Shekhar

by S H Vatsyayan

  His sister sees his disappointment and laughs. She says, ‘There are plenty. Do you want to crush me?’

  And then she drifts away again. The boy sits next to her and listens to her humming like a devotee, almost as if a goddess were giving him a blessing.

  I still haven’t forgotten those words. In those days, I didn’t know what they meant, but I do now. But I haven’t been able to decipher the dreams that I saw in those days, and the feelings they evoked—they’re beyond meaning . . .

  If this garland can rob one of life, why did it not kill me when it fell on my heart?5

  Listening to his sister sing, a sudden, unknown feeling rises in the boy’s mind. It wasn’t produced all at once, it’s been germinating slowly for several days in his heart, but its rich fullness is new, and it has surfaced on his mental horizon for the first time today while putting the garlands around her neck and listening to her sing. Very gently he brushes his sister’s cheek and says, ‘You look so good.’

  His dictionary doesn’t have entries for beauty and ugliness, good and evil, truth and falsity. He’s an innocent child but he fully appreciates the fact that ‘truth is eternal and good’.6 And so to express the unknown feeling in his heart, he says, ‘You look so beautiful.’

  And the sister understands him. She laughs again, and the slightest blush comes over her and makes her look even more beautiful and she turns away to stare at the water.

  To find her imperceptible reflection? I don’t know, and she only maybe knows herself. And now she is undergoing a secret transformation. I still tell her all of my secrets, but she’s beginning to understand that she has claim to an independent reserve of mysteries—her own heart?

  *

  The order of my memories has come undone, like when a necklace of pearls falls apart and the spilt pearls are rethreaded haphazardly. I see another scene at the same time that I see this one. It has the same characters, the setting is the same, but its essential theme is completely different. This scene has the same point of view as the other, but in the course of my life it seems as if this scene bears no relation to the other, and if there is a connection then it is that the two scenes are symbols of the simultaneous development of very different feelings . . .

  The same lake, the same houseboat, the same day. Evening has fallen, everyone has gone inside. I am alone on the roof of the houseboat. The light from the turbid and complex colours of the sky is reflected on the lake and has turned it into something like the guileless eye of nature, still drowsy from sleep, and like eyelashes around it, the long grasses are cutting into the horizon wildly. Despite being entranced I’m watching the inky shadow-images that the grass makes. It’s black, itself devoid of beauty, but still encircling such beauty!

  But even more than that, I’m sitting here waiting for something. Towards the east, the grassy eyelashes look even darker, because a clean white light falls on them from the sky. I’m trying to imagine it, the kinds of changes that will be produced in the various elements when the moon rises, the kinds of patterns that will develop. I had not realized that reality can outstrip my imagination . . .

  Below, inside the houseboat, someone is singing. I am trying hard to listen. Two voices are singing together—one of them belongs to my sister and the other to our aunt. I don’t remember the words to that song, but both voices still ring in my ears . . .

  I imagine that the voices are two powerful swimmers riding the invisible waves on the lake and vanishing into the horizon, into the moonrise, to meet the rays of moonlight, because the rays of moonlight are their sisters, and they will adorn them with garlands of lotuses . . .

  Ah! Those rays of moonlight draw nearer—the black eyelashes of the lake have now turned into lines of mascara in the eyelids of the horizon, and above them the moon has risen like an enormous, petrified eye . . .

  A strange thought wells up in my mind. The moon is a virgin, and the dark beauty of the earth is its cloak. But the moon is so beautiful that the cloak has no right to cover it and so the moon has shed and discarded it and, naked, it now walks the horizon. Its radiating beauty makes even the abandoned covering beautiful.

  I can’t definitely say that these thoughts actually arose in my heart at that moment in this very form. But in the images that appear in my memory, that child is filled with these thoughts as he stands there. If these thoughts were not in his head in precisely this form, then their germ definitely was. It was definitely true that he had acquired an indirect knowledge of the fact that beauty was completely naked and that nakedness was completely beautiful . . .

