Part 4: Threads, Ropes and Nets
1. ‘Serious’ and ‘septic’ are in Nagari-English in the original.
2. In Nagari-English in the original.
3. In Nagari-English in the original.
4. In Nagari-English in the original.
5. Agyeya appears to be misquoting from the Bhagavad Gita 9–26. He has substituted ‘vessel’ for ‘fruit’ most likely because he is recalling the verse from memory, rather than referencing the text.
6. Most likely a reference to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ quoted earlier in the novel.
7. In Nagari-English in the original.
8. In Nagari-English in the original.
9. In Nagari-English in the original.
10. In Nagari-English in the original.
11. Parijat—a tree from Hindu mythology.
12. Referring to the myth of Niobe.
13. In Nagari-English in the original.
14. Raktabeej (from rakta—blood, and beej—seed) was a demon who was granted a boon according to which each drop of blood he lost in battle would reproduce another one of him—until he was finally slain by a devi.
15. In Nagari-English in the original.
16. In Nagari-English in the original.
17. In Nagari-English in the original.
18. In Nagari-English in the original.
19. In Nagari-English in the original.
20. Georgia Johnson (1880–1966), ‘I want to die while you love me’. Agyeya has taken the first and third stanzas and omitted the second and fourth stanzas. Quoted in English in the original.
21. In English in the original.
22. In Nagari-English in the original.
Also by Agyeya
Prison Days and Other Poems
Foreword by Jawaharlal Nehru
‘These poems have appealed to me greatly. They have stuck in my mind . . . And so I commend these poems and perhaps they might move others as they have moved me’—Jawaharlal Nehru
Agyeya was jailed as a revolutionary by the British authorities in the early 1930s—an experience that indelibly shaped his literary output. The verses in this collection vividly conjure the horror and tedium of imprisonment: the sound of iron gates clanging shut and the shadows cast by the bars of a cell. But Agyeya’s vision never descends into bleakness. Even quarantined, he is constantly aware of the pulse of life radiating outside the prison walls—the lotuses in bloom, the gushing breeze, the mighty seas—as well as the solidarity and compassion that unites those in captivity.
Written between 1933 and 1938, Prison Days and Other Poems astutely captures the mood before Indian independence, when freedom was still merely a dream.
‘The grand old man of Hindi literature . . . [Agyeya’s] poetry and fiction were only the logical culmination of a multi-faceted career’—India Today
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
This collection published 2018
Copyright © Vatsal Nidhi 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-143-42635-6
This digital edition published in 2018.
e-ISBN: 978-9-353-05107-5
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Shekhar Page 62
