Does God Laugh ??

[Guest guest]

Does divinity have a sense of humour? Does God laugh? The story is

told about Rabindranath Tagore that when a Japanese admirer asked him

this question, Tagore laughed heartily. And then fell silent. His

questioner looked at him enquiringly. Again Tagore laughed, smoothed

his beard and said nothing.

The inquirer did not persist with his query but when his wife asked

him if he had got an answer, he said: "Yes, God laughs! The laughter

of what the Indians call ananda. Not loud, not too soft; for want of

a better word you could call it silence. Maybe the poet was just

amused by my question, but the depth of heart from which he laughed,

and in the following silence, I got my answer."

 

"You know," Tagore picked up the subject with him some days

later, "God laughs in Japanese. Perhaps that is why so few here

understand Him. And for the Japanese He laughs in Bengali. Then the

Japanese don't understand Him. In Germany he laughs in Tamil, and for

the Tamils He laughs in Russian. It doesn't make any sense to the

Russians when He insistently laughs in Swahili for them. Some of us

have heard Him laugh in silence but when the poet sings of that

silence, I know many, many people learned in the sciences who think

that that is rubbish: `How can you articulate anything in silence?'

In England He laughs in English and they don't understand him either!

Does God have a sense of humour?"

 

When this story was recounted to a Bengali fan of Tagore, she asked

very sanely, if one wasn't mixing up Tagore with something that

William Butler Yeats had said or in some part, Ezra Pound. Or maybe

even George Bernard Shaw. Especially the thing about England and the

English.

 

She only helped in enlarging the canvas and it became convenient to

add Keshavdas: "Keshava kah na jaya ka kahiye! Dekhat chhavi rachana

vichitra Hari, samajhau manahiman rahiye!" (no telling it, Keshava,

why tell? Look at the amazing picture of God's creation and keep to

yourself what you make of it!")

 

When you get to the still point of the turning world, as T.S. Eliot

put it, movement, words, numbers, forms don't matter. You speak

endearingly of zero, formlessness, stillness, silence. At a hundred,

we're all the same, as Shaw's Marchbanks tells Candida. Unless, like

the Queen Mother, you get to 101. In which case you're dying to be

silent, stilled; and you can scarcely wait, scarcely have to.

 

There is much mirth in meditating on whether or not Divinity laughs,

how God laughs, when, where; in Tagore and out of Tagore. But first a

word about where in Tagore, God's laughter has become extinct

 

 

(source Hindustan Times -city edition)