I Won't Let You Go (27 page)

So sure was I that you were mine

                that it never even came to my mind

            to check the real value of your gifts.

Nor did you claim a price.

            Day went after day, night after night.

            You gave, emptying your baskets.

               Glancing sideways, with an absent mind

              I would put them away in my store

                  and not remember them the next day.

              The new spring’s madhabi

                  added its presence to your gifts;

              the post-rains full moon

                  lent them its special touch.

Covering my feet

    with your black hair’s flood, you said,

    ‘What I give you is much less

          than the revenue due to your realm;

             more I cannot give

                 for I have no more.’

    As you spoke, your eyes filled with tears.

            Now you are gone.

        Day comes after day, night after night,

           but you don’t come.

After all these days I’ve opened my treasure-chest.

        I’m looking at the jewelled necklaces you gave me,

           pressing them to my breast.

My pride that partook of indifference

   is bent to the ground –

       there, where your two feet have left their imprints.

       In pain I pay you now the price of your love,

       and thus, having lost you, I have you fully at last.

Through the interstices of a casual conversation

    in an unforeseeable smile

       one day you set rocking

          my youth drunk on itself.

    A filament of deathlessness

       sparked then suddenly across your face,

          never to be seen again.

    The play of waves at flood-tide cast from the deep

       a gem-fragment of the ever-rare

       on the sea-beach of a million incidents.

       Thus does an unfamiliar moment’s abrupt pain

           knock us on the breast in a trice,

              through our half-open inner window borne 

        in a farer’s song

                    from a far forest’s edge.

So does the never-been-before with its unseen fingers

               set our heart-strings in separation’s ache,

    moving through microtones in slides from note to note,

               in our rain-resonant lonely hours abroad,

        in the evening jasmine’s sad and gentle scent,

               leaving us the unexpected, invisible

                  caress of its slipped cape.

Then one day

       for no reason at all, at an odd time

       that instant, surprise-unquiet, returns to our minds, –

           say, in a winter midday,

           when we’re passing the time, staring

       at a field shorn of crops, where cattle are grazing,

            or in the darkness of a lone twilight, when

                from sunset’s other shore the pain

                     of a soundless vina begins to vibrate.

Days of Poush are coming to an end.

    Inquisitive dawnlight

        pushes fog’s wrap aside.

Suddenly I see

    on the dew-moist shaddock tree

        budding new leaves.

    The tree looks astonished at itself.

As once Valmiki, on Tamasa’s edge,

         was himself amazed

         at his own breathed out metre,

            so looks this tree to me.

From a long silent neglect into the crimson light

    these few leaves have

        brought their unabashed speech,

like those few words which you alone could have said

    but left unsaid when you left. 

        Then was spring near

           and between you and me

               hung the curtain of unfamiliarity.

       Sometimes it fluttered;

           sometimes a corner went flying;

but the south wind, though it grew bold,

       never blew it off entirely.

           Unshackled interval didn’t come to pass.

               The bell tolled

       and at the day’s end

          you went away

              into the unspoken’s darkness.

Fallen in love, the mind said,

       ‘All my kingdom I give unto you.’

          The childish wish exaggerated, of course,

              for how could such a thing be given?

       All of it: how could I get hold of that?

              A continent

              broken up by seven seas,

       it lives alone with its distances,

          speechless, not to be traversed.

    Its head rises in cloud-capped mountain peaks,

          feet descend into cavernous darkness.

    Like an inaccessible planet is this my being,

    in a vaporous mantle, where there are occasional gaps,

          and these alone are what the telescope prods.

What I can call my wholeness

                    hasn’t been named.

               When will its ongoing design be completed?

    And who is it that’ll have direct commerce with it?

        The identity the name so far conveys

                    is a patchwork of pieces gathered from the edge

                           of the undiscovered.

      The sky is scattered with the flickering shadows and lights

                      of desires, vain and filled.

      From there fall tinted shadows of so many aches

                         on awareness’s earth;

          the winds are touched by winter or by spring;

      and who has clearly seen

                           that restless play of the unseen?

      Who can hold it

                 in language’s cupped hands?

      A margin of life’s territory is firm

                 with the ruggedness of work’s diversity;

      on another futile labours vaporise,

                  turning into clouds, ascending into space, –

                  mirages busy at their sketches.

      This world of the individual shows itself amongst men

          in the narrow corridor connecting birth and death.

      In its obscure provinces

          massed in vast unknownness

                   are powers oblivious of themselves,

               greatnesses that haven’t received their dues,

          seeds of success, unsprouted, ensconced in the soil.

      There crowd the shy one’s timidity,

           concealed self-abasements,

           histories not bruited about,

                           the many accessories

             to conceit and disguise.

