Simla, a long poem
by Samartha Vashishtha
JAYASURYA
A sleepy sun
shakes off
the slumber
and rises
over the latent town.
An army of
fallen snowflakes
resurrects
and blows the beams
to
smithereens.
Who says
only God is
omnipresent ?
A chir grips
its only
cone
in a numb hand;
and I beneath wait
for it to fall.
On
the cone perches
a ray.
Will it fall too ?
MITHHUCHĀLISĀ
On a leaf rests
a drop
and from within
peeps
the sun.
“So what!” says Mithhu,
“If Hanuman
did,
so can I !”
Then suddenly
riding the two headed
serpent
like Ivan the Tsar born,
you grab the sun
put it in
a plate
uproot some chirs
and begin to eat –
only to realize
that
chopsticks are not
Russians’ cup of tea.
GYRATION
On the bān
sits the ape
and wonders,
Who coloured the
sky
and pinned it
to Jakhu peak?
RAIN
Three days in a row
it rained hard.
The sun
went missing.
Umbrellas, raincoats, waiting
all soaked.
Water
gushed down the slopes.
Alone, all day, I sat
floating peace
messages
mounted on paper-boats;
hoping they would reach / the
Sutlej.
Some of them
you might find still
stuck in the
bushes.
Next day the papers
talked of a missile test.
That
was the last time I stepped out
in rain.
SO'HAM
On the water tank
I stand
and
ask,
”Whither dost Thou live ?”
If there is a
heaven,
clouds are the only highways
I see.
THE JUNGLE
Few dare to mess with it.
The brave or the
desperate.
Like the hostel boys who probed
Deep into the
woods
Searching for bhāng leaves each day;
And the foreign
tourists
Looking for a forgotten waterfall
Named after a lord
long dead –
To picnic;
“Which country?” we would
ask,
“No coins!” they would reply.
And early
mornings
Beasts’ hunting time still
The milkman who
climbed
Four kilometres up the valley
To sell milk
Nine
rupees a kilo;
Or women calling out at night
For their cattle
lost in the dark.
Rauvolfias are threatening enough
To keep
the rest home.
A moment dribbled
from the past
and
clung to the rods
on which we played
all day.
A drop from my
veins
met the ancient ones;
stigmata, you would say;
the
ancestors shrieked,
A murder chamber
once was
where all
night you do jāgran
on Māhāshivrātri;
and beneath the floor
planks
a corpse still waits
for its last rites.
The
building was old I knew
the day they demolished it
I went there
again
and picked the orphan moment.
I still lies on
the
mantelpiece.
psalms keep ringing in the valley / we climb up the stairs to hell / treetops glinting green are too high to offer shelter / clouds hold pitifully their empty bladders / the land has conceived from their night discharge / scattered pieces of silence catch us unawares / time dangles at the edges of mechanics / aloud from the valley the river calls / at coffee house poets brood over their ruined harvest of poems / discuss why this year it snowed so late / the sky breaks into luminous orange streaks / night falls quietly like fresh snowflakes
umbra
grandfather sits on the edge of sleep / lingering bits of day dig into his heart / with all the strength he can gather he shakes me up / wake up he says there’s a windmill around here / le’me sleep i yell only god / could afford cutting the jungle to set up one / why don’t you put on your hearing aid / god needs not a windmill at this lonely place
at the breakfast table he looks straight in my face / eighty years are enough to tell reality from space / you’ll understand it all when you are my age
his face seems like a giant banyan to me
eighty wrinkles in all he has on his skin
penumbra
tempting posters clutter the city walls / veeru and i bunk out to see tamil tits / they are shooting for a new film on the ridge these days / tents and sets everywhere we can’t identify the place / the crewmen won’t let us pass / we take the longer route round the mass
how easy it is to be a filmstar
veeru says
i guess so
i reply
and the most taxing of all to be students
fighting babar and pythagoras each day
no!
i shoot back firmly
worse is being pelted by silence
his eyes widen in surprise
leave it aside
i say
i forgot just twelve we are!
THE LAST
Visiting
the city again after a gap of five
years
This dreamy old city of mine
will forget so easily my name
like it was pebbles I drew from its fame.
Have I, somewhere along knowing this student politics,
lost the sense of the sunlight receding from bare
mountains?
Now younger than most, taller than many
when I walk again this crowded Mall road
these rocky hands stroking my pampered soles
seem colder and more hostile than ever
And when I show her my new MS of poems
my childhood friend replies
your book doesn’t reach our city of Simla.
2000-2001
