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Buddhadeva Bose’s biographical volumes
By Subhamay Ray | April 18, 2008
Of late, I was re-reading two remarkable books, the autobiographical Amar Chhelebela (My Boyhood) and Amar Jouban (My Youth) by the Bengali poet and litterateur Buddhadeva Bose. The pencil sketches of his younger days that these small volumes contain made me nostalgic and somewhat reminiscent of those childhood memories that all of us eventually lose and yet are never able to quite erase from our minds.
I have translated a few lines from his pages….where the author describes, in his own quiet yet soul-stirring manner, an old lady, an aunt of his father, who lived with them…
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Bamasundari was a small woman. She was slender and perhaps her many years of austerity and starvation didn’t let even a semblance of rotundity appear in her. Her pepper-and-salt hair was evenly cut almost to her scalp and she wore long, white cloth. I observed her for almost twenty-two years — and her appearance remained almost the same. It seemed as if age didn’t wither her at all, that her skin was still taut, her body was mobile and her memory as sharp as ever. Only towards the end of her life did she have a hump-backed appearance and if she had to pass the cotton thread through the needle she used to come to me. She died when she was with me in Kolkata — she didn’t have a disease, she died painlessly after being confined to her bed for a few days.
When I think of Bamasundari now I feel she had a glorious and effortless victory over the deprivation which widowhood brought to her. The gloom, the mental fatigue which should have come upon her never touched her. She was gentle and quiet, she would never speak ill of anyone and all the time she appeared pleasing and without complaints. And all her days she remained busy in her own world — none out of any compulsion but everything she did for her own need. She cleaned the courtyard with cowdung-water so early at dawn — she held the vessel on her waist with her left hand and moved fleet-footedly with her own rhythmic movements almost like a dancer. She was a champion when it came to how thinly she could peal and cut into pieces the pumpkin or the betel-nut. The vegetable curries she prepared tasted like nectar. She could make the most difficult and delicate of our favourite dishes in every season with immaculate precision. When she had done with all other chores she used to sew her kantha (cotton wrapper with patchwork)…I have never seen her sick, I can not remember her sleeping during the day. She didn’t have the education to read a novel, she didn’t have much interest in any religious rituals either. But since her chores around the house were endless, time never appeared to sit heavily on her — all her days were filled to the brim.
Bamasundari never worshipped a guru, she never hankered for visiting a sacred place, she never went to stay at Benaras leaving her family. But in the house she performed a few humble rituals of her own. ……Wherever we stayed she would plant a Tulsi tree and every evening she would lit an earthen lamp below it……On every Tuesday in the month of Jaistha, she would observe a vow — that was an occasion of joy for me for she would recite from the scriptural narrative tales of Mangalchandi. She would recite almost like a professional narrator following the same rhymes and tunes everyday. It was impossible for her to read this from a book and she never needed it for she had all of it in her memory from reciting it a thousand times all over her life and I wondered who taught her, if that person too had it in his/her mind….The storyline was slight…it dealt with the story of a housewife who was tired of her comforts and wealth and needed to taste sorrow and loss. But even when she sends her own son a poisoned, handmade candy she is unable to feel the sense of loss. This mythic story which I have never read in a book came back to me time and again in my adult life. That continuous and uninterrupted happiness tires our souls, that it denies the mind its sheen and lustre and makes it feel lifeless, that in our life sorrow is an essential element — all of that this widow brought to me through her recitation.
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Topics: Translations, Translations from Bengali |