CHAPTER 8

The Lover of God

Rabindranath Tagore

BORN IN 1861, Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to receive, in 1913, the Nobel Prize in Literature, was the thirteenth and last surviving child of a distinguished Bengali family, the youngest child of the previous generation’s oldest child. I attribute Tagore’s reputation as an “old soul” in part to this fact of genealogy, since, as the youngest of a vast clan, he would have grown up hearing, as I grew up hearing, family stories reaching far into the past. In the course of researching a Bengali character for a novel, I was drawn into Tagore’s life through our shared experience as repositories of generations of memory and by his frequently and eloquently expressed awareness of his essential solitude.

Mahatma Gandhi called Rabindranath Tagore “Great Sentinel” and “Gurudev” (“divine mentor”). Tagore returned the favor by being among the first to call Gandhi “Mahatma” (“venerable”). Westerners lionize Gandhi, Tagore’s contemporary, as the liberator of the subcontinent. But contemporary India, in her role as one of the world’s leading software developers, owes as much to Tagore, champion of education, as to Gandhi, whose campaign of nonviolence did little to promote education. Thanks in part to the 1982 Hollywood blockbuster film, the activist Gandhi is a common reference point worldwide, whereas in America, the contemplative and solitary Tagore is largely forgotten. But in Bangla, the world’s seventh most commonly spoken language, Tagore’s life and work remain the focus of academic studies, even as street people in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) and farmers in the remote villages of Bengal sing his songs and recite his poetry. Tagore might have his closest Western analogue in Bob Dylan, who along with Tagore is the only musician to receive the Nobel in literature.

From a letter from Tagore to his secretary:

I carry an infinite space of loneliness around my soul through which the voice of my personal life very often does not reach my friends—for which I suffer more than they do. I have my yearning for the personal world as much as any other mortal, or perhaps more. But my destiny seems to be careful that in my life’s experiences I should only have the touch of personality and not the ties of it. All the while she [destiny] claims my thoughts, my dreams and my voice, and for that, detachment of life and mind is needed. In fact, I have constantly been deprived of opportunities for intimate [long-lasting] attachments of companionship. Then again I have such an extreme delicacy of sensitiveness with regard to personal relationship that even when I acknowledge and welcome it I cannot invite it to the immediate closeness of my life. This deficiency I acknowledge with resignation knowing that it is a sacrifice claimed of me by my Providence for some purpose which he knows.

On the announcement of the Nobel, newspapers in Britain and America hastened to assure their audiences that, though dark-skinned, Tagore was “genetically Aryan.” In his Nobel, and the rush of the leading male Anglo poets of the day (W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound) to promote it, I perceive the desire of the European literary world to laud this dark-skinned colonial so long as he accommodated their ideas of how a colonial should behave and write. When he proved to have projects of his own—among them, promoting Indian independence—the British literary world turned on him and his popularity plummeted.

On every European and American visit, Tagore met the leading intellectuals and artists of the time, and while some expressed skepticism, most were charmed and seduced. That Tagore was ethereally handsome and, judging from photographs, a ringer for a modern-day Jesus reinforced the English myth of a Bengali sage. Western intellectuals were eager for a scrim onto which to project their fantasies of an ancient wisdom which might revitalize or replace the materialism of Western society, with its bustle and noise and profit-driven destruction of the natural world. Tagore was held up as the personification of the ideal—advocated by Emerson, advanced by Whitman in Leaves of Grass, and given voice in Thoreau—of a merger of Western empiricism and Asian mysticism, an ideal Tagore embraced until the carnage of World War I and the rising tide of Indian nationalism strengthened his commitment to home rule.

That some Anglos changed their points of view from lionization to cynicism offers evidence less of Tagore’s shortcomings, though there were many, than of their disappointment at finding he was not, after all, the Second Coming they had fantasized. Tagore’s Nobel came about in part because the Nobel committee—in those days a profoundly conservative body which understood its mission as the cultivation and dissemination of Western European culture—had read little more than Gitanjali (Song Offerings), a modest collection of devotional poems celebrating the waterscape, villages, and deities of Tagore’s beloved Ganges Delta and the only work of Tagore’s then available in English. Tagore himself had translated Gitanjali from the original Bangla, with assistance from William Butler Yeats, who was also its principal promoter to the Nobel committee. The origins of the initially warm resonance between Tagore and Yeats are easy to perceive; both were poets from colonized lands where English dominated but whose cultures rooted themselves in their native tongues; both poets held strong home rule sentiments and would become anticolonial activists. In 1906, long before the Nobel Prize, Tagore had published “Amar Sonar Bangla” as a rallying cry for opponents of Lord Curzon’s partition, part of the British Empire–wide strategy of divide and rule. His song “Bande Mataram” became the informal anthem of the Indian nationalist movement. Later, his “Jana Gana Mana” was chosen as the anthem of the new nation of India, and later still “Amar Sonar Bangla” revived as the anthem for the new nation of Bangladesh, making him the only composer of two national anthems.

