The grass is starved and thin;
by the gravel path
the European seasonal flowers
have lost their bloom and are withered.
A west wind blows,
a foreigner in Chaitra’s yard.
Reluctantly I wrap myself.
The water shivers in the pond with the paved surround;
the leaves of the water-lilies tremble;
the few red fish grow restless.
The lemon-grass is rampant
in the rockery.
From the leafage peeps a figure,
four-faced, in ochre stone.
On the far margin of flowing time it lives,
indifferent, untouched by seasons.
Art’s language it speaks,
which has no likeness to what the trees have to say.
The care that seeps from earth’s inner rooms
day and night to all branches and leaves –
that statue there stands outside the limits
of that vast kinship.
A long time ago man immured in it
his own secret speech
like a spirit-guarded hoard of buried treasure:
with nature it cannot communicate.
The clock strikes seven.
The scattered clouds have gone.
The sun climbs above the wall:
tree-shadows shorten.
Through the back gate
a girl enters the garden.
Tasselled plaits swing on her back;
in her hand is a slender bamboo stick.
She’s brought a pair of swans
and their young ones to feed.
The swans look grave,
aware of their responsibilities as a pair.
Even greater is the responsibility of the girl,
in whose young mother-mind love’s liquid throbs
to the demands of living creatures.
I’ve wished to preserve
this fragment of a morning.
So easily it came
and will so easily leave.
He who sent it
has paid for it already
from his own treasury of joy.
No. 13
A Baul busker walking along the street
came and stopped by your front door.
He sang, ‘Behold! The unfamiliar bird
comes flying into the cage!’
Yes, and seeing it, the silly mind thinks –
Aha! I’ve caught the uncatchable!
You were standing at the window
after your bath,
your damp hair cascading on your back.
The uncatchable was on the lids
of your far-away eyes,
in the loveliness of your rounded
bangled wrists.
You sent him alms.
He went away.
You didn’t know
it was you the song spoke about.
Like a melody you come and go
on the ektara’s string.
That instrument is your manifest form’s cage
swaying in the breeze of spring.
I roam, hugging it to my breast;
I colour it, pattern flowers on it,
just as I please.
When it sounds, then I forget its form:
its string vibrates into invisibility.
Then does the unfamiliar come out to play in the universe,
rippling right across the forest’s green,
merging with the dolonchampa’s fragrance.
You are the unfamiliar bird
dwelling in the cage of mating,
that cage with many embellishments,
where separation’s ache is eternal in bird-wings,
in flight’s postponement.
Bird without address,
flying love-wards to the horizon’s rim
where all visibles vanish.
No. 22
Right from the beginning he’s been hanging on to me,
that old chap, that antique of a bloke,
camouflaging himself by blending with me,
But today I’m letting him know
that we’re going to part, we are.
Along the bloodstreams of millions of forefathers
he has come, bearing the hunger
of so many ages, and so much thirst;
all those pains had churned many days and nights
in a long, continuous past;
with all that baggage he decided to colonise
this vessel of new-born life –
that ancient, that crafty beggar.
Ethereal messages come from upper worlds:
he fouls them up by the din he makes.
I arrange offerings on a ceremonial platter:
he reaches out his hand and grabs them himself.
Desires burn him,
wither him, day in, day out.
He smothers me with his decrepitude –
me, who am ageless.
Minute by minute he has squeezed pity out of me,
so that when death-throes grip him,
I’m really frightened, I am –
I, who am deathless.
So I’ve decided to part from him today.
Let him stay outside the door –
that old, starving wretch.
Let him beg and enjoy what scraps he gets.
Let him sit and patch his tattered wrap.
Let him live precariously on gleanings
in that little field, earth-ridge-bound,
between birth and death.
I shall sit at my window and watch him,
that long-distance traveller
who’s been travelling for so long
along the road-curves of many bodies and minds,
across the ferries of such various deaths.
