The halo of Hampstead

My maiden visit to the United Kingdom happened a little more than three weeks ago, in a bizarrely beautiful ‘cold summer’ of chilly cherry blossoms, tulips, and a sun-kissed April sky. As we toured London, amidst all the palatial European architecture and delectable fish and chips, there is this inexplicable desire that kept nudging my Bengali soul – the desire to visit Hampstead where Rabindranath Tagore stayed for a few months in 1912, a year before he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 as the first non-European to do so, which also happens to be Asia’s first Nobel Prize. One afternoon, as we got out of the Natural History Museum in central London, it was an impulsive plan with my mother and a brother of mine, and even before we could realise it was already half past four, we were at the South Kensington tube station. A train on the Piccadilly Line led us to Leicester Square, where we changed to the Northern Line, and took another train to Hampstead.

Tagore arrived in England along with his eldest son Rathindranath Tagore and daughter-in-law Pratima Devi in 1912 to show painter and writer Sir William Rothenstein, who was also a dear friend, the English manuscript of his collection of poems, Gitanjali. Rothenstein had promised to request Irish poet WB Yeats to write an introduction for the collection. Rothenstein who lived in Oak Hill Park in Hampstead, had first arranged their stay in a hotel, and then got them shifted to the Hampstead villa. It is in the London tube that the English translation of the Gitanjali had been misplaced by Rathindranath Tagore, who apparently left the attaché containing the manuscript on a train seat. It was found at the lost property office of the London Underground two days later.

Hampstead is one of the poshest areas of London, forming the north-west part of the Borough of Camden, an abode of the rich and the famous. Out of the station, I quickly checked the Google Map on my phone as three of us would walk. ‘3 Villas on the Heath, Vale of Health, London NW3…,’ I muttered slowly, looking around. After walking for half a mile, past quaint 18th-century red-brick houses, modern cafés and flower shops, and an old church, we turned right into a narrow lane that read Hampstead Square NW3 on a wall. It’s a picturesque neighbourhood flanked by rows of trees and beautiful houses. After two more minutes of walking, we crossed the main road, and the map suddenly indicated left, and there was a slender road by the woods. Three of us were out of breath by now. Perplexed and sceptical, but still trusting the map direction, we kept walking for three more minutes along the woodland, our hearts throbbing. The Vale of Health enclave has a serene quietude of its own; it is literally surrounded by the heath and is on a solitary, private street accessed by a single road. Suddenly, at a distance, there it stood like a dream come true – the impeccable white Victorian villa that has retained its charming, gothic look with the arched greyish blue front door, roof gable, and large white period windows. The Blue Plaque put up by London County Council, a recognition scheme run by the English Heritage to honour notable people and organisations associated with particular buildings across London, reads – Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). The Indian poet stayed here in 1912. As we sat on the staircase and placed a scarlet rose we had plucked from a nearby tree on a concrete fence as our offering to the great poet, it drizzled for a minute, quenching the thirst of our pilgrimage.

On our way back to the station, the sky had started to turn murky, but a constellation of stars had formed inside our hearts. The three of us stared into the clouds and hummed the lines of the song the Bard of Bengal had composed during his stay in beautiful Hampstead – ‘Aaji joto tara tobo akaashe…’

Views expressed are personal