A-Z Challenge Blog-posts -- A for April

a-z challenge blog posts

A for april

      To T.S. Eliot April may have been a cruel month, an extension of the festering, morbid seasons his wasteland cradled in its jorum. My young mind, however, differs considerably with the great poet in its opinion of April: to me it is a beautiful time of the year when the earth seems to be swelling with the new buds and the world looks all bright and enthusiastic. It is a month which brings in the soft, permeating and flowery odor of new-beginnings, new life burgeons in the clammy cells of the sleepy earth. We get ready for summer, the vigorous season of the year. To me April is full of promises of a soon-to-be floriferous future when buds in my little garden will bloom, and the park outside my apartment will look all vivacious and comfortable. I dream on the first day of the month about its fruits and blessings and smile with contentment. The soft early morning light that comes in through the window of my study and the smell of the green leaves of the hibiscus nodding its leafy branches in the delicately warm wind fills me with exquisite positive energy. The blogging challenge I took upon seems full of creative prospects. What more can a writer ask for than the opportunity to sit at her desk and write her mind? And when that task is performed every day, the creative-delight is limitless. I think of the letters I have at hand: B-Z, and envision the innumerable topics I can write about. The mind is bombarded with thoughts hitting the darkened walls of that sinuous department with ideas, words, and images. The images are positively brilliant; I feel I can touch them with my fingertips. I wonder if the magic of creating sentences is intensified by the libanophorous April waiting at my doorstep like Santa Claus on Christmas with his bag full of creative-prompts. I am sure it is. There is something in the light-warmth emanating from the sun-risen azure that assures me that April does whisper paeans of beauty and creativity to those who cares to listen to her.

   As I type my first entry of the blogging challenge, I hear the meta-voice cheerily chirping away words and sentences, unbeknownst to me, unconscious of the presence of the stolid critic that denies any flight of imagination. Today I see my poetic spirit chiming Keats’ lines from his Ode to the Nightingale:

   “Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

   Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

   But on the viewless wings of Poesy”

     My mind now wishes that it rides the unfurled wings of poetic creation and begets new ideas every morn when I will be composing my blog posts. The opportunity of getting up every day and writing for an hour or so before the quotidian rigors start seem delicious. Like a child bracing herself for a day at school with a bit of playtime activity, I let my rambling mind write words without cessation. I feel liberated; writing is indeed amazing. I have often wished that I could leave the world and its demands aside and write away to my heart’s content. On this beautiful day of the first day of April I am glad I am doing just that. One mistake we writers often make is that we don’t write much, and that way we experience creative blocks, which frustrate and disillusion us. I feel that if I were to write every day, even under the compulsion of catering to the guidelines of a bloggling challenge, which states in unequivocal terms that you must write daily, I am doing a service to my creative spirit in preparing it to return to its habit of writing on a daily basis despite the enervating toils of each day.

   The April outside my window, the April of my optimism, the April of my imagination all assure me that I can surely do it. I remember how I loved the movie Julie and Julia directed by Norah Ephron where the protagonist Julie Powell discovered her love for food and blogging when she indulged in both in a moment of creative frenzy. Julie used to wake up every day and head for the computer to type away her blog-posts. Here I am doing exactly the same and feeling that human nature every where is similar: we all love giving tongue to our thoughts. And in this April amid the buds and the greens, the sun and the heat, the birds and the truculent commuters in the metro, I will look for new beginnings, new ideas to belabor and talk about everyday till the month ends, or possibly even after the final song is sung by maiden April.

 

                                Little bell-pepper buds about to bloom in my garden 

Traveling in the Pink Zone of Female Empowerment

Picture Courtesy:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Across-pink-line-red-zone-for-men/articleshow/18887199.cms

 It is often said about women in India, and of Delhi in general, that the nation they inhabit is not safe enough for them. The usual way of categorizing and stereotyping Indian women is to consider them as weak and inferior to their male counterparts. Such popularly held and superannuated ideas about Indian women are apt to undergo a metamorphosis if one enters the hallowed portals of the ladies’ compartments in the Delhi metro trains, for here one is sure to encounter a series of young empowered females whose very presence and behavior in that no-man’s zone will assure him/her that indeed the Indian society, despite the innumerable arrows it hurls at its women citizens, has succumbed to the fluxion of change.

