, the latter in the poems: but Pramathanath stresses that they are not ‘watertight compartments’, and neither are the opposites listed above.

  As we have seen, both are present in the stories – the realism of sthal and the idealism of jal. Tagore’s ultimate artistic and spiritual goal was to reconcile realism with idealism: in My Reminiscences he defined this goal as ‘the subject on which all my writings have dwelt – the joy of attaining the Infinite within the finite’.2 There are many poems and songs where it is achieved, where the sukh-duḥkh of mortal life is perfectly in harmony with the Spirit that ‘rolls through all things’. Is it achieved in the short stories?

  Once again, one needs to distinguish between the content and the art of the stories. The essence of their content seems to be a conflict, not a harmony, of Real and Ideal, sthal and jal. They belong to the ghāṭ, to the meeting-place of land and water, a place more often than not of sorrow and tears. His characters weep because of a conflict between goodness and cruelty, innocence and the world, sensitivity and insensitivity, depth and shallowness. Sensitive characters (Ratan in ‘The Postmaster’, Ṭhākurdā’s granddaughter, Banamali in ‘The Divide’, Nirupama in ‘Profit and Loss’, Shashikala in ‘Elder Sister’, Nilkanta in ‘Unwanted’, and many more) weep because their feelings have been hurt; insensitive characters – those who have the potential for change and growth, like the narrators of ‘Ṭhākurdā, ‘Kabuliwallah’ or ‘Thoughtlessness’ – weep when they realize that their actions have been at odds with kindness and goodness. The sky weeps heavy monsoon tears in ‘Housewife’, ‘Thoughtlessness’, ‘Holiday’ or ‘A Single Night’: as if in sympathy with the tension that must always exist between division and unity, cruelty and goodness, world and Spirit.

  At the more factual and historical level of content, too, we find that many stories hinge on a conflict between one or more of the pairs of opposites in the list above: between modern, Westernized values and traditional patterns of life – with Tagore sometimes sympathizing with the former (on child-marriage or female education, for example), sometimes with the latter (on, say, older patterns of landlord–tenant relationship in ‘A Problem Solved’), sometimes holding himself ironically and quizzically aloof. Mary Lago, in her study of the stories, sees them essentially as a product of the clash between the new and the old (‘town and country’), that characterized the evolution of nineteenth-century Bengal.1 But what of the art of the stories? Do we find in them a balanced reconciliation of opposites, or an uneasy forced marriage?

  Tagore’s art is a vulnerable art. Nearly all his writings are vulnerable to criticism, philistinism or contempt, because of his willingness to wear his heart on his sleeve, to take on themes that other writers would find grandiose, sentimental or embarrassing, and his refusal to cloak his utterances in cleverness, urbanity or double-talk. The fact that his works are so difficult to translate has made him doubly vulnerable to criticism by foreigners able to read him only in bad translations. By the same token, Bengalis have become fiercely protective towards him, and find it as difficult to face up to flaws and failings in him as parents do in a much-loved, vulnerable child. He himself lacked self-criticism, and was hypersensitive to the often harsh criticism he received from his compatriots.1 His short stories are his most vulnerable productions of all, and some of them attracted scathing comments when they first appeared. Here is Sureshchandra Samajpati, editor of sāhitya, writing about niśīthe (‘In the Middle of the Night’), after its publication in sādhanā in 1894:

  ‘Nisīthe’ is a short story. The story is utterly lacking in narrative skill; only in its beauty of language and wealth of description is it attractive. But sad to say, its language and rhetoric are not put to any meaningful purpose. The zamindar Dakshinacharan Babu knocks on the door of a doctor’s house in the middle of the night shouting, ‘Doctor! Doctor!’ This is how the story begins. It’s hard to find any reason why he should wake up the doctor at such an hour to tell him his life-story. It is also unlikely that Dakshina Babu would be able to speak with such linguistic and rhetorical skill at half past two in the morning. No one telling his life-story would give such minutely detailed pictures of scenes of so
long ago, in the fine language of a poet: the pure white moonlight, the darkness, the night sounds, the fragrance, the sighs, etc. If Dakshinacharan were a sentimental poet, one might forgive him for it. But unfortunately he comes across as no more than a yātrā-actor with a good memory. He is merely reciting, at half past two in the morning, to meet the thirst of readers of sādhanā for short stories, lines which the author has given him. The story falls down because of the writer’s lack of story-telling skill and inability to perceive what might be plausible, but it has to be praised for the way in which he handles language. Why waste such skill on something so worthless? It’s hard to see clearly which part of the mystery of human existence he wishes to depict.2

  It was this kind of thing, presumably, that drove Tagore to abandon the editorship of sādhanā and give up writing stories completely in 1896 and 1897.

