Even Now

If you’re on a mountain
Put your foot on the wind’s back and come
If you’re on a riverbank far away
Become a piece of straw and ride the current
If you’re in an unknown world
Hold tight to the thread of your
Weeping and wakefulness and come

Whoever you are
Wherever you are
However you are
Come

If you have words
Nests are here to protect them
If you have silence
Distress is here to break it
If you have pain
Here’s a pillow for crying
A cot for sleeping.

Not like a soldier desperate
To seize the whole world in his fist
But if like Tulsidas you know the art
Of making a corpse a ferry
Then on the other side
Of this deep ferry-less river
A glowing path will bring you here

Here you’ll find
Your eyes filled
Not with pain or terror
But with your life’s first genuine thrill –
Though the green forest be ripped to shreds
And this pond cut back to its heart
At the threshold of the house
In which you were born
A brass lota full of water
Waits for you even now.

My Brother’s Wife

1

Gnawing a green mango, singing the season’s songs,
Staring at her hands drenched in dreams,
A girl one day
Is covered from head to toe
In a saree of silk
And is told what
It really means to be female.

Stories of fairies gamboling in mango groves,
Fear of ghosts in the toddy grove,
And becoming a fish and splashing in the pond –
All those comforting memories
Fall centiures back,
And naturally skulking
Like a tin of salt in the cellar,
She realizes that
This is her life’s stock in trade
And to circle around tethered
To a worm-eaten silk-cotton post
And to bear quietly
The leaking roof
The flaking plaster
The dilapidated well.

2

A twig from the holy banyan tree,
Vermilion paste on the twig,
Sacred grass and holy rice,
Lac bangles and the forehead dot,
Squeezing in her hands the end of her saree,
Bowing, her eyes are wet.
Lying helplessly on the cot
Brother Satyavan coughs and coughs ….
With each inhalation
The cage of his chest
Puffs out like a bellows.

Boring her third eye
Into an invisible point,
This is how my brother’s wife
Stops her heart from tearing
Apart like paper,
And she performs this ritual every year.

3

My brother’s wife wakes up with a start
Then breaks into tears –
In a dream she’d seen brother writhing,
Hair disheveled like a madman
Lips crackling like dry leaves
And on his dried-up, wrinkled face
A maze of tears

In her silk saree
The insects of time have cut a thousand holes
Her life rolls on in a cascade of memory-dust,
A reddish foam touches the fringe of her heart’s desire.

They say
That every evening
After lamplight
On a fig tree in the dark woods
A Satyavan begins banging his head.

What happens after that
Will cause you too to shudder,
So it’s best I still my tongue.

Mithila

….. so may the hero of the story forgive me
For having to write a screenplay about this place
Where pewits scream in the sky
Where ragged twenty-twenty-two-year-old men
Go from verandah to verandah
Spewing songs of Gopichand,
Where hunger renders us bodiless.

Pots dreaming on the potter’s wheel
Shiver from some unrecognized fear
And break into pieces,
A leaky bucket
Dives into the well
And nearing Shesha the snake
Flips over;

Where women sharing the bloodline of Sita
Still entrust their stories of luck and misfortune
To the latticed window, the domestic shrine, the hearth and the earth;
Into their souls I must enter like dense despair
And search for that primeval bond
Between tongue and blood.

How difficult it is to describe this fear
Where seventy kids in a hundred
Come out of the womb
With a packet of ganja on their backs
And a clay pipe in their hands

Where people rise up in the oil refinery’s smoke,
Or move like quadrupeds even at the age of twenty;
And based on the number of ponds and bamboo groves
How even more difficult has it become to say
That on the night of the last new moon
How many young widows disappeared along with their newborns.

You will have observed that man wandering
Carrying a dented aluminum lota
With broad stripes of sandalwood on his forehead
And blessings for the world on his lips
Who calls himself a descendant of Shiv Singh-
Great King of Mithila. In his eyes
Fish continuously writhe
Pierced by their own bones,
In his speech fall withered leaves,
On the threshold of his memory
Slither innumerable serpents.

Unending is this hero-less story
It has no historical eminence
It has no victory nor the joy of victory
It is the anguish of wandering from the path
So my eyes are not on some banner
Flapping in former grandeur
But on those footprints
Where every voyage begins.

(Translated from the Hindi by Robert A. Hueckstedt.)