Read I Won't Let You Go Online
Authors: Rabindranath Tagore Ketaki Kushari Dyson
They brought me this wild plant, its leaves
a yellowish green, its flowers
like crafted cups of a violet hue
for drinking the light.
I ask, ‘What’s it called?’
No one knows.
It belongs to the universe’s infinite unfamiliar wing,
where the sky’s nameless stars also belong.
So I’ve made it captive in a pet-name
to get to know it by myself in private.
I call it ‘Peyali’, Miss Cup.
Invited by the garden, they’ve all come –
dahlia, fuchsia, marigold.
But this one enjoys the unspotted freedom that comes
from not being cared for, not being bound by caste.
It’s a Baul, living on society’s edge.
In no time at all its flowers have fallen off.
The sound that the falls made
couldn’t be caught by ears.
The conjunction of moments that make up this plant’s horoscope
is infinitesimal.
The honey stored in its bosom
is a minute drop.
Its journey’s complete in a tiny spot of time,
even as the fire-petalled sun completes its flowering
in an eon’s span.
This plant’s little history’s written by the cosmic scribe
with a very small pen in the corner of a very small page.
Yet at the same time is that vast history unfolded,
where sight cannot climb from one page to the next.
The currents of centuries that flow without intermission
like slow-motion waves, carrying in their course
the rises and falls of so many mountain-chains,
in seas and deserts so many costume-changes –
the same endless time’s long flow has advanced
through creation’s conflicts
this floweret’s primeval purpose.
For millions of years in the path of its flowering and falling
that ancient purpose has stayed new, alive, mobile.
Its finished, finalised picture’s not appeared yet.
This purpose without body, that picture without lines –
in which invisible’s vision do they live without end?
In the infinite imagination of the same invisible
which holds me and the history of all men
of the past and of the future.
[Santiniketan, 5 November 1935]
As day by day the woodlands slowly cause
Phalgun’s colourful mood to fade away
into dry Baishakh’s bareness, so have you,
enchantress, in wanton neglect,
withdrawn your witching arts.
Once with your own hands you had spread magic on my eyes,
set my blood swinging, filled me with drunkenness –
my cup-bearer!
Now you’ve emptied the cup,
dashing the magical juices against the dust.
You’ve ignored my compliments,
neglected to summon the surprise of my eyes.
There’s no accent now in the way you dress yourself,
nor, in my name, any of that hushed vibration
which had once made it musical.
They say that once winds whirled
round the moon’s body.
Then had it the craft of colours,
the witchery of music.
Then was it ever-new.
Indifferent to all that, why did it, over the days,
block the flow of its own play?
Why did it grow weary of its own sweetness?
Today all it has
is the unfriendly duality of light and shade:
flowers don’t bloom there,
nor do murmuring streams glide.
That silent moon you are to me today.
And this is my sadness – that you are not sad about it.
Once, sorceress, you were wont to renew yourself
with my own delight’s dyes.
Today you’ve drawn over that scene
the black curtain of an epoch’s end,
colourless, tongue-tied.
You’ve forgotten that the more you gave yourself,
the more you found yourself in diverse ways.
Today, by depriving me,
of your own triumph you’ve deprived yourself.
The ruins of the era of your sweetness remain
in the strata of my mind:
the crumbled gates of those days,
foundations of palaces,
garden paths choked with weeds.
Among the scattered fragments
of your fallen grandeur I live,
groping for the darkness that lies beneath the ground,
picking up and saving what my fingers knock against.
And you dwell
in the wan desert of your own miserliness,
which has no water to slake thirst,
nor even the means
to con thirst by mirages.
[Santiniketan, 16 February 1936]
In the deep dark night
the rainy wind
lashes indiscriminately around.
Clouds rumble,
rattling windows,
causing doors to vibrate.
I look outside:
rows of areca and coconut palms
are restlessly tossing their heads.
Lumps of darkness
heave in the jack’s thick branches
like ghosts conspiring together.
A ray of light from the street
touching a corner of the pond
is as sinuous as a snake.
And I remember the old lines –
‘Deep the night of Shaon, deep the thunder’s moan…
at such a time I dreamt…’
Behind the picture of the Radhika of those days
near the poet’s eyes
there was a girl,
a bud of love just sprouting in her mind.
Shy she was,
her eyes shaded with lamp-black,
and ‘wringing, wringing’ her blue sari, she went
home from the ghat.
This stormy night
I want to bring her to my mind –
as she was in her mornings, evenings,
manner of speech, way of thinking,
the glance of her eyes –
that daughter of Bengalis the poet knew
three hundred years ago.
I don’t see her clearly.
She’s in the shadow of others, and these –
the way they fix their sari-ends on their shoulders,
the way they curve their hair into knots
sloping slightly on their necks,
or the way they look you straight in the face, –
well, such a picture
wasn’t in front of the poet three hundred years ago.
Yet – ‘Deep the night of Shaon…
at such a time I dreamt…’
That Srabon night the rainy wind did blow
as it does tonight,
and there are likenesses
between the dreams of yore and the dreams of nowadays.
