Just ask the maid
to get some paper and a pen.
You’ll see, I’ll make no mistakes;
from ka and kha to cerebral na
I’ll write Dad’s letter for him, I promise!
Come on, Mum, what’s the meaning of that smile?
You think, don’t you, I can never write
as good a hand as Dad can?
I’ll draw the lines first,
then the rest big and neat.
When you see it, you won’t believe it!
When the letter’s written,
d’you think I’d be silly
like Dad and put it in the bag?
Never! Myself
I’ll read it out to you,
for they don’t deliver good letters.
[Rainy season 1903?]
Hide-and-Seek
If I played a naughty trick on you, Mum,
and flowered as a champa on a champa tree,
and at sunrise, upon a branch,
had a good play among the young leaves,
then you’d lose, and I’d be the winner,
for you wouldn’t recognise me.
You’d call, ‘Khoka, where are you?’
I’d just smile quietly.
All jobs you do in the morning
I’d watch with my eyes wide open.
After your bath, damp hair loose on your back,
you’d walk this way, under the champa tree.
From here you’d go to the chapel
and smell flowers from afar –
you wouldn’t know that it was
the smell of your Khoka’s body in the air.
At noontime, when everyone’s had their lunch,
you’d sit down, the Mahabharat in your hands.
Through the window the tree’s shade
would fall on your back, on your lap.
I’d bring my little shadow close to you
and sway it softly on your book –
you wouldn’t know that it was
your Khoka’s shadow moving before your eyes.
In the evening you’d light a lamp
and go to the cow-shed, Mum.
Then would I, my flower-play done,
fall down plonk on the ground.
Once again I’d become your little boy,
go up to you and say, ‘Tell me a story.’
You’d say, ‘Naughty! Where have you been all day?’
I’d say, ‘I’m not telling you that!’
[Rainy season 1903?]
FROM Utsarga (1903-4, 1914)
No. 7
Like a musk-deer
maddened by my own scent,
a maniac, I roam
from forest to forest.
The south wind blows
upon a night of Phalgun.
I quite lose
my power of orientation.
What I want
I want by mistake.
What I get
I do not want at all.
My desire – it flies out
from my breast.
Like a mirage
it shifts from place to place.
I want to hug
and press it against my chest,
but never again
does it return to my breast.
What I want
I want by mistake.
What I get
I do not want at all.
My flute – it wants
to hang on to its own song,
like one deranged, gone
totally off the rails.
But what is caught
and bound so fast, so fast –
from it, alas,
all melody evaporates.
What I want
I want by mistake.
What I get
I do not want at all.
FROM Kheya (1906)
The Auspicious Moment
O Mother, listen: the king’s darling son
will ride past my room this very day!
How can I cope with housework
this morning?
Tell me, please, how I should dress myself,
in which style my hair should be braided,
how my body should be draped
and in which tint.
Ah, Mother, why do you look at me like that
with such surprise?
I know too well he’ll never cast a glance
at the spot by my window where I’ll stand and bide.
It will all be over in the twinkling of an eye
and to a distant city away he’ll ride.
Only from some field a minstrel-flute
may play a wistful melody for a while.
Yet, knowing that the king’s darling son
will ride past my room this very day,
what can I do but get myself dressed up
just for that moment?
[Bolpur, 29 July 1905]
The Renunciation
O Mother, listen: the king’s darling son
just rode past my room!
How the golden crest of his chariot gleamed
in the morning sun!
At my window I removed my veil
and just for a moment stole a glance at him.
I tore my chain of jewels, flung it on the dust
right before his path.
Ah, Mother, why do you look at me like that
with such surprise?
Of course, he didn’t pick up the chain-torn jewels:
his wheels ground them to dust.
His wheel-track is all you can see now
before our house.
No one knows what I gave to whom:
it’s covered by dust.
Yet, seeing that the king’s darling son
was riding past my room,
what could I do but fling the jewels of my breast
before his path?
