Translations: Tarun Bhartiya
____________________________________
Raghuvir Sahay
Laugh Laugh Laugh Instantly
Laugh – you are being watched,
Laugh but not at yourself because its bitterness
Would be noticed and you would not survive it
Laugh in a way that your happiness does not show
As it would be suspected that you do not participate in the remorse
And you would not survive it
While laughing, don’t let anyone know who you are laughing at
Let them all believe that like them you laugh
A defeated laugh of intimacy
Just as they laugh instead of speaking
As long as that mighty round dome reverberates you can
Speak to yourself
When the echo is about to fade laugh again
Because if found quiet, you shall be indicted for resistance
If you laugh at the end then all will laugh and you can be safe
Laugh but be careful of the jokes
Jokes have words
And words may have meanings ascribed by some person a century ago
It is better to laugh while talking
So that the talk looses all significance
And laugh on those compulsory moments
Like the assault on the destitute by the privileged
When no one can do a thing
Except for that destitute
And even he often laughs
Laugh laugh laugh instantly
Laugh before they leave
While shaking their hands
With pleading eyes
Laugh and remind them
That you had laughed yesterday
Coming Danger
In this shameful and defeated age
Go and find a mind
Which does not flatter out of habit
Go and find poverty
Which asks nothing for itself
And let it for once stare you in your eyes
Do it right now, for the people have started flourishing
Women would drink, men would eat – Ramesh
There would come an age like this- Ramesh
No one would have any point of view – Ramesh
There would be anger but no resistance
Except for petitions – Ramesh
There would be Danger and Danger’s warning bell
And the King would ring it – Ramesh
Your Laugh
The poor are being oppressed
you said and laughed
Democracy on its death bed
you said and laughed
Everyone is corrupt
you said and laughed
Everyone despondent
you said and laughed
So secure you must be
I thought
Suddenly finding me alone
you laughed
***
Dhoomil
Lying Next To That Woman
For the first time I felt
That nudity
Militates
Against blindness
Lying next to that woman
I felt that where hatred and
Candles have proved useless
And the shadows of the melted
Words have turned into faces
Of menacing animals, my
Poems survive on a diet of
Mud and meat
To rub out and
Obliterate time
It is not enough to have bouncing bodies
While our faces face
Leaking pots in the kitchen
And night
Does not become a path
When water melons are being slaughtered inside us
But our heads have
Turned to stone on the pillows
Lying next to that woman
I have felt that home is
Built on curses of small comforts
And where it is forbidden to
Walk with shoes
This is grass i.e. green fear
Enforcing my thoughts
Is it not nice
That my neighbour has lost
All his teeth
Like frostbitten peas
Movements in his thighs
Have collapsed
And termites
Have eaten through his ocular health
Lying next to that woman
(when suddenly
the pumps fell silent
in front of dingy houses)
I felt that to turn
Breathlessly into a forest next to a swamp
Is not a man’s habit but his petty helplessness
And there lives a coward mind inside me
Which not only protects
But is heir to my buttons
***
Asad Zaidi
East of West
The poor knows nothing beyond his village
The one who is less poor has seen the whole district
Only the tyrants have seen the province and the nation
They are the ones discovering novel ways of devotion
Turning people into radishes and carrots
And the poor into dried dark pickle
Even the English found India very Indian
As it seems these days to some
Hindi Journalists
Nineteen Hundred and Sixty Five
I am talking about Aapaa[2] who is
Talking about Ammi[3] who is talking of her
Shauher[4] who was talking of that Officer who was
Talking about the country who was talking
About the war in a screaming voice
Right now I am not going to talk of Pakistan
Hindi Journalism
I have a packet in my pocket
It would profit you if you buy it
View it and you would be surprised at your ability
Feed it to a bad Muslim
He would mutate into a good Hindu
If a good Sikh eats it
He would surely vanish in an instant
Come on Sir, taste it, you shall be blessed with a grandson soon
Poetry Reading
I went to a place
famous for its
goons
disillusioned prophets
and unemployed half-poets
It was evening
