A Poet's Aside

The entangled branches of Tangail's tamal tree.

(Photos courtesy of Mohammed Shafiqul Islam).

Hurry! Hurry! Delay is waste, to tarry, distraction: so says the modern world. It’s probably why intercity buses stop only once, at some kind of wannabe-grand roadside eatery with a fluorescent name along the lines of “Food Village” or “Leisure Spot.” The conductor says we’ll be stopping for twenty minutes. It means half an hour.

Lord Krishna's tamal tree. Can you hear his flute song?

But the village flute doesn’t run like an intercity bus. For one thing, everybody knows a flute song never need cram extra passengers in. For another, flute songs don’t travel at death-defying speed. No – the meandering, the tugging of the soul along detours and improvised paths is what any flute song is about.

…which is why, though time is of the essence and we should be hurtling non-stop towards Dinajpur by now, it can happen that the flute leads us momentarily elsewhere, to a different kind of leisure spot. 

Like the flute, this place was favoured by Lord Krishna. It’s to be found in Tangail.

A journey by flute meanders, tugs the soul.

Moreover, well, let me be clear… It’s not a physical journey that I write of this time – I’ve never been there. It’s a journey heard about, a place that might be hoping to be known. Who am I to refuse the wishes of such a place? And instead of leisure – we are, after all, talking of Lord Krishna, we might say pleasure.

The hearing of the place came about when Shahjalal University of Science and Technology English lecturer and poet Mohammad Shafiqul Islam contacted me recently. Our conversation worked its way towards villages as conversations often do with me. The Tangail native was keen to speak of a village three kilometres east of Ghatail Upazila’s Sagardighi – the village called Gupta Brindaban in reference to Lord Krishna’s childhood home. Our poet wanted to tell about an old tamal tree.

The tamal tree collects the threads of people's prayers.

The last time he reached there, he says, with friends he sat beneath that tree and took comfort from its shade. It offered coolness and peace on a day of particularly scorching heat. “We were showered with the grace of life,” is how our poet described it.

Sridan, Sudan, Basudam, Subal, Madhumangal, Subahu, Arjun, Gandharba, Daam, Stokkrishna, Mahabal and Mahabahu: when Lord Krishna reached the place many moons earlier he brought with him twelve friends, according to our poet – others say there were sixteen. He came for leela, for secret pleasure.

It’s believed Krishna used to sit in the tree and play his flute. To its melody Radha would be entranced, Krishna absorbed in the duality of music and love. At other times his friends would be with him and Lord Krishna would take pleasure of a more platonic kind. Either way, Krishna is said to have stayed by that tamal tree for a long time.

As his forefathers did, Sree Prafulla Chandra Baishnaba cares for the tree.

 

“Sree Prafulla Chandra Baishnaba welcomed us with a smiling face when we arrived,” says our poet. Like his father and forefathers before him, he has taken on the duty of looking after the tree. There’s a temple nearby, the Bigraha Mandir, where people every day offer puja.

Krishna devotees fasten threads around the tamal tree’s branches, believing their ailments can be cured and wishes fulfilled by God’s grace. Muslims and Christians are also known to revere that place. 

Hundreds of years: the root of the tamal tree.

“The tree,” says our poet, “now hundreds of years old with its skin dried up, may seem weak with the weight of age but from the tranquillity of shade it grants devotees – with the nurturing of secret wishes and the drawing of feelings of sacredness from hearts, it surely measures great strength.” As Krishna once played his flute people now spend long hours absorbed in meditation.

“Their faces seem to glow with heavenly colours,” says our poet. “They begin to feel light, both physically and mentally as God is sure to grant life to their hopes.”

The tree itself is said to have died many years ago – but people did not stop their worship when it was lifeless – and then, after twelve years its branches mysteriously donned once more the decoration of new green leaves.

“Sree Prafulla showed us other aspects of the tree that are unusual,” says our poet. “It has an opening in the root and trees should not survive in a condition like that. And the shade it provides is extraordinary.” 

Through the twisted, turning years of this world...

Two branches of the tree are unusually entangled around one leafless, small branch – it is believed that was the branch upon which flute playing Lord Krishna sat.

In Chaitra month on occasion of Madhukrishna Troyodoshi a festival is held. Thousands of people congregate – of many faiths and from as far as India.

But of course one can’t anticipate taking comfort from the shade of a tamal tree forever. The devotees take their spiritual fill from the Radha-Krishna pleasure grove and eventually leave. Poets must understand too, of course, that once a poem is done there’s a need to move on. Even Lord Krishna, though he may have stayed for many days knew he had more to do elsewhere. 

Krishna the flautist, with Radha, at the nearby temple.

 

Our poet with his wife.

“As we left,” says our poet, “We carried with us a distinct celestial feeling of solemnity and sanctity.”

And so, like the devotees, like our poet and Lord Krishna, we are also bound to move forward. The village flute cannot give pause to the song for long. 

And so, like the intercity bus the mind with body must re-embark… One stop is sufficient, surely, for the trip to Dinajpur. Don’t worry it’ll only take twenty minutes, which really means half an hour. Don’t be late in getting, once more, on board.

With thanks to Mohammad Shafiqul Islam for sharing his experience.

The tamal tree from the south.

Questions for a Lone Bird Called Das

"Perhaps I shall be a duck, some young lass's."

This article mainly relates to the poem "I Shall Return Once More" and its well-known Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (1899 - 1954).

To maternal Dhansiri’s banks did you return, as according to your plan? Are you there now in the guise of a wild bird, a white hawk or shalik or dawn crow? Or were you driven to move on by the bitter realisation that found you when you saw that river later? Your heart must’ve been struck! It’s not the river you knew, Jibanananda. Change does not stop, even for you.

Trees reflected in the Dhansiri.

As the locals tell it quite assertively, it wasn’t far from the broad Dhansiri’s riverbank, your maternal uncle’s house. Is that how you came to know her, as some say, to be stirred into noting her name? Did you feel her watery breezes as you once sat beside the pond in your uncle’s yard?

Did he feel river breezes while sitting beside his uncle's pond?

On the other hand locals attest to many things and there’s no authoritative information that you really made childhood visits to the village called Bamankathi in Jhalokati – your mother was indeed from Gaila in Barisal. There would seem to be no proof that a now empty Bamankathi yard once belonged to an uncle. It’s a history unverified.

You would understand that people like to make claim to a name like yours. You of all people would appreciate that poets sometimes like to record names like Dhansiri in representing greater things. Where is the truth, Jibanananda? Did you leave it somewhere for us to find?

The Dhansiri reflecting plants and reflecting Das.

Yet it’s nice for a moment to assume you knew at least Dhansiri. It’s no great distance from Barisal Town and maybe there really was a relative’s house in Bamankathi. There are surely details that from your life’s record got lost along the way – just as the memory of the haystack doesn’t stretch much beyond the harvest. It is interesting to ponder that you might’ve held Dhansiri close as a childhood memento...

And as for the river – old people speak of a twenty-or-fifty-times larger Dhansiri, if you want to know. They can still recall, if you ask, the setting off by ship from her banks for Barisal or Dhaka – ships which must’ve reached even Kolkata once. Did you ever see those steamers passing: how each ploughed deep rippling furrows into the river’s skin? Did it seem as if those tracks would last eternally, with all the strength in the engines that made them?

Das portrait by Narayan Chandra Biswas of Itna, Narail.

But of course a boat’s trail vanishes after minor moments and perhaps you wondered as the majestic Dhansiri and her cohort wind regained the upper hand. It would’ve seemed that nothing could stop her: certainly not any manmade contraption – and you had little affection for manmade contraptions.

Yet time happened.

Some say deltas are unfaithful creatures, Jibanananda, devoid of loyalty as to where rivers lie and in what measure of bounty their waters flow. From Dhansiri’s bank that uncle’s house is a way off now. Some call the name of Farakka to explain your Dhansiri reduced to an exaggerated stream, with barely the width between its banks for a steamer to pass. It’s not a suitable transport route anymore. Others may wonder at the longer effects of British river-tinkling, turn of the last century, at the not-so-distant Gabkhan Channel.

