My Reminiscences | Page 3

great wit, and would be constantly cracking jokes
with everybody, old and young; recently married sons-in-law, new
comers into the family circle, being his special butts. There was room
for the suspicion that his humour had not deserted him even after death.
Once my elders were engaged in an attempt to start a postal service
with the other world by means of a planchette. At one of the sittings the
pencil scrawled out the name of Kailash. He was asked as to the sort of
life one led where he was. Not a bit of it, was the reply. "Why should
you get so cheap what I had to die to learn?"
This Kailash used to rattle off for my special delectation a doggerel
ballad of his own composition. The hero was myself and there was a
glowing anticipation of the arrival of a heroine. And as I listened my
interest would wax intense at the picture of this world-charming bride
illuminating the lap of the future in which she sat enthroned. The list of
the jewellery with which she was bedecked from head to foot, and the
unheard of splendour of the preparations for the bridal, might have
turned older and wiser heads; but what moved the boy, and set

wonderful joy pictures flitting before his vision, was the rapid jingle of
the frequent rhymes and the swing of the rhythm.
These two literary delights still linger in my memory--and there is the
other, the infants' classic: "The rain falls pit-a-pat, the tide comes up the
river."
The next thing I remember is the beginning of my school-life. One day
I saw my elder brother, and my sister's son Satya, also a little older than
myself, starting off to school, leaving me behind, accounted unfit. I had
never before ridden in a carriage nor even been out of the house. So
when Satya came back, full of unduly glowing accounts of his
adventures on the way, I felt I simply could not stay at home. Our tutor
tried to dispel my illusion with sound advice and a resounding slap:
"You're crying to go to school now, you'll have to cry a lot more to be
let off later on." I have no recollection of the name, features or
disposition of this tutor of ours, but the impression of his weighty
advice and weightier hand has not yet faded. Never in my life have I
heard a truer prophecy.
My crying drove me prematurely into the Oriental Seminary. What I
learnt there I have no idea, but one of its methods of punishment I still
bear in mind. The boy who was unable to repeat his lessons was made
to stand on a bench with arms extended, and on his upturned palms
were piled a number of slates. It is for psychologists to debate how far
this method is likely to conduce to a better grasp of things. I thus began
my schooling at an extremely tender age.
My initiation into literature had its origin, at the same time, in the
books which were in vogue in the servants' quarters. Chief among these
were a Bengali translation of Chanakya's aphorisms, and the Ramayana
of Krittivasa.
A picture of one day's reading of the Ramayana comes clearly back to
me.
[Illustration: Rabindranath Tagore in 1877]

The day was a cloudy one. I was playing about in the long verandah[3]
overlooking the road. All of a sudden Satya, for some reason I do not
remember, wanted to frighten me by shouting, "Policeman!
Policeman!" My ideas of the duties of policemen were of an extremely
vague description. One thing I was certain about, that a person charged
with crime once placed in a policeman's hands would, as sure as the
wretch caught in a crocodile's serrated grip, go under and be seen no
more. Not knowing how an innocent boy could escape this relentless
penal code, I bolted towards the inner apartments, with shudders
running down my back for blind fear of pursuing policemen. I broke to
my mother the news of my impending doom, but it did not seem to
disturb her much. However, not deeming it safe to venture out again, I
sat down on the sill of my mother's door to read the dog-eared
Ramayana, with a marbled paper cover, which belonged to her old aunt.
Alongside stretched the verandah running round the four sides of the
open inner quadrangle, on which had fallen the faint afternoon glow of
the clouded sky, and finding me weeping over one of its sorrowful
situations my great-aunt came and took away the book from me.

(3) Within and Without
Luxury was a thing almost unknown in the days of my infancy. The
standard of living was then, as a whole, much more simple than