Take a jolly ride in the ladies’ compartment of the Delhi metro sometime and you’ll get a vision of New-India. Here you’ll meet students, book-worms holding popular texts, out-of-coffee-house female-intellectuals discussing books or burning social issues with friends, professionals, engineers, doctor, social workers in baggy trousers and loose fitting kurtas—together they will strike you as myriad as the travelers in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. You can read their aurora-borealic eyes and decipher the layers of dreams that dwell within. They hold snazzy gadgets, wear revealing clothes, and display badges of matrimony like chuda and sindoor along with cool anklets or tattoos. They are a fusion of the old and the new living in perfect harmony. They are assertive too; let a man walk into the ladies’ zone and you will find one or two of the ladies’ raise their eyebrows first and regard him with marked annoyance and then they will raise their voice, “Bhaiya, yeh ladies compartment hai!” (Brother, this is the ladies’ compartment).

As a daily commuter in the Delhi metro I have ample opportunities everyday to study the female representatives of ‘Incredible India’. They strike me as the amazons of a future India silently professing the radical view that they don’t want be stereotyped, assaulted or raped. Their words, far from being a kind of gnat-fritinancy, come to me as the perfumed speech of the New-Women. They always have something to say, they have their own opinions and they speak it without abashment either into their phones or with their friends. Once I heard a woman swear profusely and even though several inhabitants of the compartment looked askance at her, she continued in her jocular-swearing mode till she disembarked from the compartment. This assures you that in real life women do swear at times, just like men; that we are no more the gentle-speaking ladies of the home who think twice before uttering a swear word.

In general compartments you’ll often see men sitting in seats reserved for ladies while women stand without protest waiting for the men to vacate their seats. Most times, they never get-up and if you tell them to, they will ask you to board the ladies’ compartment. “Ladies’ compartment main jaiyeh; metro ne aap logo ko ek compartment de dia to general main seat kiyu chaiye?” (Why don’t you go to the ladies compartment; the metro officials have provided you with a whole compartment, why don’t you go there.) Such a situation seldom arises in our ladies’ compartments. One time a group of men entered the ladies’ coach I was traveling in and one of the commuters who I took to be a social worker approached them and asked them if they entered the compartment by mistake or if they did it consciously. They ignored her and continued laughing among themselves. The other women regarded her without protest. When the next station came the woman called out to one of the guards who waited at the station and said we were having a little problem in the compartment. The guard came into the compartment and literally shoved the befuddled mis-commuters into the next general compartment. Subsequently, most of the women in the compartment raised their voices in vehemently rebuking the guys; and few of the men in the next compartment joined in too. I felt proud that day and empowered as well. Later when I found the woman alighting in the same station as myself, I approached her to congratulate her for her vociferousness. She smiled and said the next time I saw something like that she hoped I would protest; “We must protect our own space,” she said.

To me the metro-trains are the microcosms of the nation I live in and the women travelling in them representatives of the female sex inhabiting our country; their behavior, their manner of speech, their attitude throws light on the general condition of women in our country. These days I mostly avoid the general compartments and opt for the ladies coach for the time I spent therein convinces me that despite the allegations of unassertiveness, the modern educated women of women are as cosmopolitan in their ways as the members of her sex in the Western countries. The sight of many of these women assures me that our generation and the future ones are more conscious of their rights and their freedom. And even though the cynic in me tells me that may be I am erroneous in considering the ladies’ compartment of a metro train, a Potemkin village, as a reflection of real-India peopled with real-Indian women, I cannot but question myself what real-India means and why these educated women armed with cool-gadgets and carrying expensive accessories are not females of real-India, whatever that is? The only answer I get is that they do not fall into closed-celled binary categories; their social personas beaming with specs of feminism are anything but weak and inferior; we cannot categorize them. What fascinates me most is the ability of the women to silently inspire; I often feel inspired by their bibliophilia, their sense of fashion, their choice of words. Isn’t this how one woman ought to inspire another? And all it takes to encourage inspiration is to put a lot of diverse females in compartment embedded in the serpentine body of a metro-rail!

