8

The gifts that Nature bestows upon her devotees are priceless indeed. But this gift is not won without long service to her. And what a jealous disposition has Queen Nature—when you desire her, you must be hers and hers alone; if your mind has turned elsewhere, the proud beauty will on no account lift her veil.

But immerse yourself in Nature with a single-minded heart, and her every blessing—of joy, of beauty, of a singular peace—will be showered upon you so copiously that you will go mad at the sight. Day and night, the enchantress Queen will bewitch you in a hundred forms, awaken a new vision within you, lengthen the life of your mind, and, with a glimpse of the immortal realm, bring you to the very verge of immortality.

Let me speak of a few such times. To speak of those priceless sensations, one could fill page after page and still not be done; much of what I wish to say would remain unsaid. The audience for such things is also extremely small; how many people love Nature with all their heart and soul?

Across the forest plains, in the fields of Labtulia, the blossoming of the dudhli grass flowers announced the arrival of spring. These flowers, too, were very beautiful, shaped like stars and yellow in colour. The long, slender, vine-like stems of the grass would grip a great expanse of earth, and the star-shaped yellow flowers would bloom at every node. At dawn they would bloom, illuminating the fields and the edges of the paths—but as the sun grew hotter, the flowers would all curl up and return to the form of buds—and on the following morning, I would see those very same buds in bloom once more.

The splendour of the raktapalash is to be found in the Mohanpura Reserve Forest and in the jungle beyond our borders, or in the foothills of Mahalikharup. From our estate, these places were a great distance away, a three- or four-hour ride on horseback. In those places, the air in the month of Chaitra is intoxicating with the fragrance of sal blossoms, and the horizon is tinged red by the shimul groves, but the songbirds—the cuckoo, the doyel, the bou-kotha-kao—do not call. Perhaps they do not care for the forsaken aspect of these unpeopled forest verges.

On some days, my heart would ache to return to Bengal. I would see in my imagination that sweet spring of the Bengali countryside; I would remember the image of a young bride in a wet sari walking from a bathing ghat with stone-paved steps, the flowering ghentu grove at the edge of a field, the dense, shady afternoon made enchanting by the fragrance of pomelo blossoms. How profoundly I came to know my own land only after going abroad! This heartache for my homeland was something I had never felt while living there. It is a great emotion in life; he who has never tasted it, that unfortunate soul, has remained a stranger to one of life’s supreme sentiments.

But the thing I am trying to say, again and again, in various ways, but which I can never quite explain properly, is this: Nature’s aspect of mysterious immensity, of inaccessibility, of vastness, and of a beautiful, spine-chilling terror. If you have not seen it, how can I make you understand what a thing it is!

Alone on my horse in the silent afternoon, in the vast, unpeopled boihar of Labtulia with its horizon-spanning forests of tall jhau and kash grass, this aspect of Nature here has shrouded my entire being in a feeling of infinite mystery. Sometimes it has come in the form of fear; sometimes, in the form of a detached, aloof, grave state of mind; sometimes, it has come as so many honey-sweet dreams, as the sorrows of men and women from my own country and from lands abroad. It is like a silent symphony of the highest order—its rhythm and harmony are in the beat of the faint starlight, in the unreality of a moonlit night, in the drone of crickets, in the gleam of a shooting star’s fiery tail.

It is better for him who must build a home and lead a worldly life not to see that form of hers. The spell of that bewitching form of Nature’s makes a man homeless; it makes of him an aimless, rootless wanderer like Harry Johnston, Marco Polo, Hudson, Shackleton—it will not let him play the householder and attend to domestic duties. It is impossible for the man who has once heard that call, who has once beheld the unveiled enchantress, to ever keep a house.

Late at night, coming to stand alone outside my house, I have seen the form of the dark plains or of a shadowless, shimmering expanse of a moon-drenched night. Its beauty is enough to drive one mad—I am not exaggerating in the slightest. I feel that for people of a weak disposition, it is better not to see that form; it is a ruinous beauty, and it is very difficult for most to withstand its power.

But it is also true that to see Nature in that form is a matter of fortune. Such lonely, vast, open forest plains, mountain ranges, and forests of jhau and kash grass—where can one find them just anywhere? And with that must be joined the silence of the deepest night and its darkness or its moonlight—if such conjunctions were so easily available, would not the world be overrun with poets and madmen?

Let me tell of the time I witnessed that form of Nature.

