Short Stories By Rabindranath Tagore

Wealth Surrendered

Part 1

Brindaban Kunda was furious. He announced to his father, ‘I’m leaving –
right now.’
‘You ungrateful scoundrel,’ said Yajnanath Kunda. ‘All I’ve spent
feeding and clothing you over the years, with not a paisa back – and
now see how you turn on me.’
In fact, the amount spent on food and clothing in Yajnanath’s house
had never been great. The sages of old survived on impossibly little;
Yajnanath presented an equally noble example. He could not go quite as
far as he liked, partly because of the demands of modern life, partly
because of the unreasonable rules for keeping body and soul together
which Nature imposes. His son had put up with this while he was
unmarried; but after marrying, his standards of food and dress began to
clash with his father’s extreme austerity. Brindaban’s standards were
material rather than spiritual. His requirements were in line with
society’s changing response to cold, heat, hunger and thirst. There were
frequent rows between father and son, and matters came to a head when
Brindaban’s wife fell seriously ill. The kabirāj wanted to prescribe an
expensive medicine for her, but Yajnanath questioned his competence
and dismissed him. Brindaban pleaded with his father at first, then grew
angry, but to no avail. When his wife died, he accused his father of
murdering her. ‘What do you mean?’ said Yajnanath. ‘Do you suppose
that no one who takes medicine dies? If expensive medicine were the
answer, kings and emperors would be immortal. Why should your wife
die with any more pomp than your mother or grandmother?’
Truly if Brindaban had not been blinded with grief and seen things
objectively, he would have found much consolation in this thought.
Neither his mother nor grandmother had taken medicine when they
were dying. It was an ancient custom in the household not to do so. But
modern people do not want to die according to ancient rules. (I am speaking of the time when the British had newly arrived in this country,
but the behaviour of the younger generation was already causing
consternation among their elders.)
This was why up-to-date Brindaban quarrelled with old-fashioned
Yajnanath and said, ‘I’m leaving.’
Giving him instant permission to go, his father said for all to hear that
to give his son a single paisa would be as sinful as shedding a cow’s
blood. Brindaban, for his part, said that to take any of his father’s money
would be like shedding his mother’s blood. They then parted company.
After so many undisturbed years, the people of the village were rather
excited by this mini-revolution. And because Brindaban had been
deprived of his inheritance, they all tried – as hard as they could – to
distract Yajnanath from remorse at the rift with his son. They said that
to quarrel with one’s father over a mere wife could happen only in this
day and age. After all, if a wife goes she can quickly be replaced by
another – but if a father goes a second father cannot be found for love or
money! This was a sound argument; but in my view (Brindaban being
what he was) it would have cheered him somewhat rather than making
him penitent.
It is unlikely that Yajnanath felt much distress at his son’s departure.
It was a considerable financial saving, and furthermore it removed a
dread that had plagued him constantly – that Brindaban might one day
poison him: what little food he ate was tainted by this morbid notion. It
lessened somewhat when his daughter-in-law died; and now that his son
had left he felt much more relaxed.
Only one thing pained him. Brindaban had taken his four-year-old son
Gokulchandra with him. Gokul had cost relatively little to feed and
clothe, so Yajnanath had felt quite easy towards him. (Despite his regret
at the boy’s removal, however, he could not help making some rapid
calculations: how much he would save each month now that they had
both gone, how much each year, and how much capital would earn an
equivalent amount of interest.) It became difficult living in an empty
house, without Gokul’s mischief to disturb it. Yajnanath missed having
no one to pester him during the pūjās, no one pinching his food at meal-
times, no one running away with the inkpot when he did his accounts.
Washing and eating with no one to disturb him was a melancholy business. Such undisturbed emptiness was what people gained after
death, he thought. It tugged at his heart to see, in his bedding and quilt,
holes made by his grandson, and, on the mat he sat on, ink-blots made
by the same artist. For making his dhoti unfit to wear in less than two
years, the pampered boy had been severely scolded by his grandfather.
Now Yajnanath felt tears in his eyes when he saw that dhoti in Gokul’s
bedroom, dirty, torn, abandoned, knotted all over. Instead of using it to
make wicks for lamps or for some other domestic purpose, he carefully
stored it in a trunk, and promised that if Gokul returned and ruined a
dhoti in even a single year, he would not scold him. But Gokul did not
return. Yajnanath seemed to be ageing much faster than before, and the
empty house felt emptier every day.
Yajnanath could not stay peacefully at home. Even in the afternoon,
when all high-born people take a siesta, he roamed about the village
with a hookah in his hand. During these silent afternoon walks, the
village-boys would abandon their games and, retreating to a safe
distance, bellow out locally composed rhymes about Yajnanath’s
miserliness. They none of them dared – in case their next meal was
spoiled by so bad an omen – to utter his real name: they gave him names
of their choosing. Old folk called him ‘Yajnanash’;
1 why exactly the boys
should have called him ‘Bat’ is hard to explain. Perhaps they saw some
resemblance in his pale, sickly skin.