Banalata Sen
I have walked earth’s byways
for millennia
from Ceylon’s coast
to the archipelago of Malaya,
in the night’s darkness,
moving ever.
I have been a guest
at the now hoary court
of Vimvisar
and Asoka;
in the further dark
of the city of Vidharva.
Life’s seas foamed
all around. I was weary
And my sole respite came,
when
I spent a couple of hours
with Natore’s Banalata Sen.
Her hair dark, like some long gone
Vidisha’s night,
her face like Sravasti’s delicate
handiwork
Like some mariner,
helm lost, gone astray
in far seas,
by chance discovering
the greenness
of Spice Islands—
I saw her in the dusk.
And raising eyes, like bird’s nests,
she asked: ‘Where were you
so long?’
She asked me then
Natore’s Banalata Sen.
Evening comes at all our day’s end
like the sound of dew,
The kite wipes off sunshine’s scent
from its wings.
When all the earth’s colours are spent,
in the fireflies’ brilliant hue,
completing an unfinished tale,
an old script
finds a new arrangement.
All the birds return home,
all the rivers.
All the day’s transactions end.
Just darkness remains
and sitting with me
face to face,
Banalata Sen.
—Jibanananda Das, translated from Bangla by Ron. D.K. Banerjee; from ‘Signatures One Hundred Indian Poets’ edited by K Satchidanandan; National Book Trust, India 2000
We Grew Up in Places That Are Gone
Why do we look
for sutures and siblings
in all the wrong places,
when Google gives us
6,35,00,00,000 results
for the word home?
—Jennifer Robertston, from ‘The Penguin Book of Indian Poets’ 2022, Penguin Random House.
An Introduction
I don’t know politics but I know the names of those
in power, and can repeat them like days of week or
names of months, beginning with Nehru. I am Indian,
brown, born in Malabar. I speak three languages, write
in two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said, English
is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave me alone, critics,
friends, visiting cousins, every one of you? Let me speak
in any language I like. The language I speak becomes
mine, its distortions, its queernesses all mine, mine alone.
It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it’s
honest, it is as human as I am human, you know…
It voices my longings, my hopes, and is useful to me
as cawing Is to crows or roaring to the lions,
it is human speech, the speech of the mind that is here, not there,
a mind that sees and hears and is aware. Not the deaf,
blind speech of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain
or the incoherent mutterings of the blazing
funeral pyre. I was child, and later they said I grew,
for, I became tall, my limbs swelled and one or two places
sprouted hair. When I asked for love, not knowing what else
to ask for, he drew a youth of sixteen into his
bedroom and shut the door, He did not beat me but my sad
woman-body felt so beaten. The weight of my breasts
and womb crushed me. I shrank pitifully. Then I wore a shirt
and a black sarong, cut my hair short and ignored all of
this womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl or be wife,
they cried. Be embroiderer, cook, or a quarreller
with servants. Fit in belong, said the categorizers.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better still, be just
Madhavikutty. It is time to choose a name, a role.
Don’t play pretending games. Don’t play at schizophrenia
or be a Nympho. Don’t cry embarrassingly loud when
jilted in love…Later, I met a man. Loved him. Call him
not by any name, he is every man who wants his
woman, just as I am every woman who seeks love.
In him the hungry haste of rivers, in me the oceans’
tireless waiting. Who are you, I ask each and all. The answer is, it is I.
Anywhere and everywhere I see him who calls himself I.
In this world, he is tightly packed like the sword in its sheath.
It is I who drink a lonely drink near midnight at hotels
of strange towns, it is I who make love and then feel shame,
it is I who lie dying with a rattle in my throat,
I am the sinner, I am the saint. I am both the lover
and the beloved. I have no joys that are not yours,
no aches which are not yours
we share the same name, the same fate, the same crumbled dreams…
—Kamala Das, from ‘Signatures - One Hundred Indian Poets’ published by the National Book Trust, India.