I Won't Let You Go (25 page)

A town in the west country.

        On its secluded edge

   a neglected house beats the day’s heat

           with a thatch that dips low on all four sides.

Eternal shadows lie prostrate in the rooms

   and a musty smell lives as a permanent prisoner.

               A yellow rug on the floor

is printed with images of gunmen hunting tigers.

        Under a shishu tree a road of white soil heads north:

           there the wind blows

               like a fine-spun wrap on the fierce sunlight’s limbs.

On the sandbank in front are fields of wheat, cajan, melons,

                           water-melons.

                Ganga glitters in the distance.

                    Boats being towed

                        look like ink sketches.

          On the veranda, Bhajiya, silver bangles on her wrist,

                 grinds wheat between stones

                     and sings in a monotonous drone.

Girdhari the doorman has been sitting next to her

       for a long time, under who-knows-what pretext.

               Beneath the old neem tree the gardener draws

                   water from a well with a bullock’s help.

                       The midday’s wistful with its creaks

               and the field of sweetcorn shimmers in water-streams.

       The warm wind wafts the faint scent of mango buds

and tells us that bees have gathered on the mahaneem’s flowers.

   Later in the afternoon a young woman comes from the town.

       She is foreign to these parts and her sad face

           is drawn and pale from the heat.

               In a low voice she teaches the poetry of a foreign poet.

   In a room where a tattered blue screen obscures the light

               and the damp odour of vetiver fills the air,

        enters the pain of a human heart from beyond the seas.

My early youth goes seeking its own expression

        in a foreign tongue,

               even as a butterfly flits

                  among beds of cultivated seasonal European flowers,

                        in their crowds of colours.

He was about ten years old,

       an orphan raised in a home that wasn’t his own,

   like a weed that springs up by a broken fence,

          not tended by a gardener,

       receiving sunlight, gusts of wind, rain,

          insects, dust and grit;

       which sometimes a goat crops off

          or a cow tramples down,

             which yet doesn’t die, gets tougher,

                  with a fatter stem

             and shiny green leaves.

From the jujube tree he’d fall, trying to pluck its drupes,

        and break his bones,

    faint after eating poisonous berries,

get lost on his way to the Chariot Festival;

        but nothing could destroy him:

    half dead, he’d revive,

        lost, he’d return,

            caked with mud, his clothes ripped;

    would be spanked hard

            and yelled at in torrents,

        and when freed, he’d run off again.

Weeds had choked a dried river’s curve;

      herons stood on its edges;

   a jungle crow rested on a boinchi branch;

      high above flew a white-breasted kite;

   a fisherman had fixed long bamboo poles for his net;

      a kingfisher perched on a pole;

   ducks dipped their heads and picked water-snails.

          It was the middle of the day.

The shimmering waters were alluring;

   the water-weeds swayed with their leaves outspread;

              fishes darted about.

      Further down, weren’t there serpent-maidens

         who combed their long tresses with gold combs,

              casting those moving shadows on the ripples?

      The boy fancied a dip precisely there,

         in those green transparent waters

             as smooth as a snake’s body.

‘Let’s see what there is’ was his greedy approach to everything.

      So he plunged, got caught in the weeds, –

    screamed, gulped water, and went down down down.

When a herdsman grazing his cows on the near-by bank

    pulled him up with the help of a fishing-boat,

             he was unconscious.

   For days thereafter he remembered that feeling

            of losing his grip on things:

                how the world went dark

            and the image of his long-lost mother

                returned only to yield

                     to the black-out.

                It was quite exciting, really, –

            like death, that big experience.

‘Go on,’ he urged a playmate to dare the same,

   ‘Just try to drown once, with a rope tied round your waist.

           I’ll pull you up again.’

       But the playmate wouldn’t agree to do it.

   ‘Coward!’ he fumed, ‘Coward! What a coward!’

Like an animal he’d slink to the Buxy family’s orchard,

   getting plenty of blows, but eating many more jaams.

       ‘Monkey!’ they’d say at home, ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’

              Why should he be ashamed?

       The lame Buxy boy limped as he gathered fruits,

           heaping them in baskets.

               Branches got broken;

                   fruit got trampled.

                       Was
he
ashamed of it?

One day the second Pakrashi boy showed him a tube

    with glass at its end and said, ‘Just peep inside!’

        A pattern of colours he saw,

            which shifted with each shake.

        He begged, ‘Give it me, please.

            You can have my polished shell

                for peeling green mangoes

            and my flute made from green mango kernel.’

It wasn’t given to him.

    So he had to nick it.

       He wasn’t acquisitive,

    didn’t wish to hoard anything, just wanted to see

           what was inside.

    Cousin Khodon twisted his ear and said,

       ‘Why did you nick it?’

           The scamp replied,

               ‘Why didn’t he give it me?’

       As if the real blame lay with the Pakrashi boy.

   Neither fear nor loathing did his body know.

       He would pick up a fat frog just like that

           and in a hole in the garden meant to take a pole

                keep it as a pet,

                    nourish it with insects.

