THE TAGORE STORIES

STORY 3

BOLAI

The story of humankind forms the conclusion to the many chapters that tell the history of the earth's many creatures--this we have heard. In any human society we sometimes encounter the various animals that live hidden within us--this we know. In reality we call that human which has blended all the animals within ourselves, combined them into one: penned our tigers and cows into one enclosure, trapped our snakes and mongooses in the same cage. In the same way we give the name raag to that which combines all the sa-re-ga-mas within itself and creates music--after which the notes can no longer make trouble--but still, even within the music an individual note may stand out from the others: in one raag the ma, in another the ga, in yet another the flat dha.

My nephew Bolai, my brother's son: in his nature, somehow, the fundamental notes of plants and trees sounded the loudest. Right from childhood he had the habit of standing and staring silently, not exploring places like other boys. When dark clouds massed themselves in layers in the eastern sky, it was as if his soul became dense with the moist fragrance of the forest in July; when the rain came thrumming down, his whole body would listen to what it said. When the sunshine lay on the roof in the afternoon, he walked about bare-chested, as if gathering something into himself from all the sky. When the mango trees bloomed in the month of Magh, a deep happiness would enter his blood, in memory of something inexpressible; his inner nature would spread itself in all directions, like a grove of sal trees flowering in Phalgun, would become suffused, become deeply colored. At these times he liked to sit alone and talk to himself, patching together whatever fairy-tales he had heard, the tales of the pair of aged tattlers that had built their nest in a crevice of the ancient banyan tree. This wide-eyed-always-staring boy didn't talk very much; he would stay quiet, thinking things over in his head. Once I took him into the mountains. When he saw the green grass that covered the slope all the way down to our house, he was delighted. He didn't think the coverlet of grass was any fixed thing; he felt it was a playful, rolling mass, always rolling down. Often he would climb up the slope and roll down himself--his entire body itself become grass--and as he rolled, the blades of grass would tickle the back of his neck, and he would laugh out loud.

After the night's rains, the early-morning sun would peer over the mountain tops, and its pale golden rays fell on the deodar forest; and without telling anyone he'd go quietly and stand awestruck in the motionless shadows of the deodars, his body thrilling all over, as if he could see the people within these gigantic trees--they wouldn't speak, but they seemed to know everything, these grandfathers from long ago, from the days of "Once-upon-a-time-there-lived-a-king."

His eyes, deep in thought, weren't turned only upwards: I often saw him walking in my garden with his head bowed, searching for something. He was impatient to watch the new seedlings lift their curly heads towards the light. Every day he would bend low to them, as if asking: "And now what? And now what? And now what?" They were stories always unfinished--tender young leaves, just arisen; he felt a companionship towards them that he didn't know how to express. They too, seemed to fidget in their eagerness to ask him something. Maybe they said, "What's your name," maybe "Where did your mother go?" Maybe Bolai replied, in his head, "But I don't have a mother."

It hurt him whenever someone plucked a flower from a plant. But he realized his concern meant nothing to anyone else. So he tried to hide his pain. Boys his age would throw stones to knock amlokis off the tree; he couldn't speak, he turned his face and walked away. To tease him, his companions would stride down the garden, slashing with a cane at the rows of shrubs on either side, in an instant would break a branch off the bokul tree; he was too ashamed to cry, lest someone think it madness. His most troubling time was when the grass-cutter came. Every day he had walked among the grass, peering closely at it: here a green tendril, there an unknown purple-and-yellow flower, so tiny; the occasional nightshade and its blue flowers, in their hearts a speck of gold; along the boundary wall, a kalmegh vine; elsewhere an onontomul; the small shoots just emerged from neem seeds pecked off the tree by birds, how pretty their leaves--and all these would be weeded by the ruthless weeder. These weren't the fancied plants of the garden, and there was no one to listen to their complaints.