Rupa had already started looking for her. He scanned Maina from head to foot. She looked like a battered tree which had had a tough fight with a storm. Rupa felt her forehead with his palm. Maina was running a high temperature. She was shivering. Rupa made her lie down on her cot. He embraced her and said with sympathy and affection, ‘Maina, my pet, do not think so much. If you do, you are sure to go nuts. Let us accept it: We are a strange creation of God – neither man nor woman, neither beast nor tree. We are living fossils, but with human emotions and feelings. Even God shudders to think about us. So take me to be your father, mother, brother, husband, everything. Relax, I will get you some medicine.’
Maina would not allow Rupa to move. She put her arms round his neck and shed incessant tears.
Rupa sniffed. His eyes glittered with tears just as dew-drops shine on the leaves of a tree when the sun comes up.
(Translated from the Bengali by K.K. Ghosh)
T W E N T Y - S I X
The Birth of a Poem
AMRITA PRITAM
A poem was taking shape in Ravi’s mind. He had just come up the bridle path from Lakkar Mandi to Kala Tope. And as he trod the green sward, he had tasted the lush verdure of it, he had drunk deeply, he had quaffed the cup to the dregs. He had trudged up the slopes, mile after mile, till he reached the dak bungalow and laid down his burden. And when his wife had made him a cup of hot coffee and made his bed too, he found that sleep was far from him. He had come out of the dak bungalow alone. He came out, and found that the verdure he had tasted, the cup he had quaffed, were welling up in him. They were coming up in a poem which he had started putting down on paper. He was putting it down on paper and feeling like a man taking an antidote to get over the intoxication.
He put down the sheet of paper on the turf under his feet. The poem was unfinished yet. He placed a pebble on the sheet of paper to keep it from being blown away, and lay down on the grass. He was reminded of Sartre’s words: ‘When I write I try to capture a certain beauty in a web of despair.’ When he wrote, Ravi told himself, it was the other way about: he always tried to capture despair in a web of beauty.
Ravi brooded, looking deeply inwards. There was no despair in his heart. But the words he had put on paper were words of despair. There was no denying that. He felt like a vigilante in a cemetery. His love was an extinguished flame. Even the glow of dying embers was not there. Even the ache of unrequited love was gone. He had wanted someone and had failed to win her. But the one he had married – she too met the demands of his intellect beautifully. Perhaps that was why the days gone by had left no ache. But every time he put pen to paper, a pain would come dripping down the pen. Only, he could hardly call it a pain, for it was not a living pain. And this made Ravi think of himself, of Ravi the poet, as a vigilante keeping watch among the graves.
Sartre came back to his mind again. Sartre had confessed to a feeling that his compulsion to take up pen and paper every morning was akin to apologizing for being alive. Ravi found this very true. He had never yearned to show what he wrote to the girl he wrote about. Nor did he want to buy fame with his poems. He shared Sartre’s view of fame – fame comes to a man when the man is no more. It is a flower decorating a grave. And if it were to come to a man when he is still alive, it would finish him off first and then decorate his grave. Ravi had never submitted his poems to prize competitions. These competitions seemed to him like cockfights arranged by rich men to show off their riches or their status – to be followed by a procession of the winning cockerel, the poet who had won his way to victory by wounding his adversaries. Ravi wrote for no beloved, nor for Dame Renown. He ate to live and he wrote to make amends for the sin of living.
A nauseating simile rose to Ravi’s mind. Poems are like earthworms. Earthworms are born of the hot soil and poems are born out of heated minds. He did not really feel nauseated by his brainchild. The dank and squirmy form of an earthworm wriggled before his mind’s eye and his imagination quivered at the analogy. ‘But it is true,’ thought Ravi, and he chuckled softly.
Ravi’s mind turned on to a new tack. Every poem is the child of silence. When a man is dumbfounded by something, rendered speechless, he has to break out of his silence through poetic expression.
...And then it occurred to Ravi that writing a poem was like stealing an apple from Eden. Adam stole an apple and lost his paradise for ever. A man who writes a poem may keep his mind, but a part of his mind is forever banished from this world.