Drawn by his powerful novels and essays, by some wordless, deep recognition of a fellow solitary, and by a lifelong fascination with Bengal, I traveled halfway around the world in search of Jorasanko, the Kolkata compound in which Tagore was born and where he died.

Built by the British Empire as its base for raping the subcontinent, Kolkata, “City of Joy,” went in the course of the twentieth century from being Asia’s wealthiest city to being its poorest. Here the forces and tragedies of capitalism and colonialism are laid bare: a throng of people, more humanity than the spacious, airy Western imagination can comprehend, whole villages on the broad sidewalks, cooking, sleeping, laughing, defecating, begging, nursing, and always and everywhere selling, selling, selling; and amid the infinite gradations of brown complexions that constitute Bengal, a solitary Anglo man a head taller than the swirling, eddying, singing, shouting, chaotic mass. I am that man, that solitary, all but unique during the weeks of my visit—Anglos are not fond of visiting the scenes of our crimes—a white man traveling alone.

I meet local doctors, a husband and wife whose son would like to immigrate to the United States. The wife receives me in the visitors’ parlor. She and her husband pursued their medical education in Moscow; they have traveled to London. She has an unmarried daughter of an eligible age. Within moments of our meeting she asks if I am married. Prepared for this question by friends and wanting no misunderstandings, I tell her I’m a gay man. She ponders. “I have heard of this phenomenon,” she says.

Later she asks, is it not obvious that marriages arranged by parents are more likely to succeed than those arising from passion? Later she asks, is it not obvious that a man has three responsibilities: to marry, to give his wife children, preferably sons, and to support her while she raises them and later in her old age? Later she asks, is it not obvious that, when a man reaches a certain age, for the well-being of all concerned he should leave the household and the family to the women and retire in solitude, like an old tiger, to the forest? Later she asks, of course we know men have sex with men, but why do you have to talk about it?

The struggle of people to maintain dignity in the most appalling environments; the exuberance, love of life, joy, city of joy, in conditions the prosperous would find unbearable.

I tremble for my race when I think that God is just.

I am searching for Jorasanko, home of the Tagores.

At the Kali temple: bloody mouth, necklace of skulls, black complexion. Baskets of scarlet hibiscus, to feed her appetite for blood; flocks of goats, sacrificed hourly, to feed her appetite for blood. It was, I believe, this cultural familiarity with death—the perception of it not as the termination of life but as life’s essential and ever-present complement—that led Tagore to think on it so deeply; Elisabeth Kübler-Ross opens every chapter of her groundbreaking On Death and Dying with quotations from his writing.

The great festival is underway, celebrating Durga, patroness of Kolkata, virgin and mother of Shiva’s children, and her defeat of the evil demon Mashisha: pandals larger than mansions, larger than palaces, bamboo framing covered with hemp woven into fantastic architectural detail, woven into animals and humans and pilasters and Corinthian columns and rosettes and featuring in every interior, as unvarying as the ox and lamb and Virgin and babe of the Christmas crèche, variations on the goddess Durga, solitary warrior, astride her lion, her four children to either side, a weapon in each of her ten arms and in one hand the trident with which she pierces the blue demon Mashisha at her feet, in his manifestation as a water buffalo.

A fantasy city built in the architecture of dreams, built to be destroyed. People crowd the puja pandals. A great pandal dedicated to Muhammad Ali, with a banner over its entrance, “A LIFE WITHOUT FEAR.” On the last day the city parades to the river and returns the goddesses to their origins, mud to mud; there is no past, no future, time is an illusion, there is only here and now, let us begin and begin and begin again.

The monsoons have prolonged themselves but in my very Anglo determination to make use of every moment, I set out to find Jorasanko.

Rain falls steadily. In a city with little drainage, the streets are knee-deep in water. Only the skinny rickshaw drivers are at work, pulling their fares through the flooded streets. The Russian-built metro arrives and departs precisely on time. I get off near the Asia Society, club and home base for remaining members of the upper castes that aligned themselves with the Raj. Surely someone there will direct me to Jorasanko? The entrance is manned by four armed guards, smoking. I ask for directions to Jorasanko. The guard requests my passport. He inspects every page, including the blank pages, then hands it to his fellow guard, who repeats the inspection. All four guards inspect it, then the last vanishes through a door, my passport in hand. They indicate a bench. I wait. An hour passes. “All I want are directions to Jorasanko,” I say. The guards smile. I wait. They smoke. I wait. After another hour, in desperation I pull a business card from my wallet. “I’m a professor,” I say. “May I have my passport?” The first guard inspects my card, then hands it to the second, who hands it to the third, who inspects it and says, “The distinguished professor from America! You must meet the director!” “But I don’t want to meet the director,” I say. “I just want my passport.” I’ve given up on the day’s project of locating Jorasanko. The rain is still falling. “You must meet the Society director, when he returns from tea,” the first guard says. “And when will he return from tea?” I ask. The guard smiles. An hour passes. The fourth guard returns, carrying my passport. “The director is happy to make an appointment,” he says. “But I don’t want to see the director,” I say. My passport disappears again. A half hour passes. At 4 p.m. the guard returns. “Your appointment with the director is at 5 p.m.,” he says. “May I have my passport?” I ask, figuring that, with it in hand, I will make a break for the door. “After your appointment with the director,” he says. An hour passes. Precisely at 5 p.m. the guard beckons me forward.

