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Chandrakant Shah
The Piano
One piano
Two light blue jeans
Three o’clock show
Four main characters
Five dollars per person
Six-cinema multiplex
Seven M&M candies
Eight ounces of diet soda
Nine hundred popcorn, fresh butter with salt
In the darkness
All that is played by lips on the keyboard is the piano
All that is told by the eyes is the story
All that happens in the 35 mm frame of two seats is the movie
Translated by Naushil Mehta and Arundhathi Subramaniam
Kabir
Come! Let us bring genes out of the closet
Let us reach them to other lands, argots and worlds
What are jeans if not bobbins brimming with language?
A vocabulary of 68,800 Gujarati words makes life routine
Man’s bond with jeans – is it authorised or unauthorised?
Come! Let us bring genes out of the closet
Having travelled far and wide, we return to Kabir’s handloom
The wet fabric of jeans reveals the source of all knowledge
Bury a full-blown life with jeans and engorge the grave with
jeans
Come! Let us bring genes out of the closet
Translated by Naushil Mehta and Arundhathi Subramaniam
[
Translator’s Note: Kabir : medieval Indian mystic, a
weaver by profession.
]
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