‘But no,’ Ravi thought, ‘the two parts of his mind will be at odds with each other. They will be warring factions, jealous of each other, hating each other. This sustained hostility turns into aggressiveness. Poems are the ordnance of each aggression.’ And this thought brought a stab of pain into Ravi’s laughter. ‘Poems are perhaps the scars of wounds suffered in this battle.’
...Poetry’s potentiality for manifesting itself in so many forms made Ravi think of its deeper ramifications. Man takes up but a small part of the earth. All around him the straitjacket of circumstance and environment is so tightly and intricately knit that he cannot even move his limbs freely. But the reach of his poetry is so vast that it can simultaneously have one foot in humanity’s cradle and the other foot in humanity’s grave.
The stream of consciousness flowed on. It was not flooded by storm water. It flowed quietly, respecting the limits of the banks, and Ravi breasted the current effortlessly....
‘Viraji, your sheet of paper had blown away, so far away, and you did not even know,’ Mona came to Ravi and told him. She put it down near Ravi’s hand. The breeze had become stronger. Mona looked around for a stone to put on the sheet of paper. Because the pebble on it was too small, the wind kept blowing the sheet away. Mona put her hand on it.
In the soft twilight, Ravi looked at the paper; then he looked at Mona’s hand resting on it. It was frail and transparent. It was like a paperweight. The thought of a disembodied hand serving as a paperweight on a table intrigued Ravi. He remembered the day his wife had placed his coat on her shoulders and she had reminded him of a beautiful hanger. Ravi wondered why living limbs always figured in his imagination as lifeless objects. Full, fair and taut shoulders imagined as coat hangers; frail, transparent hands imagined as a paperweight. Why did it not occur to him that shoulders could be held and caressed and drawn into an embrace? And a hand could be lifted to one’s lips?...
Ravi made an effort to clasp this fancy to himself – to his ‘intellect’, much as he might be trying to swim against the current in a river. He felt repelled by his tendency to imagine live limbs as inanimate objects. He felt life pulsating in others, but in him something had died. That was why it did not occur to him to touch others, to smell others and to clasp them to himself. Ravi strained to revive what was dead in his heart; he strained at his senses and fixed his eyes on Mona’s face.
Mona was his wife’s younger sister. About fourteen. Or maybe, fifteen. But till today Ravi had seen her only as a child. He had always scolded her as a child. And he had always made amends as he would to a child. Ravi gathered his thoughts with an effort and looked at Mona as if he had to turn his head while swimming against the current to do it. For the first time he saw that Mona had attained fullblown youth. Youth had filled up her breasts, her neck, her cheeks, and it had breathed into her lips a rich red tint.
And it seemed to Ravi that the colour had faded from his own heart. And it occurred to him he could revivify the faded colour of his heart by putting his own lips to Mona’s full, red ones.
Such a thought had never occurred to him before. Its sudden emergence scared him – and, it seemed to him. a serpent had suddenly surfaced in the silent stream of thought in which he had been swimming. He was scared by the serpent surfacing so close to him.
‘Wake up, Viraji. Are you in a trance?’ Mona said, sitting down on her knees near the sheet of paper. Ravi stared at her face. It was the same innocent, carefree face – as Ravi had always seen it. The face did not glow with the provocative li
ght of youth, nor was it offering provocation to anyone else. Ravi turned his eyes once more towards the flowing stream of thought. The serpent was no longer swimming there.
Ravi patted her cheek lightly and said, ‘Go, child. What are you doing here?’
‘Your sheet of paper,’ she said. ‘It had blown away. You might have been looking for it, for who knows how long, if I had not chased it and got it.... Your poem would have gone with the wind,’ she added, with a touch of asperity.
All right, naughty girl. Take my thanks. There now, go inside. I will come a little later.’
Mona caught his hand and pulled him up. ‘You come in, too,’ she said. ‘Didi was so tired. She has gone to sleep. What shall I do in there alone?’
Ravi’s hand trembled. He felt as if the serpent swimming in the stream had come near him and brushed against his bare body.
