A Sweet Speechless Pain

Son!
Do not open the window on the north
it opens on to Auwa

How’d you know
that a sweet speechless pain
flows in from this direction

The pain may not be overwhelming,
But that makes no difference –
exactly like a stream of darkness that
seeping through the sewage channel,
fills an entire chamber with darkness, and with winter,
this pain, too
once it enters through the window,
never ceases to flow

This delicate, little pain
is an ancient memory
which along with the fine sand of the river Sookree,
has been blown far, far away
there are no traces even in the air
of that what happened

Detached from the event,
this fine pain
– not by remembering
but by ruminating –
fills me with a pride-stupor;
the pain, then, in effect
changes to joy,
and Time passes by –
smiling, rolling.

Sure, I am not addicted to this stupor
but what can one do of such a caprice
except shutting down that window
which opens on the north

I feel like
packing this pain up in a little salt bag
and put it with the food
of those who are about to cling on to
the train that leaves the Kharchee junction
to take them to places that promise living

If I couldn’t do that
I would
cloth-filter this pain,
and mix it with the kohl in a box
so that it sets in human eyes
and from there,
it be visible to all

This small pain is not
a small matter though !
thin like memory,
it is the dust of collective history of human pain
crushed by the decrees of kings –
an ancient dust
that does not sore a human eye
but makes my eyes moist
that’s why, I say,
Son, do not open this window
it opens on to Auwa.

Mourning

Folks, you embraced death, silently –
dying for poetry without saying a word
and staging dharna to kill yourself!

Your death would have been divine
had you died saying something –
your words, then, would have become
the final words of a Sati.

Folks, it was a pointless hesitation –
No one looks for figures of speech, alliteration
in poems written with death staring in face.
And democracy, too, was not
as far as you might have assumed
perhaps you could not see it –
there was a four centuries’ thick wall in between –
this much distance in time
is hardly an obstacle for poetry.

Now, I am mourning your unsaid words
Speak!
here is the chance, speak, if you wish to.
let my words be your voice.
Wake up!
Come out of your drowsiness,
rub your eyes and
get up
see how bright
the forest of poetry has now become.

What if we are not contemporaries
its the same fire that burns us.

Why do you all look around, aimlessly,
startled, when I call you?
Look at me!
Standing before the Kajleshwar Mahadev temple
on the bank of the river
it is I
calling you.

Don’t remind me that
being away from the lamp
is worse than death
for a moth whose life lies in flames –
but what could I do, then?
motionless like the layers of earth,
I must have been in the foetus, in a different carnation –
I was Far, far away from Auwa

You don’t know
those who did not reach Auwa, then
could never learn to live
they withered in the heat of their own little deaths.

I am not calling those
who dancing down the same old tracks
reached to a point
where land, ownership and poetry
all lose their flavor
and become tasteless

where wounds cry and injure the body
where losing all that he had –
self, past, memory –
a man with bed sores hardly resembles himself
he still remains a man
but all empty
like a receptacle
made of old papers –
to be filled with things;
the writing on its walls
soon fades and becomes unreadable
its truth is dissolved into the ink
and slowly dries up
what remains are the images
drawn over that

I ,a poet of today,
am addressing you –
who let the heat of your truth
be engraved in your bones.
Tell me,
clipped in your lips,
the word that you took with yourselves
was it ‘freedom’?

Return,
come back
the dharna is over
the air in Auwa is free of the smell of your blood
that banyan near the temple has also been swallowed by time
storms have blown away that sand
on which you sat
and stabbed the first dagger in your toe joint –
a stream of milk sprang from there
that the children to come never drank from

And so, who else could have offered light
to people living in darkness –
there was no spark left either!
All who lived after you
had a window in their frames –
rain would spray in, unhindered
and spoil the mirror of discretion
and then, it was all the same for them –
poets and grain parchers
goldsmiths and rishis

The northern wind pushed them southwards
and the southern wind threw them northwards
and it did not break them,
they remained intact –
how could they find the same glow in their souls?
In a herd of turbans
they were themselves nothing more than a turban –
they lived for the turbans on their heads
they never knew they only had turbans
no heads

All that has disappeared from Auwa
can be found inside me –
the whinnying of the Champavat horses
the sound of flesh burning on the collective pyre
the Chaukadiya alliteration of the Chaadhau meter
the thunder of Govind nagarchi’s trumpet
even that new name given by history – Mota Raja
all this is here
inside me
but what use you would make of them?

Let all this buried under the ashes of my inside
someone must come searching fire underneath it –
I see my salvation defined in his searching fingers.
Till then,
The memory-feeding poet in me
will keep incubating this one word – dharna,
will keep nurturing this eggless time of ours,
alone in the endless expanse of time
on the junction of sunlight and winter,
speculating:
if the small ones of peewit
trapped under a bell, hanging by an elephant’s trunk
could survive the massacre of Kurukshetra
my mourning may also survive
as a true monument
of your lost remembrance

Hoping for this to happen
I wait, silently, speechlessly
in the shelter of my memory

(Translation: Giriraj Kiradoo)