He: (Shey) (Modern Classics (Penguin)) Read Free

in lieu of a hat; one might, if hungry, lick the Ochterlony Monument up to its very top; a shovel is employed to clear the eye of coal dust; a brass-bound cudgel is a serviceable toothbrush; and if one’s mouth is polluted, the rites of purification are easily looked up in Webster’s Dictionary. Creating a commotion with every word,‘kintinabu meriunathu’,‘kangchuto-sangchani’ and ‘iktikutir bhiktimai’ announce their presence.The animals found here are strange compounds of humans and cows and lions, which the people of Tasmania have named ‘Gandishandung’. Here, if you pull too hard on someone’s hair-tuft, his body might well ‘slither off him like a loose sock and fall to the ground with a thump’, and it is entirely permissible to yell for someone to come and inhabit that cast-off frame.
    The little girl who listens to these tales sometimes claps her hands in delight. And sometimes she asks, wide-eyed, ‘Is all this true, Dadamashai?’
     
    *
     
    A fantasy in fourteen chapters, Shey was published as a whole in 1937, but its component parts had been composed over a long time. Says the storyteller as he begins his story,‘The person who listens to these stories is nine years old.’ The young listener—Pupe, or Nandini— was actually ten when some of the parts were first published. By the time they were all brought together as a book, she was sixteen. In one way, though, these story-conversations between grandfather and granddaughter had begun long before Pupe reached the age of nine. She was much younger when, in his diary of that time, Rabindranath wrote (15 February 1925):
     
    Last night, I had finished dinner and was sitting in my cabin. I was
    commanded: ‘Dadamashai, tell me a story about tigers.’ . . . So I began—
     
    A tiger of the stripy kind
    A mirror chanced to view,
    And seeing the black upon his coat
    Into a temper flew.
    He thought the matter urgent—
    So to find a good detergent,
    Bade Jhagru post to Prague
    Or else Hazaribagh.
     
    Gradually growing and changing, this rhyme about a tiger would finally come to feature in Shey. By then, the artist’s strokes and the poet’s words had merged to give it a completely different character.
    Another being would come to stand between grandfather and granddaughter—his identity left open under the pronoun ‘he’, unconfined by any definite shape or form, free to wander anywhere and everywhere whenever the fancy takes him. Constantly being born anew, he can say whatever he likes, crossing the bounds between truth and fiction. He can do anything—even write tiger-poems.
    In fact, ‘He’ wanders beyond the confines of the written tale. In letters to the real Pupe at various points in the year 1931, the real grandfather frequently reports,‘He came…He said, “Send me to Darjeeling”’ or ‘He has gone to Java’ or, indeed, ‘He went off, saying “Pupu-didi is away, I won’t stay here either”’ or ‘He has gone off wearing my quilted wrap. His own tattered shawl had got soaked in the rain and he’s left it behind. I’m thinking of putting it to use as a fruit-juice strainer’.
    The telling of tiger-tales to a young listener is a subject Rabindranath returns to in his lecture series The Religion of Man (1931) , and in discussions of literary theory written in 1933.There he proves how real even the most fantastic tales can be to the child-mind, observing, ‘Whatever impresses itself upon the mind in a distinct form or shape is real.’ It does not rely upon reason or logic; it may have no functional meaning or factual basis; it may lie far beyond the limits of possibility. Still,‘it presents an image before the mind, awakens an interest in it, fills up an emptiness: it is real.’
    Here the word ‘real’ obviously carries a special significance. To understand what that is, we must consider the literary context of the time.The post-Tagore era of literary activity is about to begin; the young writers of the new age