Bolai – A short story by Rabindranath Tagore
Bolai is a part of a collection of short stories Galpa Guchchha written and narrated by Rabindranath Tagore for Barsha-Utsab, a festival to celebrate the onset of rains in Santiniketan. It was later published by Visvabharati Publications. This is a free form translation by the Amit Mukhopadhyay.
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The saying goes that the human life is documented in the conclusion of different phases of the history of life of different other animals. It’s pretty-much known to us that we get to see the different animalistic behaviors in the people around us. Actually we call us human when all the internal animalistic attributes are combined together to project us as an amalgamation of all our traits, which combines all our virtues and vices together, to cage us inside the package of this so called human life. Just like how all the do re mi fa so la ti are combined to form the melody in musical symphony.
None of them can make noise any more when they are combined in music. But in musical harmony too, some of the notes become major and plays a vital role to lead the symphony, sometimes it’s the fa, sometimes it’s mi in minor, sometimes it’s so, you never know.
My nephew Bolai – he has the traits of the plants and trees as his major in his soul symphony. From the very childhood he loves to stare at things sitting quiet in a corner, unlike running around like other kids. In the eastern sky the dark clouds keep on mounting in their cumulonimbus patterns, his mind get soaked into the wet winds from the rain forest of Sharavan evening; when it rains as if the train crosses the river bridge, as if he listens to that through all his bare body!
When the evening sun lows down the sunlight on the rooftop, he sucks that sunlight in his wide open arms, as if he is absorbing something, god knows what from the whole sky! In the beginning of the spring the flowers bloom on the Mango trees, that flourishes an intense delight in his blood flow! Like a Sal forest in late spring, his temperament spreads into wide open, gets fulfilled in sheer joy, as if gets filled in with a dense, thick hue of nature around him.
He feels like talking to himself only, he talks to himself about all that he has heard in the stories, and fairy tales, like the age old bird couple that dwells in the whole amidst the branches of that very old Banyan tree – the Byangoma & Byangomee. That boy with his far stretched eyes, can’t speak out much. So he has to be thoughtful, more and more in himself.
Once we took him to a hill station. In front of our house there is a deep slope goes down to the valley down under that is fully covered with green grasses, he just stares at that slope and that delights him like never before. He doesn’t seem to feel that the grass layer down the slope is a static one, for him it seems like a rolling down game play, just rolling and rolling down the slope, often he himself used to roll down the slope on the grass carpet – he used to feel himself as an integral part of the grass – used to be delighted immensely by the cordial cuddles by the grass heads in his neck and ears.
