I Won't Let You Go (29 page)

When I called you to the arbour,

fragrance still lingered in the mango grove.

Don’t know why your thoughts were elsewhere,

why your door was closed.

One day fruit-clusters filled the branches;

you ignored my full cupped hands.

Your eyes were blind to fulfilment.

In Baishakh, in harsh pitiless storms

gold-hued fruit fall tumbling down.

‘My gifts,’ I said, ‘which lie in the dust, –

may they find their heaven in your hands!’

Your mind, alas, was still unresolved!

Unlit was your evening

and by your dark door I played my lute.

My mind, in unison with star-light,

on the resonating strings danced.

Not a flutter in your heart!

A yearning bird in a sleepless nest

sent vain calls to some lost mate.

The hour passed, the moment slipped.

You kept to your room, in indifference dipped,

though the moon was still in the sky.

Who can thought-read? My silly heart

had wanted to pour itself in words.

I had reckoned on some surplus remaining, –

a memory lingering, drenched in tears.

Perhaps there was a beat in the anklets.

At dawn’s feet the pallid moon

slipped down from night’s necklace.

Was the lute’s lament some company for you?

Did it raise waves below sleep’s brink?

Was there some pleasure, even if in dreaming?

    Evening arrived, her hair let down,

         having just had her bath in the sunset-ocean.

    Dreams’ incense seemed to be rising

                     towards the stars.

    In that quiet moment, – compact, magic-wrapped, –

           she, – I won’t mention her name, –

her hair just plaited, a sky-blue sari on,

           was singing on the open roof-terrace, all alone.

       I was standing behind her:

       she mightn’t have known that, or she might have.

To the tune of Sindhu Kafi went her song, and said –

    
If this is what’s in your mind, that you’ll go away –

      
then I won’t call you back, no, I won’t.

           I don’t – do I? – ask the morning star to stay. –

As I listened, the world’s utility-sheath

    slipped, and as though from its bud, –

    revelation not vouchsafed before –

    the unknowable opened, fully blown,

       scattering its light aroma in the sky.

            It was the unattainable’s protracted sigh,

       the unuttered language of difficult hope against hope.

    Vedic words, dispellers of death-grief,

       had once averred, unveiling the universe,

           that honeyed is this earth’s dust.

       In the same tune my mind said –

           ‘This earth’s dust is musical, it is.’

       ‘Death, honeyed death,’

           cried my mind, –

       ‘On the wings of song

           you carry me to another world.’

I saw her.        She was like a nymph

    sitting at a ghat the colour of touchstone, dipping

            her red-dyed feet in evening’s black waters.

    Soft ripples of tunes ruffled the shoreless lake,

        and charged with my own heart’s trembling, the wind

            circled and touched her.

    I saw her.        She was like a bride

        in nuptial chamber waiting, lights turned off,

            all the veins in her limbs in one pulsation

               in the imminent’s ecstatic expectation.

    The Pole Star’s unflickering eye looked on from the sky

        and the Shahana Ragini’s tenderness hung in the air.

    I saw her.        She seemed to have returned

        to a fore-existence, to that obscure haze

           where the familiar jostles with the unfamiliar.

        Bent on recovering that epoch’s escaped phrases,

           she was turning and casting her song’s net,

        seeking, seeking, with the caresses of her notes,

                        an identity that was lost.

Before us, a nut tree’s head rose higher than the roof.

    Above it slipped the moon, the fourth of the waning phase.

               I called her by her name.

Sharply she stood up, turned to me, frowned,

                                   and said –

        ‘How unfair! Why did you steal up like a thief?’

        I didn’t reply,

    didn’t say, ‘There was no need

for this trite play-acting. Today you could have happily said, –

    “Come, I’m glad to see you.”’        A pall of dust

        fell and settled on the honeyed.

    The next day was a market day.

        I sat at the window, staring, next to me

        that open roof-terrace, where now the sun burned,

    wiping off, with its clear light,

                 last night’s spring-excess.

    Without making distinctions the light fell –

        on field and road, the merchant’s tin roof,

           trays and baskets of greens,

                 stacks of straw,

           piles of clay pots,

                 pitchers of fresh molasses,

           touching with its golden stick

               blossoms emerging on the mahaneem tree.

By the roadside rose a peepul, twined round a palmyra trunk.

    In its shade sang a blind mendicant, drumming a pot –

       
– Went away, saying ‘I’ll come tomorrow’.

