(from Pathey Bipathey by Abanindranath Tagore)
Translated by Debashish Banerji
Fog covers everything this morning. There hasn’t been a fog like this this winter. Water land and sky remain sunk in milky light; wherever I look, it feels as though an enormous pane of frosted glass hangs before me. All the ship’s benches are wet with dew; there is no place to sit. 7:50 is the departure time for the ship, but it is now 8:25, yet none of the fellow passengers can be seen. The boatswain, bundled up in an ear-concealing cap, motley woolen jacket and dirty stuffed wrap with Lucknow prints, is picking out fish for himself from a fisherwoman’s basket, storing them in his red bucket. The ship today is a sleeping duck, its head tucked under a wing, floating still by the waterside. My overcoat collar pulled well over my ears, I sit. As with sitting on a lone school bench on a rainy day, I am thinking I’d hurry home if I found a car. At such a time, I heard coming from the fog before me, someone call “ma” in a tender voice.
At this wharf at Barabazar – where from before dawn to well past sunset, there is no respite from the frantic din of work – all the ships stopping their horns stand silent today in the fog. You can imagine how silent it must be. Hence it goes without saying that in this silence that call “ma” in that tender voice penetrated deep within me. As if startled from sleep, looking ahead I saw – confronting our first class deck two large double storeyed ships with enormous bows have pushed through the fog and become half-visible. On the hull of one ship in large black letters is written “Matu” and on the other, ” Questan.” I see no people in the second ship; but in the one named “Matu,” below its balcony near the kitchen, I see sitting close to some shining copper vessels a ship-boy in blue pajamas washing a painted birdcage vigorously with water. With every splash of cold water the bird in the cage screams “ma ma” and that boy looses a continuous stream of speakable and unspeakable abuse at it.
I have always liked birds for pets and what is more, here’s a talking bird! Bringing myself right to the nose of the bow, I was studying the play of boy and bird, when Obin sneaking up from behind, said – “If you wish to get a good look at the bird, come with me.”
Seeing me hesitate, Obin repeated – “Why are you troubling yourself in this cold? Our ship will not stir before 9:30. Come, I know well the old proprietor of that ship, we can spend some leisurely time with him, smoking his pipe and sharing yarns. Mirsahib is a fine fellow. You’ll enjoy knowing him. And there isn’t another ship as showy as “Matu,” it’s wrapped all over in gilt and mirror. It’s cabins are worth seeing.”
Crossing, with Obin, another enormous jetty and a jute storage godown, I entered the ship Matu. It seemed hardly a ship, more like a mansion floating on water! Each deck stretched like a congress pandal, the eye failed to cover its extent. Having climbed up the double storeyed stairs dressed in brass and rubber, we were looking through the gigantic rooms full of gold and crystal, when a deck hand appeared and announced, “Mir saheb sends you his regards.”
Entering Mir saheb’s private cabin with Obin I found an old captain seated on a fabric bed pulling on a hookah, a box of paan beside him. Behind him through the glass of an open window a hazy impression of the jute godown’s tin roof was visible. After the customary pleasantries, Mir saheb turned to Obin and said with a smile, “I’m back in these regions after a long gap. It has been two years since I saw you last and here we are again.”
Presenting me, Obin said, “I brought this friend to meet you. He is very fond of birds; next time you must get him a cockatoo from Singapore. Anyways, tell us now the tale of your voyage.”
Saying this Obin, without pause for permission, picked up a bundle of paan from the box, stuffed two in his mouth and four in my hand, closed his eyes and sat erect, making himself comfortable. Seeing me hesitate, Mir saheb interjected, “Chew the paan, enjoy the story.”
So saying, he began –
“On one side Singapore-Hongkong, on the other, Alexandria and Constantinople, between these my ship docked in uncounted ports. Through day and night, good luck and misfortune, light and shade, in these eighty five years how many a river I have ferried, how many oceans crossed! But this Bhagirathi pulls my heart in a way I can’t explain. Here, on the banks of this Ganga I was born, and in this soil of Bengal I was nurtured. Whether on this land or in the immeasurable depths of the ocean my grave has been fixed, only Allah knows. But my heart wishes that the ship of my last journey sets anchor by the bank of this river. Driven against huge cyclonic storms, wherever whenever I have steered my ship, the image of this riverbank with an enormous banyan and my moss-covered grave below it, has arisen in my mind. The image of home however is not rooted for me in Bengal. My home was here, but what it was like and where, on this or that bank of the river, I have forgotten. Who else lived in that home, brother, sister, no memory remains. Only I remember my mother. Luminous her form in the darkness, nothing else. This is all that remains of my childhood, of when I was a child being raised by my mother.
Subsequently, my memories are clearer. I can’t say what my age was, a number of black boats scattered on the Ganga and myself seated on the bank wailing “ma, ma.” There wasn’t a stitch on my body; and two rupees clutched in my fist. The two rupees were for buying a train ticket – this I remember clearly. Then a sannyasi – with coiled topknot, ash-smeared body, brownish face hair – came up to me and asked, “Beta, why do you cry?” I said, “Take me to my mother, I want to go to Delhi.” The sannyasi laughed and asked if I had any money. I gave him my two rupees and holding his hand, entered a dark narrow street. What happened next escapes me. It is the only hole in the otherwise continuous chain of events in my life.
