Gandhi was walking in the sun
that had survived Naokhali.
‘Come, have some rest.’
Gandhi turned back:
It was a shady tree.
‘You? It is not yet time for me to rest, ‘replied Gandhi.
The tree complained:
‘The world is in a hurry. I have grown old;
no more do I flower nor bear fruit :
even birds have abandoned me’.
`Don’t worry/Gandhi said,
‘You are waiting for the axe
and I, for the bullet.’
‘Don’t say that’, the tree was in agony,
‘Someone will need that shade.’
The memory of spring escaped the tree as a sigh.
‘Pray’, said Gandhi.
‘If you don’t stop, I
will have to walk with you’,
the tree now began to walk with Gandhi.
A wind blew. A bird flew to the tree.
‘See, I am in bloom again’,
the tree laughed with white flowers.
`You have started walking? Then
I can cease, ‘Gandhi’s blood
whispered as it gushed out,
like a prayer for every being.
‘See, my flowers are growing red’, cried out
the emancipated tree.
Three birds that had
dreamt of fruits
came flying from the East.
(Translated from Malayalam by the poet)
OLD WOMEN
Old women do not fly on magic wands
or make obscure prophecies
from ominous forests.
They just sit on vacant park benches
in the quiet evenings
calling doves by their names
charming them with grains of maize.
Or, trembling like waves
they stand in endless queues in
government hospitals
or settle like sterile clouds
in post offices awaiting mail
from their sons abroad,
long ago dead.
They whisper like a drizzle
as they roam the streets
with a lost gaze as though
something they had thrown up
had never returned to earth.
They shiver like December nights
in their dreamless sleep
on shop verandahs.
There are swings still
in their half-blind eyes,
lilies and Christmases
in their failing memory.
There is one folktale
for each wrinkle on their skin.
Their drooping breasts
yet have milk enough to feed
three generations
who would never care for it.
All dawns pass
leaving them in the dark.
They do not fear death,
they died long ago.
Old women once were continents.
They had deep woods in them,
lakes, mountains, volcanoes even,
even raging gulfs.
When the earth was in heat
they melted, shrank,
leaving only their maps.
You can fold them
and keep them handy :
who knows, they might help you find
your way home.
(Translated from Malayalam by the poet)
THE SHEEP TO THE BUTCHER
Was it for this you carried me
on your shoulders as I limped?
And saved me from the sacrificial fire
after that fiery speech on dhrama
in the royal assembly? (1)
The poet says you too are
performing your dharma. (2)
Then tell me, what is
the sheep’s dharma?
To fatten you with milk?
To die, turn into your meat?
No one shouts at you,
`Don’t savage!’ (3).
Poets have stopped
that business long ago.
Only, make sure
your knife is sharp.
And don’t go after my lamb.
My udders will ooze milk when it cries.
But what you want is blood.
Be quick, do it in a single stroke.
(Translated from Malayalam by the poet)
Notes:
(1) The Buddha had once carried a limping lamb on his shoulder and saved it from being sacrificed at King Bimbisara’s court.
(2) Idassery, Malayalam poet.
(3) Poet-sageValmiki’s command to the hunter shooting down a bird in love-play: ‘Ma Nishada’ (‘Don’t, savage’).
MARTYRDOM
Burning on the blazing cross
that pierces the four directions,
your visage, the cosmic image:
Your body is nailed to the Present,
your legs are buried in the Past.
Your head is held high in the Future,
where the evening sun burns.
You stood, O, Lord of Love,
straight , silent , majestic,
your five elements oozing
out of the five stigmata,
on the red-gravelled passage
where the meteors freeze into white flowers,
gazing at the sea where
the conch devours the pearls,
lighting up the dark caverns of ages
with your arrow-sharp golden rays,
wounding grief.
Then, as you writhed into stillness,
your five senses: Your eyes
gave the skies their blue,
your ears lent music to my sun,
your touch turned this dry earth
moist and tender, your sense of smell
lent charming fragrance to this flower,
your sense of taste turned into
the exciting power of wine.
Your infancy became earth’s spring,
your childhood the season of rains
that nourishes tender shoots,
your youth, the harsh, intense, summer.
And I, offering in sacrifice
my five suns through my stigmata,
-these my five senses-,
are you not I?
LAL DED SPEAKS
AGAINST BORDERS *
Last night I saw a chinar tree
scream and run.
Its leaves and boughs were trembling;
its roots oozed blood.
It was afraid to look back.
The sky had drowned in the Dal lake 1;
it was now a river of fire.
A terrible beast with an allegator’s body
and a thousand dragon-faces
emerged from the sparkling lake.
Its eyes sent forth lightning.
Dead infants dangled from its
ten thousand claws.
Wherever the venom
from its forked tongue fell,
brothers began to fight one another
and the saffron and sandalwood trees
withered in the wink of an eye.
The dust-storm its breath roused
put out the sun and led women astray.
The little boats once filled with lotuses
Now carried the unclaimed dead. It rained bones.
Siva danced in the lifeless snow
piled up on the ruins.
His drum woke me up.
2
I sit alone, desolate, my throat
blue with the poison I drank.
Where are those deodar trees
that blossomed all over
the moment I asked them about Shiva?
Saints of the valley, when did
our words ooze away from hearts
like water from unbaked pitchers?
Springs and stars will not talk
to those who believe in borders.
I don’t believe in borders:
Do the grains of sand know
the name of the land where they lie?
The roots of apple trees
reach for one another
under the walls built by man.
Wind, water and roots
work against walls.
Birds snap borderlines
with their sharp wings.
