Free Letters from a Young Poet by Rosinka Chaudhuri

no trees, no grass—for variety occasionally cracked wet earth, and in some places dry white sand—if you turn your face towards the east you can see endless blue above and endless white below, empty sky and empty earth; a wretched, dry, hard emptiness underneath and a spirit-like, generous emptiness above. Such
desolation
isn’t to be seen anywhere else. If you suddenly turn your face towards the west, you see the lap of a still, small river, tall banks on the other side, trees and bushes, huts, all looking like an amazing dream in the light of the setting sun. Exactly as if on the one side you have creation and on the other annihilation. The reason for mentioning the light of the evening sun is that we normally go out for a stroll in the evening, and therefore it is that picture that remains etched on the mind. When one is living in Calcutta one forgets how astonishingly beautiful this world is. It is only when you live here that you comprehend that this sun that sets every day among these peaceful trees by the side of this little river, and the hundred thousand stars that silently rise every night above this endless, ashen, lonely, silent sandbank—what a surprisingly noble event this is. The sun, as it rises slowly in the east at dawn, opens a page in some tremendous book, and the evening gradually turns another enormous page in the sky from the west—what an amazing script that too is—and this barely flowing river and this sandbank spread across the horizon and the other shore like a picture—this neglected bit at the edge of the world—what sort of large, silent, deserted school is this! Anyway. These words may sound very much like ‘poetry’ in capital letters, but here they are not out of place at all. Anyhow, as a family we experience the pure joy of separation for some time in the evenings in this huge sandy expanse—the boys go with their attendant in one direction, Bolu goes in another direction, I go my own way and the two women go their way…. In the meantime, the sun sets entirely, the golden hue fades from the sky,the surroundings become unclear in the dark; gradually, from the faint shadow by my side I realize that the bent, thin moon’s light is slowly beginning to blossom—the white moonlight upon the white sand seems to increase the illusion for one’s eyes—which is sand and which water, which is earth and which sky, one needs to guess at which is which. As a result, it all merges into one another and begins to feel like an unreal mirage-world…. Yesterday, after loitering on this magic coast for a long time, I went back to the boat and saw that except for the boys, nobody else from our group had returned. For a moment I thought, let me send for them, but both selfishness and pity together disarmed me. In other words, keeping both my own happiness and theirs in mind, I drew up an
easy chair
and began to read a book upon an extremely obscure
subject—Animal Magnetism
—in the equally obscure light of just one lamp. But still nobody returned…. Keeping the book face down on the bed I ventured out. Looking out from upstairs I could see no sign of any dark heads anywhere—everything around faded into a pale emptiness. I shouted out Bolu’s name once at the top of my voice—its sound ran eerily past me in ten different directions—but there was no response; then my heart suddenly seemed to stop on every side, as happens when you suddenly close a big open umbrella. Gofur took a light and went out, Prasun went, the oarsmen of the boat went, everybody went in different directions—I went one way, shouting, ‘Bolu’, ‘Bolu’—Prasun on another side calling ‘Choto-ma’—occasionally, one could hear the sound of the boatmen’s faint ‘Babu’, ‘Babu’. * In that desert, on that silent night, several shouts could be heard rising. Not a sound anywhere. Once or twice from a far distance Gofur called out, ‘I see them,’ but almost immediately corrected himself, ‘No,