and I was standing engrossed, watching the game. It was at a football match between Hindu and Moslem students on our school playground. But I shall never forget the day I met him. One day very early in the morning he left his home and his people and everything he possessed, with nothing on him but the clothes he wore: and he never returned again.

Whether he is alive or dead to-day I do not know.

Let me tell you just what I have got to tell, though that, you must know, is easier said than done.īefore I describe how my wandering life began, I must introduce the person who initiated me into its joys. History does not record how the bad boy grows up, unloved and uncared for, led into evil ways by the attraction of evil, hit and knocked about by unpleasant experiences, till one day, at last, he slips off unnoticed, with the burden of universal contumely and evil repute on his shoulders, into the eternal silence and oblivion of the land without a name.īut no more of this. The desires and curious longings which pursue them through life are so incongruous and strange, so way¬ward and fantastic, that a description of them would probably evoke unmeasured derision from the wise. May it not be, so the question shapes itself in my mind, that those whom God summons to the heart of His wonderful creation, are not the people who have had the opportunity to shine as the best boys at school and pass examinations, nor those gentlemen who sweep grandly through life in a coach and pair with pomp and retinue, finishing up with the publication of their 'Memoirs' at the end? Providence endows its favorite children, it would seem, with some amount of sense, but not what men of experience would call sound common sense. I feel that perhaps this degradation into which, by universal report, my life has sunk, may not after all have been necessarily so low as my contemporaries have always thought. But to-day, as I sit down to unravel the memories of long ago and investigate how even the morning of my life came to have a prefacing 'Shame!' affixed to it, I am suddenly assailed by an unwonted doubt. My friends and kinsmen with one accord have kept up a running comment on my life, summed up in an invariable 'Fie!' or 'Shame!' Nor has my mind ever had the hardihood to challenge this estimate as anything but just and fair. WHAT memories and thoughts crowd into my mind, as, at the threshold of the afternoon of my wandering life, I sit down to write the story of its morning hours!įrom my childhood to the present day it has always been the same.

Srikanta by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay