You crossed ocean-waves to establish,

30

With resolute faith, green seats of power

On bare, inaccessible islands;

You bewitched dust, scaled peaks, wrote on stone

In leafy characters your battle

Tales; you spread your code over trackless

Wastes.

35

Sky, earth, sea were expressionless

Once, lacking the festival magic

Of the seasons. Your branches offered

Music its first shelter, made the songs

In which the restless wind – colouring

40

With kaleidoscopic melody

Her invisible body, edging

Her shawl with prismatic tune – first knew

Herself. You were first to describe

On earth’s clay canvas, by absorbing

45

Plastic power from the sun, a living

Image of beauty. You processed light’s

Hidden wealth to give colour to light.

When celestial dancing-nymphs shook

Their bracelets in the clouds, shattering

50

Those misty cups to rain down freshening

Nectar, you filled therewith your vessels

Of leaf and flower to clothe the earth

With perpetual youth.

O profound,

Silent tree, by restraining valour

55

With patience, you revealed creative

Power in its peaceful form. Thus we come

To your shade to learn the art of peace,

To hear the word of silence; weighed down

With anxiety, we come to rest

60

In your tranquil blue-green shade, to take

Into our souls life rich, life ever

Juvenescent, life true to earth, life

Omni-victorious. I am certain

My thoughts have borne me to your essence –

65

Where the same fire as the sun’s ritual

Fire of creation quietly assumes

In you cool green form. O sun-drinker,

The fire with which – by milking hundreds

Of centuries of days of sunlight –

70

You have filled your core, man has received

As your gift, making him world-mighty,

Greatly honoured, rival to the gods:

His shining strength, kindled by your flame,

Is the wonder of the universe

75

As it cuts through daunting obstacles.

Man, whose life is in you, who is soothed

By your cool shade, strengthened by your power,

Adorned by your garland – O tree, friend

Of man, dazed by your leafy flutesong

80

I speak today for him as I make

This verse-homage,

As I dedicate this offering

To you.

End of the year, of spring; wind, renouncing the world, leaves

The empty harvested fields with a farewell call to the bees –

Come, come; Caitra is going, shedding her leaves;

Earth spreads out her robe for summer languor beneath the trees;

5

But sajne-tresses dangle and mango-blossoms are not all shed,

And edging the woods ākanda lays its welcoming bed.

Come, come; in the drought there’ll be nothing of these

But the dance of their withered wraiths in the barren night, so come, bees.

I hear the song of the closing year like a flute in the rustling leaves,

10

So smear your wings with pollen’s chronicle before its fragrance flees.

Take all you can from flowers that summer heat will strew;

Cram the old year’s honey into the hives of the new.

Come, come; do not delay, new year bees –

Look what a wealth of parting gifts has been laid on the year as she leaves.

15

The fierce, destructive heat of Baiśākh will quickly seize

The dolan-capā buds that tremble now in the Caitra breeze.

Finish all that they have to give, let nothing stay;

As the season ends let everything go in an orgy of giving away.

Come, thieves of hidden honey; come now, bees -

20

The year has chosen to marry death and wants to give all as she leaves.

Wet with sea-water, with loose dripping hair

You sat on the rock shore.

Your flowing yellow skirt

Rolled and curved round your feet.

5

The tender dawn

Wrote in glistening gold on your naked breasts and unadorned skin.

With a makara-crested crown on my brow,

Holding in my right hand bow and arrow

I stood majestically

10

And said, ‘I have come from a far country.’

Starting from your stone seat in alarm,

You cried, ‘Why have you come?’

I said, ‘Do not be afraid:

I have come to pick pūjā-offerings in your flowering wood.’

15

You came with me, smiling your favour;

We picked jasmine and jātī and cāpā-flower.

We dressed a basket with flowers; we sat together

And jointly worshipped dancing Śiva.

Dawn-mist vanished; the light that flooded the sky

20

Showed Pārvatī smiling as she caught her husband’s eye.

When over the mountains appeared the evening star,

You sat alone indoors.

Blue silk girdled your waist; on your head, a mālatī-chaplet;

Round each of your wrists a bracelet.

25 I played my flute as I drew near;

‘I come as your guest,’ I said at your door.

You lit your lamp in dread and alarm,

Stared at me, said, ‘Why have you come?’

I said, ‘Do not fear me:

30

I have come to dress you in my finery.’

You smiled; I placed

A necklace of golden crescents across your breast.

I circled your bound-up hair with my own

Makara-crown.

35

Your companions lit lamps and marvelled;

The jewels on your body sparkled.

You sweetened and disturbed the spring night;

Your anklets jingled as you danced to my beat.

The full moon smiled; śiva and Pārvatī,

40

Light and shade, played in the waters of the sea.

I did not notice the ending of the day;

I found myself floating again in my boat on a twilit sea.

Suddenly the wind was against me:

Waves reared, a storm blew up fiercely.

45

Salt-water filled my boat,

And it sank with its cargo of jewels in the dark night.

Again but broken in fortune I came to wait at your door,

In stained rags, no splendour.

Opening the door of the Śiva temple I saw

50

That our basket of flowers still lay there.