The director’s office is on the top floor, an ornate room with high ceilings and vast paintings from centuries of European colonialism. Mold covers one wall and creeps over the paintings. The director waves me to a seat. He sits at his empty, spotless desk. “The distinguished professor of English,” he says. “I’m not that kind of professor,” I respond. “Actually, I’m just looking for Jorasanko,” and in his slight grimace the thought occurs that Tagore was most likely no friend of the Asia Society, that just possibly I am being given the runaround. Then he smiles and places his hands together and stands. “ ‘The Prelude,’ ” he says, “by William Wordsworth,” and recites from memory, ten minutes and more. His hands come together again and he sits. “Now you must recite for me,” he says. “Shelley? Byron?” “I’m afraid I don’t memorize the British,” I say. “You must give a lecture,” he says. “Really, you are so kind,” I say, “but I just came to find Jorasanko, and so if I could have my passport returned . . .” “We will arrange a date,” he says, pulling out his calendar. “Next Thursday,” he says, “at noon. I will invite our board. They will be so pleased to hear from the distinguished visiting professor from America.” “I don’t have a lecture prepared,” I say. “I didn’t travel with any notes.” “Your topic?” he asks. “Well, I just wrote a book on the encounter of Buddhism and Christianity in America,” I say. He frowns. “I must consult with my board.”

Back-and-forth for several minutes, while the painting molders and the rains continue. Finally I am released, and oh, yes, your passport, a matter of no consequence, ask downstairs. And I ask downstairs, and my passport is produced, and I am shown the door.

When I emerge—the end of the day now, a day on which I had a long list of projects—I am learning not to make lists of projects, I am learning to submit, I am learning about life in Kolkata, I am learning about life—the rains have stopped. I wade through flooded streets, back to the subway, back to the rickshaw, back to the Vedantist study center where I am staying—an institute founded by followers of Brahmo Samaj, a monotheistic reformist movement of Hinduism cofounded by Tagore’s father. The moment I enter my cell, the telephone, which has not been working and which will never work again, rings. The director of the Asia Society is calling. “No American will be allowed to speak on Buddhism,” he says. “Another topic, please.”

I’m sullen. “Memoir,” I say. “I write memoir. I can talk about writing memoir.” He rings off.

I spend the intervening week wondering if I dreamed this day or if in fact I am obligated to appear, but I, ever the polite visitor and, it must be said, curious what adventure waits, show up at the appointed time. There, in the bright, hot, humid midday sun of Kolkata, on the sidewalk packed with street vendors and beggars and bureaucrats in dhotis on their midday break and the unbreathable air and din of passing lorries, a skeletally thin man with a pronounced limp is walking up and down, up and down, wearing a sandwich board reading Fenton Johnson / Distinguished American Professor / Lectures on Wordsworth / 12:00.

In the upstairs conference room: forty solemn women wearing gorgeously patterned silk saris and one handsome man. The director introduces me. I give a brief summary of the concept of a creative writing program and my place in it. I read from my memoir of my partner who died of AIDS in Paris in 1990, pages of which I had located online and printed in an internet café. When I say the word AIDS, the director rises and leaves. I speak of my conversation with the one person charged with administering AIDS prevention programs in Kolkata, a city of fifteen million. The women are stone-faced. I invite questions. There are no questions. The handsome man presents me with a bouquet of roses and an honorarium: 500 rupees, about four dollars. How might I find Jorasanko? I ask. He brings his hands together, bows, and smiles.

Rabindranath Tagore understood his formative setting to be not the congested streets of Kolkata but rural Bengal, the great delta of the Ganges, where life patterns were shaped not by land but by water: the annual, harmonic rhythm of monsoon floods, planting, and harvests, and the religious festivals celebrating these. Though educated in Jorasanko, Tagore spent much of his adulthood as the benevolent overseer of the villages of the family’s Ganges Delta estates, a role richly portrayed in The Home and the World, Bengali director Satyajit Ray’s lush film adapted from Tagore’s novel of the same name. Though Tagore was caught up in the social and cultural upheaval that marked the emergence of India in the twentieth century, he was first and foremost a chronicler of village life, in song, poetry, prose, theater, and painting.

Writing at the time of the building of the modern nation-state of India from humankind’s most ancient surviving culture, Tagore ceaselessly experimented with old forms of music and poetry. Though he never played a musical instrument, he composed some two thousand songs. His collected works fill thirty-two volumes. Late in life he took up painting, exhibiting in major cities around the world. He opposed all forms of militarism, and protested the British firing on Sikh pilgrims at Amritsar in 1919 by disavowing the knighthood Britain had conferred on him. And yet he could also oppose Swadeshi, Mahatma Gandhi’s program of self-reliance, on the basis that it created a barrier between England and India, Hindu and Muslim, when, in his view, cooperation, collaboration, and education were the only roads to peaceful coexistence.

