PASH: A POET OF IMPOSSIBLE DREAMS

The book 'Pash: A poet of impossible dreams'  is a collection of about 100 poems of Pash translated by me. The book has been published  by Pash Memorial International Trust in collaboration with Shilalekh, Delhi.The book was released on 23rd March 2010(see link  http://paash.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/paash-talwandi-salem-23rd-march-2010-3/ ) ,  the day on which  Pash was assassinated (23 March 1988)  by the Khalistani terrorists. Interestingly 23rd March is also the day on which Bhagat Singh, along with Raj Guru and   Sukh Dev ,was hanged by the British in 1931.Bhagat Singh's influence on Pash was very great. Here are  a few of Pash's poems translated by me. These are among his most mature poems.

WHEN REVOLT RAGES 

When in the pitch dark nights

Moments recoil

And stand in terror of each other

The light in the attics

Jumps from the windows

And commits suicide

When revolt rages

In the womb of such peaceful nights

I can be done to death any time

In the broad daylight

In the thick of the night

---

TO THE NIGHT 

The millet stalks hang their heads in dejection

The stars too are speechless -

What’s wrong with the night!

Oh night, don’t grieve for me

You owe me nothing

Don’t worry

That the cud-chewing cattle are so dumb

Don’t worry

That the village air, always full of warmth,

Is so quiet today

Don’t worry

You just look into my eyes

That are never going to see again

That valiant friend of mine

About whom the newspapers have written today…

O night, where is that temper of yours

When he had descended here

Raging like a hill torrent.

First, we read in the moonlight

Then, like thieves, we argued,

Then fought

Oh night, you were happy then

When we fought

Why are you sad 

Now that we have parted?

Oh night, I plead with you

In the name of the dead one

It does not become of you

It is I who owe you something

Not you

Night congratulate me

And I congratulate these fields

They know everything:

Where the blood of humans spills,

And how to prize that blood

They know all this

So night

You look into my eyes

And I look into the future.

---

LISTEN 

Listen to the music of our hearth

Listen to our cry laced with pain

Listen to my wife’s requests

Listen to my daughter’s demands

Measure the poison in my bidi

Listen to the drumbeat of my cough

Listen to the cold sighs of my patched trousers

Listen to the heartache of my worn out shoes

Listen to my silence

Listen how I express myself

And gauge the depth of my misery

Listen to the arithmetic of my rage

Here is the corpse of my civilized behaviour

Listen to the music of the beast in me

Listen to the song of the literate

Sung by the illiterate and the barbaric

Whether you like it or not

Listen to what we have to say

---

WE SHALL FIGHT COMRADE

 

We shall fight, comrade, for the unhappy times

We shall fight, comrade, for the bottled-up desires

We shall gather up, comrade, the fragments of our lives

The hammer still falls on the bare anvil

Furrows are still made in the clayey soil 

Is it our duty to fight?

We shall forget this question

And fight, comrade

We swear by our crushed desires

We swear by our hopes turned to ashes

We swear by our horny hands

We shall fight, comrade

We shall fight

Until Veeru the goatherd

Has to drink goat piss

Until those who till the land

Cannot inhale the fragrance of mustard blossoms   

Until the swollen-eyed school teacher’s husband

Does not return from the war front

Until the police constables are duty bound

To strangulate their own brethren

Until the babus keep writing on their files

In human blood

We shall fight

Until there are reasons for us to fight

If we don’t have the gun, we shall have the sword

If we don’t have the sword, we shall have the passion

If we don’t know the art, we shall have the reason 

And we shall fight, comrade…

We shall fight

Because one gets nothing without a fight

We shall fight

Wondering why we did not fight until now

We shall fight

To acknowledge our guilt

To keep alive the memory of those who died fighting

We shall fight, comrade…

---

TO A POLICE CONSTABLE 

I have left behind

My sisters, shedding an ocean of tears

My father’s beard

Quivering under some unknown fears

A mother supplicating before God

And fainting every now and then.