In conclusion I wish to say that Alice Walker was right when she said in her essay In Search of our Mothers' Gardens when talking about ordinary women feeding their creative urges: “The answer is so Simple that many of us have spent years discovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high-and low.” Indeed when it comes to female empowerment in India we too casually disregard our pedestrian sisters who despite being homemakers encourage their daughters to pursue their careers, women who in their daily lives try to bring in positive change in their society by allowing their daughters to speak in familial discussions—may be the handful of women I see everyday are those extraordinary females who have empowered mothers or sisters and who in their lives knowingly or unknowingly disperse creative auras that inspire other women to think-out-of –the box. In this sense they are indeed real-women, the positively real female citizens that India should be proud of.

Here is a poem I wrote after one of my daily commutes in the Delhi metro:

The Train

The train lurches its way to a known destination

Outside islands-neighborhoods appear and disappear

The train stops at one station

 And then at another

As if to judge the aspect of the defeated contenders--the island-neighborhood

Inside the train a sea of

gadget holding women tapping their

toes to inaudible music.

And in their middle there I sit

Just another face

thinking of the train and myself

on my way back home

Readers' Response:

Nisha Rana, a poet and a teacher posted his comment on my Facebook page, and I cannot but share it with you all.:

" I can't speak for other women/girls, but travelling via metro in the well guarded, safe territory of the women's compartment has actually made me lesser comfortable in travelling alongside men in the general compartments than I was prior to this reservation. it reminds me of a protective father who has kept his daughter away from any kind of trouble that the society might have to offer. And when the daughter enters the outside world without her daddy being there to rescue her if the need may arise, she is completely clueless. But it is okay. am sure the daughter will make mistakes and learn from them 
We are at the first stage of empowerment where we have to provide women with a special treatment to help them come shoulder to shoulder with men. though I sincerely wish for the day to come when women will not be treated any differently than men,well at least not treated as inferior on the basis of those differences that cannot be ignored. I wish for the day when the endangered species will not need to stay within the boundaries of a wildlife sanctuary to be able to walk freely."

Confessions of a Bibliophile on the Eve of St. Valentine’s Day

Today the world seems to gird up its loins to celebrate the universal day of love tomorrow, and young and old lovers continue to look for novel gifts for their sweethearts assisted in their endeavor by kindly online-vendors, blogs, newspaper supplements and  innumerable other agents in the cosmos who have something to sell. The process of helping (or hauling out, if you will) lovers in their hour of travail by handing them evanescent Valentine’s Day Special offers unequivocally proves that there’s still good in the world and Paulo Coelho was absolutely right when he wrote the following in The Alchemist: “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

On the eve of the impending holy day of love and devotion, I felt it was my moral duty as a writer, however paltry my skills may be, to compose a write-up on love. My buoyant writing-spirit, however, took up an apathetic stance as I imbibed more and more of the cloying lover’s day stuff. I wonder how one can help imbibing them when V-day is around the corner; they seem to hound you ready to pounce on you on one of your weak moments. I don’t want to sound like one of those dyspeptic philonoetics you meet so often these days, but then of late I have started detesting the conventional ways of love to be displayed with unflinching etiquette on Valentine’s Day so much that my dearest wish is to bung bricks at those who follow the customs without questioning their real efficacy in matters of love.

As I ruminated on love like any other law-abiding citizen, I found my thoughts turning to a different kind of love, the love of books. This idea which made me shout “Eureka” filled my skeptical mind with hope. When it comes to books a bibliophile has a lot of love carefully stored in the nooks of her cardiac organ. A visit to my bookcase proved my unspoken assertion to be true that indeed those rows of books dwelling in the wooden case have made me the person I am.

Not long ago I read an article about book-lovers in a Bengali newspaper’s Sunday supplement wherein the writer had said that those who read tend to be proud about their reading and more often than not display their learnedness in their public interactions. I wonder if such a display is as erroneous as it is considered to be. Only a reader knows how painful interactions with non-readers could be. And even though the Facebook walls are filled with quotations worth pennies about the habit of reading and how important and life-changing books could be, more and more people I interact with seldom show any interest in the actual reading of books. I being a loner in that respect have preferred until now to hide this incongruity of loving inanimate texts which animate my life like nothing else; so on the eve of Valentine’s Day I wish to profess my love to my beloved books and their authors. I wish to raise my voice and say “You are the butter to my bread, the breath of my life.”