His commitment to education was lifelong and unwavering. He founded first a utopian school at Shantiniketan, where his father had already established an ashram for Brahmo Samaj. Later Tagore fils enlarged his school into a utopian university, Visva-Bharati, which played a major role in the maturation of some of the greatest artists and thinkers of the new Indian nation, among them Satyajit Ray and the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen.

But Tagore always understood the arts and the sciences, East and West, mysticism and reason, as inseparable and symbiotic. Abroad he defended Indian spirituality; in India he defended the Western enshrinement of reason.

In this he revealed another characteristic my solitaries share: he was ornery, a contrarian, one who turned over the stone of received opinion to find the riches underneath. Tagore was utterly committed to the beauty and power of reason even as he understood that reason was only one aspect of the great harmonic chorus of the universe—the conductor, perhaps, to sustain the entirely apt metaphor, first-rank in importance, but not to be confused with the music itself. His achievements were the fruit of aristocratic privilege, but the dominant motif of his life was simplicity and solitude.

As a youth—as one might expect of the thirteenth and youngest child of a vast clan deeply invested in its intellectual and aesthetic traditions—Tagore became fascinated with poetry from earlier times. At the age of fourteen he wrote eight poems in a distinctive lyrical style dating from the sixteenth century, celebrating the unrequited love of the maiden Radha for her lord Krishna. Claiming that he had found and copied the poems from an ancient manuscript, Tagore presented them to his older brother, editor of a literary journal underwritten by the family. The brother was much taken with their beauty and accepted them immediately. When Tagore revealed the deception, his brother delighted in the joke, eventually publishing thirteen of his youngest brother’s poems under the title The Lover of God and the pseudonym Bhanusimha Thakur.

The poems might be dismissed as an adolescent prank, but in them Tagore, disguised from others and, most intriguingly, from himself, assumes the persona of a middle-aged lady-in-waiting advising the young princess Radha on matters of the heart. He anticipates Virginia Woolf’s praise of androgyny as the foundation of creativity; in the manner of Jane Austen, Henry James, or Eudora Welty, the solitary occupies the role of gender-ambiguous sage and counselor regarding relationships.

Perhaps in imitation of Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass Tagore greatly admired, Tagore added to and revised those early poems throughout his life. For many years he denied his authorship of them; at one point, to underscore the joke, he authored a fake biography of the fake poet, written in the high academic style he detested.

However fantastically overcrowded and polluted, India has not banished its gods and goddesses. Today you still find them hanging out casually on every street, in every village lane, in the subway stations, in the rice paddies. Every corner tree and lightpost features a tiny altar to some member of the Hindu panoply of deities; they inhabit Tagore’s every poem. I open my copy of The Lover of God randomly, to encounter immediately references to Kala, goddess of art, and Kānu, a diminutive of Lord Krishna.

You listen, Kānu, Divine Lord among beasts,

she thirsts for the pure nectar of your love.

Let her drink.

As is statistically demonstrable with youngest sons, Tagore may have carried a genetic predisposition to androgyny or, perhaps, an unexpressed homosexuality—I’m thinking of the poems of The Lover of God and the organic ease with which, as a fourteen-year-old, Tagore inhabited a woman’s consciousness. Poems by a fourteen-year-old, late-nineteenth-century Bengali boy, dreaming himself into the persona of a middle-aged duenna, three centuries in the past, advising her lady on her romantic obsession with a god; poems the boy, later a Nobel laureate, revisited and revised until he was nearly eighty years old.

I find a gentle lesson here for our postmodern, materialist, secularized, fact- and device- and identity-obsessed West—a lesson about penetrating the baroque delights of the surface to the essential unity (Brahma) of what lies underneath, with the self not as a fixed entity but a door waiting to be opened to a hallway of mirrors framing more doors, each to be opened and explored, in solitude and in silence.

In his reminiscences, Tagore makes only passing reference to his marriage, arranged in 1883 to a child bride ten years old; Tagore was twenty-two. He and his wife lived together only briefly; she died in 1902. In his memoir he writes a single sentence, “I was married”; that is the sum of his assessment. Though Tagore spoke against child marriage, he arranged for his daughters to marry at ten and fifteen years of age—perhaps, one of his biographers speculates, to free himself for his life projects, the schools at Shantiniketan and Visva-Bharati. At the time of his favorite daughter’s death from tuberculosis, Tagore had hardly seen her in five years. Like Whitman—like me—Tagore wrote of an idealized companion. “If only, right now, someone dear to me were here, one human companion I could love,” he wrote in his short story “The Postmaster.” His child bride could not fill that role, whether because of limitations on her part or because her upbringing had not provided her the slightest preparation to be other than a submissive, not-seen-and-not-heard, sequestered-in-purdah wife.