and in my welcome a light was lit
Audience trickled in one by one
I kept getting their introductions – what they did what was their name
Things I am sure to forget
Students, clerk, few teachers
even a postman and a Paanwaal
That wretched Panwaadi
He was smiling a very paternal smile
and offering examples of self-composed poetry
I spied a few old ladies
some girls-adolescents
Some Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh louts
Extending their humble respects – O God
how would poetry be saved in this province
At last, clattered in
wife of the city administrator
to kick off the show
(Recently I saw in the papers
a small news item announcing her death
reasons unknown)
Ancestral Cannon
Come sometimes to our place
To view our glorious destitution
There is this medieval cannon
Difficult to use
That brass of our inheritance
Has turned green, iron turned to black
Takes an hour to stuff the gunpowder
Half of that to light the fuse
Just about the same time it takes to take position
Janaab1, to attack the enemy
We have no weapon
Worse and unreliable than this
The enemy start cheering
The moment they face it
It is not even useful for the guard of honour
How long can you make
The guest wait at the door
1857 : Search for Material
Wars of 1857, which were very distant wars
Are wars that are nearer these days
In this age of shamefulness and crime when
Every wrongdoing appears to be self-inflicted
The rumblings of the drums of rebellion and
A very native Hindustani racket and commotion
Panicky middlemen and informers’ murmurings
Anxious wanderings of small landholders waiting to jump sides
Can be heard
Perhaps this is the influence of novels written in the past
And commercial cinema
But this is not the racket of those 150 crore rupees which
The Government of India has sanctioned to celebrate
150 years of India’s ‘First War for Freedom’
By the pen of that Prime Minister who regrets
Every war for freedom and apologises to the whole world for them
He, who is ready to sacrifice everything for
The national goal of better servitude
This is the memory of that fifty seven which
Was wiped clean by a Pan Indian Elite
Bankims and Amichands and Harishchandras
And their descendents parked comfortably on their cushions
They who never wanted anything but better servitude
It is that fifty seven for which
Moolshankars, Shivprasads, Narendranaths, Eashwarchandras, Syed Ahmeds,
Pratap Narayans, Maithali Sharans and Ramchandras
Had nothing but silence and disdain
And which was finally remembered only seventy-eighty years later by Subhadra
In Hindi’s officially polite literary canon
This is the memory of that tradition which is
Kept alive 150 years later by suiciding farmers suicide
And weavers of this land whom
It is even difficult to call rebels and who are just crunched as numbers
In the statistics of National growth and poverty line(s)
Like a sad, dirty and anarchic procession
They exit Special Economic Zones towards mass graves and crematoriums
Who has made them so forlorn?
Perhaps in 1857 common people were fated
to be dusty and dirty – every one accepted it then
But has become a serious crime now
Usually wars remain unfinished, to be finished later
In some other age with some other weapon
Sometimes as it happens those dusty and dirty dead get up and attack again
Challenging the undead who seem more dead than the dead
Dead ask them the names of their battalions, brigades and commanders
Or maybe thinking of them as sympathisers start telling them
Now I shall move towards Najafgarh
Or in confusion start asking for the route to Bakhtawarpur
Dead of 1857 say Forget about our Feudal commanders
Or how they fought for the return of their influence
And how we died for them
Say something for yourself
Is there no injustice left in your world
Or it is you who cannot imagine its end
Old Hand
Not many would know that once
I had been a drama critic
and horoscope writer at the same time
in a paper run by an ageing Freedom Fighter
and edited by his ex-boyfriend – a man in his late 30s
perpetually carrying a hurt look in his eyes
‘You have been assigned a double duty…’
the editor paused and looked at me as if to catch
something in my expression and continued:
‘but be clear, you have to keep the two
strictly apart: astrologer in the afternoon
theatre critic in the evening.
No mix up… ha-ha
and no byeline for three months.’
Not sure what would be best
I just mumbled thanks
Fireworks started a week later.
