A Wife’s Letter Rabindranath Tagore
Translated from Bengali by Prasenjit Gupta To Thine Auspicious Lotus-Feet: Today we have been married fifteen years, yet not until today have I written you a letter. I’ve always been close by your side. You’ve heard many things from me, and so have I from you, but we haven’t had space enough to write a letter. Now I’m in Puri on a holy journey, and you are wrapped up in your office work. Your relationship to Calcutta is a snail’s to its shell--the city is stuck fast to you, body and soul. So you didn’t apply for leave. It was the Lord’s desire, and so was His granting me my leave application. I am Mejo-Bou, the second bride in your joint family. Today, fifteen years later, standing at the edge of the ocean, I understand that I also have other relationships, with the world and the World-Keeper. So I find the courage to write this letter. This is not a letter from your family’s Mejo-Bou. Not from the second wife. Long ago, in my childhood days--in the days when my preordained marriage to you was known only to the Omniscient One who writes our fates on our foreheads--my brother and I both came down with typhoid fever. My brother died; I survived. All the neighborhood girls said, “Mrinal’s a girl, that’s why she lived. If she’d been a boy, she couldn’t have been saved.” Jom-Raj is wise in his deadly robbery: he only takes things of value. No death, then, for me. It is to explain this at length that I sit down to write this letter. When your uncle--a distant relative--came with your friend Nirod to view your prospective bride, I was twelve. We lived in an inaccessible village where jackals would call even during the day. Fourteen miles from the railway station by ox-cart, then six more on an unpaved road by palanquin; how vexed they were. And on top of that, our East-Bengal cookery. Even now your uncle makes jokes about those dishes.