Tagore, the most celebrated tourist' in Shillong

SHILLONG: "Moter upor Shillong Bhalo, jai na baluk ninduke (Overall Shillong is good, no matter what adversaries may say)." These were the last lines that Rabindranath Tagore had penned down in his poem Shillonger Chithi' (The Letter from Shillong).
The eternal tourist that he was, the bard wrote: "Gormi jokhon tutlo na aar pakhaar haowae, shorbote, thanda hote doure elum Shillong namok porbote (When the heat of summer could not be met even with fans and soft drinks, I rushed to the hills of Shillong!"
Besides Swami Vivekananda and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Tagore was one of the most illustrious and celebrated tourists to visit Shillong during the British days an era when reaching this salubrious hill station was not an easy affair at all."Those days, the road was not good and there were no proper mode of communication. Tagore took one of the private vehicles from Guwahati to Shillong, called service bus' when he visited Shillong for the first time in 1919. Those two buses were called Rani' and Maharani' introduced by Ghulam Haider," says educationist Uma Purkayastha, who has carried out avid research on Tagore's tryst with Shillong. However, according to analysts, Tagore, who traversed Shillong from Guwahati, probably did it in some "private motor vehicle".
The poet, in his memoirs, described the zig-zag road to Shillong as "aka baka poth" with "dhudhare drishshoman jongol (eye-catching jungles on either sides of the road). He had also celebrated the salubrious odour emanating from the pine trees. The bard was vivid about his "meetings with unknown flowers" in the evergreen hills of the Khasi Hills. One of his magnum opus, "Shesher Kobita", has romantic descriptions about the pine spot'. The Nobel laureate had likened this land with the clean, pure, sparkling and sunlit Shillong after a torrential shower with one of the most memorable characters of one of his celebrated novels.