A self-sketch by Pradip Moitro

( Continued from previous part)
Time has yielded its scalpel unhesitantly. One by one the dancers have departed; but music for me is not over yet. I stand on the dance floor and inhale the heady perfume; and I see the body swayed to music and I am mesmerised by the quickening glance. I say sing a song, sing along, sing what you have been looking for, sing what you found deep in the blue eyes of a Kentucky girl, in the flaxen hair of an English country lassie.

One grows old when one no longer can joyously submit oneself to the spell of love. In 1822, when German poet Goethe was seventy-five, he fell madly in love with the beautiful seventeen- year- old Ulrike von Levetzow. She became the inspiration to Goethe’s magnificent creation, Marienbad Trilogy. At every stage of Goethe’s long life, there was a searing love affair, in which he has held his fingers over the flame. And every love have spirited him into a glorious creation. His greatest Faust ends with the line: “The eternal woman lifts us above”. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe: these are four pillars of European literature.

In the annals of archaeology there is nothing to match the story of Heinrich Schliemann, the German merchant- turned-archaeologist. Unable to get in Europe a divorce from the frigid Russian beauty Ekaterina, Schliemann sailed to America to get one. America granted him one. Meanwhile, he had embarked upon a correspondence with an eighteen-year-old Greek beauty of superb intelligence. Between Schliemann and the beautiful Sofia the only thing in common was their love of Homer. On strength of a few letters he dashed to Greece and they were married. Schliemann was convinced that Homer’s Troy was an actual city in reality and lay buried in Hissarlik, Turkey. Together they went to Turkey. Schliemann was not wrong: their painstaking excavations in Hissarlik unearthed treasures beyond their imagination. Schliemann spirited the treasure to Germany where Kaiser Wilhelm personally received them. The booty remained in Germany until the fall of Berlin in the Second World War. The Russians took all of it to Kremlin.

Despite wide differences between their ages, theirs was a successful and happy union.

On a trip to Hissarlik and exploring the remains of Byzantine Empire, I met a gorgeous Turkish girl. She was twenty- two, slightly more full than slim, and a Master’s Degree student at Istanbul. Nazan was not usual Muslim girl. She readily jettisoned all the taboos to be with me.

When I told Nazan that, by being with me, a non-Muslim, she had turned history on his head, she looked at me quizzically. In 1452, the twenty-one year old Sultan Mehmet laid seize on Constantinople, Christendom’s most opulent city. For four months, the city repelled all attempts to breach its impregnable walls. The Emperor waited for other Christian princes of Europe to come to his rescue. He only received airy promises. Mehmet made a tactical retreat, but came back with renewed ferocity. In 1453, on a morning in May, the city fell. Emperor Constantine fell to the invaders’ sword. Having allowed his soldiers full run of the city, the Sultan recoiled in horror in scale of destruction. After twenty-four hours of plunder, pillage and destruction, he ordered a halt to the orgy. Those women and girls who escaped the carnage were quickly converted to Islam. A twelve hundred year old Christian empire was swept away by a twenty-one year old Muslim leader of a nomadic tribe from Central Asia. The grand cathedral of Hagia (pronounce – aya) Sofia became the Blue Mosque: Constantinople, the capital became Istanbul.

Nazan with her jade green eyes, with her nacreous flesh set against the setting August sun in Istanbul, was the eloquent testament to many races whose blood flows in the veins of modern Turk.

I told Nazan that if Sultan Mehmet was alive, he would have put both of us to death. To which she retorted, “You are my Sultan”. Thereafter, she always addressed me as “My Sultan”. And whenever I called her I used to say, “The new Sultan of Turkey is calling for Princess Nazan”.

Having decided to take myself out of the orbit of those who found me an object of jealousy and spiteful small talks, I became homeless. With this sense of homelessness, of permanent exile, I also began to realise the consolation of the words of a fifteenth century Florentian man of letters: Ubi bene, ibi patria. That is, wherever there is goodness, there is my country. Not merely my country, I felt therein was my home and there lay my heart. This conviction became so firmly entrenched in me that it turned my exile into my kingdom. Every girl, whom I loved and who loved me, has been a part of this kingdom. They are the ones who taught me love, awakened my sleeping heart and made me to say myself:”O wonder how many goodly creatures are there here/How beauteous mankind is/O Brave New World that hath such people in it”.

So I write, calm in my mind and joyous in my heart. I have spent all these years fortified by reasons not to communicate, have lived by my determination to fade far away into the sunset. I write today because, as French say:”Le Coeur a ses raisons que la raisonne connait point.” Translation: The heart has reasons that reasons know nothing of.

And the heart of heart’s reason is Love. Amour vincit omnia (Love conquers all). From the early days of my youth to date, I carry within me moving words of St. Paul: “Though I speak with a tongue of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I had a gift of Prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and though I had all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give up my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.”

With this realisation has come the recognition which, nearly thirteen centuries ago, a poet wrote in Sanskrit:
Kalohyong nirabadhi, vipula cha prithivi
Asti mama samana dharma ko-opi

My rendering:
Without end is Time, and without limit is Universe
Somewhere in this limitless universe,
And at some point of its endless Time
There has got to be someone like-minded.

This is an elastic philosophy. It assuages the pain of the moment, of the hour, of the day, of the life itself. It has stood by me whenever I have felt the desolation of opulence, whenever I felt lonely in a crowd. When my day is done, I will say with the Italian poet who was in exile from his native city: “E’n la sua voluntade e nostra pace”. In thy will is my peace.

(End)

About the author

Pradip Moitro (1939 – 2012) was born in undivided India, in today’s Bangladesh. Post partition, the family migrated to West Bengal, where he completed his schooling at Barrackpore, a Calcutta suburb. Then he studied at St. Stephens, Delhi and tnen moved to Oxford.Later he became an in -house polymath of White House and rose to a speech writer of an US President in the last quarter of 20th century. He breathed his last at Oxford.

About the author

Pradip Moitro (1939 – 2012) was born in undivided India, in today’s Bangladesh. Post partition, the family migrated to West Bengal, where he completed his schooling at Barrackpore, a Calcutta suburb. Then he studied at St. Stephens, Delhi and tnen moved to Oxford.Later he became an in -house polymath of White House and rose to a speech writer of an US President in the last quarter of 20th century. He breathed his last at Oxford.

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