covering it quite. Each minute, second going by
leaves its souvenir-script upon the mind,
like the deformed doodlings of a heedless boy,
each obscuring the other, weaving amnesia’s net.
If this Phalgun I have perchance forgotten
the message of that earlier Phalgun, if the flame
has silently died on grief’s lamp, forgive me then.
Yet I know, because you had once appeared,
harvests of song had ripened in my life,
which continue; once the light of your eyes
had played its vina, wringing the innermost notes
from sunlight itself. Gone is your touch,
but what a touchstone you have left within my heart,
which shows me still, at times, the undying
panorama of this universe, makes me drink
causeless joy’s full cup. Forgive my oblivion.
I know you had once called me into your heart,
which is why I myself forgive my own fate,
forgetting all those miseries, those griefs
which it has heaped on my days: how it has snatched
thirst’s water-cup from my lips, conned me with smiles,
betrayed my confidence, suddenly upset
my laden ship within sight of shore: all I forgive.
You are no more. You have hopelessly receded.
Evenings are mournful, charged with your smothered vermilion.
My mateless life in an empty house has no grace.
All this I accept, and above all, that you were here once.
[On board the Andes, 2 November 1924]
The Apprehension
The more you heap my hands
with the coins of love,
won’t it expose the more the deceit’s depth
that’s within me?
Better for me to pay my piling debts
and sail away in an empty boat.
Better that I should starve and you withdraw
your heart filled with nectar
and go away.
To dull my pain
I might wake it in you;
to lighten my load
I might press it on you;
my anguished cry of loneliness well might
keep you awake at night –
such are my fears, why I don’t speak freely.
If you can forget,
please do.
On a lonesome trail I was, when you came along,
your eyes set on my face.
I thought I’d say, ‘Why not come with me?
Say something to me, please!’
But all of a sudden, as I gazed at your face,
I felt afraid.
I saw a dormant fire’s secret smoulder
in the obscure depths
of your heart’s darkest night.
Anchoress, should I suddenly fan
the flames of your penance into a blazing fire,
wouldn’t that stark light slash all veils asunder
and lay my poverty bare?
What have I got to offer as sacred fuel
to your passion’s sacrificial fire?
Therefore I say to you with humility:
With the memory of our meeting
let me return alone.
[Miralrío, San Isidro, near Buenos Aires, 17 November 1924]
The Skeleton
There on the plain, on the way-side, an animal’s skeleton
is lying on the grass,
the same grass that had once given it strength
and gentle rest.
They lie, bleached bones in a heap,
time’s loud dry laughter,
like death pointing its finger, insinuating:
Where the beast ends
there you end as well; there’s no distinction;
in your case too, when life’s wine’s been drained,
the broken cup will be left like that in the dust.
I said: Death, I don’t believe what you say
mockingly of emptiness.
My life’s not the sort that becomes a total pauper
at its journey’s end,
that at the end of the day
pays with hollow bones its last bill of board and bed.
All that I’ve thought and known, spoken, heard with my ears,
all that has burst from me in sudden songs
were not contained in a life hemmed by death.
What I’ve received and what I’ve given back –
on this earth of mortals where can that be measured?
Many a time has my mind’s dance transcended
life and death, and gone where beauty lives
eternally. Can it then stop for ever
at the boundary of bones?
My true identity
cannot be measured by flesh.
The hours and minutes don’t wear it out by their kicks,
nor does the wayside dust pauperise it.
For in the lotus of manifest form I’ve drunk the honey of the formless,
in the bosom of suffering found the dwelling of joy,
heard within me the voice of eternal silence,
seen the way of stars through the dark empty spaces.
No, I’m not a big joke of the Creator,
not a grand holocaust built with infinite riches.
[Chapadmalal, near Mar del Plata, Argentina, 17 December 1924]
The Exchange
Flowers of laughter she brought, and I
the fruits of suffering’s monsoon piled in a basket.
And I said to her, ‘If we do an exchange,
tell me who’ll be the loser!’
The beauty laughed, mightily amused,
and said, ‘Come, let’s do it!
Have my flower-chain. Let me take your fruits
filled with the juice of tears.’
I looked at her face, and right enough
a belle dame sans merci she was.
She picked up my basket of fruits, laughed and clapped,
mightily amused.
I took her garland of flowers,
pressed it to my breast.
‘Mine’s the victory!’ she cried, and never stopped laughing
as she scampered off.
The sun, he meanwhile clambered to the zenith
to burn the earth.
The hot day ended. In the evening I discovered
that all my flowers had perished.
[On board the Giulio Cesare, going away from Argentina, 17 January 1925]
FROM Mahua (1929)
The Identity
In rain-stopped afternoon clouds
fear still lurked,
as the wind blustered at times,
mouthing sharp rebukes.
Above, in the sun’s red, cloud-torn, Durvasa’s wrath
flared in oblique glares of bloodshot eyes
and dun matted locks.
In that dismal weather I brought you an afternoon gift,
kadambas in a basket.
In the rain’s sombre shadow
in a songless dawn
those despair-dispelling flowers in a lampblack-hour
had stocked, in their ecstatic pollen, visions of the sun.
When sluggish clouds, hard pressed by easterly clouds,
had rushed to the sky’s rim,
and on a Srabon night
the woods, hit by a cataclysm, had wept,
even then the bold kadamba had shed its scent
to birds’ nests, stalks unwearied, not yet felled.
With such a flower, symbol of my confidence,
I made you a present.
In the dripping evening, friend, you brought me
a single ketaki.
I was by myself,
my lamp unlit.
In the tossed dense green of a row of areca-palms
fireflies flitted, unflagging in their quest.
You stood outside my d
oor,
secretly smiled.
‘What have you brought?’
I asked, curious.
Raindrops fell pitter-patter on the leaves;
I stretched my hand in the fragrance-laden dark.
Abruptly did my limb reverberate
to a staccato of thorns.
How that barbed touch caught me unawares
like a pleasure’s sharp twang!
It wasn’t an offer of surrender, easily gained,
but splendour within, sheathed in spiky pain.
A homage hedged in by don’ts
was what you gave me.
[Calcutta, 20 August 1928]
Disappearance
On the canvas of disappearance I see your eternal form.
You’ve finally arrived in my invisible inner domain.
The jewel of everlasting touch have I obtained.
You’ve yourself filled the gap made by your absence.
When life darkened, I found
you’d left within me evening’s chapel-lamp.
Through separation’s sacrificial fire
passion becomes worship, lit by suffering’s light.
[Santiniketan, July 1928 (26 Ashadh 1335)]
FROM Punashcha (1932)
Kopai
Padma meanders away under far skies:
I see her in my mind.
On one side sandbanks,
fearless, for they’re destitute, without attachments;
on the other side bamboo and mango groves,
old banyans, derelict cottages,
jack-trees of many years’ standing, with fat trunks,
a field of mustard by a pond,
wayside jungles of rattan,
an indigo factory’s ruined foundations, a hundred and fifty years old,
tall casuarinas murmuring in its garden night and day.
There’s the neighbourhood of the Rajbangshis,
where their goats graze on cracked fields,
and a granary with a tin roof stands by the market-place.
The whole village trembles with fear of the cruel river.
Hallowed in legends is that river’s name.
Mandakini flows in her pulse.
She is free. She passes by human dwellings,
endures them, but doesn’t acknowledge them.
Her uncorrupted high-born metre holds
the memory of desolate mountains and the call of lonely seas.
On her sandbank-moorings it was once my lot to dwell,
in solitude, far from crowds.
Seeing the morning star, I would rise at dawn,
and at night sleep on boat-deck
under the Great Bear’s eyes.
Her indifferent streams would flow
past the margins of the multitudinous thoughts
of my lonely days and nights,
even as a traveller skirts
a householder’s joys and sorrows, near yet far.
Then at the end of my days of youth I came
to this savannah’s edge
where shaded Santhal villages make a fringe of massed green.
River Kopai is my neighbour here.
Not hers the glamour of an ancient line.
Her name’s non-Aryan,
linked to the laughter-rich
sweet speech of generations of Santhal women.
With the village she’s on intimate terms:
between land and water there’s no conflict here
and dialogue’s easy between her two banks.
Fields of san-hemp are in flower, brushing right against her body;
green rice seedlings have risen.
Where the footpath stops, meeting her bank,
she gives way to the farer,
letting him walk across
her murmuring crystal current.
Not far, the fan-palm rises from the plain;
mangoes, jaams, amlokis jostle on the banks.
