I Won't Let You Go (15 page)

Joyless country, in tattered decrepitude dressed,

burdened by your own sagacity, you think

that God’s deception has been caught red-handed

by your too-clever discriminating gaze.

With a wit as sharp as a needle of kush-grass,

unemployed, you sit at home night and day,

convinced that this earth, this universe,

planets and stars in the firmament are fakes.

Birds and beasts, creatures of many species,

bereft of fear, have breathed here for ages.

To them this created world is a mother’s lap,

but you, old dotard, have faith in nothing! And this

cosmic concourse, fairground of millions, billions

of living things is to you child’s play.

Well, maybe it’s play, but one which we must join

with everyone, in a happy hullabaloo!

What would be the point of leaving it all and sitting

silently in a dark corner of the self?

Know that you are but a child in this vast world,

in the cradle of infinite time, in the sky’s playground:

you think you know it all, but you know nothing!

Pick it up – with faith, humility, love –

that grand toy – coloured, musical, scented –

which your mother’s given you. Well, maybe it’s dust!

So what? Isn’t it dust beyond compare?

Prematurely senile, don’t mope, sitting alone:

you won’t be an adult till you join the merry-go-round!

Where I’ve found myself, there I belong,

a needy offspring of this indigent earth.

The burden of pains and pleasures I’ve had since birth

I’ve decided to accept as my sheer good luck.

My earthen mother, green and all-enduring,

I know your hands don’t hold infinite riches.

You want to feed all hungry mouths, but alas,

so often you can’t; and ‘What, what can we eat?’ –

your children cry, their faces pale and withered.

Mother, I know your hands hold unfinished pleasures:

whatever you shape and give us breaks into pieces.

Death, omnivorous, pokes his fingers in every pie

and all our hopes you can never satisfy,

but that’s no reason to forsake your warm breast!

Now fades the garland of mandars round my neck,

o great Indra, and the radiant mark is quenched

on my sullied forehead. My piety’s strength

wanes. And gods, goddesses, today I must

say goodbye to heaven. Gladly have I spent

many millennia in the kingdom of the gods

as one of the immortals, and had hoped to see

at this parting-hour a hint of tears

in heaven’s eyes. But heartless, void of grief,

indifferent, this happy celestial land

just looks on. The passing of millennia

is not a blink to its eyes; not even the hurt

a branch of the peepul-tree feels, when from its edge

the driest leaf falls, can be felt by heaven, when

hundreds of us, like burnt-out refugee stars,

are dislodged, to descend, in an instant,

even from the region of the gods down to the earth’s

unending stream of births and deaths. And should

such hurt have been felt, should the merest trace

of separation’s shadow have fallen across heaven,

then would its eternal brilliance have been veiled

with soft dewy vapours as on earth; Nandan-garden

would have murmured sighs; Mandakini,

lapping its banks, would have, in liquid voice,

sung sad tales; at the day’s end

evening would have come, walked like a hermitess

to the horizon, beyond lone fields; still nights

would have played the chanting crickets’ ascetic chorus

under the assembled stars; in the hall of the gods

at times dancing Menaka’s golden anklets

would have missed a beat; leaning on Urbashi’s breast,

her golden vina, strings roughly pressed,

would have at times, as if unawares to her,

burst into sudden bars of tragic music.

Lines of idle tears might then have appeared

on the dry eyes of the gods; by her husband’s side,

throned on the same seat, Shachi might have suddenly looked

into Indra’s eyes, as if seeking water for her thirst.

And the wind might have wafted towards heaven

sudden gusts of the earth’s long-drawn sighs,

shaking petals off the Nandan branches.

Stay laughing, heaven. Gods, keep drinking your nectar.

Heaven is indeed your very own place of bliss,

where we are aliens. Earth – she is no heaven,

but she’s a motherland; that’s why her eyes

stream with tears, if after a few days

anyone leaves her even for a few hours.

