Nights In Serampore

excerptI will never forget the nights spent with Bogdanof and Van Manen around Calcutta, in Serampore and Titagarh. Bogdanof, who had been the consul of the Tsarist Empire to Teheran and Kabul for ten years, was at the time my teacher of Persian. He had made friends with me despite the age and cultural differences – he was a famous Orientalist, a contributor to the most noted publications, while I was just a very young scholar – primarily because we were both Orthodox. Bogdanof had kept his Orthodox faith both among the Muslims from Persia and Afghanistan, whom he loved, and the Hindus from Bengal, for whom he felt a repulsion he could hardly suppress. Van Manen, on the other hand, loved the Indian world. He'd been, for many years now, the librarian and secretary of the Asian Society of Bengal, after being for a while the librarian of the Theosophical Society of Adyar. He was a Dutchman past the middle of his life, who'd come to India in his first youth, and, like many others, had remained forever enthralled by it. He had spent about twenty-five years studying the Tibetan language, which he had learnt better than anyone else, but because he was lazy and liked to live a good life, he had published very little. He was happy to do research simply for the pleasure he took in studying and learning. He had no respect for academic titles, he was single, and he had a penchant – which he kept secret – for the occult. As soon as the rainy season was over and the days started to get colder, we were inseparable. All three of us worked at the library of the Asian Society on Park Street, me and Bogdanof at the same table, Van Manen in his office. Bogdanof was revising a translation from Mohamed Dhara Shikuh, Van Manen was cataloguing the Tibetan manuscripts recently bought from Sikhim, and I was deciphering Subbâshita Samgraha, a text known for its unending difficulties. Each of us respected one another's work, and apart from the words we exchanged when we looked up from our papers to light a cigarette, we were rather silent. Shortly before the library closed, we would gather in Van Manen's office, and it was in there that our long conversations began, lasting sometimes way after midnight.Especially towards the middle of the autumn, the Calcutta nights grew incredibly beautiful. There's nothing I could compare them with, for their air blended the melancholy of the Mediterranean night and the sounds of the Nordic one with the feeling of dissolution into non-being, stirred in your soul by the night of the Oriental seas, and the strong vegetal fragrances that greet you the moment you enter the heart of India. For me, those nights were quickened by some magic that I could not possibly resist. Even before making friends with the two famous scholars, I would often spend whole hours roaming the streets, sometimes going back home only towards dawn. I was then living on Ripon Street – which branches off Wellesley Street, one of the thoroughfares – in the south of the city, very near the purely Indian neighbourhood. I would leave home immediately after dinner and wander through those narrow lanes, among walls overwhelmed by shrubs in bloom, until I'd left behind the last Anglo-Indian villas and got into the labyrinth of indigenous shacks, where life never rests. For somebody who hasn't been warned, the inhabitants of this part of Calcutta seem to have no need of sleep. At whatever time you might be going back home, you find them on their porches, or on the kerbs, or in their small rooms with doors opened onto the street – singing, working, talking or playing cards. This is the neighbourhood of poor people, and the nightly tumult is so full of music and excitement that you might think there's always some kind of celebration. The acetylene lamps give off an intense light, the smell of huka and the sweet opium smoke blend with those unforgettable fragrances typical of the Indian quarters – cinnamon flowers, damp stables, milk, stale boiled rice, sweets made from honey and deep-fried in butter, and hundreds of other such nuances impossible to identify, in which you sometimes think you've recognised eucalyptus leaves, fat oils scented with attar or the smell, so similar to that of raw incense, of the nicotiana flowers. You can find all that as soon as you get away from the European centre or from the edges of the big parks, dominated as they are, sometimes to dizziness, by the smoky juices of the jungle. You can find all that – although each street meets you with a new nuance, sometimes in striking contrast with the previous mixture, from which it derives, for just a few seconds, with surprising firmness. As for me, entranced as I was by the magic of the Calcutta nights, eager to live them as diversely as possible – I liked alternating the noisy nights of the indigenous quarters with nights of total solitude in the big Maidan Park or at the Lakes, where I would forget I was at the outskirts of a city with more than a million inhabitants – for me, then, the nocturnal company of Bogdanof and Van Manen was a delight. In the beginning, when I wasn't all that good friends with the two scholars, we used to go for a walk on Ellenborough Course, the broad road that crosses the Maidan, immediately after the evening meal. Soon after that, we started going to the Lakes, from where we'd come back late after midnight. Van Manen was the most talkative of us. On the one hand, because he was the oldest; on the other, because he'd lived a rich life from all points of view and he knew India, especially Bengal, as few other Europeans did. It was he again who, one evening in the library, invited us to Serampore for the first time, to a friend of his, Budge, who had a bungalow there. We borrowed a car from the Calcutta Club and left, on an impulse, immediately