I Won't Let You Go (24 page)

In rain-stopped afternoon clouds

       fear still lurked,

    as the wind blustered at times,

            mouthing sharp rebukes.

Above, in the sun’s red, cloud-torn, Durvasa’s wrath

    flared in oblique glares of bloodshot eyes

            and dun matted locks.

In that dismal weather I brought you an afternoon gift,

           kadambas in a basket.

        In the rain’s sombre shadow

                in a songless dawn

those despair-dispelling flowers in a lampblack-hour

had stocked, in their ecstatic pollen, visions of the sun.

When sluggish clouds, hard pressed by easterly clouds,

        had rushed to the sky’s rim,

     and on a Srabon night

        the woods, hit by a cataclysm, had wept,

even then the bold kadamba had shed its scent

to birds’ nests, stalks unwearied, not yet felled.

        With such a flower, symbol of my confidence,

            I made you a present.

In the dripping evening, friend, you brought me

           a single ketaki.

               I was by myself,

                  my lamp unlit.

In the tossed dense green of a row of areca-palms

fireflies flitted, unflagging in their quest.

You stood outside my door,

             secretly smiled.

     ‘What have you brought?’

             I asked, curious.

Raindrops fell pitter-patter on the leaves;

I stretched my hand in the fragrance-laden dark.

Abruptly did my limb reverberate

         to a staccato of thorns.

     How that barbed touch caught me unawares

             like a pleasure’s sharp twang!

It wasn’t an offer of surrender, easily gained,

but splendour within, sheathed in spiky pain.

        A homage hedged in by don’ts

            was what you gave me.

On the canvas of disappearance I see your eternal form.

You’ve finally arrived in my invisible inner domain.

     The jewel of everlasting touch have I obtained.

You’ve yourself filled the gap made by your absence.

When life darkened, I found

you’d left within me evening’s chapel-lamp.

     Through separation’s sacrificial fire

passion becomes worship, lit by suffering’s light.

Padma meanders away under far skies:

       I see her in my mind.

On one side sandbanks,

       fearless, for they’re destitute, without attachments;

on the other side bamboo and mango groves,

       old banyans, derelict cottages,

   jack-trees of many years’ standing, with fat trunks,

       a field of mustard by a pond,

       wayside jungles of rattan,

an indigo factory’s ruined foundations, a hundred and fifty years old,

   tall casuarinas murmuring in its garden night and day.

There’s the neighbourhood of the Rajbangshis,

   where their goats graze on cracked fields,

       and a granary with a tin roof stands by the market-place.

          The whole village trembles with fear of the cruel river.

               Hallowed in legends is that river’s name.

                   Mandakini flows in her pulse.

She is free. She passes by human dwellings,

                   endures them, but doesn’t acknowledge them.

               Her uncorrupted high-born metre holds

the memory of desolate mountains and the call of lonely seas.

On her sandbank-moorings it was once my lot to dwell,

       in solitude, far from crowds.

               Seeing the morning star, I would rise at dawn,

       and at night sleep on boat-deck

                  under the Great Bear’s eyes.

       Her indifferent streams would flow

               past the margins of the multitudinous thoughts

                  of my lonely days and nights,

               even as a traveller skirts

                  a householder’s joys and sorrows, near yet far.

       Then at the end of my days of youth I came

                  to this savannah’s edge 

             where shaded Santhal villages make a fringe of massed green.

                 River Kopai is my neighbour here.

                      Not hers the glamour of an ancient line.

                 Her name’s non-Aryan,

                      linked to the laughter-rich

                         sweet speech of generations of Santhal women.

                             With the village she’s on intimate terms:

                         between land and water there’s no conflict here

                     and dialogue’s easy between her two banks.

     Fields of san-hemp are in flower, brushing right against her body;

                     green rice seedlings have risen.

Where the footpath stops, meeting her bank,

     she gives way to the farer,

                 letting him walk across

                    her murmuring crystal current.

Not far, the fan-palm rises from the plain;

     mangoes, jaams, amlokis jostle on the banks.

        She speaks the tongue of common men;

                    nobody would call it literary.

              Her rhythm binds land and water together;

   there’s no rivalry between the liquid and the green.

        Her slim body twists and turns

              through light and shade,

                   dancing in simple steps to hand-clappings.

   In the rains her limbs are touched with ecstasy

        like a village girl drunk on mahua wine:

             she doesn’t break or cause to drown,

        just twirls and twirls the eddies of her skirts,

             gives little pushes to both her banks,

                   and laughing loudly, races along.

   At the end of the post-rains her waters become limpid,

                   her flow becomes thinner,

        showing the sand below,

   yet the pallor of that shrunken celebration

                   cannot shame her,

for her affluence isn’t arrogant, nor is her poverty a disgrace:

                   she is lovely in both –

   like a dancer who dances, jingling her jewels,

             and sits quietly, tired,

                   laziness in her eyes

   and the hint of a smile in the corner of her mouth.  