I saw, lit by the restless festivity

Of the surging mêlée

Of moonlight dancing in the sea,

My patterns still painted on your meek lowered brow,

55

My necklace still on your breast.

Unobserved I saw, expressed

In your gestures and form,

The pitch and beats of my drum;

In your limbs the swing

60

Of my tālas delighting, singing, oscillating.

Hear my prayer, beautiful maiden;

Come before me with your lamp again.

This time I am no longer makara-crowned;

I no longer have bow and arrow in my hand;

65

Neither have I brought a basket for the gathering of flowers

In your wood by the sea where the south wind blows.

My vīnā is all I have with me.

Look at me, see whether you recognize me.

God, again and again through the ages you have sent messengers

To this pitiless world:

They have said, ‘Forgive everyone’, they have said, ‘Love one another –

Rid your hearts of evil.’

5

They are revered and remembered, yet still in these dark days

We turn them away with hollow greetings, from outside the doors of our houses.

And meanwhile I see secretive hatred murdering the helpless

Under cover of night;

And Justice weeping silently and furtively at power misused,

10

No hope of redress.

I see young men working themselves into a frenzy,

In agony dashing their heads against stone to no avail.

My voice is choked today; I have no music in my flute:

Black moonless night

15

Has imprisoned my world, plunged it into nightmare. And this is why,

With tears in my eyes, I ask:

Those who have poisoned your air, those who have extinguished your light,

Can it be that you have forgiven them? Can it be that you love them?

Kinu the milkman’s alley.

A ground-floor room in a two-storeyed house,

Slap on the road, windows barred.

Decaying walls, crumbling to dust in places

5

Or stained with damp.

Stuck on the door,

A picture of Gaeśa, Bringer of Success,

From the end of a bale of cloth.

Another creature apart from me lives in my room

10

For the same rent:

A lizard.

There’s one difference between him and me:

He doesn’t go hungry.

I get twenty-five rupees a month

15

As junior clerk in a trading office.

I’m fed at the Dattas’ house

For coaching their boy.

At dusk I go to Sealdah station,

Spend the evening there

20

To save the cost of light.

Engines chuffing,

Whistles shrieking,

Passengers scurrying,

Coolies shouting.

25

I stay till half past ten,

Then back to my dark, silent, lonely room.

A village on the Dhaleśvarī river, that’s where my aunt’s people live.

Her brother-in-law’s daughter –

She was due to marry my unfortunate self, everything was fixed.

30

The moment was indeed auspicious for her, no doubt of that –

For I ran away.

The girl was saved from me,

And I from her.

She did not come to this room, but she’s in and out of my mind all the time:

35

Dacca sari, vermilion on her forehead.

Pouring rain.

My tram costs go up,

But often as not my pay gets cut for lateness.

Along the alley

40

Mango skins and stones, jack-fruit pulp,

Fish-gills, dead kittens

And God knows what other rubbish

Pile up and rot.

My umbrella is like my depleted pay –

45

Full of holes.

My sopping office clothes ooze

Like a pious Vaiava.

Monsoon darkness

Sticks in my damp room

50

Like an animal caught in a trap,

Lifeless and numb.

Day and night I feel strapped bodily

On to a half-dead world.

At the corner of the alley lives Kāntabābu –

55

Long hair carefully parted,

Large eyes,

Cultivated tastes.

He fancies himself on the cornet:

The sound of it comes in gusts

60

On the foul breeze of the alley –

Sometimes in the middle of the night,

Sometimes in the early morning twilight,

Sometimes in the afternoon

When sun and shadows glitter.

65

Suddenly this evening

He starts to play runs in Sindhu-Bārōyā rāg,

And the whole sky rings

With eternal pangs of separation.

At once the alley is a lie

70

False and vile as the ravings of a drunkard,

And I feel that nothing distinguishes Haripada the clerk

From the Emperor Akbar.

Torn umbrella and royal parasol merge,

Rise on the sad music of a flute

75

Towards one heaven.

The music is true

Where, in the everlasting twilight-hour of my wedding,

The Dhalesvarī river flows,

Its banks deeply shaded by tamāl-trees,

80

And she who waits in the courtyard

Is dressed in a Dacca sari, vermilion on her forehead.

When I called you in your garden

Mango blooms were rich in fragrance –

Why did you remain so distant,

Keep your door so tightly fastened?

5

Blossoms grew to ripe fruit-clusters –

You rejected my cupped handfuls,

Closed your eyes to perfectness.

In the fierce harsh storms of Baiśākh

Golden ripened fruit fell tumbling –

10

‘Dust,’ I said, ‘defiles such offerings:

Let your hands be heaven to them.’

Still you showed no friendliness.

Lampless were your doors at evening,

Pitch-black as I played my vīnā.

15

How the starlight twanged my heartstrings!

How I set my vīnā dancing!

You showed no responsiveness.

Sad birds twittered sleeplessly,

Calling, calling lost companions.

20

Gone the right time for our union –

Low the moon while still you brooded,

Sunk in lonely pensiveness.

Who can understand another!

Heart cannot restrain its passion.