To provide context for Tagore’s misogyny as well as a sobering reminder of the cultural norms of early-twentieth-century India even among educated men, I note that Gandhi treated women with comparable indifference, in marked contrast to, e.g., Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, with Whitman in particular repeatedly including and celebrating the place of women in the great American experiment of democracy. That neither Tagore nor Gandhi overcame this elemental prejudice speaks volumes about the weight of Bangla and Hindu tradition and the liberation that arose, at least for some, in North America, the new, relatively unencumbered continent, where women were, if not equals, at least necessary partners in the settlement and exploitation of the land and its native peoples. And though Tagore took care to differentiate between the rigid social structures of the Hindu caste system and his Brahmin ideals, he never repudiated the privilege his caste afforded him. One of his biographers characterizes him as “an aristocrat not a democrat,” and in fact Shantiniketan segregated Brahmin from non-Brahmin boys from its founding in 1901 until the 1915 visit by Gandhi, who was not Brahmin.

And yet: writers and artists form and express their most foundational truths in and through their work. Tagore’s poetry and prose, including most notably The Home and the World, reveal a tender and profound sensitivity to the awakening expectations and trials of women in a rapidly changing India. In this he was among the voices—he was perhaps the great literary voice—paving the way for his fellow Bengali Bharati Mukherjee’s The Middle Passage and Other Stories, which received the National Book Award in Fiction in 1984 and opened the floodgates for the current wealth of writing by women of the subcontinent.

In Shantiniketan’s initial years, the Kolkata elite dismissed Tagore’s university as hopelessly idealistic, but one sees in its principles and in Tagore’s vision the essence of the solitary’s idealism—my father’s secular monastery, if you will. Its founding required a certain faith in destiny. That the land on which it was built was a parched tract in a poverty-stricken region of Bengal hardly mattered, since, for Tagore the mystic, the mind could make a heaven of any hell. Satyajit Ray, who lived there from 1940 to 1942, recalled it as “a world of vast open spaces, vaulted over with a dustless sky, that on a clear night showed the constellations as no city sky could ever do . . . if Shantiniketan did nothing else, it induced contemplation, and a sense of wonder, in the most prosaic and earthbound of minds.” Tagore emphasized the character of the place and its commitment to solitaries and solitude in a letter to his niece: “far horizons, black storm-clouds and profound feelings—in other words, where infinitude is manifest—are most truly witnessed by one person; a multitude makes them petty and distracting.” In its early years Shantiniketan imposed a standard of living that was, depending on your point of view, ascetic or primitive, but as the land recovered from its abuses and responded to Tagore’s reclamation projects, the school became a byword for the cultivation of beauty—that is, a theme and watchword for the solitary’s project.

As the youngest of thirteen, Tagore would have had from earliest consciousness an intimate relationship with death, because he would have been looking on as one by one his elders died. In fact Tagore survived his wife, three children, five brothers, and three sisters. “This conviction appeared in my writing again and again,” he wrote, “that it is in the form of sorrow and despair, conflict and death that the infinite makes its appearance in life.” Earlier he writes, “In order to know life as real one has to make its acquaintance through death. . . . The person who rushes ahead to take death a captive can see that what he seizes on is not death, it is life.”

Death . . .

I shall welcome, and receive him

with my whole heart, and believe him

friend and soulmate dear . . .

Tagore, Gitanjali

. . . to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Whitman, Leaves of Grass

And so midway through my month in Kolkata I take the train to Benares, city of death, where orthodox Hindus come to die because, in the Hindu cosmology, to die in Benares is to escape the karmic cycle of life and death and pass directly to nirvana. Bengali friends wisely advised me to arrange for a guide. But my train arrived late on a blisteringly hot day, I was feverish, and so, after waiting an hour in the heat—not so much as a shade shelter at the train station—and uneasy at drinking the little water that was to be had, I hired a cab driver to penetrate the impenetrable maze of Benares. When my guide arrived at my hotel an hour later—four hours later than our appointment—I fired him, a stupid decision born of so many cultural assumptions, chief among them my understanding of time as governed by calendar and clock. Why arrive at the station “on time” when the train arrives and departs on a schedule known only to the gods? “I don’t need a guide,” I thought. “I can travel alone, I’ve always traveled alone. I will learn it all by myself.”

As indeed I did, but I recommend against this particular exercise in Western arrogance. A couple travels as a self-contained unit, in which each serves as a sounding board and defender of the other; the solitary is exposed and vulnerable before whatever adventure the journey presents. To offer the most explicit example: beggars and hawkers in the streets made a beeline for me, the solitary Anglo who had no obvious refuge, no one at hand to turn to so as to ignore the extended hand or the high-volume sales pitch.

