The Rats' Feast: A Tagore Omnibus

by Rabindranath Tagore, Astri Ghosh

Genres: Classics

Synopsis

A dry-fruit seller from Kabul with a heart of molten gold and a fist of iron. Escapades of naughty schoolboys travelling on a train with an unusual teacher. The decisive battle of skill and oratory between two poets in a king's court. The everydayjoys and sadness of a sick boy who sees the world through a half-open window of hope. A bemusing world of Cards/based on rules and class divides. Morning and night/life and death, poverty and riches, working girls and growing boys... everything touched Rabindranath Tagore's mind and heart/and flowed into writing through his magical, unstoppable pen. Tagore's genius has yet to be fathomed completely. His writings continue to stay fresh and crisp/ surprising us/ provoking us and moving us a hundred years after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Original and touching/ intense and unforgettable, the stories, plays and poems in this volume have been carefully selected and translated into a definitive and valuable collection of Tagore's masterpieces.

Release date: May 20, 2013

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 238

Sample

Twelve years old and struggling with my Bangla—reading was fun but writing, a nightmare—I woke up one morning to find my mother standing next to my bed with a familiar smile. I knew it well, it was her ‘I have something you won’t like’ expression. I was in Class Six, the Bangla paper of the annual examinations was scheduled for following day, and I was already in a blue funk.

My mother held out a slim book, saying, ‘Practice test. Answer all the questions in here.’ Several grunts and an hour of procrastination later, I had to finally open the book. Yep, there it was, several sample question papers. But wait a minute! It said that these questions had been set by Rabindranath Tagore! And suddenly I had another reason to be afraid of Whitebeard, as I thought—privately, of course—of the man everyone in the family worshipped.

But I have to admit I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of envy either. Was there no limit to this man’s abilities? As far as I knew back then, he had written poetry—in fact, I was half convinced every poem ever written in Bangla was his—short stories and novels. Some of those stories I was allowed to read, but I had my eye on the novels, which were placed on the delicious-but-forbidden shelf in the big bookcase. The Bangla teacher at school never tired of telling us that Tagore also wrote plays, essays, travelogues, and reams of letters. And, as it turned out, question papers too. I mean, really, did he have to make the rest of us feel so inadequate?

But as I read the short stories—some prescribed by the school, the rest sneaked off the top rack—something about them began to haunt me. The young people in his stories always seemed to be in some form of imprisonment. Distant family or cold schoolteachers, abject poverty or early employment, physical ailments or a sad heart—there was at least one, if not more, of these things creating a virtual jail for the boys and girls in the stories.

When I turned fourteen, at which age I obviously knew everything there was to know in the world, I had a moment of Tagore epiphany. It came out of an unguarded remark made by a teacher at school. When we were being exceptionally obnoxious—in a class of forty-five 14-year-old boys, what do you expect?—one afternoon, he sneered at us, ‘Do you think you are in Rabindranath’s Shantiniketan, where you can do as you like?’

There was a school where boys—OK, girls too—could do as they liked? Hope and despair jostling each other in my head, I turned to the only one of my uncles who did not judge when I asked a question. An armchair Naxal revolutionary (version 1.0), he was suitably contemptuous of Tagore, but despite his attempt to be dismissive, he managed to explain to me that Whitebeard—whose beard was actually black when he was young—was a staunch believer in freedom for young people.

Freedom? Tell me more!

Schooled at home because he hated the regimen at the educational institution he had been sent to, and dropping out of college in England afterwards, Tagore the student was your quintessential rebel. Which is why he not only established a school, college and university at Shantiniketan aimed at giving students the freedom to explore, experience and realize their potential, but he also informed much of his writing with this theme. To him, the life of young folks—that’s you and, shhh, don’t tell anyone, but me too—is a constant quest for freedom. That is why he’s so 21st Century as a writer, even if the setting of his stories seems old.

So don’t let your parents and elders tell you what Tagore stood for. Read this splendid selection of his stories, plays and poems to find out for yourself. They might not like it, but you will.

Arunava Sinha

Delhi 2013

My five-year old daughter Mini can’t survive for even a minute without talking. It took her a year to learn to speak after she came into this world and since then she has not wasted a minute of her waking hours in silence. Her mother is often cross with her and asks her to keep quiet, but I can’t. It is unnatural for Mini to be quiet, and I couldn’t stand it if she were. That is why, whenever we talk to each other, our conversations are always very animated.

One morning, when I was writing the seventeenth chapter of my novel, Mini came in and got started. ‘Father, Ramdayal the guard calls a crow a kauwa. He doesn’t know a thing, does he?’

Before I could let her know about the diversity of many languages of the world, she started off on another subject. ‘Father, Bhola says that when it rains, an elephant in the sky squirts water from his trunk. Imagine! Bhola says such silly things, he talks all day long!’

Without waiting for a response from me, all of a sudden she asked me, ‘Father, how is Mother related to you?’

In my mind I muttered, ‘my sister—in—law’ but when I spoke I said, ‘Mini, why don’t you go and play with Bhola. I have work to do right now.’

She then sat down at my feet, beside my desk, and started playing a game with her hands and knees, reciting agdum bagdum at top speed. The hero of my seventeenth chapter Pratap Singh was at the time jumping in the dark of night with Kanchan Mala, from the window of his high prison into the river below.

My room is by a road. Suddenly Mini stopped playing agdum bagdum and ran over to the window screeching, ‘Kabuliwala, ho Kabuliwala.’

Dressed in grubby, baggy clothes, with a turban on his head, a bag hanging from his shoulder, a couple of boxes of grapes in his hands, a tall man from Kabul was slowly walking along the road. It was difficult to know what the sight of him had made my precious daughter think, but she started to call him most enthusiastically. I thought that the swinging bag spelt disaster; my seventeenth chapter would not get finished.

However, just as the Kabuliwala smiled and looked at us and started to come over to our house, she gasped and ran inside, and was nowhere to be seen. She had a blind conviction that if you examined the bag you would find a couple of living children like her in it.

The Kabuliwala came over and greeted me with a salaam—I thought, even though Pratap Singh and Kanchan Mala’s situation was precarious, it would be rude not to invite the man in and buy something from him.

I bought something. Then we chatted for a while. About Abdur Rahman, the Russians, border politics and efforts to protect Afghanistan from the British.

As he got up to leave, he asked, ‘Babu, where did your girl go?’

To get rid of Mini’s fear I had her fetched from the inner rooms. She clung to me and looked at the Kabuliwala’s face and bag with suspicious eyes. The man from Kabul took some raisins and dried apricots out of his bag and wanted to give them to her, but she would not take them and clutched at my knees with twice the suspicion. That was their first meeting.

A few days later, as I was about to go out one morning, I saw my daug. . .