25

I had hoped that some remaining

Tear-soaked memories would sway you,

Stir your feet to lightsomeness.

Moon fell at the feet of morning,

Loosened from night’s fading necklace.

30

While you slept, O did my vīnā

Lull you with its heartache? Did you

Dream at least of happiness?

Accept my homage, Earth, as I make my last obeisance of the day,

Bowed at the altar of the setting sun.

You are mighty, and knowable only by the mighty;

You counterpoise charm and severity;

5

Compounded of male and female

You sway human life with unbearable conflict.

The cup that your right hand fills with nectar

Is smashed by your left;

Your playground rings with your mocking laughter.

10

You make heroism hard to attain;

You make excellence costly;

You are not merciful to those who deserve mercy.

Ceaseless warfare is hidden in your plants:

Their crops and fruits are victory-wreaths won from struggle.

15

Land and sea are your cruel battlefields -

Life proclaims its triumph in the face of death.

Civilization rests its foundation upon your cruelty:

Ruin is the penalty exacted for any shortcoming.

In the first chapter of your history Demons were supreme –

20

Harsh, barbaric, brutish;

Their clumsy thick fingers lacked art;

With clubs and mallets in hand they rioted over sea and mountain.

Their fire and smoke churned sky into nightmare;

They controlled the inanimate world;

25

They had blind hatred of Life.

Gods came next; by their spells they subdued the Demons –

The insolence of Matter was crushed.

Mother Earth spread out her green mantle;

On the eastern peaks stood Dawn;

30

On the western sea-shore Evening descended,

Dispensing peace from her chalice.

The shackled Demons were humbled;

But primal barbarity has kept its grip on your history.

It can suddenly invade order with anarchy –

35

From the dark recesses of your being

It can suddenly emerge like a snake.

Its madness is in your blood.

The spells of the Gods resound through sky and air and forest,

Sung solemnly day and night, high and low;

40

But from regions under your surface

Sometimes half-tame Demons raise their serpent-hoods –

They goad you into wounding your own creatures,

Into ruining your own creation.

At your footstool mounted on evil as well as good

45

To your vast and terrifying beauty,

I offer today my scarred life’s homage.

I touch your huge buried store of life and death

Feel it throughout my body and mind.

The corpses of numberless generations of men lie heaped in your dust:

50

I too shall add a few fistfuls, the final measure of my joys and pains:

Add them to that name-absorbing, shape-absorbing, fame-absorbing

Silent pile of dust.

Earth, clamped into rock or flitting into the clouds;

Rapt in meditation in the silence of a ring of mountains

55

Or noisy with the roar of sleepless sea-waves;

You are beauty and abundance, terror and famine.

On the one hand, acres of crops, bent with ripeness,

Brushed free of dew each morning by delicate sunbeams –

With sunset, too, sending through their rippling greenness

60

Joy, joy;

On the other, in your dry, barren, sickly deserts

The dance of ghosts amid strewn animal-bones.

I have watched your Baiśākh-storms swoop like black hawks

Ripping the horizon with lightning-beaks:

65

The whole sky roars like a rampant lion,

Lashing tail whipping up trees

Till they crash to the ground in despair;

Thatched roofs break loose,

Race before the wind like convicts from their chains.

70

But I have known, in Phālgun, the warm south breeze

Spread all the rhapsodies and soliloquies of love

In its scent of mango-blossom;

Seen the foaming wine of heaven overflow from the moon’s goblet;

Heard coppices suddenly submit to wind’s importunity

75

And burst into breathless rustling.

You are gentle and fierce, ancient and renewing;

You emerged from the sacrificial fire of primal creation

Immeasurably long ago.

Your cyclic pilgrimage is littered with meaningless remnants of history;

80

You abandon your creations without regret; strew them layer upon layer,

Forgotten.

Guardian of Life, you nurture us

In little cages of fragmented time,

Boundaries to all our games, limits to all renown.

85

Today I stand before you without illusion:

I do not ask at your door for immortality

For the many days and nights I have spent weaving you garlands.

But if I have given true value

To my small seat in a tiny segment of one of the eras

90

That open and close like blinks in the millions of years

Of your solar round;

If I have won from the trials of life a scrap of success;

Then mark my brow with a sign made from your clay -

To be rubbed out in time by the night

95

In which all signs fade into the final unknown.

O aloof, ruthless Earth,

Before I am utterly forgotten

Let me place my homage at your feet.

When, in that turbid first age,

The Creator, displeased with himself,

Destroyed his new creations again and again;

In those days of his shaking and shaking his head in irritation

5

The angry sea

Snatched you from the breast of Mother Asia,

Africa –

Consigned you to the guard of immense trees,

To a fastness dimly lit.

10

There in your hidden leisure

You collected impenetrable secrets,

Learnt the arcane languages of water and earth and sky;

Nature’s invisible magic

Worked spells in your unconscious mind.

15

You ridiculed Horror

By making your own appearance hideous;

You cowed Fear

By heightening your menacing grandeur,

By dancing to the drumbeats of chaos.

20

Alas, shadowy Africa,

Under your black veil

Your human aspect remained unknown,

Blurred by the murk of contempt.

Others came with iron manacles,

25

With clutches sharper than the claws of your own wild wolves:

Slavers came,

With an arrogance more benighted than your own dark jungles.

Civilization’s barbarous greed

Flaunted its naked inhumanity.

30

You wailed wordlessly, muddied the soil of your steamy jungles

With blood and tears;

The hobnailed boots of your violators

Stuck gouts of that stinking mud

Forever on your stained history.

35

Meanwhile across the sea in their native parishes

Temple-bells summoned your conquerors to prayer,

Morning and evening, in the name of a loving god.

Mothers dandled babies in their laps;

Poets raised hymns to beauty.

40

Today as the air of the West thickens,

Constricted by imminent evening storm;

As animals emerge from secret lairs

And proclaim by their ominous howls the closing of the day;

Come, poet of the end of the age,

45

Stand in the dying light of advancing nightfall

At the door of despoiled Africa

And say, ‘Forgive, forgive – ’

In the midst of murderous insanity,

May these be your civilization’s last, virtuous words.

I saw, in the twilight of flagging consciousness,

My body floating down an ink-black stream

With its mass of feelings, with its varied emotion,

With its many-coloured life-long store of memories,

5

With its flutesong. And as it drifted on and on

Its outlines dimmed; and among familiar tree-shaded

Villages on the banks, the sounds of evening

Worship grew faint, doors were closed, lamps

Were covered, boats were moored to the ghāts. Crossings

10

From either side of the stream stopped; night thickened;

From the forest-branches fading birdsong offered

Self-sacrifice to a huge silence.

Dark formlessness settled over all diversity

Of land and water. As shadow, as particles, my body

15

Fused with endless night. I came to rest

At the altar of the stars. Alone, amazed, I stared

Upwards with hands clasped and said: ‘Sun, you have removed

Your rays: show now your loveliest, kindliest form

That I may see the Person who dwells in me as in you.’

King of Death, your fatal messenger came to me

Suddenly from your durbar. He took me to your vast courtyard.

My eyes saw darkness; I did not see the invisible light

In the depths and layers of your darkness, the light

5

That is the source of the universe; my vision

Was clouded by my own darkness. That a great hymn

To light should swell from the inmost cavern of my being

And reach to the realm of light at the edge of creation –

That was why you sent for me. I sang,

10

Aiming in my melody to bring to the theatre of physical

Existence the poetic glory of the spirit.

But my vīnā could not play the music of destruction,

Could not compose a rāga of silent wrath;

My heart could not engender a serene image of the terrible.

15

And so you sent me back. The day will come

When my poetry, silently falling like a ripened fruit

From the weight of its fullness of joy,

Shall be offered up to eternity. And then at last

I shall pay you in full, finish my journey, meet your call.

One in the morning - waking in a flurry,

Fresh sleep ruptured. The clock by his pillow

Had roused him brusquely with its harsh alarm.

His time in the house was finished.

5

Now, in the cold of Aghrān,

At the call of merciless duty,

He must leave family, go to an alien land.

All that was discardable for now

Would remain behind:

10

The rickety divan with its grimy bedspread;

The broken-armed easy-chair;

In the bedroom,

Balanced on a leaning tepoy

A spattered old mirror;

15

In a corner, a wooden cupboard

Stuffed with worm-eaten ledger-books;

Stacked against the walls,

Piles of outdated almanacs.

In a niche, a tray of withered, abandoned pūjā-flowers:

20

All of this there in the feeble lamplight,

Wrapped in shadow, motionless, meaningless.

The taxi brashly honked its presence at the door.

The deeply sleeping town

Stayed aloof.

25

The distant police-station-bell rang three-and-a-half.

Gazing up at the sky,

Sighing deeply,

He invoked divine protection for his long journey.

Then he padlocked the door of his house.

30

Dragging his unwilling body,

He moved forward, paused –

Above him, bats’ wings

Swept across the black emptiness of the sky

Like shadowy spectres of the cruel fate

35

That was leading his life into uncertainty.

By the temple, the aged banyan-tree

Had been swallowed by the night as by a snake.

By the bank round the newly-dug tank

Where labourers’ dwellings had sprung up

40

Roofed with date-palm leaves, faint lights flickered.

Near them, the scattered bricks of a tumbledown kiln.

Images of life, outlines blurred

By the ink-wash of night –

Farmers busy all day in the fields cutting paddy;

45

Girls gossiping, arms round each other’s necks;

Boys, released from school,

Scampering raucously;

A sack-laden ox cajoled and shoved to morning market;

Herd-boys floating across to fields on the other side of the river

50

By clinging to the necks of buffalo –

The ever-familiar play of life as the taxi rushed the traveller

Through the dark, but before its dawn arousal.

As he sped past a weed-filled pond

The scent of its water

55

Evoked the cool, tender embrace of many days and nights.

But on went the car by the winding route

To the station:

Rows of houses on either side –

People inside them comfortably sleeping.

60

Through gaps between the trees in the dark mango-groves

The morning-star could be glimpsed,

Honouring the brow of silence

With the mark of infinity.