The broad sweep of the Ganges. Hymns chanted in unison. In the narrow alleyway in front of the hotel a banyan tree raises its limbs over crowded houses, its roots flowing over broken walls and pavement seeking earth, its branches filled with spider monkeys silhouetted against the last light from the setting sun, their screeches and screams punctuating the sitar and flute and tabla from the burning ghats, where the smoke from today’s cremations rises to become what is. The lowest caste rakes through the ashes for gold fillings or silver rings, their salary for tending to the untouchable dead. The bell stops. On the darkening river a flotilla of oil lamps drifts, set afloat by the faithful, each carrying a wish or a prayer. On the steps immediately below someone has just released the day’s sewage, which flows down the steps to join Mother Ganga. A few feet from where the brown sewage dumps into the river, men and children are bathing. Some drink of the holy river, some brush their teeth. The ghats are lined with two-prowed skiffs that take people on the river. A spider monkey creeps along the ledge under my balcony, almost within touch; his big brown eyes and slightly worried gaze meet mine. Another flotilla of oil lamps slowly makes its way downriver. Another conch shell blows; the music steps up its rhythm. This is music meant to penetrate the heart and it is no wonder that the British held it in unease. Someone is ringing a bell, blowing a conch, banging a tin cymbal on the vast wide sweep of the bend in the river. The alleyways are at times narrow as my shoulders and never more than ten feet wide, a space shared by goats, cattle with calves, vendors, children, bicycles, the occasional motorbike, mangy dogs, cow pies, monkeys. Teams of men from the lowest caste, dressed in white, the color of death, carry the dead on pallets on their shoulders, marching double-time; the crowds part as if by magic to let them pass as they convey the corpses to the burning ghats. Ascetics of all persuasions wander through; emaciated men and women who have come here to die wander through. Someone is always at my elbow to offer postcards, a massage, beer, hash, opium, girls, boys.

Near the burning ghats, five wooden platforms face the river. On each stands a young man dressed in white, edged with red or green. In coordinated choreography they face to one side, then to the river, then to the other side, waving first peacock-feather fans, then great dusters made of bound grasses. The movement is slow and graceful and hypnotic. The priest is chanting hymns over the loudspeakers while tabla, sitar, and flute play. Cattle wander through the crowd. The boats pull up one by one, the pilgrims debark. A saffron-robed monk wanders through the crowd with sacred fire cupped in a clay saucer; people wave their hands over it. After an hour the dancers stop but the conch shells blow and bells ring into the night.

The next day I meet with a devout scholar of Sanskrit, a lifelong solitary who has come to Benares to die. She serves me tea in her tiny apartment, where she is watching American Christian cable. From my notes:

• A Jew or a Muslim is made a Jew or a Muslim through circumcision, a Christian is made a Christian through baptism, but we are born Hindu.
• When you worship you become the deity. Incense symbolizes purification by fire; you are burning the five senses, you are surrendering everything.
• The river is the microcosmic self, the ocean is the macrocosmic self. The soul flows down from the mountain to join its larger self. Once you are in the river, you are bound to reach your destination. It’s not water, it’s energy. Good and evil are the play of language, nothing else. Language is maya which you have to forget in order to experience what lies beyond.
• If good comes into your life, it’s because you’ve been blessed by God, not because you’re better than others.
• Good and evil are the same thing—the same person in different masks. We meditate at dusk or dawn because that’s when good mixes with evil, light with dark. I do not concern myself with what is good, what is evil. I concern myself with right action. In what way may I be in accord with the moment—to do what it asks of me? Americans want direct action, but direct action is seldom the best means to the goal. Patience is what is called for, to let the matter reveal itself for what it is.
• We will burn the homosexuals.
• The universe is a bright jewel set firm in forgiving and held fast by love.
• A rain of flowers accompanies a great hero’s death.

Men with gold or metallic white or silver or red paint on their foreheads, marks of their particular devotion. Drums beating, low- and high-pitched bells ringing, gongs, chanting, past and through the burning bodies, the minor key colors—ochre, tan, sandstone—of the temples and ghats lit by the light off the river, the stench of sewage, the splash of pilgrims and old men bathing, the water, the devotees of Shiva with red threads around their arms, the boat ride, the oars two bamboo trunks with boards nailed to them, the boatman older than time, a world outside of time or maybe without time. Time is an illusion. I confess I do not believe in time.

There is no time, all past and all future

is contained in this moment.

Rabindranath Tagore, Balai

At each day’s end I retreat to my cell and wonder: Did I really see that? Did that really happen? Questions rendered more piercing and unanswerable because I had no second pair of eyes, I had no companion, I traveled alone.

And yet who would want a companion as a scrim between oneself and India, between life and death? None of this would have happened to the coupled me. The solitary traveler occupies a place of openness that becomes a place of radical empowerment, because learning begins in letting go, becoming vulnerable, feeling awkward and stupid, losing the self to find the self.

For all his respect for science, knowledge, education, Tagore was at heart a contemplative. One reads it in his poetry, which idealizes the timeless cycle of rural life, with its rhythmic progression from one season to the next, each season with particular tasks to be performed in consonance with the demands of nature. Tagore’s international travel deepened his contemplative nature; he encountered the environmental and social destruction of industrialization worldwide and, like any sensitive soul, was appalled. Perhaps that is why he advocated the slow, labor-intensive, one-mind-at-a-time approach to change.