I received a wire from the lawyer in Purnia: I had to be there by ten o’clock the next morning. Otherwise, our loss in a major case for the estate was certain.

Purnia was fifty miles from our estate. There was only one night train, and by the time the wire was in my hands, it was impossible to get to Katoria station, seventeen miles away, to catch it.

It was decided that I must set out on horseback at once.

But the road was long indeed, and fraught with danger, especially at this hour of the night, in this forested region. So it was also decided that the tahsildar, Sujan Singh, would accompany me.

We set our horses off in the evening. A little while after leaving the kachari and entering the jungle, the moon of the third night of the dark fortnight rose. In the faint moonlight, the forest and plains looked even more strange. We rode side by side—I and Sujan Singh. The path was sometimes high, sometimes low; the moonlight glinted on the white sand. There were thickets here and there, and endless stretches of kash and jhau forest. Sujan Singh was telling stories. The moonlight grew steadily brighter; the jungle, the sandy tracts, became gradually clearer. The tops of the low jungle stretched out in a continuous straight line into the far distance—as far as the eye could see, a vast, shimmering plain on one side, and the jungle on the other. To the left, a distant range of low hills. Desolate, silent, not a human settlement anywhere, no sign of life, no sound, as if we were the only two creatures on a lonely forest path on some other unknown planet.

At one point, Sujan Singh stopped his horse. What was the matter? From the jungle beside us, a large wild boar with a brood of young ones was crossing our path and entering the jungle to our left. Sujan Singh said, ‘It’s a good thing, Huzoor. I thought it was a wild buffalo. We’ve come near the Mohanpura jungle, and the fear of wild buffalo is very great here. Just the other day, a buffalo killed a man.’

A little further on, something dark truly did appear in the moonlight in the distance.

Sujan said, ‘The horses will take fright, Huzoor. Rein them in.’

In the end, we saw that it did not move or stir. Approaching it slowly, we saw that it was a clump of kash grass. We set the horses to a gallop again. Fields, plains, forest, a world awash in shimmering moonlight—a lonely bird calling somewhere in the sky or the forest—ti-ti-ti-ti—the horses’ hooves were kicking up great clouds of sand, there was no way to stop them for even a moment—onward, onward—

My back was aching from sitting in the same position for so long, the seat of the saddle had grown hot, the horses had broken their canter and settled into a trot. My horse was also very skittish, so I was keeping a careful watch far down the path ahead—if it were to stop short suddenly, being thrown from the saddle was inevitable.

The path through the jungle had been marked by tying knots in the tops of the kash grass; there was no actual road, and one had to find one’s way in this deep jungle by following these knotted tufts. At one point, Sujan Singh said, ‘Huzoor, this doesn’t seem to be the path. We’re lost.’

I located the North Star by finding the Saptarshi Mandal—Purnia was due north of our estate, so we were on the right track. I explained this to Sujan.

Sujan said, ‘No, Huzoor, we have to cross the Kushi river ferry, and only after crossing it do we go straight north. For now, we have to cut across to the north-east.’

Finally, we found the path.

The moonlight had grown even brighter—and what moonlight it was! What a vision of night! Those who have never seen the moonlight on a lonely sandbar, on a path beside a forest of tall jhau trees, will not understand what this moonlight looked like! How many have seen it? Moonlight on paths through forests, hills, and plains under such an open sky, in a shadowless, desolate, profound moon-drenched night; moonlight on sandbars. Uff, what a gallop! The two horses were panting as we rode side by side; even in the cold, sweat appeared on our bodies.

At one spot in the forest, under a shimul tree, we stopped the horses to rest for a little while, just ten minutes or so. A small river flowed by, merging with the Kushi River a short distance away. The shimul tree was in bloom. The forest there closed in around us from all sides so completely that there was no trace of the path, and yet it was a forest of short trees and plants—only the shimul was very tall—standing with its head raised amidst the woods. We were both terribly thirsty.

The moonlight began to fade. The forest path grew dark as the late-night moon sank behind the distant mountain range on the western horizon. The shadows grew long. Not a sound from any bird, only shadows, darkness—dark fields, dark forest. The late-night air grew quite cold. It was nearly four o’clock by my watch. I felt a fear that a herd of wild elephants might appear before us in the darkness before dawn! There was a herd of them in the Madhubani jungle.

