Free Letters from a Young Poet by Rosinka Chaudhuri Page A

no’—just try and imagine the state I was in! If you must imagine it you have to picture all of it—the silent night, the weak moonlight, thelonely, quiet, empty sands; far away, the moving light from Gofur’s lantern—sometimes, from a certain side, a distressed call in the form of a question could be heard, and from every other side, its indifferent echo—occasionally, a flicker of hope, and in the next moment, deep despair. All sorts of the most impossible anxieties started to arise in my mind. Perhaps they have fallen into quicksand; perhaps Bolu has suddenly had a fainting fit or something; all sorts of frightful hallucinations of carnivorous animals began to come to mind. I began to think: ‘Those unfit to protect themselves are those who unthinkingly bring danger to others.’ I became firm against women’s liberation—I could quite see that Bolu, poor thing, was a complete innocent; he had been compromised because he was at the mercy of the two free women. After about an hour, a cry arose that the entire lot had climbed up on the dunes and were marooned on the other side, unable to return. Then I ran towards the
boat
—it took a long time to reach it. The
boat
went to the other side; the
boat’s
goddess returned to the boat—Bolu began to say, ‘I’m never going out with you lot again.’ Everybody was penitent, tired, distressed, so all my well-chosen and impressive remonstrances remained in my heart—waking up in the morning the next day, I still found myself incapable of getting angry. So we all dismissed this enormously serious affair by laughing about it, as if it was all greatly amusing. Anyway, writing about it in detail to you over the course of the last three days has certainly made my mind feel much lighter.
    Oh no! The
maulab
і saheb has arrived with a crowd of peasants * and has salaamed—I feel like saying to him—
Fie on you, these peasants and these estates—
    Let the estate go to nothing, and take the maulab with it!

5
    Shahjadpur
January 1890
    The students of the Entrance School here have formed a Sunіtisancāriṇі Sabhā [Society for the Dissemination of Good Morals] in which they deliver lectures on ethics, and their
masters
had come to catch hold of me so I could light up the face of their proceedings. When they all got into action about my poetic ability and a variety of other great talents—when they reached top gear on the subject of my gifts in comparison to every
master
and every
pundit
ever, with one person taking off at the point at which another had stopped—if one says poet, another says great poet and yet another says that the language and the feeling both equal each other, a fourth says everything is new, Bengali literature has not seen the like of it until now—what the fifth said cannot be declared publicly, hearing what the sixth had to say the tips of my ears became quite red—before the seventh could speak I hurriedly agreed to be present at their Society for the Dissemination of Good Morals. The second master of the school here is a particular fan of my
Heňẏāli nāṭya
. * He said my ‘
Heiňli nāṭya
’ was completely new in the Bengali language—‘Reading this, we are falling about laughing!’ The next day, we managed to arrive at the Society for the Dissemination of Good Morals. Boys and old men included, there must have been about five or six hundred people there—some quite thin, with no shoes, sitting upon benches swinging their feet and coughing; some others were quite fancy, with watch chains over massive new black alpaca robes [
c
ā
pk
ā
n
], that is, our
munsef
s, lawyers, etc. † I was sittingthere quite dejected, my hands and feet quite cold, face getting quite red, when suddenly somebody announced that the revered Sri Rabindranath Thakur Esquire should take his seat as chairman. The munsef-babu said, ‘I second that.’ Without a word, I ascended the seat of the chairman. The students are supposed to speak on the subject of