The lines on the map
do not stop even a dry leaf.
Let us be rivers.
3
I journeyed from earth
to heaven and hell; I sought no word’s permission.
The flesh remained here;
the soul rode the rainbow.
At times it saw an eagle
torn into halves;
clouds growing horns at times.
Saw Pandavas’ mother gather
firewood in the forest, Krishna reaching Kalindi
on the back of a mule,
his clothes soiled.
Saw Shiva’s bull plough the field,
Parvati roaming the hills S
hepherding the lands,
Sita singing from a tribal’s hovel.
heard. Lava’s laughter
from a tiger’s cave.
4
I see darkness at noon.
We sit on volcanoes sipping wine,
we dance on the edge of graves.
Perching under the moon
Glistening like Nandi’s eyes2
the nightingale told me
blood knows no borders.
It is one’s own blood the
continues to run in another.
When the two touch each other in love
their blood becomes one;
touched with hate blood flows out screaming.
Even clothes are borders.
So I strip myself to attain my Shiva,
naked like the breeze over the lake.
My lips are wicks that burn,
my breasts, flowers
and my hips incense:
I am an offering.
Ask the peepal and the palash,
the soul has no religion;
nature suckles everything.
The blue sky is
The throat of the Neelkant…3
5
I asked the skylark to reveal to me
the meaning of her song before she died.
She just said, the embers will die
if they cease to gleam.
I saw her song being baked for the hungry.
It climbed the loom for those
Shivering in the cold,
arched itself to form a roof
for the shadeless.
Then I understood
the meaning of prayer.
Each stone became Sambhu.4
The cuckoo layed eggs in every vein,
Every nerve became the string of a santoor.5
I danced in the leopard’s carve.
The Word lost its boundaries.
6
I am a lake of measureless blue.
Shiva, my shore of endless green.
No iron curtains, not even hedgerows.
Let rains and deer graze on either side.
Hey, those trying to milk the wooden cow,
arms are meant to hug.
She who has conquered greed needs no sword;
She who has conquered lust, no veil.
Follow the stone’s way:
it is both pestle and Natraj,6
stain it not.
Look here, my throat is
Brahma’s chalice.
A dove and a lion on my shoulders.
I am the childhood of the future,
The badam tree that has seven lives.
I am the alphabet.
7
I do not believe in borders.
No fortress can stop those
who move from birth to birth.
We were in the past;
We will be in the future.
Infinity is ever fresh,
fresh as well, the moon.
O mind that is ever restless in the body
like a baby on its mother’s lap,
grow from small attachments
to bigger ones,
go to the place that has no directions.
Consciousness has no borders
outside the senses.
Endless is the sunlight of the jeevanmukta.7
Farewell to the vain mornings
where blood-stench blooms
Farewell to the rains of history
that taste of gunpowder.
Come back, vineyards,
come back, my lambs,
sparrows, lotus-ponds:
the Infinite calls
from within the sand grain.
(Translated from Malayalam by the poet)
*Lal Ded (Lalleswari or Lalla Arifa), the Kashmiri woman saint- poet who left the unhappy Brahmin home of her in-laws to learn philosophy from the Saiva siddhas and Sufis, walked naked, rejecting caste, religious rituals and custome and singing her verses, vakhs. Here she comments on borders king at today’s besieged Kashmir.
1 The big lake in the Kashmir valley
2 Nandi is Shiva’s sacred bull.
3 Shiva is called Neelkant, the blue-throated as he drank the poison that emerged with the nectar while the gods and demons together churned the Milky Ocean.
4 Sambhu, another synonym for Shiva
5 Santoor: a Kashmiri stringed instrument, originally , satatantri, having 100 strings.
6 Natraj: The dancing Shiva
7 The one who is detached and ready for deliverance.
IN MEMORY OF A SWEDISH EVENING
(To Lars Lundqvist)
With steady hands
you went on pouring the
ruddy autumn in my goblet.
You read your poems
bright like the maple leaves,
filling the air like a Brahms symphony,
-sipping one mouthful for each line.
I translated your birds and trees into
my birds and trees.
Nouns revealed their core.
Verbs were inert.
There was a meadow
in your coat pocket.
I called out to the Western Ghats,
as if it were a hungry sheep.
The wind was turning
the pages of an apple tree.
I inhaled my childhood.
As I looked on
you turned into a green train.
I boarded it and whistled like the rain.
We left behind the church of the chill.
Words rubbed against words.
When beasts get into language
The dead burst into laughter.
2005
(Translated from Malyalam by the poet)
COOL,HOT
In Delhi’s cold
I recall my mother,
the first warmth
that had enveloped me.
I could not take mother to Kasi,
not even her lullaby.
That remorse keeps a compartment
in every train that shuttles
between Delhi and Benares.
Standing on the banks
of the Ganga with my companion
I thought: I could have brought
mother’s ashes for Ganga.
There was no shortage of ashes,
nor of dead bodies there;
but mother had lived and died in Malayalam.
`Ram nam sach hei’ would have
turned her an alien.
Yet the Lord knew her
with her coolness.
Didn’t she hide in that unoiled matted hair?*
Here, she flows in front of me
Let me wash my feet in her
It may not expiate my sins
But it is cool like affection, soiled.
Reaching home in Delhi
I open the tap:
Here comes Ganga, purified.
How did mother manage
to pass through this pipe?
‘O, I took a magic potion: Death.
Now I can take any shape,
can go anywhere.’
I scooped her up in my hands:
and was cooled,
in Delhi’s heat.
(Translated from Malayalam by the poet)
*Remember Siva hiding Ganga in his tangled hair.
