Selected Short Stories (Penguin Classics) by Tagore Rabindranath

Author:Tagore, Rabindranath [Tagore, Rabindranath]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780141962207
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-09-01T07:00:00+00:00

Complaining of the heat, Dakshinacharan took another drink of water. Then he stepped outside and walked up and down the verandah a few times before coming in and sitting down again. He did not seem to want to go on talking: it was as though I myself was extracting the words from him by a kind of sorcery. He began again:

‘I married Manorama and returned to Bengal. She had married me with her father’s permission; but whenever I spoke affectionately to her, whenever I tried to win her with loving words, she remained solemn and unsmiling. There were misgivings, perhaps, at the back of her mind that I didn’t quite fathom. It was at this time that my drinking got out of hand.

‘One evening early in autumn I was walking with Manorama in our garden at Baranagar. It was eerily dark. There was no sound even of birds fluttering their wings in their nest – just the rustling of shadowy jhāu bushes on either side as we walked.

‘Feeling tired, Manorama reached the white stone seat at the base of the bakul tree, and lay down with her head on her arms. I sat down next to her. The darkness was even denser there, though the bits of sky that were visible were covered with stars. The crickets under the trees were stitching, as it were, a narrow border of sound along the edge of the robe of silence that had slipped down from the sky. I had been drinking that afternoon, and my mind was in a fluid, maudlin state. As the darkness pressed my eyes, the shadowy shape of my wife’s languid body, the dim pallor of her loose sari, stirred me with inexorable passion. But she seemed like a shadow herself – impossible to hold in my arms.

‘Suddenly the darkness over the jhāu bushes seemed to catch fire: a thin, yellow crescent moon climbed slowly into the sky above the trees, lighting the face of the woman slumped in her white sari on the white stone seat. I could hold back no longer. I moved and clasped her hand and said, “Manorama, you don’t believe me, but I do love you. I shall never be able to forget you.”

‘I winced in alarm at my own words, remembering I had once spoken in the very same way to someone else. And that very moment, above the bakul tree, over the tops of the jhāu bushes, under the yellow slice of the moon, right from the eastern to the far western bank of the Ganges, a laugh sped swiftly, a rolling laugh. I cannot describe that heart-rending laugh, the way it seemed to split the sky. I lost consciousness, and fell from the stone seat.

‘When I came round, I found I was lying on my bed indoors. My wife was saying, “Why did you pass out like that?”

‘ “Didn’t you hear?” I replied, trembling. “Didn’t you hear that laughter, the way it filled the sky!”

‘ “Laughter, you call it?” said my wife, laughing herself.

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