Equally it might be that dear Dhansiri simply mourned the loss of her poet friend after you fell beneath that Kolkata tram and left that earthly life. It can be the river in protest simply refused to carry on with the vigour that had been.

"I shall return to the banks of the Dhansiri, to this Bengal / Perhaps not as a man but in the guise of a white hawk or a shalik."

Or was it your entanglement with nature that became quite unmanageable? As the currents of your own, now large, River Jibanananda grew after your death so the Dhansiri might have rather instinctively regressed towards modesty as a means of maintaining a kind of balance. Perhaps we witness in its reduction a form of love, a self-sacrifice returned to you by one of Bengal’s rivers? Could it not be so?

Some say you were a loner. But the rivers were always with you, Jibanananda.

Some say Das was a loner, but the rivers were with him.

Yet if it was your thoughts of rediscovering her beauteous strength that drove you as a bird back to Dhansiri it must have hurt to comprehend that like your own bodily vitality Dhansiri’s would eventually wane.

And when you knew Dhansiri reduced, did you break down? Were you overwhelmed – afflicted by the pain of that Dhansiri destiny you witnessed? No, more likely you took your anguish into yourself and waited for introspection to take its course and push it out again eventually, in a new and vast language of bird flight, a secret carnival of altered syntax cartwheels in the air and altitude rising and dipping lines seemingly without connection. Did the other birds understand your aerial acrobatics then? One day they will.

The plot in Bamankathi they call the 'Das house.'

And if you stayed at Dhansiri, were you circling overhead as we crossed the farm fields, directed by farm hands to the empty yard they call the Das house? They had excitement in their voices – they wanted that place to be special. Did you feel nostalgia or were you laughing – they got it all wrong!

Have you seen the new plantation and the fence of sticks that marks the nearby property they call the Sen house; was it there and not actually in Natore that a young lady once caught your eye, the one you reframed and named for the world as Banalata? On the other hand Sen is a common name. Nobody can ultimately know the source of your inspiration.

Beyond the fence is the 'Sen house' in Bamankathi.

That whole Bamankathi neighbourhood is gone now – just empty plots. I suppose they might have followed you to Kolkata at the time of Partition. I suppose you would have known it before your death. Was it with a sense of sadness then, for what you knew to be gone, that you wrote of Dhansiri? Or was it but a name?

Whichever was the case, wherever you put the truth, the destiny of the river you noted, you cannot have known that.

Yet don’t dismay, still there is nature’s beauty in her. A lesser Dhansiri is given to reflection and village fishing frames. Crops grow along her banks and small dinghies are yet moored there. The newer Dhansiri would be a most welcome home for a duck belonging to some young lass, her crimson feet adorned with bells. You wouldn’t be the only duck to float amidst Dhansiri’s calmed memories, though the company of other ducks might not have impressed you. Are you a duck – one of them? Which one?

Some say deltas are unfaithful creatures. The Dhansiri is not as Das would've known it.

A final question, Jibanananda, a personal question: when that tram bell rang on Kolkata’s street in 1954 did you fall or was it an attempt at suicide, a desire for an early exit from a then barely appreciative world? There is speculation, you know. Of course it’s not decent to speak much of suicide – there’s too much culture in it – and you don’t need to answer. I just wanted to say, I wanted you to know that if it was suicide, I for one can understand it.

Fishing frame in the Dhansiri.

You broke all the rules of poetry in your life and you should’ve been rewarded for that – but the reward came late and perhaps it was, in the end, the rules that broke you? Perhaps that’s how it always ends when the world is not ready. You must know that by now.

Perhaps the Dhansiri reduced its flow from missing its poet friend?

The Dhansiri, Jhalokati.

The Dhansiri today is quiet.

This article is published in Star Magazine, here: Questions for a Lone Bird Called Das