TWO POEMS - SHAKTIPADA BRAHMACHARI



(TRANSLATION BY ARJUN CHOUDHURI)




MANASA MANGAL

OR


THE LAY OF MANASA


Seven bedecked boats wandering, endless waters everywhere
In Sravan incessant drones this lay of Manasa
and clumps of pullulating reeds rearing snakelike hoods
Rags to cover oneself in and the agony of Behula
While whistling breezes waft home a benighted evensong
The daughter of Sa’ha hastens on her eternal voyage

Far it is from Nichhani to home in the city of Champaka
Back in the homestead hangs a seven-tiered shika
At night by the light of an improvised oil lamp,
The old woman blinded bewails the passing of Lakha.
My son the fisherman this night fares in the waters
Keep him unscathed, Manasa, O let him prosper.

The Sravani breezes from the southern quarters
Bear hence the uterine odours of the waters
Even now does the twice-born bard Bansidass this strain sing
Not hither, not hither, it is another dour lake...yet to be seen.....
In the entrancing gloom of the dim evening hour,
Called up by the pull of the unknown beyond,
The daughter of Sa’ha hastens on her eternal voyage


UDBASTUR DIARY

OR

PAGES FROM THE DIARY OF AN EXILE



1.

He who has seized my homestead, has dispelled all my fear
The sky on its breast the imprint of my name does bear.
No more doubts, for I will wage a war to end all wars
My mekhlaa-clad sister has gifted me a single tambul.
I, for now, have learnt my lessons
Devoid of all language, in an academy of affection.
Bangla is my mother-tongue, the world is my shelter
For me, Prafulla and Bhrigu are each a blood brother.


2.

Ten brothers, each a champaka blossom
A single sister among them like a parul bloom
They tore out their hearts to inscribe
“This, the Ishan quarter, rejoices, weeps
In what language, listen, and know”

You cannot hear it. And these conspirators thrive as yet
Come hither and listen to this tumultuous roar
Rising from three hundred thousand souls
“Bangla is my mother-tongue, Ishan-Bangla my mother”

THE GRASS THAT GROWS BENEATH MY FEET - CONCEALMENT – FOR BARDS

In my room
I always secure that place
where many lost hairs lie
streaming away senselessly
seeing able sights,
to strike and to strike more

and more fear into eyes,
sounding as serpents which,
sloughing their skins
bite their own burgeoning bodies
in closeted confusion.

In my room,
I build my own bonds
to break them, bushel them
and bind my stranger limbs
if limbs you can label them at all.
And I wait for one winding stairway
to open up in my walls - to escape

into eternity, forever.

In my room,
I sing all sailors’ sirens’ songs
in bits and bits and pieces

from pottery shards shaded

beneath the successful earth
reminding me of an ontogeny –

There was once an ounce of omniscience
lurking in these now leaking, luckless lands.
In my room, there is eternity

clad in ennobling ennui.

In my heart,
there is a pace that I have plastered
onto my poor life of loneliness
ruled over by a wondrous worldly wisdom.

I walk from wall to wall
wafting my wasted senses in hope,
expecting my eternally shelved stairway

to grow as the grass beneath my feet grows,

in the silentest, most significant

manner of manifestation.

A VERY BLUE EYE

There is something called an eye...indeed there is, and.....

An Eye must always be BLUE....not black, because then it will see only the night and its taciturn beauties of water shining, darkened, dampened earth and leaves floating like carcasses on a bloodless stream....bloodied by a presence that no longer is one, actually....

not brown, because there is too much of raw earthiness in that....too much of pain, too much sorrow-bearing quite unlike bearing-a-child...and too much of the seen, the manifest bides its time in it...waiting only for the day in the night and the night in the day's raw light.

not red.....because then one would be an icon in a catacomb....where the Saviour of Palestine and the Messiah of Rome is portrayed as a lamb awash in its own blood....red is when you see the penultimate thrust of Time is betrayed in between the climax and the strength. Red is fire doused by a familiar-to-the-eye coloured amphora of wine-coloured sand.

Time is the all-powerful mendicant who begs his way into the cycle we imagine we create and then leaves us destitute with just a closely calculated gust of breeze that the arms of Time conjure-whip-up.