Kopai has made a poet’s rhythm her own companion today,

   a rhythm that reconciles an idiom’s land and water,

             what in speech is song and what is homely.

Walking to that flawed measure, a Santhal boy will trip across,

                      bow in hand;

                 a bullock-cart will cross over

            with stacks of straw;

        the potter will trot to market,

            his pots slung from a pole,

        followed by the village dog

            and the three-rupees-a-month schoolmaster,

                 a torn umbrella over his head.

           From the first-floor window eyes can see

                   a corner of the pond

                      brimful in the month of Bhadra.

           Trees, deeply reflected, tremble in the waters

                   with the sheen of green silk.

             Clumps of kolmi and heloncho grow on the borders.

        On the sloping bank arecas face each other.

On this side are oleanders, white rongons, one shiuli,

        two neglected tuberoses showing impoverished buds.

A henna hedge with bamboo reinforcements;

        beyond it, orchards of banana, guava, coconut.

Further off, among trees, a house’s roof-terrace

                with a sari hanging from it.

A fat bare-chested man, a wet cloth round his head,

        sits on the ghat’s paved steps, his fishing-line cast.

                Hour after hour passes.

        The day wanes.

               Rain-rinsed sky.

        Abnegation’s pallor in the ageing light.

               A slow breeze stirs,

                   rippling the waters of the pond;

                       shaddock leaves quiver and glint. 

I look, and it seems to me

       that this is the pale reflection of another day,

          bringing me, through the gaps in the fence of modernity,

                  the image of someone from a far-off age.

Her touch is tender, her voice gentle,

   her black eyes are enchanted and naïve.

The wide red border of her white sari

                falls circling her feet.

   She spreads a mat for her guest to sit on the yard;

                she wipes the dust off with her sari’s end;

      she fetches water in the shades of mangoes and jacks;

then the magpie robin calls from the shajina branch

    and the black drongo swings its tail among date trees.

      When I say goodbye to her and come away,

              she can hardly say anything, –

just leaves the door ajar

              and stands there, looking at the road,

                          and her eyes dim. 

By the River Mayurakshi.

    As my pet deer and calf are on friendly terms,

        so are the sal and mahua trees.

    They shed their leaves

        and these are blown to my window.

    In the east the fan-palm stands erect:

            morning’s oblique light

casts its stolen shadow on my wall.

    A footpath skirts the river

                over red soil,

    its dust strewn with the kurchi’s fallen flowers.

        The aroma of shaddock blossoms

                hugs the wind;

    there’s rivalry between jarul and polash and madar;

        the shajina’s floral tassels swing in the air

    and the chameli winds all along the fence

                by the River Mayurakshi. 

            Paved with red stones,

                    the steps of a modest ghat descend to the river.

                By the ghat stands a champak of many years

                           with a fat trunk.

           Over the river I’ve built a bamboo bridge

                    and placed on either side in urns of glass

                        jasmines, bels, tuberoses, white oleanders.

                             The waters are deep in places,

                    with pebbles below,

          where swans come floating,

     while on the sloping bank

graze my russet milch-cow

    and brinded calf

        by the River Mayurakshi.

A pale blue rug on the floor

    is embroidered with dark brown flowers.

       The walls are saffron

            with borders of black lines.

    A little veranda looks towards the east;

       there I sit even before the sun rises.

    And I’ve found a person

from whose throat the notes splash

    like light from a dancer’s bracelets.

       She lives in the cottage next door,

a passiflora trailing over her roof.

    It’s when she sings to herself

        that I hear her at all,

           for I never ask her to sing.

Her husband’s a good chap:

      he likes my writings,

   has a sense of humour, knows where to laugh,

can converse with ease on most humdrum topics,

   but can also suddenly hold forth

in what people patronisingly call a poetic style

           at eleven p.m. in the sal forest

               by the River Mayurakshi.

           Behind their cottage

               they have a kitchen garden

and about two bighas of land where they grow rice,

           plus orchards of mango and jack 

            hedged in by ash-sheoras.

In the morning my neighbour croons

    as she churns yoghourt to make butter,

while her husband rides off to supervise the farm

           on a red pony.

    On the river’s other side stretches a road

           and beyond the road a dense forest;

from there comes the sound of Santhal flutes

           and gypsies come there for their wintering

                   by the River Mayurakshi.

    That’s all. This dwelling of mine

I’ve never built, nor ever will.

     Never have I even seen the Mayurakshi.

         Her name I don’t hear with my ears:

                 upon my eyes I see it.

     It rubs the unguent of dark blue magic

                 on my eye-lids.

And I despair

    of my mind ever settling elsewhere.

        Taking leave of everything, indifferent to all else,

            my soul yearns to rush off

                     by the River Mayurakshi.