The name that comes to my mind as I dwell on the topic of bibliophilia is Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, or P.G. Wodehouse. The mere recollection of his name illuminates my mind with a “spontaneous overflow of emotions”. Overtime I have read most of what Wodehouse had to offer, my special favorite being the Jeeves stories and the Blandings Castle saga. The presence of Wodehouse in my life has been that of a doting father amusing his child after she had lost one of her pet toys. I in my case I had never lost my toys but have often mislaid my peace of mind. When prospects in life look uncertain I still turn to Wodehouse, and before I know it the nebulous sheets have passed and I am left smiling with a recollection of something Bertie Wooster said or something Gussie Fink nottle did. So substantial is my reading of Wodehouse that I can express this with a certain modicum of confidence that I can look into the eyes of any expert in humor literature without a tremor. It feels great to consider the change that reading Wodehouse had brought in me. For one Wodehouse, and only Wodehouse, made me realize that reading is more fun that fidgeting with useless gadgets and thus saved me from spending enormous sums on procuring cellular phones with baffling applications and other worthless accessories. Secondly, Wodehouse made me realize that there is indeed an elixir in life we could all afford, and that is a smile. It annoys me to see that people smile so less these days. Having read such inimitable Wodehouse classics like Code of Woosters, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, Very Good, Jeeves, etc., I cannot but be good-humored and always armed with a smile at any time of the day.

I know as a student of literature I am risking my scholarly aptitude when I confess that my love for apparently silly stories of a somber encyclopedic butler (Jeeves) and his weak-headed employer (Bertie Wooster) made me love literature, that these fictional tchotchkes which Florence Cray, one of Wodehouse’s snooty erudite female characters, would dismiss as bad reading made my life a garden of Eden, or better still. Nevertheless, I hold my head unabashedly high in my love for the man who made the world smile to his efforts rather than plunge them into seas of despair. One advice for the agelasts: thou must head for the hills when thou spotteth a book by monsieur Wodehouse.

I realize I have dwelled a little longer than I should have been on the subject of Wodehouse, and now I must talk about my other beloveds. Names of the composers of numerous hardbound and paperback paramours fill my mind, and I must choose carefully. The contestants are: Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Umberto Eco, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Khaled Hosseni, Ernest Hemingway, Vladimir Nabokov and Satyajit Ray. I will start with lady V, Virginia Woolf that is. To tell you the truth it was her death that fascinated me and made me love her books. The first book by Virginia Woolf I ever read was her  AWriter’s Diary published by her husband Leonard Woolf after she had died. It amazed me to read the occasional accounts of her creative writing, how thorough she was about her books, how humble and confused at times and how pitiably crestfallen when somebody criticized her. The diary made me love Virginia Woolf, the person and not the author. The last entry in the diary had been made only a few days before she had drowned herself and there wasn’t any hint as to that ending, which, I thought, she might have planned well before she composed that last entry. I remember crying after I had finished the diary and read all about her death on the internet. The only way to allay my disturbed thought as to how painful death must have been for Woolf was to read her books. And that’s what I did. Mrs. Dalloway gave way to The Waves, To the Lighthouse, Jacob’s Room and A Room of One’s Own. The last book, which is perhaps one of the earliest books on feminism, had been a particularly interesting read for me.

And now I must say a few final words of love before I end my write-up about Kingsley Amis and Vladimir Nabokov. These two writers, the former with his overtly confident, school-master-ish ways and the latter a sesquipedalian who stunned me with the way he ravished the English language for the purpose of artistic composition, made me yearn and crave for a writing life. I never said more vehemently the words I want to be a writer, I want to write so badly than after I had read a book either by Amis or by Nabokov. Truly, Nabokov’s Lolita is despicable and shocking in many ways, but his labile use of the English language, his abstruse esoteric style  more prominent in Pale Fire than in Lolita are virtues worth envying. As for Kingsley Amis’s cigarette-smoking protagonists in both Lucky Jim and Take a Girl Like You, I would say that never have I seen characters so well-rounded, so energetic than when Amis painted them; he is undoubtedly the fodder for aspiring creative writers like us who wish to master the art of characterization, style and technique.