She speaks the tongue of common men;
nobody would call it literary.
Her rhythm binds land and water together;
there’s no rivalry between the liquid and the green.
Her slim body twists and turns
through light and shade,
dancing in simple steps to hand-clappings.
In the rains her limbs are touched with ecstasy
like a village girl drunk on mahua wine:
she doesn’t break or cause to drown,
just twirls and twirls the eddies of her skirts,
gives little pushes to both her banks,
and laughing loudly, races along.
At the end of the post-rains her waters become limpid,
her flow becomes thinner,
showing the sand below,
yet the pallor of that shrunken celebration
cannot shame her,
for her affluence isn’t arrogant, nor is her poverty a disgrace:
she is lovely in both –
like a dancer who dances, jingling her jewels,
and sits quietly, tired,
laziness in her eyes
and the hint of a smile in the corner of her mouth.
Kopai has made a poet’s rhythm her own companion today,
a rhythm that reconciles an idiom’s land and water,
what in speech is song and what is homely.
Walking to that flawed measure, a Santhal boy will trip across,
bow in hand;
a bullock-cart will cross over
with stacks of straw;
the potter will trot to market,
his pots slung from a pole,
followed by the village dog
and the three-rupees-a-month schoolmaster,
a torn umbrella over his head.
[August 1932 (1 Bhadra 1339)]
By the Pond
From the first-floor window eyes can see
a corner of the pond
brimful in the month of Bhadra.
Trees, deeply reflected, tremble in the waters
with the sheen of green silk.
Clumps of kolmi and heloncho grow on the borders.
On the sloping bank arecas face each other.
On this side are oleanders, white rongons, one shiuli,
two neglected tuberoses showing impoverished buds.
A henna hedge with bamboo reinforcements;
beyond it, orchards of banana, guava, coconut.
Further off, among trees, a house’s roof-terrace
with a sari hanging from it.
A fat bare-chested man, a wet cloth round his head,
sits on the ghat’s paved steps, his fishing-line cast.
Hour after hour passes.
The day wanes.
Rain-rinsed sky.
Abnegation’s pallor in the ageing light.
A slow breeze stirs,
rippling the waters of the pond;
shaddock leaves quiver and glint.
I look, and it seems to me
that this is the pale reflection of another day,
bringing me, through the gaps in the fence of modernity,
the image of someone from a far-off age.
Her touch is tender, her voice gentle,
her black eyes are enchanted and naïve.
The wide red border of her white sari
falls circling her feet.
She spreads a mat for her guest to sit on the yard;
she wipes the dust off with her sari’s end;
she fetches water in the shades of mangoes and jacks;
then the magpie robin calls from the shajina branch
and the black drongo swings its tail among date trees.
When I say goodbye to her and come away,
she can hardly say anything, –
just leaves the door ajar
and stands there, looking at the road,
and her eyes dim.
[August 1932 (25 Srabon 1339)]
Dwelling
; By the River Mayurakshi.
As my pet deer and calf are on friendly terms,
so are the sal and mahua trees.
They shed their leaves
and these are blown to my window.
In the east the fan-palm stands erect:
morning’s oblique light
casts its stolen shadow on my wall.
A footpath skirts the river
over red soil,
its dust strewn with the kurchi’s fallen flowers.
The aroma of shaddock blossoms
hugs the wind;
there’s rivalry between jarul and polash and madar;
the shajina’s floral tassels swing in the air
and the chameli winds all along the fence
by the River Mayurakshi.
Paved with red stones,
the steps of a modest ghat descend to the river.
By the ghat stands a champak of many years
with a fat trunk.
Over the river I’ve built a bamboo bridge
and placed on either side in urns of glass
jasmines, bels, tuberoses, white oleanders.
The waters are deep in places,
with pebbles below,
where swans come floating,
while on the sloping bank
graze my russet milch-cow
and brinded calf
by the River Mayurakshi.
A pale blue rug on the floor
is embroidered with dark brown flowers.
The walls are saffron
with borders of black lines.
A little veranda looks towards the east;
there I sit even before the sun rises.
And I’ve found a person
from whose throat the notes splash
like light from a dancer’s bracelets.
She lives in the cottage next door,
a passiflora trailing over her roof.
It’s when she sings to herself
that I hear her at all,
for I never ask her to sing.
Her husband’s a good chap:
he likes my writings,