The humble, the meek, the most incompetent,

sinners and sick men – all she would hold tight

in an eager embrace, fasten to her soft breast,

such is the pleasure a mother gets from the touch

of her children’s dusty bodies. So let there flow

nectar in heaven, and on earth let love,

for ever mixed with pains and pleasures, stream,

keeping earth’s heaven-spots evergreen with tears.

Nymph, may the pain of love never diminish

the shine of your bright eyes. I bid you goodbye.

You desire nobody, nor grieve for any.

Should my love be born in the poorest home on earth,

by the side of a river, at the edge of a village, in a hut

half-hidden in the shade of a peepul, she might

carefully save for me her ambrosial store

within her breast. When she’s a child,

she will in the mornings sit on the river-bank,

fashion images of Shiva with the riverside clay

and pray to have me as her bridegroom. When evening falls,

she’ll light a lamp and let it float on the waters,

and alone on the ghat, her breast trembling with fear,

she’ll figure her fortunes with total concentration.

One day, at an auspicious hour,

her eyes lowered, she will walk into my home,

draped in red silk, sandal tracery on forehead,

to the playing of festive flutes. Then will she be,

in days of rejoicing and in days of affliction,

with good-omen bangles and propitious vermilion dot

below her parted hair, the presiding goddess

of my home, the full moon’s orb

by the bedside of the world’s tumultuous ocean.

Sometimes, gods, I shall remember this heaven

like a far-off dream, when half-way through the night

waking suddenly from sleep, I’ll see the moon

flooding the white bed, and my love fast asleep,

slack arm lying loosely, sari dishevelled,

shyness forgotten, until roused by my soft

amorous kisses, she will, startled, fold me

fast in her arms, twine around my chest,

as the south wind wafts flower-scents, and wide awake,

a koel calls from a distant branch.

                                        Ah, mother,

pauperised, afflicted, tearful, tarnished earth,

after so many days at last today my heart 

stirs with weeping for your sake, alas!

As soon as the sadness of farewell filled these eyes,

which had been dry before, the celestial world

vanished who knows where like an idle dream

or a shadow-picture. And your blue sky, your light,

your populous human habitations, long lines

of sandy beaches by the seas, white snow-streaks

on blue mountain-heads, quiet dawns

between avenues of trees, face-lowered evenings

on deserted river-banks: all, all fell down

onto a tear-drop, reflections within

a mirror’s depth.

                       Ah, sonless mother,

the torrent of tears you shed at our last adieu,

which, welling from your eyes, overflowed

and anointed your maternal breasts, has now

evaporated. Yet in my mind I know

when I return once more to your homestead,

instantly you’ll hold me within your arms,

to the sound of auspicious conch-shells, and you’ll welcome

me as one long known to you, to love’s shade

in your home, familiar world of affections,

filled with pains, pleasures, fears, and children.

From the next day, I know, you’ll be at my bedside,

ever vigilant, with a trembling heart,

panic inside you, sad gaze upturned

to the gods above, and pensive, wondering when

you might lose him, whom you had regained.

When into the waters of Lake Achchhod the lady

stepped down for bathing, then was the young spring

straying all over the world, in fits of trembling

like first love, hairs standing on end

every now and then. Then was the wind

idly prattling on a bed of leaves,

where the shade was the densest; noon’s radiance

was aswooned on the forest’s lap; a pair of pigeons,

perched on a still and peaceful champak branch,

were, in an interval between close beak-kissings,

rapt, in their privacy, in ecstatic cooing.

On the bank, beneath a white stone, her deep-blue cloth

lay forlorn in a corner, from glory dropped,

uncared-for, the lovely body’s warm scent

still clinging to it, like a last flicker of breath

in a fainted body whose term has come to an end.

The girdle lay, discarded from her waist,

silent in rejection’s hurt, the anklets too,

the breast-cloth in disorder upon the ground,

fallen from the twin heavens on the hard stone.

The golden mirror gazed into emptiness,

recalling a face. Arranged on a golden plate –

sandal-and-saffron paste; ravished and abashed,

two red lotuses; beautiful, unwithered,

a garland of white oleanders; a washed white cloth,

light, translucent, like a sky lit by the full moon.

