deserve a statue
on whose inauguration
responsible townsfolk
lose a busy day.
I’ve sat in a corner of my dinner plate
and lived an ordinary life.
The civility of prisons,
the courteousness of slaughter-houses,
are what I’ve inherited;
these qualities I’ve improved upon
and taken them two steps ahead.
(To be successful in life
it isn’t necessary to read Dale Carnegie
but understand road signs.)
My lies are small ones,
but that is until you ask me the weight of a gun.
On the expression of a traffic cop
standing at a crossing
I’ve sighted the map of democracy.
And now I’m all smugness and satisfaction.
There’s nothing I have to finish.
I’ve reached that turn in one’s age
when the files begin to close.
Sitting on the verandah in my armchair,
I have few worries.
The sun sets on the toe of my shoe.
Far away, a bugle sounds.
This is the time when the soldiers return,
and the city, quietly, slowly,
changes its madness
to windowpanes and light bulbs.
Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
Nilakantha Dikshita (1580-1644)
From Peace
What a family to be born into! Can you believe
who turned out to be my parents?
And all the lectures I’ve heard—the finest professors,
the range of topics, class after class . . .
I’ve seen how bad the world can be. Tasted
every pleasure. What I’ve never managed
is a quiet heart. As you can see,
I’ve got it made.
My feet always know the way straight
to the crooked alleys,
My tongue follows its secret agenda:
to tell lies and lies alone.
My clever mind searches out the finest faults
in everyone. But when it comes to doing
what’s good for me, I’m a lame,
dumb beast.
To make her happy, I didn’t think twice
about throwing away my wealth or my life.
Her love was dearer to my heart
than the rapture of release.
And now that my life is spent,
and my money too, my dear wife
thinks less of me, Shiva,
Burner of Cities,
than a ball of fluff.
When they were little,
I would have killed
to provide for them.
I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat,
but I put them through school.
Now these children of mine
think they were born out of thin air,
bringing with them great wisdom
from a previous life.
They don’t remember
who they are.
My wife, my sons, closest friends,
my relatives, servants, whoever—
can’t bear to part from me
even in their dreams.
But when the horde of Death’s messengers
come knocking on my door,
not even one of them, Shiva,
Killer of Passion,
will volunteer to join me.
If you have the great good fortune,
of making friends with the king’s close aides,
you’ve found your guru.
If they let you past the gate,
you’re in heaven.
Then, if you get to meet the king in person,
it’ll be like shaking God’s hand.
And if you drop dead at your post in the palace,
as far as I’m concerned,
that’s instant
redemption.
Pilgrimage to holy places,
worshiping the gods,
an obsession with rituals and charity,
mastery of the arts—
for people like me,
all these are only
ways of getting rich.
And then what happens?
We either bury the money in the ground
or surrender it to the king.
All the trouble I took,
ever since I was a kid
serving at the feet of my teachers,
to fathom the secrets of God—
look what came out of it:
the stuff of bedtime stories
that I tell yawning kings,
night after night,
to kill time.
Shade, water, clothing, food,
transportation, light—
where we mortals have to go,
not one of them is for sale.
It’s a long road, and the journey
must begin with a certain something
that we, in our body’s hunger,
can’t seem to remember.
Translated from the Sanskrit by David Shulman and Yigal Bronner
Jayanta Mahapatra (b. 1928)
The Abandoned British Cemetery at Balasore, India
This is history.
I would not disturb it: the ruins of stone and marble,
the crumbling walls of brick, the coma of alienated decay.
How exactly should the archaic dead make me behave?
A hundred and fifty years ago
I might have lived. Now nothing offends my ways.
A quietness of bramble and grass holds me to a weed.
Will it matter if I know who the victims were, who survived?
And yet, awed by the forgotten dead,
I walk around them: thirty-nine graves, their legends
floating in a twilight of baleful littoral,
the flaking history my intrusion does not animate.
Awkward in the silence, a scrawny lizard
watches the drama with its shrewd, hooded gaze.
And a scorpion, its sting drooping,
two eerie arms spread upon the marble, over an alien name.
In the circle the epitaphs run: Florence R . . . darling wife
of Captain R—R—aged nineteen, of cholera . . .
Helen, beloved daughter of Mr. and Mrs.—of cholera,
aged seventeen, in the year of our Lord, eighteen hundred . . .