Without further ado, I now bid my dear readers farewell with the hope that too might spare a thought or two in the direction of their favorite books on this St. Valentine’s Day and try their best to convert non-lovers of literature into paramours of fiction.

Wish you all a very happy St. Valentine’s Day!!

Aranye Eka

Aranye Eka

Original short story written by Sunil Gangopadhyay

Translated from Bengali by Barnali Saha

Picture Courtesy: ibnlive.in.com

Modhu was alone in the forest. He, however, constantly felt that somebody else was around him. The animals and the birds were there, the branches of the trees broke and fall, dried leaves were shed, he was aware of all that. Yet sometimes queer sounds were heard, there was this snapping sound of breaking branches which startled Modhu time and again. 

The ankle of his left feet was sprained; Modhu was limping. He made a stick with a broken branch of a teak-wood tree. When walking he was scared of making noises himself, he strode cautiously. Sometimes he looked around.

Modhu hadn’t been in the forest in the last seven years. Before that he came with the evict-elephant group. There were fifty-sixty people at that time. People didn’t generally come to the forest alone. Especially in the last few days people were failing to muster enough courage to visit the place at all.

Modhu was hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything since the previous night. Who knew when would find something to eat? There weren’t any fruits in this forest. At times innumerable mauled fruits of the banyan tree lay here and there; even the crows did not partake of them.

Finding a rather clean spot Modhu sat down with a thud. He leaned against a mangrove tree. Suddenly there was a rustling sound among the dry leaves. It was as if someone was approaching. Modhu was startled. Terrified, he got up to see that it was no human being but a big-sized mongoose. It stood around ten arms-lengths away and stared at Modhu.

Had it been a field-rat instead of a mongoose then Modhu would have run and tried to kill it. But mongoose meat is no delicious treat. They are hard to kill as well.

Modhu made a shooing noise a few times. The mongoose wasn’t scared. It continued looking piercingly in the same direction. Their teeth are terribly sharp. If it bit the windpipe then—

Modhu dashed his stick to the ground violently. When this didn’t help either he threw a piece of stone in the direction of the mongoose. It then sluggishly entered the bush.

A new thought occurred to Modhu. The mongoose might have wanted to come to the place where he rested. That meant snakes could be present somewhere in the vicinity. It might have detected the presence of snakes.

Modhu wrenched his body and scrutinized the surrounding. There was a hole in the mangrove tree, it seemed suspicious. The snake was what he feared the most. There wasn’t a lot many tigers left in the forest. Once in a while one or two of them emerge. Sometimes leopards could be seen. The number of bears decreased considerably as well. What remained were the elephants. There wasn’t anything as such to fear about elephants, save that he caught a few of them and became an elephant ruffian.

The previous week around five elephants invaded the farmland of a neighboring village. The villagers threw burning flambeaus to evict them. When a tusked elephant tried to break down the houses, a tin of kerosene was thrown at it. And then when the fire from the burning flambeaus touched… It would have been better if it had died; instead it fled from the spot in a terribly wounded state. If Modhu found himself before it—anyway, Modhu thought he now feared human beings more than animals. If confronted by animals he could find some escape route, but if the villagers came to know of his existence, they would surely do something to him. He needed to hide in the forest for four-five days, then if he could leave the forest and reach the railway station… Modhu had fourteen-fifteen rupees with him.

It was Pori who destroyed him.

Everything was over between him and Pori. Modhu wanted to marry Pori. She seemed pretty healthy, would be efficient as a farmhand.  Pori’s father, however, set the rate as two hundred rupees. Apart from that he asked for a bullock, a pair of goats and ten saris. Where would Modhu get so much money from, he didn’t have any zamindari in Europe! He gave Pori’s father a piece of his mind and said that he could get a better girl than Pori in half the price mentioned.

A great feast was given on the occasion of the sraddha (the ceremony done in Hindus in memory of the bygones on the particular days after the death) ceremony of Byakababu, finding him alone therein Pori approached him and said, you couldn’t arrange for the money, could you? What kind of a man are you?