Now there were small hills on either side, with the path running between them. On the hilltops were leafless golgoli trees with their white trunks, and here and there, a forest of raktapalash. The forest and hills looked strange in the darkness after the moon had set. The sky grew lighter in the east—the morning breeze was blowing, and the calls of birds reached my ears. Sweat was streaming down the horses’ bodies. Onward, onward—they were very good horses to be able to gallop so far along this path. We had left the kachari in the evening—and now it was dawn. The road still seemed to stretch endlessly before us—the same monotonous forest, the same hills.

From behind the hill in front of us, the sun was rising like a ball of brilliant red sindur. We stopped our horses in a village by the roadside and bought some milk, which we both drank. After another two hours’ ride, we reached the town of Purnia.

I finished the estate’s business in Purnia, but as if in a state of utter distraction, my mind remained fixed on the road. My companion wanted to set out as soon as the work was done—I stopped him, for the sheer greed of savouring once more the singular beauty of such a long ride on horseback on a moonlit night.

And so we did. Though the moon rose a little later the next day, we had moonlight until dawn. And what moonlight it was! In the forest and hills, the moonlight of a waning moon of the dark fortnight had created a serene, gentle, yet strangely unfamiliar dream-world—that same low kash jungle, those same yellow golgoli flowers on the slopes of the hills, that same high and low path—all of it together seemed like some distant star-world. As if after death, we were disembodied spirits flying through some unknown, invisible realm—into that nirvana-loka of the Lord Buddha, where the moon does not rise, and yet there is no darkness.

Many years later, when I had forsaken that free life and entered the world of household affairs, sitting in a rented house in a narrow Calcutta lane, listening to the sound of my wife’s sewing machine during the leisure of an afternoon, how many times I have thought of that night, of that singular joy, of that mysterious, moon-drenched forest beauty, of the white-trunked golgoli trees on the hills in the darkness after the moon had set, of the fresh, earthy smell of the dry kash jungle—how many times in my imagination have I mounted a horse again and ridden to Purnia on a moonlit night.

One day in the middle of the month of Chaitra, I received news that a Bengali doctor named Rakhal-babu in the village of Sitapur had died suddenly the previous night.

I had never heard his name before. I did not even know he was there. I heard he had been there for twenty or twenty-two years. He had a practice in that area and had apparently also built a house in that very village. His wife and sons lived there.

In this land of non-Bengalis, a Bengali gentleman had died suddenly. What was to become of his wife and sons, who was looking after them, what arrangements were being made for his cremation or his shraddha rites—my mind grew extremely restless to know all this. I felt that my first duty was to go there and inquire after the grief-stricken family.

Upon inquiry, I learned that the village was about twenty miles from here, on the border of the Karari Khas Mahal. I arrived there towards evening. Asking the local people, I found Rakhal-babu’s house. There were two large tile-roofed huts and three or four smaller ones. Outside, in the local style, was a sitting-room with three of its walls missing. There was no way to tell it was a Bengali’s house; from the string charpai in the sitting-room to the Hanuman flag in the courtyard, everything was of this region.

At my call, a boy of twelve or thirteen came out. He asked me in rustic Hindi, ‘Who are you looking for?’

His appearance made it hard to think of him as a Bengali boy. He had a long tiki on his head, and of course, the sacred thread he wore was a new one for mourning—I understood all that, but how does even the expression on his face come to resemble that of a Hindustani boy?

Giving my identity, I said, ‘Call the senior-most person in your house.’

The boy said that he was the eldest son. He had two younger brothers. There was no other guardian at home.

I said, ‘I would like to speak with your mother for a moment. Please go and ask her.’

A little while later, the boy came and took me inside the house. Seeing Rakhal-babu’s wife, I thought her young, within her thirties, dressed in the recent widow’s garb, her eyes swollen from crying. The household furnishings were those of a destitute family. On one side was a small grain-bin, on the porch a couple of charpais, torn quilts and blankets, local brass ghaylas, a gurguri pipe, an old tin trunk. I said, ‘I am a Bengali, your neighbour. I heard about Rakhal-babu, and so I came. I feel I have a duty here. If you need any help from me, please tell me without hesitation.’ Rakhal-babu’s wife stood behind the door panel and wept silently. I comforted her and explained the purpose of my visit again. This time, Rakhal-babu’s wife came out in front of me. Weeping, she said, ‘You are like an older brother to me. In this time of grave crisis, God has sent you.’

