I Won't Let You Go (21 page)

O Mother, listen: the king’s darling son

    just rode past my room!

How the golden crest of his chariot gleamed

    in the morning sun!

At my window I removed my veil

and just for a moment stole a glance at him. 

I tore my chain of jewels, flung it on the dust

    right before his path.

Ah, Mother, why do you look at me like that

    with such surprise?

Of course, he didn’t pick up the chain-torn jewels:

his wheels ground them to dust.

His wheel-track is all you can see now

    before our house.

No one knows what I gave to whom:

    it’s covered by dust.

Yet, seeing that the king’s darling son

    was riding past my room,

what could I do but fling the jewels of my breast

    before his path?

Gently in this hallowed place

            wake up, o my mind –

on this seashore of India’s grand

            concourse of humankind.

                                      Here I stand and stretch my arms,

                                                  saluting God-in-Man;

                                      in grand rhythm, with great delight

                                                  I praise Him as best I can.

            This mountain-range so steeped in meditation,

            these plains clutching their rosaries of rivers:

            here for ever the sacred Earth

                         we may find,

            on this seashore of India’s grand

                         concourse of humankind.

No one knows who called them to this place –

           such streams of humanity!

Whence did they issue, in impetuous cascades,

           to lose themselves in the sea?

                                   Here Aryans and non-Aryans,

                                              Chinese and Dravidians,

                                   Scythians, Huns, Pathans, Mughals

                                              dissolved in one body.

           Now that the West has opened its door

           we’re bringing ourselves gifts from that store.

           We shall give and receive, mingle and harmonise:

                      there’s no turning back

           on this seashore of India’s grand

                      concourse of humankind.

Those warrior-hordes who sang of conquest

           with a demented din,

through desert trails and mountain passes

           all those who poured in:

                                   they are all within me still,

                                                none are far from me!

                                   In my blood their music hums

                                                in all its diversity.

           Resound, resound, awesome vina,

           so those who still despise and shun us

           may burst the barriers and gather around us.

                      Yes, they’ll congregate

           on this seashore of India’s grand

                      concourse of humankind.

Here once without cease

           the great sound of
Om

had vibrated in heart-strings

           asking us to be one.

                                   With ascesis it strove to cast

                                                the Many in the fire of the One,

                                   to forget divisions and set in motion

                                                one gigantic heart.

           The entrance to that sacred space

           where such a sacrament took place

           is now open, so with good grace

                       we must humbly congregate:

           on this seashore of India’s grand

                       concourse of humankind.

Look! That sacrificial fire

           is streaked today with suffering’s red glare.

Within our spirits this burning we must bear –

           it is written in our fate.

                      My mind, be strong to endure this affliction

                                  and listen to unity’s call.

                      Your sense of fear, embarrassment, humiliation –

                                  banish them, conquer them all.

           The intolerable pain will come to an end.

           Behold what a huge new life is about to be born!

           The night glides to daybreak, the mother-bird wakes

                       in her colossal nest –

           on this seashore of India’s grand

                       concourse of humankind.

Come, Aryans, non-Aryans,

           Hindus and Muslims alike.

Come you too – you, English people.

           Come, come, Christians!

                                   Come, Brahmins, with chastened minds,

                                              and hold everyone’s hands.

                                   Come, outcastes, bidding goodbye

                                              to your burden of affronts.

           Make haste to Mother’s consecration,

           where the ritual jars are waiting to be filled

           with water blessed by the touch

                      of all and sundry’s hands –

           today on this seashore of India’s grand

                      concourse of humankind.

Where the lowliest live, the poorer than poor,

           it’s there that your footsteps ring:

                      behind all, below all,

                                  amongst those who’ve lost everything.

           When I make an obeisance to you,

           somewhere my gesture comes to an abrupt end. 

To those lowest depths of hurt and insult, where your feet descend,

           my gesture of homage, alas, cannot bend:

                       behind all, below all,

                                   amongst those who’ve lost everything.

Pride can never reach you where you wander

           in humble clothes, bereft of adornments:

                       behind all, below all,

                                   amongst those who’ve lost everything.

           Where wealth is heaped, where honour is piled up,

           it’s there that I expect your company,

but where you dwell as a friend of friendless men,

           to that low abode my heart, alas, cannot bend:

                        behind all, below all,

                                    amongst those who’ve lost everything.

My ill-fated country, those you have affronted –

with them you must be equalised by sharing the same affront.

           Those you have denied

           human rights,

allowed to stand before you but never invited in –

with all of them you must be equalised by sharing the same affront.