[Bolpur, 29 July 1905]
FROM Gitanjali (1910)
No. 106
Gently in this hallowed place
wake up, o my mind –
on this seashore of India’s grand
concourse of humankind.
Here I stand and stretch my arms,
saluting God-in-Man;
in grand rhythm, with great delight
I praise Him as best I can.
This mountain-range so steeped in meditation,
these plains clutching their rosaries of rivers:
here for ever the sacred Earth
we may find,
on this seashore of India’s grand
concourse of humankind.
No one knows who called them to this place –
such streams of humanity!
Whence did they issue, in impetuous cascades,
to lose themselves in the sea?
Here Aryans and non-Aryans,
Chinese and Dravidians,
Scythians, Huns, Pathans, Mughals
dissolved in one body.
Now that the West has opened its door
we’re bringing ourselves gifts from that store.
We shall give and receive, mingle and harmonise:
there’s no turning back
on this seashore of India’s grand
concourse of humankind.
Those warrior-hordes who sang of conquest
with a demented din,
through desert trails and mountain passes
all those who poured in:
they are all within me still,
none are far from me!
In my blood their music hums
in all its diversity.
Resound, resound, awesome vina,
so those who still despise and shun us
may burst the barriers and gather around us.
Yes, they’ll congregate
on this seashore of India’s grand
concourse of humankind.
Here once without cease
the great sound of Om
had vibrated in heart-strings
asking us to be one.
With ascesis it strove to cast
the Many in the fire of the One,
to forget divisions and set in motion
one gigantic heart.
The entrance to that sacred space
where such a sacrament took place
is now open, so with good grace
we must humbly congregate:
on this seashore of India’s grand
concourse of humankind.
Look! That sacrificial fire
is streaked today with suffering’s red glare.
Within our spirits this burning we must bear –
it is written in our fate.
My mind, be strong to endure this affliction
and listen to unity’s call.
Your sense of fear, embarrassment, humiliation –
banish them, conquer them all.
The intolerable pain will come to an end.
Behold what a huge new life is about to be born!
The night glides to daybreak, the mother-bird wakes
in her colossal nest –
on this seashore of India’s grand
concourse of humankind.
Come, Aryans, non-Aryans,
Hindus and Muslims alike.
Come you too – you, English people.
Come, come, Christians!
Come, Brahmins, with chastened minds,
and hold everyone’s hands.
Come, outcastes, bidding goodbye
to your burden of affronts.
Make haste to Mother’s consecration,
where the ritual jars are waiting to be filled
with water blessed by the touch
of all and sundry’s hands –
today on this seashore of India’s grand
concourse of humankind.
[Bolpur-Santiniketan, 2 July 1910]
No. 107
Where the lowliest live, the poorer than poor,
it’s there that your footsteps ring:
behind all, below all,
amongst those who’ve lost everything.
When I make an obeisance to you,
somewhere my gesture comes to an abrupt end.
To those lowest depths of hurt and insult, where your feet descend,
my gesture of homage, alas, cannot bend:
behind all, below all,
amongst those who’ve lost everything.
Pride can never reach you where you wander
in humble clothes, bereft of adornments:
behind all, below all,
amongst those who’ve lost everything.
Where wealth is heaped, where honour is piled up,
it’s there that I expect your company,
but where you dwell as a friend of friendless men,
to that low abode my heart, alas, cannot bend:
behind all, below all,
amongst those who’ve lost everything.
[Bolpur-Santiniketan, 3 July 1910]
No. 108
My ill-fated country, those you have affronted –
with them you must be equalised by sharing the same affront.
Those you have denied
human rights,
allowed to stand before you but never invited in –
with all of them you must be equalised by sharing the same affront.
Day after day you have avoided the human touch,
showing your contempt for the deity that dwells in man.
One day the Creator’s ruthless fury
will make you sit by famine’s doorway
and share with others what there is to eat and drink.
With all of them you’ll have to be equalised by sharing the same affront.
There, where you have pushed them away from sharing your seat,
even there you have banished your own powers, carelessly.
Crushed by feet,
those powers now crumble to dust.