  A voice enters, tearing through the child’s dream. ‘Shekhar, come down now!’ This, too, is his sister’s voice. Ever since then, whenever I forget myself in a metaphysical frenzy while looking at an extremely beautiful scene, a sharp voice calls to me and says, ‘Shekhar, come down now!’

  Dead, long dead;

  Long dead!

  And my heart is a handful of dust,

  And the wheels go over my head,

  And my bones are shaken with pain,

  For into a shallow grave they are thrust,

  Only a yard beneath the street.

  And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,7

  Under the cover of a grove of eucalyptus trees stands a half-hidden bungalow called ‘Eagle’s Nest’. This was the bungalow where she was living on the day Shekhar had buried her under flowers and abandoned her, filled with an irrepressible spirit, unable to bear the shadow that Sharda cast over him. Today, after so many days, Shekhar was running towards that very same grove, and memories of the past were racing through his mind . . . and the first wave of adolescence was crashing inside him.

  The hoofs of the horses beat . . .8

  The same Sharda who used to make him laugh. Sharda, who played music on the veena that he could lose himself in, who had teased him so much that she had become his friend. Who had become everything for him, who didn’t have her own home, who filled him with an urge today . . . which he also could not bear.

  He came right up to the grove and stopped. Did he hope that he would find Sharda waiting for him at her doorstep and that she would start when she saw him? Because that didn’t happen. She wasn’t at the door. The door was closed. And even the smoke wasn’t there today, the smoke that used to rise from the chimney of ‘Eagle’s Nest’, the smoke he used to spend his days watching from a distance . . .

  Timidly, Shekhar went to the door of the house. There was a lock on the door. He looked in through the window—the house was completely empty.

  For a while he couldn’t make sense of what was directly in front of him. And then slowly it dawned on him, and

  The hoofs of the horses beat, beat,

  The hoofs of the horses beat . . .

  He stumbled and sat down on the steps.

  When he got up and left, his mind was completely blank. After that he just never had occasion to be hurt by this wound or even try to understand it.

  *

  Just as a creature that lives inside its shell will only go outside it when it is hungry or when it is seeking a mate, and once it is satisfied it will return to the safety of its shell, similarly unsatisfied and discontented, Shekhar, too, emerged. Wretched and wounded, even if he had wanted to go back, the hunger inside him wouldn’t let him return. He was vulnerable to injury, armourless, and life was leading him farther and farther away from the safety of his home . . .

  He was quietly eating his roti. And, at the same time, he was thinking. Mother was sitting next to him in the kitchen; Father was talking to her. A letter had just arrived carrying news about his brother who had dropped out of college. It said that he was in Calcutta trying to find work as a policeman. That’s what Father was explaining to Mother, and Shekhar was eavesdropping absent-mindedly.

  His brother had told people in Calcutta the name of the college he had attended but had lied about the names of his parents. When the college was asked to verify his identity they sent a telegram to Father.

 
Father was hurt most by the fact that his son had lied about his parents. That’s the sort of thing he was saying.

  Mother said, ‘I always used to say, how in the world could anyone trust such a son?’

  Father said, ‘Humph.’

  Then Mother said, ‘And if you ask me in all honesty’—and then her voice suddenly got softer—‘ask me in all honesty, I’ll say that I don’t trust this one either.’

  This one?

  Shekhar didn’t see anything, but sitting there it didn’t take him long to imagine the whole scene, that agitated, stony visage and that thumb pointing towards Shekhar—‘This one!’

  He sat like that, stonily, until night fell. He didn’t eat or drink anything. Mother came and scolded him, then she cursed her own fate, cried and left. Father came, yelled at him and left. Night fell, everyone was asleep, and it was perfectly quiet. Shekhar went into his room, closed the door and bolted it, blew out the candle and sat down on his charpoy and smouldered . . .

  Much of the night had passed before he picked up his diary and tried to relieve his turmoil . . .

