Gandhi

1

You are imprinted on memory
like almost nobody else,
the line drawing that you are,
your round bald head
mirrored in a way
by the rondures of your spectacles.
Later there was that slightly bent back
and the staff-leaning torso.
Naked, knee-down,
I think of your long strides
scissoring a continent
from the black walls of jails
to the white salt of Dandi.

2

I am not fond of big words like ‘epic’, Gandhi-
we Indians use such words so often and so loosely;
but your life was an epic, if ever there was one.
The uninspiring Gujarati in his western clothes,
the nondescript lawyer
who seemed to have walked out
of some small town grocery,
taking on  the white race
and the white racists in Africa,
taking on the sola topees
and the Sam Brownes
and that sharp accent, which
like a pair of garden shears
had clipped its way across half the world.
This isn’t a chronicle
or I’d have gone on and on..
All I wish to say is
I’d rather read you than Homer,
the exploits of that butchering Achilles,
or that cuckold Menelaus
or that daughter-killer, Agamemnon
and his wife Clytemnestra,
murderess and adulteress rolled in one.
Yes, I’d rather read you than the Iliad.

3

That last year must have been terrible for you,
the joy and glory turning to ash in your mouth,
and that tide of blood which darkened many rivers,
though it left your sea at Porbander rather clean.

You walked into flame and arson
and crowds that wielded sharpened steel,
the rim of their eyeballs aflame with hatred.
Sitting comfortably on the sidelines
we thought your cry for peace
was turning into a lightning conductor for war,
and that your plea for ahimsa
was lighting up further fires.
We were wrong, as always-
those who opposed you could never be right.
You walked into the knives of Noakhali
and the blood-dripping lanes of Calcutta.
You knew you were circling
the jagged rim of a volcano,
you,  the one voluntary suicide
among a horde of homicides.
You kept inviting death, Mahatma,
till that Godse bullet found you.

Prayer on January 30

We won’t ask you for the impossible-
to close the hiatus between matter and nothing,
or  save the world from a meteor hit.
We don’t ask  for certitudes, though we know
that the land of nothing-certain is as bad as nothing.
We won’t ask you to un-burn
those whose huts and skin have caught fire;
though we may ask for renewal
where the ash has settled.

Let not the harsh winds of our times
blow love away.
Let not the harsh winds of our times
blow our perceptions  into a wall
behind which people are sharpening knives.
Let not the harsh dreams of our times
devour us, along with our appetites.
Lead us from this landscape of rubble
to water, but let the sound be real-
even traffic sounds like surf at night.
And let water remain water
and not turn to blood.

Lead us from chemical colours to vegetable dyes,
from plastic to cotton,
from fractions to wholeness.
Ephemeral as we are,
let the infinite touch us somewhere.
Detach us from the tree of time.
And those with no faith,
cast them on the waters of belief.

Let the repressed be brought into light,
the hidden into knowledge.
Let there be harmony
between those who speak of shadows
and those who speak of the sun.

Let the unlit be lit.
Steer the light our way.
Let the forest leaf.
Let the lyric leaf.