Beyond Land and Time

Windy Night

(Hāwār Rāt)

Translated by Faizul Latif Chowdhury

Last night it was an intensely windy night—

a night of countless stars;

An expansive wind played around my mosquito net;

At times billowing it like the belly of a monsoon sea,

At times tearing it off the bed as if to cast to the stars;

Sometimes I felt—may be in half-sleep—that there was

no net on my bed,

That it was drifting like a white heron

in an ocean of blue winds alongside the Swati star.

It was such a wonderful night, last night—

All the dead stars awakened  

the sky became capacity packed;

I could spot the faces of the dead ones—

obscure and beloved, among those stars;

In the dark of night, the stars sparkled like the dew-drenched eyes

            of a hero kite sitting atop the Aswattha tree;

An expansive sky dazzled like the moonlit shiny shawl  

from leopard’s skin— spread around

                the shoulders of the queen of Babylon!

Last night was such an amazing night.

Stars that had vanished from the sky thousands of years ago

They too showed up,

   gleaned through the window many a dead sky;

The beauty queens whom I saw pass away

in Assyria, Egypt, Vidisha

As if they had filed up in columns last night

                                       with long spears in hand

along the foggy outline of the distant sky—

To overcome the inevitability of death?

To assert the invincible triumph of life?

To erect a scary solemn monument of love?

I was benumbed—totally overcome

I was almost torn asunder under last night’s blue torture;

Within the endless expansive wings of the sky

            the earth was vanquished like an insect!

And came down from the core of the sky turbulent wind

through my windows, gushing in,

Like a bevy of zebras in the green pasture

                            bewildered by the lion’s uproar.

My heart is overwhelmed with the scent of green grass

across the sprawling veldt,

With the essence of extensive sunlight

                                   that inundates the horizon,

With the restless robust lively furry exuberance of darkness,

like growls of an aroused tigress,

In life’s tempestuous blue intoxication!

My heart tore apart and flew away leaving the earth behind

It flew like a drunken balloon inflated in the blue sea of winds

chasing the mast of a distant constellation, from star to star

like an indomitable vulture.