mybookjournal

I always wanted to read a book by Rabhindranath Tagore but as I am not much in to poetry yet, so I had to pick one of his prose for starters and this was the book that caught my attention. The summary looked very simple I almost wondered what was hidden in this 300 pages book but then I got to know what a spellbinding emotional saga it was which mesmerized me immensely. No, this is not an exaggeration just because it was written by a famous personality but really it was something deep and touching. The way Tagore ji has constructed the story and has explained each character's emotional trauma that- it was very hard to blame anyone in certain situations…apart from human emotions of course which is always fluctuating and never constant!

Mahendra – apple of his mother’s eye is a ruler of his house, who at the very beginning rejects a very intelligent girl Binodini only to get attracted to innocent Ashalata and marry her who was actually his friend Bihari’s would-be-wife. Then when poor Binodini is widowed and enters Mahendra’s life the second time his life becomes a turmoil from there on!

Mahendra getting attracted to Binodini even after he was married was not right I agree but somehow I felt it was all Asha’s doing who initially insisted Mahendra to befriend Binodini just because she was her "chokher bali" but blaming innocent Asha is also not correct because poor soul was unaware of human emotions which has no boundaries! Then again should we blame loner Binodini? No at least not to some extent. Being widowed immediately after marriage having not found any love from even a single soul she was hungry for it and she also had bitterness towards Mahendra and Bihari who had once rejected her which made her furious when ever she thought about it and she, so wanted to prove all of them how much worth she was compared to Asha. But all characters at one point of time entirely forgot to draw a line between their feelings and relationship and so things went out of hand so much so that it could not be controlled by anyone except for time.

All things considered I felt Asha was one of the wonderful and strong character in this novel and not Binodini! Reason being, it is always easy to get hold of anyone or anything by acting mean but it is difficult to stay put where your roots are till people realize who you really are. I only wished Asha to be a bit apathetic towards Mahendera in the end but may be she was not born that way!

my book journal