the other lost for months in monsoon.
One was old, one poor; both were hot.
The heat vaporised thought and order,
drained the will, obliterated reason.
I settled, 20 and morose, in a town
built by a patricidal emperor
whose fratricidal son imprisoned him,
for eight years, with a view of the tomb
he built for his wife, to remember her.
I was over conscious of my rhyme,
and of the houses, three, inside my head.
In the streets, death, in saffron or green,
rode a cycle rickshaw slung
with megaphones. On the kitchen step
a chili plant grew dusty in the wind.
In that climate nothing survived the sun
or a pickaxe, not even a stone dome
that withstood 400 years of voices
raised in prayer and argument. The train
pulled in each day at an empty platform
where a tea stall that served passers-
by became a famous fire shrine.
I made a change: I travelled west
in time to see a century end
and begin. I don’t recall the summer
of 2001. Did it exist?
There would have been sun and rain.
I was there, I don’t remember
a time before autumn of that year.
Now 45, my hair gone sparse,
I’m a poet of small buildings:
the brownstone, the townhouse, the cold water
walkup, the tenement of two or three floors.
I cherish the short ones still standing.
I recognise each cornice and sill,
the sky’s familiar cast, the window
I spend my day walking to and from,
as if I were a baffled Moghul in his cell.
I call the days by their Hindu
names and myself by my Christian one.
The Atlantic’s stately breakers mine
the shore for kelp, mussels, bits of glass.
They move in measured iambs, tidy
as the towns that rise from sign to neon sign.
Night rubs its feet. A mouse deer starts across
the grass. The sky drains to a distant eddy.
Badshah, I say to no one there.
I hear a koel in the call of a barn owl.
All things combine and recombine,
the sky streams in ribbons of color.
I’m my father and my son grown old.
Everything that lives, lives on.
English
Sitanshu Yashashchandra (b. 1941)
Solar
Sweet smelling rays shoot out from
that new-risen orange, the sun;
the neem, buried in the night,
a burst of flashing green;
and roots live coals that spark
off blazing birds.
So long now
Since
I looked
at you with
desire.
From here that dangling branch
is a bird winging through the wide sky.
It’s chaitra, and rising gum drips from tree-trunks.
I seal my letter with this fresh and dripping gum.
I wrap up vaishakh in yellow cloth
and send the packet, look!—to you.
I am no scribbler of verses but a walker,
do you see, of these straight paths.
Translated from the Gujarati by Suguna Ramanathan and Rita Kothari
Susmita Bhattacharya (b. 1947)
Five Acts
School. See her run,
plaits swinging, Act I.
Home. Frock’s gone
for Act II. Sari’s on.
Marriage, Act III,
viz.: gold dowry.
Act IV’s begun
(with luck) with a son.
Guru enters, Act V:
soul to stay alive.
With a futile sigh
the Curtain, from on high.
Translated from the Bangla by Joe Winter
Keki Daruwalla (b. 1937)
Map-maker
Perhaps I’ll wake up on some alien shore
In the shimmer of an aluminium dawn,
to find the sea talking to itself
and rummaging among the lines I’ve drawn;
looking for something, a voyager perhaps,
gnarled as a thorn tree in whose loving hands,
these map lines of mine, somnambulant,
will wake and pulse and turn to shoreline, sand.
The spyglass will alight on features I’ve forecast—
cape, promontory—he’ll feel he’s been here,
that voyaging unlocks the doorways of the past.
And deep in the night, in the clarity of dream,
The seafarer will garner his rewards,
raking in his islands like pebbles from a stream.
2
Does the world need maps, where sign and symbol,
standing as proxies, get worked into scrolls?
You see them, mountain chains with raingods in their armpits
and glaciers locked like glass-slivers in their folds.
Desert, scrub, pasture—do they need shading?
They’re all there for the eye to apprehend.
A family of cactus and camelthorn tells you
where one begins and the other ends.
These questions confound me, I’d rather paint
for a while—a ship on the skyline,
or cloud-shadow moving like a spreading stain.
Yet they live, pencil strokes that speak for rain
and thunder; and die—maplines ghosting round
a cycloned island that has gone under.
3
Forget markings, forget landfall and sea.
Go easy Man, I tell myself; breathe.
Gulls will mark the estuary for you,
bubbles will indicate where the swamps seethe.
Map the wrinkles on the ageing skin of love.
Forget Eastings, Northings—they stand for order.
Cry, if you must, over that locust line
flayed open into a barbarised border.