  Tagore’s comments on his stories later in life show that he was aware of their weaknesses. He knew that not all of them would bear comparison with the best European stories – especially the French and Russian writers who were by then available to him in translation but were scarcely so in Calcutta in the 1890s. He defended himself by pointing out that he had to play the demanding role of a pioneer in the art of writing short stories in Bengali. In his interview with Buddhadeva Bose he said:

  You speak about my language, and say that even in my prose I am a poet. But if my language sometimes goes beyond what is appropriate in a story, you can’t blame me for that, for I had to create my Bengali prose myself. My language was not there, heaped-up and ready-made… I had to create the prose of my stories as I went along. You often speak of Maupassant and other foreign writers: their language was already made for them. If they had had to create their language as they wrote, I wonder how they would have fared.1

  It is not of course true that there was no Bengali prose to speak of before Tagore: Bankimchandra Chatterjee was a master stylist, even if his dry, compact style was not a model that the lyrically inclined Tagore could naturally adopt. It is also a fact that other Bengali writers started to write short stories at the same time as Tagore – particularly Nagendranath Gupta (1861–1940) – so Tagore was not totally alone.2 But he was the first Bengali writer to think of the short story as a serious art-form, rather than merely as an entertaining way to fill up the pages of periodicals; the first to write about real, contemporary life rather than romanticized history or myth; and although some British and American models were available to him – and his brother Jyotirindranath perhaps gave him some acquaintance with French – the manner and provenance of Western short stories were really too remote from Bengal to be of much relevance. Some have argued that his ‘supernatural’ stories were influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and Théophile Gautier: one recent debunking critic has accused him of actually lifting material for ‘In the Middle of the Night’ and ‘The Hungry Stones’ from Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and Gautier’s ‘The Mummy’s Foot’.1 But a taste for the macabre and ghostly had long been fostered in Bengal by folk-tales, and Tagore’s direct and straightforward manner of story-telling seems worlds apart from European fin de siècle.

  Even if there had been a mature tradition of short-story-writing in Bengali, and even if the great French and Russian masters had been available to him as models, his stories would probably still have been vulnerable, would still have mixed the perceptive with the naïve, the realistic with the idealized, the rhetorical with the plain, the sophisticated with the jejune. His nature demanded it. He was never a writer who could learn from others: his own, unique literary demon, his jīban-debatā, had too relentless a grip on him. His stories – not only in their content but in their overall character and ‘feel’ – belong not wholly to the prosaic real, not wholly to the poetic ideal either, but to the ghāt where the two meet: sometimes happily (for the ghāt is a place of welcome and home-coming as well as parting), sometimes more uneasily. They leave us, I would say, with a sense of uncertainty: with the cry of the mad Meher Ali in ‘The Hungry Stones’ (‘Keep away! All is false!’) ringing in our ears as well as the song of love that Uma in ‘Exercise-book’ hears; with the rattle of the empty treasure-jar in ‘Fool’s Gold’ as well as Tarapada’s flute-music in ‘Guest’. The reconciliation at the end of ‘The Gift of Sight’, between a wife whose blindness takes her deep into her Indian soul and a husband whose medical career takes him far away from his, is not, perhaps, total – but Tagore would be a much less valuable writer if it was. His blend of poetry and prose is all the more truthful for being incomplete.

  1990

  The Living and the Dead

  I

  The widow living with the zamindar Sharadashankar’s family, in the big house at Ranihat, had no blood-relatives left. One by one they had died. In her husband’s family, too, there was no one she could call her own, having no husband or son. But there was a little boy – her brother-in-law’s son – who was the apple of her eye. His mother had been very ill for a long time after his birth, so his Aunt Kadambini had brought him up. Anyone who brings up someone else’s son becomes specially devoted: there are no rights, no social claims – nothing but ties of affection. Affection cannot prove itself with a legal document; nor does it wish to. All it can do is love with doubled intensity, because it owns so uncertainly.

