Part 12 (1/2)

SHAZADPUR,

_5th September 1894._

I realise how hungry for s.p.a.ce I have become, and take my fill of it in these rooms where I hold my state as sole monarch, with all doors and windows thrown open. Here the desire and power to write are mine as they are nowhere else. The stir of outside life comes into me in waves of verdure, and with its light and scent and sound stimulated my fancy into story-writing.

The afternoons have a special enchantment of their own. The glare of the sun, the silence, the solitude, the bird cries, especially the cawings of crows, and the delightful, restful leisure--these conspire to carry me away altogether.

Just such noondays seem to have gone to the making of the Arabian Nights,--in Damascus, Bokhara, or Samarkhand, with their desert roadways, files of camels, wandering hors.e.m.e.n, crystal springs, welling up under the shade of feathery date groves; their wilderness of roses, songs of nightingales, wines of s.h.i.+raz; their narrow bazaar paths with bright overhanging canopies, the men, in loose robes and multi-coloured turbans, selling dates and nuts and melons; their palaces, fragrant with incense, luxurious with kincob-covered divans and bolsters by the window-side; their Zobedia or Amina or Sufia with gaily decorated jacket, wide trousers, and gold-embroidered slippers, a long narghilah pipe curled up at her feet, with gorgeously liveried eunuchs on guard,--and all the possible and impossible tales of human deeds and desires, and the laughter and wailing, of that distant mysterious region.

ON THE WAY TO DIGHAPATIAYA,

_20th September 1894._

Big trees are standing in the flood water, their trunks wholly submerged, their branches and foliage bending over the waters. Boats are tied up under shady groves of mango and bo tree, and people bathe screened behind them. Here and there cottages stand out in the current, their inner quadrangles under water.

As my boat rustles its way through standing crops it now and then comes across what was a pool and is still to be distinguished by its cl.u.s.ters of water-lilies, and diver-birds pursuing fish.

The water has penetrated every possible place. I have never before seen such a complete defeat of the land. A little more and the water will be right inside the cottages, and their occupants will have to put up _machans_ to live on. The cows will die if they have to remain standing like this in water up to their knees. All the snakes have been flooded out of their holes, and they, with sundry other homeless reptiles and insects, will have to chum with man and take refuge on the thatch of his roof.

The vegetation rotting in the water, refuse of all kinds floating about, naked children with shrivelled limbs and enlarged spleens splas.h.i.+ng everywhere, the long-suffering patient housewives exposed in their wet clothes to wind and rain, wading through their daily tasks with tucked-up skirts, and over all a thick pall of mosquitoes hovering in the noxious atmosphere--the sight is hardly pleasing!

Colds and fevers and rheumatism in every home, the malaria-stricken infants constantly crying,--nothing can save them. How is it possible for men to live in such unlovely, unhealthy, squalid, neglected surroundings?

The fact is we are so used to bear everything, hands down,--the ravages of Nature, the oppression of rulers, the pressure of our _shastras_ to which we have not a word to say, while they keep eternally grinding us down.

ON THE WAY TO BOALIA,

_22nd September 1894._

It feels strange to be reminded that only thirty-two Autumns have come and gone in my life; for my memory seems to have receded back into the dimness of time immemorial; and when my inner world is flooded with a light, as of an unclouded autumn morning, I feel I am sitting at the window of some magic palace, gazing entranced on a scene of distant reminiscence, soothed with soft breezes laden with the faint perfume of all the Past.

Goethe on his death-bed wanted ”more light.” If I have any desire left at all at such a time, it will be for ”more s.p.a.ce” as well; for I dearly love both light and s.p.a.ce. Many look down on Bengal as being only a flat country, but that is just what makes me revel in its scenery all the more.

Its un.o.bstructed sky is filled to the brim, like an amethyst cup, with the descending twilight and peace of the evening; and the golden skirt of the still, silent noonday spreads over the whole of it without let or hindrance.

Where is there another such country for the eye to look on, the mind to take in?

CALCUTTA,