I shall sit upstairs
and watch his different crazes,
the see-saws of his hopes and despairs,
the chiaroscuro of his mirths and sorrows.
I shall watch, as people watch a puppet-show;
I shall laugh to myself.
I’m free, I’m translucent, I’m independent;
I’m eternity’s light;
I’m the flowing joy of creation’s source;
a total pauper am I;
I own absolutely nothing that is walled in
by ego’s pride.
No. 27
Under the cascading stream
I place my little pitcher
and sit
all morning,
sari-end tucked into waist,
dangling my legs
on a mossy slippery stone.
In an instant the pitcher fills
and after that it just overflows.
Curling with foam, the water falls, –
nothing to do, no hurry at all, –
the flowing water has its holiday play
in the light of the sun
and my own play leaps with it
from my brimming mind.
The green-forest-enamelled valley’s
cup of blue sky.
Bubbling over its mountain-bordered rim,
falls the murmuring sound.
In their dawn sleep
the village girls hear its call.
The water’s sound
crosses the violet-tinted forest’s bounds
and descends to where the tribal people come
for their market day,
leaving the tracks of the Terai villages,
climbing the curves of the winding uphill path,
with the ting-a-ling-a-ling
of the bells of their bullocks
carrying packs of dry twigs on their backs.
Thus I while away
the day’s first part.
Red’s the colour
of the morning’s young sunshine;
then it grows white.
Herons fly over the mountains
towards the marshes.
A white kite flies alone
within the deep blue,
like a silent meditative verse
in the far-away mind
of the peak with its face upturned.
Around noon
they send me word from home.
They are cross with me and say,
‘Why are you late?’
I say nothing in reply.
Everyone knows
that to fill a pitcher it doesn’t take long.
Wasting time which overflows with no work –
who can explain to them the strange passion for that?
No. 29
Just one day among many days
had somehow got caught
in a picture, metre,
or song.
Time’s envoy had managed to keep it stranded
outside the path of traffic’s constant current.
In the image-immersion rituals of the epoch
many were the things that sped beyond the ghats.
No one knew when that one day got stuck
in a dry bend of the river.
In the Magh forests
so many mango blossoms budded,
so many fell down.
In Phalgun flowered the polash
and carpeted the ground.
Between the Chaitra sun and the full-blown mustard-field
in sky and earth
it was a contest between bards.
But no brush of any season
left its mark
on that day of mine that got stuck.
I was once right in the middle of that day.
The day was recumbent
amongst so many things,
all of which crowded round me, before me.
I saw them all
without taking it all in.
I loved,
but didn’t really know
how much.
So much was wasted,
absent-mindedly left
undrunk in the juice-cup.
That day, as I knew it then,
has changed its looks.
So much is dishevelled, so much is topsy-turvy;
details have vanished.
She who emerges from it all –
I see her today against the background of distance:
a new bride of those days.
Her body was slim
and her sari-end, peacock-neck-coloured,
reached her head just above the hair-coil.
I couldn’t make time
to tell her everything.
Much was said at random now and then,
but they were trivial things.
And soon the time was up.
Today her figure has re-appeared,
quietly stood
at the fence between shadow and light.
She seems to want to say something
and can’t.
How I long to go back to her side,
but there’s no way to return.
No. 31
I’m letting the neighbourhood club
have use of my ground-floor room.
For that, they’ve praised me in the local paper,
called a meeting, put a garland round my neck.
For eight years now
my home’s stood empty.
Now when I come back from work, I find
in a portion of that room
someone reading a newspaper,
his legs thrust on a table,
others playing cards,
others locked in some furious argument.
The enclosed air
gets stuffy with tobacco smoke;
ashtrays pile
with ash, matchsticks,
burnt-out cigarette ends.
With such turbid conversation’s din
day after day
in huge quantities
I fill the emptiness of my evenings.
Then after ten p.m. a stretch of time
like a meal’s left-overs piled on dirty plates
is vacated for me once more.