Gradually, in the course of conversation, it became clear that this Bengali family was completely destitute and helpless in this foreign land. Rakhal-babu had been bedridden for over a year. All his savings had been exhausted on his treatment and household expenses—now they did not even have the means to arrange for his shraddha ceremony.

I asked, ‘But Rakhal-babu was in this region for a long time, wasn’t he able to do anything?’

Rakhal-babu’s wife’s hesitation and embarrassment had lessened considerably. It was as if, in this foreign place, in this time of misfortune, the sight of a Bengali face had given her a lifeline in a shoreless ocean; so it seemed from her expression.

She said, ‘I don’t know what he used to earn before. I have been married for fifteen years—he married me after my co-wife died. Ever since I came, I’ve seen the household just get by somehow. Here, very few people pay the visiting fee in cash; they give wheat, they give maize. Last year in the month of Magh, he fell ill, and since then there hasn’t been a single paisa. But the people of this country are not bad; those who owed him anything brought all the wheat, maize, and lentils to our house. That’s how we’ve managed, otherwise we all would have starved to death.’

‘Where is your father’s house? Has word been sent there?’

Rakhal-babu’s wife was silent for a while, then said, ‘There is nothing to send word about. I have never seen my father’s house. I had heard it was in Murshidabad district. From childhood, I was raised in my brother-in-law’s house in Sahibganj. I had no mother or father. That sister of mine died after my marriage. My brother-in-law has married again. What relationship do I have with him?’

‘Are there no relatives of Rakhal-babu anywhere?’

‘He had clan brothers back in his native village, I used to hear, but they never kept in touch, and he didn’t travel to the village either. He was not on good terms with them, so sending them news or not is all the same. I heard I have a maternal uncle-in-law, in Kashi. But I don’t know his address either.’

A terribly helpless situation. With no one of their own, my heart sank thinking of the plight of this widowed woman with her two or three young sons, without support or resources in this friendless foreign land. I did what was necessary for the moment and returned to the kachari. Writing to the head office, I arranged for a grant of one hundred rupees from the estate for the time being and somehow managed to get Rakhal-babu’s shraddha ceremony completed.

After this, I went to Rakhal-babu’s house several more times. I had arranged for a monthly aid of ten rupees from the estate, and I went to deliver the first instalment myself. The Didi was very kind, and spoke of many things with great affection and kinship. Her affection and care in that foreign land felt very dear to me. For the lure of it alone, I would go there whenever I had the leisure.

At the northern edge of Labtulia is what looks like a very large lake. In this region, such a body of water is called a kundi. The name of this lake was Saraswati Kundi.

A dense forest lined three sides of Saraswati Kund. No forest like this existed on our estate, or even in Labtulia. It was a close congress of great ancient trees—whether due to the nearness of the water or for some other reason, the forest floor was crowded with a miscellany of creepers, leaves, and wildflowers. This forest encircled the blue waters of the vast Saraswati Kund in a crescent, leaving one side open—from there, one’s eyes fell upon the far-stretching eastern sky and the distant mountain range. And so, if one sat somewhere on the bank at the corner of east and west and looked to the left and to the right, one could properly grasp the singular beauty of Saraswati Kund. To the left, the gaze travelled from the deep to the deeper woods, losing itself in the thick, intense green; to the right, the image of the pellucid blue water, the far-flung sky above it, and the hazy mountain range swelled the heart like a balloon and lifted it from the earth’s soil into flight.

I used to go and sit there alone for days on a stone slab. Sometimes, at midday, I would wander through the forest by myself. I would sit in the shade of so many great trees and listen to the birds’ calls. Now and then I would collect flowers from the plants and wild creepers. The variety of birdsong to be heard here was greater than in our estate; there were not so many birds there. Perhaps because they found so many kinds of wild fruit to eat, and because they had the opportunity to build their nests in the high crowns of the trees, the number of birds in the forest by Saraswati Kund was exceedingly large. And many kinds of flowers bloomed in the woods as well.

The dense forest on the lake’s bank was over three miles long and about a mile and a half deep. Along the water’s edge, in the shade of the trees, a narrow track ran from one end of the forest to the other—I used to wander along this path. Through the gaps in the trees, I would sometimes glimpse Saraswati’s blue water, the distant sky stooping over it, and the mountain range dissolving into the horizon. A cool, gentle breeze would murmur, birds would sing, and the scent of wildflowers would drift by.