Of what concern to me is a vanished Empire?
Or the conquest of my ancestors’ timeless ennui?
It is the dying young who have the power to show
what the heart will hide, the grass shows no more.
Who watches now near the dead wall?
The tribe of grass in the cracks of my eyes?
It is the cholera still, death’s sickly trickle,
that plagues the sleepy shacks beyond this hump of earth,
moving easily, swiftly, with quick power
through both past and present, the increasing young,
into the final bone, wearying all truth with ruin.
This is the iron
rusting in the vanquished country, the blood’s unease,
the useless rain upon my familiar window;
the tired triumphant smile left behind by the dead
on a discarded anchor half-sunk in mud beside the graves;
out there on the earth’s unwavering gravity
where it waits like a deity perhaps
for the elaborate ceremonial of a coming generation
to keep history awake, stifle the survivor’s issuing cry.
English
Mahadevi Verma (1907-87)
No Matter the Way Be Unknown
no matter the way be unknown, the spirit solitary
no matter darkness, like the new moon’s enshroud
in kohl-touched tears today wash this gathered clou
d.
other eyes do not cry—
pupils lightless, lashes dry—
amidst a hundred lightnings here
lamplight danced, although this gaze was watery.
others’ may be the feet that retreat;
others’ that leave resolve to thorns and own defeat—
these feet that measure immortality,
pledged to pain, insensed with creativity,
by their propagation will secure
in darkness dawn’s golden tapestry.
others’ will be the biography whose elements
will merge with nothingness, in dust its monument.
that on which destruction falls today
I walk on everyday,
a continuum on pearls,
a fete of sparks, jubilant, fiery.
even if you send an embassy of laughter,
or spring, that makes the leaf-fall-dark of angry
forehead softer—
you will find this breast unflustered,
anguish-water, dreams’ lotuses clustered;
know, this unity in solitude
in separation is binary:
no matter the way be unknown, the spirit solitary.
Translated from the Hindi by Vinay Dharwadker
Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004)
Background, Casually
1
A poet-rascal-clown was born,
The frightened child who would not eat
Or sleep, a boy of meagre bone.
He never learned to fly a kite,
His borrowed top refused to spin.
I went to Roman Catholic school,
A mugging Jew among the wolves.
They told me I had killed the Christ,
That year I won the scripture prize.
A Muslim sportsman boxed my ears.
I grew in terror of the strong
But undernourished Hindu lads,
Their prepositions always wrong,
Repelled me by passivity.
One noisy day I used a knife.
At home on Friday nights the prayers
Were said. My morals had declined.
I heard of Yoga and of Zen.
Could I, perhaps, be rabbi-saint?
The more I searched, the less I found.
Twenty-two: time to go abroad.
First, the decision, then a friend
To pay the fare. Philosophy,
Poverty and Poetry, three
Companions shared my basement room.
2
The London seasons passed me by.
I lay in bed two years alone,
And then a Woman came to tell
My willing ears I was the Son
Of Man. I knew that I had failed
In everything, a bitter thought.
So, in an English cargo-ship
Taking French guns and mortar shells
To Indo-China, scrubbed the decks,
And learned to laugh again at home.
How to feel it home, was the point.
Some reading had been done, but what
Had I observed, except my own
Exasperation? All Hindus are
Like that, my father used to say,
When someone talked too loudly, or
Knocked at the door like the Devil.
They hawked and spat. They sprawled around.
I prepared for the worst. Married,
Changed jobs, and saw myself a fool.
The song of my experience sung,
I knew that all was yet to sing.
My ancestors, among the castes,
Were aliens crushing seed for bread
(The hooded bullock made his rounds).
3
One among them fought and taught,
A Major bearing British arms.
He told my father sad stories
Of the Boer War. I dreamed that
Fierce men had bound my feet and hands.
The later dreams were all of words.
I did not know that words betray
But let the poems come, and lost
That grip on things the worldly prize.
I would not suffer that again.
I look about me now, and try
To formulate a plainer view:
The wise survive and serve—to play
The fool, to cash in on
The inner and the outer storms.
The Indian landscape sears my eyes.
I have become a part of it
To be observed by foreigners.
They say that I am singular,
Their letters overstate the case.
I have made my commitments now.
This is one: to stay where I am,
As others choose to give themselves
In some remote and backward place.
