Part 6 (1/2)
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.]