Agitatedly, Ravi shut his eyes. Mona’s breath was fanning his forehead. A streak of fire ran through his body. And then it seemed to him he had clasped Mona to himself. His fingers were trembling on her soft, full breasts and his cold lips were quivering against hers. And then it seemed to Ravi, the serpent in the stream had not merely brushed past him – it had sunk its fangs into him and his body was burning with it.
‘What’s happened to you, Viraji, are you asleep again?’ Mona asked innocently, and she tried to open his closed eyes with her fingers.
Ravi’s head was reeling. There was a stunned silence in his ears. No outside sound penetrated his brain. All that he heard was a voice from within himself. Every moment the serpent’s poison was spreading in his body. Amidst the mounting effect of the poison, it seemed to Ravi he had torn Mona’s shirt away from her neck. In the darkness, her bare body was gleaming like marble. Mona’s naked body flashed on Ravi’s eyes like lightning and left them dazed.
Ravi saw that the serpent’s spreading poison had made his body rigid. But his consciousness was intact, still alive, watching his own death throes, watching the setting in of rigor mortis. There was a kind of helplessness in his dying body – and a kind of fear in the watching mind. One Ravi was still looking at Mona with desire in his eyes, the other Ravi was gesturing at her to go away.
Mona comprehended nothing of this. She saw only the gesturing hands and obeyed. She put the poem in Ravi’s hand and went in.
Ravi wanted to shout to her to stay. But his own throat throttled his voice. Exhausted, he shut his eyes again.
The stream of consciousness flowed on as before – respecting the limits of its banks. Ravi surrendered himself to the current. Like a splash of cold water, there came to his mind a philosopher’s dictum: ‘You have to live, you cannot deny Life.’ ‘A philosophy of helplessness,’ mused Ravi. ‘If man can do nothing else, can he not at least move his lips to deny Life, to reject Life?’ Ravi tried to move his lips but the cold water of the stream had frozen his lips. And it struck Ravi that he was just an ordinary, weak man. He had tried to be an epic lover, a heroic lover, but had failed. He had tried to be a tragic lover and had failed to be even a pathetic lover. He was just an ordinary, weak man – a man whose lips could utter neither an affirmation nor a denial. And then it seemed to Ravi he was unable to move his lips at all. He could only capture the despair of his lips in a web of poetic beauty. His hands picked up the sheet of paper and put down a few lines of verse.
When he finished his poem, Ravi was as tired as if his limbs had been exhausted by an excess of swimming. The stream still flowed quietly between the banks...and the serpent that Ravi had seen in the stream was no longer visible. Ravi’s mind was not scared now, only tired.
All at once, Ravi felt cold. The water in the stream was getting colder every moment. He clutched the bank securely and clambered out of the stream, wiping away from his body the thoughts that dripped from it and headed for the dak bungalow. His poem had sucked out all the poison from his body. He was now as whole of limb and hale of body as he had been before. His only thought was to step in quickly and snuggle into his wife’s warm bed.
(Translated from the Punjabi by G.S.P. Suri)
Best Indian Short Stories
KHUSHWANT SINGH is the most widely read author in India today. His weekly columns are reproduced by over fifty journals in all the regional languages of the country. He has done different things at different times: practised law, diplomacy and politics; taught comparative religion at Princeton and Swarthmore; and edited The Illustrated Weekly of India and The Hindustan Times. He has written regularly for several European and American journals including The New York Times. He has also edited and translated a number of literary works.
Author of more than ninety books, Khushwant Singh is best known for his work of fiction, Train to Pakistan, and his two-volume History of the Sikhs, which is still considered the most authoritative writing on the subject. His acerbic pen, his wit and humour, and, most of all, his ability to laugh at himself have ensured him immense popularity over the years.
He was Member of Parliament from 1980 to 1986. Among other honours, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the president of India (he returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union government’s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar).
He lives in New Delhi.
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Published in India in 2003
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While I have taken care to establish contact with each of the contributors for his/her permission to reproduce the story, this has not always been possible. I have taken the liberty to do so. I regret omission and would appreciate it being brought to my notice so that i can get in touch with the contributor. - K.S.
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