My backward place is where I am.
English
Jaya Mehta (b. 1932)
When a Stone Is in One’s Hands
Stone is history
an edifice
a sculpture
of Gandhi, Jesus, Buddha.
Stone is memory of
the Taj’s opulence
a memorial stone
a foundation
a support
a weapon.
When did we learn all this?
When a stone is in hand
one experiences power
and forgets that what gets wounded
is hide
whether white or black
hurt by a sharp pebble.
When a stone is in hand
one forgets that
a fallen person
can be given water, even an enemy.
Such amnesia
when the hand grips a stone . . .
Translated from the Gujarati by Pradip N. Khandwalla
Nirendranath Chakravarti (b. 1924)
Old Age
Don’t wait for me any longer, folks.
The day’s drawing on,
You’d better set out now.
I’ll take a little time.
I’m not quite unencumbered like you people:
If I sit down somewhere,
Huge branches start to sprout within my breast,
And from my feet
Great roots begin to grow.
I can’t rush out as soon as you snap your fingers.
So just you move on, folks,
Don’t sit waiting for me any longer:
I’m going to be late.
Translated from the Bangla by Sukanta Chaudhuri
Firaq Gorakhpuri (1896-1982)
Annihilate the Stillness of the Evening
Annihilate the stillness of the evening, it’s unfathomably dark
Light the lamp of poetry, it’s unfathomably dark
The benighted colonies of the world will begin to glow
Sing elegiac songs, it’s unspeakably dark
I have lost my restive heart in the lands of grief
Go, look for it carefully, it’s dark, dark, dark
In this savage night you can see nothing at all
Let imagination not run wild it’s impenetrably dark
If she cannot attend the carnival of grief
Invite her smiles today, it’s incredibly dark
The tears that quivered in Adam’s eyes after the Fall,
Shed those tears, it’s impossibly dark
I see no end to this sad night
Invent another night, it’s intensely dark
Revive the memory of past resolutions
Kindle new lamps, it’s real pitch dark
His life was but a delirious sleep
Do not awake Firaq, it is frightfully dark
Translated from the Urdu by Noorul Hasan
Narayana (c. 12 CE)
From Hitopadesa
On Hunger
A woman will her child forsake
When hunger’s pangs she can’t evade,
As will the famished mother
snake
Eat eggs that she herself has laid:
What sins will not the starving do?
Men grown gaunt turn pitiless too.
Translated from the Sanskrit by A.N.D. Haksar
Vinod Kumar Shukla (b. 1937)
Those That Will Never Come to My Home
Those that will never come to my home
I shall go to meet.
A river in flood will never come to my home.
To meet a river, like people,
I shall go to the river, swim a little and drown.
Dunes, rocks, a mountain, a pond, endless trees, fields
will never come to my home
I shall search high and low
for dunes, mountains, rocks—like people
People who work at the time,
I shall meet, not during my leisure hours,
but as if it was an important job.
This first wish of mine I’ll hold on to, like the very last one.
Translated from the Hindi by Dilip Chitre
Mangesh Padgaonkar (b. 1929)
Lamp
Memory has smells, of grass damp
and crushed, has sounds of bird song
swarming in full-throated throng.
Commemorate these with the lighting of a lamp.
Memory has a tree, has wet black bark
And beneath, soft soil on which to lie.
Eye moved, there in the speechless orbit of eye,
Meteors split and shredded the dark.
Memory has a path, overtaken by flowers
An unrestricted growth where the feet pause, stop.
The earth quivered, there, like a dewdrop.
With splendid red dawn rewarded the stars.
When the smell of memory quickens again, on the damp
soil and the pressed grass quickens with bird song
swarming in full throated throng,
commemorate me with the lighting of a lamp.
Translated from the Marathi by Vinay Dharwadker
Melanie Silgardo (b. 1956)
Between
My London is where I am.
Comfortable city where we feed birds
and worry about the diminishing bees.
At my desk struggling for words
I would rather be watching the
tree fern unfurl its newest frond or
the woodpecker puncture the birch
with his rataratarata, while the
parakeet, foreign and raucous,
swoops and shrieks. Green wing
and scarlet beak how you bring
my Bombay back. In a flash I hear
crows and the hootootoot of cars in
gridlock, cricket commentary blaring,
and the clatter of stainless steel from
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