  ‘It would have been better if I had been a dog, or a mouse, or some stinking insect or worm—better than being the kind of man whom no one can trust.’

  He got up. He stared at the wall, agitatedly, and said in English, ‘I hate her, I hate her!’9 Then he got dressed, jumped out of the window and started walking.

  As he neared a park some miles away he vowed that he wouldn’t listen to his mother, he wouldn’t communicate with her, he would never do the kind of thing that would compel his mother to put even an ounce of trust in him . . .

  He didn’t make this promise out loud, he wrote it down on a piece of paper. But immediately something inside him changed again. He tore the paper to shreds, threw the pieces on the wet ground and began grinding them with his feet—until they were invisible, covered with mud and buried.

  ‘I am trustworthy, will stay trustworthy. Why should it be my defeat that she doesn’t know how to trust?’

  He came home just as dawn was breaking.

  I see a disconnected scene. It’s very vibrant; I can often see it perfectly clearly, but I don’t always get the order right. I use the image that I have seen of myself in the scene to estimate my age, but my memory doesn’t help me be any surer of that estimate.

  I am bringing back Father’s monthly wages after cashing his cheque at the bank. Father is at the office, and I am taking the money out of my pocket to give to Mother. There are several denominations and a lot of banknotes, and several silver rupees, and that’s why, when I see Mother’s extended hands, I say, ‘Mother, take them in your anchal, there’s too much.’

  Mother slowly spreads her anchal, but laughs as she says, ‘I’ll spread my anchal only when you bring home your own earnings; why bother for this?’

  I am about to hand over the money but I stop. I look at Mother with a strange look in my eyes, which she doesn’t seem to understand—perhaps I don’t understand it either. Then ignoring her outspread anchal, I pull out the side table and deposit the money there—‘Count it.’ And I leave the room.

  *

  When I think about how this is possibly among the reasons that I am here—as a reaction to this distrust—I don’t know why I refuse to give Mother credit for this immense change, for this incredible influence. I don’t know why my heart wants to deny her even this much gratitude, to be indebted to her for this undesired but good impact.

  Ever since that day, no other image has haunted me—while sleeping or awake, conscious or unconscious, in fight or flight—as often as the image of the terrible, unexpected knowledge of her distrust. I remember, after I was arrested, when my thoughts first turned to home, I thought that when Mother heard the news of what happened, her first reaction would have been one of victory, something like ‘I knew it. I never trusted him!’ Then she would be sad, might even cry, or get angry, but her first thought, no matter how fleeting, and even if she immediately regretted it, her first thought would be that she should have seen this coming . . . and I don’t know why, but this thought gave me much consolation, made me perfectly calm and made me completely indifferent to the police’s excesses.

  Forgiveness is the soul’s religion, but I am unable to do it. It’s not the case that I’ve become angry because of the things that have happened to me here. At least it isn’t any more.

  I know that even if this hadn’t happened, I’d still have evolved into this state, become the person that I am today. There was some force inside me ever since I was born, or the germ of a force, which had been propelling me here undeterred, and still would be, even if Mother never spoke to me or said a word about me. This knowledge, on the one hand, prevents me from getting angry, but on the other hand, it also keeps me from being grateful . . .

  I believe that revolutionaries aren’t made; they’re born. A revolutionary disposition isn’t fashioned from the power of struggle against material conditions, from the activities of life, from the action–reaction response to circumstances. It’s not something external that attaches to the spirit; it’s an innate part of it. I don’t believe in God because if we suffer from helplessness or powerlessness, these are not external factors, but internal ones. If they were external, they would be characteristics of another, and then we could call that ‘God’, but it’s inside us, it’s our own, even if it takes an external influence to make it solid. We could call it a ‘personal destiny’.10

  It’s not my argument that Karl Marx was simply born or that Shelley didn’t learn anything from the world or that Trotsky wasn’t as affected by his world as much as he affected the world. What’s unique about a revolutionary’s spirit is that it remains revolutionary even when it embraces the modern ideas that are flying around as part of its development since it is more advanced than the most advanced sections of its times. That’s why Einstein is a revolutionary despite being born in reactionary Germany, and despite being cradled in the womb of the world’s greatest, fieriest, most intense world-historic event of the Russian Revolution, Stalin never became a revolutionary. He simply remained to pick up the scraps . . .