On the traveller went,

65

Alone among sleeping thousands,

While the car that hastened him echoed far and wide

Down the empty streets,

Callous in its sound.

The terrace where I sit is screened

From the springtime dawn sunshine.

What a boon to have leisure –

No pressing tasks crowding in upon me yet;

5

No hordes of people pestering me,

Trampling over my time.

I sit and write:

The sweetness of a free morning collects in my pen-nib

Like the juice that drips from a slit in a date-palm.

10

Our peacock has come to sit on the railing next to me,

Tail spread downwards.

He finds safe refuge with me –

No unkind keeper comes to him here with shackles.

Outside, unripe mangoes dangle from branches;

15

Lemon trees are loaded with lemons;

A single kurci-tree seems surprised

By its excess of flowers.

The peacock bends his head to this side and that

With unthinking natural restlessness.

20

His detached stare

Pays not the slightest attention to the marks in my note-book.

If the letters were insects he would look:

He would not then regard a poet as utterly useless.

I smile at the peacock’s solemn indifference,

25

Observe my writing through his eyes;

And indeed the same aloofness

Is in the entire blue sky,

In every leaf of the tree that is hung with green mangoes,

In the buzzing of the wild bee-hive in our tamarind-tree.

30

I reflect that in ancient Mohenjodaro,

On a similarly idle late Caitra morning,

A poet must have written poems,

And universal nature took no account whatsoever.

The peacock is still to be found in the balance-sheet of life,

35

And green mangoes still hang from branches;

Their value in the gamut of nature from blue sky to green woods

Will not diminish at all.

But the poet of Mohenjodaro is completely excluded

From the wayside grass, from the dark night’s fireflies.

40

I expand my consciousness

Into endless time and vast earth;

I absorb the huge detachment of nature’s own meditations

Into my own mind;

I regard the letters in my note-book

45

As autumnal flocks of insects –

I conclude that if I were to tear out the pages today

I would merely be advancing the ultimate cremation awaiting them anyway.

Suddenly I hear a voice –

‘Grandfather, are you writing?’

50

Someone else has come – not a peacock this time

But Sunayanī, as she is called in the house,

But whom I call Śunāyanī because she listens so well.

She has the right to hear my poems before anyone else.

I reply, ‘This won’t appeal to your sensitive ears:

55

It’s vers libre.’

A wave of furrows plays across her forehead -

‘I’ll put up with it,’ she says,

Then adds a little flattery:

‘Prose, when you recite it,

60

Can take on the colour of poetry.’

And she throws her arms round my neck and hugs me.

I quip, ‘Are you trying to transfer some of that poetic colour

From my throat into your arms?’

She answers, ‘That’s not how a poet should talk:

65

I’m the one who passes the touch of poetry into your voice:

I may even have awoken song.’

I listen in silence, too happy to reply.

I say to myself – The aloofness of nature

Is constant, like a mountain it looks down loftily

70

From numberless accumulated years.

But my śunāyanī,

Morning star,

Can lightly and suddenly scale its immensity;

And time’s great disregard surrenders to that instant.

75

Poet of Mohenjodaro, your evening star

Has passed through its setting

To surmount again the crest of morning

Here in my life.

New deliverer –

The new age eagerly looks

To the path of your coming.

What message have you brought

5

To the world? In the mortal arena

What seat has been prepared for you?

What new form of address

Have you brought to be used

In the worship of God in Man? What song of heaven

10

Have you heard before coming?

What great weapon for the fighting of evil

Have you placed in the quiver, bound to the waist

Of the young warrior?

Will you, perhaps, where a tide of blood besmirches your path,

15

Where there is malice and discord,

Construct a dam of peace,

A place of meeting and pilgrimage?

Who can say if there is written on your forehead

The invisible mark

20

Of the triumph of some great striving?

Today we search for your unwritten name:

You seem to be just off the stage,

Like an imminent star of morning.

Infants bring again and again

25

A message of reassurance –

They seem to promise deliverance, light, dawn.

Satanic machine, you enable man to fly.

Land and sea had fallen to his power:

All that was left was the sky.

God has given as a gift a bird’s two wings.

5

From the flash of feathery line and colour

Spiritual joy springs.

Birds are companions to the clouds: blue space

And great winds and brightly-coloured birds

Are all of the same race.

10

The rhythms in the life and play of birds belong

To the wind; from the sky’s music comes

Their energy and song.

Thus each dawn throughout the forests of the earth

Light, when it wakes, unites with birdsong

15

In one harmonious birth.

In the great peace beneath the immense sky,

The dancing wings of birds quiver

Like wavelets rippling by.

Age after age through birds the life-spirit speaks:

20

It is carried by birds along tracks of air

To far-flung forests and peaks.

Today what do we see? And what is its meaning?

The banner of arrogance has taken wing,

Proud and overweening.

25

This thing has not been blessed by the life-divinity.

The sun disowns it, neither does the moon

Feel any affinity.

In the brutal roaring of an aeroplane we hear

Incompatibility with sky,

30

Destruction of atmosphere.

High among the clouds, in the heavens, its din

Adds new blasphemous grating laughter

To man’s catalogue of sin.

