Banshi (Flute Music)

artwork by apurba

I earn twenty-five rupees a month,
As a junior clerk in a trading office,
Eat at the Duttas' house,
Tutor their boy in exchange.
Then it's off to Shealdah Station
To spend the evening.
Saves the expense of lighting.
Engines chuffing,
Whistles screeching,
Passengers rushing,
Coolies yelling,
It's half-past ten
When I head for my lonely, silent, gloomy room.

My aunt's village on the Dhaleshwari River.
Her brother-in-law's daughter
Was all set for marriage to my unfortunate self.
Surely the signs were auspicious, I have proof
For when the moment came, I ran away.
The girl was saved from me
And I from her.
She never came to this room, but she's never away from my mind,
Wearing a Dacca sari, vermilion in her parting.

Monsoon lours,
Tram fares go up,
Often my wages get cut.
In nooks and corners of the lane
There pile up and rot
Mango skins and stones, jackfruit peelings,
Fish-gills,
Corpses of kittens,
And who knows what other trash!
The state of my umbrella is like
The state of my wage packet,
Full of holes.
My office clothes resemble
The thoughts of a pious Vaishnava,
Oozing and lachrymose.
The dark presence of the rains
Hangs in my moist room
Like a trapped beast
Stunned and still.
Day and night I feel that the world
Is half-dead, and I am strapped to its back.

At a bend in the lane lives Kanta Babu,

Long hair nattily groomed,
Wide-eyed,
Refined of manner.
He loves to play the cornet.
Frequently the notes come floating
Through the lane's stinking air.
Sometimes at dead of night
Or in the half-light before dawn,
Sometimes in the afternoons
When light and shadow coruscate.

Suddenly one evening
He begins to play in Shindhu Baroa raga,
And the whole sky rings
With the yearning of the ages.
Then in a flash I grasp
That the entire lane is a dreadful lie,
Insufferable, like the ravings of a drunk.
Suddenly my mind sees
That Akbar the emperor
And Haripada the clerk are not different.
Torn umbrella and royal parasol fuse
In the pathos of the fluting melody
Pointing towards one heaven.

The music is true, the key
To that endless twilit witching
Where flows the River Dhaleshwari
Its banks fringed with dark tamal trees,
Where
In a courtyard
She is waiting
Wearing a Dacca sari, vermilion in her parting.

From Rabindranath Tagore The Myriad-minded Man, Bloomsbury: London, 1995.