I was an instant hero with the compositors
who loved the drama and spice in my forecasts
and sometime would cleverly add their bit after the
galley proofs were seen — these were my real comrades
in those days of letterpress and ageing lead fonts —
and I ran afoul of all the theatre groups in town
and the foremost actress who knew the home minister
the prima donna however decided to target the editor
than the upstart critic who called her mediocre.
I was out in three months, the editor
gave a warm hug: ‘O boy, how did you manage
to offend so many in such a short time?
They are baying for my blood…
that bitch says I am responsible
egged on by that dramatist that shallow man
he is a pimp, pimp, pimp…
do you want me to go instead of you? ‘
‘It’s alright’, I said
with a lump in my throat.
And he said:
‘The boss wants to see you. In his house.’
What harm could that do now I thought and
there I was face to face with the Freedom Fighter.
‘I wanted to meet you’, he said,
‘and ask you to remember me as a friend. OK?
You have been reading my stars rather well
and at this stage don’t have to worry about your own…
You are a very talented young man
but you need a bit of grooming…
this house will always be open for you.’
And he stretched his old, immensely sad hand.
He really appeared to me a sad man.
—
(Translation of Old Hand from Hindi: Asad Zaidi)
***
Tarun Bhartiya
Extracts from Shillong-Sohra Road
The Car in front
has eight passengers instead of five
The child catches the anxious wind
In the boot an old suitcase
holding onto its belonging
Like a cranky old man
Rain trapped in Shilot
And some abandoned clouds
Roam the hills with tourist like rush
On the car flutters a red flag
Tying its messenger-the rooster
With a white sun
Rooster does not inform the gods
But tells us
That just around here
West of this British imagined road
Towards Dympep
Is a name which only appears in revenue maps
Mawbeh
And a dance that does not even try
To seduce photographs
Without any plans we follow the car
The child leans out of the window
Tastes the mist and beckons us
2
This is my daughter’s first Sohra journey
Me and her mother seem more excited than her
See that is bamboo- Did you see the pig
Yes the same pig who in the book cleverly
ate the runaway pancake
She doses off
She who does not even have her clan name
Or whose breeding has been declared suspect
By the highest court of this land
In her dreams she echoes her mother’s sorrow
Like at this moment the jungle sits
In that sorrow, the jungle she did not see
Before Mawkduk
On the right was the forest
Whose dkhar adjective is sacred
Says Angela
When she was traveling in these areas for dkhars
Meaning those who create maps – who hate
Unanthologised earth like they seem to know the
Meaning of every message if they meet Ba Hep on the third hill
The story of Ba Hep’s wife who eloped will seem to them
Like an epic
Meaning she hated being the native interpreter
Meaning she found me
Me who does not even know
The names of the forests whose
Ghosts scamper through my
Daughter’s dreams
3
When the British reached here
Preserving their pen
Clouds rubbed the tiredness
On their words
Now on these hills
Lovers run away
From the gates of the caves imprinted on these skies
In the shadows of their grave stones
They kiss and yawn
With the edge of their damp dresses they cover
The music of morality
Produced by the oldest church of these hills
Should we undress these graves
From behind the spectacles of knowledge should we read these stones
With her layers and layers of skirt
How long did she survive the Missionary’s wife
Did these hills leak through her nights
Did she first dry her petticoats
Or Mr. Jones’s translation of the Bible
Frontier
(Someone crushed the snake who had lost its way)
Be careful
Kong Aitee’s stories end only after you have climbed
Down five hundred and four steps
Here just here Ganak was digging amongst these pock marked stones of the water fall for his daughter, the one who ran away to the foreign lands.
Yellow Black butterflies touch me nots
Grandson does not even know where is Shilot
It is just here (just above the roaming fingers)
Umlulu, the river which Ganak stole and took away to Shilot
In seventy one Pakistan not Bangla
We saw in the clouds a horseman brandishing his sword
Five hundred Four Five hundred four
Come in the season of Oranges we don’t sell Oranges
Eat as much as you like
Take as much as you can hold in your hands
But you cannot take a single for your lover who sits in Shillong
Romance of the Folk Innocence of the Folk
I am not a collector of folktales that
I will not get tired climbing Five hundred and four steps
****