After this I remember a day waiting to go to Delhi in a wooden enclosure under a tin roof with the sannyasi and our bowls blankets and bundles. All around women and men, young and old, and so many people; some seated, some lying wrapped in blankets. Between two iron columns in the room the water of the Ganga could be seen. Then a great ship like this one appeared and stood right alongside that room. It was so large it didn’t seem to be on water. One saheb appeared and inspecting each of us by pressing our arms legs chests and backs, wrote something in a large register, after which all the people rushed like a herd of cows through the gate and entered the ship. The sannyasi slapped my back and said, “Go, boy! Dilli!” So saying he held my hand and helped me into the ship. Once in the ship, I turned around and saw the sannyasi disappear into the human ocean outside. In joyful expectation of going to Delhi, so long my heart was exulting, but seeing the sannyasi disappear, it’s as if everything stood still inside me. I can’t say how long I was in this state, suddenly hearing the sound of rushing water I noticed that the ship was moving. In the play of light and dark, the rippling water surface looked like the back of a striated snake. A black saheb wearing a white cap and a tan coat appeared and dragging me to a corner of the ship, made me sit. There a group of women seeing me, beat their chests and wailed, some calling their son’s names, some crying “father,” and some “o brother!” After barking a reprimand at them, the saheb left. From the conversations of these fellow passengers I gathered that this was a coolie ship. But I was too young then to know what coolie meant. Watching the water of the river, the light in the sky, the distant forested banks, the effects of dawn and dusk on sand banks my days passed happily.
Then the history of the tea garden. I have seen there how a human can break the backbone of another human by twisting it in slow degrees. How the hot blood of a human turned gradually cold under the whip, he pulls the load of others like a beast of burden body bent to the ground till one day he falls and dies, burying his head and bursting his heart in the hot sand – this too I’ve seen. Yet if I think of home, it is the image of this tea garden that rises in my mind. Here there was much suffering but also unlimited joy. Having come here seeking my mother after losing her in childhood, the sorrow that racked my insides cannot be expressed in words. But then again when some child-bereft mother behind a thorny pineapple bush gathered me to her breast with thin mud-caked hands, shedding her tears on the sun-scorched afternoon earth; when some little black girl wearing red saree and red lacquer bangles would leap on my back while picking tea leaves and embrace me crying “brother!” that sense of joy was indescribable. Then in spring, when all the forests were filled with flowers, songs of birds, golden sunlight, young green leaves, in moments of respite when I looked around I couldn’t bear the loss of my mother. In sixty years I didn’t let my mind or body show any fatigue. This strength came not from me, but was given to me by the one who is my true mother. This is why the saheb owner of the tea garden felt affection for me and wrote the garden in my name after his death. He had no relatives. All his affect was reserved for his tea garden and due to his confidence in my ability to run the garden, for me. But he was mistaken. I did love that plantation – not for its manicured terraced tea shrubs – but for the creepers of human affection that wove themselves around their thorny edges. Where the trees of the forest bent low like a mother to kiss the dust of stones, for those cool shaded forest paths I had secretly stored all my love for those sixty years. At the center of the tea garden, the owner of the plantation had built his own grave – a pointed column of polished black stone, with his name and date of birth in large gold letters. Inscribing his death date on it, I put an end to my tea garden chapter.
The last band of coolies, playing their drums, had left for the docks, to board the ship headed homewards. The evening moon cast its magical light on the silent garden, the motionless forest. Turning out the light in the house I was gazing ahead, when above my head someone or something passed by calling in a tender voice, “ma, ma, ma.” Then like a shadow someone ran past my door towards the forest, it seemed a small boy. I set out stick in hand. Near a cave by the forest, where the darkness stood with its mouth agape, I found the boy. He was a coolie.
I said to him, “All have left, and you’re still here?’
He replied, “Ma has escaped, how can I leave without her?”
I looked this way and that if I could find his mother; the boy suddenly shouted, “Mir saheb, there, see ma!”
In the dark, a flowering branch bent over the opening of the cave, I saw nothing else. Then, as I stood startled by the unspeakable abuse the boy was hurling at his mother, a black bird flew by and sat on his shoulder -.
Interrupting Mir saheb’s story I said, “Below the upper balcony of your ship this morning I have seen just such a boy.”
Laughing, Mir saheb said, “Indeed, he is here with me. I saw the boy clasping the bird with both hands and kissing it repeatedly while letting out an interminable stream of abuse; while the bird repeated, “ma, ma, ma!” Then I heard the coolie ship sound its horn and leave the dock. I said to the boy, “The ship has left, how will you go to your homeland now?”
Staring blankly at me he said, “I have no homeland.”
“Then where were you headed?”
“Where everyone else was.”
I kept the boy with me. “Mir saheb, where is your homeland?” – when he asked me this, I replied, “I don’t know” He thus believes that he and I have set sail to find our homeland.
I said to Mir saheb, “That boy mouths such horrible abuses at the bird, why don’t you scold him and take the bird away? A bird that calls “ma” with such a sweet voice is such a rarity!”
Mir saheb said, “Babuji, it is that boy’s tender “ma” call that the bird has learned from among the old sadness and weeping of that tea garden – not all of that boy is made of abuse.”
At this time, that boy wearing a blue kurta ran in and said to us, “Your ship will now sail, hurry – the mists have lifted and the sun is out.”
Our ship departed sailing past “Matu.” I saw rising from the three chimneys of Mirsaheb’s ship faint white smoke like the down feathers of a bird’s breast. When our ship returned to the jetty, I saw the space where Mirsaheb’s ship had stood, empty. Through that gap was visible an unending line of coolies with loads of jute on their backs making their way to the godown; and gold hat on head, stick in hand, a sahib, supervising them.
