# Still the Song: Four The old woman sat on the bench outside the tea stall, a cup growing cold between her hands. The morning had turned harsh—not with heat or cold, but with the kind of light that makes everything look tired, used up, as though the world itself had been living too long. Across the narrow street, in the window of the cloth merchant's shop, a length of red silk caught the sun. She had seen that same bolt of fabric yesterday, the day before, perhaps longer. She couldn't say how long it had been there, only that it had become part of the street's face, like the crack in the wall beside it, like the dog that slept under the awning. "Your tea will get cold, Didi," said the boy who ran the stall. He called everyone Didi or Dada, whether they were older or younger. It was his way of being kind without knowing it. She lifted the cup to her lips but didn't drink. The steam had already vanished. What remained was merely the memory of warmth—a strange thing to hold, a strange thing to let go of. "Did you hear?" the boy continued, speaking to no one in particular, as the young often do. "The clinic is being closed. They're moving it to the new colony. The doctor is leaving at the end of the month." She had not heard. But she had known it would happen. Things always moved away from places like this one—the old, the tired, the places where people died instead of being born. Money followed youth, and youth followed the future. That was the order of things. "Will you go there?" the boy asked. "To the new clinic?" The question hung in the air between them. She considered it. Going meant getting up very early, meant taking an auto-rickshaw across the city to where the buildings were new and the streets were numbered instead of named. It meant being among people who were hurrying, who had somewhere to be. "No," she said quietly. "I won't go." The boy didn't ask why. Instead, he wiped down the counter—the same counter he wiped every few minutes, whether it needed it or not—and moved on to serve a younger woman who had just arrived with a child on her hip. The old woman set her cup down on the bench. It would sit there until the boy collected it, or until it fell. Both were equally possible; both would lead to the same end. She thought of her daughter in Delhi, who had stopped calling three months ago. Not because anything had happened—no fight, no angry words. Simply because there was nothing left to say that would make the distance between them feel smaller. The last time they had spoken, her daughter had asked her again, please, to come live with them. A room was waiting. Good air. A park nearby. She had said no. And her daughter, who had asked this question perhaps a hundred times, had finally stopped asking. The red silk in the window across the street trembled slightly—or perhaps it was only the heat rising from the pavement. Either way, it moved, and for a moment it seemed almost alive, almost aware of being watched. An old song came into her head then, words and melody together, as if rising from some deep place that had not been disturbed in years. She did not sing it aloud. To sing alone in a public place at her age was to admit something she was not yet ready to admit—that she had become invisible enough to do such things, that nobody would notice or mind. Instead, she hummed. A low, almost inaudible sound, barely a breath given shape. The boy at the tea stall glanced at her and smiled. Then he turned away. The woman continued humming as the morning moved toward noon, as the street gathered its small population of the idle and the purposeful, as the red silk in the window held its color against the glare. The melody had no end that she could see. It simply continued, note following note, like days following days, like the stubborn, unreasonable persistence of being alive. She hummed on.

# Beyond the Mist

That beautiful Bengal exists no more—nor that deep river, nor the verdant green of the jute fields faded now to grey. The herons drift back from the silk-cotton trees on habit’s wing, and turbid life floats on the bitter foam of an ancient sea—brightness bleeding away with each passing day, colors lifting from old photographs, all memory turning to sepia. Where have you been all this time—lost in what mist, what forgetting?

And yet, still your shadow drifts in Natore’s mist—untouchable, but felt, the way we cannot weigh the air yet feel its press against our skin; the song ends but the melody lingers in the ear, the bell stops but its tremor remains. All night the bat’s wings write in the language of darkness—finding its path in the echo of sound, making darkness itself a map. Numberless idols shattered, yet one face blooms again—entirely yours, indelible. Daily I wait—come back, as the migrant bird returns across a thousand miles to the same tree, the same branch, so will you.

## Dust-Crowned Prayer

Leave your obeisance here—on crumbling columns, broken temples, where bricks have loosened but faith has not, where the roof has caved but the sky has come nearer. Rest in the shade—the shade of the banyan and the sacred fig, the shade of a hundred years of meditation, shade older than the sun. Echo it with each breath—this is your country, mother-like—you do not choose your mother, nor your country.

In its fields, its sky, its light—in sorrow, poverty, sickness, grief, you too are woven—inseparable as blood vessels. Tears, monsoon, festival, dark days—the country holds them all, the year holds every season, the body holds every wound. Keep great memory bright with reverence—seek joy beyond the flesh, look for the person in the human, the face behind the mask.

This is your country—leave your prayer silently, raise the dust to your head, mark your forehead. Pray to this one thing night and day—this dust-crowned, sweat-soaked, incomplete, beautiful land—whose incompleteness is its beauty.

## The Mother’s Thousand Faces

In how many forms do you stand before us—mother, fertile giver, thousand-armed. In the fields, by the ghats, in the border forests, in the generous oblivion of distant villages—where the map ends, there too lie your footprints. Sometimes fearful, fragmented—a path lost in winter’s mist, without direction; sometimes tender, dark—harvest of patience at your breast, the plow of governance in your hand, endless waters of forgiveness in your eyes. Both hands are yours, both roles are true—the hand that feeds, the hand that rules, both speak the language of love.

Mother, day by day I know you—worn by the stepmother’s emptiness, learning through want; as the goldsmith knows gold by fire’s test. Though foreign glitter clouds the roadside and a red veil falls—do not let Bengal fade, do not lose the language. Lose the language and you lose the primal address—like a house without a key, you stand before the door unable to enter.

