By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(About Rabindranath Tagore’s Shesher Kobita (Closing Poems); originally published on May 2, 2011, in my blog Draupadiarjun)
NOBEL LAUREATE Rabindranath Tagore (May 7, 1861 - August 7, 1941) finished writing Shesher Kobita (Closing Poems) at Balabrooie, Bangalore, on June 25, 1928, in the monsoon season.
The novella unfolds over sixty-six pages in the anthology of Tagore’s novels published by Viswa Bharati in 1990. I’ve read Shesher Kobita several times, every time finding it impossible to skip a word. It is a word puzzle, a labyrinth constructed with words. Like laughing children, we touch the insubstantial walls, which at once collapse like Inception’s dream masonry.
Tagore has shed his poetic thrift and is laughing as he strands us in this deluge of words! And how can flesh-and-blood people inhabit this “waking dream?” But there are people, and Shillong holds them as if in a cocoon.
So, on one fateful day in Ashad (mid-June to mid-July), with Meghadootam on his mind, Amito meets Labonyo. Considering the time (the late 1920s, and 5th Century CE in Amito's musing) and the place (a winding Shillong road with old forests sloping down one side), a modern accident, involving two cars, begins a timeless story.
Amito, being Amito, has an opinion on the relative importance of Time versus timely:
"Shomoy jaader bistor taderi punctual howa shobha pai. Debotar haate shomoy osheem tai thik shomoytite shurjo othe, thik shomoye osto jai. Amader meyad olpo, punctual hote giye shomoy noshto kora amader pokkhe omitobyayita. Amaraboti-r keu jodi proshno kore ‘Bhobe eshe korle ki?’ tokhon kon lojjai bolbo ‘Ghorir kantar dikey chokh rekhe kaj korte korte jiboner ja-kichhu shokol shomoyer oteet tar dikey chokh tulbar shomoy pai ni.”
(Only those with time on hand should be punctual. As God has infinite time, the sun rises and sets punctually. Mortals shouldn’t waste time being punctual. When one is asked, at Amaravati, 'What did you do on earth?’ won't one be ashamed to say, 'I worked like clockwork and missed every timeless thing?) [My translation].
Amito’s "philosophy" earns him sixty timeless days. A more purposeful, punctual man would have hurried back to work.
Amito is a twenty-something barrister, educated at Oxford and London. He does next to nothing professionally in Calcutta, and is a social gadfly. Silver-tongued, he finds endless opportunities to throw people with contrary opinions. His inherited wealth, voracious reading, individuality and willingness to be urbanely attentive make him attractive to women – and unbearable to other men.
Labonyo is a few years younger than Amito. She was brought up by her widower father, who is the principal of a college in western India. The professor wished her to be well-educated and independent. She is a willowy woman with a beautiful voice. On their second meeting, after a very brief, lighthearted exchange with her, Amito knows why he likes her: more than her pleasing appearance, her calm intelligence attracts him. (We have been told, however, that Labonyo did not exhibit calm intelligence in her behavior with another suitor.) A series of events placed Labonyo in Shillong that summer. She is employed as a resident tutor to a young girl.
Labonyo and Amito meet when each of them is secretly balancing on a slippery slope. Amito is restless, feckless, and has nothing steadfast in his life. He loves to talk, but he can find no one who comprehends the seriousness hiding behind his showmanship. He argues and he judges the caprices of fashionable society, and he savors nothing and has nothing to fight for.
Labonyo has started afresh after alienating the other suitor, Shovanlal. The breakup cost her, because she was used to regarding Shovanlal as a contender (for academic honors), a punching bag (Shovanlal’s timorousness, Tagore suggests, gave Labonyo a superiority complex) and also (barely acknowledged even to herself) her future husband. In a fit of pique and obtuseness (calm intelligence!), she also arranged her father’s remarriage and refused further monetary support from him. Fortunately, she likes tutoring and is blessed with a good employer, Jogomaya. In her free time, she pores over English Literature and Classical History.
Adoring, constantly talking, charming and intelligent Amito now bursts onto the scene. In the idyllic isolation of Shillong, artificial fetters fall away from Labonyo.
"Na-chena jogote bondi hoyecchi, chiney niye tobey khalash pabo,” (I’m now a prisoner in a strange world, and will be free only when I know this world) Amito says during the course of the funniest conversation in Shesher Kobita. He has not yet uttered to Labonyo the name "Nibaron Chakrabarty”, although he does mention a “special poet.” "Nibaran Chakrabarty” is an alias of Amito himself. Amito offers the line quoted above in explanation after launching into a poem he possibly composes on the spot (or not; he carries a long, slim, canvas-bound notebook in his pocket, and in our day would’ve likely shed his anti-haute peeve and bought an iPad 2). The poem turns out to be a declaration of love, and Labonyo is clearly identified with the "Unknown” whom the "special poet” is determined to know. Amito’s poem reveals to us that he has changed since meeting Labonyo. Before, he was a jaded, conceited man in a world he knew too well. Now he is conscious of ignorance, if only regarding Labonyo. We, the readers, know that he is as much a stranger to himself as Labonyo is to the “special poet" and only deep and true self-recognition will set him free.