No one will shift into shade

My dumb cattle at the manger

Or give them a drink of water

And the fireplace will remain unlit

For days, out of mourning.

O constable, tell me,

Do I look so dangerous even to you!

O brother, be honest,

Don’t you see

On my whip-skinned body  

In my bleeding mouth

A glimpse of your own self?

Lined up with the enemy

You may brag and boast

But your sleepy eyes

Your stony forehead

Your worn out shorts

And its pockets

Soaked in tobacco stench

Tell another tale.

If there’s one thing

That draws the line between us

It is this uniform of yours

But even today your family woes 

Are the same as mine

When your father unloads

The bundle of fodder from his head

His over-strained muscles too

Ache to crush the tyrant’s head

There and then.

When you are unable to meet

Your children’s school expenses

Your wife’s heart too,

My brother, is torn apart.

When the bribes drunk by you

Corrode your inside,

You too wish to slash

The state’s jugular vein -

The state has eaten away

In a few years

Your sandalwood body

Your rishi-like temper

Your family’s happiness

Pleasant like the monsoon breeze

You may distance yourself from me

Under the cloak of this uniform

But the world within you

Wants to hold my hands

How can we, always stacking up our losses,

And kneading our derelict childhood,

Be a threat to anyone?

And those who sold and ruined themselves

For our happiness could be no cause of trouble

For anyone.

You might have become a truncheon

In the hands of the enemy

But tell me

Swearing on your belly

How can we be a threat to each other?

We are a threat only to those

Who see danger everywhere.

Save your obscenities 

For your precious anger

I am not the son of a white-clad leader

I’m just one of thousands of faces

That, drenched in dust, are shaping

The destiny of this hapless country

The rivers of my country are far smaller

Than the lines of sweat on my forehead

No religious book is holier

Than the silence on my lacerated lips.

And the story of our pain is far more intense

Than the three colours in the flag

You salute, clicking your heels

And each hole in our hearts

Is far bigger than the Ashok Chakra on it.

My friend, trampled under 

Your spiked boots I am still higher

Than Mount Everest.

Your cowardly officer

Has misled you to believe

I am a violent and dangerous enemy

Of this state

No, I haven’t yet begun

To spin the first thread of rebellion

As yet I am helpless before   

My family’s misfortunes

As yet I fill up the void of action

With my pen

As yet I am a tenuous link

Between the peasants and wage earners,

And you too, my right hand,

Remain estranged from me.

I have yet to change the barber’s razors

Into daggers

I have yet to write ‘Chandi di Vaar’

On the masons’ trowels

And the womb

That shall give birth to blazing slogans

Is yet to be pierced 

With the cobbler’s poison-tipped bradawl

And Dhamma carpenter’s roaring adze

Is yet to be hoisted higher

Than this devil’s flag

And the menials

Ever condemned to wash your dirty dishes

Have yet to recover their customary dues

For the jubilees

And the sweeper Khushia

Has yet to smoke in his hookah

The soft thigh bone

Of a high ranking vulture.

The day I become a rainbow

Stitching all the seven colours together

All my thrusts against the enemy

Shall prove deadly.

Then the spray of stinking spittle

From a car brandishing the state’s flag

Shall not sully my life’s lusting face.

I cannot reach that lighthouse all alone

I need you

And you also have to reach there.

We are a caravan

Of life’s strong fragrances

Your forefathers too have

Fertilized this beautiful land.

We are passionately in love

With the song of life

And in our longing is contained

The tune of your sadness too.

O constable, tell me

Do I look so dangerous

To you?

I have left behind…

---

A THORN PRICK  

(To a man whose birth no calendar commemorates)

He lived long

Hoping his name would shine 

The earth was very big

And his village so small

All his life he slept in the same hut

All his life he defecated in the same field

And kept on hoping

His name would shine

All his life he heard only three sounds:

The crowing of the rooster

The huffing and puffing of his cattle

And the chomp of his own jaws while he ate.