Mark a poem that hasn’t broken forth, map the undefined,
the swamp within, the hedge between love and hate.
Forget the coastal casuarinas line.
Reefs one can handle. It’s lust that seeks
out its quarry that one cannot map, nor that
heaving salt of desire that floods the creeks.
4
If you map the future, while a millennium
moves on its hinges, you may find
the present turned into an anachronism.
This too is important—what is yours and mine,
The silk of these shared moments. But having stuck
to love and poetry, heeding the voice of reason;
and experiencing the different textures of
a season of love and love’s eternal season,
I put a clamp on yearning, shun latitudes, renounce form.
And turn my eye to the far kingdom
of bloodless Kalinga battling with a storm.
Dampen your fires, turn from lighthouse, spire, steeple.
Forget maps and voyaging, study instead
the parched earth horoscope of a brown people.
English
Lal Ded (1330-1384)
From I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded
What the books taught me, I’ve practised.
What they didn’t teach me, I’ve taught myself.
I’ve gone into the forest and wrestled with the lion.
I didn’t get this far by teaching one thing and doing another.
Translated from the Kashmiri by Ranjit Hoskote
Pravin Gadhvi (b. 1951)
Shadow
‘O Wood Cutter
Cut my Shado
w’*
Whether I turn Hindu
Buddhist
or Muslim
I can’t cleave this shadow.
Gone is the faeces pot
and the broom
but this shadow
does not depart.
Whether I change
name
work
address
or ilk
this shadow does not leave.
Whether I change
language
dress
or history
this shadow does not crumble.
Whether I compose a smruti
draft the Constitution
enact laws
or become a vote bank
this shadow can never be erased.
‘O Wood Cutter
Cut my Shadow.’
Translated from the Gujarati by Pradip N. Khandwalla
Mrinal Pande (b. 1946)
Two Women Knitting
Rama said
Rama said to Uma
Oh my,
How time passes.
Ah me, says Uma
and both fall silent.
The two women cast on stitches
Skip stitches, slip the skipped stitches over,
Knit over purl,
Purl over knit.
After many intricate loops and cables
Their dark secrets still lie locked within
They have thrown the keys to their jewel casques in the lake.
Put the keys in, and the locks will bleed real blood.
Two women are knitting
Clicking steel against steel
Passers-by look up amazed at the sparks that fly.
Loneliness comes at every other row in their patterns
Though they have worn each others’ saris
And bathed each others’ slippery infants
Even though at this very moment their husbands
Lie asleep in the rooms upstairs
Shaking them in their dreams.
Translated from the Hindi by the poet and Arlene Zide
Anon, Rajputana Folk Song
A Child-Husband
I was so loved by my mother,
She married me to little Juvarmal.
While I grind, he is in my lap;
While I cook, he is in my lap;
When I go to fetch water, Juvarmal holds my finger, (as he walks
beside me).
In my hand I have the sickle, on my shoulder the rake,
On my head I have Juvarmal’s cradle.
The path is winding, and there is a green peepul tree;
I climb up it, and hang up the cradle of Juvarmal.
With the sickle in my hand I began to cut,
Juvarmal, who was sleeping in the cradle, cried.
O passer-by, on your way,
Please give a swing to Juvarmal, the child,
‘Is he your brother or nephew? what is he?
Or is Juvarmal your child?’
‘He is the son of my mother-in-law, and brother of my sister-in-law,
The child Juvarmal is my husband.’
Translated from the Rajasthani by Winifred Bryce
Gieve Patel (b. 1940)
The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel, He Being Neither Muslim Nor Hindu in India
To be no part of this hate is deprivation.
Never could I claim a circumcised butcher
Mangled a child out of my arms, never rave
At the milk-bibing, grass-guzzling hypocrite
Who pulled off my mother’s voluminous
Robes and sliced away at her dugs.
Planets focus their fires
Into a worm of destruction
Edging along the continent. Bodies
Turn ashen and shrivel. I
Only burn my tail.
English
Gagan Gill (b. 1959)
The Girl’s Desire Moves among Her Bangles
The girl’s desire moves among her bangles
They should break first on his bed
Then on the threshold of his house.
But why on the threshold?
Because a woman sits grieving inside the girl
A woman who’s a widow
No, not really one
But a woman who’ll surely become
A widow.
The girl’s fear throbs in her veins
And moves across her bangles
The girl’s desire throbs in her bangles
And they throb with her sorrow.
