That Station, This City

You'll never understand the ache of living after losing faith in humanity,
for you died believing and somehow stayed alive!
How they live with such bright faces after shattering trust!
To break faith requires knowledge—not everyone can manage it.
When leaving, you said: at least guard your disbelief carefully. I couldn't.
Unable to leave this city, I must live by faith alone.
Today in this city, melancholy clouds drift on wounded wings,
even one blessed with sharp memory struggles to recall the simplest conversations!
My pen, my voice—neither births a single word anymore.


That longing clinging to every station wall
finds its freedom today, just like that.
Some desires dangle from compartment chains—pull without reason, pay the fine!
When the same war runs endlessly, it ceases to be war.
Yet it continues. Neither the war of surrender nor of defeat........
Still everything goes, everyone goes........
I see life and think of war, see war and think of life.
This old shore knows not how to return.
Amidst all this stand the stations, one by one.


I watch the heartbreaking life of newly enlisted soldiers.
Today in their regiment, red has merged with blue—
changing colors is quite the predicament.
Our consciousness still urges preparation, stirs us awake.
Ah, someone seems to have uprooted entire history to paint a picture!
We grow happy then, burst into applause!
Now perhaps we can recognize each person separately!


When that train which began moving last century stops again in the same old place,
our minds wake from sleep and open their eyes to look.
We scramble to our feet, and immediately
that train carries us from the poet's gray drawing room to the farmer's gentle fields.
We see unknown people wearing the soldiers' stern uniforms.
They are border guards! When standing guard, one needs clothes—somewhat stern!


I hear your realm of dreams borders the divine world?
I know I'm not meant to know; nor will I ever know.
Your smoke-like hands, your cotton-soft floating eyes,
I'm not meant to forget them, nor will I ever forget.
Even today Sophia Loren's Sunflower colors cling to my hands,
so I survive by writing pictures. After a while, Abanindranath's ghost becomes human!


We who couldn't escape after dropping life's burden—
are we all alive? Does alive mean merely breathing?
Look at that sparrow to understand life.
Or at least, gazing into the eyes of Shankha-Sunil's Marguerite
left behind in youth's freshly departed cradle, calculate and tell me.
I've always wanted to write about her,
but when have I managed to write anything!
The girl beyond the window's transparent glass shutter
who painted living dreams in a completely frost-covered city's dead eyes,
why must she vanish at just twenty-eight?


That timid, powerless God who, seeing heaps of hunger's poetry, hides behind wind
and thinks: nothing's happening anywhere, may all beings find welfare in their own ways—
don't seek answers from Him.
No matter how much consolation you accept, at day's end the blind king remains blind!
In some sky, Sunil, Marguerite still laughs.
Does Sunil too laugh ruefully in blue sorrow.......Marguerite who was meant to live!
Shankha still can't fathom whether pictures and fragments of writing become clouds in this land!
Why here! Why still! Why this way!


Chaitra's blazing heat is no longer felt so much,
ice chips and white particles shift clouds in the breeze, tumbling into various lives—
into the lives of missing young foolish boys or that guard at the dry station!
Food beckons the belly, yet the body stops, stretches its legs alongside,
finally merging with one another in some deep satisfaction!
But when the boatman's heart receives the call from unknown ghats' restless boatwoman's beckoning,
can they then merge with each other?


How many of life's stories embed themselves in memory for years, breaking knees, just as—
hunger remains, clouds remain in the sky, sunlight in the courtyard, pain remains.
Life seems trapped in certain suffixes!
Birds will build nests in trees with twigs in their beaks,
someone will eat mutton with hands plunged wrist-deep,
lemon slices will float in whiskey glasses—touched and pierced by some sulking pink tongue,
a tongue that hasn't met another tongue for centuries!


The rustling salty light's fringes all around—in papery folds, the crafted knife's wonder and murderous butter's fragrance are completely intermingled!
Outside that restaurant sits a large dustbin.
Beside it some Mozart turns red, some Picasso waits to turn blue.
In that small house in the maple trees' shade on that side of the restaurant's adjacent road,
sitting in one room on autumn's last day, poet Atwood wrote:
To live, love is enough!
.........We could never become so certain and unburdened.
Our love has always been terribly muddled. Can one live peacefully with such tangled goods hanging around the neck?


We are not poets. We think of hunger too.
In rich countries, excess food fills outdoor dustbins daily,
after the night's last bus light fades, a scramble begins there among socialism's bastard children.
Who will grab first the relatively fresh sandwich of fresh Parmesan!
Hunger doesn't understand Marxism. It's quite unruly, sticking its claws everywhere unpleasantly........
Do some poor folk like us live in rich people's countries too!
Many people's lives pass making dustbins their food gods; perhaps in hardship, but they do pass!
They have no religion, they have hunger. They have no God, they have dustbins.
When religious days come, clothes and sweaters are also found in those happy countries—at churches.


The sad people of our small town have never seen magic wands atop sky-covering houses,
in their homes night falls before day, water burns instead of rice at the pot's bottom.
The boy and girl both, working sleeplessly, grow old before their time!
We have no Robin Hood, we only have bandits.
Our hunger only grows more stubborn.
Even in any bright day's light, we can't remember any dialogue.
Not one word remains in our dictionary for happiness!


In white light some helpless black letters burn like stains,
the rare keyholder for the lock still without a key rushes down some desolate road following the shepherd's flute path!
When melody flies in mountain air, some promising underground band's guitarist dips fingertips in the sideboard's wine,
then some soft finger rows wait for when their magic will continuously release reckless sounds from tiny chords, like waterfalls dropping water's children......
Somewhere touching fairy tales, the wind's light chariot flies away with playful tricks,
like a nanny flying away with a sleeping child; and the indifferent housewife becomes helpless at odd hours.
Who says this moving city around us isn't actually that theater where
all flying spaces gradually enter a static existence; it has melody, perhaps gentle voice too,
and what else exists is worth pondering; of course, only if one ponders!


When I sleep I sense that with such vibrant life-writing, all non-writing seems to float away in contrary winds........
Upon waking I see no pulse of life anywhere.........so is there a strike in this city today!
I close my eyes in fear! I think: it's just one night, even fasting it will pass fine! Why such anxiety about it?
Who knows! Perhaps time will answer.