He never heard the sound of the sun  

Setting on the silky sand dunes

He never heard the sound of flower buds

Opening in spring

The stars never sang a song for him

All his lifetime he knew only three colours:

One the colour of the earth

Which he never knew how to name

Other the colour of the sky

Which had so many names

None of which he could remember

And the third of his wife’s cheeks

Which he never named out of shyness

He could compete against anyone in eating moolis

He won many a bet on eating the corn on cobs

But he himself was eaten away without any wager.

His years, like ripe melons, were swallowed whole

And his fresh milk temper

Was drunk with great relish

He never came to know how

Health-giving he was!

And the desire that his name should shine

Chased him like a bee.

He mutated into his own statue

But no one ever celebrated this.

The pathway from his home to the well

Is frequented even today

But in his footmarks

Buried under innumerable footprints

There yet smiles a wound

A wound inflicted by a thorn

Yet smiles there.

---

JOGA SINGH’S SELF-INTROSPECTION 

O friends, how during this war shall I hide

The wounds I already have

My three marital vows shall neither become my shield

Nor act as balm.

When I set out all the five K’s rode with me

All the while I felt I held the reins in my hands

Without knowing I was being driven

By the wayward paths   

That sometimes brought me to a brothel

Sometimes to the magical lakes

Where songbirds were learning

To die in bliss

I had never realized

Pathways had a will of their own

And the three vows

Their own history, however brief…

Oh my God, when shall my body be rid

Of this fever of the three vows

That has become my sixth K

Had I turned my back on the Guru 

It would have been different

But now Joga Singh is nothing more than his feet in the stirrup

And when I reach Bhangani I shall only be a hand

I’m sometimes my hand, sometimes my foot

But never Joga Singh.

And the fourth vow!

Sometimes I feel it is no more than a bright corner

Of an imagined land with no corners beyond

Friends, even if I lose in the battlefield

It would only be the destiny of those six K’s

Joga Singh neither ever wins nor loses

Joga Singh is ever ready to obey the commands

Joga Singh neither ever wins nor ever loses

---

A NOTE FOR MY VILLAGE FROM JAIL  

My village, come to meet me sometime at night

When the vulture sitting on the watch tower

Has folded its wings, and

Only the guards are awake, but they don’t matter

You just come, like the bird

That flies, unmindful, over a burning pyre, and ask:

Where is that solitary prisoner, blinded by the cell walls,

Whose sight was once like the bright sunshine

Dancing on the village pond?

But no -

You won’t have the time

You must be engrossed in manipulating the wind   

To winnow the groundnut crop

Before the stock of fodder is used up.

You must be busy making a bed of sand

For the tender-fingered children

To practise the alphabet on,

Children who won’t be able to escape

From the loops of the first letter of the alphabet.

O my village, your green fields

Must be soaking up the aura of stateliness

Radiating from the new crop of young girls

Casting secretive glances sideways,

And again and again retreating into shyness.

You must be busy gathering the fragments

Of laughter that broke up on the lips of the young

Whose engagements broke off

Just as the pitcher full of wort
Ready for distillation   

Should fall and break into pieces

Just before distillation

You are after all a village, not a romantic poet

Lost in the wasteful question:

Do two and two make four?

You quite well know if two and two don’t make four

You have to peel and chisel to make them do.

You are the roar of valour, my village,

Don’t come like a thief.

I shall return, one day, by myself

I have no identity

Without looking at your muddy and slippery pathways,

Without shimmering, along with the earthen lamps,

At the burial mounds raised to your ancestors.

I have to come, to shed my innocence,

At the meeting place

Where life-wearied old men sit together

And talk of sacred and ageless truths.

---

GRASS    

I’m grass

I shall green-wash all your misdeeds

You may bomb the university

Reduce every hostel to a heap of rubble

Level all our jhuggis …

How will you deal with me?

I’m grass and I shall cover everything

Rise from every heap.