  If this is the case, is it pointless to propagate revolutionary ideas? No, but if the ideas are being disseminated in the hope that they will produce new revolutionaries or that they will give rise to revolutionary possibilities, then they will prove fruitless. But if the objective is to recruit existing revolutionary forces, collect the existing will to revolution, to give it a line of march, then this objective will come to fruition.

  After all, the revolutionary is a natural leader. Why should all of his followers be revolutionaries? If I am a carpenter, if I make things with adzes and planes, why do the adzes and planes need to be self-motivated and self-directed? Why is this necessary?

  I’ve seen countless such individuals who say, and think, that a particular mental reaction to something made them revolutionaries, like Tilak’s funeral,11 the images of martial law or Jatin Das’s hunger strike.12 They lie! Or perhaps they lack the self-awareness that would allow them to see their own revolutionary instincts lurking behind these external causes, or then maybe they don’t have the instinct, and they aren’t revolutionaries.

  Those are elements of a revolution, external manifestations of a rebel’s plan and reflective abilities, but not the necessary, fiery, inner drive that gives them substance and endurance. Under duress, they fall naked, their internal vacuousness, their bankruptcy, becomes transparent; these people, who trumpet the power and influence of eminence, hide a secret in their depths which escapes and bleats its presence.

  These days our leaders repeatedly proclaim that ours is only an economic revolt. We have no bread in our homes, we aren’t paid our wages, we’re hungry, and that’s why we’re rebels. I think that this is ignoble, an immense insult to the self.

  There was a time when ‘religion’ was the dominant force. Then, our hypocritical leaders tried to demean the idea of revolution by saying, the people’s revolt is not religiou
s, but social, so we should have the right to reform our society. When ‘society’ began to become more important, those same hypocrites became nervous when they confronted it, and then they argued that they wanted full political control, and when ‘politics’ became important, they then claimed, we aren’t interested in challenging politics, we are rebelling against financial mismanagement. Vile, vile, vile! I say, O revolutionaries, come, first rid yourself of this vanity! Learn, understand, declare that we are not against misadministration, but we are rebels against homogeneity, against conformity; we want to change everything; ours is a revolution driven by our opposition to religion, to politics, to economics, and in the end even against our personalities.

  Idols can be built from the earth, but the earth cannot be built. An even better idol can be made from the same clay or even clay of a lesser quality, but if there isn’t any clay, no amount of propaganda, no amount of education, no amount of burning sacrifice can create an idol.

  A revolutionary heart needs a revolutionary-maker, in the same way that the touch of an artist can transform the clay. To complete a revolutionary, to create a quintessential man, one needs mental power, immense control, unceasing toil, just like one needs when making a work of art from clay.

  But even after being fully trained, acquiring all the necessary abilities artificially, a person without that inner force can only become a revolutionary up to a point just like a picture with all the ornamentation and decoration but lacking inspiration can only be a work of art up to a point . . .

  That’s why I say, I believe that just as a thousand years’ worth of effort is insufficient to create a Leonardo da Vinci or a Rabindranath Tagore, similarly, the generation of a complete and model revolutionary is a precondition for successfully bringing about a new century, a new culture.

  The most important thing for an artist, after mastering a working knowledge of art’s internal force, is to have a pure reverence for art itself. Similarly, the most important thing for a revolutionary is to have a devotional attachment to revolution. That’s the only way he acquires the ability to lose himself in his work, to devote his entire subjectivity to it, and still have the power to judge it objectively. It’s the only means by which his drifting is intentional drifting—if he dies it’s because he wants to sacrifice his soul, if he loses himself in the world, it’s because he has understood his personality . . .