Half Pure

 
Nalini, from shuli-blossom mornings to golden evenings I've tried so hard, and tried again, but I can't remember anymore... that bell-ringing Sunday, you were pressed between page thirty-two of a folded book; crushed beneath the aging yellow rose in your first youth!
I've searched everywhere, you understand... you're nowhere on the bookshelves!
Yet you had promised you wouldn't become a butterfly...

In the blue of carefully gathered peacock feathers you lingered with fresh fragrance...
Golden brides were arriving on the durva grass then, I was dying to touch your part with a drop of alta I'd wiped away,
you said, the punished grasshoppers will return next Boishakh in the rhythm of blossoms!
Going to the grove I found classical tedium flooding the birds' nests in famine of green... yet you never came!
I never got to see how much the alta-parting burns with joy, how much the heart's soil reddens with caress upon caress!
You see, mad heart-mad one, love has become a question mark in every line of romance now!

Nalini, you know, whenever night falls across my terrace, memories keep churning me; they want to know why love wasn't born in the womb of my eyes that night? Why didn't the kamini-bakul awaken?
How can I tell them, she who lives in unresolved insomnia is an intensely sedimentary woman!
I saw no graceful girl that day, saw no moon.
I didn't see tousled hair, didn't see krishnachura eyes, didn't see tears, didn't see... how kadam blooms in throat, in flesh, didn't see the lips of a frightened girl... Nalini, I saw only you!
You weren't born to bloom, you bloomed into being.

Burnt moonlight, broken mist, beaten shuli flowers, exiled love, half-fed rainbow, aging clouds...
They don't know how true the sedimentary woman is in prehistoric darkness!
They don't know wet handkerchiefs never dry on the cornices of eyes... because classical rhythm never touches divided sunlight!
In the immigrant man's poverty, the sad full moon is terribly destitute! She wants the sun to come again, clouds to come... a kiss to touch the whole face!
And you Nalini, what did you want from that eighteenth-moon in the impenetrable new moon? To go a little deeper, to bolt the door of two lips?
Yet in the mistaken lived life I passed through, you alone were clear moonlight!
Sometimes flowing gently in betel vines, sometimes falling simply in dustless smoothness, sometimes melting drop by drop into the body-marrow-fruit stems of trees... because you were the triple-algaed one of the nakshi-kantha!

One day or never, you said, you had given flowers with both hands full.
In your handful of warm flesh burns the full childhood of my lonely ring finger!
Yet my feelings have no body, no dew-washed feet; they cannot walk over dark twilight into endangered exile; the sad full moon says mockingly, remember how much happiness there was in mustard flowers?!
Still I wrote poetry with tearless, uncomplaining tears gathered in my eyes, because that water is free and careless like Shravan.

They say rain's love cannot be neglected, but does rain speak only of love? It's the weeping of sad clouds... perhaps the weeping of many who look up at the sky daily and give birth to sighs, their weeping.
Rain doesn't give me much love, you understand... you had said, the beauties of melancholy are wonderfully classical!
In ceaseless enchantment I bloomed into a flower at the wrong time!

But is this that same Nalini? Today she counts happiness, crushes every living oath without emotion in an instant for each seared joy!
Whom I can no longer say to, come, let's walk in seawater to Behula's Rupnagar!
Who spreads herself every night like soft stale bread... and says, don't eat me with butter, dip me in gravy and devour!

I wanted to live in the creases of your forehead, Nalini!
Why did you want to walk the many-traveled paths of hands then?
I wanted two dew-wet feet, why did you open the door of steam-washed lips?
The time that was ours, I never wanted it to slip away; why then did you draw wrinkles across the sky?

Today I feel like saying in the grasshopper's joy, thank you, Nalini; you made this humble one grateful with the gift of some free, liberated time!
Stay well, two humans fragmented in anarchy, stay well in kinship-green!
However ugly what's achieved may be as relatives in this life, let it return crossing both shores in the severed current!

I too rub and rub away your story in my own way, how much more gray life in moss-green?
My own story today is a lonely Bedouin on desert paths, drinking nectar after cutting the throat of dreams... this is not my past!
Don't make beggars and bauls sing the same love song, tell me why you'd place your palash-red feet on the easy path of curse-breaking!
Otherwise... not kadam in flesh, but separation will bloom in disbelief!

Don't sink your nails in butterfly wings, the brown skin of color-plaster will fall away!
Don't touch the seeds of applied songs with your breath, the gardening dreams will wither one by one.
Don't sit to write letters when Ashadh comes; do you want the words to be violated in their very sprouting?

Therefore, having come with a bazaar of complaints, if you wish, call me a person grown up in wrong existence!
Yes Nalini, I am wrong, but half pure!