In their 1995 biography The Myriad-Minded Man, Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson compared Tagore to Gandhi as a means of underscoring Tagore’s role in Indian history. “Tagore versus Gandhi was the cherisher of beauty versus the ascetic; the artist versus the utilitarian; the thinker versus the man of action; the individualist versus the politician; the elitist versus the populist; the widely-read versus the narrowly-read; the modernist versus the reactionary; the believer in science versus the anti-scientist; the synthesizer of East and West versus the Indian chauvinist; the internationalist versus the nationalist; the traveler versus the stay-at-home; the Bengali versus the Gujarati; the scholarly Brahmin versus the merchant Vaishya; and, most prominently, the fine flowing robes and beard versus the coarse loincloth and bald pate.”

In that list—as best I can tell from my research, not pejorative but merely descriptive—I search for my own place on the spectrum from mystic (Tagore) to pragmatist (Gandhi). It seems so predictable that the Brahmin Tagore, who grew up in a palace, however humbly appointed, underwritten by generations of collaboration with the British, should be the voice of liberal moderation, while Gandhi, born to the merchant class which had a problematic relationship with the British authorities, would become the voice of nonviolent revolution. Tagore was a solitary—“a boy who was shy and kept to himself, playing his solitary games,” he wrote of himself, a “rogue” and “vagabond” with an inclination for breaking tradition, who at the same time was passionately committed to the concept of nonduality—of complete unity between the mind and soul. In Tagore: A Life, Krishna Kripilani writes, “The basic and most robust characteristic of Tagore’s philosophy of life was . . . that there is no inherent contradiction between the claims of the so-called opposites—the flesh and the spirit, the human and the divine, love of life and love of God, joy in beauty and pursuit of truth, social obligation and individual rights, respect for tradition and the freedom to experiment, love of one’s people and faith in the unity of mankind.” In the end, I apply a lesson from Hinduism: rather than see Gandhi and Tagore in opposition, I see them as complementary—as night is to day, Tagore is to Gandhi, the contemplative and thinker who articulates the foundation on which the activist builds a nation. In assessing their misogyny, I try mightily to remember that, as they were men of their times, I am shaped by my historical moment—my fate—and that, if I am remembered, later generations will in their turn be bemused or horrified by my blind spots, which by definition I cannot perceive. I reach back in my life to recall as well a lesson I learned from a San Francisco Zen Center gardener: “Aren’t we fortunate that the teachings come to us in flawed vessels.”

Tagore was able to articulate and realize his vision in some significant measure because he was not bound by the demands of his own wife and children, a fact he recognized. “I have clearly realized that God has not created me for a householder’s life. I suppose that is why . . . I have been constantly wandering about and have never been able to establish a home anywhere . . .” The less praiseworthy side of Tagore’s life—e.g., his indifference to his wife and children—offers evidence, perhaps, of what happens when the round peg of the solitary is forced into the square hole of conventional societal demands, or the conflict so many artists experience between their calling and their particular responsibilities: to spouses, to children, to family. I’m moved to consider that their families and lovers might have fared better had the rest of my solitaries followed the examples of Henry James and Eudora Welty and remained solo and childless.

I encounter his biographers’ characterization of Tagore as “ferociously egocentric” and wonder if their characterization arises from horror at the heresy of self-love. If one teaches, as Tagore taught, that the individual is a microcosm of the world and that there is no separation between the individual and the world, the best way—indeed, the only way—to selfless generosity is through the fullest love of the self. That required Tagore to leave behind conventional family roles, as it had required the Buddha to leave his wife sleeping next to his newborn son to set out on his journey of self-discovery, and Jesus to claim as his true mother and brothers not his blood family but those who follow the will of God.

Tagore defined “sin” as “not one mere action but . . . an attitude of life which takes for granted that one’s goal is finite, that our self is the ultimate truth, that we are not all essentially one but exist each for his own separate individual existence.” By extension, virtue consists of merging the particular and individual into the communal, the universal, the enduring. Curious and significant, is it not, that this self-described solitary should so passionately advocate the unity of all creation. That, perhaps, is what defines the mystic: in the alembic of solitude, she or he compounds the fate of the individual and the fate of the cosmos into symbiosis.

The day after my adventure at the Asia Society, I hire a car and direct the driver to take me to Jorasanko. Stifling heat, steam rising from the broken pavements. For hours the car inches forward between people and goats and cows and lorries and more people. We move at the pace of a monk in walking meditation. I pay the driver and walk. I get lost.

Where is the cheerful man astride the elephant who with its trunk plucks the 100-rupee note from my pocket? Where is the woman panhandling with the battered hubcap and, at her feet, the limbless, twitching baby lying face down on the pavement? What is time? Illusion. What is death? Life.

