Kabuliwalla and other stories by Rabindranath Tagore – A Book Review

It’s so easy to know you are in love yet so difficult to explain. A plethora of mixed emotions run through your heart and mind, inexplicable ones. It makes you restless, your heart skips at times like a watchful timid deer, at times an invisible needle pricks it causing a sweet pain, a pain you want to elude from but somehow enjoy it, when day dreaming is not an option but inadvertently becomes a need, a time when what you think and what you say are poles apart. You attempt to read a book but you don’t read anything for hours, the clouds have got a new meaning, the sky is suddenly blue and oh, the flowers are so lovely. I have a dried leaf in my hands and I turn it, look at it and then at the sky; I have it in my hands for hours as I sit there lost in my thoughts beside the river and eventually throw it away.

And ‘love’ is just one of the multitudes of emotions. To be able to penetrate through a person’s thoughts and feelings and relive their emotions and to be able to decorate them in words is the mark of a genius and that’s what Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s short stories tells us about him. Set in the rustic Kolkata villages, every story oozes with the innocence of that era, long gone, and the characters are only haunted by the silhouettes of their emotions. So be it the puzzled ghost of the widow Kadimbini in ‘The Living and the dead’, the virtuous wife in ‘The gift of sight’ or the innocent Ratan vying for the attention of the unruffled postmaster in ‘The Postmaster’ or be it the anguish of poor Ramcharan to spend his entire life raising his thankless son like a rich boy, only to hand him over to his master in ‘Little master’s return’;  the upsurge of emotions are felt, the suffering is felt, the motherly love caresses the heart, the distress weakens, the longing breathes through the soul in the stories. The ‘Kabulliwallah’s’ endurance to the coldness of his little friend is heart warming.

Most of Rabindranath Tagore’s characters have been women, and though oppressed in one form or another, they are strong women replete with sentimentality and often a marked sensuousness. Tagore’s writings dive deep into the oceans of their spirited emotions and whether the pearl is found or not, the discoveries along the journey are a treasure of their own.

           Though I generally avoid translated books, I really liked the short stories. Having been in Mumbai since my childhood, it’s a pity that I can’t read and write in Bengali, which happens to be my mother tongue and the original language of Tagore’s writings. I am sure, in Bengali, the stories would be a greater delight to read.

My Rating : * * * * * * * * * * - 8/10

Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore