Amit Chaudhuri - Odysseus Abroad

Now they could cross and board the stationary 517, or walk past Keats’s house and, near the Heath, take the A11.

“No let’s go to Belsize Park.” The final decision, when he chose to exercise it, was Ananda’s.

“Take the tube?”

“Yes — to King’s Cross.”

Why to a stop as uninviting as King’s Cross wasn’t clear. Yet his uncle nodded, as if he’d been given counsel full of wisdom.

They went back up Pond Street, skirting the Royal Free Hospital.

“Sing that one Pupu: se din dujane dulechhinu boney ”—one of Rabi Thakur’s commonest ditties, common but lovely.

“Not now.”

Ananda was humming a raga: Purvi. His uncle couldn’t abide classical music. Not only because of its demonstrative virtuosity, which he regarded with contempt. (Anything outside his ken was beneath him. He bowed to no superior form or authority.) But also the sacred context of classical music embarrassed him. Being a Tagorean, he saw the universe in a bright humanist radiance. Any mention in songs of Hari, Radha, or Ram made him flinch. That’s what the Brahmo antecedents of modern Bengal had done — turned the Bengali into a solitary voyager, with no religion and nothing but a raiment of poems, Tagore songs, and — instead of deities — novelists and poets.

Ananda stubbornly sang Purvi going up to Haverstock Hill. A car crept up on a zebra crossing. No one blew the horn here. Ananda preferred to practise twice a day. On some days he gave his voice a holiday. He managed this routine because of his peculiar relationship with the university. His tutors, certainly Mr. Davidson, had given him a cautious berth — lecturers barely noticed him and his absences. Since he’d forgone a second spell of practice today, he felt a pang of remorse. Saraswati, whom he looked up to, might notice. Nubile, private, plucking on the veena — from her remote domain reigning over the arts.

“Pupu— se din dujane !”

Finally Ananda surrendered.

That day when we together

Were suspended in the forest

On a swing that was threaded with flowers .

They were in front of the church; the neighbouring school was closed, or there would have been children rushing past. Ananda hesitated to sing in Warren Street for fear of being overheard. In the streets, he felt less constrained. His uncle, his eyes closed in emotion and pain, was so absorbed he didn’t notice people walking by. He might be indifferent to Ananda’s future as a modernist poet and only cursorily concerned with his progress as a student — but he adored the way he sang Tagore. If he’d had his way (in a utopia, his uncle would have been an autocrat), he’d have had Ananda give up writing and every loyalty to classical music, and only perform Tagore songs. So it was just as well his word wasn’t law.

May that small memory

Awaken in your mind

From time to time — don’t forget it .

“Beautiful!” Eyes three quarters closed; Ananda could glimpse the whites through the slits. Somehow they made their way to Haverstock Hill.

“This song brings back a beautiful memory — but full of sadness.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It was in Sylhet. In a garden in the evening. A girl I knew was nearby. There was something in the air. But, ah! I couldn’t tell her my feelings.”

It was the first Ananda had heard of this. Because no object of affection had been referred to prior to Gilberta.

“I knew I’d never tell her.”

“Was it someone you had a relationship with?”

“No, no.” The term “relationship” was anachronistic; it didn’t make sense here. But Ananda was thinking of his non-adventure with his cousin.

“Did you have sex with her?” Another misguided query. Ananda knew this the moment he spoke: Rangamama was a virgin, wasn’t he?

—

“The weather feels like Shillong.”

Yes, the air outside the church had been reminiscent. Ananda remembered, from visits to extended family a decade ago, the hill station’s dry summer sun.

Not turning left at once towards the tube station, they crossed to the Trust House Forte Hotel —then turned. They were physically in the realm of Ananda’s 1973 visit: the meeting over curry with the Shah; unwieldy kippers at the hotel’s breakfast buffet; Cliff Richard and the Bee Gees; his uncle with sideburns dropping past his ears, his skull still not quite visible, as it was now. Ananda felt distant from that visit though he was in its vicinity; even the bar and smoking room of the hotel, seen through the large windows, looked unrecognisable — their arrangements altered.

“Did you ever write poetry yourself?”

Ananda put it to his uncle not to challenge him but because it seemed a worthwhile query. Not least because his uncle was such a dogmatic propagandist for Rabi Thakur, who he routinely said was “the greatest lyric poet ever.” A “lyric kobi ,” in his uncle’s vocabulary, was superior to every other variable of poet — a magical being, sighted hardly ever, like the fox or the badger. “The life of a lyric kobi is very brief,” his uncle had informed Ananda, who had no idea if the statement were a literal or figurative one. Ananda knew that many young men in Sylhet wrote poetry. His own father, Satish — for long a man of commerce and finance — had been among them. Ananda’s mother had told her son that Satish was well known, when he was seventeen, for writing short and sad poems that ended in ellipses. The poems must have been about love because those who’d read them referred to the ellipses as “asrur phota” or “teardrops.”

“I left that sort of thing to others,” said his uncle as, looking right and left, they walked past Belsize Avenue. “It’s possible to take shortcuts writing poetry in English. There are no shortcuts to writing Bengali poetry.”

So not only was he claiming to be different from deluded friends (including Ananda’s father) who had, seized by the poetry bug, fooled themselves into thinking they were poets: he was having a go at Ananda and the new species he belonged to, of aberrants who’d elected to write, ridiculously, in English. Shortcuts! Was he saying that it was easier to be a fraudulent poet in English than in Bengali?

“Of course Chhorda began by writing some remarkable poems.” This was the older brother in Shillong. That he’d grown partly dependent on his younger brother since retiring from the state civil service led Radhesh to feel a vicious recoil against a man he’d once worshipped for his refinement and even been intimidated by. “He asks me for money now; he used to treat me like an errand boy then!” A couple of times in Warren Street he’d even called Chhorda sneeringly by his pet name — Manu. Which had provoked Ananda’s mother to heartfelt protest and remonstrance. Which had led to his uncle tugging her by the hair in rage and Ananda giving him a push that sent him flying back. They came to the steps of the Hampstead Town Hall, his uncle adding proudly: “What a sensation it was when Desh published one of his poems when he was sixteen!” It was a big deal to have a poem out in Desh in those days, whether you were from Calcutta or Sylhet, sixteen or sixty.

“Was it good? The poem?” Ananda was well aware that his uncle had it by heart.

“It was beautiful — yes.” He made the inevitable qualification: “Naturally, it bore the imprint of Tagore’s diction and cadence. Very hard to escape that.” English poets couldn’t match Tagore for his finesse. European poets largely didn’t exist. And no Bengali poet, whether it was his older brother or the great Jibanananda Das, could avoid visiting a tone and terrain that was already Tagore’s. Better, then, for the Bengali not to write poetry at all, and just read Tagore; his uncle had demonstrated the wisdom of this in the decision he’d long ago taken: to abstain.