One day, I climbed up and sat on the branch of a tree. There is no comparing that bliss. Above my head was a thick mass of green leaves from a host of giant trees, and through the gaps, pieces of blue sky. On a huge creeper, clusters of flowers swayed. Far below, at my feet, large toadstools had sprouted from the damp earth. Coming here and sitting, all I wanted to do was think. So many kinds of new feelings would crowd into my mind. A sort of profound, supernal consciousness would slowly emerge from the deep interior and bloom in the outer mind. It came in the form of deep joy. It was as if I could feel the heartbeat of every tree and creeper within the calm pulse of my own blood.

Where our estate was, there was not such a variety of birds. That place was like another world; its trees, plants, and creatures were of a different kind. When spring appeared in the familiar world, in Labtulia there was not a single cuckoo’s call, not a single familiar flower of spring. It was as if it possessed a harsh, stark, Bhairavi-like form; serene and beautiful, yes, but devoid of sweetness—it overwhelmed the mind with its vastness, its austerity. It was a raw, unadorned khadav melody, a dhrupad in Malkosh or Chautal, never touching the softer notes of sweetness—it carried the mind to another plane with the grave, sublime form of its music.

Saraswati Kund, in contrast, was a thumri, which made the mind moist and dreamlike with the honeyed, gentle luxury of its sweet notes. In the still afternoons of Phalgun and Chaitra, sitting here in the shade of the lakeside trees and listening to the birds’ calls, my mind would wander far away. The wild neem trees would scatter the fragrance of their blossoms on the air, and clusters of water lilies would bloom in the water. I would sit for a long time before getting up and leaving after evening fell.

The Nāḍhā plains were being surveyed for distribution among the tenants, and I often had to go there to inspect the work of the amīns. On my way back, I would make a detour of about two miles to the south-east, just for the pleasure of entering this forest by Saraswati Kund and walking for a while in its shade.

That day I was returning around three in the afternoon. After crossing the vast, sun-scorched plain under a blistering sun, I entered the forest, my body slick with sweat, and went through the deep shade right to the water’s edge—the distance from the edge of the plain to the water’s edge was no less than a mile and a half, and in some places even more. Tying my horse to a tree branch, I spread out an oilcloth under a dense thicket and lay down at once. The branches of the thicket enfolded me from all sides in such a way that no one could see me from the outside. A couple of feet above me, plants and a type of wild creeper with a thick, wood-hard stalk were entwined, forming a roof. From some tree, large, green, bean-like pods, about a foot long, dangled almost over my chest. Another tree, its branches filling nearly half the thicket, was covered in tiny flowers, so small they were invisible unless you went very close—but what a dense, intense fragrance they had! The secluded space beneath the thicket was heavy with the scent of that unknown wildflower.

As I have said before, the forest of Saraswati Kund was a haven for birds. And what a multitude of birds there were in this forest! So many kinds, so many colours—shyama, mynah, hartit, parakeet, pheasant-crow, sparrow, babbler, dove, green pigeon. In the high branches of the trees were hawks, kites, kullos—and in the blue water of Saraswati, herons, coots, ruddy shelducks, storks, drakes and other waterfowl. The space above the thicket was raucous with birdsong—how they vexed me! It was impossible to hear oneself for their joyous, astonished twittering. Much of the time they paid no mind to humans; they saw me lying there, but they sat on the dangling branches and creepers a couple of feet all around me, chirping away, without a glance in my direction.

I loved this fearless movement of the birds. I had seen that even if I sat up, they were not scared; they would fly off a little way, but not flee the country entirely. After a while, they would come very close again, hopping and chattering.

It was here that I first saw a wild deer one day. I knew there were wild deer in the jungles of our estate, but I had never seen one before. I was lying down when suddenly, at the sound of footsteps, I sat up and looked towards my head to see a deer standing in the deeper, more inaccessible part of the thicket, amidst a tangle of dense creepers and leaves. Looking closely, I saw it was not a large deer, but a fawn. It had spotted me and was staring at me with its large eyes in simple wonder, as if thinking, What strange creature is this?

Some time passed; we were both silent, motionless.

After half a minute, the fawn seemed to take another step forward to get a better look. Its eyes held the same eager curiosity as a human child’s. I don’t know if it would have come closer, but just then my horse suddenly shifted its feet and shook itself, and the fawn, startled and frightened, dashed through the thicket, presumably to report the news to its mother.