Sorrow?
Where’s this girl’s man?
The man who’s in her mourning veins
Who fills her bangles with desire?
Her man lies caught
In someone else’s body
Someone else’s dream, someone else’s sorrow
Someone else’s tears
Each one of his sorrows, dreams, tears
Lies beyond the girl’s mourning grasp.
But the girl’s still a girl
The same primitive innocence in her
Fills her with madness, a deathwish
For which she will always punish the man
In the days to come.
When she will smash her bangles
On the threshold of his house . . .
Translated from the Hindi by Mrinal Pande and Arlene Zide
Ali Sardar Jafri (1912-2000)
A Poem
Darkness,
Wearing the robe
Of man’s blood,
Offers the mirage of hope
To those who cannot see.
Translated from the Urdu by Baidar Bakht and Kathleen Grant Jaeger
Valmiki (c. 600 BCE-250 CE)
From the Ramayana, Book VI, Canto CXVII
Sita’s Disgrace
He saw her trembling by his side,
And looked upon her face and cried:
‘Lady, at length my task is done,
And thou, the prize of war, art won.
This arm my glory has retrieved,
And all that man might do achieved;
The insulting foe in battle slain
And cleared mine honour from its stain.
This day has made my name renowned
And with success my labour crowned.
Lord of myself, the oath I swore
Is binding on my soul no more.
If from my home my queen was reft,
This arm has well avenged the theft,
And in the field has wiped away
The blot that on mine honour lay,
The bridge that spans the foaming flood,
The city red with giants’ blood.
The hosts of King Sugriva led
Who wisely counselled, fought and bled;
Vibhishan’s love, our guide and stay—
All these are crowned with fruit today.
But, lady, ‘twas not love for thee
That led mine army o’er the sea.
‘Twas not for thee our blood was shed,
Or Lanka filled with giant dead.
No fond affection for my wife
Inspired me in the hour of strife.
I battled to avenge the cause
Of honour and insulted laws.
My love is fled, for on thy fame
Lies the dark blot of sin and shame;
And thou art hateful as the light
That flashes on the injured sight.
The world is all before thee: flee:
Go where thou wilt, but not with me.
How should my home receive again
A mistress soiled with deathless stain?
How should I brook the foul disgrace,
Scorned by my friends and all my race?
For Ravan bore thee through the sky,
And fixed on thine his evil eye.
About thy waist his arms he threw,
Close to his breast his captive drew,
And kept thee, vassal of his power,
An inmate of his ladies’ bower.’
Canto CXVIII
Sita’s Reply
Struck down with overwhelming shame
She shrank within her trembling frame.
Each word of Rama’s like a dart
Had pierced the lady to the heart;
And from her sweet eyes unrestrained
The torrent of her sorrows rained.
Her weeping eyes at length she dried,
And thus mid choking sobs replied:
‘Canst thou, a high-born prince, dismiss
A high-born dame with speech like this?
Such words befit the meanest hind,
Not princely birth and generous mind.
By all my virtuous life I swear
I am not what thy words declare.
If some are faultless, wilt thou find
No love and truth in womankind?
Doubt others if thou wilt, but own
The truth which all my life has shown.
If, when the giant seized his prey,
Within his hated arms I lay,
And felt the grasp I dreaded, blame
Fate and the robber, not thy dame.
What could a helpless woman do?
My heart was mine and still was true.
Why when Hanuman sent by thee
Sought Lanka’s town across the sea,
Couldst thou not give, O lord of men,
Thy sentence of rejection then?
Then in the presence of the chief
Death, ready death, had brought relief,
Nor had I nursed in woe and pain
This lingering life, alas in vain.
Then hadst thou shunned the fruitless strife
Nor jeopardied thy noble life,
But spared thy friends and bold allies
Their vain and weary enterprise.
Is all forgotten, all? my birth,
Named Janak’s child, from fostering earth?
That day of triumph when a maid
My trembling hand in thine I laid?
My meek obedience to thy will,
My faithful love through joy and ill,
That never failed in duty’s call—
O King, is all forgotten, all?’
To Lakshman then she turned and spoke,
While sobs and sighs her utterance broke:
‘Sumitra’s son, a pile prepare
My refuge in my dark despair.
I will not live to bear this weight
Of shame, forlorn and desolate.
The kindled fire my woes shall end
And be my best and truest friend.’
His mournful eyes the hero raised
And wistfully on Rama gazed,
In whose stern look no ruth was seen,
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