English

For Pratyaksha

Chalk

Fetters of rowanberry weigh on the boughs

Time trembles in the vacillating sunbeams of broken August

Hearing my footsteps, a blackbird screeches and scurries away

 And flutters past the neighbouring hedge

It has been years I have lived here, but never realized

There must be someone on the other side—somebody as on this one—

Who thinks of the hedge as an uncrossed sign

Somewhere where someone crosses over, a sign remains

Stranded thereupon someone remembers a parted country

A sepia photograph stuck upon the fridge fades away,

And we who kept seeking a misplaced home, when will we ever

Chance upon that door, on which with a piece of chalk

We could write our own name, unlike that written on any other book, before

Translation from Hindi : Arup K Chatterjee

Assurance

The adamant howlet mutters all day, even in slumber—its breath

Reduced to dreams that await fulfilment—

“Today I am an instrument which plays without being blown

Within my deaf ears, in my own cacophony.”

I will tell them, while I dream

I am unlike them—notAlone,

but—asunder

Though I compile similar strands of simplicity

Merely an assurance for the palp

This every moment is always the only one that remains

And I have rarely lived before this one

I am as far as I am close to it

In this bedlam, parted from the slag of my corporeal frame

Inside a vacant humid metro compartment, I clasp my own knuckles

Around a pole; disagreeable to my own life, so often, and each time I forget

And then I have to run amuck in order to convince myself that I am alone

And just as I have begun recognizing myself

A galaxy of desires knocks at my door

To take me away, once again far away

Distracting my mind into a wanton stupor

It is undemanding to walk upon the past

And inflate it with desirable sorrows and tolerable joys

Its dungeon is the manuscript of life’s incomplete fictions, which we murmur

A nocturnal elm flowers with drowsy memories

Where even in the darkness we will be able to identify each other

Extending our arms to comfort drooping shoulders

And each day, in the same faith, we walk out of our homes

That our open eyes is the proof we live

That someday we will each be able to tell of ourselves

Of this we certainly have the assurance

Translation from Hindi : Arup K Chatterjee