[Santiniketan, 30 May 1936]
You are standing outside the doorway, screened by the curtain,
wondering whether to come into my room.
Just once I heard the faint tinkle of your bangles.
I can see a bit of your sari-end, pale brick-red,
stirring in the wind
without the door.
I can’t see you,
but I can see that the western sun
has stolen your shadow
and cast it on the floor of my room.
Below your sari’s black border I see
your creamy golden feet hesitating
on the threshold.
But I won’t call you today.
Today my light-weight awareness has scattered itself
like stars in the deep sky of the moon’s waning phase,
like white clouds surrendering themselves
to the blue of the post-rains.
My love
is like a field long abandoned by the farmer,
its boundary-ridges in ruins,
on which absent-minded primal nature
has re-asserted her rights
without giving it so much as a thought.
Grass has grown over it,
weeds without names have sprung.
It has merged with the wilderness around it,
as at the end of night the morning star
lets its own light’s pitcher sink
into the light of the morning.
Today my mind’s not hemmed in by boundaries,
so you might misunderstand me.
All the old signs are wiped out.
You won’t be able to hold me together anywhere
tight in any trussing.
[Santiniketan, 1 June 1936]
Many were the riches I didn’t gain in my life,
for they were beyond my reach,
but much more I lost because
I didn’t open my palms.
In that familiar world
like an unsophisticated village belle
lived this flower, its face covered,
ignoring my neglect without a grudge –
this tamarind flower.
A squat tree by the wall,
stunted by the niggardly soil,
its bushy branches growing so close to the ground
that I hadn’t realised its age.
Over there lime flowers have opened,
trees have filled with frangipani blossoms,
kanchons have budded in the corner tree,
and in its prayerful striving for flowers
the kurchi branch has become a Mahashweta.
Their language is clear:
they have greeted me and introduced themselves to me.
Suddenly today some whispering from beneath a veil
seemed to reach my ears.
I spied a shy bud in a spot of the tamarind branch
on the wayside,
its colour a pale yellow,
its scent delicate,
a very fine writing on its petals.
In our town house there is
an aged tamarind tree I’ve known since childhood,
standing in the north-west corner
like a guardian-god
or an old family servant
as ancient as Great-grandfather.
Through the many chapters of our family’s births and deaths
quietly it has stood
like a courtier of dumb history.
The names of so many of those
whose rights to that tree through the ages were undisputed
are today even more fallen than its fallen leaves.
The memories of so many of them
are more shadowy than that tree’s shadow.
Once upon a time there used to be a stable below it,
in a tiled shed
restless with hooves.
The shouts of excited grooms have long departed.
On the other bank of history is that age
of horse-drawn carriages.
The neighing’s silent
and the canvas has changed its tints.
The head coachman’s well-trimmed beard,
his proud disdainful steps, whip in hand,
have, with the rest of that glittering paraphernalia,
gone to the great greenroom for costume-changes.
In the morning sunshine of ten o’clock
day after day from under that tamarind tree
came a carriage without fail to take me to school,
dragging a young lad’s load of helpless reluctance
through the crowded streets.
No, you won’t recognise that boy today –
neither in his body, nor in his mind, nor in his situation.
But poised and serene, the tamarind tree still stands,
indifferent to the rises and falls
of human fortunes.
I remember one day in particular.
From the night on the rain had poured in torrents
till by daybreak the sky was the colour
of a madman’s eyeballs.
Directionless, the storm blew everywhere
like a huge bird beating its wings
in an invisible cosmic cage.
The street was water-logged,
the yard flooded.
Standing on the veranda I watched
how that tree lifted its head to the sky, like an angry sage,
reprimands in all its branches.
On each side of the lane the houses looked like nitwits:
they had no language with which they could complain
against the sky’s torment.
Only that tree in the tumult of its leaves
could voice rebellion
and hurl arrogant curses.
Ringed by the mute insensibility of brick-and-wood,
it alone was the forest’s delegate,
and on the rain-pale horizon I saw its commoved greatness.
But when, spring after spring,
others got their honours, like ashok and bokul,
I knew the tamarind as a stern and stoical porter
at the outer gate of the monarch of all seasons.
Who knew then how beauty’s softness lurked
in that harsh giant’s bosom, or how high it ranked
in spring’s royal court?
In its floral identity I see that tree today:
like the Gandharva Chitrarath,
vanquisher of Arjun, champion charioteer,
practising singing, lost in his art, alone,
humming to himself in the shades of Nandan-garden.
If then, at an appropriate moment, the eyes
of the adolescent poet of those days had spied
the furtive youth-drunkenness of the middle-aged tree,
perhaps in the early hours of some special day,
made restless by the buzzing wings of bees,
I might have stolen just one bunch of those flowers
and placed it, with trembling fingers, above
someone’s joy-reddened earlobes.
And if then she’d asked me, ‘What’s its name?’
I might have said –
‘If you can think of a name
for that sliver of sunshine that has fallen across your chin,
I shall give this flower the same name.’
[Santiniketan, 7 June 1936]