You must come down to that level, or else you can’t be redeemed.
Today you have to be equalised with others by sharing the same affront.
Whoever you fling to a lower level will bind you to that level.
Whoever you keep behind your back is only dragging you backwards.
Whoever you keep occluded,
hidden in ignorance-darkness,
is shaping a chasm between you and your own welfare.
You must be equalised with all of them by sharing the same affront.
A hundred centuries have rained indignities on your head,
yet you still refuse to acknowledge the innate divinity of man.
But can you not see
when you lower your eyes
that the God of the downtrodden, the outcaste, is there in the dust with them?
You must be equalised there with all the others by sharing the same affront.
You cannot see Death’s messenger at your door:
he has already inscribed a curse on your caste-pride.
If you don’t send out a call to all
and still insist on staying apart,
wrapping yourself on all sides with your conceit,
then surely in death, in the pyre’s ashes, you will be equalised with all.
[Bolpur-Santiniketan, 4 July 1910]
FROM Balaka (1916)
No. 6
Are you just a picture upon a piece of paper?
Those distant nebulae
who jostle in the sky’s nest,
those who, day and night,
light in hand, are in transit through the dark,
planets and stars –
are you not as real as they are?
Alas, picture, are you just a picture?
In the midst of the ever-restless why are you calm?
O you without a path,
find a travelling companion!
be amongst all and still be so far away,
for ever fastened to fixity’s inner niche?
Why, this dust that lifts
the grey end of its cloth
and wind-blown, runs amuck,
in Baishakh strips the widowed earth of jewels,
decks the anchoress in saffron attire,
in spring’s coupling-dawns
covers her limbs with the tracery of patterns:
even this dust is real, alas,
like this grass,
almost hidden under the feet of the universe.
Because they are mutable, they are real.
You are immutable, you are a picture.
You are just a picture.
One day you walked this road by our side.
Your breast stirred with your breathing.
In your limbs
your life created its very own rhythms
in songs and dances
keeping time with the cosmos.
Ah, that was so long ago, that was!
In my life
and my world
how real you were once!
In every direction,
wherever my eyes glanced,
it was you who inscribed
the graphics of art’s delight with beauty’s brush.
In that morning it was you who was
the word of the cosmos made flesh.
As we travelled together,
behind the screen of one night
you came to a stop.
I’ve kept going
with so much pleasure and pain
for days and nights.
Flood-tide and ebb-tide
in light and dark, sea and sky;
on either side of the road the flowers march past,
quietly, with all their dyes.
Life’s wild river rushes in a thousand streams,
ringing death’s bells.
The unknown calls me;
I walk further, further,
drugged by my passion for the road
.
But where you stood
when you got off the road –
there you are stuck.
This grass, this dust, those stars, that sun, that moon –
screened by them all,
you are a picture, you are just a picture.
What a poetic delirium this is!
You – a picture?
No, no, you are not just a picture.
Who says you are bound by still lines
and mute cries?
Nonsense! That joy could have ceased only if
this river had lost its flow
or this cloud
had wiped this golden writing off itself.
If the shadow
of your fine hair had vanished for ever,
then one day
the murmuring shade
of wind-blown madhabis too
would have been a dream.
Had I forgotten you?
It is because
you lodge in my life’s roots
that the error arises.
With absent minds we walk,
forgetting the flowers.
Don’t we forget the stars?
And yet
they sweeten the air we breathe,
fill with tunes
the emptiness that dwells within our errors.
Being unmindful – I don’t call it oblivion:
you’ve swayed my blood from your seat in my amnesia’s core.
Before my eyes you are not;
right within my eyes are you installed.
That is why
you are the green of my greens, the blue of my blues.
My whole world
has found its inner harmony in you.
No one knows, not even I,
that your melodies reverberate in my songs.
You are the poet within the poet’s heart.
You are not a picture. No, not just a picture.
Early one morning I found you,
then lost you at night.
And in the darkness you return, unawares to me.
You are not a picture. No, you are not a picture.
[Allahabad, 20 October 1914]