Day after day you have avoided the human touch,

showing your contempt for the deity that dwells in man.

            One day the Creator’s ruthless fury

            will make you sit by famine’s doorway

and share with others what there is to eat and drink.

With all of them you’ll have to be equalised by sharing the same affront.

There, where you have pushed them away from sharing your seat,

even there you have banished your own powers, carelessly.

            Crushed by feet,

            those powers now crumble to dust.

You must come down to that level, or else you can’t be redeemed.

Today you have to be equalised with others by sharing the same affront.

Whoever you fling to a lower level will bind you to that level.

Whoever you keep behind your back is only dragging you backwards.

             Whoever you keep occluded,

hidden in ignorance-darkness,

is shaping a chasm between you and your own welfare.

You must be equalised with all of them by sharing the same affront.

A hundred centuries have rained indignities on your head,

yet you still refuse to acknowledge the innate divinity of man.

            But can you not see

            when you lower your eyes

that the God of the downtrodden, the outcaste, is there in the dust with them?

You must be equalised there with all the others by sharing the same affront.

You cannot see Death’s messenger at your door:

he has already inscribed a curse on your caste-pride.

            If you don’t send out a call to all

            and still insist on staying apart,

wrapping yourself on all sides with your conceit,

then surely in death, in the pyre’s ashes, you will be equalised with all.

Are you just a picture upon a piece of paper?

    Those distant nebulae

    who jostle in the sky’s nest,

        those who, day and night,

    light in hand, are in transit through the dark,

           planets and stars –

    are you not as real as they are?

        Alas, picture, are you just a picture?

In the midst of the ever-restless why are you calm?

    O you without a path,

       find a travelling companion!

    Must you, night and day,

be amongst all and still be so far away,

    for ever fastened to fixity’s inner niche?

       Why, this dust that lifts

the grey end of its cloth

    and wind-blown, runs amuck,

in Baishakh strips the widowed earth of jewels,

    decks the anchoress in saffron attire,

       in spring’s coupling-dawns

           covers her limbs with the tracery of patterns:

       even this dust is real, alas,

              like this grass,

       almost hidden under the feet of the universe.

Because they are mutable, they are real.

       You are immutable, you are a picture.

              You are just a picture.

One day you walked this road by our side.

    Your breast stirred with your breathing.

        In your limbs

            your life created its very own rhythms

                in songs and dances

            keeping time with the cosmos.

        Ah, that was so long ago, that was!

                 In my life

             and my world

                 how real you were once!

             In every direction,

        wherever my eyes glanced,

    it was you who inscribed

        the graphics of art’s delight with beauty’s brush.

    In that morning it was you who was

        the word of the cosmos made flesh.

As we travelled together,

   behind the screen of one night

        you came to a stop.

   I’ve kept going

        with so much pleasure and pain

   for days and nights.

Flood-tide and ebb-tide

       in light and dark, sea and sky;

    on either side of the road the flowers march past,

         quietly, with all their dyes.

Life’s wild river rushes in a thousand streams,

        ringing death’s bells.

            The unknown calls me;

        I walk further, further,

            drugged by my passion for the road.

        But where you stood

           when you got off the road –

               there you are stuck.

This grass, this dust, those stars, that sun, that moon –

               screened by them all,

        you are a picture, you are just a picture.

        What a poetic delirium this is!

            You – a picture?

No, no, you are not just a picture.

    Who says you are bound by still lines

        and mute cries?

     Nonsense! That joy could have ceased only if

            this river had lost its flow

                 or this cloud

     had wiped this golden writing off itself.

            If the shadow

of your fine hair had vanished for ever,

               then one day

          the murmuring shade

     of wind-blown madhabis too

would have been a dream.

     Had I forgotten you?

It is because

     you lodge in my life’s roots

              that the error arises.

With absent minds we walk,

          forgetting the flowers.

              Don’t we forget the stars?

          And yet

     they sweeten the air we breathe,

             fill with tunes

     the emptiness that dwells within our errors.

        Being unmindful – I don’t call it oblivion:

you’ve swayed my blood from your seat in my amnesia’s core.

        Before my eyes you are not;

        right within my eyes are you installed.

               That is why

you are the green of my greens, the blue of my blues.

               My whole world

        has found its inner harmony in you.

            No one knows, not even I,

            that your melodies reverberate in my songs.

         You are the poet within the poet’s heart.

     You are not a picture. No, not just a picture.

        Early one morning I found you,

            then lost you at night.

And in the darkness you return, unawares to me.

     You are not a picture. No, you are not a picture.