Two Glistening Wheels, a Bell and a Tiffin-Carrier
Krishna Kalpit Vishwa Hindi Sammelan The language in which we wail And shed tears They ride on it And fly up above those clouds One says I did not go Let me be counted among the tyagis Another says I did manage to Let me be regarded among the bhaagis One was tossing down the list-of-contents from the sky In the parched fields of Hindi-Patti A latest Hindi sheikh Had set up a harem of government committees Exiting one To enter the other Someone was being wrecked at principal The other at interest and the third in etiquette One was screaming: All life insult has been my lot Now let some honour be conferred on me too One was saying: Let me be given all the dough Into dollars shall I transcreate them The other said, no, I am the only one to play The unattainable veena An imperialist Was busy garlanding a communalist A woman, with the blood of the guiltless Went on signing strange advertisements A freakish soiree, this A piffling singer Was singing obscene bhajans An editor was looking for Repose at the shoes Of the foreign minister A reporter, in a Shastri-Bhavan drawer Fixed his permanent address One used to say I shall breathe my last in Italia One wished to be irrelevant in Spanish One would play hide and seek With an almost dead language One was sulking One was being sweet-talked One professor At Jawaharlal Nehru University Harlequin, ludicrous Spewing commentaries on Muktibodh One deadbody Was glued to the wings of the British Airways The other Had already chaired every Literary Circle, every Goshti of the future One soul had entered Next year’s every representative body A perplexing tableaux of globalization this In some strange brothel in Soho Someone was hoisting the Hindi langot And in the distant East In some dry, grainy desert village In a language in which the child stammered That used to be called Hindi Wherefore all righteous opposition? Shall only beggars of the future Barter and transact in this great language? A poet of this language Cuts into two his liver and regrets Chisels on with his poetry Tearing off page after page after page… —————– Tale of the Bicycle More humane than a human Is traipsing travelling hope A possibility, standstill The supple fingers of a flying kite The limber legs, their unwritten tale One can pick-out from the shadow of that kite Ganesh on mooshik Shivji on bayl Durga on sinh Kartik on mayur Indra on hathi Saraswati on hans Lakshmi on ullu Yamraj on bhaisa Mahajan in BMW President in airplane Mullah Nasiruddin on donkey Crowd in a train But on a bicycle, every single time a human being A workman—weary, spent A school going kid Or in the streets of Patna The wife of jankavi Laldhuyan Tied up sewing-machine on the carrier Cycle is the only conveyance in this wide world Which is not a vahan of any God There cannot be any memorial song for the cycle It is the only machine running towards life The oldest friendship between humans and machines Made into poetry by the Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan And Vittoria De Sica enacted it in his film Through the dank and tortuous alleyways of poverty, pain and humiliation Where human beings live Till that point, only cycles can ply From the site of the event, one cannot come to the conclusion That the cycle was used against humanity When dead-bodies were removed and gunpowder-smoke cleared itself The glistening twin wheels of the cycle lay Right at the centre of the road The bell cast far away, adrift And that tiffin-carrier, in which—bomb not roti, That disappeared mischievously Till the end: the story of a bicycle Is the story of a man ——————– The poems first appeared in tirchhispelling.wordpress.com Translation: HUG adminhumanitiesunderground.org