       
I’m gazing at that morrow, I am. –

    The hubbub of buying and selling was like a fabric

        on which the notes embroidered with their art

    a motif of the entire universe’s tense disquiet –

                    ‘I’m gazing, I am.’

    A pair of buffaloes with longing eyes wide open

       went along the road, dragging a laden cart.

            Bells jingled at their necks;

       the wheels groaned at each turn.

    A field-flute’s tunes

       seemed to be hung out in the firmament’s light.

          Embracing all, the mind was entranced.

       To the beat of the Vedic verse my mind repeated –

              ‘Honeyed is this earth’s dust.’

    Before the kerosene shop

       my eyes spied a latter-day Baul.

    Tied to the waist of his patched mantle

                   was a drum.

       A crowd had gathered round him.

I laughed, seeing the absurd too was harmonious here:

    this man too had come to fill the market’s canvas.

       I called him to my window

              and he began to sing –

      
To market I came, in search of the uncatchable.

     
Everyone pulls me about, saying ‘Hither! Come hither!’

Eyes fill with sleep

        and from time to time I wake up.

As the water of a new monsoon’s first shower

        seeps through the ground to tree-roots,

so has the light of the young autumn trickled

        through my sleep to my unconscious mind’s roots.

     The day draws towards mid-afternoon.

Thin white wisps of clouds

        are afloat but still in the Kartik sunshine –

               paper boats made by the children of the gods.

        From the west a fast wind begins to blow,

        shaking the branches of the tamarind.

        A road goes north to the neighbourhood of dairymen:

from there bullock-carts spread saffron dust

                                on the pale-blue sky.

     In the quiet hours of this afternoon

                 my mind drifts in the currents of non-work

                     on the raft of a day without cares.

        This day has torn its mooring from the world’s ghat:

                to no need is it tied.

        Crossing the river of colours, in the evening it will vanish

                into the black ocean of unruffled sleep.

In pale ink is this day’s mark left on time’s page

               and will soon fade.

        In man’s fate-writings it is the luck of some days

                   to be inscribed in the thickest alphabet:

               between such scripts this is an empty space.

        A tree’s withered leaves fall on the ground:

               the tree too tries to pay its debt to the earth.

        The fallen leaves of these lazy days of mine

               have given nothing back to humanity’s forest.

        Yet my mind says:

               to accept is also a way of giving back.

           I have accepted in my body and mind

           the juice of creation’s fountain dripping from skies.

        That coloured stream has given its tint to my life,

                    as it has to rice-fields,

            to forest leaves, and to the wrap

        of the migrant cloud of the post-rains.

All of them together have filled today’s world-picture.

That a burst of light has flashed through my mind,

    that autumn’s warm breath has ruffled the waters where sleep

        and waking mingle, like Ganga and Jamuna –

    aren’t these too to be found in the cosmic picture?

        My gladness without reason that gleams

            with the peepul’s restless leaves in the juice-hall

        of water, land, and sky may not leave its mark

upon the history of this universe,

yet its art is among the universe’s expressions.

            These moments, drowned in creativity’s juice,

            are the seeds of my heart’s red lotus being threaded

       into a chain in the seasons’ royal court –

            a garland made of the gladness of all my life.

       Nor has this not-famous day of an idle chap

            left a gap in that chain:

       this day too has witnessed the threading of a seed.

By this window I spent last night alone.

Stuck to the forest’s forehead was the moon’s curve –

                the fifth of the waxing phase.

             The same universe was that,

save that the maestro had changed its melody

             with the ascents and descents of hazy light.

             The earth, that busy wayfarer,

         was then motionless, sari-end spread on the yard,

no longer heeding the household by her side,

listening to the legends murmured by starlight.

         Childhood memories came back – from a far-off vaporous age.

                             The trees were still,

            the massed embodiment of the night’s quiet,

their shadows cast in a row on the obscure green of the grass.

In the daytime, by the road of daily living

            those shadows had been nurses, companions

giving refuge to herdsmen,

         peace from noon’s fire.

Now in the moonlit night, with no more duties to discharge, 

             they sat, silhouetted in the night’s light:

         brothers and sisters had together made with brushes

             compositions as their whims had dictated.

         My diurnal mind

                 had changed its sitar’s pitch.

I was like one transported to a neighbouring planet,

                 watching through a telescope.

The deep feeling that gathered mass in my mind

       throughout creation I have dispersed.

    That moon, those stars, those trees – clusters of darkness –

       became one, became vast, became complete

               in my consciousness.

       That the cosmos has found me

               and in me has found itself

                   is surely a triumph for an idle poet.