Here Modhu couldn’t show the same kind of temper he exhibited in front of Pori’s father. He said in a bland tone, can’t you wait for another year? I planted tobacco leaves this season. If insects don’t attack then—

Giving a waggish smile with her thin lips Pori said, my father cannot wait any longer. A lot of people are offering large sums of money.

Modhu said, your father wants money and you want nothing?

At that time for some unknown reason Pori started to twirl her hair braid and looked away and said, am I expected to go to the household of an utterly indigent person who cannot arrange for any money?

The words caused Modhu to flare-up. In exceptionally pure tongue he said, you have so much lust for money; you see in the end you will find yourself rotting in the household of some rich businessman who is afflicted with white leprosy.

He didn’t want to see Pori’s face after that incident. Within the next one and half months Pori was married off, and along with her husband she went to live in a tea garden near Sankosh.

Modhu bought a pair of goats with the hundred and ten rupees he saved for his marriage. After eight months the pair of goats gave birth to three kids. Modhu was happy to sell them all on the next market-day for a hundred and fifty rupees.

After four years Pori returned to her father’s house. Her babies never survive. After birth they throw out their arms and legs a bit and then die. The same thing happened thrice. Pori was very sad.

Suddenly one day Modhu met Pori near the edge of the tobacco-field. He was removing the silt from the drain with his spade; Pori stood just behind him, her face was pale, the look in her eyes seemed somewhat obscure.

Modhu was startled to look up and suddenly find Pori before him. She struck him as a girl whom nobody knew. That time at the Rath-er mela when Khudi’s mother had been possessed, she had that same kind of look on her face. Pori now looked just like her. Modhu was sad. 

Scared, he asked, how are you, Pori?

In a bland tone Pori said, Modhu, you ruined me!

I? What did I do to you?

You didn't let me be happy.

Modhu climbed up from the drain. His hands were daubed with mud. While rubbing those hands he said in an embarrassing tone, Pori, I never did any wrong to you. I am poor, and have remained the same. Had you married me then you would have endured a lot of pains. But you and the contractor—

You cursed me; you said my husband would have white leprosy.

I didn’t mean anything. The contractor doesn’t suffer from that disease.

Yes he does; it’s a secret.

My words don’t mean anything. I am taking them back anyway. Did I ever willingly want to harm you?

Every year my babies die.

Don’t you have doctors at your tea garden? Contractor-babu has a lot of money—

No treatments were successful.

Modhu was feeling sad for Pori. At that time there was a sudden gleam in Pori’s eyes. She grabbed a bunch of Modhu’s hair and shaking him she said, you bastard, you won’t let me become a mother? You have so much jealousy in your heart?

After that Pori began to approach the pedestrians and tell them that because of Modhu’s imprecation her babies never survive. Some of them believed her, they looked askance at Modhu. Poor Modhu had to run around to save himself.

Then at night the day before yesterday, Modhu was found in Pori’s room. Contractor-babu arrived unexpectedly at midnight. Poor Modhu wasn’t guilty at all; he thought that if he were to stop Pori from spreading such words he needed to befriend her first. 

Modhu begged Pori to forgive him and said, please don’t disrepute me anymore! The young kids run away whenever they see me—

Pori said, you won’t have a bad-name if I ever become a mother. But I won’t become a mother; my husband has white-leprosy—

Modhu had a god-fearing nature. He was a motherless lad. His father saved him when he was a child by making a vow at the altar of Maa Sitala (a Hindu goddess). The mention of unrighteous practices scared him. At first he didn’t consent to Pori’s offer, but then once, twice, thrice—.  The contractor was an exceedingly knavish man. He arrived as noiselessly as a wild-cat. He had solid news. Such rumors spread easily.

On the one hand Modhu already had a bad reputation because of his imprecations, and on top of that if the contractor gentleman took him to the Panchayat then there were would be no escape for him. He could be beaten to death. Madhu thought for a few moments, he then detached the wooden bolt from the door with a forceful pull and brought it down on the contractor’s head. After that he didn’t wait to look around, he just ran.