## Prayer’s Other Name

Not all rivers reach the sea—some are lost in the desert, dissolve into sand; some sink underground, flowing through darkness; some forget their destination, circle endlessly on the plain. Not all clouds rain on green—some only cast shadow, block the sun; some only thunder, speak the language of lightning; some bring tears to the eye and pass on, giving no rain. Not all earth becomes idol—some merely becomes path, so that others may walk, and being that path is itself a kind of idol.

Light the lamp in house after house and the hope of birth-light wakes—that hope is darkness’s child; light does not birth hope, for hope is born only where it is absent. When prayer melts at the chest’s warmth—no words remain, no language, no grammar, only a silent tremor, deeper than heartbeat—then it takes a name: love.

## VII. Verse and the Poet

### The Hunting Code

Flowers are falling. The wind carries fallen leaves in its fist—the child thinks the dead leaf gold, the adult thinks it trash.

# Clouds of Uncertainty

Clouds of uncertainty have gathered in the sky, a grey curtain drawn—and yet nothing feels right—neither within nor without.

And yet when the prey of poetry circles down—wings of words broken, drenched in the blood of meaning, pulled by gravity—or when the hunter itself lies bleeding, torn to shreds, then a secret joy awakens, like candlelight in a dark room. That joy burns as fiercely as the hunt is grand—the thrill of hunting whales is nothing like hunting rabbits. In true hunting, the difference between hunter and hunted dissolves—both are bloodied, both victorious, both defeated.

Being a tiger is easy—hunting man is thrilling, because man alone is prey that hunts back. Before that, one must burn the heart in the fire of some doctrine—learn that the boundary between black and white is trivial; truth dwells in grey—in the blended ground of shadow and light. Otherwise, such great prey is never caught—truth escapes, falsehood gets trapped.

Poetry, I tell you

You are no longer the lifeless form of sculpture—blood now flows through your veins, warmth has returned to marble lips. Words grow within your body like a child—from the minaret of rhythm to the grey pasture of livelihood, you bloom like a flower in the mingling of clouds and ornament—a flower born through the crack of stone, whose roots have made stone itself their food. The stone’s buried wound is written on prose’s earth—leaves torn by the sharp claws of wind, yet from each tear sprouts a new bud, from each wound a fresh shoot.

Melancholy, weary—yet unconquered, like a wall that stands even after burning. At day’s end, beneath a starlit sky, I search for other meanings in the wet folds of clouds—from your image, life’s final union, final kiss, final word.

The Lexicon of Birth-Vine

If my poetry tastes like your blood—salt water of the ocean, bearing life, yet quenching no thirst; saving, yet satisfying nothing. If it flows sweet as a river, like a deer’s eyes, or verses swollen with the sorrow of rage—lava-tongue spilling from a volcano’s mouth—then the beginning is auspicious. If in the binding of color, a sky-lamp burns in the lantern of wings—from earth to sky, from root to star—from the seed of broken dreams in a distant grove, a nest is built where such a bird will be born as no one has seen before, whose song no one has ever heard.

Then it is no mere poetry—it is the birth-vine of my life, the lexicon of my deepest longing—each word’s meaning written in blood, each line a map of veins, each stanza the blueprint of an organ.

At the Mountebank’s Fair

What good is writing poetry? Rather, watch the dance of day and night—the dance that life itself dances—without method, without rhythm, without choreography, yet enchanting—because each step is unexpected. A fair of decades has opened in the mountebank’s yard—no entry fee, only belief required, only eyes kept open. What strange flower grows in what garden—whose scent has no memory—leaves one sleepless, the mind secretly seeks the honey’s hidden taste, the tongue waters. (The word “mountebank” usually refers to someone who shows monkey tricks or a peddler who performs sleight of hand.)

The sun falls on the path—in the glittering facade of restaurants, the noon fatigue dissolves in the city’s crowd; a wandering cat lies in the sun and becomes a philosopher, eyes half-closed, thinking the infinite; crow and mouse look at each other in silent truce—a ceasefire without any treaty. The plain’s reciprocity is truer than vacant poetry—they know that mere survival is the only art, the hardest art.

Brush and Star

Though by the river, thirst burns on both banks—the ocean’s fish, dwelling in salt water, still thirsts; abundance contains lack. Even when light shines, darkness does not depart—shadow is light’s own child. The path through the heart is quicksand—the more you walk, the deeper you sink; the more you struggle, the lower you descend. It cannot be evaded—to evade is to evade oneself, to flee from one’s own shadow. To paint a picture with only color and brush—even that is as difficult as a star.

Stars too burn themselves into light—creation’s price is always combustion, always self-immolation.

Yet still words are being woven.

Even now poetry—somewhere, somewhere, something is being written, underground springs flow onward—even if no one knows, beneath the earth rivers run—even if no map contains them. Everywhere the crush of brick and sand and stone—the earth suffocated, bound in concrete’s corset; the smell of burning in the air, processions of deceit lining the streets—falsehood peddled in truth’s name, injustice doing business in justice’s clothes. And yet sometimes even in the whisper of grass a green signal awakens—grass has no interests, no political party, and so its signal is most trustworthy. In the cool touch of an almond, a small peace—the day passes in the yellow light of evening, slowly, lazily, forgivingly.

These days so many have no work, no shelter over their heads, no coins in their pockets—empty hands, empty bellies, empty eyes. And yet it astonishes—somewhere words of poetry are still being woven, like on a loom, with patience, one thread at a time. Poetry is not a condition of survival—poetry is the reason for surviving, the only reason, a reason that escapes all logic.