Shilaidaha
Wednesday, 15 June 1892
Yesterday, on the first day of Āshāṛh, the coronation of the rains was conducted with much pomp and ceremony. After a very hot day, dark clouds rolled in with a lot of fanfare towards evening…. Yesterday I thought: it’s the first day of the rains, today it would be better to get drenched than spend the day inside a dark room—the year 1299 [Bengali Era] will not return a second time in my life—if you think about it, how many times will you experience the first day of Āshāṛh in your entire life—if you collect them all together and you have about thirty days, then you must concede that that’s a very long life. Ever since I wrote ‘Meghdūt’ the first day of Āshāṛh has had a special significance—at least for me. I often think, these days of my life that keep coming one after the other—some brilliant with sunrise and sunset, some the calm blue of dense clouds, some shining like white flowers on a full-moon night—how lucky I am to have them! And how valuable they are! A thousand years ago, Kalidasa, sitting in the royal court of nature, had welcomed the first day of Āshāṛh by composing, in immortal rhyme, the song of man’s pain of separation from his beloved; in my life too, the same first day of Āshāṛh rises every year with its entire sky of wealth—that same first day of Āshāṛh of the ancient poet of ancient Ujjaini with its men and women with their multitude of joys and sorrows, separations and reunions, of many many ages ago! That first great day of that very old Āshāṛh will be subtracted by a day every year from my life, until a time will come when there will not be a single day remaining in my life of this day of Kalidasa, this day of Meghdūt, this first day of the rains in India for all of time past. When you think about this deeply, you feel like looking once again at this world very carefully—you want to greet the sunrise every day in your life fully and consciously and say goodbye to every sunset like a familiar friend. If I were a renunciate by nature I might have thought that life is transient, so instead of spending my days uselessly I should engage in good works and in taking the name of god. But that is not my nature, that’s why I sometimes think—such lovely days and nights are going from my life every day, and I’m unable to take them in fully! All these colours, this light and shade, this silent splendour spread across the sky, this peace and beauty that fills the entire space between earth and heaven—how much preparation all of this takes! Such a vast field of celebration! Such a huge and amazing affair happening every day outside, and we cannot find a proper response to it within us! We live at such a far remove from the universe! The light of a single star reaches us after travelling through the infinite darkness for millions and millions of years, from millions and millions of miles away, and it cannot enter our hearts, as if our hearts were a further million miles away! The colourful mornings and evenings are falling from the torn necklace of the horizon’s brides like so many gems into the ocean’s water. Not one of them enters our thoughts! That time on the way to England the unearthly sunset I had seen upon the still waters of the ruby-red sea—where has it gone! But thank god I had seen it, thank god that that one evening of my life had not been rejected and wasted—in all our endless days and nights no other poet in the world had witnessed that one amazing sunset except me. Its colours remain in my life. Each day of that sort is like an individual legacy. The few days I spent in that garden of mine at Peneti,* a few nights on the second-floor terrace, a few rainy days in the western and southern verandas, a few evenings by the Ganga at Chandannagar, one sunset and moonrise on the mountain peak at Sinchal in Darjeeling—it’s as if I have filed away a few brilliant, beautiful fragments of moments of this sort. Beauty, for me, is a real drug! It really and truly drives me mad. When I used to lie on the terrace on moonlit nights as a child, it was as though the moonlight was the white foam of liquor overflowing and drowning me in it…. The world in which I find myself is full of very strange human beings—they are all occupied night and day with rules and building walls; they carefully put up curtains just in case their eyes actually see anything—really, the creatures of this world are very strange! It’s a wonder they don’t cover up every flowering bush, or erect canopies to keep out the moonlight. These wilfully blind people, traversing the world in closed palanquins, what do they see as they go? If there is an afterlife in which one’s wishes and desires are taken into account, then I want to get out of this wrapped-up world and be born again in an open, free, beautiful and heavenly place. Those who are unable to truly immerse themselves in beauty are the ones who scorn beauty as merely the wealth of the senses, but those who have tasted it know that it has within it an unutterable depth—beauty is far beyond even the most powerful of the senses; forget about the eyes and ears, even if you enter it with your entire heart you will not reach the limit of its melancholy. Why do I come and go on the city streets dressed up like a gentleman? Why waste my life in polite conversation with neatly dressed gentlemen? I’m truly uncivilized, impolite—is there no beautiful anarchy for me anywhere? No festival of joy with a handful of madmen? But what’s all this poeticism I’m engaging in—this is the sort of thing that heroes of poems say—pronouncing their opinions on conventionality over the course of three or four pages, thinking they are bigger than the rest of human society. Really, it’s quite embarrassing to say such things. The truth within these thoughts has always been suppressed by talk over the ages. Everybody in this world talks a lot—and I’m foremost among them—I’ve suddenly realized this now after all this time….
P.S. Let me finish telling you what I wanted to say to you at the start—don’t worry, I won’t take up another four pages—that is, it rained heavily in the evening on the first day of Āshāṛh. That’s all.