Short Stories By Rabindranath Tagore

the living and the dead

The widow living with the zamindar Sharadashankar's family, in the big
house at Ranihat, had no blood-relatives left. One by one they had died.

In her husband's family, too, there was no one she could call her own,
having no husband or son. But there was a little boy - her brother-in-
law's son - who was the apple of her eye.

His mother had been very ill
for a long time after his birth, so his Aunt Kadambini had brought him
up. Anyone who brings up someone else's son becomes specially
devoted: there are no rights, no social claims - nothing but ties of
affection. Affection cannot prove itself with a legal document; nor does it
wish to.
All it can do is love with doubled intensity, because it owns so
uncertainly.

Kadambini poured her frustrated widow's love on to this boy, till one
night in Śrābaṇ she suddenly died. For some strange reason her
heartbeat stopped. Everywhere else, Time continued; yet in this one,
small, tender, loving heart its clock's tick ceased. Keeping the matter
quiet, in case the police took notice, four Brahmin employees of the
zamindar quickly carried off the body to be burnt.

The cremation-ground at Ranihat was a long way from human
habitation. There was a hut on the edge of a tank there, and next to it an
immense banyan tree: nothing else at all on the wide open plain.
Formerly a river had flowed here - the tank had been made by digging
out part of the dried-up course of the river.

The local people now regarded this tank as a sacred spring. The four men placed the corpse inside the hut and sat down to wait for the wood for the pyre to arrive.

The wait seemed so long that they grew restless: Nitai and Gurucharan
went off to see why the firewood was so long coming, while Bidhu and
Banamali sat guarding the corpse.
It was a dark monsoon night.
The clouds were swollen; not a star could be seen in the sky. The two men sat silently in the dark hut.

One of them had matches and a candle, wrapped up in his chadar.
They could not get the matches to light in the damp air, and the lantern they
had brought with them had gone out as well.
After sitting in silence for a
long time, one of them said, 'I could do with a puff of tobacco, bhāi. We
forgot everything in the rush.'
'I'll run and get some,' said the other. 'I won't be a minute.'

'That's nice!' said Bidhu, perceiving his motive. 'I suppose I'm to stay
here on my own?'
They fell silent again.
Five minutes seemed like an hour. They began inwardly to curse the two who had gone to trace the firewood - no
doubt they were sitting comfortably somewhere having a smoke and
chatting.
They were soon convinced that this must be so. There was no sound anywhere - just the steady murmur of crickets and frogs round the tank.

Suddenly the bed seemed to stir a little, as if the dead body had
turned on to its side.
Bidhu and Banamali began to shudder and mutter prayers.
Next moment a long sigh was heard: the two immediately fled outside and ran off towards the village.
A couple of miles along the path they met their two companions returning with lanterns in their hands. They had actually just been for a smoke, and had found out nothing about the firewood. They claimed it was being chopped up now and would not be long coming. Bidhu and Banamali then described what had happened in the hut.
Nitai and Gurucharan dismissed this as nonsense, and rebuked the other two
angrily for deserting their post.
The four of them swiftly returned to the hut at the cremation-ground.

When they went in, they found that the corpse had gone: the bed was
empty. They stared at one another. Could jackals have made off with it?
But even the garment that covered it had gone.
Searching about outside the hut they noticed in a patch of mud by the door some recent, small, woman's footprints.