  Kadambini poured her frustrated widow’s love on to this boy, till one night in Śrābaṇ she suddenly died. For some strange reason her heartbeat stopped. Everywhere else, Time continued; yet in this one, small, tender, loving heart its clock’s tick ceased. Keeping the matter quiet, in case the police took notice, four Brahmin employees of the zamindar quickly carried off the body to be burnt.

  The cremation-ground at Ranihat was a long way from human habitation. There was a hut on the edge of a tank there, and next to it an immense banyan tree: nothing else at all on the wide open plain. Formerly a river had flowed here – the tank had been made by digging out part of the dried-up course of the river. The local people now regarded this tank as a sacred spring. The four men placed the corpse inside the hut and sat down to wait for the wood for the pyre to arrive. The wait seemed so long that they grew restless: Nitai and Gurucharan went off to see why the firewood was so long coming, while Bidhu and Banamali sat guarding the corpse.

  It was a dark monsoon night. The clouds were swollen; not a star could be seen in the sky. The two men sat silently in the dark hut. One of them had matches and a candle, wrapped up in his chadar. They could not get the matches to light in the damp air, and the lantern they had brought with them had gone out as well. After sitting in silence for a long time, one of them said, ‘I could do with a puff of tobacco, bhāi. We forgot everything in the rush.’

  ‘I’ll run and get some,’ said the other. ‘I won’t be a minute.’

  ‘That’s nice!’ said Bidhu, perceiving his motive. ‘I suppose I’m to stay here on my own?’

  They fell silent again. Five minutes seemed like an hour. They began inwardly to curse the two who had gone to trace the firewood – no doubt they were sitting comfortably somewhere having a smoke and chatting. They were soon convinced that this must be so. There was no sound anywhere – just the steady murmur of crickets and frogs round the tank. Suddenly the bed seemed to stir a little, as if the dead body had turned on to its side. Bidhu and Banamali began to shudder and mutter prayers. Next moment a long sigh was heard: the two immediately fled outside and ran off towards the village.

  A couple of miles along the path they met their two companions returning with lanterns in their hands. They had actually just been for a smoke, and had found out nothing about the firewood. They claimed it was being chopped up now and would not be long coming. Bidhu and Banamali then described what had happened in the hut. Nitai and Gurucharan dismissed this as nonsense, and rebuked the other two angrily for deserting their post.

  The four of them swiftly returned to the hut at the cremation-ground. When they went in, they found that the corpse had gone: the bed was empty. They stared at one another. Could jackals hav
e made off with it? But even the garment that covered it had gone. Searching about outside the hut they noticed in a patch of mud by the door some recent, small, woman’s footprints.

  The zamindar, Sharadashankar, was not a fool: to try to tell him a ghost-story would get them nowhere. After long discussion, the four decided they had best say simply that the cremation had taken place.

  When, towards dawn, the wood arrived at last, those who brought it were told that in view of the delay the job had already been done, using firewood stored in the hut. They had no reason to doubt this. A dead body was not a valuable object: why should anyone wish to steal it?

  II

  It is well known that an apparently lifeless body can harbour dormant life which in time may bring the body back to life. Kadambini had not died: for some reason, her life-function had been suspended – that was all.

  When she regained consciousness, she saw dense darkness all around her. She realized that the place where she was lying was not her usual bedroom. She called out ‘Didi’ once, but no one in the dark room replied. She sat up in alarm, recalling her death-bed – that sudden pain in her chest, the choking for breath. Her eldest sister-in-law had been squatting in a corner of the room warming her little son’s milk on a stove – Kadambini had collapsed on to the bed, no longer able to stand. Gasping, she had called, ‘Didi, bring the little boy to me – I think I’m dying.’ Then everything had gone black, as if an inkpot had been poured over a page of writing. Kadambini’s entire memory and consciousness, all the letters in her book of life, became at that moment indistinguishable. She had no recollection of whether her nephew had called out ‘Kākimā’ for the last time, in his sweet loving voice; whether she had been given that final viaticum of love, to sustain her as she travelled from the world she knew, along Death’s strange and endless path.