The men holding hands. The plates of recycled cardboard and banana leaf on which street vendors sell their food. The smell of cooking in the streets; the smell of tuberoses and defecation and diesel exhaust in the streets. The community of hijras, self-castrated men who live below the overpasses as women. The people crowd around the Brahmin priest in white muslin as he sprinkles them with Ganges water using a stem of basil or places a handful of marigold and hibiscus petals into their outstretched hands. I return to the monastery, giddy from the heat.

I am still searching for Jorasanko.

Courtesy of the international secret decoder ring society through which LGBT travelers in closeted lands make contacts with locals, I meet with Kolkata’s nascent LGBT rights organization Swikriti, comprising six gay men and one fierce lesbian. On my last full day in Kolkata she invites me and her fellow activists to a midday meal at her parents’ small apartment in Dum Dum, a suburb named for the explosions made by ordnance when the Raj used this area as an artillery testing ground. I am conscious of the resources my hosts have invested in this meal, conscious of my fantastic wealth and my height and breadth; I tower over everyone in the group, I have always had plenty to eat and space to grow and expand. The lesbian interprets for her grandfather, who tells me his story of surviving the Indian government massacre of the Naxalites, leftist Maoists whom the government of India is still trying to obliterate. During the bloody Bangladeshi war for independence in 1971, thousands were rounded up and shot. He escaped by pretending to be dead and, when dark fell, crawling to safety over his murdered comrades. The next day the corpses were bulldozed into a mass grave. Now the remaining Naxalites have retreated to the state of Assam, the remote northeast of India, the origin of the crafts Swikriti is selling to support their struggle for LGBT civil rights.

I am lightheaded with fever; I will barely reach Rome the next day before collapsing—less from illness, though there is that, than from sensory overload. I feel ignorant and inescapably American before another forgotten horror of history. They want me, the writer, to carry the Naxalite story to the world, but years have passed and this is the best I can do.

After lunch, they produce an assemblage of objects donated from the tribal corners of Assam. Thrifty traveler that I am, I have spent my rupees—when am I likely to be in India again?—and I have remaining only the equivalent of fifty American dollars. There is no place where a traveler may obtain cash in Dum Dum. I ask for a price; I want to be sure to exceed what they have paid and of course they smile and bow, they will never reveal to a guest what they paid. In the end I give them everything in my wallet, though back in America I look at the white linen cloth interwoven with gold thread draped across my sofa and I am seized with guilt that I acquired these objects—there were others—for less than they might have brought in a tourist market.

When we leave, we walk through alleys too narrow for a rickshaw. I ask, and they, my fellow queers, my fellow outsiders, take me to Jorasanko.

Jorasanko Thakur Bari, “House of the Tagores,” the family compound in which Tagore grew up, is a multistory mansion surrounding a courtyard encircled by open-air porches on each floor—an architecture that walls off the external world while allowing for free circulation of light, air, and gossip. The guards ask for my passport and I show it but I do not let it leave my hands. The building is rather grand, with one wing once reserved for purdah. A few of Tagore’s black-and-white brush paintings are on display, some labeled in Bangla—the government of West Bengal, still angry at the British, translates nothing into English.

In the courtyard—evening now—we encounter the reincarnation of Durga: a small girl chosen for characteristics that evoke the goddess (flat feet, a certain posture), dressed in scarlet silks and placed on a pedestal while the Brahmin priest in his white skirt sprinkles us with Ganges water as incense burns and the drummers beat a wild rhythm against the backdrop of Durga piercing the demon at her feet.

In my childhood, the first-grade class elected four boys who would be dressed in snappy sky-blue capes and would carry a statue of the Virgin along the town’s single street in the May procession. The mothers made garlands of May flowers, peonies and spirea and early roses, and festooned the statue’s palanquin, while parents and children followed the village priest, bedecked in a golden chasuble, chanting Latin. The chants return to me, Salve Regina, rosa mystica, domus de aurum, as I walk over the muddy, broken pavements outside the Tagore mansion, past the drivers huddling in the rickshaws, the tarps pulled down against an evening shower, past those drivers who have found a fare and are maneuvering their carts through the stream of cars and buses and trucks and people and cattle, immersed in this sea of diesel exhaust while a sari-clad woman, borne on a palanquin, holds herself upright on the seat like a queen—as the sidewalk vendors with their fruits and vegetables brightened by the wet approach her, their goods extended—the handsome teenage boys walking with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders and everywhere kindness and cooperation and generosity, everywhere illness and deformity and death.

At the airport, I phone my mother, halfway around the world. She asks for my impressions of Kolkata, and without thinking I respond, “How stingy are people who have everything, how generous those who have nothing!”

In his dictated deathbed statement, Tagore said, “Today my sack is empty. I have given completely whatever I had to give.” The statement recalls Eudora Welty—“What animates me and possesses me is . . . the love of . . . art and the love of giving it, the desire to give it until there is no more left”—or Henry James’s “magnanimity,” or Marianne Moore’s “idealism willing to make sacrifices for its self-preservation.” Each of these solitaries understood solitude as a vocation, a particular calling from an external force or destiny, our best means to give and give until there is no more left.