Beyond Land and Time

The Hunt

(Shikār)

Translated by Joe Winter

Dawn;

the colour of the sky is a grasshopper’s-body soft blue—

the guava and custard-apple trees all around a parrot’s-plume green.

A single star stays on in the sky:

like the most dusk-intoxicated girl at an all-night village wedding-gathering

or the pearl the woman of Egypt took from her breast to put in my glass of blue wine

thousands of years ago one night—just so—

just so a single star is still lit in the sky.

In the field‘s frosty night some out-of-state rustics started an all-night fire to keep warm—

a cockscomb-flower’s red flame;

crumpling the dry aswattha-leaves is still burning;

now under sunlight it lacks the kumkum’s bright colour;

it is like the miserable urge in the breast of a scrawny shalik.

In the morning light the all-around forest and sky glitter in the precarious dew like a peacock’s green-blue wings.

Dawn;

after a night eluding the leopardess’s grasp

in a starless mahogany darkness, circling from sundari–grove to arjun-tree thicket,

a beautiful brown deer awaited this dawn.

In dayspring light he came down;

He is tearing and champing the green fragrant grass as if at

a fresh pomelo;

he is down in the river’s cold sharp wave—

to pass on a passion like the river’s current to his sleepless tired bewildered body;

to feel a gigantic delight, like the dawn sunshine tearing through the frosty shriveled womb of darkness;

to wake alert beneath this blue sky

like a golden lance of the sun

and astound doe after doe with his courage and comeliness and coveting.

A peculiar sound.

The river’s water is machka-petal-red.

A new fire’s lit—the warm venison’s nearly ready.

On a bed of grass, under the stars, a host of old dew-damp stories;

cigarette-smoke;

a few human heads with neat partings;

a few guns here and there—the frost—a stilled sinless sleep.