Brimful and blue the waters, still and unruffled,

deep and rapturous, stretched from bank to bank,

a mass of embraces overflowing the breast.

At the lake’s edge, in the bokul’s dense shade,

sitting on a white stone-slab, the lovely woman,

breast-deep in water, her trembling reflection

spread in the transparent liquid, drew to her breast

the white she-swan that had been reared with care

and fondled her, folding her delicate wings

in her bare arms, placing her long neck

on her own shoulder, speaking again and again

affection’s ravings, brushing her soft cheek,

drunk with touching, on the swan’s feathery back.

From the four directions sweet melodies were rising

in water, land, and sky; someone was framing

a winsome story in shadow and sunshine,

in the forest’s slumber and the leaves’ susurrus,

in the many tremors and throbs of the spring day,

in breath and swelling, language, hint, and hum,

in flashes and wonders: as though the sunray-strings

of the sky’s vina, plucked by a celestial girl’s

champak-fingers, were pouring lamentations

in bursts of music, piercing the quiet

with their keen anguish, while without a sound

the limp bokuls kept falling from their tree

in the seclusion, and ceaselessly sang

the indefatigable koel, whose vain calls

travelled the forests as echoes – single-minded,

blind to all else. Not far in the shade

a streamlet came to meet the edge of the lake

ringing her ruby-spangled bells in dance

to a murmurous mingling; on the grass-swathed bank

a crane slept, lulled by the water’s gentle lapping

in the noon air, his long slender neck

gracefully curved and tucked under his back

between grey wings. Meanwhile in the sky

a flock of swans pursued their hurried flight

to Kailas, where the snows had melted,

leaving behind them distant, favourite haunts –

rivers and beaches. Weighted with woodland smells,

sometimes the weary wind had warm impulses

and flung itself with deep, long-drawn sighs

into the charmed lake’s bosom, its cool arm-embraces.

Eager and curious, the Love-god, friend of Spring,

was sitting concealed at the foot of the bokul tree,

on fallen flowers, carelessly leaning on the trunk,

his feet stretched out on the layer of new grass before him.

The edge of his yellow wrap trailed on the ground;

a chain of malatis hung from his curly hair

to his white neck. Smiling with sidelong glance,

in fun he observed the alluring young woman’s

bathing-dalliance. Avid and impatient,

his restless fingers awaited the right time

to aim his floral arrow at her pure, soft breast.

A million bees were flitting from flower to flower,

murmuring; a rapt-eyed deer

from time to time gave little, gentle licks

to his mate asleep in the shade. The touch of spring

had filled the forest with languor and desire.

Leaving hurt, piqued ripples in the water’s edge,

with wet footprints, one by one, marking the steps,

the beautiful woman came up to the bank:

her heavy hair came undone and cascaded down her back.

In all her limbs the surging waves of youth

were held immured by the magic formula of grace,

still and hypnotised. And on their peaks

fell the midday’s sunshine, – on forehead, lips,

thighs, waist, breast-tips,

arms, – gleaming on all the lines

of that dripping body, as round her gathered,

together in one place, air’s entire sphere

and the infinite sky, bent in humble zeal,

kissing her whole body, like a diligent servant

wiping off, with a warm towel, all the wetness.

Her shadow cast at her lac-dye-reddened feet

lay prostrate like a cloth that had slipped down.

Hushed with amazement, the woods stayed ever so still.

Then rose the Love-god, leaving the bokul’s base,

a soft smile on his face.

                                  Coming before her,

suddenly he came to a halt. At her face

for a moment he looked with a steady, transfixed gaze,

and at the next, kneeling on the ground,

speechless with wonder, his head bowed down,

at her feet laid his offerings of adoration,

his flower-bow and all his flower-arrows,

emptying his quiver.

                             At Love after his disarmament

the beauty looked benignly, with a serene countenance.