You may pulverize Banga

Decimate Sangrur,

Pulverize Ludhiana into a heap of dust  ?

My greenness will do its act

And two or ten years hence

Passengers will ask the bus conductor:

‘Where are we?

Drop us at Barnala,

Where green grass grows thick.’

I’m grass, I’ll do my act:

Green-wash all your misdeeds.

----

A SUPPLICATION FOR INITIATION 

Dharam Guru, I have but one son -

My man and bread-earner is dead.

After your thunderous roar

No men survive far and wide.

Now there are only women,

Or herbivorous bipeds

Who earn bread for them.

You, Dharm Guru, are skilled in all the sixteen arts

The faintest fold on your brow

Can despatch happy homes into destitution.

Everyone, after settling scores with one,

Tries to ram his head into another

But I have only one head, Dharam Guru,

My son’s – and my man and bread-earner is dead.

I shall worship only the gods prescribed by you

I shall sing only the hymns sanctified by you.

I shall despise all other faiths as worthless.

But I have only one voice, Dharam Guru

My son’s – and my man and bread-earner is dead.

All these days I have been a dimwit

Paying no attention to the faith

Professed even by my own family.

I have been committing the heresy

Of regarding the family as my faith.

Foolishly, on hearsay, I have regarded my husband as God

The joys and sorrows of my family

Have been my only heaven and hell.

I was perhaps the bird-shit of Kalyug, Dharam Guru.

But now in the resounding bugle of faith blown by you

The fog of apostasy has lifted from my eyes.

From now on I shall hide my own truth

And parade your truth

As the only possible truth.

After all, just a woman, I am a cipher

Before your daredevil warriors.

At any time of my life,

I have always been less beautiful than your sword

In my most shining moments,

I have been colourless before your refulgence.

I was ever non-existent

It is you, and only you, O Dharam Guru

Dharam Guru, I have only one son

Had I seven

They would have been no match to you

Your dynamite has Godly fragrance

It lights up the night skies

And drives the heretics back on the righteous path

I shall offer holy water to your sacred bullet

I have only one son, Dharam Guru

And my man and bread earner is dead

---

 MA, YOU ARE WEARING OUT 

Ma, you stop worrying

I have bid goodbye to my friends.

Do you know what they said:

Now your going back is impossible.

They are lying, ma.

Now don’t let me go back there.

And we won’t let Babloo also go.

They are the people

Who took away your elder one from you.

Ma, you stop worrying,

I shall catch hold of that rascal Ashim Chatterjee

By his moustache and throw him at your feet

And you ask him to hand over your elder son’s corpse.

They spellbind young boys

Using father’s bones as a magic wand

Why do you cry, ma?

I’ll make even my elder sister

Retrace her steps

And then we all, brothers and sister,

Shall sit together and laugh and laugh

As in our childhood days

When we, blindfolding you,

Would hide ourselves under the cot

And you groped for us spreading your arms

Or, exactly like that

When I used to run away

After pinching your back

And you would hurl the rolling pin after me

And I used wave the broken pin

To make fun of you.

I know father’s memory still rankles in your heart.

He was very gentle – don’t you remember -

How once, having fallen off the tree

While axing a branch, and broken his arm

He had kept laughing

Lest you should faint with shock.

And how very small was sister

Just like a doll

Who, now living in the city, has become so clever.

But ma you stop worrying

We shall daub her hands with the bridal paste

And then I and Babloo

Shall lie in your lap and

Listen to the fairy tales

And talk about that Tamluk

Which was once Tamralipti

Ma, we shall go far away

Where there are only birds

And the sky is not small like a tent’s roof

Where trees are like human beings

And not human beings like trees.

Ma, you stop worrying

We shall go back to the days

When the way to the city

Led through a huge forest.

---

http://paash.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/paash-a-poet-of-impossible-dreams-2/

  http://paash.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/paash-talwandi-salem-23rd-march-2010-3/