Amito breaks the uneasy calm of Labnyo’s life-in-exile. Labonyo, despite her contradictions and biases, is still the most natural and clear-eyed human Amito has seen in a long time. In the perilous circumstances of their accidental meeting, it seemed to Amito that Labonyo materialized in front of his car, as if lightening had etched her elegant body in the gloom of the hillside. The two short names he gives Labonyo, "Bonyo” and "Bonya” meaning, respectively, untamed and flood, and the later comparison with a "jhorna” or "nirjhorini” (waterfall), indicates that he sees in her a lack of artifice. She seems to reconnect him with his own most sincere self. Labonyo, Jogomaya and Shillong, a place of pristine beauty, together present to Amito a contrast to painted faces, stilted conversations and high society.
Labonyo, basking in Amito's adoration, has no reason to be sulky or envious. She has become a better version of herself, more honest, less cruel. Her education now is a true and becoming polish, through which candor and simplicity may show through. Amito tells her:
"Doibat ek-ekjon manushke dekhte paowa jai jakey dekhei chomke bole uthi, e manushti ekebare nijer moto, panchjoner moto noi.”
(By happy chance we sometimes find someone who makes us start and think, this person is unique, not commonplace.) [My translation].
Amito has no hesitation proposing to Labonyo, but she will not have him. She will not be the passing fancy of a man who, she is convinced, considers marriage "vulgar”. In response, Amito says: "Manusher charitro jinishtao choley.” (Character evolves). He presents more persuasive arguments, but Labonyo brushes them aside as Amito’s love for words. The more adulatory the words, the more invisible and flawed she feels! There is a breakdown in communication.
Labonyo, once driven to fury by dumb adoration, is now gagging on words of love. And poor Amito, who twice quotes Donne’s famous line from 'The Cannonization’, can neither hold his tongue nor make her believe it’s real love. Labonyo, meanwhile is already entombing the memory of Amito’s passing fancy as the one perfect thing in her life. Her thoughts alight on Shah Jahan, Mumtaz and the Taj Mahal. Her doubt eventually frightens Amito too, a little. At the end of chapter 7 Amito asks himself what option is left to him if words do not work.
To Jogomaya, Labonyo confides her fears. Amito loves, but the person he loves, she thinks, is not Labonyo, an ordinary woman, but someone unreal created by Amito’s extravagant imagination. (This view is expressed also in the poem she writes to Amito in the end.) If they were to marry, her luster would keep just so long as his fabulous creativity permitted it. Labonyo feels that if Amito were to be constant in real life, his nature must change. But she will not change him.
Even after her rejection, Amito does not leave Shillong. Eventually, on a day of incessant rain, when the tempest outside seems to scoff at her cowardice, Labonyo gives in and accepts Amito’s hand. Amito decides to go to Calcutta for a few days. Labonyo, who still wants him to have an opportunity to change his mind, tells him to remain there till the wedding day, set for winter.
However, Amito’s sister CiCi (Shomita) descends unexpectedly with friend Katie (Ketaki) in tow, and Amito is obliged to linger in Shillong. For several days, he leads a strange dual life: he sleeps at the hotel where CiCi is staying, but every afternoon he goes to the dilapidated little house he used to rent and now owns. There he discards his pucca-Sahib garb for the traditional clothing that Labonyo and Jogomaya are used to seeing him wearing, and he visits them at tea time.
Why does Amito behave in this strange manner? Why does he not disclose his wedding plans to CiCi and Ketaki and introduce Labonyo?
Cocooned in magical words, neither Amito nor Labonyo has the will to bring out into the open secrets that are like "thorns”, "lightning” and "neuralgia pain”, the very type of terribly truthful disclosure that Amito used to brag that (his secret avatar) "Nibaran Chakrabarty” had the poetic valor to make (in contrast to old, moribund Robi Thakur, aka Tagore, who, Amito declared, shrank from such truths). They avoid speaking about the occasions in their past when they had been, or were willing to be, in love. In other words, Amito and Labonyo choose to remain unknown to each other. Which is tragic, because had they managed to get their fairly humdrum personal histories out of the way, they might have ended up knowing each other better than many couples who openly discuss their pasts but cannot write poetry to each other!
Amito still expects to spend the rest of his life with Labonyo. She still harbors doubt.
Inevitably, the day dawns when it is revealed that Ketaki was the love of Amito’s youth and still wears the ring he gave her. Like Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, Ketaki revives memories girded by the ring. Now Labonyo returns her ring to Amito. She pushes him to make a trip to nearby Cherrapunji. When he returns to Shillong, Jogomaya’s home is deserted. In Calcutta, however, Amito is in touch with Joti, Jogomaya’s son, who goes to college there. It is possible for him to find Labonyo, but he will not. Labonyo and Amito have persuaded themselves that their love is not meant for the real world.
Although Labonyo did not want to change Amito, she did do so. In the end he even speaks like her.
At their last meeting, in Shillong, Labonyo told Amito:
"Amake tumi angti diyo na, kono chinho rakhbar kono dorkar nei. Amar prem thak niranjan: bairer rekha, bairer chhaya tatey porbe na."
(Don’t give me a ring, no reminder is necessary. Let my love be pure: the outside world won’t leave a mark on it or cast a shadow.) [My translation]
Not brave enough to know everything about each other, but more self-aware and humbler, they now embrace prosaic life. Amito marries Ketaki, and Labonyo agrees to marry Shovanlal next summer on Ramgarh hill, probably Ramtek, where, according to Indologist Vasudev Vishnu Mirashi’s 1969 book on Kalidasa, the lovelorn yaksha of Meghadootam had been exiled.
Lobonyo and Amito exchange farewell poems.
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