The noise of passing tram-cars invades the room
and at such times I sometimes listen to songs
on the gramophone –
the few records I have, the same
over and over again.
Today none of them are here.
They’ve all gone off to Howrah Station
to give an ovation
to someone who’s just brought
hand-clappings from across the seas
clipped to his own name.
I’ve turned off the lights.
What’s called ‘current times’ –
after many days
that current time, that herald of everyday
isn’t in my room this evening.
Rather, I sense a lingering pain
clinging to everything
from a touch that was air-dispersed,
a faint scent of hair
that was here eight years ago.
My ears are alert,
as if to receive a message.
The old empty seat
with its floral cover
seems to have someone’s news.
An old muchukunda tree
from my grandfather’s days
stands in front of the window
in the black night’s darkness.
In the scanty sky that there is
between this tree
and the house on the road’s other side
a star shines brilliantly.
I stand staring at it
and it begins to ache inside my chest.
How many evenings had seen that star reflected
in the flood-tide waters of our life together!
Amongst so many things
one tiny incident makes a special come-back.
That day I’d been too busy
to read the paper in the morning.
In the evening I’d at last sat down with it
in this very room,
by this window
and on this armchair.
She came ever so quietly behind me
and quickly snatched the paper from my hands.
We tried to grab it from each other
with bursts of loud laughter.
I recovered my plundered property,
cheekily once more sat down to read it.
Suddenly she turned off the light.
That defeat-acknowledging
darkness of mine that evening
envelops me totally today
even as her victorious arms,
loaded with silent, teasing, mischievous laughter,
had encircled me
in that light-turned-off seclusion.
Suddenly a wind
rustles the tree’s branches.
The window creaks.
The doorway curtain
flaps restlessly.
‘Love,’ I blurt out,
‘From death’s kingdom have you
come back to your very own home today
with your brown sari on?’
A breath brushes my body;
a strange voice speaks,
‘To whom can I return?’
I ask,
‘Can you not see me?’
I hear,
‘He whom I knew
most intimately on this earth,
that ever-youthful lover of mine
I no longer find
in this room.’
I ask, ‘Is he nowhere?’
Quietly she says,
‘He is precisely where
I am and nowhere else.’
An excited hubbub reaches me from the door.
They’ve come back
from Howrah Station.
No. 46
I was then seven years of age.
Through the dawn window I would spy
the upper lid of darkness lifting,
a soft light streaming out
like a newly opened kantalichampa flower.
Leaving my bed, I would rush into the garden
before the crow’s first cry,
lest I deprived myself
of the rising sun’s preliminary rites
among the trembling coconut branches.
Each day then was independent, was new.
The morning that came from the east’s golden ghat,
bathed in light,
a dot of red sandal on its forehead,
came to my life as a new guest,
smiled to me.
Not a trace of yesterday would there be on its body’s wrap.
Then I grew older
and work weighed me down.
The days jostled against one another,
losing the dignity that was unique to each.
One day’s thinking stretched itself to the next day.
One day’s job spread its mat on the next day to sit down.
Time, thus compacted, only expands,
never renews itself.
Age just increases without pause,
doesn’t return
from time to time to its eternal refrain,
thus to re-discover itself.
Today it’s time for me to make the old new.
I’ve sent for the medicine-man: he’ll rid me of the ghost.
For the wizard’s letter
every day I shall sit in this garden.
A new letter each day
at my window when I awake.
Morning will arrive
to get introduced to me;
will open its eyes, unblinking, in the sky
and ask me,
‘Who are you?’
What’s my name today
won’t be valid tomorrow.
The commander sees his army,
not the soldier;
sees his own needs,
not the truth;
doesn’t see each person’s
unique, creator-shaped form.
Thus have I seen the creation so far –
like an army of prisoners
bound in one chain of need.
And in that same chain
I have also bound myself.
Today I shall free myself.
Beyond the sea
I can see the new shore before me.
I won’t tangle it with
baggage brought from this shore.
I Won't Let You Go: Selected Poems Page 20