Rabindranath's Body

By Ankur Razdan

RABINDRANATH’S BODY

In a cave, a body is writing. Privacy is good for writing. Without anybody watching, the body works on and on—it is a body of work. The set-up is pretty basic: a stone that serves as a seat, a larger stone that serves as a desk, a quill pen that has lost its feathers, a never-ending scroll of paper, and the uncompromising darkness. At irregular intervals, the paper is cut, forming collections of the body’s work ranging from great lengths to what cannot really be called length at all. The inkwell the body dips its quill into has long since run dry—but that’s okay, the scratches made onto the paper are perfectly sufficient for its purposes.

The body never stops writing, and certainly never leaves the cave. Interminable routine without stimulation is bad for writing, but only when you have a soul. But it doesn’t, so actually, it isn’t. The gist of every idea the body pursues in its writing was developed long before it ever came to the cave, that is when the body was alive. That said, it must be admitted that when it comes time for these ideas to be fleshed out, many of the finer, more writerly details end up involving things like rocks, dampness, clinking sounds, stalactites, stalagmites, and cave-dwelling domed land snails, Zospeum tholussum, both in terms of the species in general and individual specimens in particular.

The body, incidentally, used to be the body of Rabindranath Tagore, but it really is incidental. Its ambitions were brewed up while the soul was busy, engaged in winning the Nobel Prize and concomitant activities thereof, without much interplay between the two forces. Now that the body has the opportunity, it doesn’t procrastinate. It writes.

Tagore’s body cannot review what it has written as it writes it, nor after. There isn’t exactly a readership in the cave, either. The texts it produces could be described as charming and puckish. It’s genre work, mostly. The sentences do stumble over each other a little awkwardly—sometimes, when the blind hand makes a mistake, this literally happens—and it is somehow always the case that amid the self-detonating spaceships, demon-devourings, and dazzling displays of inhuman intelligence, everybody’s spouse has been murdered (sometimes by their own hand), everybody’s critical memories are resurfacing due to a chance encounter, and everybody is at the point of the highest emotional tension in their entire lives. But the body likes that kind of stuff.

Topics which are never ventured into include reincarnation, Karma, Dharma, the raising of the dead to a trumpet blast, and judgement, whether eternal or of any other duration. The body feels no need to create spiritual literature—if it tried to write that way, it would only be deluding itself, as you or I would be deluding ourselves if we decided we were called upon to compose interplanetary literature or core-of-the-sun literature or probiotic literature. One advantage to lacking a soul (or not a lack—a manufacturer of blank canvasses would insist that nothing was missing from their products) is the absence of delusion. To the extent its senseless head can experience what it writes, the body is about as self-satisfied as writers get.

So Rabindranath Tagore’s body sits in the cave leaning wraithlike over its labor, scratching its sharp quill, sharp as in life, into the paper, every once in a while pushing its long, traipsing beard out of the way. Someday or other a clever archeologist will come to map out all the indentations on graph paper, and there will be a digital archive. But that won’t happen for a long time, a thousand years at least, well after we’re dead and the body has returned to its grave, its opuses unsigned and anonymous. Absent interested scholars or scientists, some questions insist themselves upon the two of us in the here and now. What shall we do with the body? What shall we do with the writings, piling up in the back? What shall we do with the cave? We have to decide.

[Written on India’s 75th Independence Day, 8/15/21]

Ankur Razdan is a writer based in the Washington, DC area. A regular fiction contributor at Sterling Clack Clack, he has also appeared in The Westchester Review, The Tiny Journal, The Chestnut Review, and many more. Follow him on twitter at https://twitter.com/mukkuthani and visit ankurrazdan.com for his professional editing services.