Chapter 81 - Brighton Beach

Sagara Prana TaL MaL La

Not many are aware of Savarkar’s renown as a poet and composer. I certainly wasn’t. But he has many poems and compositions, which all seem to be in Marathi.

Many of them were composed in times of real distress, with raw emotion. Like the famous Saagara Praana Tal Mal La. Here’s a version sung by siblings Hridaynath and Lata Mangeshkar:

Savarkar composed this song at Brighton Beach. He was at the Brighton seaside for a rest-cure, because he had pretty severe bronchitis. (Aside: As someone who suffered through this sort of issue myself, it occurs to me now that both Savarkar and Ramanujam suffered ill health in England, not due to the cold as was commonly said, but due to the severe pollution of air and water in that era.)

When he was by the beach (on 10 December 1909…. which seems like a pretty bad time to be by the beach in England?), he felt boxed in by all the happenings of the past year — His brother’s sentencing to Kalapani, Dhingra’s act and subsequent hanging, his brother, wife and sister-in-law struggling to make ends meet, and the dragnet closing around him himself. He wished the ocean, that connected him, his brother in the Andamans and his homeland, would take them all back home.

Not long before, there was an attempt on Lord Minto’s life, and his brother Narayanrao was implicated, though he hadn’t been involved. His sister-in-law broke down from seeing him arrested and wrote to Vinayak. He wrote back a poem called Saantvana (Consolation). You can read it here. I’m surprised there isn’t a song of this.

Now, these are pivotal moments in Savarkar’s life, and any story about this era of his life must have them. But how does one incorporate that in a novel?

In a movie, you can lapse into a montage while a song plays, but in a novel, if there is poetry, you’re taking the reader’s attention away from the story and into something new. Further, it’s not my poetry, and it isn’t even in English originally. So, is it even right of me to put in the whole thing?

So what I did was to incorporate the thoughts in the poetry in words, and let the setting and emotion do the rest. I certainly have tried to do justice to this, but I strongly doubt I have. You be the judge.

Brighton Beach

Brighton in November still carried the ghost of summer, though winter was waiting in the wings. The air along the promenade had a sharper edge, the kind that slipped under collars and made the skin of one’s hands feel brittle. The sea glinted a dark, choppy blue under a restless sky, and the wind came in fits, sometimes barely a breath, sometimes a sudden slap that sent gulls shrieking inland. Along King’s Road, the grand hotels stood like watchful sentries—The Metropole, The Grand—their red brick walls weathered but proud, their windows catching what little sunlight the afternoon offered.

The beach below was a broad, slanting bank of pebbles, damp and dark near the water, where the tide dragged long fingers of seaweed back and forth. The Palace Pier stretched out into the sea on its iron stilts, a delicate skeleton against the waves, the faint strains of a brass band still audible if the wind blew just right. A few children scattered pebbles at the water’s edge, their mothers seated stiffly in deckchairs, shawls gathered tight at the throat, as if unsure whether to admit that summer was gone.

Further up the promenade, where the iron railings curved in a gentle scroll, Tatyarao sat alone in a dark serge coat. He had chosen a striped deckchair that faced the sea, not the town, his back to the bustle of tea rooms and boarding houses that lined the esplanade. His posture was too straight for comfort, as though he’d forgotten how to sit idly. A book rested open on his lap, its pages fluttering in the breeze, but his eyes were rarely on it.

To the casual eye, he was a man resting, as the doctor had ordered, by the seaside. But Brighton, with its crumbling Regency façades and its stubborn, noisy pier, seemed to hold its breath around him—as if it too were waiting for whatever he was waiting for.

He pulled out the letter in his pocket and read it for what seemed like the thousandth time, but the days of rest had blunted the pain.