I feel the age we live in is drawing to a close –

35

Upheavals threaten, gather the pace

Of a storm that nothing slows.

Hatred and envy swell to violent conflagration:

Panic spreads down from the skies,

From their growing devastation.

40

If nowhere in the sky is there left a space

For gods to be seated, then, Indra,

Thunderer, may you place

At the end of this history your direst instruction:

A last full stop written in the fire

45

Of furious total destruction.

Hear the prayer of an earth that is stricken with pain:

In the green woods, O may the birds

Sing supreme again.

I come to the station morning and evening,

I love to watch the coming and going –

Hubbub of passengers pressing for tickets,

Down-trains boarded, up-trains boarded,

5

Ebb and flow like an estuarine river.

Some people sitting there ever since morning,

Other people missing their train by a minute.

Day – Night – clanking and rumbling,

Trainloads of people thundering forth.

10

Changing direction at every moment,

Eastwards, westwards, rapid as storms.

The essence of all these moving pictures

Brings to my mind the image of language,

Forever forming, forever unforming,

15

Continuous coming, continuous going.

Crowds can fill the stage in an instant –

The guard’s flag waves the train’s departure

And suddenly everyone disappears somewhere.

The hurry disguises their joys and sorrows,

20

Masks the pressure of gains and losses.

Bho – Bho – blows the whistle,

Ruled by the clock’s division of time.

No one can bear to wait for a second,

Some get aboard, some stay behind.

25

Succeeding, failing, boarding or remaining,

Nothing but picture after picture.

Whatever catches the eye for a moment

Is erased the next moment after.

A whimsical game, a self-forgetting

30

Ever-dissolving sequence –

Each canvas ripped, its shreds discarded

To pile up along the roadside,

Detritus lifted hither and thither

By tired hot summer breezes.

35

‘Hold back, hold back,’ rings out the clamour

Of passengers left stranded –

Next thing they have also vanished,

Chasing, running, wailing.

Clang – Clang – sounds the tocsin,

40

Time for good-bye, off goes the train.

Passengers leaning out of the windows,

Waving until they are whisked away.

The world is merely the work of a painter,

This is the truth I have accepted –

45

Not made by a craftsman, beaten and moulded,

Not a thing the hand can grip hold of,

But an insubstantial visual sequence.

Age follows age never losing momentum,

A stream of forming and passing pictures.

50

Alone in the midst of the to-ing and fro-ing

I watch the constant flux of the station.

One – brush – the picture is painted,

Another brush blacks it out again.

Who are those coming from one direction?

55

Who are those floating the other way?

Frown and bolt the door and glare

With disapproving eyes,

Behold my outcaste love, the scourge

Of all proprieties.

5

To sit where orthodoxy rules

Is not her wish at all –

Maybe I shall seat her on

A grubby patchwork shawl.

The upright villagers, who like

10

To buy and sell all day,

Do not notice one whose dress

Is drab and dusty-grey.

So keen on outward show, the form

Beneath can pass them by -

15

Come my darling let there be

None but you and I.

When suddenly you left your house

To love along the way,

You brought from somewhere lotus honey

20

In your pot of clay.

You came because you heard I like

Love simple, unadorned –

An earthen jar is not a thing

My hands have ever scorned.

25

No bells upon your ankles so

No purpose in a dance -

Your blood has all the rhythms

That are needed to entrance.

You are ashamed to be ashamed

30

By lack of ornament -

No amount of dust can spoil

Your plain habiliment.

Herd-boys crowd around you, street-dogs

Follow by your side –

35

Gipsy-like upon your pony

Easily you ride.

You cross the stream with dripping sari

Tucked up to your knees –

My duty to the straight and narrow

40

Flies at sights like these.

You take your basket to the fields

For herbs on market-day –

You fill your hem with peas for donkeys

Loose beside the way.

45

Rainy days do not deter you –

Mud caked to your toes

And kacu-leaf upon your head,

On your journey goes.

I find you when and where I choose,

50

Whenever it pleases me -

No fuss or preparation: tell me,

Who will know but we?

Throwing caution to the winds,

Spurned by all around,

55

Come, my outcaste love, O let us

Travel, freedom-bound.

No pause in the passage of the Yaka’s yearning on towards Alakā,

Borne by impatient winds,

Following the hazy horizon’s rain-racked beckoning

From mountain to mountain,

5

Forest to forest.

A careering crane’s-wing-flap of joy, tuned to the music

Of the heart-rending sighs of the shadow-cast rains,

Flies to ever-far heaven

Along with his longing;

10

A high beauty forever accompanies his deep pain.

A huge separation dwells at the heart of onward time

That tries door after future door,

Life after future life

In an endless attempt to close its distance from perfection.

15

The world is its poem, a rolling sonorous poem

In which a remote presage of joy annotates vast sorrow.

O blessed Yaksa -

The fire of creation is in his yearning.

Where silently his beloved waits, watching the minutes,

20

The long days move.

Her room is closed: no road to look out on –

Her hope,

Worn out by waiting, lies in the dust.

