Usually, after I complete writing a story, I generally am left with no patience for it later. I, therefore, lay no importance to it if the public lauds it or cremates it. But, this story has created in my mind a strange feeling. This story is not a virtually imaginative story that I have put together by placing various features and essences. This is, however, an exception. I am writing this story based on some matter that was sent to me by a total stranger in the form of a letter. What I have done is merely to flesh it out in my language as a story. The person is not only a stranger to me, but he has kept his identity obscure. Just one fact about him is very clear and that is that he is an adventurer. I feel he had been touring around our country. Therefore, I will just refer to him as a tourist. And yet, he is not just an adventurer, but someone who takes up the challenge to visit inaccessible, dangerously impregnable and undiscovered areas. It lures him onward and excites his blood in a thrilling bid. He had sent to me just such a tale, which is not only strange but unbelievable. I guess that the reason which prompted him to send this story to me has some other focussed reason! Was he trying to judge me by sending the matter of the story to a writer not very well-known? How could I meet him? He had given no clue to his identity in his letters. Not even the postal seals were a giveaway, for he has posted them not from one place, but various places. All the places were however in India. There was not even a little glimmer of hope.
Were those ancient tribespeople really living a life in some fertile plateau or valley covered by deep forest, far away from the civilised world? The tourist had given the description about them and their lifestyle as though they have to date, no connection with the human world, not to speak of the civilised world. Passing from the Stone Age to the Neolithic Age, their lives have been a deep pause of silence, and yet the description states that they exist in a land that seems like a primitive heaven, an Eden. These people weaned by nature had created for themselves a basic primordial existence, where there was no clash, no accidents and no fear of death. Life there had no diversity. In India, there are evidences of ancient people living here and there, but their numbers are very few. Such people may not have risen to the height of civilisation, but they have not moved away to remain isolated.
However, the people whom the tourists had discovered were totally alien, the tools they used to get going with life and its needs were not handy. They were just makeshift. Yet, using them in the course of their existence, they had developed a cultural identity. They had their life’s philosophy, thoughts of death and a very close and vital relation with the forces of nature. This lends a religious angle to their existence, which has a distant old base. Although the tourist had not mentioned it, they did not seem like a negligible lot population-wise.
If someone happened to ask me if, from an artificial planet that can see every aspect of a house in a thickly populated city, from where the movements of a revolutionary can be observed from space and the need for political help to attack him from an unmanned craft, away from the eyes of the world – faced by such a question, I would only be embarrassed, and in trying to provide the right answer to it I shall myself be doubtful. In truth, with the passing of time, I have come to be in two minds about the truth of the tourist’s tale.
Alternately, I experience within my mind a different drawing of the story due to a different feel. If what the tourist states is not just an imaginary tale, if some people in a state of transition from the Stone Age to the Neolithic Age still exist, then do the people of the world have the responsibility of bringing those tribespeople forward to upgrade them to modern life existence? This question returns repeatedly to my life. Whether the change brought about by such an interference in the lives of these tribespeople has proven fruitful occasions my curiosity. From the description, I gather that although the people he described were in the Stone Age, their culture was vibrant, and this vibrancy had arisen from their close proximity to nature. The cruelty in the headman’s self-surrender, as has been reported by the tourist, had in fact no influence of selfishness or cruelty of the community. It was an example of accepting death gradually.
There was a lot of opportunity to accept the celebration of the headman’s description of his death as a symbolic rite. Of course, that would depend on the priest’s wisdom. In the lifestyle of the people, spiritual prophecy had a vital role to play and this fact becomes clear from the thoughts of the priest. In some generous-minded priest’s thoughts, this cruel reality may be deemed to be a symbolic celebration! – the way animals are sacrificed in the ritualistic religious ceremonies of civilised human beings, and that which is taken to be sacred and ominous. It is the same agony of seeing the animals bursting out in pain which the mute creatures cannot express in words. Civilised people feel nothing when they see the expressionless face of the sacrificed animal. Compared to the civilised people’s religious observances of animal sacrifice, the instance of the death of the headman of the tribespeople pales
in comparison.
On the other hand, according to the beliefs of these people of the ancient tribe, the attachment of the soul of each person of the tribe to live in a tree of the plantation of similar trees brings a picture of man and nature in a close and harmonious relation. Even the planting of a tree on the buried mound is a symbolic instance of bringing about a scheme of nature’s balance. This brings to the life and observance of the people, an unconscious assimilation of purpose. If such a people really existed, then research studies ought to be conducted to study the pattern of their life and living.
I am a mere writer, not a research analyst; and dwelling on the rigour of such adventures, I do not dare to go ahead. But the tourist referred to here was both mentally and physically compelling. Once I would meet him, I would have a mind to ask him to organise a group of anthropologists and intellectuals, and on the basis of the ancient tribespeople’s way of life and their social and cultural practices form a research study.
For such a scheme, the tourist would have to take the initiative. Given the way he met the tribespeople, the manner in which he deserted them was a revelation of his sense of irresponsibility. But if the entire thing had evolved in his brain, and hearing the story of an unknown writer being narrated by a person and finding in it a reason for mockery – had he sent it to a writer who is a stranger to him? And yet for all that, I would have to meet this tourist. For, the more I thought about the unbelievable tale he had written to me, the more was I disturbed at not knowing the truth about it. This was the reason that I was unable to write anything for the last four to five months. I needed to be released from this creative negativity.
I had not thought of using this stranger’s narrative for writing the story “Pratipath”. I had just concluded that someday the matters of his letters may be of some use. I had, therefore, kept them in a file. It was then that Arindam happened to arrive one day.
Excerpted with permission from Yatra: An Unfinished Novel, Harekrishna Deka, translated from the Assamese by Navamalati Neog Chakraborty, Thornbird/Niyogi Books.