   He’d stow beetles in a cardboard box,

           feed them on dung-balls,

      raise hell if anyone tried to chuck them.

    He’d go to school with a squirrel in his pocket.

One day he put a harmless snake inside the teacher’s desk,

    thinking, ‘Let’s just see what Sir does!’

The gentleman opened his desk, leaped, and ran –

       his flight was quite a thing to see.

       A pet dog he had,

             not pedigreed by any means,

                very much a native of the soil.

       He looked quite like his owner,

             behaved like him too;

       couldn’t always find food,

           so had to steal it;

had to pay for his crime by having his leg number four lamed.

    And the chastisers, by some causal connection,

       had the fence of their cucumber field broken.

    Save in his master’s bed the dog couldn’t sleep

       at night, nor his master without him.

        One day the dog met his end,

having stuck his muzzle into a neighbour’s just-served dinner.

    The worst torment hadn’t drawn a tear from the boy,

but now he spent two days hiding from others and crying.

            He wouldn’t eat or drink.

       Koromchas had ripened in the Buxy orchard;

            he wasn’t interested in pinching any.

    Those neighbours had a nephew, seven years old,

       on whose head he dumped a broken pot.

    From under the pot came a whining, like from an oil mill.

Decent people wouldn’t have him in their homes.

    Only Sidhu the milkwoman brought him in

                  and gave him milk to drink.

Seven years ago she had lost her son. 

     The two boys’ birthdays had been three days apart

        and they’d had the same looks:

           dark skin, flat nose.

On this milkwoman auntie of his the boy played his latest tricks,

     cutting off the string which tethered her cow,

          hiding her pails,

     staining her clothes with catechu.

To the tune of ‘Let’s see what happens’ went his experiments,

   which would only cause the milkwoman’s love to flow

     even more, and if any told him off,

she would simply side with her favourite, and that would be it.

Ambika the schoolmaster regretted to me,

    ‘Even your poems written for children don’t appeal to him.

           That’s how thick he is.

       Mischievously cuts the pages

           and says the mice did it,

               the monkey that he is.’

    I said, ‘The fault is mine.

        If there was a poet truly of his own world,

    the beetles would come out so vivid in his verse

        the boy wouldn’t be able to leave it.

Have I ever managed to write with authenticity

        about frogs, or that bald dog’s tragedy?’

The empty house seems displeased with me.

    I’ve done something wrong

        and it’s keeping its face averted.

    I wander from room to room,

        feeling unwanted,

            come out panting with exhaustion.

I’m going to let this house and go off to Dehra Dun.

    For such a long time I couldn’t go into Amli’s room:

        it would twist my heart.

Now that the tenant will come, the room must be cleared,

    so I undo the padlock and go in.

A pair of Agra shoes, a comb,

    hair oil, a bottle of perfume.

    On a shelf her school-books.

        A small harmonium.

           A scrap-book

covered with cut-and-pasted pictures.

    On a clothes-rack towels, dresses, saris of homespun cotton.

In a small glass cabinet a variety of dolls,

            bottles, empty powder tins.

    I sit silent on the seat

                in front of the table.

    There’s the red leather case

         she used to take to school.

    From it I pick up an exercise-book,

         a maths one, as it happens.

             Out slips an envelope, unopened,

                with my own address

             in Amli’s childish hand.

             They say when a man drowns,

                 pictures from the past

                     in one moment press before his eyes.

             So does that letter in my hand

          in an instant bring back so many things to my mind.

Amala was seven

    when her mother died.

        The fear that she wouldn’t live long

           began to haunt me.

        For there was something sad about her face,

           as if the shadow of an untimely parting

        had tumbled backwards from a future time

           to fall on her big black eyes.

    I was so afraid to leave her alone.

           Working at my office,

               I would suddenly wonder

        if something awful had happened at home.

From Bankipore came her mother’s sister on holiday.

   She said, ‘The girl’s education’s in a mess.

       Who’s going to bear the burden of an ignorant girl

               in this day and age?’

Ashamed to hear her words, I blurted out,

     ‘I’ll get her admitted to Bethune School tomorrow.’

Admitted she was, but her holidays seemed to grow

    more in number than days of academic work.

There were days when the school bus came and went without her.

       Her father was involved in those plots.

The following year her aunt came on holiday again.

    ‘This just won’t do,’ she said,

         ‘I’ll take her with me and put her in a boarding-school

             in Benares, for she must be saved

                 from her father’s loving excess.’

         So she went away with her aunt,

            dry-eyed, but deeply hurt

               because I let her go like that.

    I set out on a pilgrimage to Badrinath

        in a sudden desire to run away from myself.

    For four months there were no communications.

Thanks to my guru, I reckoned,

        the knot that tied me had slackened.

    In my mind I placed my daughter in God’s hands

            and my chest felt lightened.

After four months I came home.

    I was running to Benares to see Amli,

        but on my way got a letter.

            What’s there to say? –

                It was God who had taken her.

But I don’t want to talk about those things.

     Sitting in Amala’s room, I open the unopened letter

            and read:

        ‘I want to see you so much.’

                There’s nothing else on the paper.