And not even green, not because there is envy in the heart of the neighbour....or the lover who sweeps your lips with a sweep of his or her lips...acting together in unison as the ubiquitous hands at a desk full of work leftover....as those of Sankhini Bhattacharjee born of the Seed of the confused planet, Shukra....or those of Krishnashish Chandra who cannot decide whether he should say to that virtual Man what he wants to say in appreciating that Poet's poesy.

and not even anything else....only BLUE...because the sky is not blue. It only appears to be blue. We, you and I see that the sky is blue. But then a man and a woman and a man in a Kaal Boishaakhi in the heart of Bangla will see the dark, dank heart of the sky which is not blue.

A traveller in an oasis in the desert at evening-song-sung-sadly-away-from-home will see the sky as red as fire that is far away, too far away to be stolen and then await punishment for stealing it, all the while one's liver and intestines shaking.

And even brown sometimes...when the sun is no longer interested in warming the earth. And green as green can be when we imagine lost sea routes in the sky....all said and done, the sky is not blue....nothing is....not even the ocean....nor the flowing rivers of Galatea....and Thetis.

All eyes therefore need to be BLUE.

"The river flowed both ways. The current moved from north to south, but the wind usually came from the south, rippling the bronze green water in the opposite direction. This apparently impossible contradiction made apparent and possible, still fascinated Morag, even after years of river watching."

The Diviners - Margaret Laurence

AT THE ROUNDED HALLOWS – JULY 20, 2007

Red rain in the drowning day
seeks cold pleasure
in driving hearts to a coarse death.

Rain of seasonal turbulences
unreasonable,

wafting across heart-wide oceanic regimes
vast, very silent,

and with cloud-messengers
bearing to many homes
a deathly wreath of longing
and of knowing.

Red-as-can-be rain,
beloved of waters,
of the earth and of the heart,

and a sum of seized songs
of surrendered souls,

red, so-red rain.

A crafted song here for the rain that seeps through most senses –

and sweeps through the valley of the heart –

as that river we adored loved asked for

and lost, forever.

Those who have watched rivers flow across their lives will realise how vivid a picture it is - watching a river, day in, day out, each minute of one's life passing in drops and gulps of air, of rising blood in, a languid love for and ever-present-silently-creeping-about hatred of, an unnatural growth....and all the while waiting for some strange thing that would rise or fall down, swoop down upon oneself, to end that sempiternal flow.

Apprehensive. Fearful. Yet waiting, ceaselessly, endlessly. For nothing in particular. But still waiting.

Thus have I watched my river grow with me.

It may have been here, for all I know; millenia before our people came to settle on this two-bit earth so beautifully wrought with fertile valleys and strangely infertile, apparently cursed spots of land where, as that leering Naidu from the O.N.G.C. office tells me, spurts of liquid wealth lie in wait, biding their time, cleverly straining to gush out. 'It only needs a little prodding', Leering Naidu would add, with a loud guffaw and a meaningful wink.

But do rivers actually survive for that long a period of time – I doubt it in spite of myself. Do they live in peace when there is that awful tread of homelessness upon their banks? I wonder, could my river have resisted all that and survived?

My meek river. My cowed down, mulled-waters-flowing-in-sorrow river. I wonder - what secrets of ancestry and trysts does it hide in its murky waters straining against the brightly birling sun that crosses our tiny earth each day, and wanders below it, sogaa-like each night.

But it was here, a huge body of water, a cause of sorrow for the valley's peoples who lived, farmed and prospered on its banks, at least a few centuries ago, barely a millenium, I know this from my readings of the ancient sagas; those kathas and gathas that have been left to our people by our long-fled forefathers who could not bear the confusion and the doubt engendered by each roving ripple on the chaotic surfaces of the river. And even now, this mysterious river of mangled history continues to grow.

The charanas and the kaviyals who sang of the river's might in the days of yore tell us that it had been a mighty river, as wide and huge as the holy Ganga herself. They tell us the great tale of the river's origin - how the great God Vishnu, in his incarnation as the Cosmic Boar, or Varaha, had once caressed the Earth goddess Medini with his tusks when he had made love to her. One of those cosmic dentures had pierced the poor paramour of the great God and had created an obvious rent in her delicate bosom. Our river was born of that awesome penetration. Varaha-vaktra - they called it; Born from the Visage of the Boar, literally.

Over the many ages that had supposedly passed after that great cosmic event, the riv er had come to be known as Varavaktra, Boroboktro, Borobokro and then had passed into the domain of the recent, the contemporary, the best of the lot and the worst of the ages.

It is known as Barabak now, the vestiges of the Vishnu-Medini-name long since fled into oblivion.

This present name, Barabak, simply means “the river which has many a big twist”.