I remained sitting under the thicket for a long time after that. Through the gaps in the trees, I could see the blue water of Saraswati Kund stretching in a crescent to the foot of the distant mountain range. The sky was blue, without a trace of cloud in any direction. The flocks of waterfowl in the Kund had started a quarrel, a clamour, a full-blown riot. A grave and elderly stork, perched atop a tall tree on the bank, was voicing its annoyance from time to time. Along the water’s edge, flocks of herons were clustered so thickly in the treetops that from a distance they looked like clusters of white flowers in bloom.

The sunlight gradually grew ruddy.

The mountain peak on the far side seemed to take on a copper hue. The flocks of herons spread their wings and began to fly. The sunlight climbed to the crowns of the trees.

The birdsong grew louder, as did the fragrance of that unknown wildflower. In the afternoon shade, the scent seemed to have grown denser, sweeter. A mongoose, from some distance away, raised its head and was staring at me fixedly.

What secluded peace! What strange solitude! I had been here for a good while, no less than three and a half hours—apart from the twittering of wild birds, I had heard no other sound, save the crunch of branches and leaves under their feet, and the rustle of dry leaves or bits of creeper falling. There was no sign of human life anywhere.

The crowns of the great trees had all sorts of varied and different shapes. In this evening hour, as the ruddy sunlight fell on them, their beauty became strange and wonderful. Creepers had climbed up, entwining the tops of many of them. There was one kind of creeper that people here call bhiyora lata; I had named it bhomra lata—the drone-creeper. Whichever treetop it climbed, it would cling to it, wrapped tight. At this time of year, the bhomra lata flowered—small, white blossoms, like wild jasmine, illuminating the tops of so many great trees. It had a most wonderful fragrance, much like blooming mustard flowers—though not as pungent.

How many wild shiuli trees there were in the forest of Saraswati Kund! In some places, the profusion of shiuli trees was so great it seemed like a shiuli forest. In early autumn, heaps of shiuli flowers had fallen on the large rock slabs in the morning—a kind of long, coarse grass grew around those rocks, and large thorn-apple bushes were entangled with it. Thorns, grass, rock slabs, all covered in heaps of shiuli flowers. It was a damp, shady spot, so the morning’s flowers had not yet dried.

In how many forms I saw Lake Saraswati! People say there are tigers in the forest of Saraswati Kund. On the day of the Ras Purnima festival, eager to see the moon-bathed beauty of Saraswati’s vast waters, I threw dust in the eyes of the tahsildar Banwarilal, and under the pretext of coming to the head office in Azimabad, I secretly slipped away from the Labtulia sub-office and came here alone on horseback.

I didn’t see a tiger, it’s true, but that day I truly felt that here, in the deep of night, enchanted forest-goddesses came down to sport in the moonlit waters of the lake. All around was silent and still. Only from the dense forest on the eastern bank could the calls of jackals be heard. The distant mountain range and the forest canopy looked indistinct. In the cool, moonlit air, the faint scent of the night-blooming flowers of the trees and the bhomra lata… before me, the vast, waveless lake, encircled by forest and hills, its breast flooded with the full moon’s light of Hemanta… a full, shadowless, otherworldly, celestial moonlight, falling on the water, reflected in the tiny ripples… the moonlight on the large treetops, covered with the white flowers of the bhomra lata, made it seem as if the white garments of fairies were fluttering in the trees…

Another kind of insect was making a monotonous sound, like a cricket’s. The sound of a leaf or two falling, or the rustle of a wild animal fleeing over the dry leaves…

The forest-goddesses, of course, do not come while we are here. Who knows how late at night they come! I could not bear the cold for too long. I stayed for about an hour and then returned.

It was here that I first heard this legend of the fairies of Saraswati Kund.

One day in the month of Sravan, I had to spend the night at the survey camp on the northern border. With me was the amīn Raghubar Prasad. He had previously worked for the government and had known the Mohunpura Reserve Forest and the forests of this region for twenty-five or thirty years.

As soon as I brought up Saraswati Kund, he said, “Huzoor, that is an enchanted lake. Nymphs and fairies descend there at night. On moonlit nights, they take off their clothes and leave them on those rocks on the bank, then enter the water. Anyone who sees them at that time, they lure into the water and drown. In the moonlight, you can sometimes see the faces of the fairies floating on the water like lotus flowers. I have never seen it, but the Head Surveyor, Fateh Singh, saw it once. One day after that, he was walking alone late at night through the forest by the lake to the survey tent. The next morning, his body was seen floating in the water of the Kund. A large fish had eaten one of his ears. Huzoor, you should not go there like that.”

