Art:  Samia Singh

Translated from Hindi by Bharatbhooshan Tiwari

Blacksmith at the City Square

The place where Vidisha’s Lohabazar begins

right there at the square the roads lead to all four directions

one towards Banskuli

one towards the station

towards busstop one

and one towards the cremation ground

That is where on the market day on Mondays

blacksmiths sit at one side

with sickles, axes, nutcrackers

and trowels

they keep pleading with every passerby

to buy something from them

hardly a handful of things get sold

by the evening

A little further ahead

there is a new billboard on display

at iron merchant

Mohsin Ali Fakhruddin’s shop

‘Buy Tata’s sickles for

sharp edge and sturdiness’

This is the same Tata sickle whose

design resembles the election symbol

of the left parties

The Tatas have the sickle

The hammer, the ear of corn and salt too

What does the blacksmith sitting on the square have

Besides consummate hunger

The Reaction

An invisible concentration camp is cast wide

after reaching home from the school

he has

thrown away at once his school bag with disdain

that heavy school bag

full of books and notebooks

At this moment

the boy is holding

the string tied to a kite

and he is out of the concentration camp

These days of Baisakh

mark the beginning of relief for him

now it is just him and the kites

which exist in the universe

Registering his intervention

against this torture

a Kankauwa stuck in the peepal branches

is fluttering incessantly

The Notion

The Black makes its way into the White

the moment this process ends

the White gets ruined

A few stars twinkle in the darkness above

the memory recalls traditional festivities

There exists a system behind everything

an absolute notion

A boy is steadily pouring

the tea into cups from the kettle

there is a steadiness in everything

that the nurse clad in white collar does

her balanced treatment with a wound

her patient eyes watching the dripping blood

Vigilant are the two mosquitoes sitting on the window

Before their next assault

With its own notion the sun sets somewhere

if someone is thirsty

His thirst recognizes its own water

Watching the black blended totally within

the White quietly mourns some place.

A poem from the Vidisha Diary Series

The households in which the shirts of an elder brother

are used by a younger one

shoes, chappals and trousers too

are put to use year after year in the same way

They come to Banskuli once in a while

to tighten the trousers at waist by an inch

Or to get darned the clothes that are torn at the knees

Normally if a father happens to exist in such houses

he wears a weather-beaten jacket

and a livid shirt made of flannel

which now can’t even afford buttons made of cotton

Ten steps further from

the darner’s shop, Rais Ahmed

sitting amid old musical instruments

keeps playing a melancholy tune on his clarinet

Is it a tune or

he is trying to darn the torn times of himself.