      There much hidden thick muck

          waits to be mopped up by death’s working hands.

      This undeveloped, unmanifest myself:

          for whom is it, and for what?

      So many beginnings it brought, so many expressions;

          with so much toil was its language-building fraught,

               so much not reaching the felicity of speech, –

      to perish abruptly in no-meaning’s abysmal pit!

          Such childishness of creation: how can it be borne?

The maestro works with his study’s curtain half drawn;

           the blossom stays veiled in the bud.

The artist’s unfinished picture’s not for the public:

           a few hints may be had,

but full viewing’s forbidden. 

         In me his vision’s not completed yet,

             which is why so much dense silence surrounds me,

             why I’m unfamiliar, unattainable.

Circled by an impenetrable guard,

        in his hands is this creation still;

            the time’s not ripe to hold it to any eyes.

               All are far from me, –

and those who said ‘I know’, knew not.

In the dawn half-light

   the koel’s intermittent calls

      are like fireworks of sound.

   Torn clouds disperse,

          on each a fragment of a golden script.

Market day.

    Bullock carts trundle

       on the track that crosses the field.

    Sacks of rice, fresh cane molasses in pitchers,

       and carried on the hip-baskets of village girls,

          kochu greens, green mangoes, shajina sticks.

   Six a.m. in the school clock.

       The bell’s ding-dong and the tint of the young sunshine

           merge with my mind.

   By the wall of my little garden

           I sit on a chair

               under an oleander.

   From the east the sun’s strength casts

       an oblique shadow on the grass.

   Two coconut trees standing side by side

       toss their branches unquietly in the breeze

       like twin children making an enormous fuss.

   Sheltered by shiny green,

       young fruit peep from the pomegranate tree.

The month of Chaitra’s moored to its last week.

    The sail slackens

        in the sky-floating raft of spring.

            The grass is starved and thin;

    by the gravel path

        the European seasonal flowers

           have lost their bloom and are withered.

    A west wind blows,

        a foreigner in Chaitra’s yard.

        Reluctantly I wrap myself.

    The water shivers in the pond with the paved surround;

        the leaves of the water-lilies tremble;

           the few red fish grow restless.

    The lemon-grass is rampant

       in the rockery.

    From the leafage peeps a figure,

       four-faced, in ochre stone.

    On the far margin of flowing time it lives,

       indifferent, untouched by seasons.

    Art’s language it speaks,

       which has no likeness to what the trees have to say.

    The care that seeps from earth’s inner rooms

       day and night to all branches and leaves –

          that statue there stands outside the limits

              of that vast kinship.

A long time ago man immured in it

       his own secret speech

    like a spirit-guarded hoard of buried treasure:

       with nature it cannot communicate.

The clock strikes seven.

       The scattered clouds have gone.

    The sun climbs above the wall:

       tree-shadows shorten.

           Through the back gate

              a girl enters the garden.

    Tasselled plaits swing on her back;

         in her hand is a slender bamboo stick.

    She’s brought a pair of swans

         and their young ones to feed.

    The swans look grave, 

        aware of their responsibilities as a pair.

            Even greater is the responsibility of the girl,

    in whose young mother-mind love’s liquid throbs

        to the demands of living creatures.

             I’ve wished to preserve

                  this fragment of a morning.

             So easily it came

                 and will so easily leave.

        He who sent it

has paid for it already

    from his own treasury of joy.

    A Baul busker walking along the street

       came and stopped by your front door.

    He sang, ‘Behold! The unfamiliar bird

            comes flying into the cage!’

       Yes, and seeing it, the silly mind thinks –

            Aha! I’ve caught the uncatchable!

You were standing at the window

    after your bath,

        your damp hair cascading on your back.

The uncatchable was on the lids

           of your far-away eyes,

in the loveliness of your rounded

                bangled wrists.

You sent him alms.

                He went away.

You didn’t know

       it was you the song spoke about.

Like a melody you come and go

    on the ektara’s string.

            That instrument is your manifest form’s cage

                swaying in the breeze of spring.

    I roam, hugging it to my breast; 

        I colour it, pattern flowers on it,

            just as I please.

    When it sounds, then I forget its form:

        its string vibrates into invisibility.

    Then does the unfamiliar come out to play in the universe,

        rippling right across the forest’s green,

           merging with the dolonchampa’s fragrance.

You are the unfamiliar bird

    dwelling in the cage of mating,

       that cage with many embellishments,

    where separation’s ache is eternal in bird-wings,

       in flight’s postponement.

                  Bird without address,

flying love-wards to the horizon’s rim

                  where all visibles vanish.