The poet has given her pining no language,

25

Her love no pilgrimage –

For her, the unspeaking Yaksa city

Is a meaningless prison of riches.

Permanent flowers, eternal moonlight –

Mortal existence knows no grief as great as this:

30

Never to awake from dreams.

God has granted that the Yaka may pound her door with yearning.

He longs to sweep his beloved

Away on the surging stream of his heart,

Away from the motionless mounts of heaven

35

Into the light of this many-coloured, shadow-dappled mortal world.

Ink-black clouds banked in the north-east:

The force of the coming storm latent in the forest,

Waiting as quietly as the bats hanging

In the branches. Darkness blanketing

5

Dense leaves that are still and silent

As a crouching tiger intent

On its prey. Flocks of crows

Suddenly aloft in a craze

Of fear, like tattered

10

Shreds of darkness littered

Over the void of a cosmos

Broken into chaos.

Where have you come from today in the guise

Of a storm, your unbound hair scented with past wild flowers?

15

In my youth you came once before on another

Day, first messenger

Of the freshly shining Spring.

You brought the first flowering

Jasmine of Ãsārh, you were indescribably lovely.

20

You blossomed in my heart,

In my boundless wonder: I do not know from what

Radiant world unseen

You came into the light of vision.

You meet me today by a path no less mysterious.

25

How potent your face

Appears in the brief lightning-flame!

How novel its expressions seem!

Is the path by which you come today

The same as I knew before?

30

I see

Sometimes its faint outline;

Sometimes not the slightest hint or glimmer can be seen.

You have brought in your basket flowers recalled or forgotten,

But others I have never hitherto known;

35

And in your fragrance you carry

The message of a season new to me.

A deathly-dark suffusion

Obscures its coming revelation.

O honour me

40

With its garland, place it around my neck in this dimly

Starlit palace of silence. Let this our last

Tryst

Carry me into the infinite night

Beyond all earthly limit;

45

Let it make me one

With the not known.

The sinking sun extends its late afternoon glow.

The wind has dozed away.

An ox-cart laden with paddy-straw bound

For far-off Nadiyā market crawls across the empty open land,

5

Calf following, tied on behind.

Over towards the Rājbamśī quarter Banamālī Pandit’s

Eldest son sits

On the edge of a tank, fishing all day.

From overhead comes the cry

10

Of wild duck making their way

From the dried-up river’s

Sandbanks towards the Black Lake in search of snails.

Along the side of newly-cut sugar-cane

Fields, in the fresh air of trees washed by rain,

15

Through the wet grass,

Two friends pass

Slowly, serenely –

They came on a holiday,

Suddenly bumped into each other in the village.

20

One of them is newly married – the delight

Of their conversation seems to have no limit.

All around, in the maze

Of winding paths in the wood, bhāi-flowers

Have come into bloom,

25

Their scent dispensing the balm

Of Caitra. From the jārul-trees nearby

A koel-bird strains its voice in dull, demented melody.

A telegram comes:

‘Finland pounded by Soviet bombs.’

O my day-break sparrow –

In my last moments of sleepiness,

While there is still some darkness,

Here you are tapping on the window-pane,

5

Asking for news

And then dancing and twittering

Just as your whim takes you.

Your pluckily bobbing tail

Cocks a snook at all restrictions.

10

When magpie-robins chirrup at dawn,

Poets tip them.

When a hidden koel-bird hoots all day

Its same unvarying fifth,

So high is its rating

15

It gets the applause of Kālidāsa

Ahead of all other birds.

You couldn’t care less –

You never keep to the scale –

To enter Kālidāsa’s room

20

And chatter

And mess up his metres

Amuses you greatly.

Whenever you perch on a pillar

At the court of King Vikramāditya

25

And bards spout,

What are their songs to you?

You are closer to the poet’s mistress:

You happily join in her round-the-clock prattle.

You do not dance

30

Under contract from the Spring –

You strut

Any old how, no discipline at all.

You do not turn up politely

At woodland singing-contests;

35

You gossip with the light in broad vernacular –

Its meaning

Is not in the dictionary –

Only your own throbbing little chest

Knows it.

40

Slanting your neck to right or left,

How you play about –

So busy all day for no apparent reason,

Scrabbling at the ground,

Bathing in the dust –

45

You are so unkempt

The dirt doesn’t show on you, worry you at all.

You build your nest in the corner of the ceiling

Of even a king’s chamber,

You are so utterly brazen.

50

Whenever I spend painful, sleepless nights,

I always look forward

To your first tap-tap at my door.

The brave, nimble, simple

Life’s message that you bring –

55

Give it to me,

That the sunlight by which all creatures dwell

May call me,

O my day-break sparrow.

When I woke up this morning

There was a rose in my flower-vase:

The question came to me –

The power that brought you through cyclic time

5

To final beauty,

Dodging at every turn

The torment of ugly incompleteness,

Is it blind, is it abstracted,

Does it, like a world-denying sannyāsi,

10

Make no distinction between beauty and the opposite of beauty?

Is it merely rational,

Merely physical,

Lacking in sensibility?

