Letters from a Young Poet Read Online Free PDF Page B

marriageable age, and it would be a dozen years after 1887 (when the first letter here is received) that she married the distinguished writer, editor and literary critic Pramatha Chaudhuri in 1899, unusually late for a woman of her times. In 1886, Rabindranath had dedicated three ‘Letter-Poems’ to her in
Kaṛi o komal
; all three were titled ‘
Patra
’ (Letter), and all of them were dedicated to ‘
Srimatī
Indirā
,
Prāṇādhikāsu. Nāsik’
or ‘Miss Indira, Dearer than Life. Nasik’. In a letter-poem Rabindranath wrote to Suren, in Nasik at this time, published in
Bhāratī
, we have a riotous depiction of their relationship, written in a mix of Hindi and Bengali, where, addressing Suren, he says of Indira:
Merā upar julum kartā terā bahin bāi,
    kī karṇegā kothāẏ gāṇyā bhebe nāhi pāi!
    bahu t jorse gāl ṭiptā dono āṅgli deke,
    bilātī ek paini bājnā bājātā theke theke,
    kabhī kabhī nikaṭ āke ṭhoňṭme cimṭi kāṭtā,
    kāňci le kar koňkṛā koňkṛā culgulo sab chaňṭta, …
    This woman, your sister, is torturing me so,
    I can’t think of what to do or where to go!
    She pinches my cheek hard between her two fingers,
    And keeps playing now and then upon some English piano thing;
    Sometimes she comes up very close and pinches me on my lips,
    Takes a scissor and begins to trim all my curly hair … 11
    Uncle and niece and nephew had many names for each other; among these, the most consistent nickname for her at home was Bibi, and he was their ‘Robika’ (a diminutive of Rabi-
kaka
; ‘
kaka
’ being one’s father’s younger brother). Here, in these letters, however, he frequently addresses her as ‘Bob’. The strange Englishness of the endearing nickname paradoxically seems typical of him, the committed Bengali man of letters. It could be speculated that this was an affectionate reference to the anglicized lifestyle of his brother’s household. Indira’s cousin Sarala has left an account of these children upon their return to Calcutta, already well travelled abroad, attending Loreto and St Xavier’s schools respectively, going out in smart English clothes every evening in a carriage with a dog to take the air while the other children of the house gaped. Indira herself has remarked ruefully that she learnt to call her older brotherby his name in England as a child, a habit she retained, never using the Bengali ‘
dada
’ for him as custom demanded. ‘Bob’ might have been a mocking variation on Bibi on account of all of this. It was also private—in the notebooks, the name was scratched out in blue pencil—as in ‘It’s quite a lovely day today, Bob ’—so that the first edition, the
Chinnapatra
, or its translation,
Glimpses of Bengal
, had no trace of it in them. Yet the use of it is so affectionate, so engaging and particular in tone that its presence in the letters adds an incalculable element that exactly captures the relation between these two as nothing else could have done.
The Artist
    Only two of the letters collected here in this book were written in 1887, after which we skip a year and find a couple more from 1889, to be followed by four more from 1890. The flow of letters picks up a more consistent speed from 1891 onward up to 1895. Those were also the years when Rabindranath wrote some of the best short stories in the Bengali language, published later in the collection called
Galpaguccha
(Cluster of Stories), penned in close contiguity to the Bengal countryside that gave them sustenance. The landscape, in fact, demands a certain sort of art—‘writing that is quite simple, beautiful, sweet and generous’—not like the ‘
sickly
’ ‘convoluted’ plots of Western novels such as
Anna Karenina
(an opinion he excised from the
Chinnapatra
). In ‘the calm current of this small summer-worn river, the flow of the indifferent breeze, the undivided expanse of the sky, the continuous peace of both shores and the silence all around’,