“She reached the valley of the Great Dairies, the valley in which milk and butter grew to rankness, and were produced more profusely, if less delicately than at her home- the verdant plain so well watered by the river Var or Froom.”
TESS OF D’URBERVILLES
Man’s intercourse with the world is malleable. It changes too fast. I can’t help it. It’s amenable to a great degree. Anything can affect you. You yearn for something else and end up doing something else. You appreciate this digression sometimes, and you inculpate yourself some other time.
I thought last year, I must take a four-hour road trip northward from Delhi and in no time I should reach the foothills of Himalaya; there I will put my feet up from this worldly affair; dunking my feet in the perennial waters. I would roll up my jeans up to my knee at the place where this perennial flow from the pinnacle of Himalaya just begins to pat the alluvial plane of India, and I would be throwing the pebbles into the stream, reading some of Keats, some of Emily Dickinson, with my eyes intently observing those clouds giving rise to various shapes above, ad interim. I would have preferred a rivulet rather than the main river for disentangling my encumbered thoughts. But the second wave of this deadly virus just curtailed all hope. Everything shut! I was stuck, neither in the capital nor in the lap of the Himalayas. I shrank on my table like a despondent lad.
As if a divine providence, Mr. Hardy came as my savor; though I was reading so many books together then, while dusting my book cabinet this book fell on the table and those attention-seeking eyes of the heroine of this novel’s cover page yelled over me in the very same way that buffalo of the Butcher’s crossing talked to me one day. Do you remember? And I read it. So in place of my going towards Himalaya, Mr. Hardy took me to London, and with a four-hour journey from London he accompanied me to this verdant valley of black more, and there I visited the village of Marlott. I also traveled back in time. It was 1890 now! There I saw, running among the bevy of girls, a country hoyden, as fresh as newly formed snow of Himalaya. Ah! Mr. Hardy introduced me to her. She is Tess. Tess of D’Urbervilles! Go meet her!
“Light broke through the chinks of cottage shutters when the shadow of the eastern hedge top struck the west hedge midway. She, being the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure among them all.”
TESS OF D’URBERVILLES
I never knew this book would be as imposing. What a marvy prose I was reading, you can’t imagine, page after page I kept lumbering on, first slowly then fleet-footed. It was a rapturous ride. My bewildered face did not crease into the furrows of repugnance, not even for a second. When the innocent young Tess was trying to learn whistling the way it was desired by her mistress, she was trying to generate a hollow sepulchral rush of wind through her lips, and no clear note at all, I also whistled. I also remained fruitlessly blowing and blowing along with her. Neither she nor I generated a melody. But the mellifluous prose of Mr. Hardy was generating euphonies; tolling in our ears like bells.
“She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirt, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle- milk, and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which though snow-white on the apple tree trunks, made blood-red stains on her skin; thus she drew near to Clare, still unobserved of him.”
THOMAS HARDY
What can be more coincidental than this that when I had not yet finished the book and a thought came to add a few lines of ‘Hardy – the poet’, and as soon as I opened a random page of the only poetry collection that I own of Mr. Hardy, the page number 94 I found these lines, I noted down and did not try to read other lines.
“At last one pays the penalty-
The woman – woman always do.
My farce, I found was tragedy
At last!- one pays the penalty
With interest when one, fancy- free,
Learns love, learns shame… of sinner two
At last one pays the penalty-
The woman-woman always do!”
-From the Coquette, and After (Triolets)
Oh! Poor Tess! What a story your was! I will not hint about the story, everyone knows that. It’s me who is 130 years late. My fault, but I will tip my hat with a broad smile and will thank Mr. Hardy for taking me back. I must say, everything was seraphic for me in this book. I took pleasure in language. That aroma of the village! That predicament of a young girl! My soul was fulfilled. I sometimes behave like this when I overplay with my feelings, but be assured I am not trying to gild the lily. The book is already beautiful. So beautiful indeed!
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