Twenty Years after Independence

Twenty years later
I’ve got back those eyes
that have shown me the wilderness
for the first time:
a dense green flood

that has drowned all the trees,
where every word of caution and warning
has averted danger
and turned into a green eye.

Twenty years later
I ask myself the question,
“How much endurance does one need
to become an animal?”
and move forward silently
without an answer,
because the climate now is such
that it’s almost dishonest
to chase after the little leaves
blowing about in the blood.

Already it’s afternoon,
there are padlocks on the doors
on every side,
a violent incident’s inscribed
in the language of the bullets
buried in the walls
and the shoes lying in the streets,
a cow has slopped its dung
on the map of India
flapping in the wind.

But this is not the time
to gauge a frightened people’s shame,
or even to ask
whether the country’s greatest misfortune
is the policeman or the saint.
This is not the time
to go back and put on the shoes
discarded in the streets—
twenty years later
and on this afternoon,
I pass like a thief
through the lifeless lanes
and ask myself the question,
“Is freedom merely the name
of three exhausted colors
dragged by a wheel,
or does it have some special
significance?”

And I move forward silently
without an answer.

Lying Beside that Woman

I felt for the first time
that nakedness
is a desperate measure
against going blind.

Lying beside that woman,
I felt that in the place
where candles and disgust
have proved to be useless,
and the shadows of melted words
have changed into the face
of some frightening animal,
my poems have survived
on a diet of darkness and mud and meat.

Bodies humping in bed
aren’t enough
to scour and rub out time
when we find ourselves face to face
with the broken pots in the kitchen,
and the night isn’t a road leading anywhere
as it carves up watermelons inside us
and our heads on the pillows
turn to stone.

Lying beside that woman,
I felt that home is made up
of a mockery of small conveniences,
a place where one isn’t allowed
to walk around in one’s shoes,
I felt that it’s grass,
the grass of green fear,
that forces me to think this way,
I felt the comfort of thinking
that at this very moment
my neighbors have had
all their teeth knocked out,
that the wanton lust of their limbs
has withered away
like a bunch of pea-pods
bitten by frost,
that their healthy eyes
have been devoured by the walls.

Lying beside that woman
(when the bells of the fire-engines
have suddenly fallen silent
before the extinguished houses),
I’ve felt that discovering a jungle
on the edge of the panting quicksands
isn’t a human habit
but simply our commonplace
helplessness,

that what’s inside me
is a cowardly brain
which keeps me safe
and inherits my buttons.

A Chant for Peace

I’ve smoothed out the crinkles in the newspapers
and now I draw a new line of darkness
across the map of the world,
on the plateau of my future
I drain my swamp of self-abasement.
My fear grazes on me.
My true being flowers
in the armpit of the hatred next door.
To prove that I’m unarmed
in the suicidal solitude of my brain
I’ve killed all three of Gandhi’s monkeys.
I fire the kiln of patriotism
and cast my cold muscles in foreign molds,
before the atomic bomb explodes
I boil its scheme in the cup of argument.
I’m protected by the caution of prostitutes
and the cruelty of dangerous times.
I distribute rock-candy
and the extract of oregano seeds
among pregnant women.
I send young men to kill themselves
in the Department of Labor,
then use a sheet of paper
to cut the hard rock of Five-Year Plans.
I teach old men pride in the past
and children the idiom of thick-skinned resistance.
Having escaped the bloodshot cries of vultures’ eyes
and the kinship of cold people,
the MacMahon Line now sleeps next to a corpse,
while I shine the world’s shoes
and its ambassadors of peace
with the polish of tradition.
I line my eyes with kohl
drawn from the walls of the womb
where culture makes its home.
I see that the treachery of right hands
has laid mine-fields across Asia.
In its four corners—north south east west—
Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Israel
and several other names
glisten like bloodstains.
But I’ve hung out my starving intestines in the wind
and I’m completely ethical
in enduring the putrefaction of my limbs.
I call the wolf my brother.
Foreign instigators of war
have repaired our freedom’s broken-down machine
by sticking a dove’s feather on it.
It has begun to circulate the air again.
I’m neither rope
nor armor
nor prosody,
I’ve been squeezed and crushed in the middle.
I’m shut tight on all four sides.
I know that these words can’t fabricate
either a chair or a crutch.
My rage is a rotten log
on the flooded river of public opinion.
Like a rattle-drum at a monkey-show
beaten rhythmically
by the beaded tassels of London and New York,
my life is an English figure of 8.

Poetry

She knows that countless faces
have been stripped naked
behind the facade of words—
that murder is no longer
a matter of people’s taste,
it has become a habit.
Born of a rustic’s boredom,
she moved to the city with a literate man.

As she passed through the ritual
of praying for conception
even before she became a full-blown woman,
she learnt that love is a search
in densely populated neighborhoods
for a home to rent.
Soaking continuously in the rain,
she learnt that every girl
becomes a highway hotel
after the third abortion—
and every poem
after the third reading.

No—it’s pointless now
to look for any meaning there,
to look for meanings
in the secret codes of crafted style
and the hogwash of diction.
But, yes, if possible,
say to the man passing at your elbow—
here, here’s your face,
it had fallen off
in the demonstration’s wake.

At this point in time that’s enough.

It was a long time ago
that a primal animality would scream
in a wilderness somewhere
and stun the whole city—

but now she understands
that poetry today
is merely the monologue, cut short,
of a man exploding in rage
at a sit-in strike.

To Be Honest with You

Orchards flutter in the wind
like pennants on split bamboo staves,
just as the names of the people killed
in the name of religion
flutter on the pages of history,
that’s all there is to say,
every road that leads to the bathing ghats
on the sacred river front
passes through the red-light district,
and we’re forced to stand like eye-witnesses
precisely in those places
where nothing’s left to happen,
indifferent for a while in our boredom,
only to be pulled out of the crowd again
after the return of miracles.
Between time and the people,
the question isn’t one
of measuring the level of noise,
but of the distance between the two
that’s protected even at this speed,
we think that most of the time
honesty escorts us
all the way to the edge of crime
and leaves us there,
the most valuable moment of a man
oppressed by habits and advertisements
is weighed against doubts,
there’s a secret exit in every faith
that leads straight to the outhouse,
and what an ugly mockery it is
of the morality that chooses to go
merely with the flow of opinions,
that our noses are placed on our faces
right under our eyes.

(Translated from the original Hindi by Vinay Dharwadker.)