The blow had indeed been forceful one.  After running for a bit Modhu thought that probably he might have killed the contractor gentleman. The thought seemed to benumb his limbs. Little saplings were sprouting in his tobacco-field, that year he put a straw awning on his hut, ordered a shirt from the tailor, all those things remained behind. Running hastily Modhu entered the forest.

Leaning against the mangrove tree Modhu fell asleep. Upon awakening he grabbed his stomach. His stomach gave the impression of burning furiously.  Around five-six beedis remained in his pocket, but he must have dropped the match box when he was running. There wasn’t any way to smoke the beedis despite them being there in his pocket. What more he even had twelve to fourteen rupees in his pocket, yet he was now dying of hunger, it seemed outrageous. How could the dignity of money be kept alive? He neither wanted to rest nor walk. Nevertheless, he got up and started to saunter.

After walking for a bit he clearly heard the sound of approaching feet. It sounded like the sound of human feet. Madhu rushed to hide himself in the bush. The forest guards sometimes come to that area to see if somebody was illegally cutting tress, or to get a bribe. Hunters could come to kill the roguish elephant; but they won’t come to such an interior spot in the forest.

Modhu kept on looking cautiously. A little later he observed a couple of guys who seemed to be more scared than him approaching in his direction. They looked like gentlemen. They had disheveled hair, wore torn shirts, yet their faces retained a certain degree of suavity.

Modhu gave out a sigh. He had no difficulty in recognizing them. They were political babus. They traded arms and ammunition. Onetime they outwitted the police, now the police outwitted them.

Madhu wanted to see if the gentlemen had any food with them. But their hands were empty. They didn’t have any baggage with them either. Madhu was dejected.  If they had food with them Madhu might have approached them and squatted on the ground.

The two boys walked forward and then sat leaning against that same mangrove tree where Madhu had been resting a few moments ago. They brought out a packet of cigarettes.

One of the two said, a mad elephant always come by itself, isn’t it?

The other wearily said, I don’t know!

Then he stretched his body in order to sleep.

Modhu was debating whether to walk out of the bush or not. The next moment he sprang up. The young man who was lying jumped up like a spring in a mechanism and started to cry, oh, god, oh god, I am dying! Something bit me—

It didn’t take Modhu a second to understand that he was beaten by a snake. Modhu was also lying in that same spot. It could have beaten him as well. Why was Maa Manasa (the snake goddess) so kind to him?

The other lad leaned and said, what happened? Why are you shouting like this?

The other chap said, I am dying; my body is burning—

At that moment Modhu stepped out of the bush. As soon as the other lad observed him, he pressed his hands together and said, we are from the village, we came to pick up wood. Then dragging the legs of the other young man he said, there’s a snake there. You better come away from that spot.

The snake couldn’t be seen. Nobody had the courage to look into the hole on the tree. Modhu inspected the bite marks and understood that it was a fatally poisonous snake.

The snake bit the young man on the nape of his neck. He seemed perplexed. He didn’t know what to do. He muttered, a rope, a rope is required now. Don’t you need to tie it up with a rope?

Madhu recalled the song of Maa Manasa—

 ‘If a snake bites you on your head, where would you tie the amulet?’  The poison would travel to the brain very soon. It wasn’t sure if he would live for even fifteen minutes.

Modhu noisily threw a big ball of spit on the ground. Then he opened his mouth widely and said, babu, see if I have any open sores in my mouth.

The young man said, why?

Why don’t you see!

No. I don’t see any sore.

Do you have a knife?

No sooner the young man had brought out a knife than Modhu used it to make a gash near the nape of snake bitten lad. Then just like some ferocious beast he put his mouth on the nape of the young man’s neck and began sucking his blood.

Every time he filled his mouth with the blood and then spat it out on the ground. The other chap stood stunned.

The snake-bitten lad was facing the ground. He had little consciousness in his body. Modhu continued sucking blood from his neck and spitting it on the ground. His heart was racing at that moment. If he had even a small open sore or a cut in his mouth then he wouldn’t survive.

This continued for half an hour, then Modhu went to a side and threw up. He put his fingers in his mouth and threw up for a long time. He couldn’t throw up much though in his empty stomach. He came and rolled the lad. He examined him by pulling his eyelids and placing his hand near his nose.

