Patishar
10 September 1894
I’ve been on the waterway since yesterday morning. There are only marshes on every side—the raised tips of rice stalks—the villages, with their few densely packed huts, float in the distance—a mildly fragrant green lichen extends, congealed, up to quite a distance, so that one suddenly mistakes it for land; on that itself, a variety of waterbirds gather. It’s a Bhādra day, there’s not much of a breeze, and the slack sails of the boat hang limply; the boat has moved sluggishly throughout the day, proceeding in the most indifferent manner. The bright sun of śarat falls on this lichen-diffused extensive water-world, and I sit on a chair near the window with my feet up on another chair humming to myself the whole day. All the morning melodies such as Rāmkeli, which seem so absolutely routine and lifeless in Calcutta, come completely alive in their wholeness over here the moment you evoke them even fractionally. Such an amazing truth and new beauty appear in them, such a universal deep tenderness melts into the air all around, making everything misty, that it seems as if this rāginī is the song of the entire sky and the entire earth. It’s like a web of magic, like a māẏā mantra. There’s no end to the numberless fragments of words that I conjoin to my tunes—so many one-line songs accumulate and are then discarded throughout the day. I don’t feel like sitting down to systematically turn them into complete songs. I sit on this chair drinking in the golden sunlight from the sky while my eyes fall like an affectionate touch upon the moist lichen’s new softness, allowing my mind to fill up easily and lazily with whatever comes spontaneously to it—I cannot try any harder at the moment than this. I can remember the two or three lines in the most simple of Bhairabī rāginīs that I spent the entire morning continuously reciting, so I’m attaching an extract as an example for you below —
ogo tumi naba naba rupe eso prāe.
(āmār nityanaba!)
eso gandha barana gāne!
āmi ye dike nirakhi tumi eso he
āmār mugdha mudita naẏāne!*
(Oh, come to my heart in new and newer forms
[My constant newness!]
Come as a fragrant song of welcome!
Whichever direction I look, you come to me
To my entranced, shut eyes!)