It was by this same Saraswati Kund that I discovered a strange man one afternoon.

One day, returning from the survey camp, I was slowly making my way along the forest path by the lake’s edge when I saw a man in the woods digging in the ground, doing something. At first, I thought he had come to dig up bhuin-kumra. The bhuin-kumra is a creeper-like plant; beneath the creeper, in the earth, a huge tuber, the size of a winter melon, grows—it’s not visible from above. It sells for a good price as it is used in Ayurvedic medicine. Out of curiosity, I dismounted and went closer. I saw it was not bhuin-kumra, not anything like that; the man was planting some kind of seeds.

Seeing me, he was taken aback and looked at me with an embarrassed expression. He was getting on in years, his hair a mix of black and white. He had a gunny sack with him, from which the tip of a small spade was visible. A crowbar lay beside him, and several paper packets were scattered about.

“Who are you?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

He said, “Huzoor, are you the Manager-babu?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“Namaskar. My name is Jugal Prasad. I am the cousin of your Labtulia patwari, Banwarilal.”

Then I remembered that Banwari Patwari had once, in passing, brought up his cousin. The reason for bringing him up was that a post for a clerk had become vacant at the Azimabad head office—that is, where I lived. I had asked him to find a good man. Banwari had said with regret that he had a good man right in his own cousin, but the man had a strange temperament, a sort of whimsical, detached nature. Otherwise, with such a hand in Kaithi Hindi, such learning and knowledge, few people in this region could match him.

I had asked, “Why, what does he do?”

Banwari had said, “He has many fancies, Huzoor. Wandering here and there is one of them. He does nothing, he’s married, but doesn’t look after his family; he roams the woods and jungles, yet he’s not a holy man or an ascetic either. He’s just that kind of person.”

So this was Banwarilal’s cousin!

My curiosity grew. I said, “What are you planting there?”

The man had probably been doing his work in secret; he said in a tone as if he had been caught and was ashamed and embarrassed, “Nothing, just—the seeds of a plant—”

I was surprised. The seeds of what plant? This was not his own land, this was a dense jungle. What was the point of scattering seeds in its soil? I asked him this.

He said, “There are many kinds of seeds, Huzoor. In Purnia, I saw a very beautiful foreign creeper in a sahib’s garden—it had lovely reddish flowers. These are its seeds. There are also seeds of many other kinds of wildflowers, collected from far and wide. Those creepers and flowers don’t exist in the jungles here. So I’m planting them. They’ll grow into plants, and within two years, they will form thickets. It will look beautiful.”

Understanding the man’s purpose, my respect for him grew. The man was spending his own money and time to enhance the beauty of a vast forest, a forest in which he had no property rights of his own—what a strange man!

I called Jugal Prasad over, and we sat down together under a tree. He said, “I have done this before, Huzoor. All the wildflowers and flowering creepers you see in Labtulia, I brought and planted ten or twelve years ago, some from the forests of Purnia, some from the hilly jungles of the Lachhmipur estate in South Bhagalpur. Now those places have become absolute jungles of those flowers.”

“Do you enjoy this work very much?”

“The jungle of the Labtulia plains is a truly wonderful place—to make new flowers bloom on those small hillsides or in the thickets of the forests here, that has been my long-cherished hobby.”

“What flowers did you used to bring?”

“Let me tell you, Huzoor, how my mind turned to this. My home is in the Dharampur region. In our part of the country, there were no wild bhandir flowers at all. As a boy, I used to graze buffaloes along the banks of the Kushi river, ten or fifteen kosh from my village. There, I would see the great beauty of the wild bhandir flowers in the woods, jungles, and fields. I brought seeds from there and planted them back home. Now, along the roadsides, in the thickets, and on the fallow land behind people’s houses in our region, there’s a jungle of bhandir flowers. Since then, my head has been turned in this direction. Wherever a flower is not found, I will bring that plant or creeper and plant it—this is my passion. I have spent my whole life wandering and doing this. Now I am obsessed with this work.”

I saw that Jugal Prasad knew about many of the wildflowers and beautiful trees and creepers of this region. I had no doubt that he was an expert on the subject. I said, “Do you know the Aristolochia creeper?”

