A Journal of Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya

The cremation ground too became sad
and thought that he would die of grief,
but the hillock smiled. The youngman
visited the cremation ground again and
lamented for the departed wife. However,
the same youngman appeared there after
a gap of three years and wept bitterly.
Now it was the death of his second wife
after five years of his first wife’s death.
After her cremation, he went home and
came back to the cremation ground again
in the evening and started rolling in the
ashes of his departed second wife. Then
the cremation ground’s faith in the
sublimity of that man’s love was shaken.
It appeared that this time he would die
because he could not bear the grief of
his second wife’s death. The hillock smiled
again. After a few years he again came
wailing to the cremation ground because
his third wife had died. While crying
he remembered the distinct virtue of his
three departed wives : the first was his
follower, the second was his companion
and the third was his guide. He was
crying that he could not live without that
guide. But the cremation ground
understood the myth of man’s sublime
love and the hillock perceptively remarked:
‘Driven by the desire to live, he bears
every separation ….. every agony because
— man loves himself the most’ . Such
a superb ending leads to the climax.
Though here it is shown that man is more
selfish and forgets the grief of departed
wife by marrying again and again yet the
message is about both man and woman
being capable of bearing the separation
because everybody loves oneself the most.
This story is short but full of aesthetics
and social reality simultaneously. The
translator Madhu B. Joshi has done a
commendable creative translation but
words like ‘dom’ may not be understood
by the non-Hindi readers. Second most
significant story is entitled ‘Jagadamba
Babu is coming to the village’ by Chitra
Mudgal. Here a social worker Jagdamba
Babu donates a hand- driven tricycle to
a poor handicapped boy, Lallona, whose
mother thinks that his future would be
bright but all of a sudden that tricycle
is taken back because in another function
Jagdamba Babu is to dole out tricycles
to other handicapped people but such
tricycles have not arrived at the place
so far. However, the story reaches the
climax when Jagdamba Babu’s men ask
Lallona’s mother to tell a lie to the society
: ‘If anyone asks….. say it was stolen.’
(P.95). This shows the cruel world of
political NGOs who talk more but do the
least social service. The translator Deepa
Agarwal has wrongly translated ‘cart’ and
‘vehicle’ for the hand-driven tricycle which
is used by the handicapped persons.
Similarly she has casually used a term
‘Newspaper people’, rather it should be
‘press persons’. Further she has used
dozens of Hindi words without their English
synonyms : ‘ghunghat,’ ‘ekadashi’, ‘khoya,’
‘tika’, ‘chachiya’, ‘pranam’, ‘tantrik’ ‘gauna’,
January-March 2012 :: 157