after nightfall.Serampore is about fifteen miles north of the city, on the right bank of the HooglyRiver, which links the Ganges with the BengaliGulf. Titagarh is on the other bank. Two good roads, one starting in Howrah, the other in Chitpur, connect Calcutta with the two old settlements, nowadays almost gone. Budge, Van Manen's friend, had his bungalow a few miles west of Serampore, in a region still full of trees. It was an old building, which had been repaired several times, but which was impossible to preserve in a good state in the Bengali climate and so close to the jungle. The bungalow – as Budge modestly called it – reminded me, when I first saw it through the palm trees, of those half-deserted villas from Chandernagore, the glorious French colony near Calcutta, villas dating back to the beginning of the 19th century, with wrought iron gates, wooden pavilions, swallowed fast by the forest. Nothing can be more melancholy than a walk through Chandernagore immediately after sunset. Around it grow eucalyptus trees, and the sadness of the ruined villas, barely discernible in the dusk among the merciless waves of vegetation, overwhelms you to disintegration. Nowhere are ruins so dismal as in India, though nowhere are they less lugubrious either, for they're animated by a new, sweeter and more musical, life, that of grass, creepers, snakes, and glow worms. I used to like to wander through Chandernagore because I could find there a history almost dead in the rest of India. Nowhere would I get a more melancholy picture than in Chandernagore of the history, so picturesque and so dramatic, of the first European colonists, of the French pioneers, sailing round Africa and a part of the Indian peninsula to fight with the jungle, malaria and the heat. I could reconstruct there the old image of the glorious pioneer, I could revive his adventurous life, I could imagine his legendary existence, and all this seemed vainer than all vanities in the night scented by the eucalyptus flowers and lit only by the stars and glow worms.It seems that Budge had bought the bungalow from an Anglo-Indian farmer a few years after the war and was keeping it mainly as a refuge and resting place for when things were getting a bit overwhelming in Calcutta. He was a strange man, this Budge, he was single, very rich, and with no luck in hunting; one of the first things I found out about him from Van Manen was his proverbial lack of talent for hunting.The first time we visited him in Serampore, he was there too. He had arrived only a few hours before us, and was meaning to stay for a couple of days. We found him with a thick cigar between his teeth, sprawled in a chaise-longue on the porch, indifferent to the mosquito raids. He looked tired and he hardly got up to greet us. He invited us to have a whiskey on the rocks to regain our strength. Then, until dinner was served, he stayed on the porch talking to Van Manen, while Bogdanof and I went exploring the surroundings. "Make sure you don't wake up the snakes," our host shouted after us as we were going down the steps. No doubt we woke up enough snakes because we were making a lot of noise. We headed towards the edge of the palm tree forest, where we could see some water. We couldn't quite tell from afar what it was, as the moon had not risen yet and all we could make out in the starlight was the surface of the water. On getting closer, we found a fairly big pond, most of it covered with lotus flowers. Next to us, reflected in the water, was the slender shadow of a coconut tree. Although a mere couple of hundred metres from the bungalow – whose acetylene lamps looked lost in a mist because of the billions of night butterflies and ephemerids – we felt as if we were all of a sudden on the shore of a magic lake, so profound was the silence and so mysterious the air."Let's hope our true God will watch over us again," Bogdanof said, sitting down slowly on the edge of the pond.I smiled in the dark, for I realised he'd meant that. He never blasphemed the name of his God. But maybe because I didn't feel tired, or maybe because I was afraid – some months before, while I was just about to jump from a boat onto the shore, a friend grabbed my arm and killed with his stick a small green snake that was lurking in the dried mud just where I was going to put my foot – I preferred not to follow his example and leaned against the coconut tree. "I've always hoped I will not meet the Great Snake while I'm still alive," Bogdanof resumed, as if guessing my thought. "Sarparâja, that's what you call it, isn't it?"For Bogdanof, 'you' meant both the Sanskrit language scholars and the rest of the Hindu population of India. "Sarparâja," I confirmed with seriousness, "but also sarpapati, sarparishi, sarpeshvara, and many other names. But they're all about the Great Snake, as you call it…""Let us pray to God we never meet it," Bogdanof interrupted me. "Neither here, on the poisoned land of India, nor in the nether world, in Hell."I lit a cigarette. We both kept silent for a long time. Behind us stretched, ruffled at times by a breeze imperceptible to our foreheads, the palm tree forest. When the rough leaves touched, you thought for a moment that the whole forest was made of copper. Your head turned in amazement, for the metallic sound contrasted strangely with the air saturated with vegetal scents. And a shiver seemed to go down your spine. Then all stopped, and silence descended again upon the woods and the lake. We kept watching, with one of those blank, lost looks that the still surface of a water can bring in your eyes, and waiting for the lotus flowers to open."It is indeed very beautiful here," Bogdanof whispered eventually, more to himself. "We'll be coming again."


by Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)