Eerie Tagore and the Winter Parlour That Misplaced His Measures

A muted hush pools inside Tagore House, most thickly in the abandoned winter parlour, where Arun Prasanna Tagore, a Bengali mathematician and part-time music theorist, once carried his calculations into domestic twilight. Now the small ribbon of ink drifting across his score suggests an intention he could not bear to finish.

A Ribbon in the Mathematician’s Quiet Pursuit

Arun, born 1878 in Calcutta, learned harmonic ratios from his older sister Meera Tagore, whose chipped tuning block rests atop the stove.

His evenings unwound in deliberate sequence: one pot of chai cooling on the sill, rhythmic finger taps along the sitar’s frets, equations penciled beside melodic phrases. His order still haunts the parlour—ink bottles ranked by shade, rulers pressed flat between hymn books, calculations folded into envelopes addressed to no one. Even the worn cushion on his chair holds the faint dip of a man leaning forward, attentive to a connection only half perceived.

Where His Confidence Lost Its Line

Rumors murmured that Arun miscalculated a structural load for a small bridge designed as a favor for a merchant family—an error that did not collapse the span but sowed distrust. In the rear hallway, a chalkboard slate lies cracked near the wainscoting. Meera’s tuning block bears a new chip along its edge. A folded sheaf of correction notes hangs from the stair rail, smudged by hurried fingers. A page of interval ratios has fallen face-down, one corner singed by an overburned candle. These impressions lean toward a mind frayed by two callings, unable to balance either.

Only the spilled ribbon of ink across his hybrid score remains—part melody, part mathematics, wholly unfinished. Whatever halted Arun’s last attempt at harmony endures in these abandoned rooms.

Tagore House remains abandoned still.