The other chap hurried cried out, Ajoy, Ajoy!

The young man faintly replied, what?

Modhu sprang up and said, o, he has survived!

In the next moment after he had jumped Modhu felt dizzy and fell on the ground. Scared, he tried to grab the ground. With his blurry eyes he tried to say, I don’t want to die. It seemed the whole firmament and the ground was shaking with the intention of pushing him and rolling him down. In a weak tone he said, o, dear, please don’t throw me out.

Modhu regained his composure after a little time. The venom of the snake didn’t enter his system. He was dizzy because he jumped in an empty stomach.

Modhu got up once again. And then he said, babu, please stay here. I will get some water for him.

After he had walked a few steps, Modhu came back. In an embarrassing tone he said, can you please give me your matchbox; I want to smoke a beedi.

The lad offered him cigarette, but Modhu didn’t take it. He went to a side and lit his beedi. He felt relieved. One can live without eating, but one cannot survive without partaking of an addictive. A couple of puffs from his beedi generally cleared his mind.

Modhu knew where to find water. He saw the place in the morning. Slowly he walked to the spot. It was a pit of dirty water. He scrutinized the surrounding cautiously for once to make sure no wild animals or beasts were near.

Modhu squatted near the pit. He leaned and picked up a handful of water. When he straightened afterwards he experienced an unusual sensation. It was as if a revolt had broken out inside his body. Unknown objects were running about in his blood stream. Modhu understood it was joy. He never felt this joyous ever before in his life. He saved someone’s life. Someone was dying, and Modhu saved him. A person who would have certainly died was saved by Modhu. It seemed that the joy inside his body would come bursting out of his system. 

Taking water in his cupped palms Modhu looked up. Only a small portion of the sky was visible. Darkness was about to impend in the forest. All the tress seemed to be observing him.

Modhu cried silently. The tear drops from his eyes poured on the water in his cupped palms. He posed a question to some invisible authority in his mind, I was angry when I hit the contractor gentleman on his head. In exchange for that I saved somebody else’s life. Will I not be forgiven for that?

Nobody replied to Modhu.

Glossary of Non-English words:

1. Beedi: A thinn Indian cigarette filled with tobacco flake and wrapped in a tendu leaf and tied with a string at one end.

2 .Maa Manasa: The snake goddess
3. Maa Sitala: A Hindu goddess
4. Sraddha-"Sraddha, Sanskrit Śrāddha, also spelled Shraddha,  in Hinduism, a ceremony performed in honour of a dead ancestor. The rite is both a social and a religious responsibility enjoined on all male Hindus (with the exception of some sannyasis, or ascetics). The importance given in India to the birth of sons is to ensure that there will be a male descendant to perform the sraddha ceremony after one’s death." Source--http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/561839/sraddha
5. Rath-er mela-The event of 'Ratha Yatra' is marked by this fair

Translator’s Note: All rights to the original short story Aranye Eka belong to the author Sunil Gangopadhyay. This translation is an attempt by the translator to pay homage to one of her favorite writers in Bengali literature. 

The translator has no rights to the original Bengali short story. PLEASE DO NOT COPY OR USE ANY PART OF THIS WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION

Original short story published in Panchasti Priya Galpa by Sunil Gangopadhyay. Published by Sahityam

Peace, at last

 

Not having wielded the pen for days at length, I felt intimidated about the right hand’s capability to beget any words on paper. This intimidation led to uncertainty and a lack of confidence in self’s capacity to craft a sentence. And then when against my wishes I sat at my desk and forced myself to grab the fountain pen and write whatever comes to my mind, the words started flowing. Although there was a slight hesitation in the beginning, but then everything seemed all right; I wrote for one hour and when I put my pen down I realized that my cold sudoriferous hand has written twelve pages of my life story with the following word of advice directed to the self in unequivocal terms: write every day if you wish to call yourself a writer in future years! Unlike most self-directed advice issued by the mind, I intend to strictly follow this one. If you are a writer then, mon amie, never let a hiatus transpire your writing life if you don’t want nightmares of an exhausted writing life haunting you at night.