As I described the shape of the flower, he said, “The hansa-lata? The one with flowers shaped like a swan? That’s not a native plant of this country. I’ve seen it in the babus’ gardens in Patna.”

One had to be amazed at his knowledge. And how many such worshippers of pure beauty had I ever seen? He had no selfish interest in scattering the seeds of beautiful flowers and creepers in the forests, not a paisa of income. He himself was extremely poor, yet all this tireless effort and concern was just to increase the wealth of the forest’s beauty.

He said to me, “Babuji, there is no forest in this region as wonderful as Saraswati Kund. So many trees and plants there are, and have you seen the beauty of the water! Well, what do you think? Would lotuses grow if I planted them? In the rural areas of Dharampur, there are many lotuses in the ponds. I was thinking of bringing some tubers and planting them.”

I resolved in my mind to help him. The two of us together would adorn this forest with all sorts of new wildflowers, creepers, and trees. From that day on, this thought possessed me like an addiction. Jugal Prasad did not have enough to eat; his family was in great hardship, I knew this. I wrote to the head office and got him a clerk’s job at the Azimabad office for a salary of ten rupees.

That year, from Calcutta, I brought seeds of foreign wildflowers from Suttons, and from the hills of the Dooars, I brought cuttings of wild jasmine creeper, planting them all in great abundance in the forest lands around Saraswati Lake. What joy, what enthusiasm from Jugalprasad! I instructed him not to reveal this excitement and delight to the people at the estate office. They would surely think him mad, and they wouldn’t spare me either. The following year, with the monsoon rains, the plants and creepers we had planted began to grow at an astonishing rate. The soil on the banks of the lake was exceedingly fertile, and the plants we had put in were well-suited to the region’s climate. The Suttons seed packets, however, were the source of some confusion. On each packet, they had printed the name of the flower, and in some cases, a brief, one-line description as well. Of the seeds I planted, choosing them carefully for their fine colours and appearance, the ‘White Beam’, ‘Red Campion’, and ‘Stitchwort’ showed exceptional progress. The ‘Foxglove’ and ‘Wood Anemone’ did rather well, too. But despite all our efforts, we could not manage to keep the ‘Dog Rose’ or ‘Honeysuckle’ seedlings alive.

I had planted a type of plant from the yellow datura family along the edges of the lake. It bloomed very quickly. Jugalprasad had brought seeds of the wild bayra creeper from the jungles of Purnia, and within seven months of the seedlings sprouting, I saw that the tops of many nearby bushes were becoming blanketed by the bayra vines. The flower of the bayra creeper was as lovely to behold as its fragrance was delicate.

One day, at the beginning of autumn, I saw that the bayra creeper was covered in countless buds.

The moment I gave Jugalprasad the news, he dropped his pen at the Azamabad estate office and came all the way to the shores of Saraswati Lake, seven miles distant, practically at a run.

He said to me, “Huzoor, people said that the bayra creeper would sprout, and that it would grow, too, but that it would never flower. Apparently, not all of the creepers do. Just look at all the buds!”

In the lake’s water, I had planted the tubers of an aquatic flower called ‘Water Crowfoot’. The plant began to grow with such vigour that Jugalprasad became afraid it would usurp the lotuses’ territory in the wilder parts of the lake.

I had wanted to plant bougainvillea, but its association with fashionable city parks and gardens is so strong that I feared a bush of flowering bougainvillea in the woods of Saraswati Kund would destroy its wild character. Jugalprasad also shared my views on such matters. He, too, advised against it.

I had also spent no small amount of money. One day, I heard from Ganori Tewari that in the jungles of the Jayanti hills, across the Karo river, grew a strange kind of wildflower—known in those parts as dudhia phul. Its leaves were like the turmeric plant’s, the plant itself just as large—a very long stalk would shoot upwards three or four cubits high. One plant would produce four or five stalks, and each stalk would bear four yellow flowers. Not only were they beautiful to look at, but their fragrance was exceptionally lovely. At night, the scent would travel a great distance. Wherever one of these flowers once grew, it would proliferate with such astonishing speed that in two or three years, it would form a veritable jungle.

From the moment I heard of it, my peace of mind was lost. I had to have that flower. Ganori said it would not be possible except during the monsoon; one had to bring the plant’s tubers and plant them—without water, they would die.

Giving him money for his expenses, I sent Jugalprasad on his way. After a long search, he managed to procure and bring back ten to twelve ganda of the tubers from the impenetrable jungles of the Jayanti hills.