There are some who argue

15

That grace and ugliness take equal seats

At the court of Creation,

That neither is refused entry

By the guards.

As a poet I cannot enter such arguments –

20

I can only gaze at the universe

In its full, true form,

At the millions of stars in the sky

Carrying their huge harmonious beauty –

Never breaking their rhythm

25

Or losing their tune,

Never deranged

And never stumbling –

I can only gaze and see, in the sky,

The spreading layers

30

Of a vast, radiant, petalled rose.

Lazily afloat on time’s stream,

My mind turns to the sky.

As I cross its empty expanses

Shadowy pictures form in my eyes

5

Of the many ages of the long past

And the many peoples

That have hurtled forward,

Confident of victory.

The Pāhāns came, greedy for empire;

10

And the Moghuls,

Brandishing victory-banners,

The wheels of their conquering chariots

Raising webs of dust.

I look at the sky –

15

No sign of them now today:

Through the ages

The light of sunrise and sunset

Continues to redden the sky’s pure blue

At dawn and dusk.

20

Then others came,

Along tracks of iron

In fire-breathing vehicles –

The mighty British,

Scattering their power

25

Beneath the same sky.

I know that time will flow along their road too

Float off somewhere the land-encircling web of their empire.

I know their merchandise-bearing soldiers

Will not make the slightest impression

30

On planetary paths.

But the earth when I look at it

Makes me aware

Of the hubbub of a huge concourse

Of ordinary people

35

Led along many paths and in various groups

By man’s common urges,

From age to age, through life and death.

They go on pulling at oars,

Guiding the rudder,

40

Sowing seeds in the fields.

Cutting ripe paddy.

They work –

In cities and in fields.

Imperial canopies collapse,

45

Battle-drums stop,

Victory-pillars, like idiots, forget what their own words mean;

Battle-crazed eyes and blood-smeared weapons

Live on only in children’s stories,

Their menace veiled.

50

But people work –

Here and in other regions,

Bengal, Bihar, Orissa,

By rivers and shores,

Punjab, Bombay, Gujurat –

55

Filling the passage of their lives with a rumbling and thundering

Woven by day and by night –

The sonorous rhythm

Of Life’s liturgy in all its pain and elation,

Gloom and light.

60

Over the ruins of hundreds of empires,

The people work.

Every day in the early morning this faithful dog

Sits quietly beside my chair

For as long as I do not acknowledge his presence

By the touch of my hand.

5

The moment he receives this small recognition,

Waves of happiness leap through his body.

In the inarticulate animal world

Only this creature

Has pierced through good and bad and seen

10

Complete man,

Has seen him for whom

Life may be joyfully given,

That object of a free outpouring of love

Whose consciousness points the way

15

To the realm of infinite consciousness.

When I see that dumb heart

Revealing its own humility

Through total self-surrender,

I feel unequal to the worth

20

His simple perception has found in the nature of man.

The wistful anxiety in his mute gaze

Understands something he cannot explain:

It directs me to the true meaning of man in the universe.

Today I imagine the words of countless

Languages to be suddenly fetterless –

After long incarceration

In the fortress of grammar, suddenly up in rebellion,

5

Maddened by the stamp-stamping

Of unmitigated regimented drilling.

They have jumped the constraints of sentence

To seek free expression in a world rid of intelligence,

Snapping the chains of sense in sarcasm

10

And ridicule of literary decorum.

Liberated thus, their queer

Postures and cries appeal only to the ear.

They say, ‘We who were born of the gusty tuning

Of the earth’s first outbreathing

15

Came into our own as soon as the blood’s beat

Impelled man’s mindless vitality to break into dance in his throat.

We swelled his infant voice with the babble

Of the world’s first poem, the original prattle

Of existence. We are kin to the wild torrents

20

That pour from the mountains to announce

The month of Śrāban: we bring to human habitations

Nature’s incantations – ’

The festive sound of leaves rustling in forests,

The sound that measures the rhythm of approaching tempests,

25

The great night-ending sound of day-break –

From these sound-fields man has captured words, curbed them like a breakneck

Stallion in complex webs of order

To enable him to pass on his messages to the distant lands of the future.

By riding words that are bridled and reined

30

Man has quickened

The pace of time’s slow clocks:

The speed of his reason has cut through material blocks,

Explored recalcitrant mysteries;

With word-armies

35

Drawn into battle-lines he resists the perpetual assault of imbecility.

But sometimes they slip like robbers into realms of fantasy,

Float on ebbing waters

Of sleep, free of barriers,

Lashing any sort of flotsam and jetsam into metre.

40

From them, the free-roving mind fashions

Artistic creations

Of a kind that do not conform to an orderly

Universe – whose threads are tenuous, loose, arbitrary,

Like a dozen puppies brawling,

45

Scrambling at each other’s necks to no purpose or meaning:

Each bites another –

The squeal and yelp blue murder,

But their bites and yelps carry no true import of enmity,

Their violence is bombast, empty fury.

50

In my mind I imagine words thus shot of their meaning,

Hordes of them running amuck all day,

As if in the sky there were nonsense nursery syllables booming –

Horselum, bridelum, ridelum, into the fray.