Hemant Divate
A Depressingly Monotonous Landscape
for Hiranyai How did the landscape in my mind flow into my daughter's mind? Right here in front of me is an expanse of buildings, shopping malls, highways, factories and traffic and if I tell her to sketch a landscape she draws sunsets a flowing river, trees, fields, shrines, draws birds which look like scrawled numbers in my tiny, overcast skies. Never seen from the seamless forest of this city the sunset beyond the house in my mind the river, trees, paths, temples, birds, footways Yet how did these stream into her mind? ii By the time she understands this picture of my childhood which has flowed away and the answer to Why she draws exactly like this? will all the paintings by everyone in this world have melted away? Or will they remain trapped in their silence? iii Like me, she gets nightmares of headless people carrying the corpses of orphaned villages into the cemeteries of cities or ferrying frightful landscapes of cities only to superimpose them on the erased villages. The same, the very same landscape encloses within itself all the headless people All, all cities have the same name the same streets, same buildings, same shopping malls all are transfixed in the same predefined places like a regiment standing ready to march. She moves along paths with the same name, same colours same smells, same forms same faces as though clones of themselves and at the same deceptive crossroads she reaches the same statue. No matter where she flees the same statue confronts her again and again and she arrives at the same landscapes of the same cities with no signs or landmarks to guide her. In the same places she sees the same people speaking the same language and with same shapes same gestures standing in queues of the same length in the very same manner going to the same stations driving the same vehicles at the same speed in the same direction at the same time passing by the same trees of the same height of the same kind separated in the same way by the same dividers on the same road. The same people are tattered the same way by the same bombs and lie scattered the same way petrified the same way broken the same way. In the same monotonous manner on any channel on any TV flash the same misery-multiplying pictures monotonous monotonal monototal totally monotonous depressingly monotonous totally depressing dep-dep-depressing She dips, dips and collapses sees my same terrified, depressed face at the last moment, when she lets go of her tight grip on my hand in the crowd and just like me she too flows away into the gigantic, self-destructive flood of headless people. I dream the very dream she is dreaming at the same moment I too see her petrified, depressed face see the terror and shudder I forget to carry village to city and city to village and reach here reach where?
Something about This Shore for the Poet of the Shore Beyond
for Dilip ChitreFrom the plateau of a raucous language you kept pushing the god of your gaunt letters You didn't tire In your innermost mind you heaved How sad are the colours of vegetables when their greenness is uprooted. Colour doesn't remain colour Only the tearful sobs of blue and dusky proteins and carbohydrates are left. You could pull so many tricks From a Bombay duck's heart you could make a tune You could sound a whistle from okra stew From the pressure cooker's kicked-out steam you would conjure up opium balls From yourself you would make abeer-gulal appear. You loved the yellow in green the white in black the sky blue in coppery the crimson in blue the carmine in purple Hypnotic and free of colour, you'd meet and lie deeply spread like the Buddha beyond the leisure of visits. Holding language rhythmically you zipped away Like the devotee Prahlad you nursed language In the tongue of the deaf and the dumb you wrote your Dravidian purana wrote the song of the summit. In the minute crevice of language you thrust your chubby finger. You are neither my granddad nor my great-granddad neither father nor brother nor uncle nor some other kin Measuring the shore-to-shore expanse up to this moment why do you recline in my mind? Are the Dyaneshwar and Tukaram resting on your shoulders mine? Is the primal jagar bubbling briskly on your forehead mine? Mine is the darkness percolating through the clouds of your flimsy vest The flatulent doubt dangling from your croaking, bloated stomach is known to me I know the black brightness under your unfathomable eyes I am familiar with the sluggish Bade Ghulam Ali Khan who lived frolicking beneath your moustache. Out of what bond did you share with me the DNA struggling for a language? Out of what relationship did you share your secret encyclopaedia? From beyond the shore of madness why do you call only me by waving your hands? Having reached the dead end why do you love me? I'll get crushed under your loving shadow I'll get trampled under your cries that come from beyond madness. I don't want the feel of your cries I don't want the endless tangles of your language I don't want the secret god of your language I don't want anything, anything from you I'll see the end of my language in my language I'll live or die in the language even beyond my madness. You took the liberty of fondling the breasts of language At times you touched her?straightaway violated her Scandalized I watched your futt video but didn't get engrossed I too have experienced the genital beauty of language and the forest spread over miles and miles I am angry?angry with you?angry You shared everything with me but vanished silently You went away quietly after reading your own poem but didn't wait to listen to mine!
From the recently published book of poems A Depressingly Monotonous Landscape translated from the Marathi by Sarabjeet Garcha.